The Ecliptic (46 page)

The mansion roof was studded with moss and a trench of slimy rainwater ran all along the parapet. I did not venture far. Gripping the tiles, I sidled out until I had a view into
the bay, where Fullerton’s body—
Jonathan’s
body—rested somewhere underneath the roiling waves. The afternoon was no less dismal from this height. A flat
discolouration to the sky, like dirty turps, and the air so cut with damp that everything seemed glimpsed through a smeared windowpane. I wanted to follow Quickman’s advice and deliberate on
things before I acted. But being on the roof amidst the countless swaying pines, with the nearest family house a mere grey shape in the distance, I could only think how far the boy had come to die.
And I could not let the world continue so indifferently.

Because when I thought of Fullerton now, I saw the prom deck of the
Queen Elizabeth
and a child with a Superman comic, and the sweet ‘Get Well’ card he had drawn for me:
Your super friend, Jonathan
. Every word that he had spoken in the past few days was loaded with a new significance: those awkward lies about Green Lanes (he could not tell the truth about
his upbringing in case it alerted me to his real identity), the talk of his father not taking him camping (Victor was not an outdoorsman), the constant mention of those weekends at his
granddad’s flat (Victor being so frequently abroad for conferences, Amanda so routinely at her squash club, that it made sense for the boy to form a bond with the only grandparent he had
left). And something about cycling ‘all the way to Hampstead’ one night in his sleep? (The Yails had a home in Primrose Hill, not far from there.)

There were so many inferences that now seemed blatant. Of course, the
DV-Ecliptic
was an extrapolation of the
Queen Elizabeth
and other ocean liners the boy had sailed on.
Irfan To l likely represented some inherent fear of being alone (given how much time the boy claimed to spend with his granddad, this seemed reasonable to assume). And what were those comics if not
just a way to express the terror of his nightmares? The provost had said as much himself:
The dreams are part of his creative process. That’s all I can tell you
. It was not
unfeasible to picture Jonathan reading through his father’s session notes and seeing the ecliptic scribbled down and underlined. Easy to imagine how it might be overheard through the door of
the consultation room, or dropped into a no-name-basis conversation at the family dinner table. Perhaps Victor had discussed his patients’ cases brazenly on the telephone with other doctors
as the boy listened on the upstairs line—who could say? I had never believed much in coincidence, and it seemed unlikely that the two of us would converge on the same point of fascination
without some guiding hand. Now he was gone. And Victor—poor Victor—was out there somewhere, wondering, oblivious. I had to get word to him.

Down on the front lawn, the Frenchman in his yellow poncho was walking in large circles with another guest—I could not see who it was. I had not bothered to study them too closely, but as
they started yet another lap, I realised that the other man was not a guest at all. The Frenchman had made a scarecrow out of a broomstick, an old peacoat, and what looked like thatches of dry
leaves. He was dancing this strange manikin around the boggy grass as part of some performance. With every circuit, it seemed that he dismantled a piece of the dummy, and, the longer it went on,
the more of its guts and fibres lay strewn upon the lawn. He was calling out now in French, but I could not understand what he was saying.

After a moment, guests started to emerge from their lodgings to watch. An audience of short-termers gathered on the portico steps. Ender looked on from the path, his arms stocked with firewood.
Even Ardak was tempted from the outhouse to see what was going on, and leaned there, pulling off his work gloves while the Frenchman kept on calling out his nonsense. And when I heard the
provost’s voice below—that murmuring tenor with all its affectations—I sensed an opportunity. The fuss about the Frenchman’s piece grew louder, fuller. Everyone was
preoccupied with it. And so, as fast as I could manage, I edged along the parapet and climbed back down the ladder, through the roof beams, until I reached the empty hallway.

The provost’s study was in the other wing of the building, across the upper landing, and the parquet floor resounded with my every step. I lifted off my shoes and left them in the
corridor, striding past the staircase and the mess hall underneath me. The floor was oddly warm against my feet. I expected the door would be locked—and it was—but I was able to
scrutinise the keyhole. It was a warded lock that required a short, fat key, most likely of the same dull brass as all the door fixtures.

I hurried down two flights to the lobby, where Ender’s door was still ajar at the back end of the house. There was a cheery rumble of voices out on the portico, and I tried not to be seen,
stepping quietly along the hall. The Frenchman kept on crying out his garbled script. I pushed inside the old man’s room, unsure where to look. A fleet of leather slippers was neatly lined
under his bed, his pyjamas folded on the pillow. The muslin curtains were tied back with ribbon, and I could see right into the old man’s bathroom: a clot of foam left on his shaving brush, a
rim of whiskers in the sink. There was no time to feel ashamed. I searched his desktop and the bending bookshelves, rifled through his cupboards, finding nothing. My blood began to cool. In the
drawers of his writing table, I discovered only envelopes, boxes of
baklava
(his private stash), and a mound of typewritten pages in Turkish.

I could hear boot soles on the floor outside, amusement in the corridor. The old man was coming back—I felt sure of it—and I stole into his closet, holding my breath. My head grazed
a row of hooks behind me on the wall. All manner of things hung from them: bales of twigs, a whistle on a lanyard, large blue beads with painted eyeballs, and keys on metal loops. When Ender did
not appear, I snatched two of the stumpiest—one brass key, one silver—and fled back to the hall. Heading for the portico, I was certain I would feel a meaty hand upon my shoulder, hear
a chiding
tsk
from another guest behind me. But it never came. I was able to break out onto the steps and merge with all the short-termers, while the Frenchman carried on his strange
performance. He was calling: ‘
Adieu! Adieu! Adieu!
’

Gluck seemed more bemused by it than interested. His tufty eyebrows were pushed into a point over his nose. I went to him and said, ‘Do you know what all this gibberish is about?’
And he gestured to a sign that hung around the scarecrow’s neck that said:
DOUX ET NÉGLIGEABLE
. ‘It’s very polemical,’ Gluck said, ‘but
I don’t really know the motivation. From an aesthetic standpoint, though, I’d say it’s quite successful.’

Something else you will not learn at art school: real inspiration turns up only when your invitation has expired. There is no preparation you can put in place for it and no
provision you can make that will entice it to your door. It will find you either sleeping, occupied with chores, or entertaining the dumb neighbours you allowed in as a compromise. And when it
finally shows, you will have to wake up fast, abandon everything, turf out the pretenders just to make it welcome, because it will take less time to disappear than you spent waiting for it. There
is no finer company than inspiration, but its very goodness will leave you heartsick when it goes. So do not waste time asking it to wipe its feet. Embrace it at the threshold.

The boy’s comics were exactly where I left them: spread out on the workbench with the muller rested on the inner page of Issue 5. I went to light my stove and filled the
kettle. My nerves were still fidgeting and I needed some weak tea to calm myself. Lying on the couch, I gazed at the paint-spattered ceiling and thought of Victor Yail. His face all shapeless with
grief. His lenses fogged by tears. Cracks in his voice. I tried to think how I was going to break the news to him, but every sentence I conceived was banal:
Your boy is dead—I’m
sorry . . . He took his own life . . . We threw him in the sea . . .
How else could I say it? The facts would not change.

As the fire burned rosily in the stove, I grew so absorbed in looking at the flames that my head began to haze and drift. I made the tea and took it to the window. No promise of sunshine
outside. Clouds like sooty thumbprints on a chimney breast. Turning round, my hip knocked against the workbench and the muller slipped slightly off the page. Something caught my attention: the
grain of the image underneath the glass. Blurry discs of colour.

Standing over it, I held my eye up to the muller as if it were a gem loupe. And through the glass I saw the printed substance of the illustrations. Their colours were made up of tiny dots in
rows: magenta, cyan, yellow and black. Some overlapped, some were spaced apart, the rest were tightly packed. A galaxy that could not be seen from far away. A thing that was there, and yet not.

When the lunch bell rang, I did not leave my studio. I pulled out the timbers I had been keeping underneath my bed, wiped off the heavy film of dust, cut all the angles with a
mitre-saw, and screwed them into place to make a stretcher. I rolled out all the canvas I had on the studio floor and pulled it taut across the frame, hammering in the tacks. Before long, I had a
four-by-nine-foot rectangle of blankness staring back at me. It spread across the full width of my studio and there was not one inch of it I feared. The primer coat still had to dry, and I stood
near, projecting the image onto it in my mind. There seemed no point in making a cartoon: the mural I had conceived was very simple—pure abstraction—and it was best to let the idea
express itself without too many constraints. First of all, I needed darkness.

The boy had ruined all but one of the mushroom garlands in my closet. There was the tobacco tin of pigment stowed behind the bathroom cabinet—not quite enough to get me through the night.
I could grind up what was left, but I would have to harvest more.

My muller and the mixing slab were already clean. Still, I gave them another rinse for procedure’s sake and organised my workbench as normal. I drew the shutters, stapled the roller blind
against the window frame, and then—with a sadness that twinged the length of my spine—I went to fetch a new roll of tape from the cupboard and left it on the tabletop for later.

When the dinner bell sounded, I ignored it. It struck me that I did not have to wait for dark to harvest what I needed. I knew the route into the woods so well that I could walk it blindfold.
And with all the other guests now gone to the mansion for their evening meal, I did not have to worry about being noticed. So I stuffed a roll of tin foil into my satchel, edged lightly down the
path, and slipped into the apron of the trees.

In the vapid daylight, the woods became a different place, cloistered but not as menacing. The pines had a crisp, fulsome scent, flushed out by the rain. I looked for the notches I had knifed
into the trunks—the four short lines upon the bark that I used to help me navigate at night—and followed them, one notch at a time, until the air turned dank and the ground felt more
elastic underfoot. Up ahead, I saw the enclave with the leaning trees, and then the narrow clearing with its nest of rotting logs. And there they were: the mushrooms, so ordinary before sunset.
Plain brown clusters of fungus with brims almost translucent. I dropped to my knees and sliced every last fruithead from the bark, until the tinfoil sheet was covered by them. I wrapped and taped
them inside, putting the packet in my satchel. Dashing back between the pines, I got the feeling I had left something behind—my knife, perhaps my scarf.