Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘Yes, sorry, I thought I had more.’

‘They’ll do for now, I suppose.’ She tipped the pills straight into her mouth and swallowed, chasing them with tonic. ‘There’s a dispensary aboard somewhere. Let me know if you need anything.’

‘Have you ever taken Dramamine?’ I said.

‘No, and I don’t think I want to.’

‘I’m still getting the queasiness, that’s all.’ My hands dropped to my belly.

‘Always takes a while to find your sea legs, first time round. We’re not far off land now, anyway.’ She gave a timid burp into her fist. ‘Ugh. Sorry. Your tonic’s awfully warm.’

‘Who was that on the phone?’

‘The Turkish baths,’ she said. ‘I’ve booked us in for quarter past.’

‘You’re not dragging me down there with you.’

‘Well, I can’t go on my own again,’ Dulcie said. She got up, kneading her shoulder. ‘You never quite know who’s lurking in those cubicles, and, yesterday, I got saddled with the most dreadful Chicago woman. Please don’t be difficult about this. I’m in agony.’

As we headed down the corridor in our dressing gowns and slippers, Dulcie paused by a room marked electric therapy. ‘I’ve always wondered what goes on in there,’ she said, trying to see in through the keyhole. Narrow strips of ultraviolet light tinged the edges of the doorframe, brightening her face, showing all its downy hairs. ‘I don’t see any electrodes or wires. Perhaps I’ll give it a go.’ She straightened up, clutching her shoulder as though plugging a bullet wound. We moved past the locker rooms towards a line of cubicles screened off with drapes. At the reception desk, an attendant in a white uniform greeted us and ticked our names in his ledger. ‘Mrs Fenton, if you’d like to follow Katarina, she’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you,’ he said, then set his big wet eyes on me. ‘Miss Conroy, is there a particular treatment you’re interested in today? I’m afraid the jet-showers are currently out of order, but everything else is more than shipshape.’

‘I’d rather go with Dulcie,’ I said, ‘if that’s all right.’

The attendant went quiet. He knitted his lips and brought his hands together. ‘Well, there’s only space for one in the massage room — it’s fully booked.’

‘You can wait for me in the baths, darling. I shan’t be long.’ Dulcie headed off with her masseuse, calling back to me, ‘Raymond will take care of you, won’t you, Raymond?’

‘She’ll have nothing but the best,’ the attendant said. He turned to me, presenting the empty corridor. ‘Let me show you to the hot rooms, madam.’ He walked on, reeling off a very practised script about the levels of pampering that were available to me, and I trailed behind, pretending to be tempted by all his talk of ‘alcohol rubs’ and varieties of soap. The further we went, the drier the air became, and my forehead began to mist over. I could not tell if I felt more or less seasick, but I was building up a serious thirst. ‘Tell me, madam, how much heat do you favour?’

I thought it was a very strange question and did not know how to reply.

The attendant smiled, as though familiar with this type of silence, as though it were the lifeblood of his working week. ‘If I might make a suggestion?’ He paused here, quite dramatically. ‘Most of our female guests prefer the caldarium — we keep that running at a hundred and seventy-five, Fahrenheit, that is. But if you like it a bit warmer, we have the laconicum.’

‘And how hot is that?’

‘Well, we’d never let you cook all the way through,’ he said, tittering. ‘We keep it around two hundred degrees. As I say, most of the female guests prefer—’

‘The caldarium,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’

‘Lovely. You’ll find towels as you go in. It’s just this door to your right, madam.’

Nobody will teach you this at art school, but there are many ways to paint a room from memory. You can construct it from delinquent parts: take a fixture from the ceiling of your childhood bedroom, a fall of light from the refectory of a hospital you once attended with your mother, a carpet borrowed from a rented flat in Maida Vale, and assemble them like scraps. You can add flesh to a skeleton of facts: keep the magnolia tiles you know for sure were there and colour them in grey; thicken the mist with candle wax; steal the women from the first-class poolside, paint them lounging chest-down on those tiles in swimming costumes, shine their hair, fatten their legs, shade their backs a different pink. With enough thought and industry, you can paint a room that has no visible joins, which reveals more truth than any photograph could capture, because who could ever dispute what you have seen with your own eyes? Only by painting it this way — grinding it to powder and rebuilding it, particle by particle — can you fully understand what a room means to you. But, sometimes, all this does is reconstitute a whole that would be better left in fragments, like fixing up a shredded letter just to read your old bad news. If you construct a room in paint, you haunt it. Your life rests in every stroke. So paint only the rooms that you can bear to occupy forever. Or paint the stars instead.

Sitting down to lean my head against the tiles, the tension in my breast began to ease, and I could feel the heat drawing the dirt of London from my body the way that sunshine teases oil out of tarmac. The caldarium was almost empty. On the tiled shelf that skirted the far wall, two women lay frontwise with their arms bent out, their heads a yard apart, just close enough to talk without raising their voices. I could not see their faces, only the scoured pinkness of their backs, the long wet knots of hair that fell over their shoulders. There was a soothing scent of rosewater, a kindness to the light. And it occurred to me that I had found the one space on the ship where I could be at peace: a priestly kind of sanctum between decks, not quite silent, not quite vacant. So what if it was hot enough inside to raise a soufflé?

I spread a towel upon the shelf and lowered myself onto it. The air was thick as plaster and I had to concentrate on breathing. Ten-second inhalations through the nose, out through the mouth. As the rhythm of my heart slowed down, so did my mind. I shut my eyes, surrendered to the heat. It was as if my thoughts started to pearl and separate, like a paint that rests too long inside a can. Everything relaxed: my limbs, my tongue, my neck. And soon I was envisioning things in the bleary heat. I was outdoors, walking in a field beneath the high noon sun. There were fairground rides in the distance. A rag-and-bone man was ambling up the grassy slope towards me, his horse beleaguered, nostrils steaming. It was pulling a cart with a pile of old rocking chairs and balusters. And then I heard the women stirring near by, and this picture fell away.

My pulse felt like a dripping tap, and I was strangely cool inside. The ship’s engines were juddering the shelf I lay upon. And the attendant was calling over a loudspeaker: ‘ Would you describe it as an aggravating scarf, madam? Is it meek and insubstantial? ’ The tiles looked greyer when I opened my eyes.

Such heat.

In through the nose, out through the—

My body was laced in sweat — strangely cool — but mostly it was underneath me, in the creases of my thighs. I tried to sit up, and I felt the bones lurch out of me, slip right through my skin— ‘ Let me show you the On Highs, madam. We’ll soon have those kinks worked out of you ’—or perhaps I had just skidded off the shelf and dropped onto the carpet—‘ There, there ’—because, when I glanced up — strangely cool — Dulcie was standing right over me, wrapped in a towel, squeezing my hand—‘ Don’t you ever stop criticising? No, it’s a permanent vocation ’—and she was padding my forehead with a cold flannel, and saying, ‘I’ll wait with her. You go.’