The Ecliptic (12 page)

She glared at me. ‘Huh?’

‘I suppose when all that drama’s in your blood, you never lose it.’ I took out the folded pages from my skirt and waved them.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You mean . . .’

‘What else?’

‘Let’s go outside a sec. It’s too loud in here.’

‘Yes, I think that’s probably best for everyone.’

We stepped out onto the landing. The noise of the mess hall softened to a drone. There was a thumbnail of a moon that night, framed in the picture window, and the darkness was thickening above
the trees. MacKinney turned on a lamp and leaned against the banister. ‘Sorry for getting irked in there,’ she said. ‘It’s just that Q can really sound so high and mighty
sometimes.’

‘I’m amazed you’ve finally noticed.’

She groaned, sweeping underneath her lenses with her fingers. ‘So, tell me: how bad is it?’

I gave her the pages. ‘Well, first of all, the Willa character, the painter, she reminds me of someone. Can’t think who.’

Mac shrugged. ‘That’s not exactly a coincidence.’

‘Good. I’m glad I wasn’t imagining it. People used to see themselves in my paintings all the time and I never had the heart to disappoint them.’ I put my hand upon her
shoulder. ‘The most important thing, as far as you’re concerned, is that the characters felt very real to me—in fact, I understood their situation better than you know. I assume
that’s why you asked me to read it.’

Mac’s face bloomed. ‘They did?’

‘I had the most sympathy for Christopher, of course, though I could understand Willa’s dilemma, and I thought she was nicely conflicted. It’s strange, I almost never feel for
the man in that kind of scenario—usually, it’s the woman who has to make all the compromises and do all the forgiving. I found that quite refreshing. It’s another kind of
infidelity that’s breaking them up, isn’t it? That’s how I read it, anyway. The affair is between Willa and her art . . . I liked that idea. If you’d given me more than a
few pages, I could’ve found out what happens next. Now I’ll have to wait and catch it in the West End.’

For a moment, Mac said nothing. I could not tell if she was glad or dispirited. She tightened her fist around the pages, closing her eyes, and when she blinked them open again, they were glassy
and mapped with tiny lines. ‘You have no idea how much it means to hear that, Knell. Just to know it made you feel something. Thank you. That was all I needed.’

‘Wait until you hear my notes on the punctuation.’

She smiled. ‘Don’t ruin it.’

‘Does this mean we can finish our dinner in peace?’

‘OK, but Quickman has to tone down the sanctimony. It’s getting out of hand.’

‘I’ll speak to him about that.’

‘Good.’

We headed back to the mess hall. ‘What kind of name is Lindo, anyway?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. Ask the provost.’

‘Hard to take a man seriously with a name like that.’

But Mac had already tuned out. She was hesitating at the threshold, studying her pages. ‘You really think there’s something worth developing here?’

With my hand on my heart, I said, ‘I’d stake my sponsor’s life on it.’

‘God, it’s such a relief. I can’t tell you how much better I feel.’ She edged away. ‘I might just go to my room and dig out the rest of the draft.
Carpe
diem
and all that.’

‘You’re not going to stay and eat with us?’

She started to backpedal. ‘No, I’ve lost my appetite. Give my pudding to Tif.’

‘That’ll go down well.’

And it was then, as Mac was heading back across the landing, that a surge of footsteps came up the stairway behind us. There was such a frantic energy to the noise, it seemed as though some
forest animal had been loosed inside the mansion. But a familiar shape revealed itself—a head of brown hair, a bulky set of shoulders. It was Fullerton. He went dashing up the stairs so fast
he could not control his feet. A toecap caught on the very last step, tripping him. His body hurtled forwards, skidding. Knees and elbows slapped the parquet, but he rose quickly to his haunches,
stilling his breaths.

‘Are you OK?’ Mac asked from the corridor.

He seemed to be startled by the sound of her voice, shifting his head in her direction. ‘Hello? Who’s there?’

‘It’s MacKinney,’ she said. ‘I’m right here.’

‘Hello? Is someone out there?’

I stepped closer. ‘Fullerton, it’s
us
. It’s Knell and MacKinney. Are you all right?’ But when he heard my voice coming from the other side of the room, a greater
panic wracked him. He stood gawping at the stained-glass lampshade above his head, as though fearing it would drop. He wiped the spittle from his chin, checking his fingers. ‘I think
I’m bleeding,’ he said. ‘I don’t have much time. How do I get out?’

‘You’re fine,’ Mac told him.

‘
Please
. How do I get out?’

‘Calm down there, sunshine. You’re not making any sense.’ She turned to me, her face bent with concern. ‘He must’ve hit his head or something.’

‘Just tell me which stairs to take,’ the boy went on. ‘Are you there?’

‘Fullerton, we’re standing right in front of you,’ I said. ‘Stay still. I’m coming to help you.’ Slowly, I moved into his path, not wanting to alarm him.

‘You’re so faint. Please—how do I get out?’ He began to peer at the ceiling, turning in circles.

I was near enough to touch him now, and I held my hand out, hoping he would take it. But, although his eyes were locked wide open, he did not acknowledge me. I waved my arms and, still, he could
not see me. ‘He’s sleepwalking,’ I said to Mac. ‘Has to be.’

‘Tripping, more like,’ she said. ‘Look at those pupils—he’s on something.’

‘Hello? Are you there?’ the boy called now. ‘Tell me where to go.
Please
.’

Mac turned. ‘I’m going to get Ender.’

‘No, wait.’ I spoke very loudly and clearly to the boy. ‘Go back to where you started. We’ll come and fetch you.’

But the boy just shouted to the ceiling: ‘Hello? Please—anyone there?’ Then, under his breath, he said, ‘
Fuck
.’ He checked his mouth for blood again, and
hurried forwards. I had to step aside to let him past.

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 Kabata
ş
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.