Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

I moved closer to the parapet, looking down at the moss-grown shelf over the portico, the thawing gardens and studio lodgings. It was difficult to judge MacKinney’s mood. We had eased one another through gloomy spells so often it had become a kind of running joke between us: ‘Will you help me dig a tunnel?’ I would ask her sometimes; or if I caught her doodling on a napkin, she might say, ‘Planning our escape.’ Now she seemed to be stricken with something more than her usual disquiet — a deeper hurt I could not reach — and she was resistant to the normal platitudes. I wondered if it might all be related to the boy somehow. ‘There isn’t a person here who isn’t tired of it, Mac. We have to keep going. Work through it.’

‘You think I’ve been sitting on my hands all this time?’

‘No. That isn’t what I said.’

‘I’ve tried everything. Nothing fits, nothing feels right. I can’t even put down a simple stage direction without questioning myself. Sooner or later, I’m going to have to surrender. It’s clear I don’t have another play in me. Whatever talent I might have had once — it’s long gone.’

‘Just write what you believe.’

‘ What? Is that serious advice?’

‘I don’t know what else to say.’

Ardak came out from the portico beneath us, carrying his ladders back to the outhouse. As he walked, the rungs cast beautiful zoetrope shadows on the sunlit lawns and, for a moment, I lost track of where I was.

‘Knell — are you even listening?’

I turned to find Mac squinting at me. ‘Of course.’

The intermittent shine had got me thinking of the squeezebox in the dusty space beneath my mother’s bed, the lolloping weight of the instrument in my hands, how the lamplight used to shimmer on the metal when I took it out.

‘So you really don’t mind? I’ve lost all my objectivity on it now, but I think it’s the only thing worth developing.’

‘What is?’

‘The scene I’ve just been telling you about. The monologue. Jesus, Knell, you were nodding along while I was talking. Did you not hear anything ?’

I apologised, and this seemed to placate her. If I had known how much of the conversation had skipped by me, I would have confessed to it. ‘Sorry. It might not have been such a good idea to come up here on an empty stomach.’ I felt totally disoriented.

‘Let’s go down then,’ Mac said. ‘We’ll get some salep and go to my room. You can read it there. It won’t take long.’

Once I was back through the hatch, I felt better. There was a pleasant sawdust smell about the attic and a satisfying closeness to the walls. ‘Wouldn’t it be better to ask Q to read it, or one of the other writers? I don’t know if it’s right, involving me like this. We ought to keeps things as they are.’

Mac put her arm around me. ‘Quickman will only bring a certain — how to put this— intellectualism to his readings, which isn’t what I need right now. I’m looking for a simple emotional response. And I wouldn’t trust those short-termers with a single word of mine.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re the perfect audience for this — you understand where I’m coming from. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’

We stopped outside the mess hall, where Gülcan kept an urn of salep constantly warming throughout the day. It was the provost’s favourite drink and we had come to share his fondness for it as a winter tonic. Mac filled two cups and we carried them along the corridor to her room, passing the thresholds of other guests, some of whom I could hear working at typewriters. It seemed to me that Mac’s corridor was forever rattling with these factory noises — the bright clamour of thoughts being machined — and I had always believed it was a heartening sound until that day. ‘Listen to them,’ she said, ‘typing up. They’ll be out of here soon.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

‘For them maybe.’

MacKinney’s room was deliberately spartan: a single bed made up with hospital corners, a bureau with the tidiest stack of manuscript pages, an oak wardrobe as solid and imposing as a casket. We were not discouraged from bringing in photographs of loved ones, but if any of us possessed them they were not put on display — I suspected Mac had pictures of her daughters hidden somewhere and spent her evenings tenderly thumbing their faces in private.

On the ottoman by her window was the tan leather suitcase I had seen her carry into Portmantle many seasons ago; she kept it with its lid open and its belly packed with hardbacks, preciously arranged, all of them page-marked with strips of ribbon. What belongings she had were organised like this, aligned to some private schema. Only her camping stove and coffee pot — special items she had requested from the provost — bore the scars of regular use; they were so blackened and spilled-on that she kept them tucked behind the door, covered by a tea towel.

She put down her salep on the bureau and slid out the top drawer, carrying the whole thing to her bed. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, rifling through, ‘it’s probably best if you don’t read it while I’m standing here in front of you. That will just be agony for both of us.’ The foolscap pages wilted in her hands as she held them out to me. ‘It’s my only copy. I’d tell you to be careful with it, but I’m quite sure it’s headed for the fireplace in the end.’

The papers were a little greasy. Flicking through them, I saw that each page bore Mac’s careful handwriting — an upright style that never broke the borders of the rulings, whose letters crouched like tall birds herded into crates. At least a quarter of the text was neatly struck through with black pen, and Mac had redacted most of her own notes in the margins. ‘Just, you know — tell me if there’s anything there,’ she said.

‘I will.’

‘Think you could get back to me by dinnertime?’

‘What’s the rush?’

‘I told you, I don’t know how long I have.’

There had been such wistfulness about the way MacKinney had been talking on the roof that I had mistaken her meaning. I thought that she had been trying to vent her frustrations about Portmantle again, weighing her regrets against her achievements. But I understood now, from the urgency in her voice, from the way she was tap-tapping her foot on the floorboards, that it was something else. She was leaving us — and not by choice. ‘Did something happen? Are they trying to kick you out?’

‘Shssh. Close the door.’

I pulled it shut. The salep taste in my mouth began to sour. Without the echo of the corridor, the room had a very cloistered feeling. It seemed there was no one else alive in the world but the two of us.

Mac said, ‘I don’t know anything about your sponsor. Tell me about her.’

‘What?’

‘ Tell me about her. ’

‘Him,’ I said.

‘Really? A man?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I can’t say why, but I expected better of you.’

‘Well, I didn’t exactly choose.’

‘Is he older than you?’

‘Yes.’

‘By how much?’

‘A good ten years or so.’

‘That’s a shame. You better hope he gets plenty of exercise.’

‘Oh, he was never much of a sportsman, I don’t think.’ Then I finally grasped her point. ‘Is there something the matter with your sponsor?’

‘Not any more there isn’t.’ She gave a long exhalation — less of a sigh than a test of her lungs. ‘But you can’t smoke fifty a day and expect to live forever, can you?’ Lifting the drawer from the bed, she went to slip it back into the bureau, wobbling it home. ‘Seventy-three years old. Not bad in the scheme of things.’