The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  Outside there was nothing but a red sky. Red long past sunset and long before sunrise. Red of an impossible hour. Red, and behind that struggling green, and behind that trapped and gentlest white. It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature’s grace, unhurried, the slowest, seeping effulgence. Lesser and greater than all light. Blood of the sky.

  Cyril Parks left himself then. Perhaps it was the solitary quietude of this occurrence, which was kept under glass for they did not step outside to applaud Miss Borealis, though she was intensely lovely, or his condition, resting on the swaying anchor of sleep, ready ahoy, soon to be sent down to the depths and so susceptible to any form of sublimation. Perhaps it was holding his mother’s hand at the window as though she were a guide, neither witch nor widow nor angel at that moment, but simply a guide on the wasteland sand of the shore, and when she took her hand softly away from his he felt arrived. Perhaps this is what ended that first part of his life. He stepped out of it willingly. And for all his remaining youth and curiosity, the full store of energy set to keep him beating on until it finally wound down and fluttered out in his heart, he would have taken death right then, under Aurora’s beauty, and gone happily, knowing he had seen the last and brightest of all miracles.

  – The Kaiser and the Queen of Morecambe –

  Where one confusion ended two more were sure to take its place, wasn’t that how it went? Soon there was to be an entirely new batch of contentious issues to wrangle with. Life’s next riddles may well have stemmed from Cy’s discovery of the Pisces vaginales in a science book during a weekly biology lesson, given as always and as it was currently being, by Colin Willacy, headmaster of Morecambe Grammar School. The Pisces vaginales. It certainly had a funny ring to it. It had a funny shape to it also, there on the page, like a mangled anemone. Every Wednesday afternoon, prior to rugby, the class of boys was required to locate within their natural-history textbooks a fish native to the British Isles so that they could then march down to the bay’s shore, attempt to find the selected species and sketch the blighter into their notebooks, for Headmaster Willacy was quite the practitioner, favouring the methods of field research to classroom dissertation. He also possessed a boisterous, cane-happy left arm and a good aim for catapulting loose objects from the blackboard shelf at chattering individuals, but that was by the by. Star-slubbers, flukes, ink fish, barnacles, rays. The marine choices were many. Top marks were awarded for a successful find, which seemed a little random and circumstantial to Cy, though he made no mention of this theory. And if success was not to be had they were to draw whatever God may provide for them that day, as Mr Willacy forthrightly put it. The beach and God provided artistic and scientific bounty only when either felt moved to. They also provided a startling collection of oddities from time to time, items not grown within the nurturing womb of the ocean, but fashioned in the factories of smoky towns, delivered by trains, bought in haberdasheries and market places, then lost or discarded near water channels only to end up gallivanting right around the coast before arriving at Morecambe. Old shoes, pots and pans, gloves, bottles, pieces of motor cars, rubber devices with ambiguous functions. None of which carried any merit if it was drawn. Cy had a decent artistic hand. It was perhaps his finest talent, other than distance piddling. Since a relatively young age he had been able to copy an object from sight or memory, exact to its edges, true to its dimensions, faithful to its proportions, so he did not mind these excursions to the beach so very much and was largely keen, even when the bucketing rain smudged his charcoal and the strong wind flapped his notebook out of his hands.

  – Sir. I’ve found mine. The Pisces vaginales. That’s what I’ll hunt for today.

  – What’s that Parks?

  – Pisces vaginales, sir. Recorded at Morecambe Bay in the eighteen hundreds according to the book. So called because it resembles the genitalia of a woman. What’s a genitalia, sir? Sir? It says here that they contract tightly when touched and emit a liquor like that of a vagina in coy … in coy … in coitu …

  – My room, Parks! Immediately! The rest of you, on with your study. In silence. And if I hear a word …

  Cy was marched down to the fusty, book-strewn office of Colin Willacy where all castigations and lectures were issued, and where, it was widely rumoured, the headmaster took a wee drop of port daily around about lunchtime. If you licked your hand before Old Willacy had a chance to whip it with his cane it didn’t hurt so very much. It still hurt, but was less likely to redden up and blister and smart all day. However, it turned out there were misdemeanours that did not warrant a caning. Much to his surprise and relief Cy did not get birched for his fishy transgression, though the headmaster paced about the room a good while before making this clear, giving Cy ample time to prepare his appendages for the onslaught of stinging wood. The old man removed his mortarboard and ran a hand lengthwise through his thinning white hair, smoothing long wayward strands of it along the dome of his pate. He adjusted his chalk-stained gown about him.

  – Sit down, lad.

  Willacy had never called him lad before. He was a funny old codger, with foibles and eccentricities, like insisting Cy write script with his unnatural right hand not his natural left, and a recurrently weepy, pus-crusted eye when it came to the examination period, but this term of endearment was a new one to Cy. He wiped his palms on his breeches leg and sat.

  – Now, Cyril, I’m going to tell you this because I know you are without a father and it is a father’s duty to inform his offspring of such matters. I do not fault your mother for her neglect, indeed you’ve arrived at your inquisitiveness and speculation reasonably early it seems; then again you are a rather… tall fellow for your age, but, she shall not be blamed for ill preparation. However, we cannot have you running around declaring vulgarity to the world. That would not do. I shall try to be brief and I shall try to be frank.

  Being brief and frank were not two of Colin Willacy’s strong points. In all fairness, Cy was of the opinion, he did not get off lightly. It was quite possibly one of the worst punishments he had ever received, and after a dire, meandering, inclusive speech containing every loathsome aspect of a curriculum Cy had no inclination to participate in, he left the headmaster’s quarters, pale and visibly shaken, so his pals were at first convinced he had taken the birching of a lifetime. He probably would have preferred a caning. The incident did not prevent him from sharing his new-found knowledge about the school yard, since he was now in possession of some remarkably formal terminology, some remarkably extensive slang words, and some remarkably modern concepts – Mr Willacy was, after all, a thorough teacher. Within a week several new rhymes had been introduced to Morecambe’s school yards, though Cy sincerely maintained,

  whilst getting severely caned, that he was the author and distributor of none of them.

  – French letter, French letter, on the spot, there’s nothing better.

  – Fishy fanny, fanny fish, won’t you make a funny dish.

  So it was that another mysterious world creaked open its door for him.

  That July they were all treated to Gaynor Shearer’s obvious nipples, seen like broomhandles through her bathing suit as the chill wind off the Atlantic puckered her skin and the skin of all the other Bathing Beauties lined up on the promenade. They were in the midst of a four-day carnival in anticipation of armistice. Decorated horses and carriages had made their way through the streets in the parade, streaming with banners and leaving snowy trails of paper confetti in their wake. The beauties were officially daring to bare more than had ever been bared before. Had any of the Tory councillors been present at the pedestal that afternoon there may have been a swift dismantling of the exhibition, coats flung over scantily clad bodies – which would not have been entirely unwelcomed by the girls for the air was not a little nippy – and a general sense of spoiled fun. As it was the Bathing Beauties were not interrupted and they posed bravely on the pla
tform, hips at hourglass angles, and with lunatic grins on their powdered faces which were in actuality jaw-locked grimaces of discomfort at being exposed to the elements in such a savage fashion. Cy and every other come-of-age lad in town of such proclivity marvelled at the show, which was nice and naughty at once, and stirred a new ingredient up in them, like batter which would thereafter coat every desirable woman in their lives. He came home immediately after the show and disappeared into his room, eyes a little fazed, gait a little obstructed, so that Reeda assumed her son to be sick with excessive eating. The affair was destined to become one of Morecambe Council’s annual pet peeves and one of England’s best-loved, male-melded, seaside-resort traditions. And though Gaynor’s were not the only nipples on display that day, they certainly were the most pronounced and most persistent and she was crowned queen of the first ever Morecambe Bathing Beauties competition.

  On the third day of the carnival there was an ox roast on the prom. A beast from a nearby farm had been slaughtered and roasted on a massive medieval spit. It was set up on a pole resting between two trestles. The strong meaty fragrance drifted across the piers and through the streets, rumbling stomachs and suggesting to the whole of Morecambe that just around every corner was a gorgeous oven-warmed dinner. It was high season and the crowds thronged about the town, queuing for almost a mile to buy their ox sandwiches. Reeda Parks and her son had been helping the butcher carve and distribute the fare all day with the help of two other ladies. It was up to Cy to wrestle as best he could with the monstrous bottle of HP sauce, getting as little as possible on each sandwich – though it was a tad like riding a bicycle downhill without a handle-bar for steering or brakes for stopping – before one of the women whipped the bread together and handed it out to the next in line. Lomax, the butcher, a striped-aproned giant who seemed completely suitable for the task of slicing up such a carcass, was carving furiously and great portions of shredded brown flesh fell into the catch tray below, where Reeda and the others would retrieve it in accordance with the customers’ preferred tastes, lean or gristle or crackling. The butcher’s patter never tired, and never altered.

  – Lancashire or Yorkshire, sir? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire, madam? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire sir? Meat or fat?

  By the end of the afternoon if Cy never saw an ox sandwich again before departing the earth for more clement climes, or gruelling, furnace-like ones – he still had not ruled out that possibility – it would be entirely too soon.

  The boys were cutting down an effigy of Kaiser Bill from the flagpole hook in Pedder Street ready to burn him that evening before the dance when Cy first got a whiff of what was to become, later on, his profession of choice. Though at the time, had this been revealed to him in Alva’s crystal ball or via some other tarot table, it would have seemed pure madness, he would have scoffed and laughed and asked for his carny-thieved jiggery-pokeried pennies back. But that was all to come.

  Pedder Street was narrow and winding, one of the older parts of town, with moss on its walls, three churches nestled into its corners and a length of small, sunken-windowed, three-storeyed dwellings with sooty chimneys. It also contained some houses and businesses of ill-reputation, the Professor and Madame Johnson for example, spiritualists with the capability to reunite you with the souls of deceased loved ones and occasionally the departed infamous – communing, it seemed, was a bit like an open telephone line, you never quite knew who you might find on the other end – something Cy’s mother was vehemently against, and there were also houses where it was understood that many women lived at once and many gentlemen visited. From this end of town Cy could just about hear the clank and boom of rust-dead trawlers and German U-boats and submarines being dismantled at Ward’s Ship-Breakers and the strains of mendicant music being played by the blind fiddler at the old harbour. There was no political choice for stringing up the Kaiser in this particular street other than a convenient metal crooking from which to play out his demise and ridicule by hanging. Being still the tallest of the three, and therefore having the extra reach, Cy had climbed up the nearest building with a pair of garden shears to hack the villain loose. It was a question of balance and stretch, out-manoeuvring gravity, wielding the shears while slumped up the crumbling bricks, bandy-legged like a frog. Inelegantly, he held his arms out and with a quick snip removed the Kaiser’s bulging nose.

  – Take that you daft little Prussian.

  – No time for that now, Cy. It’s a shilling per hundred candles lit along the prom if we hurry.

  – All right. Hold your horses.

  There was a funny noise coming from the window on whose sill his foot was resting. The sash was cracked open a fraction and Cy could hear a buzzing like that generated inside a beehive when the workers are about to swarm. But it was less of a bumbling, husking animal effect and more the uniform drone of man-made apparatus, like a dentist’s drill. The sound was captivating. There were voices also, men’s voices, one of which was substantially louder and more commanding than the other. He leaned against the wall and tried to listen in to what was being said, while the boys below him waited, shuffling their feet.

  – Get on with it, would you, you great string bean?

  – We haven’t got all night, nosey-Parker.

  Such was the strain of his eavesdropping that Cy was having trouble balancing. He adjusted himself clumsily on the sill. It was at about that point in the proceedings when there was a telltale tinkle of glass pane being broken and the buzzing ceased and the cracked window suddenly slid up. A careless boot-toe, he had over-stepped the platform! A woollen-capped head arrived at the level of Cy’s foot. Two hands with colourfully stained fingers then came out on to the window ledge, one of them grasped Cy’s boot firmly, as if snaring a hare, and the man in the wool cap turned to look up. His eyes were a guttering glacial blue and unrelenting. They were as pale and transparent and fire-cold as a flame leaping out of a mineral-grained log in a grate. Eyes that you wouldn’t want to have to out-stare in an argument, thought Cy, that would make you feel like quarry in a dispute even before a word or curse was spoken, and he returned their gaze, spellbound. The vessels were large and round, containing bad emotion and amusement at once, indications of a personality that would travel the length and breadth of its own deficiencies as well as its redeeming traits, though the former seemed much more likely. And as the eyes observed him upwardly, there was something else to them too: not exactly shock, for here was a man probably not put into such conditions easily, Cy read of him, but soft-surprised cognition. Cy felt a strange perception also. As if some mutual knowledge of the other was casting itself about them. As if both their graves were simultaneously being trodden over. Cy remained perfectly still, partly in sympathetic curiosity, and partly because there did not seem to be another course of action which would not involve an untidy jump from a fair height with the open shearing blades, perhaps leaving one incarcerated leg behind on the sill, and uncomfortably stretching recently evolved and endeared parts of himself he wasn’t willing to stretch before he could wrestle free. Then there might be running and quite possibly a sound leathering from the pursuer if he was caught. After a few quiet, canny moments the eyes waned, the stained hand let go of his ankle, tapped his boot three times, and disappeared. The head retreated and the window sash banged shut, dislodging the remainder of the fractured glass pane. Jonty loud-whispered up to Cy, his hands cupped about his mouth.

  – Get down. Get Kaiser Bill down. Hurry up, we can’t stop here. He’s a left-footer and a gype.

  – Who’s a left-footer?

  – Shhhhh! Mr Riley.

  Above Cy another window suddenly opened and the figure of a man leaned out. He had a knife. Cy peered up as best he could without becoming dizzy and losing his footing. It was the same man as before, though he now seemed annoyed. There were keen gestures from his arms and irritation stacked along the veins in his neck. Moving swiftly he sawed through the roping of the Kaiser’s gallows and the doll slumped to the
ground. The potty Hohenzollern helmet rattled and spun on the street and rag intestines burst out through the grey uniform. Without a word the window shut, slicing down with a final shucking sound like that of a guillotine. The boys hastily departed Pedder Street.

  Afterwards, walking back along the pier and towing the Kaiser behind them in a barrow, Jonty told Cy and Morris that his dad said Mr Riley was an undesirable papist with a disgraceful occupation, who bought dead pigs’ heads from the butchers and took them home for ungodly purposes. Morris was not impressed at all.

  – So, my mam eats fish cheeks, she says that’s the best part of the fish to eat. And sometimes the eyeballs, raw, she just picks them out and pops them in her mouth like aniseed balls!

  – No, not to eat, you great pillock, to practise on, on the hide, with his needle. His mucky needle. He’s a scraper.

  – What does he scrape?

  – Don’t know exactly, father won’t tell me, but I know it isn’t nice.

  Apparently there was more pointy ministry in the town than just Cy’s mother’s. When he got home Cy told his mam about the Kaiser, about Mr Riley and the pigs, hoping she might be able to clarify the situation.

  – Well. I doubt very much whether Lomax would let go of his pigs’ heads to anyone, love, Catholic or not. Otherwise he’d not have any sausages to sell on Thursdays.