The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

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