The Ship

by Honeywell, Antonia

  ‘How do you know anyone exists?’ my father asked me. ‘How do you know you exist?’

  I was fourteen years old when Regent’s Park was bombed. I had never thought about how I knew that I existed. How could I know such a thing? It wasn’t something to know or not to know. It just was. I remember looking at the challenge in my father’s face and thinking of all the other things that just were, like water, and air, and food when I was hungry and the fact that I could walk and run, and that there were clothes for me to put on to keep my body warm, and that my mother and father and I lived together in a flat in a place called Bloomsbury.

  And I remember how I thought, even then, about the number of things that had always just been, and which were no longer. Books. Shops. Restaurants. The fact that I had once been able to walk around the display cases without tripping over foul-smelling people in sleeping bags, and that the cases themselves had once been full. I thought about the objects, and realised that they, too, had once just been. The iron spoons had once carried food into the mouth of a living, breathing person who lived and loved just as I lived and loved now. The necklaces had been worn; the pots had held valued possessions; Lindow man had walked and talked and held someone close. Once upon a time, they all just were, and somehow they came to be shut behind glass, hundreds, thousands of years later, until their only existence was as part of someone else’s just am.

  ‘I breathe,’ I’d said at last, and when neither of them stopped me I continued. ‘I feel pain when I fall over, or when I burn myself on the fire. I get cold. I get hungry.’

  ‘And when the tent city you live in is bombed to oblivion?’ my father asked. ‘What happens then?’

  ‘But I don’t live in a tent city,’ I said.

  My mother turned to me and the blood rushed back into her lips so quickly it looked like she was returning from the dead. ‘That’s right,’ she said quickly, and as my ship-self relived the conversation I winced, because I realised now how important the conversation had been. ‘She doesn’t live in a tent city. So that’s fine.’ She clapped her hands, as though celebrating the departure of an unwelcome guest. ‘What shall we have for dinner?’

  ‘A roast chicken, I think,’ my father had said dryly.

  ‘There isn’t any chicken,’ I said.

  My father shrugged.

  And my ship-self watched my long-ago self take the final step inwards as my thoughts pulled in once more, to the central circle, the smallest one, which was also the biggest because it encompassed absolutely everything else.

  ‘But doesn’t the fact that I remember roast chicken mean that I exist?’

  My father kept his eyes fixed on mine. ‘Try that the next time we go to re-register. Leave your card here, and tell the official that you remember roast chicken.’

  My mother laid her hand on my father’s sleeve. ‘She’s right, Michael,’ she said softly. ‘If she remembers roast chicken, she exists. That’s all right. Once upon a time, we thought we existed just because we thought. Let’s leave it now. There’s corned beef.’ My father’s laugh was harsh and short, more like the coughs that came from the sleeping bags in the museum than a laugh. He had invented the Dove to bring fairness, equality, hope into a desperate situation, and it had not worked. ‘The tent people remembered roast chicken, Anna.’

  ‘Corned beef,’ my mother repeated, emphasising the words in an attempt to puncture my father’s thoughts. ‘Good protein. And fat. For energy. Lucky we got to the food drop quickly.’

  ‘Only because we knew where to go.’ Now, on the ship, as I remembered the conversation, I could see that my mother was playing into my father’s hands. By trying to get away from the subject, she was bringing him back to it. From the safety of the ship, I could look back and see that my father was right. I was there now. Ninety marks into our voyage, I had arrived.

  ‘How did we know where to go for the food drop?’ my father had asked.

  ‘The screen told us.’

  ‘Now think of yourself with no card,’ he said to me. ‘How do you get your food?’

  Two days before, the screen bulletin had given the address of the food drop. An hour before it was due, the drop address changed. And as we went to the new address, we passed the old one, and the queue there wound around the building, down the street and around the corner, so long that we could not see its end.

  ‘Shouldn’t we tell them?’ I had asked. But not even my mother said yes. That queue, hundreds, thousands of people we did not know, became the left behinds. In the hour since the change in the food drop location, they had fallen from the government list. They had re-registered late, or searched for something outlawed on the screen, or not renewed their identity cards. Perhaps the internet hot spot they relied on had gone cold. They would starve. Or be bombed. And no one would count them.

  We killed those people, Father, I thought, straightening my stiffening legs. My ankles were beginning to swell. I looked around at my exhibits. What was the difference between the Nazareth Act and the manifest?

  My mother had never been able to commit to the ship. The ship will be the last thing we do, she had said. Every additional day we stayed in London had been a chance she was giving me to find a way of my own. But she had never had the courage to turn me loose, and I had never learned enough to leave. She had loved me too much, and she had failed. I knew now. I had begun to understand.

  I had been kneeling on the floor of my museum for too long; my legs had gone dead. I forced myself to stand up and it hurt to do so. The light was fading; I had missed dinner, but I found that I wanted to go to the goodnight meeting. I wanted to see my father, to look at him, to study his face and see if there was any trace there that he, too, remembered where we had come from. I pictured myself apologising to Tom, too, and the prospect of reconciliation was soothing. Being in trouble all the time was exhausting, and I was very tired.

  I slipped into the ballroom and stared around me. Pleased, confident, shining faces, all turned towards him. Michael Paul, father not only to me, but to all the children. No longer challenging his own child about her existence, but bestowing existence generously, lovingly, openly on everyone. The only things that mattered now were the ones which were in front of us every day. Rivets were metal and round; bolts were metal and hexagonal, but the stars were made of diamonds, or kitchen foil, or light bulbs, or holes punched in a vast swathe of black velvet. And the sun bounced over the ship, controlled by a rope in my father’s hands, and the ship was the centre of the sky and the entire world was nothing more than a plate of water.

  Father, we thank you.

  What, after all, was I fighting for? The world was gone. There were no apples, no oranges, no eggs. I saw Tom, sitting with an empty place beside him. There was a place for me here. Gerhard put a hand on my shoulder in greeting. Would I, like Helen, be forgiven for my childish questioning, my doubts?

  But my father was speaking, and I sat still to listen.

  ‘The glitches with our portals may be irritating,’ he was saying, ‘especially if you were halfway through a good book. But glitches remind us of what we have gained. I know, Chris,’ he said, as a man in a dull green jacket put his head into his hands, ‘you’ve tried to sort them out, and I know you’ll keep trying. I also know you’ll succeed.’ So it wasn’t just Ballet Shoes, I thought, then put the thought away. ‘What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter. We’re not defined by screens and cards anymore. Now we exist because we learn.’ He looked at Helen, who smiled and pulled Gabriel a little closer to her. ‘We exist because we play together, eat together.’ He held one hand towards Tom, the other towards Gerhard, palms upwards, as though he were offering them something. ‘We exist because we create.’ Here he bowed towards Alice, who blushed and looked at the floor. ‘We exist,’ he said, lowering his voice so that we all had to lean towards him, ‘because we love.’ I wanted him to look at me so badly that I turned my head away, but when I looked up it was Emily who was pink-cheeked, Emily who attracted tender, approving
smiles, Emily whose head was inclined to the side in prettiness and pride.

  And then, before I could feel jealous, he looked at me. ‘We exist, my darling, because we remember roast chicken.’

  My father had won. This, then, was the end, the triumph of humanity, the final destination of mankind. No mast, no screens. Learning, playing, eating and loving. It was sweet of him to remember the roast chicken, but it really didn’t seem to be important anymore. I looked at Tom, and my heart contracted. Tomorrow, I promised myself silently. Unless the ship sinks tonight, I’ll join it tomorrow. I’ll apologise to Tom, and I will never go looking for anything beyond what I am given, ever again. I slipped away to my cabin and lay in the dark, my body aching for my lover. Sorry, Mother. I was not strong enough, and I am in love.

  I lay awake and I thought about the water. All around us, bearing us up, supporting us. But threatening us, too. My mind raced. Water will not be stopped, I thought. Hold it in your hands and it will seep through your fingers. Hold it back with chains and it will trickle through the links. Hold it back with a walled dam and it will burst through, all the more powerful for having been contained. My father dictated, and my mother broke away from him, went to the window and threw open the curtain. If she had not broken away. If she had not …

  I remembered the shot, and a figure in faded black running away. I lay in the dark and I suddenly realised there was one place I still had to look. There was one final question to be answered. One place where, even now, I might find what I was looking for.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I search for the truth and find a stranger an engagement

  Four or five hundred years ago, people walked the streets with oranges stuck with cloves held to their noses, or little posies of sweet rosebuds. They believed that terrible diseases were carried by terrible smells, and if they could not smell the smells, then the ghastly rashes that marked the dying would never blossom on their own skin. They were wrong, my mother said. But we had no oranges, no cloves, no scented flowers, so I don’t know how she could have known. It wasn’t as though we could do what she always told me to do, and find out for ourselves. Do things really change? Four hundred years. What did it mean? Four hundred years on, we were no further on than we had been. They had oranges stuck with cloves; we didn’t even have oranges. And in four hundred years more, the ship would be at the bottom of the ocean with the mast; my museum would be gone; everyone would be dead.

  I felt my marks with my fingertips. Ninety of them. I thought of going on my quest in the dark, but it was another moonless night, although there was no storm in the air now. I tried to sleep, hoping that my mother would lead me to the fourth deck again. But the things she had shown me there had been her dreams, not mine. The things Tom and I had found, the cots and the clothes and the crockery and the paint and tools, were my father’s dream. And wrapped in my father’s dream were the dreams of everyone else on board. Roger dreamed of healing the sick; here he was, healing the sick. Helen taught the children. Gerhard provided food. That was why my father had interviewed so carefully, searched out the people he would save. That was why no one argued with him, why the little secrets I had uncovered had, as Helen said, hardly been subversion. What would you subvert, if everything was as you wanted it? Tom’s grandfather had wanted something that my father could not provide; he had not been allowed to come on board. Those who were here had all been chosen, not just for their good deeds, but because they, too, had surrendered hope.

  We are every human being that has ever lived, has ever thought, has ever created. We are the ultimate expression of humanity, and it is humanity that we celebrate here. Every kindness that has ever been done in the name of humankind, from the first man who reached out his hand to a crying child, to the last person back on land who broke his sole piece of bread in order to share it, is here, in us. In our floating home, we contain all that has ever been. Let us savour, and enjoy.

  Let us savour, my father said, and enjoy. The difference between his chosen people and me was simple. They could rush forward, immediately, and throw themselves headlong into the riot of learning and experience my father had put before them. The only prospect before them was of better things, wonderful things, a richer, more beautiful, more profound life than they had had any hope of before. There was no risk.

  But my inclusion had been automatic. No one had made sure I was starving before they set a feast before me.

  Savour, and enjoy. Perhaps I could have done. If my mother had lived, I thought, we would have walked together, to the library, the gallery, the music room, and embarked upon a sweet, clean journey of discovery. We would have walked without looking over our shoulders, looked at paintings and artefacts without the weight of my father’s warnings pressing us down, experienced the wonder of learning without the fierce oppression of guilt. I saw us walking down Great Russell Street together, she in her floating dress, me doing double skips to keep up with her, only this time the street was safe and bright, and the bodies were gone, and the sun shone on green trees and white buildings, and the blue plaques on their walls were the colour of the sky. We would have had the past to live again, and live differently, for however long we were granted.

  But what was I, now that my mother was gone? Who was my father? The man who had once loved my mother? Or the man who had created this world for me, and in so doing, had made sure I would never be able to find out who I was?

  At first light, then, I left my cabin. My hard red shoes set the gangways ringing; I stepped as softly as I could, but I could not help the noise. Eventually I took my shoes off and dangled them from my hand. The cold metal impressed itself on the soles of my feet. Was this man, sailing his people in circles with no thought for the future, also the man who had rushed back from his trips just to be able to kiss me goodnight, who had scoured London for my red shoes and said nothing of their origin? Just how great had been his desperation to sail? Around me, behind the cabin doors, the people began to stir. When I got to my father’s cabin, I hid behind the stairwell. I watched the sun rising; when he left for his breakfast, I slipped inside.

  There was nothing in the instruments, or in the map I found in the top drawer of the great wooden chest. There was nothing in the green dot that still went bleep, bleep, bleep as the circling green line swept over it, although I studied these things carefully. Nothing in the telescope I found in a corner cupboard, or in the compass that lay beside it. I looked quickly and thoroughly, because I wanted to be at breakfast if I could. I searched the surface of the desk, the floor, and the padded cushions of the chairs. And it was while I was searching the chairs that I finally found something important, sitting on top of the little table beside the leather armchair. It had not even been hidden.

  The manifest.

  I opened it. I was struck once more by its texture, dry and yet solid, the smooth surface on which we had inscribed our names. I turned page after page, trying not to tear them in my anxiety to find what I was looking for.

  Harry Oz. Round, fat letters, carefully formed.

  Lalage Paul. My own signature, a little shaky in the middle.

  And between them, my mother’s page. There was no signature. She was gone. No more present in the manifest than she was in the clothes store upstairs. I sat on my father’s chair, breathing hard. It was not enough. She had been too ill to sign the manifest. The fact that her name wasn’t there proved nothing.

  I kept searching. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that I would know what it was when I found it. In one drawer, there was a notebook. It fell open at the ragged remnants of a ripped out page. I did not need to go back upstairs to know that Tom’s grandfather’s letter was written on the missing page; I recognised the paper, the pattern of the torn edge; I could see the words indented on the page beneath. And I wondered how my father could have borne to watch the old man writing those words. I love you, and I let you go. What more had my father been prepared to do, to ensure our departure? The notebook gave no further clues; my mot
her was not there. I was terrified that one of you would be hurt before she would agree to come away. I am only grateful that it was not you. But we had both been hurt. She by a bullet, me by her death. Where had that bullet come from? I pulled out every drawer, searched in every cupboard, but could find nothing more.

  I went back to the manifest. In my head I heard my father’s voice. Anna’s gone. Fine. I would look beyond her. I turned the pages of the manifest one by one. I read the summaries my father had written at the top of each page. I looked at the names; I studied the signatures. And there, just seventeen pages in, I found it. Neil Bailey. Engineer, twenty-seven years old. Used scavenged items to create rainwater savers; distributed them without charge to those without access to water. There was no Neil Bailey on the ship. But here he was in the manifest. A man, a history, and no signature. What had happened to him? Where was he now?

  I marched out of the cabin and into the dining room.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said to my father. ‘Right now.’

  ‘We’re just about to eat, Lalla,’ Emily said, walking behind me with the toast basket. ‘Surely it can wait.’

  ‘Sit down,’ my father said patiently. ‘You’re so hungry you’re forgetting your manners. Eat something. And then afterwards, if you still want to, we’ll go to my cabin together and talk for as long as you like.’

  I looked around at the people, all so familiar now. At Emily, eyes wide with love for my father. At Patience, head inclined in pity or despair. At Roger, whose frown still held a secret. At Tom. Roger, Patience, Finn, Luke, Helen, Gabriel, Mercy with the embroidered patch on the left knee of her trousers. Alice. Emily. My father. Tom. All here to die. Tom was going to die. And something in me broke, and the nausea I had been feeling for weeks became a vast, all-consuming hunger. I burst into tears, and as my tears emptied out, the void inside me grew, and I wanted to eat and eat until there was nothing left in the stores.