Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

After a moment, guests started to emerge from their lodgings to watch. An audience of short-termers gathered on the portico steps. Ender looked on from the path, his arms stocked with firewood. Even Ardak was tempted from the outhouse to see what was going on, and leaned there, pulling off his work gloves while the Frenchman kept on calling out his nonsense. And when I heard the provost’s voice below — that murmuring tenor with all its affectations — I sensed an opportunity. The fuss about the Frenchman’s piece grew louder, fuller. Everyone was preoccupied with it. And so, as fast as I could manage, I edged along the parapet and climbed back down the ladder, through the roof beams, until I reached the empty hallway.

The provost’s study was in the other wing of the building, across the upper landing, and the parquet floor resounded with my every step. I lifted off my shoes and left them in the corridor, striding past the staircase and the mess hall underneath me. The floor was oddly warm against my feet. I expected the door would be locked — and it was — but I was able to scrutinise the keyhole. It was a warded lock that required a short, fat key, most likely of the same dull brass as all the door fixtures.

I hurried down two flights to the lobby, where Ender’s door was still ajar at the back end of the house. There was a cheery rumble of voices out on the portico, and I tried not to be seen, stepping quietly along the hall. The Frenchman kept on crying out his garbled script. I pushed inside the old man’s room, unsure where to look. A fleet of leather slippers was neatly lined under his bed, his pyjamas folded on the pillow. The muslin curtains were tied back with ribbon, and I could see right into the old man’s bathroom: a clot of foam left on his shaving brush, a rim of whiskers in the sink. There was no time to feel ashamed. I searched his desktop and the bending bookshelves, rifled through his cupboards, finding nothing. My blood began to cool. In the drawers of his writing table, I discovered only envelopes, boxes of baklava (his private stash), and a mound of typewritten pages in Turkish.

I could hear boot soles on the floor outside, amusement in the corridor. The old man was coming back — I felt sure of it — and I stole into his closet, holding my breath. My head grazed a row of hooks behind me on the wall. All manner of things hung from them: bales of twigs, a whistle on a lanyard, large blue beads with painted eyeballs, and keys on metal loops. When Ender did not appear, I snatched two of the stumpiest — one brass key, one silver — and fled back to the hall. Heading for the portico, I was certain I would feel a meaty hand upon my shoulder, hear a chiding tsk from another guest behind me. But it never came. I was able to break out onto the steps and merge with all the short-termers, while the Frenchman carried on his strange performance. He was calling: ‘ Adieu! Adieu! Adieu! ’

Gluck seemed more bemused by it than interested. His tufty eyebrows were pushed into a point over his nose. I went to him and said, ‘Do you know what all this gibberish is about?’ And he gestured to a sign that hung around the scarecrow’s neck that said: DOUX ET NÉGLIGEABLE. ‘It’s very polemical,’ Gluck said, ‘but I don’t really know the motivation. From an aesthetic standpoint, though, I’d say it’s quite successful.’

Something else you will not learn at art school: real inspiration turns up only when your invitation has expired. There is no preparation you can put in place for it and no provision you can make that will entice it to your door. It will find you either sleeping, occupied with chores, or entertaining the dumb neighbours you allowed in as a compromise. And when it finally shows, you will have to wake up fast, abandon everything, turf out the pretenders just to make it welcome, because it will take less time to disappear than you spent waiting for it. There is no finer company than inspiration, but its very goodness will leave you heartsick when it goes. So do not waste time asking it to wipe its feet. Embrace it at the threshold.

The boy’s comics were exactly where I left them: spread out on the workbench with the muller rested on the inner page of Issue 5. I went to light my stove and filled the kettle. My nerves were still fidgeting and I needed some weak tea to calm myself. Lying on the couch, I gazed at the paint-spattered ceiling and thought of Victor Yail. His face all shapeless with grief. His lenses fogged by tears. Cracks in his voice. I tried to think how I was going to break the news to him, but every sentence I conceived was banal: Your boy is dead — I’m sorry. . He took his own life. . We threw him in the sea. . How else could I say it? The facts would not change.

As the fire burned rosily in the stove, I grew so absorbed in looking at the flames that my head began to haze and drift. I made the tea and took it to the window. No promise of sunshine outside. Clouds like sooty thumbprints on a chimney breast. Turning round, my hip knocked against the workbench and the muller slipped slightly off the page. Something caught my attention: the grain of the image underneath the glass. Blurry discs of colour.

Standing over it, I held my eye up to the muller as if it were a gem loupe. And through the glass I saw the printed substance of the illustrations. Their colours were made up of tiny dots in rows: magenta, cyan, yellow and black. Some overlapped, some were spaced apart, the rest were tightly packed. A galaxy that could not be seen from far away. A thing that was there, and yet not.

When the lunch bell rang, I did not leave my studio. I pulled out the timbers I had been keeping underneath my bed, wiped off the heavy film of dust, cut all the angles with a mitre-saw, and screwed them into place to make a stretcher. I rolled out all the canvas I had on the studio floor and pulled it taut across the frame, hammering in the tacks. Before long, I had a four-by-nine-foot rectangle of blankness staring back at me. It spread across the full width of my studio and there was not one inch of it I feared. The primer coat still had to dry, and I stood near, projecting the image onto it in my mind. There seemed no point in making a cartoon: the mural I had conceived was very simple — pure abstraction — and it was best to let the idea express itself without too many constraints. First of all, I needed darkness.

The boy had ruined all but one of the mushroom garlands in my closet. There was the tobacco tin of pigment stowed behind the bathroom cabinet — not quite enough to get me through the night. I could grind up what was left, but I would have to harvest more.

My muller and the mixing slab were already clean. Still, I gave them another rinse for procedure’s sake and organised my workbench as normal. I drew the shutters, stapled the roller blind against the window frame, and then — with a sadness that twinged the length of my spine — I went to fetch a new roll of tape from the cupboard and left it on the tabletop for later.

When the dinner bell sounded, I ignored it. It struck me that I did not have to wait for dark to harvest what I needed. I knew the route into the woods so well that I could walk it blindfold. And with all the other guests now gone to the mansion for their evening meal, I did not have to worry about being noticed. So I stuffed a roll of tin foil into my satchel, edged lightly down the path, and slipped into the apron of the trees.

In the vapid daylight, the woods became a different place, cloistered but not as menacing. The pines had a crisp, fulsome scent, flushed out by the rain. I looked for the notches I had knifed into the trunks — the four short lines upon the bark that I used to help me navigate at night — and followed them, one notch at a time, until the air turned dank and the ground felt more elastic underfoot. Up ahead, I saw the enclave with the leaning trees, and then the narrow clearing with its nest of rotting logs. And there they were: the mushrooms, so ordinary before sunset. Plain brown clusters of fungus with brims almost translucent. I dropped to my knees and sliced every last fruithead from the bark, until the tinfoil sheet was covered by them. I wrapped and taped them inside, putting the packet in my satchel. Dashing back between the pines, I got the feeling I had left something behind — my knife, perhaps my scarf.