cellophane hope

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. There wasn’t much of a view, only a whisper of light yellowing the seabed at too close a range for it to be very impressive. Peony’s eyes lingered over ghostly crags, swirls of sand and the odd fossilised stick, but she never saw anything living. Despite the warmth of the captain’s cabin, staring into the abyss always chilled Peony’s bones, and she hugged the silk bed sheets more tightly around her. She was glad she wasn’t requested often to this lovely, dove-coloured room of soft light, thick curtains, ankle-deep carpets. She wasn’t the captain’s favourite, something he felt important to tell her emphatically and often, but Marigold had been sick – not sick enough to waste medicine on, but puffy-eyed and runny-nosed enough to discourage the captain for a few nights.

The captain was dozing, one coarse-haired, meaty arm flung over his face. He had a liver spot just above the elbow and he snorted in his sleep. Peony shifted in her perch on the edge of the bed, tapping her feet. Sometimes he preferred her to be gone by the time he woke up, and other times he’d rather she stayed.

The deep water was mesmerising, darker than ink outside the light from the torch. When Peony let her mind wander and her eyes lose focus, she could almost see… things… the currents tentacled, water shuddering itself away from the boat. But it was her imagination, obviously. Nothing had lived in these oceans for centuries, and nothing would again, except for their heavy iron ship lazing itself along, a couple of thousand passengers in its belly. She padded slowly over to that window, a small and perfect square. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there, staring into three miles deep of sea-pressure, hand flat against glass that was nearly a foot thick.

‘Don’t you have work to get on with?’

The captain’s words were little more than grunts as he yanked his legs into his trousers.

‘Probably,’ Peony said. She avoided looking him in the face as she turned around and stuck out her hand, but she could see his smile dancing in her peripheral vision.

‘Always so concerned about getting paid, aren’t you?’ he said, a mocking edge to his voice. He enjoyed this, she thought, more than the other thing.

‘Well, I’m not here for the romance, am I?’

He gave a laugh at that, a good and hearty one, before pressing a bright red token into her palm. ‘Don’t spend it all at once.’

It wasn’t much, but it would buy cakes for her children, a treat they usually only got for their birthdays, or it would buy thread to darn her shirt, or it would get a few quotas of pain relief, or she could save it towards a software update for their living quarters. They didn’t have the right programme at the moment for Rowan to do her homework, and if Peony didn’t get it soon, Rowan would fall behind and be stuck in third class forever.

Dozens of pairs of eyes raked over Peony as she strode back along the walkway back to the galley, dissecting her, calculating which bits of skin had been touched, pawed, contaminated, wondering what each of her cells was worth. But then, they couldn’t have been, because they were all too concerned with how they could improve their own sorry lot. Only first-class passengers had time to indulge in the luxury of judgement. Hours pooled so plentifully around them that they sometimes did nothing but sit and discuss the minutiae of strangers for days on end.

The overseer glowered at Peony when she got back, her eyes darting to the clock, but she couldn’t have said anything. Nobody liked to get between the captain and what he wanted. Peony restationed herself next to Meadow, chopping carrots which had been grown in the UV fields two floors below. Her fingers slid over the firm, slippery surface. It was luminescently orange, absurdly vibrant, food that did not seem to take itself seriously. Third class rations were always much more subdued, a palette of beige and wheat and brown and sand. Fleetingly, she pretended she could taste the carrot, inhaling deeply and feeling it on her tongue, but it was no good. Just a few feet away a rotting severed hand swung from a butcher’s hook. It had once belonged to Saffron, who had popped the smallest crumb in her mouth, a morsel that had fallen on the floor anyway and needed to be thrown away. Her hand was a fairly effective deterrent for other hungry mouths.

‘How’s Rain doing?’ Meadow asked.

Peony stiffened, her knife fumbling momentarily in her grasp. She found she couldn’t bring herself to answer, so instead shrugged.

Meadow understood. Her husband had also worked in the UV fields, right up to his final days as the carcinoma which had started nibbling at his neck had eaten him up entirely, inside and out. It had taken years. She wasn’t sure Rain had that long. He’d been coughing a lot recently. It had probably spread to his lungs already.

But they never spoke of that. They lay side by side each night, the room filled with things too huge to say, fingertips grazing each other in the dark. She had tried to tell him once, about the captain, but he had silenced her with chapped lips on her forehead.

‘I’m glad that none of you will starve,’ he’d said, eyes emptier and more lost than the ocean floor.

When the overseer’s back was turned, Peony pulled out her token and nudged it towards Meadow.

‘You still have that contact, right? Who can get those vials of Morph?’

Meadow hesitated, then took the token. ‘Rain’s that bad already, huh? Poor bastard.’

‘He doesn’t want me to waste money on him. But-’ Peony’s words dried up but Meadow nodded. She’d lost quite a few people to the fields.

It was only a few weeks before the captain called her again. He eyed her as she walked in, and she stood there, allowing him to inspect her, her eyes drawn as always to the window, the only window on the whole ship. They didn’t need windows, that had been decided early on in the building process. She couldn’t see how the captain would need a window either, but the previous captain might also have liked having things that nobody else did.

‘Marigold will be indisposed for quite a few months,’ the captain told her, unbuttoning his shirt, which Peony took to mean Marigold was pregnant. Peony was glad she was unlikely to run into that particular problem at her age. The captain seemed to think that too, though Peony thought his distaste for swollen bellies was somewhat hypocritical. She wondered what would happen to the child, whether Marigold would be supported, whether the captain would show an interest in his get.

She looked out the window as his hands grappled and grasped at her hips. Spirals of stone jutted out from the sludgy ground. Something light and diaphanous clung to one of them. A plastic bag, perhaps. She saw plastic sometimes, bottles and tubs and deflated balloons, leftovers of life. She wondered which one had smothered the last sea turtle. How long had it taken for the blood of the last dolphin to be washed off by the oily tide? The plastic bag fluttered like a jellyfish in tropical waters, like a peace flag held high. And, despite the futility, Peony’s eyes kept roving, because she could never quite stifle the hope that there was something out there that was not yet dead.