The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  He was destroyed only in so far as all young men who lose their mothers are but will recover. Before she left for the hospital he wouldn’t let her see his face, keeping it pressed into the crook of his elbow on the table for an hour. As if to take it out and let his eyes notice her new paleness and tiredness and the determination of her belief in her mortem-lot would be to admit her fate himself and say he gave it blessing, which he did not, he did not.

  – They’ve got to cut the fly-walk off me, luvvie; if it doesn’t go the whole loaf will turn bad.

  Finding somewhere within her another of her knell-captured allegories, another of her boiled-down for stock metaphors. It was September’s end. A full blustery September with water along its edges at night and a wet blue colour to its days. The town and bay were rushing along under a painter’s oil-stroked sky as they always did in autumn. The guests were all but gone, Reeda had finished another summer season, and to her credit everything was in order. She adjusted her books, summarized them, did not make a budget for the winter. It had been a fair summer, there was money enough to set Cyril up in a way that meant he could soon provide for himself. The bank was informed of the discontinuance of mortgage. Hotel furniture was sold off. There were no stacks of sheets brought out for mending, nor was a list of winter repairs for the hotel made. She went in for her already failed surgery, spent an agonizing week in hospital during which Cy visited every day, and she came home draining fluids through piping in her chest and unable to lift her right arm. She let her son rally round her, knowing he needed to feel useful. Then she summoned Eliot Riley, who took one look at her lying drained and smeary as an empty bottle of cream against the pillow and fell about weeping.

  – Take your hat off, Eliot, and close the door. And I truly hope you’ve sobered.

  – Of course I’m sober, woman! What do you take me for?

  Cy was not in the room but he could half hear Riley in his distress, hear the serration at the pauses of his brittle, cuttlefish sentences and the use of his mother’s name over and over: Reeda, Reeda. For two people who saw each other infrequently as they did, their meetings were actuated, sentimental affairs. So that again Cy wondered if there was not some old abandoned, rusted chassis to their relationship, down under all the growth of years it might lie there still, hidden, even from them, but obstruction enough for them to clang their feet on when they came together. Perhaps in a time before his father, though Cy felt sure his mam would have told him back when he first asked to be Riley’s lad if there was a personal history which meant the employment proposal was improper. Towards the end of the discussion it was Reeda who did the talking and Riley listened. Her tone was matter of fact, occasionally she broke off, for her pain came intermittently, like the occasional taller waves in the bay that threw boats upwards and off their charted course. And he could make out one word that she repeated. If, if, if, so he knew there was choice somewhere in the matter.

  As he left the Bayview, Riley walked past Cy without a word of consolation. Without a word at all. As if his own grief invested in the loss of Cy’s mother prevented him from such expressions and inclusions lest he break down again. His demeanour was that of an emoting ham, the theatrical pathos of a fan leaving a tragic opera. Like he was wrapped up in the misery and felt it more than even Cy, the son, who was dwarfed and discredited by such enthusiastic mourning. The minted eyes had swathes of red and grey about them. His big lips quavered. He had sympathy only for himself. Not for the first time Cy wanted to yell out or run his hand along the table crashing through objects and creating infernal noise, to assure Riley he was not invisible, not insignificant, actually. Riley was a sentimental, discriminate-hearted, impossibly rude and selfish man.

  Reeda had written to her sister Doris, informing her of the situation. She arrived a week later, smelling of old lace and apprehension, and Cy was sent to meet her at the station. Doris scuttled about in the Bayview kitchen, pasting food down into something manageable for his mother, and she read her articles from the Visitor, about the bus which had crashed through the prom rail to the shore killing three passengers, about which of the town’s prostitutes had been arrested, as if Morecambe was a venue somewhere across the country, not a place just outside the window. Reeda’s hair thinned to the point where she kept a headscarf on her at all times like a clay-baked caul. Her limbs and organs began to fail her, one day she simply could not get out of bed, and Cy was once again required to empty basins of waste – her bile ducts sent into frenzy, her lungs like blighted branches, her bowels leaking. There was more and more blood in her waters, as the cancer moved further in. And there was a lot of pain, times when his mother cinched in on the bed and held her breath for long minutes, before releasing it and panting dryly like a heat-exhausted dog. Her grey gunmetal eyes went out to some place stranded between the conscious oracle of her ill fortune and a bed-of-nails of sleep. The doctor called by with stronger medication for her to take, and when she refused it, saying she would not waste her last hours and days with red dreams or a mouth too cottony to speak, her sister ground down the tablets and mixed it with her broth, asking Cy for forgiveness as she did so. As if he now held the map to Reeda’s mind, and might direct them in their search for a rational, befitting, governed end. As if his complicity might unkill her thinking, suffering death.

  She wanted her son. When everyone else in the room became a stranger, she wanted him. To sit with her if he would, and remember her with a measure of sweet and a measure of savoury when it was over, like all well-prepared dishes both parts together made the other complementary and better. Her words quick now as if she wanted them expelled, as if they were her deadlined duty and not to be relished or appraised as a glass-blown object passed gently between hands and turned over.

  – One without the other we are all made poorer. Remember that of all of us, Cyril. Remember it of Mr Riley. He is what he is and he’s more a mirror than any man you’ll meet. We did our bit, didn’t we, love? We did our bit here.

  He did not know which pieces of life she was speaking about. He didn’t know but he took her hand as she had once taken his to lead him to the blood-lit window, and he wished for a white horse on the shore to see her safely through the mist. Then, after four months of struggling, her death grew and hatched one night from the repeating, withering body and she was gone. Reeda Parks, in all her graceless, earthed and ordinary wisdom, was gone.

  The Ladies of Leeds arrived the day of the funeral and laid flowers on Reeda’s grave, dressed in long, out-of-fashion skirts as if for a royal funeral. Cy had not seen them since his youth and did not know his mother was still in correspondence with them. But he remembered their complementary, stirred-up faces as they filed into the Bayview for her wake, and washed the dishes and made Doris feel uncomfortable. That night they each lit candles on the promenade and joined hands. They were tearless, resolute. There was something martial to their movements, a quality of drilled and synchronous ceremony beneath their ruffles, like the softest military salute. It was the second of March, in 1923, and one of the ladies came to Cy and passed him a candle as he stood by the Bayview door watching the gunner’s flames pinking up the ladies’ hands. This day, eleven years ago, she said, London rattled and shook with the sound of rocks and sticks breaking Parliament’s windows, and though she wasn’t there, your mother’s heart was one of those rocks, like the rocks that will one day smash all the prejudices of her country.

  She had said he would have to make a choice – go with his Aunt Doris to Yorkshire, if he wanted, or stay with Mr Riley, who would take him in as boarder and apprentice, if he wanted. If, if, if. And there again was that forking road unfolding and dividing, and him knowing there was a route of moderate, well-put-together living, or a way of life bitter-sacrificed and bitter-gained, of damning and enlightening direction. The path of shallow passing, or the path that cut right through him – the path of Riley’s influence and Riley’s needle inserted like a catheter into the deepest soul chamber of him, into the worst and
best places of him, which would never be removed, or if it was scar-tissue would for ever keep the channel open.

  So when Cy got as far as the brown moors of Yorkshire on the train, and heard the reeding wind again across the rock formations, he kissed his Aunt Doris goodbye and thanked her, then got off at the very next station and bought a one-way ticket back to Morecambe Bay.

  – Salvaging Renaissance –

  – Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti, who became known to the world and its dog as Michelangelo, was born in 1475 and died in 1564. That made him eighty-nine years old. Not a bad age for a bugger back then. Now, there wasn’t a lot the man couldn’t do, which was quite common for that period. Not like today, where men just sit around with their cocks in their hands waiting for a job to come along, and only being skilled enough to mortar brick or dig out coal or count up taxes, one at a time. Depression or not, lad, it was harder back then, so I’ve more respect for what got done. No, this was a different time. When men could set to on any task and get it done. So Michelangelo was a painter, an architect, a sculptor and a poet. All things relevant to our trade. Some say Leonardo was the tip-top-tradey of that period, and fair play, he wasn’t a village idiot, but the truth is Michelangelo had a calling and was his own boss in a way none of the rest were, even while he took work for bread and butter. That’s why his painting got all long and stretchy, and not everybody’s cup of tea. He had something go through him towards the end. Let me tell you, any man that sees it in himself to paint the hand of God is something a bit special. Now the thing to remember about Michelangelo is this; he’d a bugger of a time getting blue paint. Just like us. It was expensive back then, see, hard to manage, and it was only used for very special things, like our Holy Mother’s robes. If there’s one thing we could do to live up to Michelangelo, it’s crack this bastard riddle with blue ink. Speaking of tea, what say you pop upstairs and put the kettle on, lad?

  There were five colours in the tattooing pallet, and a limited archive of symbols to cover the spectrum of life and death. Five colours to capture all the joys and sorrows of the world and hold them down against a piece of body. Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world right then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.

  The rooms above Eleven Pedder Street were cold and small, claustrophobic, like a cell or priest’s hole. Riley was not one for warmth but he was neat and he was tidy, which came as a surprise to Cy when he entered the domain. He had never been upstairs in all the time he had been warden to Riley and carted the drunk man home, preferring to leave him in the parlour downstairs or at the front door. Things were put away, stacked, or folded; washed at the sink the cups were shining in the bleached light of the kitchen as they dried, and there was a row of eggs on a dresser shelf as concise and uniform as a squadron. Or perhaps Riley was just deficient in acquiring domestic items, for the place was basic in appearance: chairs, table, plates, sink, bottles, food in stages of decay. And on the mantelpiece of the ever-empty fireplace were the skulls of several birds, hook-beaked, cranially fissured, delicate and predatory. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood on the very corner of the mantle as if any moment she might topple off, as if she were being tested in her balance or her own faith. Her hands were folded together in prayer, her head was bent and it seemed she was in fact looking over the precipice to the floor below. There were one or two other objects lying about, nothing distinguished, old art history books with splitting spines. The place itself was like a still-life painting. In Cy’s room, the room that Riley had prepared for him, was a mattress on the floor and four empty wooden vegetable crates to hold his possessions and clothing. There was a small window, from which the metal hook that had hung Kaiser Bill could be reached. A paint-peeling ceiling. Separating floorboards. It was monastic, it was bare and minimal, and he could not help but feel that he had stepped back in time to some artistic, suffering vault, which was appropriate to his new situation. There was an awful feel to the place – like it had been, for quite some time, waiting for him.

  It became apparent that Cy had finished with school. He was sixteen, and Headmaster Willacy was no match for the law and logistics of Eliot Riley, for all his insistence that the boy had brains and should be allowed to continue. It became apparent that he was now a full-time employee and that in that one about turn half way to Yorkshire he had sold his soul to Riley. For better, for worse. He was not heckled for being late to work, for walking back to Eleven Pedder Street with his suitcase in hand a week after he was due. Riley had expected him to come after they boarded up the Bayview, just as Aunt Doris had expected him to come with her after they lowered the body of his mother into the ground, but there were no repercussions for his hiatus. He had given assurance to neither guardian of his plans, in truth he had not really spoken to anyone such was his grief. Riley simply opened the door and stepped aside and let him enter, and on his first day back in the shop, he proceeded with the first of his customized Lives of the Great Masters lectures. It was long overdue after his promise to Reeda, and came now as if in compensation for her death, and it had more than a note or two of personal fabrication and fiction to it. Though this one slackening of the bit in his mouth and the bridle would be the last courtesy Riley ever paid Cy. Ever after, he woke him with his morning pissing and his coughing. He woke him with his nocturnal smashing and his cussing, the occasional sound of his voice joined with another, its pitch become more female, as he grunted and groaned. He berated him for every minor fault and fumble at work. He made him skivvy to his every whim and fancy. He was unfair and cruel and tasteless with his comments. And he began to infect Cy with his maelstrom temperament. Cy found his shouting voice and the terrifying beauty of fists against a surface when the gates of control and reason are unhinged and the hooves of thick-packed, red-eyed beasts come thundering out. He had to concentrate, harder than he ever had in school, to tease out splinters of fulfilment and sanity and peace from the arrangement. And all the while he missed Reeda, missed her unmitigated kindness and her simple reasoning, the salve of benevolence with which she soothed his raw troubles and loosened the dirt of life that might if left untreated infect his spirit. And God, wasn’t life just lonely without her!

  It was awful not to be in the Bayview for the first few summer seasons, with the sick but happy crowds. It was like being shown an amputated leg that had once held up his torso. At times he found himself automatically walking in the hotel’s direction, and he’d have to stop and remember his mother’s death and turn back on the way he had come. It was strange to pass by the graveyard and think of his mother, put away there, like her extra linens in the autumn in a dark cupboard. Betrayed by the soft air, which didn’t save her. There had been something certain about turn-over and survival at the Bayview Hotel, whether it was his mother’s financial acumen or her loyal guests or her ability to pin the bottom of the world up with her ethics and her tolerance and her mulish, working-woman’s patience, he did not know. Tattooing, as he came to understand it, was an altogether more precarious vocation and style of living. There could be no advertisements in the Visitor. There may have been more people around in the summer but there were no set seasons when it came to the compulsions and treasons and decisions of the human brain to change its packaging, to disguise its appearance or release its imprisoned identity. A man or woman had to refer to the discrete almanac of the mind to find those changeling cycles and tides and magnitudes, and arrive at the needle’s end of his or her own accord. Impulsively, erratically, naturally. So, now and again, other supplemental jobs had to be found. For Cy in hotel kitchens, dismantling fish heads and filleting spines from smoked bodies at the Trawlers’ Cooperative building with Morris, even sweeping the a
isles of the theatre in the Alhambra on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Riley had his own methods for breaking even, some of which were legal, many of which were not. The least reliable source of income was his gambling, on horses, on hounds, and even on cockfights held in farms around the region. The most dangerous were his excursions with Paddy Broadbent to the city of Liverpool for unspecified purposes, which resulted in frequent scars and injuries though tired jubilation observed upon their return.