‘And I would rather die out there, looking for a future, than die here, knowing there is none.’
‘Michael.’ Emily stepped forwards, her hands held out. She kept her eyes on my father and walked towards him. ‘Lalla is your daughter. You love her. We all love her. This is not the way. We convince her with love, remember?’ But my father was not deterred. His gun was trained on me and he did not flinch, even when Emily joined him on the podium and touched his arm.
‘What will you do?’ I said, turning to the ballroom in general. ‘Will you leave your children to sink with the ship? Will you live this glorious life of plenty, knowing that your children will starve because of it? Or will you help me take the ship to land?’
‘The ship is for the children,’ my father said, and for the first time I saw a tremor in his hands.
‘And their children?’
‘A beautiful life makes a present of death,’ my father said. ‘I gave my daughter a beautiful life. I have given you all a beautiful life.’
I looked around at the people, frozen in dismay, in shock, in fear. ‘Tell him,’ I said to them. ‘Tell my father to take the ship back to London. Or anywhere. I’ve seen the radar and the charts. There is land. Let’s find it, and go there, and start again. We can use the stores to give us a good start. We’ll grow clover.’ I looked at Tom and willed him to join his voice to mine. But no one said a word.
Then Helen spoke. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not going back. If you make me go back, I’ll throw myself into the sea and take Gabriel with me.’
‘Me too.’ Patience pushed Mercy from her and got heavily to her feet. ‘Lalla, child. Africa’s burned. India’s drowned. China’s dead. You saw London. There’s nowhere. Nowhere but here.’
‘And even if there was somewhere else, why would you go there?’ Mercy joined her voice with Patience’s. ‘We’ve got everything here.’ She looked around shyly, the guardian of a secret. ‘Michael told me there’s pianos. We’re going to learn to play music.’
‘Things may have got better,’ I said. ‘How will we know unless we go and see? You threw away the mast.’
Tom looked at me, and for a wild, glorious moment I thought that he was going to tell the engineers to storm my father’s cabin and set a course for the nearest land. I would not have to leave. We would be together, and find a future for our child.
‘But it’s safe here!’ my father cried, the gun now trembling in his hands. ‘That’s all I ever wanted. To keep you safe, to keep you nurtured. Why are you doing this to me, Lalla?’
I looked at him. ‘Who was Neil Bailey?’ I asked.
My father’s self-command was gone. Emily cradled his head in her arms and he cried, gripping the gun as though it was the only thing stopping him from falling. ‘No,’ he cried. ‘No.’ I looked at Emily, waiting for her to shout at me. But she did not.
‘It was an accident,’ Emily said. ‘You need to understand that we were in the holding centre for a long time. Years, some of us. We wanted to sail, but your mother would never quite agree. We had food and shelter and the guards – we were all right as far as your mother was concerned. She was more interested in the street people. I wanted her to bring you to meet us, but she never did. Michael said she was scared we’d hold you hostage until she agreed to sail. We were so insulted by that. We said too much to each other, got ourselves too wound up. And one day, Neil disappeared. That same night, Roger got the message from Michael that we were to sail at last.
‘When Neil came back, we were singing and dancing. Only Roger wasn’t joining in. When I asked Roger why not, he showed me the rest of Michael’s message. Anna had been shot in the stomach. She was barely breathing. Roger didn’t think she could possibly survive. And Neil – when he realised what he’d done – he went outside and shot himself.’
‘Where did he get the gun from?’
Emily didn’t answer.
‘Did you give it to him?’ I asked my father. ‘Did you tell Neil Bailey to shoot my mother?’
‘No,’ my father sobbed, his face contorted. ‘Not to shoot her. A broken window, that was all. She was sleepwalking into hell and she was holding your hand. A warning. To wake her up. To save your life.’
‘Is this the same gun?’ I felt myself drawn to it; I imagined taking it in my hands. My father was cradling it like a child. No, Lalla, never a gun. Just my toothbrush and my wit. I had been so naive.
‘We didn’t know what to do with it,’ Helen said. ‘It all happened so quickly. Neil died, then you arrived, and we sailed. We couldn’t just throw the gun into the sea, not with all the government troops, and the mob on the quay.’
Gabriel clung to Helen and began to cry, ‘I don’t like the gun, Mummy. I don’t like it.’
Helen held his hand. ‘No one likes it,’ she said, keeping her eyes on me as though the gun was my fault.
‘But thank goodness we’ve got it,’ Roger said grimly.
He took the gun from my weeping father and aimed it at my skirts, and the tilt of his chin and the light through the ballroom windows told me the truth. Roger, who had red and blue mugs and made maps in flour. Roger, who broke the rules and changed nothing. A broken window wouldn’t have been enough to persuade my mother to board. It had been Roger’s idea to shoot her. An arm, he would have said to poor Neil Bailey. A foot. I imagined Neil Bailey’s trembling hands, his fear. I could forgive him. But I couldn’t forgive Roger. I couldn’t forgive my father.
I walked backwards towards the deck doors, facing Roger and the gun. Any moment, I would hear a shot and feel the searing pain of a bullet in my foot, or my leg. The train of my dress caught under my shoes. I tripped, and as I struggled to my feet, I saw that Finn and some of the engineers were blocking my path to the deck door. The internal door – the door into the ship, through which the doctor had carried my mother one hundred and fifty days ago – stood wide open. I could escape into the ship, I thought. I could live in my museum and sneak down to the stores at night, the hidden, ghostly conscience of the ship. And I knew, as clearly as though I had seen it happen, that one day, someone on the ship would do this.
But I had a life of my own to find, and another to protect.
‘Please,’ I said to Finn. ‘Move aside and let me through.’
‘We can’t do that,’ he said. ‘You’re not well. You’ve never really been well, not since we sailed. Isn’t there something you can give her, Roger? To help her a bit. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.’
I looked at Tom. Did he think I should be winged, like a captive bird, or tranquillised, like the zoo animals in screen documentaries? Is that what I was to him now – a sick elephant, incubating his heir?
But Tom did not speak. Instead, he reached over to Roger and put his hands gently over the hands that held the gun. ‘This isn’t the way, Roger,’ he said gently. ‘It’s not what Michael’s taught us, or what he wants.’ Tom took the gun, and spoke softly and calmly, using a monotone that made me think of lullabies. Emily looked at Tom gratefully; Tom looked at my father. ‘We are your people, Michael,’ Tom said. ‘We will be with you, and be grateful to you, for all of our lives, and our children’s lives.’ For one wild, ridiculous moment I thought Tom was going to shoot my father. But he didn’t. He called to the engineers, ‘Let Lalla go.’ My father was shaking now. Tom carried the gun towards me. My father shrank into his chair, like a speeded-up film of a man growing old.
Emily knelt in front of him, holding his hands. ‘Are there any more guns?’ she asked him. He shook his head, and a great cry rose from him, involuntary and animal. Tom stood next to me, holding the gun, facing into the ballroom.
‘Stay there,’ he said. ‘All of you. Stay where you are.’ He stepped backwards through the ballroom doors, motioning to me to go through first. I went through to the deck, and he came with me, bringing the gun. The doors shut behind us, and we were alone.
‘Lalla,’ he said. ‘Don’t do this.’
‘I don’t have a choice.’
&nbs
p; He took the gun in both hands; he looked at it; he looked at me. Then he raised his hands high over his head and, with all his strength, he threw the gun over the deck rail. It flew in an arc and plummeted into the water near the little boat, and the splash it made caused the little boat to rock.
‘You do now,’ he said.
I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to hold and hold him, and never, never, never let him go, but I knew that if I felt his lips against mine, I would decide that tomorrow would be soon enough, or the day after, or the day after that. I had to live, even if I died as a result.
I could neither live in a grave, nor birth my child into one.
Tom looked at me. He waited. He waited a little longer. And then he went to the ballroom doors, opened them and looked back at me. I stayed still. He stepped into the ballroom and pulled the doors shut behind him.
TWENTY-FIVE
What happens in the end
And so I climbed, and my red shoes made the deck rail ring. I pulled myself up and swung my legs over, so that I balanced like a child on a swing, gripping the rail until my palms were numb. My satin train hung heavy below me.
If I let go and threw myself forward, I would hit the water. I could push off from the deck rail with my feet, and launch myself away from the ship, beyond the little boat, to the true unknown that awaited all of us. It would be quicker that way, and my mother would be waiting for me.
But no. The end was not going to be so easy. I gathered up my dress and felt the little boat rocking beneath my feet, even though the deck rail was still pressing cold into my thighs. It would be firm and solid decades after the little boat had fallen apart and rotted away. On the ship, I lived and worked with hundreds; the little boat was barely big enough for just me. The ship stored food for years to come; the little boat held only what I’d been able to carry, and a map from my father’s study. If time on the ship was running out, on the little boat it had practically gone. And yet I was going to take myself – take us – from big to small, from plenty to dearth, from the known to a place I had no power to predict.
I felt with my foot until I found the first rung of the ladder. I wondered whether Tom would betray me at the last. I looked back at the ballroom door, half-hoping for a tall shadow, a footfall. But there was nothing. Tom had chosen, and he had not chosen me.
For you, Lalla, my father always said about the ship. I did this for you, for your future, so that you could be safe.
For me, Father? I thought, remembering his arm slipping softly around Emily’s waist. For me? I remembered the cots waiting on the fourth deck. The looks of adoration on Alice’s face as he presented her with more silk, more beads, embroidery threads in ever brighter colours. The bewilderment in Tom’s green eyes as I reached for his hand in the sunlit air, and the sudden clearing of his face as my father showed him the way forward. I think this is what Michael would want, Lalla. I think this is what would make him happy.
When you are born, little one, I will never say that I did this for you. I will never place that burden upon you. These are my feet climbing down the ladder. Mine is the heart that longs for another way, mine the eyes that have seen the emptiness in the way we are living. You, as yet, are nothing. But even now, even before I am certain that you will ever draw breath outside my body, I know that I cannot, I must not, feed you for ever. You will be mine for a time, and then you will feed yourself.
On what?
Mother, you are out here somewhere. Mother, look after me. After us.
There is land. I have seen it on my father’s maps. And on that land are people. I will find them, or drown. My child will not be born into the safe, dying world of the ship, but into the desperate, shifting world of the living. My child will be born in a place I do not yet know, among people I have never met. They will welcome me, because I have given everything I have, everything I am, to find them. I will steer my little boat on the high seas, and one day, if I am lucky, I will see the vast trunks of the wind turbines towering above me, their giant arms reaching for stardust in the air, and I will know I am almost there. Maybe my hands will be the ones that reconnect the wires. Maybe, little one, those hands will be yours.
I had my father’s compass. I was leaving my museum to the ship; it was a fair exchange. They could read my story there if they wanted to.
I climbed down the ladder, my train weighing on my arm, each foot secure for a matter of seconds before taking its turn to bear my body down.
The ship was not the beginning, but the end. In a day, or a year, or a decade, or a century, the food would run out. The ship itself would rust and sink. And the people upon it – these people whom I knew, or their children, or their children’s children – would die. Burnt out, like night’s candles.
I was seized by the desire to know where the thought of night’s candles had come from. Maybe it was not too late. I would find out in a moment if I went back. I felt the cold of the metal rungs pressing into my palms, their solidity beneath my feet. Now that I was leaving, the certainty of the ship seemed very precious. I longed for it, for the knowledge that there would be food, that there would be shelter, that there would be meaningful work for me, a life in which I could flourish, love, grow. And yet, it was this very certainty that made it essential to leave. Because there is no such thing as certainty, and in creating it, we lose the very thing that keeps us alive.
I stepped into the boat and released the pulley ropes. The boat shivered on the surface of the vast sea.
I blinked away the tears that were clouding my vision, and I saw a halo of bright rust surrounding the rivet that held the ladder to the hull. Like a sunrise trying to burst through, or the creeping orange embers on a paper’s edge before the paper bursts into flame. Or a sunset, or a dying fire.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My agent, Jonny Geller, who understood the apple, and my editor, Arzu Tahsin, who bit into it.
Anna Davis, Kirsten Foster, Alice Lutyens, Jennifer Kerslake, Sophie Hutton-Squire and everyone at Curtis Brown and Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
My supportive and talented writing friends Emily de Peyer, Emma Sweeney and Rachel Connor, my long-suffering non-writing friends, in particular Ali Jezard, Rebecca Singerman-Knight and Julie Walther, and my sister Carissa Honeywell.
Everyone I’ve been taught by or alongside, with particular thanks to Maggie Gee, Katharine McMahon, Louise Doughty, Andrew Miller, Helen Dunmore and Erica Wagner.
All who read and gave feedback on the manuscript, including Jessie Burton, Geoff Curwen, Laxmi Curwen, Lucy Eyre, Emma Haigh, Daniela Haller, Sue Harris, Sarah Hooker, Tim Jordan, Rosie Pearson, David Salmon, Rose Mary Salmon, Ruth Shabi and Gillian Stern.
Helen Lappert and the wonderful women of Amersham A Cappella, who know why.
Kate Honeywell, Maureen Hancocks, Howard Hancocks, Jane Diduca, Charlotte Yeoman and Jane Davies, who have given me time.
My children. OK, so I could do it quicker without you, but the thought of doing so takes away all meaning.
And James. I thank you from the bottom of whatever it is that drives me to write. My heart belongs to you already.
About the Author
Antonia Honeywell studied English at Manchester University and worked at the Natural History and Victoria and Albert Museums in London, running creative writing workshops and education programmes for children, before training as a teacher. During her ten years teaching English, drama and film studies, she wrote a musical, and a play which was performed at the Edinburgh Festival. Antonia was one of the stars of Curtis Brown’s inaugural creative writing course. She has four young children and lives in Buckinghamshire. The Ship is her first novel.
@antonia_writes
www.antoniahoneywell.com
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Copyright
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson ebook
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
This ebook first published in 2015 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Copyright © Antonia Honeywell 2015
The right of Antonia Honeywell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 0 297 87152 1
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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