The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  – Look at it. It’s beautiful, Morris. It’s beautiful.

  – It is at that.

  And the two boys stood watching the impossibility of the entire western portion of the sky alight with burning snowflakes. When the dome finally tumbled it did so without grace. It sucked into itself the way a drunk finally gives in to stupor and folds inwards to the floor. The noise of it crashing down one hundred feet to the shore below was equally ignominious, it was the uncontrolled groaning of something large and restricted becoming uncharacteristically mobile. Though the fall looked to be an implosion of sorts, an inverted tumble, at the end of its descent it altered shape to thrust outwards. The crowds on the beach gasped. A flush of warmth moved past them, as did a small tidal wave of sparks and fireworks.

  By this point Cy’s mother was looking for him. She had not liked the way in which the fire had leaped and streaked along the sand with the pavilion’s collapse, chasing after the stray wood it was intent on devouring. The faces of those watching the show were orange and shadowy, even her sicker guests looked momentarily healthy in the warm aura of the blaze. Those in the front row, closer to the volatile mass of cinder-spinning, roaring timber were only black silhouettes, and she could not see the one belonging to her boy. By the time she had reached the Bayview Hotel and checked that her guests did not need any calming spirits or rubs for their smoke-agitated chests, her son was already home, drinking milk in the kitchen with Morris Gibbs. His cheeks were blown red and his eyebrows were thinner than she remembered. And he had the look about him of a laudanum taker after a purchase. Lit up, let out and satisfied.

  The next morning was Easter Sunday. Even for such a holy day the churches of the town were unusually packed for the morning services. Many had not felt at all comfortable with the previous night’s events, and were comforted even less by the image of a burning pathway leading to a fiery temple which had been presented to them. It was interpreted by multiple citizens on a personal level as possibly being prophetic, an indication of what might be awaiting them upon their deathbeds. Caring little for damnation or days of reckoning, all the boys of the town went down to the wreckage of the pavilion to ferret around. It was now a huge pile of debris that the tide had been in and out over, extinguishing any residual smoulder. Some were climbing on the blackened heap, others rooting through the rubble looking for treasure, fake gold-leafing from the roof, tapestry from within the ballroom. After serving breakfast in the hotel Cy slipped out and went down to the beach. He walked about with his hands in his pockets, kicking bits of decking and bricks, tarnished tiles. The lads around him were excited by the proximity of destruction, by the fact that something formerly so grand and spectacular was now demolished. A strange exuberance and exhilaration roused them and they shoved each other around. Their behaviour reminded him of Reeda’s comments about the present ugliness abroad that much of Europe was well and truly engaged in. She often said to him over the top of the morning paper that there was a certain pleasure for some people in violence. She said you could still hear it ringing in a few of the ones who came back from the war, and in those running the affair. Men especially suffered from this disposition, she informed him frankly and unapologetically. As if some were born hollow and there was a hole cut in their hearts that produced music when the breath of spite and madness was blown through them.

  Cy looked up at the greyish March sky. Not a hint that it had once swum with flickering schooling light remained there. The fiery winter storm was gone. It seemed right that out of such beauty should come such awful devastation, he supposed, the things of the universe being equal and linked, like birth and death, his life for his father’s. Fee Lung, the Chinese magician who played in the pavilion every Friday night, was standing by the desecrated spire of the dome, now half-buried in the sand, shaking his head. He looked over at Cy and smiled pristinely, solemnly.

  – Yes, yes, all is gone.

  Next to his polished feet, half hidden by spoiled wood, there appeared to be a stringed instrument of some kind, smallish, charred at the neck, perhaps a violin that had miraculously avoided being consumed by the flames. Cy pointed to it and Fee Lung stooped to retrieve the charmed item, bringing it out from under the wreckage like a rabbit from a black top hat. The Viennese Orchestra had been booked to play in the Taj Mahal that very evening.

  Beauty and destruction, thought Cy, now there’s a trick.

  His mother was right. War was a peculiar thing. It suited some and sullied others. It combed the region thinner of its men and provided conveyor-belt work and wagon-driving skills for women. Loved ones were lost, new loves were found. Soldiers arrived and marched on the prom, soldiers disappeared and died at Ypres and the Somme. Mrs Gardner of number 42 West Street claimed a widow’s pension for her deceased husband, then married to become Mrs Burton, until Mr Gardner arrived home on one leg and off she went to court for bigamy. Many families retired to Morecambe when husbands and fathers returned from abroad, having faced the worst that life could offer they were now content to live in the cheeriest place they could remember, and new houses were built to accommodate those coming in. The Tower, incomplete and scarcely rivalling those neighbouring structures it was supposed to rival, was stripped of excess metal for the war effort, rendered skeletal, though the dancehalls still made a roaring profit and provided funds for the returning wounded, and the picture houses boomed, providing a shadowy haven for potentially doomed couples to explore inside each other’s clothing while they had the chance. In people’s eyes there were strange lights that Cy had never seen before. Often it was a sad luminescence, weary with grief, light in a minor key, like the death-glow of the moon when it’s left behind in the winter day sky, stranded long after night has departed. Sometimes, as in the eyes of the White Lund women, the lights were new and budding, as useful as fresh stars emerging against a world of blackness. Then the stars went out when the girls were told their sweethearts would not be coming home. It was a time of light and dark, of good and bad. The war gave people purpose and it also brought them pain. Either way the town came through the troubles with remarkable resilience. It wept for the unfortunate, then gathered itself up and in a spirit of continuing humour it told a joke or two. Reeda said to Cy that Morecambe was needed more than ever in these years. And perhaps escape was the best prescription for the nation’s suffering, a way for the north to keep up morale. For those used to scraping by with very little money and holidaying cheap at the seaside resort the pinch of the war was no deterrent. Reeda’s consumptives were unfit for any kind of duty and were as faithful to the Bayview as ever. There may have been more day-trippers to the coast and fewer boarders through the years of conflict, but by and by the income of the town remained the same. Though the war changed something in folk slightly, Cy could tell. When people made mention of it, it was never certain what they would offer you. If asked they could be enraged or sullen, broken or mending, hopeful or raving. So for a time he had the feeling the ground was never quite firm beneath his feet.

  The quicksands of Morecambe Bay took the lives of a few unsuspecting beach-explorers and visitors every decade or so. They lay out to the south-west, beyond the town itself, and when the tide went out they formed in a quiet, saturated strip that could pull down and swallow a whole adult body in fifteen minutes or less, like an egg in the muscular throat of a snake. Once swallowed, bones could crack like the egg’s shell under pressure and the body cavities would be invaded by thick wet juice. The heavier the victim, the quicker the death was how it went. The beach was a fateful combination of rock, pebble, river-borne silt and mud hollows, which could create vertical sand tunnels and crusted-edged bowls of considerable depth. A nasty liquid conspiracy between trickling eddies and the ebbing tide resulted in some of the worst and most dangerous traps on the whole of the British coastline. When a tourist was lost, or a local went missing, the first place the police constables looked for them after Moss Street was south-west of the harbour beach. Local guides would bring the uniformed men out
on to the perimeter of the quicksands to assess the possibility of those ravenous hydra sand-mouths having claimed another victim. Drunks had a habit of challenging the quicksands when they were losing at life. And they would lose again, lose their last rum-reeky breath, and complete their demise. Sometimes the sucking holes were not that deep, they were deep enough to kill and drown and crush but not to consume fully, Morecambe Bay itself being partial to a little comedy, it would seem. And a hand or a whole arm would protrude from the surface as if waving to the search party, as if the sand predator had eyes that were bigger than its belly. Immune only were the dirty, grey, juvenile swans that waddled out flat-webbed over the mouths of the beast in search of worms and flapped extraordinarily powerful wings to lift out of the grip at the slightest indication that the ground was beginning to take them.

  The younger children of the town occasionally played a game called quicksand in the school playground, where the pretended execution of one of them was always tragically improvised. Some of the older, bolder children from the town formed lines out on the beach during holidays or weekends and the bravest of them all would step out into the treacherous jaws of living sand until the pull began to frighten them, then they would yell and get heaved back to safety, out on to the dry, stable, trustworthy beach. Almost before the children of Morecambe could understand the English language their parents told them about the perils of quicksand. How, if caught, they should remain absolutely still and not struggle, that made it worse you see, just scream for help, scream and scream until rescue came. And they were taken out across the vast, empty, sealess beach at low tide and shown that portion of the shore they must not venture on to, where there were shiny looking patches of smooth sand, which differed slightly from their surrounding canvas. Scream and scream for help, the parents said.

  But every so often a child from Morecambe would actually wander out on the beach at low tide where they should not go, perhaps collecting shells or rock-pooling, perhaps under the spell of the brewing fog that rolled in from time to time, and they would step through a patch of live sand and not step out again, and they would struggle because it is human nature to fight for life when it is being taken, and nobody would hear the screams and come to help even though it had been promised. Only the cold, disdainful Irish Sea would hear the calls and come up to investigate, that fickle arm of the Atlantic Ocean which had in part set up the trap. In it would rush and smooth over the strange, lumpy, depressed portion of beach with the wet scuffled tracks and the trenched handprints. Smoothing it over like glass, as if complicit in the murder, as if further employed in the conspiracy to get rid of the evidence. And the child would join the company of a few others inside the tightest, sludgiest, densest of bellies. And crack like an egg the child would go, and thick wet sand would seep into his mouth and ears, setting him in the last position his limbs could move into. And out would come the search parties and the guides and the police when little Charlie didn’t come home at teatime. A scarf would eventually be found, or a glove, a shoe, a fishing net, too light to be a decent meal for the hungry sand and so it was left above ground, moved around by the sea, and brought up to the piers by the police sergeant to be recognized by a now hysterical mother. Then the game in the school playground would start up again in earnest and the shrieks of panicking children would echo over to Charlie Jessop’s house on Royal Street, where his mother would be looking at a photograph of her son, whom the wretched Morecambe quicksand had made eternally seven years old.

  Cyril Parks had been up to his crotch in it before, with Jonty and Morris holding his outstretched arms. The theory was that since he was the tallest of the three there would be more of him to get pulled down, and more of him left sticking out to grab hold of and yank back out. Height was a surprisingly versatile argument for being the first to undertake experimental practices, Cy noticed.

  – Go on, Parksie, those great long legs will hit the bottom before you drown.

  – Aye. We’ll not wander off and leave you.

  It was amusing up over the ankles, sort of tickling and soft. Cy laughed to his friends and said that it was grand. But then the sand began to work faster and after a few seconds his knees were gone and it was not soft any more, it was cold and wet, like a big, pillowy tongue up his trouser legs. It was nasty. There was an unmistakable feeling of being swallowed. Sucked on like a lollipop, like the bigger boys said Lucy Willacy, the headmaster’s daughter, had done to their dickies but not as nice, he assumed.

  – What’s it like now?

  As ever, Morris and Jonty were keen to know the exact details of the experience. Cy didn’t reply. It was like being buried, he thought. Like swimming in Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Like amputation of his legs so that he suddenly felt shorter, a good deal smaller, and he could not say with certainty that he had toes any more. He got to just past his knees and said to his friends enough and to pull him out. So they tried pulling. But he kept going down, he did not start coming up. The sand had opened its monstrous gullet and begun its gurgitation. Mid-thigh now, he lost his balance, swayed, but was unable to adjust the position of his legs and he tipped over to one side. His left hand was caught by the sand and sucked on. He dragged it out, covered in a new, gluey brown skin.

  Then panic, panic, panic was all Cy felt, getting quicker in him and bigger. He was stuck. Too stuck. He was being eaten. Jonty and Morris had him by the shoulders and arms and were jerking at him but he was still going down. He tried to talk and started stumbling over bits of speech, rambling about nothing.

  – Mam’s cutlery … she’ll bust us over the chops … I … I… want to go, come back, Dad … Lu, Lu, Lucy, then if I don’t … of God, oh God … Ah, ah …

  And the ranting was replaced by yelling. He was low enough to feel the compression of sand on the end of his dicky and it was not a marvellous sensation in the slightest. He was now half-wearing the beach.

  Morris Gibbs bent suddenly and put a hand over Cy’s mouth.

  – Shut up, you idiot. Undo your trews. Quick sharp, eh.

  – What? It’s not funny Morris, it’s not –

  – Aye, go on and do it. No time to explain. Cy … Cyril. It’s all right.

  Cy fumbled with his buttons and pulled his breeches down until they met the wet sand.

  – Now. Try to point your feet down. Like standing on your tippy-toes.

  Morris’s instructions were surprisingly calm. Cy looked up and found that the eyes regarding him were utterly placid. His friend was wearing an expression that Cy had seen before somewhere, on a face under a moustache, in an old photograph on the Trawlers’ Cooperative Society building wall. It was the look of knowing the sea, come what may. And it suddenly gave him comfort. So he pushed as hard as he could without really feeling his ankles move and took a deep breath.

  Morris was counting.

  – One, two …

  On three the two boys heaved and wrenched and Cy slowly came up, peeling out of his trousers and his shoes as he did so with a loud sucking sound. The boys landed together in an untidy heap. They stood up quickly and looked back at the puddle of sand with the shed clothing inside. The vacated legs were squeezing together, shrinking in, and were full of mucky-looking water that was being displaced upwards, outwards, and filtering back through the sand like awful digestive juices in a stomach. Cy blew out a great lungful of air.

  – Well. Bugger me sideways.

  – Not on your nelly.

  They walked back over the beach towards town, laughing about the predicament they had escaped. Cy’s bare legs were cold in the fresh breeze, he was careful to tread lightly as he walked, pulling his feet up quickly from the sand, for the sensation of his toes sinking down even a little, that closeness of damp pressure to his skin, was sickening now and made him feel light-headed. It was an anxiety that would never quite leave him. After the quicksands he could no longer sleep with the blankets close about him, boggarts under the bed or not. And if he happened to saturate his garments in the rain or the river or
when he was dropped off the pier by the boys at full tide, it would never remain on his body long enough to dry and release the flesh beneath it from its clasp. He’d rather go stark bollock naked through the town than feel that terrible tight claustrophobia again. Morris Gibbs and Jonty Preston, though, were quick-thinking devils, and friends for life.

  It was when the war was pulling its hardest on the continent, when Europeans were streaming hither and thither from their smashed-open homes and villages and fields like ants from a disturbed hill-nest, and official letters to mothers and wives were flowing with regularity through the letter boxes around the bay, that another wonder was bestowed upon Morecambe. If not for harmony’s sake then for counterplay. The pavilion fire of that same year was all but eclipsed by this new and celestial beauty. Aurora Borealis. The northern bloodlights.

  It was not the crowded spectacle of the fire, nor an occasion of mass mesmerism, with all seats sold out for the performance. It was to be a private show. The town had long since known that it held one of the best positions in the country for observing this display, the tourist leaflets listing local attractions and entertainments made great mention of it, it was almost as compulsory a feature as leaving Blackpool off every local map and out of every visitor handbook. Aurora was not a stranger to the bay, for all her being the classiest act around. She was not the rarest sight, though many may have missed her that night, coming unannounced and under a dark cloak as she always did. Cy was almost sleeping when his mother knocked softly on his door and entered. Her face was softer than he had ever seen it, her eyes contained light stolen from every scrap and corner of the room it seemed, so it was dim about them, so at first his mind went out to thoughts of witchery, to her capabilities of subversion and collaboration in the parlour room. As if some sinister rite of passage bequeathed him was about to take place. Perhaps he never left his slumber, and his dreaming memory deluded him into his coming vision. But she took the covers back off him, reached for his hand and led him to the window. And fatefully he went with her.