Benjamin Wood - The Ecliptic

‘The boy gave a wan little smile. ‘Stop me if I’m sharing too much.’

‘Well, I always wished I could play an instrument,’ I said. ‘Somehow I just can’t get the knack for it. A bit like backgammon.’ As a child, I had often sneaked my mother’s squeezebox from its case and tried to draw a tune from it, but all it ever gave me were wheezes of complaint.

‘I taught myself from a picture book,’ the boy replied. ‘It’s not that hard.’

Quickman folded up the game board and shoved it under his armpit. ‘The last musician we had played the bloody flute all night. It was like having swallows in the loft. I was this close to throttling him.’

‘Then I should probably keep the noise down.’

‘If you know what’s good for you.’

The boy did not answer. He stooped to examine the samples again. ‘There’s something really peaceful about this wall of yours, Knell. Not that you want my opinion.’

‘It’s a far cry from anything right now,’ I said. ‘But thank you.’ I did not ask him to clarify what he meant by ‘peaceful’, as he had said the word with such a tone of admiration.

He side-stepped an easel to get to my workbench and started looking through the jumble there, too, picking up a palette knife, examining the crusted blade.

‘Oi! Hands to yourself!’ Pettifer said.

‘Sorry.’ The boy put down the knife and moved away.

‘We don’t mean to be fussy,’ I said, ‘but we’ve got used to things being in a certain order.’ In truth, it would not have mattered if he had upturned the entire workbench and trampled it. Nothing it held was worth protecting any more, only the kind of effluvium that all painters accrue over the course of a long project: dirty turps in peach cans; oils hardening in tubes; rags and palettes congealed with colour; brushes standing in jars of grey water like forgotten flowers. Such ordinary things had lost all meaning for me. I kept them there because I had nowhere else to store them, and they served as a reminder of my limitations. My real work was in those samples on the wall, and I would have cut off the boy’s arm before he touched a single square. But he did not try.

He zipped up his cagoule. The trophies of a hard night’s backgammon distended the front pockets. ‘Well, I’m going to hit the sack. Thanks for the game,’ he said. ‘I thought I would’ve forgotten all my moves by now.’

‘I knew it!’ Quickman slumped into his chair. ‘Hustled!’

‘Blimey. How good are you, exactly?’ Pettifer said.

‘I might’ve played a tournament or two, after hours. You know, backroom games.’

‘For money?’

‘Don’t see the point otherwise.’

Quickman said, ‘I’ve seen those backroom games. They’d never let a kid like you at the table.’

‘Well, they don’t exactly check your age in the places I’m talking about. Not hard to find a cash game in Green Lanes — all the Cypriots round there. You pick things up if you watch them closely. And they’ll talk strategy all night after a few drinks.’

There was something about the way Fullerton spoke — head down and to the side — that did not quite convince me. I just could not imagine him gambling his pocket money in some dismal London pub with a crowd of Cypriots. He was spinning us a story. Quickman must have agreed, because he stroked his beard and said, doubtfully, ‘Green Lanes, eh?’

‘Yup.’ The boy put up the hood of his cagoule, smirking. ‘Thanks for the gum, Knell. I’m sure you’ll get a chance to win it back.’ He yanked at the door. ‘Everyone sleep tight.’ And off he went.

Quickman waited until the boy’s footsteps could no longer be heard, then he stood up and buttoned his coat. ‘There’s something shifty about that lad,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if it’s a good idea to entertain him.’

‘You’re just sore because he thrashed you,’ Pettifer said.

‘Well, all right, perhaps that’s part of it.’ Quickman upturned his collar. The sheepskin was bald and grubby round the neckline. ‘There’s something a bit off about him, though. Am I being unfair?’

‘No — he’s definitely unusual,’ I said. ‘But I thought the same about you once, Q, and it turned out fine in the end.’

It was too soon to claim we had a common understanding, but I could see reflections of my own youth in the way the boy behaved. I was about Fullerton’s age when I first started painting — not yet out of my parents’ house, with barely enough experience of life to qualify me, in the eyes of society, as an expert on anything besides schoolyard gossip and girls’ fashions. But I understood, even then, how much I knew. At sixteen, I had seen enough modern art in picture books to tell a depth from a great hollow. And I reasoned that if so many vapid contributions had been made by artists gone before me, what was there to be frightened of? The precedents of their failure would be my parachute. So I began in this context: without fear, without doubt, without expectation. The year was 1953.

In the last few weeks of school, when other girls were thinking of summer jobs, I stole oil paints from the art-block cupboards at Clydebank High. I prised two window-boards from a derelict outhouse and dragged them home along Kilbowie Road, sawing and sanding them with my father’s tools, stowing them behind a coal box. The pleasure of it — the secret purpose — was so bracing I could not rest. That summer, I committed my entire life to painting.

In the gloomy backcourt of our tenement, as far away as I could get from the stinking middens, I leaned my first board against a wall. I was undaunted by the blankness of it. I did not pause to scrutinise the fabric of the thing itself, to wonder if the woodgrain was right, if the whitewash had set evenly, if it would need to be glazed later on. Instead, I walked up to the board as though it were a boy I had decided to kiss and streaked a layer of phthalo blue across the surface with a palette knife, the floppy baking kind my mother owned, making an impulsive shape upon the wood. There was no history standing on my shoulders then, no classical references hanging in my head like dismal weather. I was alone, uninfluenced, free to work the layers of chalky stolen paint with a big lolloping knife, to smudge with my fingers, pad flat with my fist, pinch, thumb, scrape, and scratch. No judgements of technique arose in my mind, because I did not invite them, did not think to. I simply acted, expressed, behaved, made gestures of the knife that seemed unprompted and divined. There was a scene in my head that I tried to reproduce, something from a wartime story of my father’s, but I could only paint it the way I imagined, not how it really was.

The hours ghosted by. Soon my hands became so colour-soaked and waxed I could not see the pleats of my knuckles or the rims of my fingernails. The dumbshow of the world — that other place I had forgotten, the outer one — broke into road noise and tenement din. Neighbours were squabbling in the close, coming out into the yard with dustpans of ash, telling young lads with footballs to clear off their landings. An early dark was settling and I heard my mother at the window, already home from work. She was calling me. And so I lifted my head to see what I had finished.

There it was upon the wall, drying: a semi-abstract thing, made in a flurry. The suggestion of a place I had never been to. A spray of rain. A slate-grey ocean spattered by bombs. The remnants of a foundry, dismembered in the sky. A falling road bridge, or perhaps a wall, and so much else I did not recognise, which somehow conveyed more in its obliqueness than I could ever have spoken in words.