The Ecliptic (2 page)

‘Don’t laugh,’ I told them. ‘He’s got to be exhausted.’ It was a mile uphill from the ferry—a draining enough hike in clement weather. And the boy was
not even wearing proper boots. No wonder he was retching.

Pettifer grinned. ‘How do you know he didn’t eat something bad while he was on the mainland? That street offal the Turks love so much. The chopped-up stuff.’ He turned to
Quickman. ‘What’s it called again?’

‘
Kokoreç
,’ Quickman said. ‘Sheep’s innards.’

‘That’s it. All very tasty while it’s going down, but once it’s in your system
—
’ He mouthed a silent explosion, then made the action with his
spreading fingers to illustrate it.

I ignored him. ‘You’d think someone could’ve warned the lad.’

‘About what?’

‘The snow. I’ll bet he doesn’t have much in that bag of his, either.’

‘Nobody warned me about
kokoreç
,’ said Pettifer, ‘and I survived. He’s a teenager, not an eight-year-old.’

MacKinney wiped a circle in the fogging glass. ‘Tif’s right. You start telling people what to pack, next thing they’ll be showing up with their valets.’

‘Especially the women,’ said Pettifer, winking. ‘We can’t have them coming here with evening gowns and whatnot.’ This sort of provocation was a feature of his
company. He was a flirt by reflex and, because the pickings of women at Portmantle were so scant, he quite often directed his affections towards me in the manner of schoolyard teasing. That I
harboured no physical attraction for him and made this fact consistently evident was what gave him the confidence to be flirtatious—such was the male tendency, in my experience. He was no
more a chauvinist than a fascist, but sometimes he liked to test my temperature for his own entertainment.

MacKinney leaned closer to the pane. ‘A bit of snow shouldn’t stop anyone who needs this place enough. Man or woman. And, anyway—he seems fine now, look. He’s not
complaining.’

‘Can’t be anything left to spit up,’ Pettifer said. ‘Half his guts are on the ground.’

He took my boot tip in the shin for this. ‘I wish you wouldn’t revel in it quite so much. When was the last time
you
hiked anywhere?’

‘I ran cross-country when I was his age.’ He patted his paunch. ‘Now I can’t get off the toilet in the morning.’

‘Jesus,’ Quickman said. ‘What an image.’

‘You’re welcome.’

It was difficult now to recall the days when Pettifer and Quickman were strangers to me. They had landed at the refuge a season apart, but they had bonded almost immediately, over a dinnertime
discussion of the weather (what better topic was there for two Englishmen to deliberate upon?). Later, when MacKinney and I had been playing backgammon at the shady end of the portico, they had
both lurked some distance from our board with glasses of
çay
, making disparaging remarks about our game in whispered voices. ‘If you’re going to sit there tittering all
day,’ MacKinney had called to them, ‘why don’t you come and show us how it’s done? We’re not exactly playing to the death.’ They had apologised for their
rudeness and sat down with us. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you,’ Quickman had said, ‘that all games should be taken seriously? My father used to drill that into me.’ I
had scowled at him then, uncertain of his meaning. ‘Still, once you’ve seen a grown man break his ankle playing musical chairs, you start to question his advice a bit.’ Mac had
laughed her big, ingenuous laugh, and that was it—the beginning of our attachment. It did not seem to matter that we had travelled thousands of miles to remove ourselves from the hindrances
of life in Britain only to hitch ourselves to each other.

‘Has anybody seen Ender? Someone’s got to let the boy inside.’ I looked back into the emptying mess hall, where the old caretaker had last been spotted at the back of the line
for bluefish stew. A few of the other guests were still finishing their lunches, alone together on the same long table. We had hardly taken the time to learn their names, but we had heard about
their projects in various ways and dismissed them as short-termers already—‘transients’
,
Pettifer called them, which was his way of saying ‘lesser
talents’.

It was our judgement that the duration of a stay at Portmantle was equivalent to the value of the work being done: if you were gone after one season, it was likely because your project could not
sustain a greater period of gestation. For example, there was the Spanish poet we had spoken to at lunch, who had proudly announced that he was working on a sequence of minimalist poems that were
disdainful of linearity, narrative, and meaning. ‘Sounds like an important collection,’ Quickman had responded, and turned his head to roll his eyes at us. ‘If anything needs to
be eradicated from poetry, it’s meaning.’ The Spaniard had nodded at this, deaf to the sarcasm, and proceeded to discuss the remarkable complexity of his work with Quickman, whose
feigned interest was admirably upheld throughout.

We gave this poet two seasons, maximum. Any guest who could not wait to talk about the project he was working on was usually a short-termer—that was our evaluation. Anyone who proclaimed
his own genius was a fraud, because, as Quickman himself once put it, genius does not have time to stand admiring its reflection; it has too much work to get finished. We never sought out the
company of short-termers. We left them to work and find their clarity alone, while we got on with jabbing at our own unwieldy projects. None of us seemed to recognise the fact that our separation
from the others was, in fact, a tacit declaration of our own genius—and, thus, it surely followed that we were the biggest frauds of all. We did not even consider that the purest talent at
Portmantle was standing at the front gate in a pool of his own vomit.

‘No point calling the old man,’ said Quickman, eyes on the window. ‘Our boy’s about to hit the buzzer.’ And right on cue, the hallway below us echoed with the sound
of it: three long, grating blasts. Quickman set the pipe back in the crease of his mouth. ‘Places, everyone,’ he said, his voice betraying a little excitement.

The buzzer sounded again.

Ender, the old caretaker, emerged from the mess hall with a napkin stuffed inside his shirt collar. It was streaked with pale stew-stains. He was still holding his spoon. ‘It is
him?’ he said. ‘The ringing?’

‘Yup,’ said Pettifer. ‘He’s probably got hypothermia by now. Better hop to it.’

‘OK. I go. You stay.’ Ender tore the napkin from his collar, dabbed his moustache clean, and tucked the spoon into his breast pocket. He went scuttling down the stairs. ‘You
can wait inside the library, yes?’ he called back to us from the bottom step, putting on his coat. ‘I bring him.’

From the window, we watched the old man tread across the thick white lawns, making holes in the snowpack. He carried the provost’s shotgun with him, as was the customary practice, hinged
over his left forearm, unloaded. The fur trim of his parka matched the two-tone grey of his hair. When he got to the gate, he spoke to the boy through the ironwork.

There was a passphrase incoming guests were told to use, which the provost changed every season, though it was usually a line from a poem or some favourite literary reference. MacKinney and I
had both been given the same quote to recite:
Eastward we turn and homeward, alone, remembering.
Pettifer had:
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, glad from a world grown
old
. Quickman’s had been a translation of a Turkish author, Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar, whose work was the provost’s academic fetish, though Quickman claimed he could not
remember the line in detail. Poor old Ender had to memorise all of these passphrases every season, his spoken English being the most reliable. His mind must have been loaded with enough disordered
verse to rival our resident Spaniard. But, in all his time as caretaker, there had been no cause for him to fire a single shot. The system worked too well. Anyone who deigned to buzz the gate at
Portmantle had to know the procedure for entry. You would be turned away at gunpoint if you did not.

After Fullerton had spoken his noiseless passphrase, the old man let him in. The boy stepped through, peering up at the window where we stood above the portico. If he saw us staring back at him,
he did not let on. He waited patiently for Ender to lock up, and then the two of them slogged across the grounds in single file.

At the front steps, Fullerton stopped to kick the powder off his heels and switched his bag to the other shoulder. He gazed back in the direction he had travelled, pausing there awhile, as
though the gate signified a line between the present and the past and he was taking a moment to acknowledge the gravity of his circumstance. We had seen this quirk of behaviour in others. Some time
ago, too far back to recall how it felt, we had made the same gesture ourselves.

‘We ought to get a move on,’ MacKinney said.

We went along the corridor, into the dark library with its classroom smell and its awkward collection of furniture. I opened the curtains and switched on the lamps. Pettifer and Quickman
crouched at the hearth, debating the merits of lighting a fire. ‘How long are we expected to entertain this lad?’ Pettifer asked of nobody in particular. ‘I mean, there’s
only so long I can sustain these airs and graces.’

‘Just hurry up and light the thing. He’ll be in need of it,’ MacKinney told him.

‘Seems to me—’ Pettifer sighed, reaching for a block of firewood, ‘that others are getting the benefit of my exertions a little too often these days.’

Quickman nudged him. ‘How about you give us the benefit of your silence then, instead?’

‘You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that.’

Quickman laughed. ‘Here—toss this paper on the pile.’

‘You should twist it first. Burns better.’

The two of them were still lighting the fire when Ender shuffled in. The boy loomed behind him, shivering on the threshold. He was wrapped up in a blanket, standard issue: scratchy orange wool
with a hand-embroidered P.

Ender coughed and said, ‘Excuse me, our guest is very cold and tired, so maybe not much of talking for today. Hello, hello, and then we go—OK?’ The old man took a step to one
side, presenting the boy with an extended arm, as though he were the conclusion of a magic trick. Then he said, ‘Fullerton, this is some people who take care of you now, for today, and soon
the provoss hisself will be here.’ In the old man’s unaccustomed tongue, it sounded more like
Foolertinn
. ‘They are old but not so bad for talking. You can like
them.’

‘Crikey.’ Pettifer rose, wiping soot on his trousers. ‘Impossible to live up to that sort of introduction.’

The boy lifted his chin and forced out a whisper: ‘Hey.’ He was trembling so much the blanket quivered about his body like a storm sail. Now that his hood was down and he was close
enough, we could see the wholeness of his face. His small brown eyes were close together, sunken, drawing attention to the slim pillar of his nose and its bell of soft cartilage. He had a slack
lower jaw—what my father used to call a ‘lazy mouth’—the tongue nesting behind the bottom row of teeth, giving wetness to his lips. His dark hair parted easily in the
middle, like the pages of a Bible, and it was fashioned in that lank teenage style, curtaining his brow, obscuring what appeared to be a birthmark on the left of his forehead. He was probably
shorter than most boys his age, though his broad, hod-carrier’s shoulders held an arching shape beneath the blanket that made him seem older.

I was the first of us to speak to him. The others hung back, unsure. We had almost forgotten how to talk to anyone but ourselves. ‘Hell of a trek, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Your feet must be aching. Sit down.’ For some reason, I did not offer him my hand to shake but gave an odd sort of Sitting Bull wave, palm flat and raised. ‘I’m Knell. With
a K. Good to meet you.’

He nodded back, shuddering.

‘Come on in by the fire. It’s going a treat now. Get yourself warm.’

He moved in closer to the hearth. Then, casting off the blanket, he leaned with both arms spread across the mantelpiece, imbibing the heat. From behind, it seemed as though he was holding up the
wall itself.

‘The two gents to your right are Pettifer and Quickman.’ They both waved, but the boy’s back was turned to them, and he did not seem to be listening. ‘And that’s
MacKinney there by the window. She and I have been here since, oh, I’m not sure it’s polite to say.’

‘Not so long as me,’ said Ender, still in the doorway. ‘I am getting the white hairs.’ He combed his moustache with his fingers and crowed.

The boy did not move. ‘Please,’ he said, so quietly it was almost lost amid the crackle of the flames, ‘if I could just have a minute to—’ He clutched his stomach.
We took a few paces back as a precaution, but nothing came up. The boy sighed and continued: ‘Just to thaw out, that’s all. I still can’t feel my toes.’ He turned now, his
back to the fire, a radiant outline about his middle. His eyes were shut and he was inhaling through the nose, exhaling through his puckered mouth. ‘You can talk . . . I just need to . . . to
be quiet for a sec . . .’

‘Of course,’ I said, sitting down on the couch, making eyes at MacKinney. We shrugged at each other. ‘The provost asked us to be your welcoming party. He thought, with the four
of us being so used to the place, and speaking the same language, it might help you bed in quicker. A little familiarity goes a long way here. He wanted to give the induction himself,
but—’

Fullerton kept on trying to regulate his breathing. I was not sure that he was receiving me.

‘He’s had to go off-island,’ I continued. ‘Organising your paperwork, I should think, just in case you decide to stay longer. So we’re only substitutes, I’m
afraid. But I promise you’re getting the same treatment as everyone else.’

Pettifer spoke up then: ‘Actually, we’ve never rolled out the red carpet like this before. For
anyone
.’ He cleared his throat, as though the implication of this noise
would prompt the boy into a response. But it did not, and Pettifer folded his arms, affronted. ‘Well, I’m really feeling the glow of philanthropy right now, I must say.’