The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  What Henry Beausang omitted to tell the authorities was that he had left the back door of the hospital specifically unlocked, he had presented the watchman with a bottle of rum, and he had loitered up on the third floor an hour longer than necessary. Nor did he mention that he had left open a window on the second floor so that the smoke might billow out evasively, just as he had been instructed to do.

  By the time the police detectives had reached the booth on Oceanic Walk, The Electric Michelangelo had dismantled his place of work for the winter. By the time they reached Den Jones’s barbershop, via the eventual cooperation of some remarkably tight-lipped and unhelpful Coney informers, several dead-ends, one or two obvious decoys, Cyril Parks was no longer anywhere to be found in the country. Nor was Sedak’s original victim around to throw light upon a very dark matter. In fact there was no record of this woman in existence at all other than her recent medical file. The city was becoming ever more a place where ghosts and demons could live their half-lives unknown and uncharted by the authorities, it seemed. The investigation was perhaps more abbreviated than it needed to be, but nobody felt truly torn up for the victim. This was after all a vague quid pro quo affair, and the file was permanently closed, or at least relegated to a spot at the back of a very full cabinet, by January of 1941. Yes, Den Jones finally confirmed, there had been an Englishman tattooing in the back room for a couple of years – but he had gone up to Montreal or Toronto as far as he knew. Something about the Canadian Air Force and doing his duty in these troubled times. To the best of Den’s knowledge he had never so much as stepped out with a girl to the movies or the music hall, let alone revenged a lady made of tattooed eyes.

  Much later, with white in his hair and two world wars behind him, Cy would dream of America, and it would visit him as a series of faces. There were the faces of Brooklyn, that could break his heart with their history, their handsome melancholy, the wet-lit eyes that were, in cold weather, very prone to tears. He dreamt of Henry’s face, made prematurely old by violence, stupid with alcohol, but gorgeous from adventure as he bid Cy farewell by the station that crisp, culpable morning in the fall of 1940. Other friends put in appearances, Den, Claudia and Arturas, the sisters, in capacities that were helpful to him when his dreams were troubling. Grace was an infrequent vision. She came and went within pockets of darkness, wrathful and beautiful, dampness on her face as she bore his needle, weeping with empty rage as she lifted down the fire iron with heated sibilance on to her opponent in the terrible game she had played. Her eyes, once swirling so full of precarious, suggestive information, always appeared closed under the heavy brow. At times he woke up assured that, during the night, he had solved the eternal puzzle of who she really was, what had created her, but whatever nocturnal handiwork his brain had done, by morning it was always misplaced or deconstructed, picked apart by devious elves. He was left with just a stray idea – a sense that she was medieval after all, as he had imagined her on that first night by the fountain with her horse, but in straightforward cruelty and justice not courtly love. Or he became convinced that his imagination at that time, oft-inebriated as it was, had run riot, and she had never really had him hold a rag in the mouth of a man who was only his secondary enemy while she murdered his vision. He wished to see more of her but wishing only made her harder to invoke, resistant to his dreams, and perhaps that was his own return form of anopia, an eye for an eye, losing sight for lost sight. Sedak’s childish visage came and went in nightmares – accompanied by scenes of the fighting he had endured on behalf of one or other of the countries he had in his life been affiliated with, Cy had never been sure which – and it was the face of a restrained child about to be punished for a crime he suddenly understood, a juvenile soul taught by some unsuitable influence or example that he could express his tainted religion, his prejudicial extremes, that his hatred should be credited with self-tolerance in the land of the free. The blind, ruined face of his and Grace’s conspiracy came to Cy most spectacularly and horribly the night after he had stood in Lancaster court dock for non-payment of rates and had noticed an old branding iron hung above the judicial bench. He dreamt he was being dragged into the dark sockets of Sedak’s missing eyes. And he woke in a fit of sickness, and ran to the bathroom to vomit. There were the ordinary faces of the century in his dreams, by their thousand under wide-ribboned hats or tulip bonnets on the boardwalk, and there were those extraordinary faces – bearded, pigmy shrunken, half-human half-amphibian or reptile scaled. And sometimes, because the dreaming mind is truly a creature of sign and symbol, it was the emblematic face of Coney Island itself that came to him, looming above like a full oval moon, that dapper, lunatic caricature with a commodious grin and slick, centre-parted hair, mocking and mimicking the crowds from the double gateway of Steeplechase. This image had staying power, and when he looked into the mirror to shave come daylight it would seem that the face was trying to be his reflection, all he had to do was bring his smile into alignment.

  Number eleven Pedder Street was dark and damp as he pushed open the door. It had the consecrated forlornness of a crypt, the sense of a threshold violated by his presence. The electricity had been cut for well over a decade when Cyril Parks finally collected the key from the solicitor’s office, so he flicked on his Zippo for illumination and burned away the cobwebs hanging from the doorway. He moved inside the downstairs rooms and put his duffle bag down on the floor, rubbed his aching leg. He had presumed the town would be streaming with nostalgia when he returned, the way a stone that is lifted out of water rushes with the memory of where it has been kept. But the streets from the train station to his destination had seemed no more vested than they ever had been when he was a resident. In the solstice twilight of the winter of 1946 he had come back to his hometown. As he walked the familiar roads he saw new places of business had opened, shops and hotels, though many of the older venues were still running and had made it through the war. But everything seemed smaller, sturdier than he recalled, and commonly organized after the anomie of his travels. The houses and churches and grander buildings of Morecambe Bay had always had a flat perspective with simple shadows at this time of day in December, he remembered, when the sun beat an early path over the harrowing Irish Sea, as if in an illustration from a nursery book. His returning eye was kinder than he expected, and it conveyed, with its visual wares, a sense of comfort. It was like stepping back into a place of sympathy, an old comfortable shoe, rather than revisiting a realm saturated with once-were spirits and cumbersome, erstwhile lives.

  What he did remember vividly as he walked from the engine sheds past the Bayview and the old fairground to a familiar door on a small winding street, was that first premeditated journey to Eliot Riley’s quarters, when the night had been pronounced and dense brown and his will had had a life of its own. He remembered his boyish heart, knocking like an open window in a gale at the thought of encountering what lay beyond the complacency of the present. That walk had been fast and eager, with his long, youthful stride carrying him well, though trepidation had made it pass with super-awareness, slowness, the town reverberating and chiming with exhaustive materials. Now he moved with greater difficulty, and a heavy limp to his right leg gifted to him by the war, but it seemed to take no time at all to navigate the old place, and reach his destination, as if Morecambe had shrunk in the wash even though the town had bled through its borders since he had been away. And he wondered how his life had fitted into this snug place while seeming so grand and unruly for the characters and the incidents of it.

  The walls of the Pedder Street parlour were bare and cracking. There were a couple of flash pictures still mounted on the walls that he had not bothered to collect up before he departed, or he had chosen to leave them behind, he could not recall. On a dusty rail there hung the musty velvet curtain with its theatrical tasselled bottom behind which the master had apprenticed his lad, and there was another private section where the apprentice had followed the lead of his dubious mentor. Cy could almost smell t
he pickled fish and stouty breath in the air, and hear the bawdy, chastising words about craftsmanship, and the hobnailed opinions on every other thing, coming from the ghost of Riley. But they came from a place far back in Cy’s mind that made them mannered and coloured like art and there was no emotional frottage or suffering to the recollection now, it was just life, just the pan-bright tones of what had been. There was an absence of keen junk about the place that most quickly abandoned dwellings have strewn about, so the house forgave him his hasty, barely put-together exit. There had never been many articles present anyway. Just the chairs for the customers in the waiting area where they once viewed the plethora of images and the wooden stools next to which were railings fixed on the wall. A fine sheen of lime dust covered the furniture. It could have been a small amateur stage vacated by players a long time ago at die bidding of a bankrupt production manager.

  He went upstairs with his flaring lighter beginning to singe his thumb. He waited for a moment in the blackness for the casing to cool before bringing back the flame. There were the bedrooms and the small kitchen, the old bath that had been filled with cold water and a drunken man on many occasions. On the chimney mantel the bird skulls were lined up, though a couple of them had collapsed in fragments under a shroud of dust. He wandered through the shadowy rooms, watching the light pass over Riley’s old books, the statue of the Virgin Mary, tenacious as ever at the edge of the shelf, and what was left in the wooden crates that had once held his meagre possessions – some old clothing, stiff and mothy in heaps, a sketch book, a set of watercolours and a brush, a gunpowder tea tin in which there were his father’s cufflinks and a photograph or two taken inside the Bayview during happier times. After a while he remembered the Jewish menorah that had sat preposterously in the window downstairs, that had wound up in Riley’s possession through he knew not what ridiculous turn, and he went to find it. There were a few grubby, waxy stubs left in the tiers which he set the flame to and this provided enough light for him to wash his face with his last ration of serviceman’s soap in the bathroom sink, after first letting the water run clear of sediment and rust.

  The sea in the bay was out and almost beyond sight, which was a disappointment the next morning as he approached the promenade, he had wanted to get close enough to it to feel the spray, but it meant that there was plenty of driftwood and kindling on the beach for him to collect for the fireplace. The previous night had been cold, with one military blanket only and his coat as protection against the frosty, stony air. It seemed he had not come so far really in two decades, he thought to himself, picking up debris on the shoreline for the Pedder Street parlour. The Lake Distict fells were a misty smear along the horizon. He had remembered them as mountains which were taller, fuller, the way landscape in paintings becomes exaggerated. In the shallow basin of the empty bay were a number of slimy, weed-covered anti-landing-craft obstructions that spoiled the view across the counties giving the vista a modern, interfered-with look. Post-war relics dotted the town behind him also, pill boxes near the piers and the ugly shelters built on the Sunshine Slopes. But other than this the town seemed unscathed by the conflict itself – he’d bought a copy of the Visitor that morning and it seemed like the same old paper that ever it was, with the same contentious, conservative opinions, the same gamely gossip and extravagant advertisements. Morecambe still had its pluck and it still professed to having soft air.

  As he strolled along the bare flats there was the pungent smell of long, deep silt, like the creational clay of the world, and he thought about all the folk of Morecambe Bay he had known. He thought of his mother. Later, he would go and lay flowers on Reeda’s grave and clear away the moss and dirt from the carved lettering of her headstone. He knew the visit would bring him a gentle peace and in a way he was looking forward to it, though the graveyard overlooking the sea was a forlorn place. He would tell his mother about America, and that she would have been glad she wasn’t around for the next war for it had trumped the last in terms of horror. Before he knew it he had walked as far as the Trawlers’ Cooperative building and since he was of a mind to do the respectful rounds he decided to pay his regards to the photograph of his father, leaning, as he inevitably still would be, on the stern of the Sylvia Rose. But the door of the construction was locked and bolted and the handle would do no more than rattle under its chain.

  – What do you need, pal? We’re shut up for the holidays until the social on New Year’s Eve.

  Cy turned to see a middle-aged man with dark red hair and a long mackintosh coat approaching him. He was about to say it didn’t matter, that it was just a courtesy visit, but the man suddenly stopped in his tracks and peered hard. Then he executed a small clog on the pavement and put his hands in the air.

  – Cyril Parks, as I live and bloody breathe! Is that you, you great string bean? Course it is, I’d know that great long lank of Lancashire lad anywhere.

  – Morris? Morris Gibbs.

  The two shook warmly and clumsily, cradling each other’s elbows with their free hands. Their eyes locked for a spell, disarmed and intrigued at once. It was as if neither had reconciled his own age until that point in his life, until confronted with a face from his youth that was now older, aged privately and separately. Morris shook his head, bemused.

  – Well, what you been up to, Parksie? Must be, what, going on fifteen years now.

  – Oh. This, that and the other. You know.

  – I do indeed. Indeed I do. Still practising on pig heads?

  – No, I’ve moved on to their arses now.

  Morris laughed loudly and slapped him on the back.

  – Well good for you. Fancy a jar? Come on, we’ll have a bit of a yarn and catch up. Not busy, are you?

  – Not exactly busy. No. But, well look, I don’t drink any more, Morris. Not for several years now. I’ll have some tea if they’ve got it.

  – Right you are. Tea it is. Look in need of a good cuppa, you do. Heard you’d buggered off to Yanksville.

  Cy abandoned his foraged firewood and they sat in the smoky warmth of the Horse and Farrier for an hour, talking of old times, which suited Cy as the recent chapters of his life were still too fresh with reddish paint to handle yet. Morris had been fishing since he left, he was one of the last to still work the Skears in the old way, with a pony and rake, for which he was proud if poor, and he still had his brother’s granddaddy eel in the jar, kept in the garden shed though because his wife would not allow it in the house. And none bigger had yet been found. Cy was glad of the company, the reminiscences, and glad to see his old friend. He inquired after their childhood third. Morris sighed.

  – Jonty died in the war, Cyril. Early on, poor bastard, in the Battle for France, ‘forty it will have been. Bad year that, bad year. Left behind a wife and three little kiddies – well, I think you met Irene before you left, didn’t you? She took in a number of vaccies, mind you; she’s a good sort.

  Cy nodded. Both of them stared into their drinks for a time. Difficult conversations and deliveries of news such as this were not unknown to either of them. They had become no easier with the passing years nor in their growing proliferation. There was still the compulsory awkward pause, the bitter sadness, the struggle to go on.

  – Well, I’ll be honest, I miss the daft bugger. Were you … er …? No, never mind, I can see that you were. Still, you’re back now. How long are you staying? And where?

  – Not sure. A while, I think, I’ve no plans. I’m staying at Pedder Street – above Riley’s old place.

  – Bloody hell, that’s rather grim. That place has been boarded up for donkey’s years. Some little devils broke in and took it over not long after you’d gone, so the Council fastened up the windows and changed the lock. Well, listen, you’ll come round ours for your Christmas dinner. I’ll not hear otherwise. Neither will the wife, and she’s fierce when she’s on the sherry come yuletide, so you best say yes. It’s good to have you back, Parksie.

  Nobody truly knew when the decline began to o
ccur. With hindsight, it would be easier for locals to blame certain aspects – the simultaneous decline of old industries, the closing of mills and foundries in the north that furnished the seaside resort with its weekly business, package holidays available cheaply on the continent, affordable airfares, or an outside world that just suddenly sped up and left Morecambe to its old-fashioned ways. Even Cyril Parks with his testy Coney Island radar, his American-honed sense of a fading amusement industry, could not quite predict or interpret or become attuned to the evolving ebb of life out of his hometown. At first he was too occupied with work to dwell on being back and living in the haunted house of his unhappiest years. The town was busier than ever in season and he could barely cope with the summer trade. He arrived home almost penniless but with a house in his name. He fixed up the neon sign and remounted it above the doorway. He bought ink from Lancaster, and fashioned some equipment. Then the crowds began to arrive and only one or two, the hardier, older holiday-makers in Sunday suits who had been coming there for their seaside break since they were short-trousered and their fathers were besuited, only they could remember a time when Eleven Pedder Street was run by the best and most notorious tattoo artist in the northern counties. Riley had otherwise faded into folklore, his wrangling personality and his drinking taking precedent over his art in the opinion of the community, and there was no need for Cyril Parks to be forgiven for treading on his grave. The money began to roll in. After a while Cy hung paintings on the walls upstairs and bought new curtains for the windows. He let the local children string up Guy Fawkes effigies early in November from the flagpole below the bedroom window. Within a couple of years he had installed a new central heating system, because he’d be jiggered if he’d keep fetching firewood, so the waiting area was no longer quite as Baltic in temperature as it once had been. His roots began to creep back down, finding and following the path they had made when he was young. He was, after all, sand-born and sand-bred. He was, after all, Morecambrian.