“Turn it off,” my mother always said, but she never meant it. She would no more have missed a bulletin than she’d have let me go out into the streets alone.
Food became scarcer; on my twelfth birthday, for the first time since the Dove, there was no cake.
“There’s no power spare for the oven,” she told us.
“Why can’t you just melt chocolate over the fire and stir in biscuits, like last year?” I asked, but my father told me to hush, and my birthday was ruined.
My mother got thinner, and when my father came home the two of them pored over papers and screens while I read and played approved screen games and tried to remember the things my mother had taught me during the day. Daytime London gradually emptied, drained by the curfews and the Land Allocation Act, and the terrible penalties of being discovered by the troops without a card. My father’s appearances were gala days; the rest were about survival. Food drops. Hiding the car, which my father claimed we’d need one day. The fingerprinting and flashing lights of the biometric re-registrations, which became ever more frequent. And the ship, the ship, the ship, held out like a promised land between them, hung on words like equality, kindness, safety and plenty. “Wouldn’t it be nice if the good people had a chance?” my mother would say, but in post-collapse London, my father and mother were the only people I knew, and in any case, she never seemed to expect an answer.
Who were the good people, anyway? The street people, or the prophets or petrolheads, who avoided me as instinctively as I did them? Were the strangers who came to the flat when my father was at home good people? I had no way of knowing; I didn’t talk to them, and in any case they never came twice. You’ll have friends on the ship, my parents told me. By the time I was fifteen, my parents were still all I knew, and their stories of the ship had become as fascinating and impossible as fairy tales. I didn’t know that the people who came to the flat were being interviewed for berths, or that the hours my mother spent on the screen were spent exploring the forbidden raven routes, looking for stories of people who deserved to be saved. I didn’t know that my father’s frequent absences were spent tracking down supplies and vaccinations; I didn’t know that he finally bought the ship itself from a Greek magnate who’d decided to tie himself to the land. I knew nothing. Except that I was lucky, and that was only because my parents kept telling me so. We walked to the British Museum almost every day, and the dwindling of the collections was the only marker of time I had.
The evening before my sixteenth birthday, I sat watching the news bulletin with my mother. At least, she watched the bulletin; I didn’t bother. I couldn’t understand how she could waste precious power when the bulletins were always the same. I never watched them; what I watched was my mother watching. She sat on the edge of the sofa, twitching and shifting as she sifted the presenter’s words, her hand resting automatically over the pocket where she kept our identity cards, right up until the bulletin finished, as it always did, with the recording of the commander’s original promise to the people. I could recite it word for word. “Keep your card. It is your life. This Emergency Government has but one task—to ensure fair distribution of limited resources. I, Marius, Commander of the Emergency Government, promise that no card-carrying, screen-registered, law-abiding man or woman in this country will go hungry, or homeless, or watch their children walk without shoes. But with that promise comes a warning. Do not let your registration lapse. Carry your card and keep it safe. My citizens are my priority. I cannot feed those who are not mine. And without your card, I cannot know that you are mine.”
“Your card, Lalage,” she said suddenly. She had handed it over to me just before the bulletin.
I felt in my pocket. “It’s fine,” I said. Her face tensed. “What?” I demanded. “I’ve got my card. It’s here, all right?”
“No. It’s not all right.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll be sixteen tomorrow. You’ll be responsible for your own card. They will shoot you if you can’t produce it. Not me. You. Your card, do you hear me, Lalage?”
“Happy birthday to me,” I muttered. But I listened. I always listened to her, although I rarely let her know it, and on the day of my sixteenth birthday, as we walked to the museum, I was so conscious of the little plastic rectangle nestled inside the pocket my mother had made for it that I forgot to complain that my father was away for my birthday. I was an adult; the card in my pocket said so, and I looked around at the museum dwellers with judgemental eyes, asking myself how they could have been so careless as to lose their cards and end up homeless. While my mother spoke with them in undertones, and handed over the food we always brought, I wandered the display cases.
So many objects had disappeared over the years. The Mildenhall Treasure. The Portland Font. My favourite exhibit, a little gold chariot pulled by golden horses, had vanished just after my fourteenth birthday. Instead, the cases were filled with little cards—Object removed for cleaning, Object removed during display rearrangement. Lindow Man was still there, though, huddled, leathern, against whatever had killed him two thousand years before. I stared at him, and through the glass at the sleeping bags beyond, inside which living bodies huddled against what London had become. My mother made sure we kept up our registrations, and she took me to the British Museum and talked at me, and we read her old books and waited for my father, and scratched letters with burnt sticks, and that was my life. A closed circle shot through with irritations, soothed by the promise of a ship that never seemed to come any closer.
“If the ship is real,” I asked my mother as we walked back to the flat, “why don’t we just get on it?”
“It’s not that simple.” She tapped in our entry code and began to fit the separate keys into their various locks.
“Why not?” I asked. It was my job to keep watch while she did the door, but nothing ever happened. My mother liked things to be done properly, that was all. Even the milk, which came in cardboard bricks when it came at all, had to be poured into a jug before she’d let me or my father have any. When the outside door was safely bolted behind us, she began the long process of unlocking the front door of our flat. We went in, and the door clunked solidly behind us. As I began to fasten the bolts, she went to the pantry, took down one of the few tins on the shelf and stood staring at it. It didn’t have a label. She held out the tin to me, smiling. “It’s your birthday,” she said. “You decide. What do you think? Shall we risk it?” I refused to look and went into the drawing room. We had always eaten roast chicken on my birthday, and I’d never forgotten it, even though the last one had been five years ago.
There was a bang at the door, then a pattern of knocks. Before it was finished, my mother and I were both there, our almost-quarrel forgotten, racing to see who could get the bolts and locks undone first. “It’s my birthday,” I protested, but she still got to him first, and clung to him, and left me to close the door and start on the bolts again.
“I’ve got something for you, birthday girl,” my father said, leaning over my mother and kissing the top of my head. I wondered, wildly, whether he’d managed to find a chicken. But the box he produced as he grinned at my mother was smaller than the palm of his hand. “We haven’t seen one of these for a very long time,” he said, and I felt my mother trembling beside me, crowding in closely as he put the box into my shaking hands. I opened the box and her face fell. She began to cry and he moved away from me in consternation.
“I thought you had found a flower,” she said. And he held her, and while she sobbed against him and he said sorry, sorry, sorry into her hair, I shook a pool of white fire onto the palm of my hand. I remembered him bringing home diamonds years ago, when the banks were teetering and there was still roast chicken, but I’d never even been allowed to hold them, and before long the diamonds had given way to rifles and grenades, piled up throughout the flat. My mother’s face had become pale and lined, and my father went away, and then the rifles gave way to stacks and stacks of screens, pristine in their boxes. Then the Art Trials began, and my father was gone again. And so it went on, but now I had a diamond of my own. I stared at it, gleaming in my hand, and could not imagine how any flower could be more beautiful.