Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

When I bent down to quiet her, I noticed what she had already seen: water was coursing from the underside of the door. It was not just a backwash from the rain, but a leak all of its own. It was gushing like a wellspring over the concrete, merging with the runnels on the path. My shoes were too sodden to feel it. ‘Quickman — look,’ I said.

He tried the handle but nothing budged. ‘That’s a bit off,’ he said.

I knocked again on the door, calling the boy’s name. Quickman banged and banged. We folded back the shutters but all I could see was our reflected faces and the lime-green halo of our umbrella. Nazar kept on barking.

‘Go and find Ardak,’ Q said. He must have spotted something I had not. There was a hardness to his voice. ‘Go!’ He pushed the umbrella into my hand and backed away, hauling off his sheepskin. The rain devoured him. His beard hung down in clumps. The dog was scrabbling and yapping.

‘What is it?’ I said.

Quickman wound his coat around his arm. ‘I said get help .’ But I could not move. He cursed me under his breath, making for the window. ‘Take the dog then,’ he said, ‘or it’s going to get hurt. Hurry up!’ I grabbed Nazar’s collar and, although she bucked against me, barking even more, I managed to drag her off the walkway.

Quickman punched the corner of the pane and the glass fractured into webs. Before he could strike it again, the whole window shattered, falling down over his shoes. He kicked away the shards from the frame and jumped inside.

However long that moment lasted (I was crouched there on the grass for some time, with Nazar fighting to get loose and nothing to see except the roller-blind flapping in the window cavity), everything happened too slowly to comprehend. I could tell the dog was barking wildly, and yet the noise was somehow inscrutable, subdued. Every sound diminished. I thought I could taste my own blood.

Then the front door swung open. Quickman was shouting at me. I let the dog go and she bolted towards him. ‘Help me lift him!’ I could hear him now. ‘Help me lift him!’ He retreated into the gloom.

I went running after.

Inside, the studio floor seemed to sway. A shallow of clear water rushed over it, like the stream of a hose on a patio deck. The bathroom light was on and Quickman was waiting there with the dog rounding his feet. He had turned off the taps, but the bathtub was still overflowing. Fullerton was slumped inside it, face down. A leather belt was tied around his neck, fixed to the base of the tap. Bands of duct tape ran all round his head. His hair eddied on the surface. ‘Hurry up, take his feet,’ Quickman said, untangling the belt. ‘I can’t lift him on my own.’

I held the boy’s ankles and Quickman dragged him up from the armpits. We heaved him out of the water and fell back against the tiles with his body pale and slick between us. The duct tape was wound over his mouth and nose, puckering his skin. Quickman tried to free it. There was another clump of it inside the bathtub, covering the plughole.

‘Help me,’ Quickman said. ‘Come on!’

I needed this — a direction, a firm hand — because I was unable to think forwards. My mind had seized and I could hear the blood skulking inside me. The boy’s eyes were thick and swollen. I picked away the tape until I saw the whites of his teeth. Quickman started to press at the boy’s sternum, blowing air into his mouth. The dog yapped right in his ear and he batted her away. I buckled against the wall. I was voiceless and afraid and crying. ‘Do something!’ Q said. ‘Run and get someone!’ He pumped at the boy’s ribs and kissed him. The dog would not be quiet. I staggered to my feet, quivering and weak with fright. I was sick all down my front. I was sick again on the walkway. But once I started running, I did not stop until I reached the mansion and found Ardak in the lobby. ‘ Ne oldu ?’ he said. I rushed into his arms and he held me close. ‘ Neyin var ?’

Anything I did not know about Jim Culvers before I arrived in London, I learned within a month of working for him. His reputation was founded on a conventional style of portraiture: straightforward paintings of angry young Teds and Soho brothel-workers in various stages of undress, which the critic in my borrowed copy of The Burlington Magazine had described as ‘formally impressive and profoundly unspectacular’. By 1957, when I became his assistant, Jim had already begun to withdraw from this traditional approach and was trying to perfect a credible method for removing the subjects from his portraits altogether. A typical Culvers picture, in those days, would depict an empty room (usually some dim view of his studio), rendered in thick strokes of muted colours, at the heart of which would be a vacant armchair or a single lip-smirched water glass. He invited models to pose for long durations, painting nothing until they were gone. To collectors, he claimed the new portraits showed the characteristics of the sitter in the barest terms, through revealing the shape of their absence. ‘Any space,’ he liked to postulate, ‘is altered when a person leaves it: so I paint that .’ Their response would be to ask him what he thought of Edward Hopper, and this would rile him so much that he would raise his asking price unreasonably.

Jim had a two-room studio on the ground floor of a mews house in St John’s Wood. His gallery, the Eversholt, afforded him a monthly allowance for rent, materials, and what they called ‘subsistence’ (in Jim’s case, this amounted to little except whisky and greyhound stakes). Out of this money, he paid me six pounds a week in wages, and I was given free lodging in his attic. It was a damp and charmless space up there, little more than a storage loft. The ceiling bellied when it rained. Pigeons flew in through the dormers in summertime. A burning-coal smell emanated from the neighbourhood chimneys. But there was a straight aspect to the roof that I could set a canvas underneath, and, if I craned my head out of the window, I could see all the way to Regent’s Park. I considered myself fortunate to have my own workspace and to be amidst the London art scene, albeit peripherally.

In those first few months with Jim, I was no more than an errand-runner. I procured new paints for him from a backstreet dealer in Covent Garden and took his pictures to the framers’ on Marylebone High Street, going back and forth on the bus with his suggested amendments, until he was content. I delivered bags of his dirty clothes to the launderette and made his lunch each day — always the same Cheddar cheese and pickle sandwich on wholemeal bread with the crusts removed and two thick circles of cucumber in each triangular half.

It did not take me long to realise that I could fit my own work around these artless tasks. While I waited for a pair of Jim’s shoes to be repaired, for example, I would sit by the canal in Little Venice with a flask of tea, sketching people in the mist, making studies of the bridges and the skittering London traffic. I would save all the brown bags that Jim’s whisky bottles came in, storing them inside my purse to use as drawing paper. I pinned my hair up with pencils, cross-boned, like an Oriental lady, so I would always have them to hand.

I discovered I could achieve more in a few stolen moments than Jim Culvers could muster in a fortnight. He would arrive at the studio at eight o’clock every morning, looking pink-eyed and dejected, and I doubt he ever gave much thought to my whereabouts in the hours before he got there, in the same way a restaurant patron is oblivious to the manoeuvres of the kitchen staff. He never saw me wandering about Regent’s Park just after dawn, when the grass was still etched with frost and the lake had no corrugations, drawing the birdlife and the skyline and the strange pollarded trees: details I would reconstitute in paintings, late at night. There was something about the gathering light of Paddington in the small hours that made its bombed-out spaces seem so vital and romantic, as though each ruin was an untold story. Some mornings, I set up on a wall in Brindley Street, sketching things that were not there, ghosts that lived inside the cavities. Other times, I wandered along the canal and drew the vagrants sleeping on the roofs of empty barges. As long as I made it back to the studio by eight o’clock to greet Jim with fresh currant buns, those precious hours were mine to enjoy.