The Ecliptic (50 page)

I managed to still my heart enough to say, ‘And what if I’ve already finished my work. What then?’

‘Last I heard, you weren’t producing much.’ The provost shot a look beyond me—to Ender, I assumed, for clarification.

‘
Last you heard
.’ I glared at him. ‘As it happens, I finished my mural last night. I’m done. I was actually going to arrange an appointment with you today to see
about getting out of here.’

At this, he sniffed. It almost seemed to amuse him. He took another sip of his Afternoon Refresher. ‘Well, I’m very pleased about that, Knell, but the choices stay the same. I cannot
let you leave knowing you pose a threat to this establishment.’

‘I’m just supposed to stay here till you throw me in the sea, is that it?’

‘Not exactly.’ He swirled the ice round in his glass. ‘My hope is that you’ll come to see the value of what’s here eventually. You have three good friends in
residence whom you’ve disrespected in your haste to use my telephone. What will happen to them and their work if you insist on blabbering to outsiders? You are jeopardising more than just
yourself.’ And, dredging the last of his juice until the grenadine bled against the tip of his nose, he said, ‘In any case, people usually find ways to occupy themselves—ask
Ender. He writes a letter to his sister in Armenia every day, and not a single one of them has ever been sent without my reading it first. They’re full of fictions of his own. You
wouldn’t believe the things Ender gets up to in his imagination, the things that he takes credit for. But ask him if he’s happier with what he has here or with the
alternative—he’ll tell you.’

I snapped my head round to look at the old man. He had one hand on the doorframe, one upon his hip, and he was gazing at the patterns on the rug. I could not tell if he was listening impassively
or just pretending not to understand. ‘What Ender chooses to accept is up to him,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t allow you to censor me like that.’

‘We all need this place for different reasons, is my point.’ The provost dabbed his nose. ‘Gülcan is distraught: she’s sacrificed a lot for her position here. There
are people who rely on her. Ardak, too; myself,
everyone
. There is an honour code on which this refuge operates, and you have shown us just how dimly you regard it. Which, as I’ve
said, is a tremendous disappointment to us all.’ He waved the old man over: two inward jabs of his fingertips. ‘Ender will take you down now. I’m giving you until dinnertime to
think it over. But there really isn’t a choice to make here, as you know.’

Ender stayed with me the whole way. I was escorted through the empty corridors and down the stairs, until we found ourselves outside again in the sunshine on a slow walk back towards my lodging.
I felt, in that moment, like some old zoo animal, captured on the brink of her escape, being paraded to her cage as an example to the others. The closeness of the old man’s steps behind me
was pressuring and measured. I tried to see goodness in the sky and beauty in my surroundings—the neighbouring islands were so verdant with evergreens, the sea chalk-lined by ferry crossings,
the apartment blocks of Heybeliada clustered far below, awaiting families to shelter through the coming summer. But where I used to look upon these things with reverence, they now filled me with
anxiety.

The old man accompanied me as far as my door. ‘At the din-nerble,’ he said, ‘I will come back for you.’

‘Is this how it’s going to be now?’ I said.

He peered back vacantly.

‘A chaperone to every meal? Because I can tell you, it’s already getting tedious.’

‘Dinnerble. I will come back again.’

‘All right. But if you’re going to make a habit of this, you can knock for me and wait on the doorstep like everyone else.’ I let myself inside and he walked off, heading
straight across the grass.

The studio was dark but I did not pull up the blinds or turn the shutters back. The warmth outside was yet to permeate the cinderblocks and the floor was cool against my stockinged feet. I did
not light the stove. I went and fell upon my bed, front first, and smelled the stale mattress. Its linens had been stripped to cover up the mural and the bare fabric had a curious musk—the
fetid body odour of a hundred sleepless nights, not all of them my own. I felt the need to get up, but I stayed exactly where I was, my cheek pressing against the springs until it tingled and went
cold. I thought about lying there forever. And I realised that if I settled there, doing nothing, seeing out my days inside the studio with no purpose left at all, then I might as well go and throw
myself onto the rocks. The boy would stay lost and so would my mural. But if I went now—if I cut the painting off the stretcher
now
—I could carry it with me. I could circumvent
the gates before the dinner bell and try to get home. And even if I had no papers, at least I would have my work. At least I would have the truth. This thought lifted me up.

I ran to the bathroom, got out the jewellery box, collected the
jetons
and my opal ring.

I took as many garlands as I could see in the back of my closet. The mushrooms came off with the slightest push. I scooped them from the table, onto a sheet of tin foil, enfolding it with tape
to keep the light out. On the shelf below, I found my suitcase. The parcel of mushrooms fitted in the front pouch. Next thing, I was pulling clothes from their hangers and tipping out my bedside
drawers and throwing in the boy’s comics. I was unpicking all the samples from the wall, baling them with string, jamming them inside the case wherever they would fit. I was clearing a space
on the floor for the canvas, shoving the workbenches into the doorway, spreading out the linens to protect it, lowering it face-down to the concrete. I was on my haunches with my knife, and cutting
along the line of the brass tacks, pressing firmly, surgically, so the fabric separated from the wood. And then I was hauling the stretcher frame away—an empty rectangle, cumbersome but
light—and I was standing over the blankness of that canvas once again, right back where I had started.

When I flipped it over, I could just make out three white circles of texture. I had no time to worry if the paint would crack in transit, or if the final layer was dry enough. The canvas was
four feet tall and twice as wide, so it took some rolling up—I had no carpet tube or dowelling to guide it with. Planning ahead, I ran a loop of string along the edge, then bunched up the lip
of the canvas into my fists, folding inwards, inwards, inwards, until the weave of the cloth found a natural curl. I rolled until I had a bulky cigarette shape with a string running through it, and
taped along its join to hold it all together. I waterproofed it with black plastic sheeting and more tape, more tape, more tape, more, then tied the ends of the string to form a strap. I stood up
to test it, holding the roll across my back like a quiver of arrows. The string dug into my breast, but it was secure and it was portable. I just hoped that it was strong enough to last.

His windowpane was dappled with the silhouettes of pines and skewed with the reflections of the mansion gables. But I could still see enough of Pettifer’s head above the
top edge of his drafting board to read the glumness in his expression. He was gazing out into the trees so absently that he did not even notice me approaching. When I reached the sloping path down
to his doorstep, my hurried movements seemed to startle him. He called to me: ‘Knell? What the heck—?’ Then he undid the latch to let me in. ‘Are you leaving
already?’

‘Shshhh,’ I said, pushing past him. I threw my suitcase on his bed. ‘Close the door.’

‘What?’

‘Just do it.’

He did. ‘Oh, sure, fine. Don’t worry about the interruption or anything. I mean, it’s not as though I could possibly be—’

‘Shshhh.’

I went to draw the blind. There was just a single sheet of paper on his drafting table: a sketch of a vaulted doorway with a sort of fish-scaled covering. ‘I’ve been trying to invent
a new type of awning,’ he said. ‘Collapsible but solid. Pointless, as it transpires. But I don’t suppose there’s any good reason why we’re standing in darkness now,
either . . . At least put a lamp on.’

‘
Don’t
.’

‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘I’m starting to sweat.’ He dabbed his forehead with his sleeve.

‘I need your help, Tif. It’s really important.’

‘Of course,’ he said, straightening his face. ‘What is it?’

His stove was hot behind my calves. ‘I can’t go to the mansion myself—don’t ask me why, just trust me.’

‘All right.’ Some hesitation in his voice. ‘All right.’

‘I need you to go and get Mac for me. Tell her if she’s got anything to give me, then she’d better bring it now.’

‘You seem a bit panicked. Is everything OK?’

‘Please, Tif. Please just do what I ask.’

‘All right, but I’m—’ He stopped himself. ‘What about Q? Should I bring him, too?’

‘Yes. If he’s there.’

‘Where else would he be?’

‘Just get him, Tif.’

‘OK, OK, I’ll put my shoes on.’ And he rushed to retrieve them from under his bed and clumsily tied up the laces. With one hand on the door latch, he turned. ‘Do you need
me to run? Because, honestly, I might not make it up there in this shape.’

‘I don’t care. Just go as quickly as you can.’

‘Well, anything above third gear might flatten me.’ He smiled. ‘Listen, I don’t need to know what’s going on exactly, or whatever that thing is you’ve got
there—’ He gestured at the bagged-up canvas strapped to my back. ‘But please swear this isn’t going to land me in any bother.’

‘You’re going to be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s not you they have a problem with.’

A bouncing nod. ‘You’re like that pretty girl at school who made me steal things from the tuck shop.’

‘I don’t have time for memory lane now, Tif.’

‘Just an observation. Want this closed behind me?’

‘Yes. Go. Bring them.’

There was a rush of sunlight as the door opened and shut. Through the gap in the blind, I watched Pettifer head up the slope and trundle out of sight. He gave a cheery whistle of a tune I did
not know. Then I was alone again, inside the partial darkness of his lodging. The place was dogged by small noises: the tick-tack-tick of the water pipes somewhere in the walls, the crackle of the
coals in the stove, the restless yattering of the songbirds in the forest, the gulls and the crows on the roof. I could not relax. My fingers twitched. My spine was tensed like a cable. I needed to
sit down but I did not want to have to take the canvas off my back, so I paced around in little circuits.

Up on the wall were masonry sketches and designs for quaint fenestrations. Tweed blazers hung on a rack near Tif’s bedside and his plan chest was dotted with trinkets. The model ship he
had built was all painted and varnished, and stood now inside a glass dome on his plan chest—I thought that some huge insect had settled on it, but in fact there was a fracture in the glass
that Tif had crossed with sticking plasters. I lifted off the cover to get a closer look. The model was so expertly built that it would probably have floated, but the one word was drab and sloppily
applied. Wens of varnish cloyed to all its joints, drips had hardened on the stern. It looked like something a man had assembled and a child had been allowed to decorate. As I put it back, the
wooden stand collapsed and a piece of it fell down, landing in the partly open drawer by my ankles. Bending to get it, I noticed the drawer was crammed with drafting paper, tattered at the edges,
and could not help but pull the top sheet out, expecting to find an elevation or a floor plan, part of some visionary design for a cathedral. But no. It was more like an artist’s rendering. A
carpeted room with a sweeping tiled shelf and ornamented pillars, skinny pencilled women lying frontwise on towels, bathing at a font. I recognised the room at once. The label said:
CALDARIUM
(
PRELIMINARY
). I rifled through the plan chest, searching all the drawings, but the same image repeated through them: varying drafts with tiny details
changed, or inked in slightly different hues. Caldarium after caldarium after caldarium after—