The Ecliptic

by Benjamin Wood

  The conversations in the mess hall did not quieten and he staggered up to the serving pass. He browsed the leftovers, lifting every dish to check what lay beneath, getting the run-off on his hands. Whatever he was seeing, it was not food. He began to rummage the drinks table behind him, pushing teacups aside and knocking cola cans, until he caught sight of the ayran pots and gathered them all in his clutches.

  A few of the short-termers noticed him then. One of them said, ‘Hey, save some for the rest of us!’ Another said, ‘Your shoelace is untied!’ They were smirking at each other. But Fullerton took no notice, or did not receive them. He marched back through the mess hall, brushing past Mac and me in the doorway. He was muttering to himself, counting his steps: ‘. . . fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six . . .’ We followed him onto the landing. He scurried off through the ruddy light, down the first staircase. ‘. . . seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty.’ He stopped at the window and stacked the cardboard ayran pots on the ledge in a single column. ‘What is he up to?’ Mac said. We watched him rip the lid off the topmost carton and course down the steps with another one still in his grip.

  For a long moment, we could only hear his presence on the floor below, the ricochets of him bounding through the house. Then the last ayran pot came spearing up towards the window in a blur. It clattered straight into the stack and burst against the glass. Great shocks of liquid sprayed up and sideways, over the curtains, the wallpaper, pooling on the sill. The radius of the splash was so wide that it dotted my shoes. There came a whoop of exaltation from the hallway beneath us.

  By the time we reached the lobby, the boy was gone. The front door was hanging open and there was a sloppy glob of cinnamon gum pushed into its keyhole. Outside, the night appeared so empty and permanent. ‘Well, I suppose the provost was wrong,’ Mac said, coming up behind me. ‘That lad needs more than just our supervision.’

  I fretted a great deal about Fullerton that night and it took all my resolve to not pay a visit to his lodging on the way back to my studio. In the end, I reasoned he was better left alone. I was still convinced that he had been sleeping on his feet throughout the episode, but I could tell that Mac believed otherwise. She did not accuse the boy outright, nor did she raise any suspicions with Ender. Instead, she kept reminding me of how fixed the boy’s pupils had been. ‘I’ve seen that spaced-out look before,’ she said, as we helped to clean the boy’s mess from the windowsill. ‘That’s all the explanation I need.’ But this made very little sense to me.

  There was no place drier than Portmantle: we took soluble aspirin for headaches or nothing at all, and even Gülcan’s rubbing alcohol was kept in a locked box in the provost’s office with all the emergency medicines. It was well understood that artists who relied on substances to pique their creativity were not accepted at the refuge; sponsors were made to vouch for the sobriety and moral character of all the newcomers before they arrived; and every guest was told the same cautionary tale about Whitlock, a fabled resident from the past, who had been caught drinking lawnmower diesel in the outhouse and was immediately ejected from the grounds—no documentation to secure his passage at the border, no help from the provost, not even a farewell handshake. (True or not, the implications of this story echoed long and loud.) Besides, I was sure the boy’s possessions had been searched on his very first day, because he had made a point of complaining to me about it, and even his cigarette packet had been empty when he had offered it to Quickman that afternoon in the library. To me, the boy’s strangeness was innate, not chemically induced. And I did not believe he would be impetuous enough to jeopardise his place at Portmantle for the sake of a fleeting high.

  All of this was on my mind as I went about my nightly preparations in the studio. There was plenty to arrange—blinds to draw and fix, windowpanes to cover, doorways to seal—and, while I waited for the fullness of the dark, I could not stop thinking of the boy and his behaviour. As I got changed into my painting clothes, I felt the jeton hanging in my skirt pocket like a curtain weight. It was my duty to keep it safe until someone came to retrieve it—losing your ferry token for the homeward leg was as good as a curse—so I took it to the bathroom and stowed it, for the meantime, with my own keepsakes.

  There was a groove in the wall behind the mirrored cabinet, a cavity in the plaster I had fashioned with a palette knife, just big enough to hide two things: (i) a tobacco tin that held all my reserves of special pigment, and (ii) a red jeweller’s box. I removed these objects delicately, as though cradling bird’s eggs, and placed them on the lip of the sink. The jeweller’s box still bore the faded insignia of the shop in Paris where it was acquired, and contained a rather ugly opal ring belonging to my sponsor. Underneath the lining was my own tarnished jeton from the Kabataş ferry port—I could still remember the bottle-cap tinkle of it dropping on the vendor’s counter, the slow quiver as it settled, the sheer excitement of holding it in my fingers. How drab and ordinary it seemed now. How purposeless. I tipped the other jeton into the box with it and snapped the lid shut.

  By the time I had replaced the bathroom cabinet on its hinges, the lights had all gone out in the mansion and the condition of the night was such that I could make a start on sampling. The only thing left to do was secure my front door and tape over the surround. There was a mildness to the air, brought on by the thaw, which made my fingers more compliant. I switched off the studio lights and watched my pigment samples surfacing in the darkness, a medley of colour swelling on the wall, part muted, part luminous. It quickened my heart to see it.

  When all my apparatus was in place, I went to the closet. By my reckoning, there were three garlands of mushrooms drying by the boiler, and at least one of those was ready to be powdered. A blue haze eked from the under-edge of the closet door and spread about my ankles.

  The glow was unusually strong. My first thought was that the recent batch of mushrooms I had gathered was brighter than average, and this put me in a hopeful mood—perhaps my harvesting techniques were improving, or perhaps the warm afternoon had enhanced the drying process. But when I slid the door back, I found the garlands trodden to a pulp on the dusty concrete. A pair of blue-tinged feet protruded from the space beneath my coats. And there, between the boiler and my rucksack, was Fullerton. He was leaning in the closet like a broom, bare-naked and unconscious.

  Instinctively, I turned my eyes away and closed the door on him—a silly, defensive reflex. For a while, my temples pounded with the fright and I could not organise my thoughts. The garlands were ruined and several days of sampling had been lost—I should have been shaking with anger, but I found it very hard to summon anything besides concern for the boy. I hurried off to get a blanket from my bed to cover him.

  Sliding the door open again, I parted the clothes on the rail, exposing his pale young body. He did not move. His face was as reposed as I had ever seen it: the eyelids softly clinched, the mouth agape. His stout-ribbed chest was smeared with bluish finger-tracks, a kind of luminescent war paint that also streaked his thighs and shins and forearms. I tried to respect his modesty as best as I could, but his awkward position in the closet made it impossible, and I caught a full glimpse of what he had. He was not as puny as the withered models I had drawn at art school, and differently built from the men I had gone to bed with, all of whom were circumcised.

  I wrapped him in the blanket, bringing it around one shoulder like a toga, clamping it with a bulldog clip. This buffeted him a fair amount against the wall, but he did not even stir. I switched on all the studio lights and called his name; it made no difference. The only thing to do, it seemed, was douse him a little.

  He did not wake up in a jolt, as I thought he might. Instead, he winced and blinked and spat, regaining his awareness gradually. He saw me standing there with the empty jug. ‘Oh shit—again?’ he said, and huffed the water from his face, pulling the blanket tight around his frame. There was a weariness to his eyes then, a sinking realisation. I had soaked him too well to be certain of it, b
ut I thought he was about to cry. ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘How long’ve I been here?’

  I got the impression he was used to waking up like this, in strange places, in other people’s homes. ‘At least since dinnertime,’ I said. ‘You’ve had a busy night, by all accounts.’

  He nodded dolefully.

  ‘Why don’t you come out of there? I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘I’m really sorry about this.’ He checked the coverage of the blanket. The hem of it just about reached his knees. ‘I don’t know how I got in, but if I broke anything, I’ll fix it, I swear.’

  ‘My fault. The door was unlocked.’

  ‘No, I mean it, Knell. I’m sorry you’ve got to deal with me like this.’ His voice was meek and hoarse. ‘Could you get me a towel?’

  ‘There’s a stack of clean ones above your head. On the shelf, there.’

  He edged forwards, stretching.

  I went to light my stove and put on the electric kettle. ‘I’m not sure how much you remember,’ I called to him from the sink, ‘but you left the mansion in a bit of a state. Ender’s having to replace the curtains. Hard to get ayran out of velvet.’

  The boy stepped out of the closet, hair all spiked and tousled. ‘Damage tends to follow me around these days.’ He stood under the harsh fluorescent lights, sniffing his arms. ‘You have mushrooms growing in your cupboard, by the way. Looks like I got most of them.’

  ‘Is that so?’ The kindling in the stove began to smoulder. ‘It might be getting damp in there. I’ll get Ardak to check.’

  ‘Doesn’t smell too bad, actually. I’ve covered myself in worse.’ He looked back at the sludge he had left in the closet. ‘Still, I feel bad about the mess. And for—you know.’ He cleared his throat drily. ‘Thanks for the blanket.’

  ‘Should I expect to find your clothes somewhere?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

  The boy did not respond. He came closer to the stove. His arms were crossed now, his shoulders goose-fleshed.

  ‘We saw you on the landing, Mac and I. You seemed to hear us to begin with, but then you ran off. You kept asking us how to get out.’

  ‘I’m sorry about that.’

  ‘I know you are. It’s fine, but—out of where?’

  Very slowly, the boy lowered himself to kneel beside the stove. ‘I sort of get trapped in my own head.’ These words came out in such a freighted tone that his jaw hung slack for a moment after. He warmed his hands by the vents, staring up at me. ‘I’m no good at explaining it,’ he went on, ‘but have you ever been to one of those really giant hotels they have in America? The New York Hilton or somewhere like that. Thousands of locked rooms that all look the same, all those corridors and stairways and lifts going up and down and up and—ugh! Just the scale of it, right? My dad used to take me to places like that. How the hell do they even build them?’ His eyes went fat with the thought. ‘Now picture that same hotel, but empty. With the lifts all broken and nobody around to fix them and no way of knowing which staircase takes you where. That’s what my head is like most of the time.’

  ‘Well, Mac’s convinced you’re on drugs,’ I said. ‘Can’t say I blame her.’

  He seemed amused by this, but did not answer.

  ‘Please tell me you aren’t involved in all that.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, raking a centre parting in his hair. ‘Did it look like I was having any fun to you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s your answer, then. Who wants to take a drug that makes them miserable?’ His legs were folded now and he was rubbing at his feet. ‘Honestly, I’ve been wandering in my sleep since I was a little kid. Our next-door neighbours would find me in their basement when I was eight or nine. Sometimes, I’d make it all the way to Hampstead on my bike. Even crawled into a skip once—nearly got crushed by a load of skirting-boards. I see the insides of a lot of cupboards, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And are you always in the nude?’ I said.

  The boy gave his customary snicker. ‘That’s kind of a recent development. At least I don’t wet myself any more, eh?’ As he surveyed the room, he must have noticed my workbench, the muller and slab, the canvas swatches that lay in wait for me. ‘I interrupted your work, didn’t I? I’m sorry. I should go.’

  ‘Stop apologising.’

  He moved to get up.

  ‘Sit down. We’re having tea. I’ll paint later.’ There was no use in telling him that the mushrooms he had trampled in the closet were my work, or that his roving feet had set my progress back several days.

  ‘Thanks for this, Knell. For not being—’ He trailed off. ‘You know what I mean. People get angry. They start looking at you funny. They think you can control it, so they end up resenting you. Don’t mean to, I suppose, but that’s what always happens . . . I had a doctor who said I should tie myself to the bedpost at night. I asked him if he’d chain his own kids up while they were sleeping. He looked at me like I was mad. Anyway, I gave it a try, just to see what happened. Made everything ten times worse. It’s not like I went anywhere, obviously, but the dreams got more and more intense and I nearly broke my ankles. So that just shows you what doctors know about anything.’

  The kettle clicked off. ‘What sort of thing do you get up to, then, inside that head of yours?’

  ‘I’m always trying to find my way out, to wake myself up. But it’s impossible. Sometimes I’ll imagine a new room I’ve never been in before. Sometimes I’ll hear a voice or music in the distance and try to follow that. I’ll find some old film playing on mute, or dream up a whole library and sit there, flicking through the books, hoping there might be an instruction to help me escape, a map or something. It’s like, every time I go to sleep, I get moved back to the first square on the board—does that make sense? And a few moves in, I realise I’ve played this game before, you know? I recognise those ladders, and all those snakes look familiar. But the game never finishes.’

  It sounded like absolute hell, and I told him so.

  ‘Yeah, but it has its good points, too.’ He mused on this for a moment. ‘You’re going to think it’s weird how much I talk about my granddad, but, for some reason, he’s been on my mind a lot since I’ve been here. I used to stay with him on weekends when my parents were away. He had a gammy foot, so he couldn’t walk far, and he hardly left the flat. So we used to just stay in and listen to records. Always the same ones. Old ragtime bands, comedy programmes, silly songs, “The Laughing Policeman”, stuff like that. His taste was quite narrow. We’d sit there listening to the same records over and over again. I got so bored of them, but there was nothing else to do. He hated modern radio, and he didn’t have a garden, and I wasn’t allowed to go out on my own. He loved the comfort of it, hearing the same old stuff every day. So I had to sit there with him, listening to it all, pretending to enjoy it. I couldn’t wait for my mum to get back and take me home. But then, once it got to the middle of the week, and I was stuck on my own at school again, I’d start wishing I was with my granddad. All those hours I must have spent with him—sitting there, hearing those same records all day—I wouldn’t swap them for anything. They made me who I am today. And I suppose I feel the same way now, about my dreams.’

  ‘It must be hard to go to sleep, though,’ I said. ‘Knowing what might happen.’

  He shrugged. ‘Feels harder to wake up, believe me.’

  The old tea leaves still had some life in them. I swirled the hot water around in the pot. He watched me with slatted eyes. ‘It’ll be weak, but that’s how I like it. I can let it steep, if you prefer.’

  ‘No, weak is fine.’

  I rinsed two cups and poured the tea. It was almost colourless. The boy examined it, took a sip and cringed. ‘Woah, you weren’t joking.’

  ‘My mother’s fault. We had to reuse all the tea leaves in our house. Wartime mentality—or maybe just a Scottish one. Now I can’t drink it any other
way.’

  ‘You don’t have much of an accent.’

  ‘Everything gets softer as you get older. Trust me.’

  He almost laughed.

  ‘I’m not sure they’d take me back in Clydebank now. It’s still in my blood, but I just don’t feel part of it any more. And I’ve never really been drawn to painting it—not like London. It doesn’t fascinate me in that way.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen your work. I know.’

  It was uttered so bluntly that it caught me unawares, and all I could do was waft my hand, as though to cleave the very suggestion from the air. ‘Come on now, I thought we were having a nice conversation.’

  The boy dipped his head. ‘I only said that because—’ He thought better of it, gulping. Then he got another burst of courage. ‘I can’t help it if I know who you are. Your stuff was up in the Tate—’

  ‘Please. Let’s not do this.’

  ‘I had to copy it once, on a school trip. The teacher made us buy the postcard.’

  ‘Shush, shush, enough now. You’re making things worse. Please, let’s change the subject.’ I frowned into my cup, disregarding him. I was not sure what I was most afraid of: being recognised for who I was, or pitied for who I was not. ‘I think I made this too strong. Does it taste a little bitter? I must have swilled it about too much.’ I went and dumped the tea in the sink. I stayed there, facing away from him. ‘In fact, it’s probably time I got some work done. Would you mind going back to your own place now, if you’re feeling better?’

  I heard him put his cup down and climb to his feet. ‘Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, OK?’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ When I turned, he was already going for the exit. ‘I feel really bad—you’ve been so nice to me and everything.’ He had shifted the blanket and tucked it tight around his waist.

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Don’t be upset with me. I’m not good with people—I tried to tell you.’

  ‘I just need to work, that’s all.’