Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

He spun round.

‘That line will come out, very easy, I can show you. Then I think you can get back to your feet.’ There was compassion in his voice, candour to his expression. ‘Because, you know, strange things happen here when I am on duty. Cadets do not like staying in the hospital. They enjoy to be outside with their friends. And there is no locks on the doors here, so I cannot make them stay.’ He stepped forward and began to disconnect the tube from my forearm. ‘Yes, they go down the steps and out of the gate. Nobody tries to stop them. It is crazy.’

Lifting out the sharp little butterfly from my vein, he padded the bloodspot with cotton wool and tossed everything into the waste bin. ‘Thank you,’ I said, but he did not acknowledge it.

‘I gave you codeine for your clavicle. The rest you must do by yourself. Good luck.’ He shut the door behind him and it did not lock. His feet went silently along the hall.

I got up. The floor seemed to wobble. There was a tightness in my breastbone. If I could make it to the beach again, I thought. If I could find my mural on the shore. If I could make it to the ferry. If I could make it to the mainland. If I could make it home.

I rifled through the doctor’s folder to get my ferry tokens back. I hugged the walls, passing frames of posed cadets out in the hallway. My arm was strapped but I flinched with every stride. There was no exit sign, only a set of steel doors to my left. I ran for them and broke into a stairwell, bounding down the concrete steps and out into the afternoon. Boys in deep-blue uniforms were on the parade ground. Their heads turned as I hurried by. They were mumbling, pointing with their eyes. Five of them. Smokers. Sailor boys with nothing to do but suck on cigarettes and gawp at injured women. A vast white building of too many windows stood beyond them. I could smell the Marmara but could not see it. Gulls were hustling in the sky.

I kept going.

Twenty, thirty yards until I reached the gate. An older cadet in full regalia was standing guard inside a wooden sentry box. The barrier was down, but I could hurdle it if I needed to. I knew that I could. I carried on, blanking the soreness, pushing it back. There was a hopeful feeling in me. The guard would let me through, I knew it. But the other cadets were taunting me now, shouting: ‘ Allez! Allez! ’ When I glanced back, they were gone. Only cars in the parade ground. Parking spaces. I began to slow.

Ahead of me, the guard had stepped out of his sentry box. He was raising the barrier. He was waving his gloved hand to hurry me through. But behind me, the shouts were getting louder, brighter. They were coming from the sky. ‘Ellie!’ they said. ‘Ellie!’

Whatever you do, Mac had warned me, keep going. So I did.

But then I saw a sign was screwed upon the middle of the barrier, slowly lifting, arcing through the sky. No Parking. No Admittance. No, something else. Its dotted lines grew sharper and more definite.

I stopped.

The whole afternoon appeared to dim around me.

Those shouts were echoing still. ‘Ellie! Ellie!’

I turned back, gazing up at the roof of the building. No one was there. Just a row of blackened flues. A metal winch. But all the bright paintwork had now tarnished grey. There was a foreign mizzle on my face.

‘Ellie, wait right there! Don’t move one inch! I’m coming down!’

I saw him. He was high up in the very top window, flailing his arms.

A studious fellow.

Victor Yail, 46 Harley Street, London.

The operator must have found him.

The road was flanked by leafless trees and ordinary grass verges. Every so often, we would pass under an empty footbridge and the lane-markings would curve slightly to the left or right, but we seemed to have been driving in one straight line since leaving the hospital. Cars that were just dabs on the horizon closed in fast and thumped right past us. The day had not yet ceded to the darkness, but it was readying itself. All the streetlamps had the bleary orange makings of a fuller light in their glass hoods. Victor kept an even speed: not more than fifty and not less than forty-five. He drove with one loose set of fingers on the steering column and his elbow on the windowsill. His other hand stayed poised on his left knee, occasionally reaching up to flick the indicator with the sedateness of a man collecting tickets at a kiosk. Soon, the hummocks began to rise in the narrows of the road ahead. And then the soot-dark loch was spreading in the windscreen and I followed it with my eyes, round to the driver’s side, till Victor’s profile fuzzed out in the window, and it all bled into an open stretch of sea.

‘How are you holding up?’ he said.

I looked away, worrying the glove box. ‘It’s difficult to say.’ I let my eyes recalibrate. There was plenty between me and the water out there — hedgerows, pasture, thickets of trees — but it was hard to reconcile it all. Every time I saw a cluster of pines I felt both homesick and at home. Being in a car, flashing over land without questioning its sureness beneath the wheels, following the road back to a place that I felt certain I had left years ago — all of these things were not easy to accept or comprehend, and yet they seemed to be the smallest of my problems. ‘I’m trying not to think about it till we get there. How much further is it?’

‘Oh, not far now,’ said Victor. ‘Five or ten minutes. We’ll pick up a sign in a moment, I should think.’

He was driving me back at my own insistence. It had taken a while to convince him. He had tried to deflect me with excuses. But now we were just five or ten minutes from Luss. Five or ten minutes from knowing.

A staff nurse and a porter had run out to fetch me. Blood was trailing in a chute all down my arm. I had an oozing hole where the butterfly had torn the skin, and I was standing in a car park in blue hospital pyjamas and a sling. ‘Come on, lovey, let’s get you inside,’ said the nurse, her kindly hand on my good shoulder. She steered me back to the entrance, under the annexe, past the waiting ambulances. The porter held the bay doors open for us, asking if I needed a wheelchair. I said no, I could walk. But voices kept sputtering in and out like mistuned radio. I was still seeing cadets in uniforms: the corridor was teeming with them. They parted for us, shaking their heads as we slow-marched through, muttering their insults in Turkish, spitting on the floor. ‘Here you go, pet — let’s put you in here,’ said the nurse, and she sat me down near the lifts between potted plants. The soil in them was dry and strewn with bent cigarette stubs. When the lift doors parted, cadets loitered in the strip-lit cavities, mouthing words at me I did not understand. The walls still seemed to be covered with pictures: old vessels in gilt frames, tall ships and steel frigates. I got lost in them for a while. I thought I smelled fresh salep . The nurse wiped my arm with a stinging wet tissue. Then Victor Yail came hurtling out of the lift, right past us. The nurse called: ‘Doctor, she’s here!’ and the porter whistled after him.

Victor’s shoes went sliding as he tried to change direction; he teetered and regained his balance. Seeing me between the plants, he held a palm to his chest and said, ‘Oh, thank goodness. You’ve got her. Well done.’

‘Where d’you want her?’ said the porter.

‘Back in the ward,’ said the nurse. ‘She needs that drip put back in her.’