I saw an eagerness about the boy’s eyes then, too, and I realised that it was happening just like I said it would—all on its own.
Even though the world Fullerton had left was different from the one we knew, altered by a history that had taken place without us, his way into Portmantle was the same as ours. The procedure for admission never changed. First, your sponsor had to seek the authorisation of the provost—no specifics could be shared without this prior consent. It was an inherited knowledge, paid forward by residents of the past to the residents of the present, and if your sponsor could not adequately relay directions, you might never reach the place at all.
Any guest who checked out of the refuge with a clean record—that is to say, without having wilfully contravened any of its rules—was afforded one endorsement to pass on. This could be bestowed upon any artist whom it was felt could benefit from the sanctuary of Portmantle. It was stressed by the provost that endorsements should only be offered to artists in the direst need. The cost of a new resident’s tenure had to be covered by their sponsor; a fairly meagre sum, paid seasonally, but it could last for an indefinite period—such was the case for MacKinney, Quickman, Pettifer, and me. Sponsors, therefore, had to be sure that the artists they were recommending were truly worth helping, as they could remain beholden to that financial outlay for a permanent duration. The responsibility could not be relinquished or transferred to someone else. Because of this, we stalwarts of the place were looked upon with respect—it was assumed that our sponsors’ long-term commitment reflected their valuation of our talents. But there were some who viewed us with a dim-eyed pity, as though we were just shadows of ourselves, washed up and doomed to failure.
Only when the provost had accepted your sponsor’s recommendation would you be told where Portmantle was located. Only then could your sponsor offer you precise instructions, and you would be required to commit these details to memory fast, because they could not be spoken again or written down. Only when you had made it to the Gare de Lyon in Paris were you allowed to open your sponsor’s envelope with the provost’s passphrase. Only then could you take the night train to Lausanne, following the Simplon Orient Express line with a second-class ticket your sponsor had paid for under his own name, his real name, through Milan and Belgrade, to the Turkish-Bulgarian border, showing your passport when you arrived at the terminus in Istanbul. Only then could you pay your fee for the entry visa and find the cheap hotel room your sponsor had booked, and burn that passport in the bathtub, dousing it with the shower-hose before it set off the sprinklers (you had to set fire to it early, to stop yourself from turning back later). Only then could you go out into the bright spring sun of the wide-open city and walk along the main road, past the swell of traffic, the taxis with their rolled-down windows and their music blaring, the clattering trams, the towering mosques, until you reached the ferry port at Kabataş.
Only then could you put one dull jeton in the turnstile slot, like your sponsor had advised, keeping another to remind you of your homeward trip every time your fingers met it in the folds of your pocket. Only then could you walk through the barrier and wait in the muggy departures terminal with your hat on, your eyes concealed by wayfarers, fanning yourself with the newspaper until the doors were opened to let you step onto the hulking white ship. Only then could you find a seat on the upper deck amongst the gathering hordes, right up close to the railing, to watch the ferry push away and feel the sudden breeze upon your cheek, taste the brackish cool upon your lips, the thrill of it. Only then could you know the full splendour of the Marmara as it ebbed around you, fathomless, agleam.
And this would be your final chance to lean back and exhale, to listen to the outcry of the seagulls following the stern, the dizzy flocks that clamoured near the deck as though escorting you. Soon, the Turkish men would lean over the railing with simits held aloft; the birds would swoop to steal the bread right from their fingers, screeching; and you would come to realise the gulls were not escorts at all, but hustlers and hangers-on, like everyone else you were sailing away from.
Only as you arrived at the first stop in Kadiköy could you undo your watchstrap and remove it, let it slide between the slats of the bench, as though you had forgotten it. Only as you sailed by the first strange island with all its tombstone houses could you glean how far you were from the world you knew, the people you loved, the people you did not. Only when you passed the next of them—one broad and inhabited, another just a sliver of green where nothing seemed to live but herons—could you understand how close you were to what you needed. Only then could you see the khaki hump of Heybeliada rising in the sun-stirred haze and know that you had made it.
Only then could you stand with the giddy tourists on the lower decks as the ferryman threw a withered rope onto the dock, waiting to step off onto a foreign land but somehow feeling you were almost home. Only then could you skirt by the Naval Academy where the uniformed cadets did their parade drills, and head south-east on Çam Limani Yolu, as you had been instructed, until the streets became narrower, emptier, and the space between houses grew so wide that you could see the spreading forest up ahead. Only then could you lose yourself in those dry, slanting pines and sense that you were now released from everything that had weighed on you before. Only then could you see the shoulders of a tarnished mansion surface above the treetops. Only at its gate could you throw down your backpack, push the buzzer, watch a squinting Turk with a grey moustache and a shotgun come up to the bars, asking your name. Only then could you say you were a different person. Only then would the old man enquire about the passphrase, so you could finally release it to the air, the meaning of the words becoming clearer as you spoke them. Only then would the gate unlock and slide back for you in the old man’s grip. Only then would you hear him say, ‘Portmantle’ye hoşgeldiniz.’
When the boy demolished Pettifer in the first game of backgammon we all cried beginner’s luck, but then they played twice more—each bout a little faster than the one before—and it soon became clear that young Fullerton possessed a startling tactical acuity. He came away with a haul of Pettifer’s belongings: a çay glass, a wind-up turtle made from camphor-wood, and a woven leather belt; and, because I had backed Tif to sweep the best of five, I was forced to surrender my last remaining pack of cinnamon gum. We assumed that Quickman, a shrewder, more experienced and aggressive player, would prove too wily an opponent for the boy, but it did not transpire that way. Fullerton outmanoeuvred him to the tune of seven points per game. In truth, it was barely a contest. By the time the boy was done, he had won a fountain pen, a Roman coin, and a silver lighter that once belonged to Quickman’s father, inscribed with two faded initials. (Tif won back a pair of loafers he had previously lost to Q, and I earned a scoopful of French coffee beans from Mac, though it seemed unfair to claim my winnings in her absence.)
‘We’ve been hustled,’ Quickman said, staring at the chequers that were left on the board. ‘That last bump-and-run was tournament stuff. What are you, regional champ? National?’
The boy beamed back at him. ‘I swear, I’ve hardly played before.’
‘You don’t fool me.’
‘I’m just lucky, that’s all. The dice fell kindly.’
‘Rubbish. I’ve never seen so much blockading. That was all strategy.’
‘It’s a blocking game all right,’ Pettifer added, ‘but it’s deadly effective.’
The boy gave nothing away. ‘If you say so.’
‘I’d better sharpen up my end-game before we play again,’ Quickman said.
‘I’m not sure that’ll help you much.’
I could not tell if the boy was being earnest or smug. He got up, took his cagoule from the chair-back, and walked across the studio, pausing before my wall of samples. The room was so bright with the overhead fluorescents that there was nothing but an arrangement of white patches for him to see, a grid of small canvas squares that I had pasted to the wall, in a pattern only I could interpret. There were at least
a hundred of them, each square containing a smear of white paint, hardly discernible from the canvas itself. Fullerton took another forward step, trying to read my pencilled notes in the margins. ‘What is it you’re working on here, Knell?’ he said quite innocently. ‘I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s something white.’
Pettifer tutted. ‘You’re overstepping.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘No, come on—he needs to be told.’
Quickman called to the boy in a chiding tone: ‘We don’t intrude on other people’s work round here.’
Fullerton held up his hands in surrender. ‘Jesus. Sorry. I take it back.’
‘They’re studies for a mural,’ I told him. ‘That’s as much as I care to explain right now.’
‘Anything else would be an imposition,’ Quickman said.
The boy was still facing the wall. ‘But don’t you ever want to run ideas by each other? Just to see the response?’
I was getting used to holding conversations with his back. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But then I wouldn’t really be painting for myself. And that’s the only way to paint.’
Quickman was now gathering the backgammon chequers into one hand, stamping down at every piece. It was evident that he was still stinging from defeat, because he said sharply to the boy, ‘This isn’t a conservatoire. If you’ve come here for other people’s input, you might want to try a different crowd.’
Fullerton turned and pushed up his sleeves. ‘It’s OK. I’m not the sharing type.’ There was still a pale disc of skin on his left wrist where a watch used to be. ‘I’ve got something I need to finish, yes, but I won’t bore you with the details.’
‘I saw a guitar in your studio,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while since we had a musician here.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t call myself a musician.’
‘What are you then?’
He backed away from my samples now, eyes slatted. ‘Jacqueline du Pré—she’s a proper musician; Glenn Gould, Miles Davis. I can bash out a folk song when I’m in the mood. But I haven’t felt much like it recently.’
Pettifer stood up. ‘All sounds rather simple when you put it like that.’
‘I’m sure it’s more complicated than he’s making out,’ Quickman said, ‘or he wouldn’t be here, would he?’
‘The boy gave a wan little smile. ‘Stop me if I’m sharing too much.’
‘Well, I always wished I could play an instrument,’ I said. ‘Somehow I just can’t get the knack for it. A bit like backgammon.’ As a child, I had often sneaked my mother’s squeezebox from its case and tried to draw a tune from it, but all it ever gave me were wheezes of complaint.
‘I taught myself from a picture book,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s not that hard.’
Quickman folded up the game board and shoved it under his armpit. ‘The last musician we had played the bloody flute all night. It was like having swallows in the loft. I was this close to throttling him.’
‘Then I should probably keep the noise down.’
‘If you know what’s good for you.’
The boy did not answer. He stooped to examine the samples again. ‘There’s something really peaceful about this wall of yours, Knell. Not that you want my opinion.’
‘It’s a far cry from anything right now,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’ I did not ask him to clarify what he meant by ‘peaceful’, as he had said the word with such a tone of admiration.
He side-stepped an easel to get to my workbench and started looking through the jumble there, too, picking up a palette knife, examining the crusted blade.
‘Oi! Hands to yourself!’ Pettifer said.
‘Sorry.’ The boy put down the knife and moved away.
‘We don’t mean to be fussy,’ I said, ‘but we’ve got used to things being in a certain order.’ In truth, it would not have mattered if he had upturned the entire workbench and trampled it. Nothing it held was worth protecting any more, only the kind of effluvium that all painters accrue over the course of a long project: dirty turps in peach cans; oils hardening in tubes; rags and palettes congealed with colour; brushes standing in jars of grey water like forgotten flowers. Such ordinary things had lost all meaning for me. I kept them there because I had nowhere else to store them, and they served as a reminder of my limitations. My real work was in those samples on the wall, and I would have cut off the boy’s arm before he touched a single square. But he did not try.
He zipped up his cagoule. The trophies of a hard night’s backgammon distended the front pockets. ‘Well, I’m going to hit the sack. Thanks for the game,’ he said. ‘I thought I would’ve forgotten all my moves by now.’
‘I knew it!’ Quickman slumped into his chair. ‘Hustled!’
‘Blimey. How good are you, exactly?’ Pettifer said.
‘I might’ve played a tournament or two, after hours. You know, backroom games.’
‘For money?’
‘Don’t see the point otherwise.’
Quickman said, ‘I’ve seen those backroom games. They’d never let a kid like you at the table.’
‘Well, they don’t exactly check your age in the places I’m talking about. Not hard to find a cash game in Green Lanes—all the Cypriots round there. You pick things up if you watch them closely. And they’ll talk strategy all night after a few drinks.’
There was something about the way Fullerton spoke—head down and to the side—that did not quite convince me. I just could not imagine him gambling his pocket money in some dismal London pub with a crowd of Cypriots. He was spinning us a story. Quickman must have agreed, because he stroked his beard and said, doubtfully, ‘Green Lanes, eh?’
‘Yup.’ The boy put up the hood of his cagoule, smirking. ‘Thanks for the gum, Knell. I’m sure you’ll get a chance to win it back.’ He yanked at the door. ‘Everyone sleep tight.’ And off he went.
Quickman waited until the boy’s footsteps could no longer be heard, then he stood up and buttoned his coat. ‘There’s something shifty about that lad,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea to entertain him.’
‘You’re just sore because he thrashed you,’ Pettifer said.
‘Well, all right, perhaps that’s part of it.’ Quickman upturned his collar. The sheepskin was bald and grubby round the neckline. ‘There’s something a bit off about him, though. Am I being unfair?’
‘No—he’s definitely unusual,’ I said. ‘But I thought the same about you once, Q, and it turned out fine in the end.’
It was too soon to claim we had a common understanding, but I could see reflections of my own youth in the way the boy behaved. I was about Fullerton’s age when I first started painting—not yet out of my parents’ house, with barely enough experience of life to qualify me, in the eyes of society, as an expert on anything besides schoolyard gossip and girls’ fashions. But I understood, even then, how much I knew. At sixteen, I had seen enough modern art in picture books to tell a depth from a great hollow. And I reasoned that if so many vapid contributions had been made by artists gone before me, what was there to be frightened of? The precedents of their failure would be my parachute. So I began in this context: without fear, without doubt, without expectation. The year was 1953.
In the last few weeks of school, when other girls were thinking of summer jobs, I stole oil paints from the art-block cupboards at Clydebank High. I prised two window-boards from a derelict outhouse and dragged them home along Kilbowie Road, sawing and sanding them with my father’s tools, stowing them behind a coal box. The pleasure of it—the secret purpose—was so bracing I could not rest. That summer, I committed my entire life to painting.
In the gloomy backcourt of our tenement, as far away as I could get from the stinking middens, I leaned my first board against a wall. I was undaunted by the blankness of it. I did not pause to scrutinise the fabric of the thing itself, to wonder if the woodgrain was right, if the whitewash had set evenly, if it would need to be glazed later on. Instead, I walked up to
the board as though it were a boy I had decided to kiss and streaked a layer of phthalo blue across the surface with a palette knife, the floppy baking kind my mother owned, making an impulsive shape upon the wood. There was no history standing on my shoulders then, no classical references hanging in my head like dismal weather. I was alone, uninfluenced, free to work the layers of chalky stolen paint with a big lolloping knife, to smudge with my fingers, pad flat with my fist, pinch, thumb, scrape, and scratch. No judgements of technique arose in my mind, because I did not invite them, did not think to. I simply acted, expressed, behaved, made gestures of the knife that seemed unprompted and divined. There was a scene in my head that I tried to reproduce, something from a wartime story of my father’s, but I could only paint it the way I imagined, not how it really was.
The hours ghosted by. Soon my hands became so colour-soaked and waxed I could not see the pleats of my knuckles or the rims of my fingernails. The dumbshow of the world—that other place I had forgotten, the outer one—broke into road noise and tenement din. Neighbours were squabbling in the close, coming out into the yard with dustpans of ash, telling young lads with footballs to clear off their landings. An early dark was settling and I heard my mother at the window, already home from work. She was calling me. And so I lifted my head to see what I had finished.
There it was upon the wall, drying: a semi-abstract thing, made in a flurry. The suggestion of a place I had never been to. A spray of rain. A slate-grey ocean spattered by bombs. The remnants of a foundry, dismembered in the sky. A falling road bridge, or perhaps a wall, and so much else I did not recognise, which somehow conveyed more in its obliqueness than I could ever have spoken in words.
When my mother came down into the backcourt and saw what I had done, she must have glimpsed my future in it like bad runes. ‘Whitsat?’ she said. ‘Did ye dae that?’ She chided me for wasting a full day on a silly picture and told me to clean her good icing knife. There were better uses for my time, plenty of errands I could do for her. But I spent the next day working on another painting, and the next, and the next, and did not care about the punishments that came after.
The Ecliptic Page 4
