The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  To begin with, I brought out the mushrooms from my satchel and placed them on the table. The brightness of their caps was strong enough to work by, though it always took a moment to adjust my eyes. I had discovered that washing the fruitheads only stultified the glow, so I brushed away the dirt with a soft sable and padded off the moisture with a paper towel. Then I chopped each mushroom into even pieces, not too thin, not too narrow, as though preparing them for a salad. In the cold studio, it took no time at all for my fingers to numb, which made the next step particularly difficult.

  I took a large sewing needle from my drawer and threaded it with parcel string, spiking every slice of fungus until I had made a garland. Tying off the ends, I carried it to my closet and hung it beside the water boiler to dry with all the others. (It was important not to let the slices shrivel too much, so I checked on them quite regularly.)

  One of the other garlands had been drying in there for six days already and was just about ready to be powdered. It was pleasantly warm in my grip as I unhooked it. Picking all the curled-up mushrooms from the line, one by one, I placed them in the mortar, grinding until I had a fine blue soot. I gave the pestle as much force as I could muster and worked it longer than usual, trying to achieve a better granulation. The pigment had a compacted quality that brought to mind volcanic ash. One garland made a cupful of powder, which was enough to make about forty samples.

  I emptied a third of the powder onto the granite slab, depressed a groove into the pile with my thumb, and tipped in three-quarters of a fluid ounce of linseed oil from the measuring spoon. With the palette knife, I worked it into a paste. Then I ran the muller over it, circling and sliding, until it had a cream-cheese consistency. This was the point at which the nascent glow of the pigment became a usable material. It collected easily onto a flathead brush, coating the bristles with little persuasion. I took a swatch of bare canvas and made one slow stroke across it, noting the oil measurements in pencil below, the fruithead sizes and amounts, and, finally, a log number. Then I pinned it to the wall beside the others.

  This procedure had to be repeated many times, adding oil to the paint by increments and remixing, until only a smear of blue remained on the slab and my arms were aching from the strain of the muller. The last of the powder was scooped out of the mortar and decanted into an old tobacco tin, which I hid in a recess behind my bathroom cabinet. At the end of it all, I had just enough strength to put fresh coke in the stove and light it, but I was too exhausted after that to wash my hands. I fell upon my couch with my dirty boots on and my fingernails speckled with the glow.

  By the time I awoke, the snow was thawing on my rooftop and I could hear the spits of water on the walkway. When I peeled the tape from the door to look outside, the sun was like a mist above the canopy of pines, and I could not tell if it was morning or afternoon. The lawns were green now in patches and the footpaths to the mansion were edged with slush. I could see a couple of short-termers under the portico, drinking coffee: Gluck, a timid fellow who wrote children’s stories, and the giant Italian in the white leather coat who made self-portraits from animal photographs. (‘I do not like this word, montage; it is very concrete,’ he had explained to us one mealtime. ‘I am concerned with many representations of myself. How I choose to explore my ideas is not the issue. Discussions of process are so boring.’ This had caused Pettifer to dab his lips and respond, ‘Yes, I lost interest the moment you brought it up,’ and the Italian had not spoken to us since.)

  I showered and changed and made my way up to the mansion. When I reached the portico, Gluck and his companion were gone, and their coffee cups were left out on the swing-seat. I found Ardak in the lobby, standing high upon a wooden ladder at the heart of the stairwell. He seemed to be fixing a curtain pole; one of the velvet drapes was slung over his shoulder like a lamb for butchering. With the window bared, the room had a gutted feeling. Dust clotted the daylight. Fingerprints deadened the balustrade.

  As I stepped by his ankles, Ardak paused and stared down at me.

  ‘What happened here?’ I asked, expecting he would not understand.

  ‘Pssshhh,’ he said, and mimed the smash of glass. He pointed to the topmost window panel and I saw that the pane had been replaced; the putty was still damp in the frame.

  ‘Lucky we have you to fix these things, eh?’

  He gave a vacant nod.

  Coming upstairs, I found MacKinney at our regular table in the mess hall, breakfasting alone. She was a fastidious eater on account of an old bowel complaint, and could often be found this way, finishing her muesli long after the kitchen had closed. In fact, we counted on Mac to save our places every morning. The head of the table by the window was known to belong to us; it afforded the best view of the grounds. If we ever encountered other people in our spot, Tif or Q would shoo them away with a few stern words. Sometimes, we really were no different from school bullies, but we had spent so long at Portmantle that we had become protective of the smallest comforts.

  I called to MacKinney through the doorway: ‘Who broke the window?’

  She gestured to the far side of the room. ‘He was trying to kill a moth, supposedly.’ By the serving pass, Fullerton was standing in an apron and rubber gloves, wiping food-scraps into a dustbin. ‘He’s been doing chores with Ender all morning to make up for it.’ The old man was going from table to table, collecting cutlery and dishes, and he did not seem especially glad of the boy’s help.

  I sat down with Mac and she slid something towards me. ‘That’s what did the damage, if you’re interested.’ It was a jeton—a dull brass token with a groove along its middle. ‘Ardak found it in the garden. No sign of the moth, by the way. Perhaps it was obliterated.’ She did not move her gaze from Fullerton, who was now stacking all the empty dishes in the way Ender disliked, so that the undersides became coated with the grease of eggs and sucuk and required extra rinsing. ‘Think it’s probably best you speak to him. He doesn’t seem to like me very much.’

  I slipped the jeton into my skirt pocket. ‘You take some getting used to.’

  A forlorn expression came over Mac then, the milk quivering on the spoon as she lifted it to her mouth. ‘Well, I’ve been thinking a lot more about my own two since he’s been here, that’s for sure,’ she said. ‘Not that they’re even kids any more. But still . . . It’s hard to watch him. How he stands, how he acts. Makes me feel old.’

  ‘We are old.’

  ‘Oh, please. I’ve got decades on you.’ Mac prodded at her muesli. ‘Think about it—he’s basically a schoolboy and he’s already jaded enough to need a place like this. What hope does that give the rest of us?’

  ‘Everyone’s problems are their own, Mac.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘But mine don’t seem to be improving. I’ve forgotten what the point of it was, anyway.’

  ‘The point of what?’

  ‘This. Being here.’ She was going to say more, but there was an almighty clatter of dishes. A stack of plates had toppled from Ender’s serving trolley. The old man was standing in the middle of the mess hall, peering down at the debris, as though confounded by the physics of it.

  The boy rushed over to help. ‘Let me sort that out for you.’ He bent to pick up the fragments. ‘Do you have a brush?’

  ‘Go!’ Ender said. ‘This is not your job. I will sweep for myself.’

  ‘I don’t mind. Honest.’

  ‘Çik! Git burdan!’

  There was a very long silence.

  Fullerton stood up, wrenching off his gloves, ducking out of his apron. He returned them to the old man with a sarcastic bow. Noticing me at the table, he traipsed over, looking stung and apologetic, but all he said was, ‘What’s his problem? I didn’t even do anything.’ He reached for the milk jug in front of Mac and drank straight out of it. The rolling lump in his throat was oddly prominent. He had not shaved and there was a faint moustache above his lip, a dandelion fuzz about his cheeks that I could not help but think a tad pathetic. As he drank, his fr
inge fell back, revealing a streak of raw pink acne at his hairline. It was possible that he had been awake all night. He seemed fragile, twitchy.

  ‘Didn’t you sleep?’ I asked.

  He wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. It was baggy and bee-striped. ‘Couldn’t keep my eyes open,’ he said.

  ‘Well, sorry if we kept you up too late. Quickman gets a bit combative.’

  ‘You didn’t.’ The boy sniffed. He set the jug down so briskly on the table that it wobbled like a bar-skittle. ‘It’s going to take me all day just to clear my head again now. Sleep is not my friend.’

  ‘Come off it,’ said Mac. There was a mound of raisins left in her bowl, which she had managed to sieve out, and now she was swirling them with one finger. ‘Try staring at the ceiling every night of your life, then tell me sleep isn’t good for you. I’ll swap places with you any time.’

  ‘No, trust me,’ the boy replied in a heavy voice, ‘you wouldn’t want dreams like mine.’ With this, he angled his head until the neck-joints clicked on both sides. His sweatshirt lifted, revealing the waistband of his boxer shorts and the neat balloon-knot of his bellybutton. Then he said evenly, ‘Will Quickman be around later, do you reckon?’

  Mac glanced at me. As though to give the boy a lesson in patience, she removed her glasses and wiped the lenses. Her whole face took on a sallow hue. ‘Quickman, let’s see . . . He can be quite hard to predict.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure he won’t miss lunch.’

  ‘Well, if you see him, tell him I was looking for him.’

  ‘Happy to,’ said Mac, slotting her glasses back into place.

  The boy gave a lethargic two-fingered wave, as though consenting to a yea-vote at the end of a tedious meeting. ‘Bye then,’ he said, and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

  The weather had been so severe that we had not paid a visit to the mansion roof all winter, knowing the frost and snow would make it perilous. But I could see no other way of consoling MacKinney that afternoon. I insisted that she follow me up the attic stairs, into the rafters, where a bolted hatchway opened to a ledge just wide enough for two or three people to stand on. She was doubtful about the conditions still, but I promised her that we would be safe. ‘It’s a little wet, that’s all,’ I said, climbing out onto the shingle. ‘There’s plenty of grip.

  Mac lumbered out of the hatch and patted the cobwebs from her knees. She took one glimpse of the view and exhaled. She was soothed by it, I thought—restored. For a long moment she stayed quiet, her eyes absorbing the scenery.

  There was a brilliant, flooding sunshine. On all sides, ferries were traversing the inky water in slow motion, oblivious to everything except their course between the islands. Most of the snow-scabbed houses and apartment blocks of Heybeliada stood dormant, just a few curls of smoke from a few stubby chimneys far away. At the Naval Academy, the parade ground was vacant of marching cadets, and the restaurants on the promenade had nobody to serve. We could see the clock tower of the Greek Orthodox church from where we were, too, and the outlines of horses in the paddock across the bay; the old theological school, high on its northern summit, was framed by a narrow arc of sunlight that seemed to angle from the clouds like a projector beam. I expected this would remind MacKinney of how privileged we were to be at Portmantle, hovering above the world, subtracted from it. It usually did us good to remember that the clockwork of the world never stopped, that history was already forgetting us. But MacKinney crossed her arms and said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.’

  I moved closer to the parapet, looking down at the moss-grown shelf over the portico, the thawing gardens and studio lodgings. It was difficult to judge MacKinney’s mood. We had eased one another through gloomy spells so often it had become a kind of running joke between us: ‘Will you help me dig a tunnel?’ I would ask her sometimes; or if I caught her doodling on a napkin, she might say, ‘Planning our escape.’ Now she seemed to be stricken with something more than her usual disquiet—a deeper hurt I could not reach—and she was resistant to the normal platitudes. I wondered if it might all be related to the boy somehow. ‘There isn’t a person here who isn’t tired of it, Mac. We have to keep going. Work through it.’

  ‘You think I’ve been sitting on my hands all this time?’

  ‘No. That isn’t what I said.’

  ‘I’ve tried everything. Nothing fits, nothing feels right. I can’t even put down a simple stage direction without questioning myself. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to surrender. It’s clear I don’t have another play in me. Whatever talent I might have had once—it’s long gone.’

  ‘Just write what you believe.’

  ‘What? Is that serious advice?’

  ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  Ardak came out from the portico beneath us, carrying his ladders back to the outhouse. As he walked, the rungs cast beautiful zoetrope shadows on the sunlit lawns and, for a moment, I lost track of where I was.

  ‘Knell—are you even listening?’

  I turned to find Mac squinting at me. ‘Of course.’

  The intermittent shine had got me thinking of the squeezebox in the dusty space beneath my mother’s bed, the lolloping weight of the instrument in my hands, how the lamplight used to shimmer on the metal when I took it out.

  ‘So you really don’t mind? I’ve lost all my objectivity on it now, but I think it’s the only thing worth developing.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The scene I’ve just been telling you about. The monologue. Jesus, Knell, you were nodding along while I was talking. Did you not hear anything?’

  I apologised, and this seemed to placate her. If I had known how much of the conversation had skipped by me, I would have confessed to it. ‘Sorry. It might not have been such a good idea to come up here on an empty stomach.’ I felt totally disoriented.

  ‘Let’s go down then,’ Mac said. ‘We’ll get some salep and go to my room. You can read it there. It won’t take long.’

  Once I was back through the hatch, I felt better. There was a pleasant sawdust smell about the attic and a satisfying closeness to the walls. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to ask Q to read it, or one of the other writers? I don’t know if it’s right, involving me like this. We ought to keeps things as they are.’

  Mac put her arm around me. ‘Quickman will only bring a certain—how to put this—intellectualism to his readings, which isn’t what I need right now. I’m looking for a simple emotional response. And I wouldn’t trust those short-termers with a single word of mine.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re the perfect audience for this—you understand where I’m coming from. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’

  We stopped outside the mess hall, where Gülcan kept an urn of salep constantly warming throughout the day. It was the provost’s favourite drink and we had come to share his fondness for it as a winter tonic. Mac filled two cups and we carried them along the corridor to her room, passing the thresholds of other guests, some of whom I could hear working at typewriters. It seemed to me that Mac’s corridor was forever rattling with these factory noises—the bright clamour of thoughts being machined—and I had always believed it was a heartening sound until that day. ‘Listen to them,’ she said, ‘typing up. They’ll be out of here soon.’

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

  ‘For them maybe.’

  MacKinney’s room was deliberately spartan: a single bed made up with hospital corners, a bureau with the tidiest stack of manuscript pages, an oak wardrobe as solid and imposing as a casket. We were not discouraged from bringing in photographs of loved ones, but if any of us possessed them they were not put on display—I suspected Mac had pictures of her daughters hidden somewhere and spent her evenings tenderly thumbing their faces in private.

  On the ottoman by her window was the tan leather suitcase I had seen her carry into Portmantle many seasons ago; she kept it with its lid open and its belly packed with hard
backs, preciously arranged, all of them page-marked with strips of ribbon. What belongings she had were organised like this, aligned to some private schema. Only her camping stove and coffee pot—special items she had requested from the provost—bore the scars of regular use; they were so blackened and spilled-on that she kept them tucked behind the door, covered by a tea towel.

  She put down her salep on the bureau and slid out the top drawer, carrying the whole thing to her bed. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, rifling through, ‘it’s probably best if you don’t read it while I’m standing here in front of you. That will just be agony for both of us.’ The foolscap pages wilted in her hands as she held them out to me. ‘It’s my only copy. I’d tell you to be careful with it, but I’m quite sure it’s headed for the fireplace in the end.’

  The papers were a little greasy. Flicking through them, I saw that each page bore Mac’s careful handwriting—an upright style that never broke the borders of the rulings, whose letters crouched like tall birds herded into crates. At least a quarter of the text was neatly struck through with black pen, and Mac had redacted most of her own notes in the margins. ‘Just, you know—tell me if there’s anything there,’ she said.

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Think you could get back to me by dinnertime?’

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t know how long I have.’

  There had been such wistfulness about the way MacKinney had been talking on the roof that I had mistaken her meaning. I thought that she had been trying to vent her frustrations about Portmantle again, weighing her regrets against her achievements. But I understood now, from the urgency in her voice, from the way she was tap-tapping her foot on the floorboards, that it was something else. She was leaving us—and not by choice. ‘Did something happen? Are they trying to kick you out?’