Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

Looking earnestly into my eyes, he said, ‘Well, this is quite a setback, Ellie, I won’t lie to you.’ He tossed the bottle onto the couch. It made an oddly noiseless landing. ‘We need to get you back on those right away. You can’t just suddenly stop. It’ll shock your system.’ He went to his briefcase, treading without care. A rag stuck to his shoe. In the top compartment, he found his prescription pad and filled out a sheet. ‘As soon as the pharmacy opens tomorrow, take this, do you hear me?’

I sat down. The muscles in my legs felt hard as metal.

‘In fact, here—’ He drew something from a different pocket of the case. Another bottle: plastic, rattling. He made to throw it, then decided not to. ‘These are Jonathan’s. He takes them for his bedwetting. It’s Tofranil, the same as yours but a very low dosage.’ He pressed them into my hand. ‘I keep them with me for emergencies. Take them. They’ll tide you over till tomorrow.’

‘What for?’ I asked. I was so tired.

‘Don’t worry what for. You’d better have something in your stomach first,’ he said. ‘How long has it been since you ate?’ He went rummaging in my kitchen. The fridge door opened, the fridge door closed. ‘Crikey,’ he said. ‘Fish paste and sweetcorn. No wonder you look malnourished.’ And he rolled up his sleeves to muck out my sink. ‘Is there someone who could stay with you tonight? A friend, a neighbour? I don’t think you should be alone at the moment.’

‘No.’ I looked down at the bottle. ‘No one else.’

‘What about the people downstairs?’

‘I don’t know them very well.’

‘Your parents?’

‘Miles away.’

‘Dulcie, then.’

‘You must be joking.’

Victor heaved out a sigh. He wiped his forehead with the crook of his wrist, soapsuds clinging to his arm-hairs. ‘I’ve a spare room at home,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to insist, but I can’t let you stay here alone. It’ll just be for the night.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t leave my work.’

And he repeated the words back to me, slower. ‘You can’t leave your work. All right.’ He surveyed the room, nodding. ‘I’ll stay here tonight then. As a friend. I just need to use your phone.’ But when he got to the wall, he found the wire had been snipped. ‘Actually, there’s a phone box down the road. Why don’t I bring us back some fish and chips, eh? My treat.’ He took my door keys from the kitchen counter. ‘Won’t be long.’

He came back a while later in a different set of clothes and without his briefcase. Instead, he had a leather overnight bag and a box of groceries. ‘The chip shops were all closed, so I’ve brought you some provisions from home.’ Unpacking the box, he showed me everything he had: sardines and mackerel in tins, bread rolls, canned tomatoes, rice, Oxo cubes, an onion, a pint of milk, some parcelled meat. ‘I’ll get cooking,’ he said, ‘once I’ve cleaned this place up a bit. Why don’t you come and keep me company?’

I told him I was not hungry, but Victor Yail was not the sort of man who could be persuaded from a path once he had started on it. While he sorted through the clutter of my kitchen, changing the bins and clearing the surfaces, I lay down on my couch and allowed myself to sleep.

The meal was nothing fancy — just minced beef and tomatoes with rice — but it was one of the finest I ever ate in my life. Victor let me finish it in silence, while he leaned on the cooker, reading through the newspaper. It was either very late or very early. The kitchen was gleaming and spare. There was a stillness behind the curtains and the peak-time blaring of the television set downstairs could not be heard. I was already feeling much better. Victor took my plate and I thanked him. He came back with a small glass of milk and two tablets. ‘Just those for now, but we’re going to start upping your dosage.’ I swallowed them down and he gave me a pat on the shoulder. It was strange to be looked after in this way, as though I were a child again. I had not known closeness like this for years.

Victor lit the stove and put the kettle on. He stroked his beard as though trying to remove it with one hand. ‘I was looking at your work, while you were sleeping. Hope you don’t mind.’ And he gestured to the mural that was bracketed to my studio wall, unfinished.

I twisted round to glare at it. The flaws were still so obvious.

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing to look at.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘Well, your taste is questionable. I’ve seen your office.’

‘What’s wrong with my office?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘If you like that academic sort of look.’

‘I happen to adore that academic sort of look. That academic sort of look is exactly what I was striving for. So I’ll take that back-handed compliment and return it to you, forehand.’ He acted out the shot, and I could not help but laugh at his ludicrous expression. I was still winding in my smile when he said, ‘I’d like to ask about the ships, though.’

‘It’s just a design,’ I told him. ‘And not a very good one, it turns out.’

‘Yes, but ships . I thought it was an observatory you were painting it for.’

‘It is. It was.’

I started to recount all the ways in which astronomy was linked to seafaring, and Victor raised his finger, wagged it at me. ‘That’s not what I was getting at,’ he said. ‘It just seems curious that the first piece of work you’ve been excited about for a while contains so many ships — even when it’s meant to be about the stars.’ He folded his arms. ‘It’s also interesting that you failed to bring this up when we last spoke.’

‘What difference does it make?’ I did not understand why he was pressing this point quite so forcefully.

‘We could have talked about the significance of those ships, for starters, and stopped you getting yourself into such a state again.’ He angled his body to address me. ‘There’s only so long we can go on dancing round what happened on the Queen Elizabeth , you know.’

I ruffled my hair in frustration. ‘You see, this is the problem with psychiatry. Everything has to be connected to something else. I just liked the idea — that’s all. It got me excited. It’s not even the same kind of ship!’

‘So what happened?’ Victor said, blank-faced. ‘Why haven’t you finished it?’

‘ Because . It stopped making sense to me.’ In through the nose, out through the mouth. ‘There’s a fault in it. In my design.’ I tried to justify it, but it did not seem to register.

Victor stepped to the sink. He began to rinse the meat-flecks off my plate under the tap. ‘That doesn’t explain why you’ve been holed up in this place again with your curtains stapled and your telephone cut off. Shall I tell you what I think?’

‘No. I’d rather you just left.’

‘Tough luck. I’m here for the night.’

‘Nobody asked you to be.’

‘Yes, I’m here out of the goodness of my strange little heart. Please sit down.’

‘I don’t have to.’

‘Ellie, sit down. We’re not having an argument. We’re just talking.’ He was staring at my reflection in the kitchen window. I could see myself framed in it, too, inside a sallow block of light. My face had the greyness of decomposing fruit, the kind that is put out on a still-life table and forgotten. I went to sit down on the couch. Victor had not tidied anything in the studio — he knew better than to move the things that mattered to me.

His theory was that I had chosen to paint ships as a way of expressing what I could not previously evoke in the caldarium pieces. I did not understand how this could be the case, but he seemed quite certain of it: ‘See, it’s not a choice you made consciously. Genuine creativity, as you always tell me, doesn’t come from any conscious thought. It’s an agglomeration of things. A happy accident. And there’s no doubt that your head is predisposed to certain types of imagery. Of course you’re painting ships. You lost a baby, Ellie — that’s a terribly traumatic thing for anyone to go through alone — and it happened while you were sailing on an enormous passenger ship thousands of miles from home. Are you trying to tell me that you can’t see the connection? That you don’t still feel adrift from things? Lost at sea? All of those clichés you use in our sessions and think I don’t pick up on.’