Free The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood Page B

a certain—how to put this—
intellectualism
to his readings, which isn’t what I need right now. I’m
looking for a simple emotional response. And I wouldn’t trust those short-termers with a single word of mine.’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘You’re the perfect audience for
this—you understand where I’m coming from. I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’
    We stopped outside the mess hall, where Gülcan kept an urn of
salep
constantly warming throughout the day. It was the provost’s favourite drink and we had come to share his
fondness for it as a winter tonic. Mac filled two cups and we carried them along the corridor to her room, passing the thresholds of other guests, some of whom I could hear working at typewriters.
It seemed to me that Mac’s corridor was forever rattling with these factory noises—the bright clamour of thoughts being machined—and I had always believed it was a heartening
sound until that day. ‘Listen to them,’ she said, ‘typing up. They’ll be out of here soon.’
    ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’
    ‘For them maybe.’
    MacKinney’s room was deliberately spartan: a single bed made up with hospital corners, a bureau with the tidiest stack of manuscript pages, an oak wardrobe as solid and imposing as a
casket. We were not discouraged from bringing in photographs of loved ones, but if any of us possessed them they were not put on display—I suspected Mac had pictures of her daughters hidden
somewhere and spent her evenings tenderly thumbing their faces in private.
    On the ottoman by her window was the tan leather suitcase I had seen her carry into Portmantle many seasons ago; she kept it with its lid open and its belly packed with hardbacks, preciously
arranged, all of them page-marked with strips of ribbon. What belongings she had were organised like this, aligned to some private schema. Only her camping stove and coffee pot—special items
she had requested from the provost—bore the scars of regular use; they were so blackened and spilled-on that she kept them tucked behind the door, covered by a tea towel.
    She put down her
salep
on the bureau and slid out the top drawer, carrying the whole thing to her bed. ‘On second thoughts,’ she said, rifling through, ‘it’s
probably best if you don’t read it while I’m standing here in front of you. That will just be agony for both of us.’ The foolscap pages wilted in her hands as she held them out to
me. ‘It’s my only copy. I’d tell you to be careful with it, but I’m quite sure it’s headed for the fireplace in the end.’
    The papers were a little greasy. Flicking through them, I saw that each page bore Mac’s careful handwriting—an upright style that never broke the borders of the rulings, whose
letters crouched like tall birds herded into crates. At least a quarter of the text was neatly struck through with black pen, and Mac had redacted most of her own notes in the margins. ‘Just,
you know—tell me if there’s anything there,’ she said.
    ‘I will.’
    ‘Think you could get back to me by dinnertime?’
    ‘What’s the rush?’
    ‘I told you, I don’t know how long I have.’
    There had been such wistfulness about the way MacKinney had been talking on the roof that I had mistaken her meaning. I thought that she had been trying to vent her frustrations about Portmantle
again, weighing her regrets against her achievements. But I understood now, from the urgency in her voice, from the way she was tap-tapping her foot on the floorboards, that it was something else.
She was leaving us—and not by choice. ‘Did something happen? Are they trying to kick you out?’
    ‘Shssh. Close the door.’
    I pulled it shut. The
salep
taste in my mouth began to sour. Without the echo of the corridor, the room had a very cloistered feeling. It seemed there was no one else alive in the world
but the two of us.
    Mac said, ‘I don’t know anything about your sponsor. Tell me about