The Ecliptic (6 page)

‘I’m not sure that’ll help you much.’

I could not tell if the boy was being earnest or smug. He got up, took his cagoule from the chair-back, and walked across the studio, pausing before my wall of samples. The room was so bright
with the overhead fluorescents that there was nothing but an arrangement of white patches for him to see, a grid of small canvas squares that I had pasted to the wall, in a pattern only I could
interpret. There were at least a hundred of them, each square containing a smear of white paint, hardly discernible from the canvas itself. Fullerton took another forward step, trying to read my
pencilled notes in the margins. ‘What is it you’re working on here, Knell?’ he said quite innocently. ‘I’m going to take a wild guess and say it’s something
white.’

Pettifer tutted. ‘You’re overstepping.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said.

‘No, come on—he needs to be told.’

Quickman called to the boy in a chiding tone: ‘We don’t intrude on other people’s work round here.’

Fullerton held up his hands in surrender. ‘Jesus. Sorry. I take it back.’

‘They’re studies for a mural,’ I told him. ‘That’s as much as I care to explain right now.’

‘Anything else would be an imposition,’ Quickman said.

The boy was still facing the wall. ‘But don’t you ever want to run ideas by each other? Just to see the response?’

I was getting used to holding conversations with his back. ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But then I wouldn’t really be painting for myself. And that’s the only way to
paint.’

Quickman was now gathering the backgammon chequers into one hand, stamping down at every piece. It was evident that he was still stinging from defeat, because he said sharply to the boy,
‘This isn’t a conservatoire. If you’ve come here for other people’s input, you might want to try a different crowd.’

Fullerton turned and pushed up his sleeves. ‘It’s OK. I’m not the sharing type.’ There was still a pale disc of skin on his left wrist where a watch used to be.
‘I’ve got something I need to finish, yes, but I won’t bore you with the details.’

‘I saw a guitar in your studio,’ I said. ‘It’s been a while since we had a musician here.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t call myself a musician.’

‘What are you then?’

He backed away from my samples now, eyes slatted. ‘Jacqueline du Pré—she’s a
proper
musician; Glenn Gould, Miles Davis. I can bash out a folk song when
I’m in the mood. But I haven’t felt much like it recently.’

Pettifer stood up. ‘All sounds rather simple when you put it like that.’

‘I’m sure it’s more complicated than he’s making out,’ Quickman said, ‘or he wouldn’t be here, would he?’

‘The boy gave a wan little smile. ‘Stop me if I’m sharing too much.’

‘Well, I always wished I could play an instrument,’ I said. ‘Somehow I just can’t get the knack for it. A bit like backgammon.’ As a child, I had often sneaked my
mother’s squeezebox from its case and tried to draw a tune from it, but all it ever gave me were wheezes of complaint.

‘I taught myself from a picture book,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s not that hard.’

Quickman folded up the game board and shoved it under his armpit. ‘The last musician we had played the bloody flute all night. It was like having swallows in the loft. I was
this
close to throttling him.’

‘Then I should probably keep the noise down.’

‘If you know what’s good for you.’

The boy did not answer. He stooped to examine the samples again. ‘There’s something really peaceful about this wall of yours, Knell. Not that you want my opinion.’

‘It’s a far cry from anything right now,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’ I did not ask him to clarify what he meant by ‘peaceful’, as he had said the word
with such a tone of admiration.

He side-stepped an easel to get to my workbench and started looking through the jumble there, too, picking up a palette knife, examining the crusted blade.

‘Oi! Hands to yourself!’ Pettifer said.

‘Sorry.’ The boy put down the knife and moved away.

‘We don’t mean to be fussy,’ I said, ‘but we’ve got used to things being in a certain order.’ In truth, it would not have mattered if he had upturned the
entire workbench and trampled it. Nothing it held was worth protecting any more, only the kind of effluvium that all painters accrue over the course of a long project: dirty turps in peach cans;
oils hardening in tubes; rags and palettes congealed with colour; brushes standing in jars of grey water like forgotten flowers. Such ordinary things had lost all meaning for me. I kept them there
because I had nowhere else to store them, and they served as a reminder of my limitations. My real work was in those samples on the wall, and I would have cut off the boy’s arm before he
touched a single square. But he did not try.

He zipped up his cagoule. The trophies of a hard night’s backgammon distended the front pockets. ‘Well, I’m going to hit the sack. Thanks for the game,’ he said. ‘I
thought I would’ve forgotten all my moves by now.’

‘I knew it!’ Quickman slumped into his chair. ‘Hustled!’

‘Blimey. How good
are
you, exactly?’ Pettifer said.

‘I might’ve played a tournament or two, after hours. You know, backroom games.’

‘For money?’

‘Don’t see the point otherwise.’

Quickman said, ‘I’ve seen those backroom games. They’d never let a kid like you at the table.’

‘Well, they don’t exactly check your age in the places I’m talking about. Not hard to find a cash game in Green Lanes—all the Cypriots round there. You pick things up if
you watch them closely. And they’ll talk strategy all night after a few drinks.’

There was something about the way Fullerton spoke—head down and to the side—that did not quite convince me. I just could not imagine him gambling his pocket money in some dismal
London pub with a crowd of Cypriots. He was spinning us a story. Quickman must have agreed, because he stroked his beard and said, doubtfully, ‘Green Lanes, eh?’

‘Yup.’ The boy put up the hood of his cagoule, smirking. ‘Thanks for the gum, Knell. I’m sure you’ll get a chance to win it back.’ He yanked at the door.
‘Everyone sleep tight.’ And off he went.

Quickman waited until the boy’s footsteps could no longer be heard, then he stood up and buttoned his coat. ‘There’s something shifty about that lad,’ he said. ‘I
don’t know if it’s a good idea to entertain him.’

‘You’re just sore because he thrashed you,’ Pettifer said.

‘Well, all right, perhaps that’s part of it.’ Quickman upturned his collar. The sheepskin was bald and grubby round the neckline. ‘There’s something a bit off about
him, though. Am I being unfair?’

‘No—he’s definitely unusual,’ I said. ‘But I thought the same about you once, Q, and it turned out fine in the end.’

It was too soon to claim we had a common understanding, but I could see reflections of my own youth in the way the boy behaved. I was about Fullerton’s age when I first
started painting—not yet out of my parents’ house, with barely enough experience of life to qualify me, in the eyes of society, as an expert on anything besides schoolyard gossip and
girls’ fashions. But I understood, even then, how much I knew. At sixteen, I had seen enough modern art in picture books to tell a depth from a great hollow. And I reasoned that if so many
vapid contributions had been made by artists gone before me, what was there to be frightened of? The precedents of their failure would be my parachute. So I began in this context: without fear,
without doubt, without expectation. The year was 1953.

In the last few weeks of school, when other girls were thinking of summer jobs, I stole oil paints from the art-block cupboards at Clydebank High. I prised two window-boards from a derelict
outhouse and dragged them home along Kilbowie Road, sawing and sanding them with my father’s tools, stowing them behind a coal box. The pleasure of it—the secret purpose—was so
bracing I could not rest. That summer, I committed my entire life to painting.

In the gloomy backcourt of our tenement, as far away as I could get from the stinking middens, I leaned my first board against a wall. I was undaunted by the blankness of it. I did not pause to
scrutinise the fabric of the thing itself, to wonder if the woodgrain was right, if the whitewash had set evenly, if it would need to be glazed later on. Instead, I walked up to the board as though
it were a boy I had decided to kiss and streaked a layer of phthalo blue across the surface with a palette knife, the floppy baking kind my mother owned, making an impulsive shape upon the wood.
There was no history standing on my shoulders then, no classical references hanging in my head like dismal weather. I was alone, uninfluenced, free to work the layers of chalky stolen paint with a
big lolloping knife, to smudge with my fingers, pad flat with my fist, pinch, thumb, scrape, and scratch. No judgements of technique arose in my mind, because I did not invite them, did not think
to. I simply acted, expressed, behaved, made gestures of the knife that seemed unprompted and divined. There was a scene in my head that I tried to reproduce, something from a wartime story of my
father’s, but I could only paint it the way I imagined, not how it really was.

The hours ghosted by. Soon my hands became so colour-soaked and waxed I could not see the pleats of my knuckles or the rims of my fingernails. The dumbshow of the world—that other place I
had forgotten, the outer one—broke into road noise and tenement din. Neighbours were squabbling in the close, coming out into the yard with dustpans of ash, telling young lads with footballs
to clear off their landings. An early dark was settling and I heard my mother at the window, already home from work. She was calling me. And so I lifted my head to see what I had finished.

There it was upon the wall, drying: a semi-abstract thing, made in a flurry. The suggestion of a place I had never been to. A spray of rain. A slate-grey ocean spattered by bombs. The remnants
of a foundry, dismembered in the sky. A falling road bridge, or perhaps a wall, and so much else I did not recognise, which somehow conveyed more in its obliqueness than I could ever have spoken in
words.

When my mother came down into the backcourt and saw what I had done, she must have glimpsed my future in it like bad runes. ‘Whitsat?’ she said. ‘Did
ye
dae
that?’ She chided me for wasting a full day on a silly picture and told me to clean her good icing knife. There were better uses for my time, plenty of errands I could do for her. But I spent
the next day working on another painting, and the next, and the next, and did not care about the punishments that came after.

Whatever happened to this backcourt spirit? When exactly did it leave me?

I had always wanted more than my parents’ life and its routineness, but I did not take my education seriously enough, and my Leaving Certificate showed only the barest of passes in English
and history, ruining any aspirations I might have had to become a teacher. Still, I could not settle for a job in the Singer factory or the biscuit warehouse, as my father had ordained. The
afterglow of painting prodded me awake at night, urged me to submit an application to the Glasgow School of Art, told me I could conquer anything if I just applied myself. At the admissions
interview, the registrar studied my portfolio and said, ‘Your work is naïve. It leans too much towards abstraction for abstraction’s sake. But it has more intensity than one
normally finds in a woman’s painting, and you are still very young. Of course, you won’t be trained in oils until third year—that ought to correct the bad habits you’ve
developed.’ A week later, he wrote to offer me a scholarship:
We truly hope you’ll accept
, the letter signed off, as though I had other choices.

By October, I found myself in colour theory lectures, attending slideshows on the canon; in drawing classes, idly sketching vegetable arrangements; in cold studios, measuring the proportions of
nude models against a 2B pencil. My parents’ tenement seemed so far away, and I feared that the ‘intensity’ of my work was being dulled—normalised—by too much
refinement of technique. In fact, this attention I paid to the rudiments of drawing and the methods of the Old Masters only heightened my appetite for painting. I made discoveries in these classes
that I did not expect: how to imply the mood of a body with a sweep of Conté crayon, how broader narratives could be revealed through compositional decisions. My backcourt spirit survived in
all the paintings I made in this period, though my early tutors did not reward it.

It was in the mural department, under the tutelage of Henry Holden, that I began to thrive. I was inspired by the grand traditions of mural painting: from the ice-age pictures in the caves of
Lascaux, to the mosaicked churches of Ravenna and Byzantium, the frescos of Giotto, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, Delacroix, and the great political gut-shots of Rivera. In Holden’s tutorials, I
felt energised and unhindered. He was a rangy old socialist in half-moon glasses, who gave us curious monthly assignments:
Devise a scene for the ballroom of the Titanic.
(For this, I
painted a ballet of furnace-room labourers in cloth caps, dancing with wheelbarrows of coal, and was marked down for ‘discounting context’.)
Paint a scene depicting a work by
Shakespeare as it relates to modern times.
(For this, I created a swathe of Glasgow tenements with Juliets waiting at every window, graveyards full of Romeo headstones and wounded Mercutios in
army uniforms. The picture was kept for the School’s collection, and subsequently lost.)