The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  – I’m a star! I’m a star in the sky!

  Electricity. What a mystery and a marvel! Like wasp stings in your bones. Like lightning harnessing you, whipping your whole body and riding you around the room. Theirs was an intrepid, fearless leap through the zapping doorway of the dazzling new electrical age. Mrs Preston, of course, got wise to the illicit use of her therapy equipment, which always seemed to be set too high when she came to use it again on a patient. And once or twice she shocked the curled hair straight on an unsuspecting soul, and had to produce some rapid explanation. Ever after she kept it in a suitcase under the bed in her room, which the boys were forbidden to enter on pain of a sound hiding. There were other intriguing oddities at Jonty’s parents’ house. The beauty was you never quite knew what you might find rummaging through the drawers and cupboards of the Surgery.

  – Look at this thing, Jont. Your mam’s name is Widdershin Winny. So’s your pissy sister’s.

  – So? Your mam’s a tuppenny street walker with a pole up her crack. And she smells like a dog’s backside.

  – Yes, well, his mam lives in Garlands ‘cause she’s a lunatic.

  It was all fun and gaming until Cy came across a small leather case tucked away at the back of one cabinet, which he recognized and which, when the catch was released, folded out to reveal several long, sharp metal instruments strapped against a velvet inlay, one curved at the very end with a tiny overlay designed for picking, plucking, tearing, like a seagull’s bill. The chill hands of every dead sailor in Morecambe trailed the length of Cyril Parks’s spine.

  – Jonty. What’s this for?

  – Mam’s crochet and knitting kit. She’s useless at it, mind, as best I can see – never makes us anything. She doesn’t send socks to the trenches either. Now then. Look at this fetching item.

  Untroubled by the discovery, Jonty had a string of dried vole skins about his head. Cy didn’t mention that the case was used by his mother in the Bayview some nights and he was fairly convinced that knitting was not quite such the brutal and exhausting hobby for the women that the sounds within the parlour suggested. Not knitting at all going on in fact, he suspected. Not where there was a locked-door brew of hocus-pocus and basins of blood and the mystery women called out clamorously as if they were night-ravens.

  On these nights of careful company and whispers and bird-like screeches, Cy gradually began to tolerate what was sinister and wonder about the night-wound ministry on the other side of the wall. The keyhole seemed to expand a fraction each time he stood holding breath outside the door, as if bidding him use it. Like his eye had once upon a time been summoned to the consumptives’ waste before Satan had shown him a gallery the other side of his squeamishness. And so one night Cy bent forward and peeked. And inside was a terrible story that couldn’t ever be told in friendly childish pictures made from red paint. It was the Devil’s joyless laboratory and in it his dabblings were mirthless, invasive, and they produced wet slop like pulled fish-gut when the gulls have flocked and pecked and ruined a catch. And Cy would never, never look again.

  There was no name for what he saw, and no possible explanation for him at that age had Reeda wanted to present him with a tricky revelation. If one lesson was to be learned by her son that night, it was that there were practices which went beyond a doctor’s formal world of medicine, and which ordinary folk might be better versed in. Because his mother undertook them and she was not a bookishly educated woman. There were rituals in blood, aspects of the human body which lived beyond official stewardship and out towards an altogether stranger keeping. So when the town authorities announced stiffer gaol sentences for local abortionists caught and prosecuted successfully, without having any connection to the term for such a thing he did not know to be afeared for the safety of his mother. Having not the vocabulary to discern relevance, there was no crime that she conformed to, she was no official malefactress. And if she was indeed a witch in all her raised-leg, sharp-hooked female rites with Mrs Preston, she was still his mother who also clothed and fed and loved him.

  If it was not entirely forgotten, the parlour incident was shoved sufficiently far back in Cy’s mind so as to trouble him less and less with the passing of time. Life could be cruel and it could be strange and it was certainly messy, that much he knew. But there were the pressing amusements of childhood to enjoy also. So it was that later that same year the boys came to be standing in a line on the concrete wall of the bathing pool, engaged in one of their favourite occupations. The piddling competition. Above the bay the sky was fast with cloud, drifting fat shadows over the town, stuck between coy sunshine and a squalling rain that had kept mostly out to sea all day so far. The boys had their backs to the town and had hold of their dickies in preparation. It was low tide and once again the flat plains of the beach were exposed, fishing boats were tipped on their sides and resting on the sand. Cy was about to burst. He had been saving himself all afternoon while drinking a good quantity of lemonade, the better to get some force with. The strategy proved to be not such a terribly good idea, however, as Morris Gibbs was late in arriving and by the time he made it to the pool Cy felt as if he had a hard football in his stomach. He wasn’t sure he could go even if he wanted, so tight the blockage felt, though in fine tradition he bluffed and told them all he was going to hit the fells on the other side of the bay, if not manage Scotland that day. Jonty Preston, who was not one for long-distance urination and preferred to referee, shouted the mark.

  – Ready? Aim. Fire!

  All five let go a welcome stream in five golden arcs across the sand and shingle. Ten feet away the beach spluttered and gurgled like a drain. It could have been his height that helped him out, he was tall for his age, or his urgent need to go, but after getting a delayed start Cy knew he was winning the competition by a good few inches.

  – And halt.

  Jonty had five sticks in his hand, ready to plant next to the wet patches. This had to be done quickly before the piddle was lost into the dry sand or evaporated. The rules of the game meant you were supposed to stop the flow for a few seconds so that the referee could score. Then if you still needed you could finish up at your convenience. Jonty was bending down with his twig-flags when Cy hit him warmly on the ankle. With all the lemonade and the unkindness to his bladder things had gotten away from him. He couldn’t have stopped that day for all the toffee in Ashworth’s sweet shop. The boys jumped off the wall holding their stomachs with laughter while Jonty raced after Cy, yelling that he’d bash his head in and make him eat his shit. A woman cycling by on the promenade called out and shook her finger at them.

  – You filthy little buggers! I know what you’re up to. Clear off. People have to swim there!

  – There’s worse than piddle down there. Show us your knickers then, missus.

  – Filthy little gutter-snipes!

  The Bare Pool, as the structure had unfortunately and controversially been christened, was a large square enclosure that had been the scene of seasonal bathing since its construction in the late nineteenth century. Tidal dangers meant that it could within minutes become the scene of perilous gnashing waves, the sea churning up pebbles and muck against the wall as if cranking the handle of an enormous meat grinder. Several bathers had been knocked unconscious against its sides during the facility’s operation and been hauled out of the pool by passers-by. Cuts and bruises were all too common; the pool was not a masterpiece of engineering. At high tide it filled with muddy water, jellyfish, seaweed and equally unwelcome human detritus and pollution – Morecambe, as a thriving though modest resort, had, in truth, neither the capacity nor the economy to deal with the excessive summer waste and the masses were frequently reacquainted with their bodily expulsions as they swam or strolled along the beach. There were of course moral implications to swimming in the Bare Pool. Mixed bathing was a heavily disputed occurrence, rigorously condemned by the conservative council since men and women were first seen to be splashing and barking with laughter like rowdy sea lions
in the pool’s arena, swallowing great gobfuls of salty water and groping at each other. It was simply not English to have men and women in states of undress carousing in the water and examining each other’s parts, they maintained; this was not the colonies, after all. Young gentlemen could clearly be seen to be aroused by the proceedings. Clubs were formed to regulate decency, with bathing huts and vans where old ladies in high collared dresses inspected the attire of lady swimmers to ensure that it was properly lined and old men tested the strength of hemming around the suits of gentlemen with the perfunctory tug of a finger. Fines could be levied for wandering inside the stipulated ten-foot distance to be kept between the partially clothed sexes. The names of offenders were, of course, to be published in the Visitor.

  Reeda Parks snorted loudly when she read about this development in the paper.

  – What will those tiresome old masons ban next, I wonder? Holding hands in the Alhambra picture house? The human body is god-given and sacred, Cyril, nothing of it is vulgar, don’t ever be ashamed of it.

  She lived by this mandate and was not ashamed to have him see her as she dressed, see her well-worn, menially utilized, hard-handled body as she bathed, with its broken stomach, the gathered flesh, the discolouration at its crevices. Nor did she make unkind comment about her fellow citizens, the weighty, the narrow, the bent or twisted, as some people did. He never asked her if that philosophy meant you could give up your body to those nocturnal procedures, including hers, which seemed withdrawn and mysterious and by nature turbid, like the rips and towing undercurrents of the water in the bay you always knew were there, writhing, even under a calm green-grey surface. Instinct told him it was likely wiser that he not expose his knowledge of his mother’s pointy midnight craft and so he never did.

  Regardless of new codes of conduct, the Bare Pool was seldom empty of suited bathers and there was no finer platform anywhere on the beach from which to hold the weekly piddling competitions.

  In the days of Cyril Parks’s childhood, the town was the scene of summer straw hats, Sunday-best attire and flagpoles clanking in the breeze, of bowling and boating competitions at Happy Mount Park and shows in the pavilions. There was punting, affordable dining and false recuperation for the blighted. Cy’s first memories were of laughter and crowds, the wind blowing through the fabric of the place so that everything moveable flapped, or rippled, or sashayed. Morecambe Bay in season housed the Yorkshire and Scottish masses, and the Bayview took its fair share, the former coming from May to August, the latter crossing the border in spring and September, and so many visited from Bolton and Bradford that Reeda jokingly referred to their home as Bradford-by-the-Sea. The town roomed its visitors in cheap hotels, provided them with entertainment and reasonably priced food and drink. Reeda would tell her small son that he was lucky, where he lived there was a never-ending holiday, rich with rewards for those who most deserved them. It seemed everywhere Cy went in summer there were seaside treats, seafood served along the pier, sugar rock, dripping ice-cream cones, quarter-sliced ham sandwiches, tea on the beach and a variety of sticky buns. The main attractions were the sea, the magnificent view over the bay to Grange and the air itself, which was infused with something vital, and Cyril Parks loved all three. Steamboats and paddlers jostled in the bay’s current alongside fishing boats, the skippers of the vessels arguing loudly about foreshore rights and landing stages, so the noise of the place went right out to sea and then came back, drifting in through the Bayview’s open windows. It was a place alive to his senses. Come July the smell along the promenade was sweet and salty with the warm suggestion of sewage at the back of it, and sometimes, in protest to unfair rental brackets which left the fishermen the worse off, catches were sorted in public shelters and gazebos, most often the ones located near to councillors’ residences, leaving piles of stinking fish heads and guts and shells for the pleasure of the public, and the town was swamped by an odour of rotting ocean fare. The Bayview’s residents, unwilling to do without their therapeutic air, rank or otherwise, would on these days take nosegays to their faces and handkerchiefs liberally sprinkled with lavender water provided by the pragmatic Reeda Parks, as they shuffled slowly along the seawalk. That forty to fifty tons of cockles alone, plus baskets full of whiting, cod and mussels came down gangplanks and up in carts every single day made for a serious argument with mighty leverage, Cy thought. And sure enough it was a trump card for the fishermen to play and rents always adjusted themselves accordingly.

  The music halls were always full. If Morecambe was the poor man’s Blackpool then poor men danced as well as rich. What little money there was in the hands of northerners come summer often ended up in Morecambe’s seafront pavilions, the Taj Mahal, the Crystal Palace, the Alhambra, each gave as many as three concerts a day in season. Often the Bayview’s guests would insist that Reeda and Cyril accompany them, purchasing tickets as thanks for another lovely week’s stay. Inside the pavilions there were orchestras with foreign, exotic sounding names, magicians and minstrels, dandies or local comedians, singing competitions. Nothing was too silly or cheerful or unpopular for the people of the north at leisure who otherwise spent nigh on fourteen hours a day at work for most weeks of the year. Cy watched the shows with interest, and he watched the watching crowds – some people laughed before a joke was even finished being told and he knew they had been to the show before, maybe several times, but their laughter never seemed forced and the gags never got old. It was as if the punch-line was really the joyful state of not-for-blessed-once having to lift a shovel or swipe a loom or smelt or saw or sew.

  When the tide went out the crowds came in. Sandy, stony mud was eclipsed by a covering of bright bathing towels, fluttering tents and swaying sunshades. From his window in the hotel it seemed to Cy a delightful, wonderful thing. A jester’s costume draped all across the beach. Hundreds of pale and lumpy legs appeared from under clothing. Skin pinked and peeled, lotions were applied too late to sore knees and rosy shoulders. Flowery-capped heads bobbed up and down in the water and feet splashed in the waves. Boys a little older than Cy in shorts and paper hats moved in and out of the heliolatrous northern masses and the striped red tents selling winkles and jellied eels and warm orange-syrup, swapping information as to where the breasts were biggest, where the legs were shapeliest, and where the bathing suits were lowest. Even the rain, reliable and persistent when it decided to appear, could not dampen the celebratory spirit of the promenade, people ran laughing and shrieking either into the sea where wetness would not matter, or into the cafés and public houses of the town, leaving sand prints on the seats and tablecloths when they departed, and the evening’s merry entertainment simply got started early. There was no silver service, no operatic gowns, there were no foreign spoils, silks brought back for daughters, fine wine for sons, nor artistic decorated objects purchased for a collection. A postcard home, a box of sugar-rock or slab of toffee, a fond memory or two of the easy banter that arose from the collective solidarity of the poor but jovial masses and from the unity of those around you who were in the same boat, so you were all in it together, was souvenir enough for Morecambe’s crowds. It was a place where England’s working weary came to laugh and sing and cast away their cares, if only for a brief and temporary spell.

  When he was very young, almost too young to remember, Cy would be taken up and down the promenade mid-season with his mother and a group of younger women, who came to stay at the Bayview for a day or two from the city. The Ladies of Leeds, his mam called them. They came for three years in succession, each year for a day or so longer. Reeda looked forward to their visit enormously, she would make extra potted shrimp and even buy a better sherry for the occasion. Before the ladies arrived she got a funny look in her eye like a dog about to snatch a bone from the butcher’s counter. They were kind, well-dressed women who would not let Reeda wait on them before first insisting that she did not, they would squabble over who would wash the dishes after supper and would compliment each other on what perfume wa
s being worn or which stockings best flattered an ankle or the choice of book presently being read. There was a great sense that these ladies liked each other very well, they seemed close, perhaps related to his mother, though he knew of only one living blood-relation, his Aunt Doris in Yorkshire. The ladies never scolded him, but they did watch him closely, while he helped his mother to cupboard the crockery, as if they expected him to fumble at any moment and drop her china dishes. They gave him questioning looks, often without issuing any actual questions.

  In the mornings, breakfast would be hurried and shoelaces tied quickly. The ladies were flushed in their cheeks and gave each other good-luck kisses.

  – Best of luck, duckie.

  – Yes, and best of luck to you.

  – Best of luck to all of us, I say!

  Then they marched out of the hotel with Reeda and Cyril in tow, their skirts snapping like sails in the wind as they strode, heading for the busy promenade. It was unclear to Cy what occurred during these outings, or their purpose, but the ladies all seemed very determined, taking turns to address the crowd and passing round a brass plate which seldom came back bearing much other than a piece of chewed-up fudge which would stick to the plate lip like glue, or shirt buttons or extinguished cigarettes. Though uncertain what the plate was supposed to collect he supposed it was not beachgoers’ rubbish as the ladies would click their tongues in annoyance at their meagre alms. Votes seemed to be what his mother’s friends wanted, and as he’d never seen a vote he did not know how to recognize one on the brass plate if it happened to be forthcoming. Cy spent these mornings holding his mother’s hand and kicking the back of one foot with the other in boredom, looking up at her frowning face.