I was seven when the collapse hit Britain. Banks crashed, the power failed, flood defences gave way, and my father paced the flat, strangely elated in the face of my mother’s fear. I was right, he said, over and over again. Wasn’t I right? Weren’t we lucky that we owed nothing to anyone? That we relied on no one beyond our little trio? That we had stores, and bottled water? Oh, the government would regret not listening to him now. The government would be out on the streets with the rest of the population. Weren’t we lucky, he wanted us to say, weren’t we lucky that we had him? He ranted, and we bolted our doors; my mother tightened her arms around me, and for months we did not leave the flat.
Across the country, people lost their homes, the supermarkets emptied and the population stood, stunned and helpless, in the streets. My father watched the riots and the looting, the disasters and the forced evictions on every possible channel; he had the computer, his phone and his tablet and juggled them constantly, prowling about the flat and never seeming to sleep. The government resigned, and then came the tanks, and the troops with their terrible guns. My father vanished. Oxford Street burned for three weeks, and I watched the orange skies from the circle of my mother’s arms, weeping for him. Hush, my mother whispered to me, hush. But I was only a child; I had not learned to be silent, and when he returned, tired and triumphant, I cried just as loudly and buried myself in him. But he was no longer the man who had walked away. The military government had listened; they had bought the Dove from him. He was a rich man now, and a powerful one, and he had more important things to do than cuddle me.
Within weeks of my father’s return, the Nazareth Act came into force. I remember the queues, the identity checks, the biometric registrations, and surrounding it all, my father’s jubilation at his success. Opponents called the Dove a violation of human rights, but as my father said, it worked. Your screen was registered, you were issued with an identity card, and from then on you were identified by your screen address, no matter where the social and financial earthquakes had left your land one. The satellites were still operational, so the authorities always knew where you were. What food there was could be distributed fairly. New laws could be communicated quickly and card-carrying citizens got the information they needed to survive. Food drops, medical assistance, re-registration requirements, work opportunities. New acts came in thick and fast: to the Exodus Act and the Optimum Resourcing Act were added the Land Allocation Act, the Prisoner Release Act, the Possession of Property Act—each heralded by a triumphant fanfare on the news bulletin, which was now the only source of information. The Dove was the ultimate firewall; anything it did not approve went onto the raven routes and over time, the raven routes became more and more dangerous. A screen open to raven routes burnt out in seconds; whether the virus that did so was a government initiative or a legacy from the days of unrestricted access, no one could say. And so, with cards and screens and the Dove, order was created from chaos. Regular biometric re-registration meant that stolen cards, and the cards of the dead, were only ever valid for a limited time. By the time I was ten, a valid card was the most valuable thing in the world, and my mother and I, duly registered, were able to go out for a walk.
“Where’s your card?” my mother demanded the first time we went to unbolt the door. “Show me.”
We’d practised so many times. I unzipped the inside of my pocket, felt through the hole, opened the card compartment of my belt and held it out to her. “Seven seconds,” she said. “It’s not fast enough.”
“You do it then,” I said, but my mother was holding her card up before I’d even started the timer.
“The troops will shoot me if you don’t show your card,” she said, “and it’ll be stolen if it can be seen.” And so I tried harder, but she wasn’t satisfied, and took my card away to look after it herself. We went to Regent’s Park, to look at the tents people had set up as temporary accommodation, although she wouldn’t let me speak to anyone. We went to the new banks of the Thames, too, to see Big Ben and the London Eye peering mournfully out of the water, but even with the security of the troop patrols, London had become desolate and dangerous, and soon our outings became confined to the British Museum, just around the corner. We went there every day; it became my schoolroom, my playground, my almost home.
“Things will get better,” my mother said, holding my hand, and I believed her. The bulletins said the same.
And yet—and yet. Time went by, and still people starved. Still they slept in floating death-traps, or in the campsites that had been created in London’s parks, now surrounded by razor wire. I saw these things through the bubble of safety and relative plenty in which I lived; I saw them so often that I became immune. My father saw them too. I think he was a little bewildered that his great triumph, the Dove, had not saved the world, and so he set about saving his own world—my mother and I—another way. He always did like to be in control.
The paper ran out, so my mother tore labels from tins and taught me to write on the back of them; when there were no pencils left, we burned splinters of wood and made our letters with scratches of black. And after a year or two, a new word began to creep through the wall that divided my parents’ room from mine, whispered at night in hopeful voices. A ship. What about a ship? I scraped the word laboriously with my burned sticks. Ship. Ship. I grew quieter as I grew older, and listened as hard as I could to my mother and father’s intense, whispered conversations. I was spelling out the titles on the spines of my mother’s old books when I first heard the word spoken out loud.
“A ship,” he said to her. “Shall we do it?”
And my mother said, “But Lalage’s future?” and my father said, “There’s no future here. We’ll make one for her,” and from that time on he was barely ever home. It was years before I learned that Anna Karenina was the title of the novel and not the name of the author.
The ship. The word floated through my childhood, a thought with nothing to tether itself to. There’ll be paper on the ship, my mother told me, when I complained about the labels. There’ll be rice on the ship, my father said, when we ate the last of the rice in our stores. The ship, my father said when the public executions went from weekly to daily. When the marketeer riots spread from Oxford Street to Bloomsbury and the bodies stayed outside our flat for three days; when the screen crashed, or the rats got inside our building; when the water gave out, or a food drop failed, he always said, Just you wait, Lalla. Wait until we sail.
The only actual ships I’d ever seen were the stinking hulks that drifted up the bloated river every now and again, relics of the great evacuations, and I knew they weren’t what my parents meant. Mostly they were empty; anyone left alive on them was shot as they swam to the bank, if they didn’t drown first. The rusting carcasses lined the river from London to the sea, lowering into the water until they keeled over, complete with the homeless who’d taken refuge on them. My mother would go pale and clench her fists as we watched the bulletins on our screens. I hated seeing my mother so unhappy, but to me she seemed naive. After all, no one had forced those people to sleep on the Sinkers, any more than they were forced to live in London’s public buildings. My parents and I lived in a proper flat, with food and clothes and locks on the door, and because we had these things, it seemed to me that they were available, and anyone who lived without them was making a choice. My father was very big on choice.