The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  I turned back to the six frightened people before me. I realised that I was still standing; I was looking down on them, whereas they had to look up to me. It felt wrong, and yet there was nowhere else for me to go.

  ‘It’s London,’ I said. ‘You’re drawing London.’ Roger came and stood behind me. I followed Oxford Street up Tottenham Court Road, where a dusting of powder spread to the edge of the desk, untouched. I pointed. ‘If you put a road there, it would be Great Russell Street, and then the British Museum would be just there.’ I kept my hands well away from the desk surface. ‘And there was a theatre there, on that corner. And there, opposite the main entrance of the museum, there was a cafe once.’ I was still trembling, but this time I was trembling with life. I could feel blood hammering around my body; I had found people, people who were not confined by the parameters my father had set out, but who were reaching out with their minds and memories, back to the past, back to the way things had once been. To the outlawed, forbidden time before.

  ‘How did you know where to find us?’ Roger asked at last.

  ‘I’ve been watching you all. I’ve been following you.’ I had nothing to lose. ‘I wanted to know what you were all doing. Who you were, why you kept meeting up secretly.’

  ‘And what were you planning to do when you found out?’

  My heart raced.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly. ‘I just thought … if I wasn’t alone. I don’t know.’

  Emily broke in impatiently. ‘Are you going to go to Michael about this?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m not going to say anything,’ I said. That, at least, I was sure of.

  Luke spoke up. I had not heard him speak since Helen’s trial and it seemed to me that his voice had become slower. His hair was longer, too; he wore it in a ponytail now, and his stubble had become a beard that made it hard to guess his age.

  ‘I don’t think she will tell Michael,’ he said. ‘After all, she’s part of it now. Those are her fingerprints on the desk. If she went to Michael, she wouldn’t be able to prove that the whole thing hadn’t been her idea.’

  ‘What whole thing?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Emily said. ‘I split a bag of flour and they came and helped me clear it up. What else is there to say?’

  ‘I don’t know, Emily.’ Roger’s voice was harsh, and his face, washed with blue light from the screen, seemed frozen, immobile. ‘What else is there to say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, and before the others could stop her, she had pushed me out of the way and started brushing the flour to the floor, making great sweeping strokes with her sleeve stretched over her arm, the cuff held so tightly that her knuckles were bright white, green, blue, red in the screen light. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated, and I could not tell whether her voice was cracked with anger or with tears. ‘This was madness. It was stupid, bloody-minded madness. What possessed us? Who cares what London used to look like anyway?’

  It was definitely tears. They spilt as she demanded, ‘What possessed me? I love Michael. I love him.’

  ‘He doesn’t know, Emily. Calm down. He’ll never know.’

  ‘What if she tells him?’

  ‘I won’t tell him,’ I said. ‘Why would I tell him? I’ve been looking for you all ever since we boarded. I knew I couldn’t be the only one.’ Anything seemed possible now. Tom would join us, and we’d find land. Go back to London, even. Five faces stared at me, expressionless in changing colours of the screensaver. Only Emily was turned away, and a tear shone on her cheek like a leftover sequin from Alice’s tapestry. ‘What are you all going to do?’ I went on. ‘Have you got a plan? I thought we could look at the maps, find out where we are. There’s a machine in my father’s study that shows the position of the ship. I’m sure I saw land on that. We can find it again. That thunderstorm the other night, I think it meant that we’re near land. We can check.’ I drew breath. ‘He turns the ship, you know. At night. With the electricity from the solar panels, or something. The engineers will know. We can chart a course. If he won’t let us use the machines, we can steal the compass. There’s one in his study, I’ve seen it. We can find land.’

  ‘You think?’

  I nodded. Were they going to exclude me after all? Did they think I was too young for subversion? But I had been up to the fourth deck with Tom. I was not too young.

  ‘Stop it, Lalla,’ Roger said. He sighed. ‘I wish you hadn’t come.’

  ‘But I have. So you have to let me in.’

  ‘Into what?’

  ‘Into whatever you’ve got planned. Were you making that London map to work out how to distribute our stores?’

  Vikram put his arm around Emily, who had started sobbing quietly. ‘Tell her, Roger,’ he said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘She won’t believe me. Us. I’ve told her before, but she won’t stop. She just keeps banging on and on. Patience won’t have her in the laundry anymore. She’s driving Gerhard mad in the kitchen. Breaking Tom’s heart. And now she’s here.’

  ‘I don’t believe my father controls the sun. But I’ll believe you. Of course I will.’

  Roger looked at me. ‘You won’t. You’ll believe what you want to believe. But I’ll tell you the truth.’

  I nodded, open-mouthed.

  ‘We meet up because we thought it would be fun to see how much of London we could remember. We didn’t want to leave a permanent record, so we got creative. Hence the flour, rather than paper, or the touchscreen in the school, or canvas.’ He paused. ‘That’s all, Lalla. We’re just smoking behind the bike sheds.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, as the floor beneath me turned to water.

  ‘Michael’s told us not to look back,’ Luke said, as though I was stupid. ‘And we thought it better to be quiet about this. We can handle it – we’re strong enough to know the difference between a game and a dangerous exercise. But not everyone is.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘No you’re not,’ Abigail cut in as the screensaver washed her red. ‘You’re just a silly, pampered little girl. You know nothing, you see nothing, you appreciate nothing. You barely even eat. How ungrateful is that? You make Tom creep around after you, when all he wants to do is stand up and tell us all how much he loves you. He barely eats either, but that’s because he’s waiting for you. Waiting for you to choose to go to him. You’re a spoilt, spoilt, selfish brat. And then you march in here and claim membership of some kind of conspiracy …’

  ‘You all know about Tom?’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘Did he tell you? Does he talk to you? Did he tell you that he promised to come back to London with me?’

  ‘Be quiet, Lalla. No one’s going back to London.’ Roger took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped Emily’s face with it. She took it from him and scrubbed at the reminder of the desk, tears and flour making a sticky paste on the surface. Regent’s Park, Oxford Street, the little secret alley and square that was once St Christopher’s Place, Baker Street. The space that was waiting to become the British Museum. All blotted out in seconds by misery and shame. The delicate lace, the beauty of memory. Gone, all gone. They were no more plotting to turn the ship around than I was planning to take my father’s place.

  And that was how I learned that the people who break the rules are the ones who are least interested in changing things.

  ‘Cowards,’ I said, my voice thick with disappointment.

  Roger turned on me. ‘What did you expect? Really, what did you expect? Did you want us all to be making bombs and strapping them to ourselves? To march on your father with guns and force the ship back to where we came from? We’ve been de-registered, thanks to you. We’d be dead before we got off the ship.’

  ‘Land, then,’ I said. ‘Just land.’

  He shook his head. ‘This is what friendship looks like. It’s not a life-changing plot. It’s just people who like each other sharing something particular to them. We were trying something out. It didn’t work.’

  Emily sank onto a
chair, the floury handkerchief hanging stiffly from her hand. ‘Michael’s right,’ she said. ‘We shouldn’t look back. He’s always right.’

  ‘I think so.’ Roger took the handkerchief from her.

  They stood up, straightening their clothes, and filed away together. Abigail and Vikram were holding hands. They left me alone with the doctor and the handkerchief.

  ‘Thank you, Lalla.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Bringing us to our senses. It was a silly, pointless thing to do really. I don’t suppose we’d have realised how pointless if you’d stayed away.’ He looked at me curiously. ‘Did Michael know? Did he send you?’

  ‘No. I followed you. By myself.’

  He looked at the handkerchief, the sole reminder of the map in flour. ‘There is nowhere for us to go,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left.’

  ‘But …’

  He put on a high-pitched whining voice and screwed up his face. ‘I want to go back, I want to go back. If you want to be heard, say something worth listening to.’ He sighed. ‘Beautiful things are happening here. Right here, right now.’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘Yes. But to you too. You have the potential to bring us all happiness beyond anything we’ve dreamed of.’

  ‘Me? How?’

  ‘Because you’ve never suffered. Because you’re young and healthy. Because you’re Michael’s daughter. Because of Tom.’

  Tom. I was meant to be meeting him in my cabin and I’d completely forgotten. I hoped he had, too.

  ‘I broke my nose the other night,’ I protested. ‘I know about pain. I do know about being hungry and all that.’

  He shook his head. He seemed about to say more, then he changed his mind. ‘You’ll see, Lalla. I hope so, anyway, for your sake as well as ours.’ He held out the handkerchief. ‘Would you slip this through the wash?’

  ‘I don’t work in the laundry …’ I began, but then I nodded. Perhaps this was a gesture of faith; an invitation to friendship. Patience would be glad to see me, surely, if I stopped asking her about eggs? I could wrap the handkerchief in a shirt, or a sheet, and bundle it into the machine so that no one else could see. I’d have to whip it away at drying time, and sneak it into Patience’s ironing pile, or do it myself. And then, and only then, would I be able to return it to Roger’s cabin, white and fresh and folded, so that no one would ever be able to tell that it had been used to wipe out London as we once knew it.

  TWENTY

  Tom is angry the museum of the ship how do you know you exist?

  When I got back to my cabin, there was a note on my pillow, written on the back of a biscuit box. Where the hell were you? The dancing, smiling biscuit on the reverse mocked me. Tom had not forgotten; he had come to me. He had disobeyed my father’s injunction and I had not been there. How long had he waited? I told myself it was too late to go and find him now; I would talk to him at breakfast. I knew I ought to feel guilty, but I had other things to think about, and very early the next morning I went back to the little research room. It was completely empty. Just the desk and the screen and the gently shifting colours of the screensaver. I passed my hands over the surface of the desk, where I had wiped out Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery, and I understood why they had come and traced the roads and the monuments with their fingers instead of just looking up a map on the screens. Great Russell Street, I thought, tracing a path with my fingertip. Bedford Street. Russell Square Gardens. Bloomsbury Street.

  All my father had done on the ship was to reinvent the Dove inside our heads. Our admiration and gratitude was a filter that made the creation of a map in flour into a crime. And yet, only my presence had turned their activity into something forbidden. I wondered if they would ever forgive me. What harm, someone once asked me, and I had grown less and less sure of the answer.

  As I reached the end of Goodge Street, my fingers met something hard and irregular, like a small stone stuck to the edge of the desk. I pushed at it with my thumb and it snapped off. I placed it carefully on my open palm and looked at it in the changing colours of the screensaver. It was a lump of flour paste. There was London in it, and Emily’s tears. It was smaller than the button but it held a story just the same. I wrapped it in Roger’s stiffened handkerchief and put it in my pocket.

  I found an empty room on the third deck, above the infirmary, and carried the little lump of flour and tear paste there. I took Helen’s photograph album, too, and Tom’s letter, and the skylight screws and what was left of the broken apple. And I took my button in its velvet jewellery box. It wasn’t a real museum, with an atrium and glass cases and more galleries than could be visited in a lifetime. But it was a museum of our lives, and I didn’t want Emily to throw it away. Six objects. The British Museum had held thousands, millions, and when I thought of the significance of my six and multiplied it by those millions, the world began to spin around me with the sense of what had been lost, and with what I had saved.

  I was late to breakfast; Tom had already gone. I thought about going and finding him in the sports hall, but I had a handkerchief to wash. I bustled about the laundry work, and as I was careful to keep my questions about anything other than sewing or knitting to myself, Patience began to look kindly on me again. She didn’t ask whether I had my father’s permission to be there, and I didn’t tell her. Tom was not speaking to me at lunchtime. I understood what it had cost him to go against my father, and I owed him an apology I did not know how to give. Every smile he shared with someone else made it harder and harder for me to find words. At dinner I took my old place at my father’s table, and stared at the pink, pale slices of gammon ham. There were rings of pineapple on the top; they reminded me of my first meal on the ship. Eighty-three marks ago. Eighty-three marks.

  ‘I saw you’d tidied your cabin,’ Emily said as she sat beside me, glowing, and my father looked happy: I felt as though I had come home after a long absence and that everyone apart from Roger and Tom was pleased to see me. Was it really this easy? I thought. Were they really so ready to see what they wanted to see? And yet I liked it, too.

  I never saw the people who’d made the London map in flour together again. Emily took her place at my father’s side, a penitent shadow, looking up at him with wide eyes and an open face. Roger avoided me; at first I thought it was coincidence, or my paranoia, but as the marks grew in number it became clear that he did not want to be alone with me any more than Tom did. He was never in the pharmacy when I delivered the clean towels, nor in the infirmary when I went in with the laundry. I left the handkerchief in his pile of clean clothes, and looked and looked for an answering nod or smile over the dinner table that evening, but he looked away whenever he saw me, and I am sure I saw him frown with frustration as he did so.

  Luke started helping Tom with the football, and Patience told me that the two of them were teaching each other tennis now too, and that soon we would all be able to learn. I feigned delight to make her happy, then found that I was actually looking forward to the first lessons. Helen spent less and less time with Gabriel; she had given him up to the ship, and when she saw him she smiled briefly and let him go back to whatever he was doing. I took him swimming, half expecting him to comment on the change in his mother, but he talked only about the next thing he intended to do. He sang a song that Helen had taught all the children in the school. Helen had written it herself, he told me proudly, and it went The ship has saved us all, grown-ups and children small, and life is new. Happy and future-proof, borne on by trust and truth, safe under Father’s roof, Father we love you.

  The tune was familiar, although I couldn’t place it, and although I found the words ridiculous, they wormed their way into my mind, so that I would find myself singing, ‘The ship has saved us all,’ as I folded laundry and took it to the cabins. The tune was a dull one – there were thousands, millions of better ones that we could listen to just by summoning them on the screen. But it was hypnotic. It floated just below the surface of my conscious mind, and w
henever I thought, I must stop singing that song, I’d find I was already doing so. Happy and future-proof. I wasn’t alone. Before long snatches of the children’s song could be heard all over the ship.

  Future-proof. It was printed on the Dove-governed screens, although I didn’t mention that to anyone. Mentally, I consigned the Dove to my third-floor museum; like the other artefacts, it had no place in ship conversations. It was in my museum that I let my memories roam; I went there most days, and because I was smiling and eating and had stopped asking questions, no one seemed to mind, or want to know what I was doing. Like Roger and his friends, I’d learned that obeying the rules means you can break them. Eight days after I’d found them out, I sat on the floor of my museum, staring at the dried-up ball of paste that was all that was left of their London map. I remembered watching the bulletin after the bombing of Regent’s Park, and the announcer’s sorrowful voice announcing fifty-four deaths.

  ‘Fifty-four?’ I’d said to my father. ‘Did all the others escape?’

  ‘Yes,’ my mother said at exactly the same moment as my father said, ‘No.’ My mother had a way of arranging her face with her eyebrows slightly raised and her eyes wide, with the corners of her lips turned up but no warmth in her eyes. It meant, There are things Lalla does not need to know. There are things I will not discuss here, in front of her.

  ‘But there were thousands of people living there,’ I said.

  ‘Only those fifty-four existed,’ my father said; as he spoke my mother turned away from him and bit her lips together so hard that it looked as though she had new, thin, white ones.

  ‘But I saw them,’ I said, puzzled. ‘They existed.’