Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘Yes, she’s got to have that,’ said Victor. ‘But let’s put her in a chair this time.’

‘She didn’t want the wheelchair,’ said the porter.

‘No, I mean a normal chair.’

‘Aye, that’ll be fine,’ said the nurse.

They were talking about me as though I were a truant child caught stealing.

‘All right then. Up you get, love.’

Then Victor said, ‘Hang on. Let me check her over first.’

The nurse said, ‘Right. I’ll go up and sort that drip out then.’

‘Thank you. Yes.’

The porter lingered. ‘D’you want us to help you take her back?’

‘No, I can handle it from here.’ Victor crouched. ‘But, thanks — I’ll shout if I need you.’

‘Aye, all right.’ The porter wandered away, towards the bunched cadets playing dice games in the corridor. They did not seem to pay him any mind.

I felt Victor’s hands upon my knees. He was on his haunches in front of me, leaning in to get my attention. ‘Ellie? You remember me, don’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s Dr Yail. Victor . Can you hear me?’

I stayed quiet. The lift pinged, but when the doors slid back, the cabinet was bare.

‘Elspeth,’ he said, ‘look at me now. Look at me.’

So I did. I stared right into his face. There was a flaky ridge upon his nose from the chafing of his glasses. His beard was dense but neatly clipped. He had a waxy quality to the skin below his eyelids, and rich green irises, like two halves of an olive. These were things that I had noticed many times before. He had not changed much in ten years. Hardly at all. ‘I can hear you, Victor,’ I said.

There was a visible release in his expression. ‘Good girl. I knew you could.’ He patted my knees and stood up. ‘I’m very glad to see you in one piece.’ He helped me to my feet. ‘You’ve had a lot of people fretting after you.’

‘Did you get my messages?’ I said.

‘Mm-hm. Don’t worry about that for now. The registrar was showing me your bloodwork. Your liver enzymes are still elevated slightly. We’ve got to sort that out before we do anything.’

‘I’m so sorry about Jonathan,’ I said.

‘Yes. I know you are. But we don’t need to talk about that now.’ He guided me by the elbow, jabbing at the lift button. ‘I want you resting and I want you getting fluids — nothing else for the moment.’ The lighted numbers were not moving. ‘Where the heck is this thing, Jupiter?’ And when it finally reached our level, doors sliding back, a sea cadet was waiting for us in civilian clothing. ‘Can you hit three for me, please?’ Victor asked him. The cadet rolled his eyes but still pushed the button.

I was cleaned up, given a dressing gown, and put into a day room on the ward. Victor made them turn my armchair towards the window. ‘Let’s see how much of this you can register, eh?’ he said to me. ‘I’m not sure what you’ve been used to recently, but there are worse places to be.’ He sat near me on a plastic chair, reading quietly through the notes in my folder, while a pouch of clear medicine seeped through me. Now and again, he looked up to check on my progress, smiling when I caught him looking, or getting up to fuss with my drip-stand.

I still could not understand how I had got there. For a while, I studied the movements of the cars below. I watched them reverse parking. I saw a man climb out of a little Ford Anglia, place his fedora on the roof to get a bouquet from the back seat, and walk off hatless. I even saw an ambulance crawl by with VALE OF LEVEN HOSPITAL painted on its flank, noticed the same words stencilled on the backs of wheelchairs and on signs outside the annexed buildings. But I could not trace the path from where I was to where I used to be. I could not see the joins between the mornings and the afternoons, from one month to the next. And my mind kept painting things that I could not be sure were there. Coiled ropes left on the kerbside. Lifebuoys hung along the railings. Naval uniforms. So I just listened to the forward-ticking of the wall clock behind me and studied the drips as they came down the tube in perfect synchrony. I found that counting off the minutes soothed me. I sat there for sixteen more of them, Portmantle getting further from my mind, the bay of Heybeliada drifting away, and the mural escaping my reach. I got up and tried to point my chair in the other direction. ‘Woah, hold on there,’ Victor said, ‘let me do it. Are you sure you don’t want to look at the view?

‘I want to see the clock,’ I said.

He slatted his eyes. ‘All right.’ And he swivelled me round and moved my drip-stand.

I watched the thin red second hand circuiting the clock face, marvelling at it, feeling more and more secure with each shift of its mechanism.

After a moment, Victor folded his notes under his arm. My drip was finished and he went to tell the nurse. When he came back, he had taken his blazer off, and was scrolling up the sleeves of his shirt. He dragged his plastic chair very close to me. ‘They’re going to take some more bloods from you now, I think. We’ve got a good dose of thiamine in you, though, and that should make things a bit less foggy. You’re still quite undernourished. We need to start building your strength up again — so it’s a therapeutic diet for today. Once you’re eating properly, they’ll let me sign you out of here. OK?’

I shrugged, wincing.

‘The collarbone’s going to hurt you for another month or so. But that’s the least of your concerns.’ He smiled consolingly. ‘Your bloodwork’s telling us you’ve had some toxins in your system — we think it’s a reaction to your tablets, but the tests have been a little inconclusive. So they’ve been trying to see how you’ll respond after some fluids. You’re starting to look a little better. A healthier colour, at least.’

I watched the second hand complete another lap. ‘Is Jonathan all right?’ I said, addressing it to the clock.

‘He is,’ said Victor matter-of-factly. ‘My secretary, on the other hand, you almost gave a coronary. She’s on a fortnight’s leave to make up for it.’

‘I really did think—’

‘I know,’ he said.

Victor reached to throw my notes onto the bank of chairs beside him. ‘The police aren’t sure how you injured yourself. Do you remember anything?’

‘I fell,’ I said.

‘From what? The sky?’

I had forgotten how much he liked his little jokes. ‘An escarpment,’ I said. ‘And then I hit my head. On the ground, I think.’

‘Well, that would certainly make sense.’ He inhaled, folded his arms. ‘They had to drag you out from under a pier. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘All true, I’m afraid. You were in quite a state.’

‘Where?’ I said.

‘Hm?’

‘Where did they find me?’

‘A village down the road. I forget the name.’

‘Where?’

‘Hang on, I’ve got it written down.’ He arched his back to retrieve his notes, flipping through them. ‘Luss,’ he said. ‘Luss pier. L-U-S-S.’

The breath went out of me.

Victor was nodding at his page of scrawl. ‘The police said you were camped out under there. And it says here you stole the tarpaulin off a boat to wrap yourself in. They weren’t sure how long you’d been there. Any light to shed on that?’

I could not even muster a noise.

‘Well, they tried to get you in the squad car, but you blacked out. So they put you in an ambulance instead and took you here. You’re lucky you were close to a good hospital. They got you on an IV right away.’

Luss , I thought. L-U-S-S.

‘They got my name from a prescription in your pocket,’ Victor went on. ‘I told them to hold you here till I could get a train up. But they’ve been doing lots of engineering works — delays across the board. I had to drive up. It took me a while to arrange things. And by the time I got here, well, you’d already discharged yourself, so to speak. I wish I could have come sooner.’