The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  ‘Shssh. Close the door.’

  I pulled it shut. The salep taste in my mouth began to sour. Without the echo of the corridor, the room had a very cloistered feeling. It seemed there was no one else alive in the world but the two of us.

  Mac said, ‘I don’t know anything about your sponsor. Tell me about her.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell me about her.’

  ‘Him,’ I said.

  ‘Really? A man?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I can’t say why, but I expected better of you.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t exactly choose.’

  ‘Is he older than you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘By how much?’

  ‘A good ten years or so.’

  ‘That’s a shame. You better hope he gets plenty of exercise.’

  ‘Oh, he was never much of a sportsman, I don’t think.’ Then I finally grasped her point. ‘Is there something the matter with your sponsor?’

  ‘Not any more there isn’t.’ She gave a long exhalation—less of a sigh than a test of her lungs. ‘But you can’t smoke fifty a day and expect to live forever, can you?’ Lifting the drawer from the bed, she went to slip it back into the bureau, wobbling it home. ‘Seventy-three years old. Not bad in the scheme of things.’

  ‘God, Mac. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK. I just wish I could’ve been there for her.’ She went extremely quiet. ‘I’d still be working in my uncle’s bakery if it weren’t for her, you know. Boiling bagels for a few shillings an hour. She took me out of that. Always believed in me.’

  ‘And never stopped,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. I always thought she’d be the first person to read my play when it was done, and now she’s dead. It feels as though I’ve let her down.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d tell you that was nonsense.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got precisely nothing to show for all the time I’ve spent here. That tells its own story.’ Mac combed through her hair with her nails, gathering it at the side. ‘Fact is, I don’t know how much longer they’ll let me stay. Her lawyers have been sending letters to the trustee board, asking what the cheques are for. Can you believe that? Miserable vultures.’

  ‘How long have you known about this?’ I said.

  ‘Days. I wasn’t supposed to say anything until the provost gets back. That’s where he’s gone—to speak to the trustees—but I don’t like my chances. They’re going to boot me out, I know it.’

  ‘It won’t come to that.’

  ‘There’s always some procedure to follow. You know what the provost’s like—he’s a bureaucrat to the core. If there’s a precedent, he’ll find it.’

  ‘God, Mac. I don’t know what to say.’

  She pointed to the sheaf of papers in my hands, smiling. ‘You don’t need to say anything. Just read for me. Tell me there’s a sentence worth keeping in that lot or I’m better off away from here.’

  There were short-termers in the library—five of them, reading in silence—and all but one of their heads lifted as I came in, bothered by the intrusion. Only the Spanish poet, who was sitting cross-legged on the sofa with an encyclopaedia, failed to look in my direction, though he gave a grunting cough as I left.

  It proved difficult to find any space in the mansion that was not already possessed: there was another group of short-termers in the lobby, conversing timidly in French, and they turned their backs when I approached, lowering their voices; Gülcan was folding bedsheets in the portico; Ardak was chopping wood by the front steps and tossing the shards into a barrow. Even the sky seemed busy with the flow of birds and the tangled streams of aeroplanes.

  And so I headed to my studio with Mac’s pages, feeling duty-bound to find potential in them. There was a good reason why the four of us did not share our work with anyone. We had given too many seasons of our lives to Portmantle, invested too much in the pursuit of clarity to ever doubt we would accomplish it, or to wonder if all the solitude and sacrifice would have meaning in the end. We were comfortable in the vacuum we had created, and told ourselves that other people’s validation of our efforts was nothing but a crutch. That was why we had come to Portmantle, after all, to rid ourselves of external influence and opinion—to be originals. And so we declined to attend the readings and performances that the provost arranged for departing guests, and took no notice of the workshops and get-togethers that sprung up like crabgrass every summer amongst the residents. Of course, we were curious about each other’s projects, and knew just enough to satisfy this interest—Pettifer had his cathedral designs; Quickman his epic novel;

  MacKinney her great play; and I had my mural commission—but we never enquired too deeply or encroached beyond these limits. Our work-in-progress was the one thing we truly owned, and to release it to the eyes and ears of the world was to corrupt it. When Quickman’s book was ready, we would be thrilled to set eyes on it. When Pettifer had built his cathedral, we would all go side by side to wonder at it. Until then, we supported one another just by sharing the same objective.

  MacKinney, in her desperation, had now broken this arrangement. I was terrified to look at what she had given me. It was unlikely to be a shambling mess, but what if she had written an equivalent of the pictures in my studio: something competent but lifeless, unexceptional? I lay down on my bed and forced myself to read:

  WILLA (hushed): No, the problem is I love you more. (She comes down the last stair to comfort Christopher. He shrugs off her hand as she touches his back.) Listen to me. I’ve thought about this. (Pause — the slightest gesture of interest from Christopher.) Before I met you, I was alone for so long that I had a system all worked out, you know, a way of turning that aloneness into something good. The only thing I had in my life was painting. Any intimacy I got, that’s what it came from – a brush and a canvas and my own imagination. It was like having a husband in a lot of ways. I mean, I was devoted to it, spent all my private time in rooms with it, went to sleep dreaming of it. Having something in your life like that, well, I suppose it stops you from missing what you don’t have – can you understand that? Painting was there for me when I had nothing. (Willa sits down beside Christopher and he does not resist.) Then I met you . . . (She nudges her hip against him.) Once you love a man more than your art, that’s it, you lose it forever. You can’t get the intimacy back, no matter what you try. It gets replaced by something so much better. (Responding to Christopher’s confused expression) This is not about me blaming you – don’t look at me like that. I’m just trying to explain what I’ve been feeling. And what I’m trying to say is that I’ll never paint the same way ever again. I’ll always feel adrift. (Willa takes his hand, but Christopher is not responsive.) When I’m painting, my whole heart has to be invested, and it just isn’t any more – it’s chosen you instead. It’s not big enough to hold all things at once, and I have to cope with that somehow, but I can’t. You’re always saying that I pine too much for the old days, and you’re right, that’s part of it. I do. Always. But what I can’t figure out is: how can I miss the loneliness of it all? How can I miss the unhappiness? (Long pause.) I know this doesn’t change anything. I’m not dumb enough to think it will. And maybe it’s true what you’ve been telling me – maybe this is what I’ve really wanted from the start. But I don’t regret falling in love with you, Christopher. How could I? You’re the best thing in my life.

  Christopher waits, then stands up slowly.

  CHRISTOPHER: Well, I regret it enough for the both of us.

  There was nothing for me to measure this fragment of a scene against. I had no experience of reading scripts, and could count on one hand the number of serious plays I had watched at the theatre that were not by Shakespeare. I was neither a critic nor a writer. But I felt sympathy for Willa from the outset, and that seemed to be the most important thing Mac could have achieved. Perhaps the dialogue could have been more tidily constructed, perhaps the staging was too static, perhaps it was all too composed, or not composed eno
ugh—it was not my right to make those judgements. What mattered most was that Mac’s characters seemed real to me, that they raised questions I had not previously considered. I was honestly relieved to find such values in her work.

  The afternoon was getting away from me, though, and I had not yet cleaned my studio. All my palette knives were in the sink, unrinsed. The muller and slab were resting on my workbench, encrusted with dried paint. The tables needed wiping down. I could see a few spilled globs of powder on the wood—the pigment was pure white in the daytime, like ordinary flour, but if I didn’t wash away the spillages properly, they would sink into the grain and glow weakly in the night. At times like this, I yearned for an assistant.

  I found the boy at the front of his lodging, perched on an upturned crate. In his part of the grounds, there was still abundant sunshine, but Fullerton had somehow arranged himself in the smallest patch of shade, at the very corner of the building. He was leaning back against the cinderblocks, knees up, scribbling on a length of narrow paper, the tails of which were hanging over his shins. It was clear that I had caught him in the wake of inspiration but I was too close to turn back.

  When I reached his doorway, I held the jeton above my head, pinched between two fingers, as though it were a white flag. I intended to say nothing, but he stopped what he was doing and called out: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I have a delivery.’

  I flicked the token at him, thinking he would catch it. Instead, it hit the concrete and rolled towards his feet. He stopped it with his boot.

  ‘Next time you get frightened by a butterfly,’ I said, ‘do me a favour and throw a cushion instead.’

  ‘It was a moth,’ he said flatly. ‘And I’m not frightened of them.’

  I could see now that he was writing on a stack of index cards that had been taped together, end to end. When he stood up, the whole set sprang outwards like the bellows of a concertina. He laid them on the crate. For a second or two, he scrutinised the jeton, bearing it to the light. Then he put it on his thumb and catapulted it back to me. ‘Thanks, but I’ve got one already.’

  I clutched it from the air. ‘It’s yours—the one you threw. Ardak found it.’

  ‘Must be someone else’s.’ The boy reached into his jeans. He drew out another jeton and displayed it on his palm: a newer, brighter version of the faded thing I held in mine. ‘Believe me now?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know who else it could belong to.’

  ‘Try harder.’ He moved the crate along half a yard, fussing over its position, until he had it in the right amount of gloom. Then he gathered up his stack of cards again, flip-booking their edges with his fingers. ‘You know, I’m starting to understand why you’ve been here so long, Knell. You make a lot of friendly house calls, but you don’t seem to do much painting.’

  I knew that he was trying to deflect me before I got too settled in his presence. It was a tactic I had often used myself with the short-termers. ‘I work at night,’ I told him.

  ‘Like a moth, you mean.’ He attempted a smile. ‘Honestly, I’m not scared of them. I just hate the stupid things, the way they move. I hate tipping them out of lampshades. I hate watching them fail. So I put them out of their misery.’

  ‘You’re a complicated boy,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’ He sat down in the same hunched manner as before, unravelling his chain of cards; I could see the yellowed tape on the reverse of them. He resumed his work as though nothing had curtailed it. The motion of his pen seemed automatic as he scrawled away on each card, gliding from edge to edge, top to bottom. When one card was done, he lifted it, bringing up the next part of the link; he filled that, too, and another. Not once did he peer down to check what he was writing. His gaze was fixed upon the hinterland between our lodgings and the bare pomegranate trees. In turn, I could do nothing but marvel at his productivity.

  At first, he did not respond to my staring. His pen gathered speed, making a noise like knitting needles. The cards collected themselves into a tidy pack between his feet. Then he said, ‘If you’re just going to stand there, gawking, you’re in for a long afternoon.’

  I was used to his forthrightness by now, but he still had the knack of putting me off-kilter. He was a fascinating thing to watch at work, a collision of focus and detachment. ‘Don’t you need your guitar?’ I asked.

  He dipped his head towards the ground. When he looked up again, his bottom lip was sucked under his teeth. He blinked once, heavy and protracted. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘now you’re definitely annoying me,’ and reeled in the line of cards, hand over hand, as though bringing up an anchor. ‘It’s funny, I was just thinking of my granddad. He used to read the papers and get all worked up about the drug addicts in the articles. He reckoned the best way to solve their problems was to lock them all up in one big house with all the finest heroin and clean needles they could want—no food, no TV, no water, no getting out, just round-the-clock heroin, the good stuff. He reckoned that after a week or so, half of them would overdose—no big loss, according to him—and the rest would get so bored of taking heroin they’d never touch the stuff again. He thought it was the chase they were addicted to, bless him. The lifestyle. Stupid, right?’

  ‘Just a bit.’

  ‘Well, here’s what’s funny about it: I’ve been here two days, and I’m starting to think he wasn’t all that loony.’ The boy took five quick strides towards me, boot soles clapping the cement.

  ‘I don’t really see your point.’

  He flipped the edges of his cards again. ‘I mean, that’s the reason we’re all here, isn’t it? The making part is what we’re addicted to, the struggle, the day to day. Our drug isn’t the actual fix, if you get what I’m saying.’

  ‘Partly,’ I said. ‘But I don’t believe that painting is an addiction. It’s always felt more like a survival technique.’

  This appeared to have some effect on the boy’s opinion of me. He peered down at his stack of cards, nodding, as though some silent plan had been decided upon. Then he offered them to me. ‘Go on—have look if you want. We’ll consider it a trade.’

  ‘For what exactly?’

  ‘For being so nice to me. I know it isn’t easy’ But just as I was reaching for the cards, he lifted them away, as though withholding ice cream from a child. ‘Just messing,’ he said with a smirk, lowering his arm again.

  There must have been a few hundred cards in total and they had a surprising heft. I skimmed through the entire set while the boy stood at my shoulder, breathing loudly. Barring the last twenty or thirty, which were blank, every card was covered with inscrutable Japanese characters.

  ‘So?’ he said, and made a platform with his hand. ‘What’s the verdict?’

  I placed the cards back on his palm. He had that same affected look of innocence—head down and to the side—that I had seen once before, when he had bragged about gambling with Cypriots. ‘Another thing you learned from picture books, I take it.’

  ‘Sort of.’ His pulse was visible in his neck, depressing and returning like a switch. There was an oiled quality about his complexion in the shade, too, an awkward teenage lustre. ‘It’s a pretty difficult language,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m really not.’

  ‘Then how do you know what you’re writing?’

  ‘I don’t. I just scribble it down and ask questions later.’ He shrugged, acknowledging his strangeness. ‘It looks like it might be real Japanese this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it. There’s always ten cards of gibberish in my head for every one that makes sense.’

  ‘So where does it all come from?’

  He tapped his forehead. ‘Certain things just stick with me.’

  ‘Like backgammon.’

  ‘Yeah, in a way.’ He must have thought I was trying to challenge him somehow, because he took a step back, and said, ‘I’ve got to get it down on paper while it’s still fresh, or it just breaks up into
all these little pieces. Then it gets harder to remember. I can’t explain it any better than that.’

  ‘You should ask Quickman to translate it for you. He wrote a whole book about—’ I stopped, realising that the boy was several moves ahead of me. ‘Japan,’ I finished pointlessly. ‘But you knew that already.’

  The boy softened his stance. ‘Well, I don’t think he’d help me now anyway. Not after last night. I shouldn’t have bothered asking you to find him.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that—Q doesn’t bear a grudge for long. Even if you did give him a thrashing.’ I did not sound very convincing. ‘Why don’t you sit with us at dinner? You can ask him then. Or I’ll do it for you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ the boy said. ‘I’ve got a lot to finish here.’

  ‘You can’t afford to keep missing meals, you know. It’s bad for the brain.’

  ‘I’m fussy when it comes to food.’

  ‘Well, it’s Monday, so it’s probably karnıyarık.’

  ‘I don’t even know what that is.’

  ‘Now you’re sounding like a proper Englishman,’ I said. ‘Think aubergine and minced meat. It’s always good when Gülcan makes it. Shall I save you a space?’

  ‘OK. But I might have to skip it.’

  ‘I’ll lean on Quickman for you in the meantime.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Just tell me one thing, for my own peace of mind,’ I said. ‘Are you really a musician?’

  The boy snickered. ‘I always thought I’d like to be,’ he replied, and went back to his crate. ‘But, no—it’s not why I’m here.’ Sitting down, sighing, he unfurled the spine of cards over his knees and blew on the nib of his pen. He glared at me until I moved away.