Then I was looking at the glossy backside of a horse. A man in a black cap was at the reins, facing the road. I was propped up in an open fayton with the POLIS man beside me. The horse was hoofing slowly down the track. We were curving back around the bay, the sea to our left, the scrabbly beach made clearer by the light of morning. A sloop was moored out in the shallows, tilting on the waves. ‘Adiniz ne?’ said the POLIS man. I looked at him, afraid. He offered me a cigarette. I shook my head. ‘Anliyor musunuz?’ His arms were sprawled along the back seat of the carriage. The horse clopped on. I did not speak. I gazed towards the sea. I watched the listing of the sloop at anchor. Upturned dinghies by the jetty. A bluff of trees across the bay. And then I caught a glimpse of something in the jumble of the beach: a long black shape upon the gravel. My canvas roll, still in its plastic. The sea had brought it to me.
I stood up in the fayton. The wheels were rolling quickly, but I jumped. ‘Hayir! Hayir!’ called the POLIS man. The pain of the landing tore me in half. I fell upon the road and hit my head. The last thing I heard was the fayton skidding to a stop. All the dismal voices I had pushed back in my mind escaped me then, as I lay bleeding. They said that I should stay down in the dirt where I belonged.
A familiar kind of ceiling, low and speckled. I found myself in a magnolia room with the pain muted out, fluids going into me through a tube. Right arm in a sling and thirsting. In the corner stood a dark-haired man in uniform, pure white and steam-pressed. He had three gold pips on his epaulettes and a face of consternation. ‘Do you know where you are?’ he said, watching me stir. I shook my head.
I was not in a bed but on a padded trolley. They had dressed me up in pale blue fatigues. ‘This is the Naval Academy, the hospital bay,’ he said. ‘You were brought by the police.’ I tried to clear my throat but nothing would come out. ‘Would you like some water?’ He filled a paper cup from a cooler by the wall and handed it to me. ‘Your clavicle is broken. It will get better in a month or maybe two. There are some stitches in your head, but the scar I think will be OK. I can say that you are very lucky.’ The water was so cold I could not taste it. ‘More?’ he said.
I gulped and hummed.
There was a youthful slouch about his step as he went to the cooler. But he was much too old to be a cadet. He must have been an officer. Passing me the cup again, he smiled. ‘What is your name?’
I croaked it out: ‘Elspeth.’
‘Ah. You can speak,’ he said with a grin. He had teeth as bright and straight as his trouser seams. ‘Elspess. That is good. I like this name.’
I blinked at him.
He went to get a cardboard folder from a stand on the wall. Through the wire-glass in the door, I could see into the hallway. Framed photographs of sea cadets in dress regalia were hung from floor to ceiling. ‘The police bring you here and tell me: she does not have any identifications. She has no name. They think you have no business here and so you do not deserve help from anyone, but they do not want your blood to spill on their nice shoes, so they get me to look at you. There are some people in this life who do not have God’s kindness in them. Do you know what I am saying to you?’
I blinked at him.
He flipped through the folder, reviewing his notes. ‘But now you have a name. Elspess. So, you see—you are a person now, like me and them. You are the same as everyone else.’ He removed a clear plastic wallet from the folder. My ferry tokens weighted down the bottom corner. There was sheet of creased-up paper in there, too. He held it out for me to scrutinise. ‘I did not show this to them,’ he said, ‘but maybe I will have to, for my own sake.’
It was MacKinney’s letter. Badly water-damaged. There was none of her usual cursive. Just the remnants of typewritten words, blotted out and paling:
It winded me. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘From your clothes. You are lucky that I found it before the police.’
I went quiet. I could not understand why Mac would give it to me. She must have handed me the wrong letter.
‘You know, I have treated some people like you here before,’ the doctor went on. ‘Coming down from that big house when they get sick. I cannot say that I am happy about this arrangement, and I do not like those people up there very much, or their policeman friends. But I am a doctor—I will not say no to people needing care. And maybe you did not know this yet, but being in the Navy does not make you rich.’ He half smiled, closing the letter back inside his folder. ‘So maybe I have to show it to the police so we can share that cash reward. That is what they would like. Take the money and ask no questions. We can all buy nice big houses of our own. For our retirement.’ Returning the folder to the stand, he lingered by the door with his back to me. His right arm reached down for the handle, not quite turning it. ‘But I think I have always liked ships more than houses. I am a Navy man. So what the police say is not important.’
He spun round.
‘That line will come out, very easy, I can show you. Then I think you can get back to your feet.’ There was compassion in his voice, candour to his expression. ‘Because, you know, strange things happen here when I am on duty. Cadets do not like staying in the hospital. They enjoy to be outside with their friends. And there is no locks on the doors here, so I cannot make them stay.’ He stepped forward and began to disconnect the tube from my forearm. ‘Yes, they go down the steps and out of the gate. Nobody tries to stop them. It is crazy.’
Lifting out the sharp little butterfly from my vein, he padded the bloodspot with cotton wool and tossed everything into the waste bin. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but he did not acknowledge it.
‘I gave you codeine for your clavicle. The rest you must do by yourself. Good luck.’ He shut the door behind him and it did not lock. His feet went silently along the hall.
I got up. The floor seemed to wobble. There was a tightness in my breastbone. If I could make it to the beach again, I thought. If I could find my mural on the shore. If I could make it to the ferry. If I could make it to the mainland. If I could make it home.
I rifled through the doctor’s folder to get my ferry tokens back. I hugged the walls, passing frames of posed cadets out in the hallway. My arm was strapped but I flinched with every stride. There was no exit sign, only a set of steel doors to my left. I ran for them and broke into a stairwell, bounding down the concrete steps and out into the afternoon. Boys in deep-blue uniforms were on the parade ground. Their heads turned as I hurried by. They were mumbling, pointing with their eyes. Five of them. Smokers. Sailor boys with nothing to do but suck on cigarettes and gawp at injured women. A vast white building of too many windows stood beyond them. I could smell the Marmara but could not see it. Gulls were hustling in the sky.
I kept going.
Twenty, thirty yards until I reached the gate. An older cadet in full regalia was standing guard inside a wooden sentry box. The barrier was down, but I could hurdle it if I needed to. I knew that I could. I carried on, blanking the soreness, pushing it back. There was a hopeful feeling in me. The guard would let me through, I knew it. But the other cadets were taunting me now, shouting: ‘Allez! Allez!’ When I glanced back, they were gone. Only cars in the parade ground. Parking spaces. I began to slow.
Ahead of me, the guard had stepped out of his sentry box. He was raising the barrier. He was waving his gloved hand to hurry me through. But behind me, the shouts were getting louder, brighter. They were coming from the sky. ‘Ellie!’ they said. ‘Ellie!’
Whatever you do, Mac had warned me, keep going. So I did.
But then I saw a sign was screwed upon the middle of the barrier, slowly lifting, arcing through the sky. No Parking. No Admittance. No, something else. Its dotted lines grew sharper and more definite.
I stopped.
The whole afternoon appeared to dim around me.
Those shouts were echoing still. ‘Ellie! Ellie!’
I turned back, gazing up at the roof of the building. No one was there. Just a row of blackened flues. A metal winch. But a
ll the bright paintwork had now tarnished grey. There was a foreign mizzle on my face.
‘Ellie, wait right there! Don’t move one inch! I’m coming down!’
I saw him. He was high up in the very top window, flailing his arms.
A studious fellow.
Victor Yail, 46 Harley Street, London.
The operator must have found him.
Clarity
The road was flanked by leafless trees and ordinary grass verges. Every so often, we would pass under an empty footbridge and the lane-markings would curve slightly to the left or right, but we seemed to have been driving in one straight line since leaving the hospital. Cars that were just dabs on the horizon closed in fast and thumped right past us. The day had not yet ceded to the darkness, but it was readying itself. All the streetlamps had the bleary orange makings of a fuller light in their glass hoods. Victor kept an even speed: not more than fifty and not less than forty-five. He drove with one loose set of fingers on the steering column and his elbow on the windowsill. His other hand stayed poised on his left knee, occasionally reaching up to flick the indicator with the sedateness of a man collecting tickets at a kiosk. Soon, the hummocks began to rise in the narrows of the road ahead. And then the soot-dark loch was spreading in the windscreen and I followed it with my eyes, round to the driver’s side, till Victor’s profile fuzzed out in the window, and it all bled into an open stretch of sea.
‘How are you holding up?’ he said.
I looked away, worrying the glove box. ‘It’s difficult to say.’ I let my eyes recalibrate. There was plenty between me and the water out there—hedgerows, pasture, thickets of trees—but it was hard to reconcile it all. Every time I saw a cluster of pines I felt both homesick and at home. Being in a car, flashing over land without questioning its sureness beneath the wheels, following the road back to a place that I felt certain I had left years ago—all of these things were not easy to accept or comprehend, and yet they seemed to be the smallest of my problems. ‘I’m trying not to think about it till we get there. How much further is it?’
‘Oh, not far now,’ said Victor. ‘Five or ten minutes. We’ll pick up a sign in a moment, I should think.’
He was driving me back at my own insistence. It had taken a while to convince him. He had tried to deflect me with excuses. But now we were just five or ten minutes from Luss. Five or ten minutes from knowing.
A staff nurse and a porter had run out to fetch me. Blood was trailing in a chute all down my arm. I had an oozing hole where the butterfly had torn the skin, and I was standing in a car park in blue hospital pyjamas and a sling. ‘Come on, lovey, let’s get you inside,’ said the nurse, her kindly hand on my good shoulder. She steered me back to the entrance, under the annexe, past the waiting ambulances. The porter held the bay doors open for us, asking if I needed a wheelchair. I said no, I could walk. But voices kept sputtering in and out like mistuned radio. I was still seeing cadets in uniforms: the corridor was teeming with them. They parted for us, shaking their heads as we slow-marched through, muttering their insults in Turkish, spitting on the floor. ‘Here you go, pet—let’s put you in here,’ said the nurse, and she sat me down near the lifts between potted plants. The soil in them was dry and strewn with bent cigarette stubs. When the lift doors parted, cadets loitered in the strip-lit cavities, mouthing words at me I did not understand. The walls still seemed to be covered with pictures: old vessels in gilt frames, tall ships and steel frigates. I got lost in them for a while. I thought I smelled fresh salep. The nurse wiped my arm with a stinging wet tissue. Then Victor Yail came hurtling out of the lift, right past us. The nurse called: ‘Doctor, she’s here!’ and the porter whistled after him.
Victor’s shoes went sliding as he tried to change direction; he teetered and regained his balance. Seeing me between the plants, he held a palm to his chest and said, ‘Oh, thank goodness. You’ve got her. Well done.’
‘Where d’you want her?’ said the porter.
‘Back in the ward,’ said the nurse. ‘She needs that drip put back in her.’
‘Yes, she’s got to have that,’ said Victor. ‘But let’s put her in a chair this time.’
‘She didn’t want the wheelchair,’ said the porter.
‘No, I mean a normal chair.’
‘Aye, that’ll be fine,’ said the nurse.
They were talking about me as though I were a truant child caught stealing.
‘All right then. Up you get, love.’
Then Victor said, ‘Hang on. Let me check her over first.’
The nurse said, ‘Right. I’ll go up and sort that drip out then.’
‘Thank you. Yes.’
The porter lingered. ‘D’you want us to help you take her back?’
‘No, I can handle it from here.’ Victor crouched. ‘But, thanks—I’ll shout if I need you.’
‘Aye, all right.’ The porter wandered away, towards the bunched cadets playing dice games in the corridor. They did not seem to pay him any mind.
I felt Victor’s hands upon my knees. He was on his haunches in front of me, leaning in to get my attention. ‘Ellie? You remember me, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s Dr Yail. Victor. Can you hear me?’
I stayed quiet. The lift pinged, but when the doors slid back, the cabinet was bare.
‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘look at me now. Look at me.’
So I did. I stared right into his face. There was a flaky ridge upon his nose from the chafing of his glasses. His beard was dense but neatly clipped. He had a waxy quality to the skin below his eyelids, and rich green irises, like two halves of an olive. These were things that I had noticed many times before. He had not changed much in ten years. Hardly at all. ‘I can hear you, Victor,’ I said.
There was a visible release in his expression. ‘Good girl. I knew you could.’ He patted my knees and stood up. ‘I’m very glad to see you in one piece.’ He helped me to my feet. ‘You’ve had a lot of people fretting after you.’
‘Did you get my messages?’ I said.
‘Mm-hm. Don’t worry about that for now. The registrar was showing me your bloodwork. Your liver enzymes are still elevated slightly. We’ve got to sort that out before we do anything.’
‘I’m so sorry about Jonathan,’ I said.
‘Yes. I know you are. But we don’t need to talk about that now.’ He guided me by the elbow, jabbing at the lift button. ‘I want you resting and I want you getting fluids—nothing else for the moment.’ The lighted numbers were not moving. ‘Where the heck is this thing, Jupiter?’ And when it finally reached our level, doors sliding back, a sea cadet was waiting for us in civilian clothing. ‘Can you hit three for me, please?’ Victor asked him. The cadet rolled his eyes but still pushed the button.
I was cleaned up, given a dressing gown, and put into a day room on the ward. Victor made them turn my armchair towards the window. ‘Let’s see how much of this you can register, eh?’ he said to me. ‘I’m not sure what you’ve been used to recently, but there are worse places to be.’ He sat near me on a plastic chair, reading quietly through the notes in my folder, while a pouch of clear medicine seeped through me. Now and again, he looked up to check on my progress, smiling when I caught him looking, or getting up to fuss with my drip-stand.
I still could not understand how I had got there. For a while, I studied the movements of the cars below. I watched them reverse parking. I saw a man climb out of a little Ford Anglia, place his fedora on the roof to get a bouquet from the back seat, and walk off hatless. I even saw an ambulance crawl by with VALE OF LEVEN HOSPITAL painted on its flank, noticed the same words stencilled on the backs of wheelchairs and on signs outside the annexed buildings. But I could not trace the path from where I was to where I used to be. I could not see the joins between the mornings and the afternoons, from one month to the next. And my mind kept painting things that I could not be sure were there. Coiled ropes left on the kerbside. Lifebuoys hung along the railings. Naval uniforms. So I just listened to the forward-
ticking of the wall clock behind me and studied the drips as they came down the tube in perfect synchrony. I found that counting off the minutes soothed me. I sat there for sixteen more of them, Portmantle getting further from my mind, the bay of Heybeliada drifting away, and the mural escaping my reach. I got up and tried to point my chair in the other direction. ‘Woah, hold on there,’ Victor said, ‘let me do it. Are you sure you don’t want to look at the view?
‘I want to see the clock,’ I said.
He slatted his eyes. ‘All right.’ And he swivelled me round and moved my drip-stand.
I watched the thin red second hand circuiting the clock face, marvelling at it, feeling more and more secure with each shift of its mechanism.
After a moment, Victor folded his notes under his arm. My drip was finished and he went to tell the nurse. When he came back, he had taken his blazer off, and was scrolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He dragged his plastic chair very close to me. ‘They’re going to take some more bloods from you now, I think. We’ve got a good dose of thiamine in you, though, and that should make things a bit less foggy. You’re still quite undernourished. We need to start building your strength up again—so it’s a therapeutic diet for today. Once you’re eating properly, they’ll let me sign you out of here. OK?’
I shrugged, wincing.
‘The collarbone’s going to hurt you for another month or so. But that’s the least of your concerns.’ He smiled consolingly. ‘Your bloodwork’s telling us you’ve had some toxins in your system—we think it’s a reaction to your tablets, but the tests have been a little inconclusive. So they’ve been trying to see how you’ll respond after some fluids. You’re starting to look a little better. A healthier colour, at least.’
The Ecliptic Page 37