Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

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 Kabataş 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.

Sliding the door open again, I parted the clothes on the rail, exposing his pale young body. He did not move. His face was as reposed as I had ever seen it: the eyelids softly clinched, the mouth agape. His stout-ribbed chest was smeared with bluish finger-tracks, a kind of luminescent war paint that also streaked his thighs and shins and forearms. I tried to respect his modesty as best as I could, but his awkward position in the closet made it impossible, and I caught a full glimpse of what he had. He was not as puny as the withered models I had drawn at art school, and differently built from the men I had gone to bed with, all of whom were circumcised.

I wrapped him in the blanket, bringing it around one shoulder like a toga, clamping it with a bulldog clip. This buffeted him a fair amount against the wall, but he did not even stir. I switched on all the studio lights and called his name; it made no difference. The only thing to do, it seemed, was douse him a little.

He did not wake up in a jolt, as I thought he might. Instead, he winced and blinked and spat, regaining his awareness gradually. He saw me standing there with the empty jug. ‘Oh shit — again?’ he said, and huffed the water from his face, pulling the blanket tight around his frame. There was a weariness to his eyes then, a sinking realisation. I had soaked him too well to be certain of it, but I thought he was about to cry. ‘How long?’ he asked.

‘Excuse me?’

‘How long’ve I been here?’

I got the impression he was used to waking up like this, in strange places, in other people’s homes. ‘At least since dinnertime,’ I said. ‘You’ve had a busy night, by all accounts.’

He nodded dolefully.

‘Why don’t you come out of there? I’ll make you some tea.’

‘I’m really sorry about this.’ He checked the coverage of the blanket. The hem of it just about reached his knees. ‘I don’t know how I got in, but if I broke anything, I’ll fix it, I swear.’

‘My fault. The door was unlocked.’

‘No, I mean it, Knell. I’m sorry you’ve got to deal with me like this.’ His voice was meek and hoarse. ‘Could you get me a towel?’

‘There’s a stack of clean ones above your head. On the shelf, there.’

He edged forwards, stretching.

I went to light my stove and put on the electric kettle. ‘I’m not sure how much you remember,’ I called to him from the sink, ‘but you left the mansion in a bit of a state. Ender’s having to replace the curtains. Hard to get ayran out of velvet.’

The boy stepped out of the closet, hair all spiked and tousled. ‘Damage tends to follow me around these days.’ He stood under the harsh fluorescent lights, sniffing his arms. ‘You have mushrooms growing in your cupboard, by the way. Looks like I got most of them.’

‘Is that so?’ The kindling in the stove began to smoulder. ‘It might be getting damp in there. I’ll get Ardak to check.’

‘Doesn’t smell too bad, actually. I’ve covered myself in worse.’ He looked back at the sludge he had left in the closet. ‘Still, I feel bad about the mess. And for — you know.’ He cleared his throat drily. ‘Thanks for the blanket.’

‘Should I expect to find your clothes somewhere?’

‘Probably.’

‘I’ll keep an eye out.’

The boy did not respond. He came closer to the stove. His arms were crossed now, his shoulders goose-fleshed.

‘We saw you on the landing, Mac and I. You seemed to hear us to begin with, but then you ran off. You kept asking us how to get out.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘I know you are. It’s fine, but — out of where?’

Very slowly, the boy lowered himself to kneel beside the stove. ‘I sort of get trapped in my own head.’ These words came out in such a freighted tone that his jaw hung slack for a moment after. He warmed his hands by the vents, staring up at me. ‘I’m no good at explaining it,’ he went on, ‘but have you ever been to one of those really giant hotels they have in America? The New York Hilton or somewhere like that. Thousands of locked rooms that all look the same, all those corridors and stairways and lifts going up and down and up and — ugh! Just the scale of it, right? My dad used to take me to places like that. How the hell do they even build them?’ His eyes went fat with the thought. ‘Now picture that same hotel, but empty. With the lifts all broken and nobody around to fix them and no way of knowing which staircase takes you where. That’s what my head is like most of the time.’