The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  The conversation became momentarily cloudy again.

  – So there’s no man?

  – No man?

  – In your apartment? With you? With a chest complaint, a cold? An old man, perhaps your father?

  – An old man with a cold, no I don’t think so. Just Maximus, but he has no cold. He had a cough last month. I gave him camphor oil in his hay, it seemed to work just fine. He’s better now, aren’t you, Maximus?

  There was a matter-of-fact tone to her voice, an austerity, and yet it also had a quality of bemusement, not exactly sham presentation, but an internal humour, as if either option were available as evidence for the listener and would be upheld in a court of law. And there was the trace of an accent, at least her voice morphed convincingly through several accents, Slavic, French, Hungarian, more like a child raised by multilingual parents than a spoiled girl in a playhouse dressing-room trying on different personalities along with her costumes. And yet, right at the very back of the voice, like indistinguishable static noise on the radio, there was a note of preservation, it was an accent that had been held on to deliberately when it could have been discarded – perhaps kept alive because of her chosen proximity to first-generation immigrants, perhaps through sentimentality or pride. She was watching him now‚ and occasionally glancing at the horse by the fountain. Her brows were dark but her face was pale and vividly sloped, with prominent, Tartar cheekbones. Cy could think of nothing else worthwhile to say. Following the recent disclosure, he felt small talk would be a meagre offering. This woman made him want to be very sure of himself, to stretch his brain an inch more and grasp what was going. And in that sense she was magnetic, pulling on thought and concentration, bringing him to her without moving herself.

  He accompanied her home. Or perhaps he was himself accompanied, he didn’t rightly know that night. Maximus was immaculately trained, it seemed; he followed Grace with the click of her tongue, passing patches of grass that a less well-behaved animal would have dropped its head into and locked its neck. It appeared there was no need for a rein or a bit. Their conversation seemed to Cy to be serious and effortful and somehow a failure, though the next morning he could remember nothing of it past her name, the bold whimsy of her keeping a horse in her apartment, and the image of her turning somersaults on the animal’s back in the Luna circus. He remembered wanting to ask her if the horse was housebroken and not finding the courage, thinking it a frivolous thing. At the door of their building she removed her coat from her arm and under it were four hemp potato sacks and four lengths of string. She clicked her tongue again and Maximus lifted up his rear hind leg. Grace put it between her legs and between the pleats of her skirt. She fitted a sack over the thick unshod hoof and tied it on. This was repeated for the remaining three hooves – the beast was utterly compliant and on the last hoof Grace took out a blue-handled pocket-knife from her skirt, unhinged a tool and scraped a stone and some debris out of the depression. It was obviously a well-practised manoeuvre, both parties knew it by heart. She opened the door, took a look inside, gestured, and both Cy and the horse entered the old marble foyer. To his amazement the horse moved almost silently down the corridor, stepping high as if over small streams or boulders with each forward motion. Grace turned a key in the lock of her door and the horse ducked its long head as it went inside, into the darkness, like a pit pony entering a mine. She turned to Cy and before he forgot all about the details, he was aware of a small line at the top of her nose where her brow met in an expression of fortification and the humour lines surrounding her eyes. In the dim hallway her irises were so dark they seemed pupil-less, deep, vertigo inducing. There was a languid, sombre curve to her bottom lip. He could find a loveliness to her face as he looked at her that was underlaid with something aged and earnest. She was compelling in a way, and he wondered if he should perhaps lean in and kiss her, he was drunk enough to warrant it. He was about to when she made a sound under her breath, a murmur of enjoyment which also contained marginal dissatisfaction, as if she was tasting a spoonful of soup and trying to decide which ingredient to add next. Then she spoke.

  – Yeah, anyway. I’m going to come and find you soon, Electric Michelangelo. I need your help with something. I think the time is right for a change.

  She offered him a smile, and then she closed the door. He waited politely for a moment and then turned and went up to his apartment, walked to the window with a chair and sat to watch the brick wall opposite. Sunrise was a few hours away, it was deathly dark, and if Grace was still up and about with the lights on he might see her doppelgänger puppet again, acting out a simplified shadow edition of what she was doing. After a while he felt too tired to focus his eyes. Dually, he was certain that somewhere below him in the building was a woman who would never yawn and drowse, she would either be fully awake and wary of all her surroundings, or unconscious. He opened his window and blew a kiss to the empty brick wall. Then he lay down on his bed and slept off the incident of meeting Grace like it was balanced on the back of a black stallion galloping away from him or balanced on a temporary filament of night.

  The next morning the apartment was cold from the open window and the rain which the daylight had brought with it. Before waking he had dreamt a succession of rapid, gritty dreams, his mind slipping and jamming from the leak of hard alcohol into his brain, flickering through meaningless images in photo-frenzy, stuttering like the heavy stroboscope projectors in the Tunnel of Terror at Coney. With each misfiring shutter came another epileptic reel of pictures, of him running and ducking to avoid being skewered and torn apart by a giant crochet pick, him trapped in a sunken submarine at the bottom of an underwater canyon, its blue emergency lamp pulsing. At one point he woke only to find he had been telegraphed to another dream where his room was on board a train rattling along the edge of a mountain pass, Carpathian steep, with the tracks about to tip over, and he panicked to think he may never be restored to truthful existence. Finally it was the sound of the rain that woke him, like the long dark whispering hair of a woman being pulled across his ear. Soothingly.

  Cy lit a cigarette in bed, pulled up the covers and tried to rub away his sore head. He thought of Grace. The sharpness and discordance of her had faded – the lawyerly intonation, the knife, the snappy dialogue – leaving an unformed image that could be fashioned into a smooth idea of a woman he might like to know and possibly touch. She was beautiful through the hair and mouth and eyes, he remembered. With the vague look of Salome about her – he had seen the dancer in a painting in one of Riley’s old art books, pale and dark and intent, John’s severed head behind her on a tray – perhaps if Grace held herself that way or let down her hair? She was undoubtedly clever and wilful, which was, if he was honest about it, nothing short of arousing to him, and he just plain admired the fact that she managed to house a horse in her room. The idea itself was baffling. That she got away with the covert dressage was brilliant. He had a sense that he liked her, very much, and not so far away from that prospect was the notion that he could love her, perhaps. He shivered, huddled down further in his bed, listening to the brickish drip of water outside the window. He could love her. Couldn’t he? There was the potential. There was the rub. It was unclear if this was truly a resolution in his mind or simply an acknowledgement of a lesser kind. Perhaps, he thought, it is only ever a combination of the two – as if holding open the door for an ancient creature taught to enter with bound feet. It felt like another strangely exotic moment in his life, the pairing of Grace and love, not dissimilar to the day he had agreed to be Riley’s lad, within half an hour or less of seeing Riley at work, of seeing the man’s own magnificent coloured body. Maybe it was even as ludicrous as that first sighting of Eva Brennan, with her English-garden eyes and her freckled arms, when his heart came undone. That feeling of being befallen, of something preordained and unavoidable and uncontrollable at work, like the diaphanous flutter of Fate’s lungs, the sluicing of its digestive system, its marrowy brewing of new blood.

&nb
sp; He lay in bed for a while with a headache from the previous night’s drink and a dry throat, looking at his ceiling and thinking back over the years of encountering women. He thought of the way he had set an affair in motion between Jonty and Eva, whom he had loved when he was thirteen years old. And after introducing them he had watched them first kiss on the pebbled mucky beach of Morecambe Bay as the tide was going out, feeling something heavy collapse down through him to the ground. He could remember that sensation as clear and awful as if it had happened only yesterday. Eva had left him romantically vulnerable, he liked to think, and that’s why he had avoided love ever since, even if he had been with a few women in the parlour of Pedder Street after his needle had finished on them, their breathing fast together, their bodies aching and after a point coordinating. But it had been so long ago, that original offence, that the face of the girl he held responsible was gone, and only the feeling of damage remained. Now he was the true keeper of the experience. He had wanted to preserve it as Riley had kept his tattoos fresh and bright with Nivea lotion, because it seemed a meaningful thing to do. And in polishing it up like a brass fixture he had worn it down to its hub, until it was nothing. Eva could no longer be conjured up to explain his aversion and trepidation in matters of the heart. She would not suffice as an icon of pain and disappointment, her ghost, her sign could no longer be used convincingly to hold him back.

  Since her, his mother had passed away, and though it had not been his choice to love Reeda and there had been no catastrophic disqualification of her love for her son, it was a wrenching emotional blow to lose her in the end. From that he had healed. It had been a less personal loss of love. Riley had scarred him up far worse with his fanatical abuse, he had opened channels in Cy that meant if he wasn’t careful to keep them covered or pursed closed, the unstemmed passage of fury and scorn might occur, the overspill of reservoirs on the darker side of him. Riley had made him want to hate and fight, he had shaded Cy in. For a full decade the big man had been an excuse for sabotaging potential relations – he could not court with Riley as a manipulative joker in the deck, a scathing father who would tell a girl about her cunt over a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Dwelling on it he knew there was now an absence of a male plan-foiler or a symbol of female loss to propel towards an affair in order to avoid it or break it. There was nobody but he, alone, to ruin love. And now there was Grace, Grace with her dark eyes and her qualities and her horse.

  He rose from bed and poured a glass of water and drank it. Then he drank another and refilled his glass. He felt hollow in his torso. Spacious. And nervous to be thinking about that which he was thinking. There was a strong presence in the room and he turned round suddenly to look behind him as if having caught sight of another being, but nothing was there, just a rumpled bed. Then he had the definite sensation of something moving on the periphery, just out of sight, waiting at the edge of him, restlessly, treading between memories, between his ribs and lungs, and nudging softly at the vacant chamber, knocking very timidly. Wasn’t it always a question of opening doors? His mother and Mrs Preston behind the sororal, screeching parlour door? Eliot Riley on the other side of number eleven Pedder Street? The blue cabin door at the top of the gangplank walkway up to the Adriatic? A key in the lock of a door in America that turned the wrong way? His heart was empty now and something of a mystery. And so one rainy spring morning at the start of a new decade he lifted the latch, opened it, and let Grace in.

  After that she seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere convenient that he could talk to her or put in his eyes an expression that would inform her of what was on his mind. He saw her riding down the boardwalk on Maximus, seated high above the throngs of people, all the strolling couples and the sugar-smeared, skipping children, the men in straw summer hats with canes and the ladies perspiring against mink in the rolling wicker chairs pushed by young black men. She was in costume, with a suit of sequin and a comb of purple feathers in her hair. She was standing up on the horse’s rump bare footed, rising and falling steadily as he moved, dropping circus flyers to the pedestrians below. He tried to attract her attention but the crowd was too thick and noisy. Later that day he closed the booth for an hour and went to watch her perform in the circus. He had not been since witnessing the demise of Lulu, had sworn he would never return, but it seemed to be a mitigating motive. To loud trombone music and cymbal clashes the horse cantered briskly into the tent then round the ring with his tail held out while Grace swapped her feet with her hands on his back. She was strong, lithe, well constructed. But the face under the make-up seemed not to be hers.

  Mornings and evenings he would pause outside her doorway, wondering if he should knock and ask her a question, something pithy and impressive, or ask her to join him for a drink. She seemed seldom to be home and when she was he often heard other voices in her rooms and shyness prevented him from announcing himself. And always, night after night, he would watch from his window for the silhouette theatre of her life to appear on the wall, her shape cut out by light like a paper chalked shape from a seamstress’s pattern. As if even the cast outline of her was enough encouragement for his affection to grow.

  At Varga he watched her play in two Wednesday chess tournaments. Ordinarily he would not have bothered to observe them, he was not terribly fond of the game, and he knew only its most basic arrangements and rules. He preferred to sit at the bar counter and pass idle conversation with friends and new acquaintances, or simply soak up the atmosphere, sitting quietly after having barked and intimidated and prattled on at customers all day long. But now he stood against the doorjamb and twice watched her make it to the final round, and lose. She was apathetic towards those contestants that she beat, barely offering a handshake lest it distract her from her prevailing concentration, and almost spiteful in her mannerisms of exasperation when they stalled on the last few moves, crossing her arms, pinching the bridge of her nose, knocking on the table top. She was a player of tempo. She kept her own pace and lost patience if it was interfered with. Habitually she would touch the base of her neck when she played, the spot at the V of her hairline. When she was finally put out she was enthusiastic towards her victor, as if in unforeseen admiration of the competitive skills that had ousted her from the proceedings, but her display seemed to have about it the marked kiss of an impending assassination. It unnerved Cy, this lack of graciousness in winning and the fire in her eye that kindled over defeat, the passion of the high-duel. There was something backwards about it, arse over tit as Riley would have said. And indeed like Riley she seemed to thrive on certain conflict where other humans tiptoed on eggshells around it. Her voice rose in argument in the gaming room as readily as did the voices of others. But he did not want to liken her to Eliot Riley. And so quickly he put the similarities out of his mind. The observers liked to pass comment on the gaming and offer analysis of strategy. There was a strange thrill to their voices, a muffled equivalent to the screaming elation and post-match autopsy of a ball game. From this Cy gleaned snippets of information about Grace’s game and translated them into personality – he realized he could question strangers about her with it seeming to be no more than topical or sporting curiosity.

  – Who is she playing tonight?

  – Sedak. She has beaten him before. Then if she goes through she’ll meet Torlione who won last week.

  – How is she doing?

  – Bishop, three pawns apiece. She’ll take the rook next. Running round the queen as usual.

  – What do you mean?

  – Girl’s weakness is her queen. She won’t ever gambit, surrenders far too many pieces to protect her, leaves the king thin, priorities out of whack. Cost her plenty a game, I’ll tell you. Means she has to suffer twice as hard on the back end defending double, especially as it’s her favourite long attacking piece. Can’t have it both ways. Quite a common eccentricity, of course, but sentimentality always has a price. You play?

  – Not really.

  – Here’s the trick. You watch her – w
atch her go after the other queen like she’s got a fire under her hood. That there is the giveaway. Keeps her for a reason, see. And if queen takes queen chances are she won’t get taken – there’ll be cavalry. All of a sudden, Boom! Lightning down the passageway and it’s the only risk she’ll take with her. Beautiful to watch, that spontaneity, that charge, makes my night when she does it.

  – Got a thing against her own kind, do you think? Bit of a harridan?

  – Bit of a hellion. Got a thing against the best fighter, got a thing for disabling the heaviest weaponry. Someone like Torlione or Sedak will get scrambled by her eventually on a set-play, if she gets clear. Real tough to pull off that style, then again so was any war that went the wrong way. Little Joan of Arc, I call her.

  – Is she a genius?

  – Nothing to do with it, buddy. The formal mathematic play is a given here. They all have memories like elephants. Past that it’s all about being fearless. And lady luck.

  A conspiratorial voice chipped in from the side.

  – She sleeps with a black queen under her pillow I heard. Spooky woman. Brrrrh.

  Cy and the commentator turned to see who had elaborated so audaciously on the discussion. It was Claudia. She winked at Cy and laughed, her orange hair bobbing.

  – Oh, hello Claudia. Do you know Grace?

  Claudia nodded, emphatically, still laughing. Then she suddenly became serious and paused to collect her thoughts. Cy fancied for a moment that she might have had a tear in the corner of the black explosion of powder around her eye.

  – Ja. Of course, who does not know Grace! She is my good friend. Sie ist meine Königin.

  Claudia had a secret that only Grace knew. She was obsessed with the baby incubator exhibition at Coney. She could not keep away from it. Outside there was a painted sign that read ‘Little babies who came before their time’, and there was a note that the youngest surviving infant to date had been born after just twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, though there was no formal medical verification that Claudia knew of to substantiate this claim. Cy had passed the place often but never been inside the show. He disapproved of it. It was one of the more extreme and less tasteful enterprises at the Island, a macabre maternity ward. Beyond the unseemliness of the place it also disturbed him on a sinister, childhood level, for it brought to mind the strange work of his mother, all the children of her unmaking, all the undone babies of Morecambe Bay. And even though he had long ago reconciled what his mother had undertaken as a sideline profession, he never went inside the exhibition, just in case all the sick infants within stood up in their cots and waved to him, intent on delivering messages from their ghostly British brothers and sisters, in the manner of Professor and Madame Johnson.