The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  When the decade rolled past the half century, they were still coming via bursting trains from Manchester and Scotland, Oldham and Leeds, and they still wanted their arms and backs decorated. He kept thinking that maybe he wouldn’t stay, maybe he’d sell up and move somewhere new, start afresh. He had only come back like a homing pigeon, because some magnetic grain in his head had drawn him there after the war ran him out of good reasons to see the world. And he’d stayed by reasoning that while there was a dependable income he may as well benefit. Rationing was over, the larder spies retreated, and rich traditional dishes once more were set on the tables of hotels and guest houses next to swan-folded napkins – again speculation abounded about who was sending potted shrimp to another King George and the Duke of Windsor and Cy was reminded of the way his mother’s consumptives relished her treats and secretly assumed that it was she. Music flooded across the Atlantic from America, and in the local dancehalls the fashions of the day took their measure from the pinball-punching, Coca-Cola swilling, rocking and rolling USA. In that decade vacation venues stuffed visitors into every nook and cranny. The recommenced illuminations drew spectators in by their thousand, celebrities came to flip the switch and electrify peacocks and garlands that ran the length of the prom, and Cy turned out to watch the festivities too and celebrated. And it felt easily remembered, and it was easy to be home.

  When things fell away they fell away fast, in the blink of an eye Cy thought, and before long establishments were closing, theatres were taking final curtain calls and arcades were dismantling their tuppenny attractions before the wrecking balls began. The northern workers just stopped coming. Motorists did not pull off the A6 at Carnforth but kept on going north to the pretty towns and mountains below the rain clouds. The Prom station closed. Smug jokes were made in other British pavilions about the once comedic-authority, now pathetic and brash-becoming town of Morecambe. By then Cy wasn’t leaving. Whether it was loyalty to the townsfolk or the dwindling if faithful crowds, or old age creeping in, wanderlust waning, or whether it was just the never-and-always-changing view across the bay that he so loved, he didn’t care to contemplate. You could go to new places but the heart still pumped the same blood about the veins, and influenced the behaviour of the same brain. Over the years he felt a gradual settlement such as he hadn’t known before. He was accompanied less and less by the ghosts of Riley and Reeda, of the war and America.

  When, in the last column on the last page of a national paper in 1965, he read that New York’s Steeplechase was closing down, the last of the big Coney Parks to survive the war, he felt a twinge of regret and a tug at his sentimental sleeve but he wasn’t sorry not to have been there until the end. No, Morecambe Bay it would be, come high or low economic tides. For better or worse. And where would he have gone anyway, in search of that stripy carnival nostalgia, that simplicity of entertainment? The older seasidey ways he was used to were dying out. The lettered rock and the melting cones no longer brought sticky, sugary pleasure, the waves were too cold and bound with seaweed, the repetitive jokes and merry songs of the collective nation failed to rouse and remedy the modern weary spirit of the population. People did not want to make do with a shared washroom and tinned fruit when they could have private facilities abroad, the Mediterranean was warm and appealingly blue, the food was exotic and the children could split off from the parents so that each could have made-to-measure fun in the sun. Even the blind fiddler at the old harbour, who was now a hundred if a day, could have seen that the changes were unstoppable and the damage irreparable. And regardless of all that, besides the folding tatty umbrella of an industry that had always sheltered his trade, wherever he was in the world, fairground fed or not, those who came to him would remain the same. Tattooing was unto itself its very own art form, old as the hills and stranger than time. Whether in rich, far-flung resorts or condemned cottages, glamorous prestige or ragged poverty, human hearts and souls were variable and would always require painting.

  Nina Shearer waltzed through the front door of Eleven Pedder Street in leather and torn trousers, with purple glitter on her cheekbones and Egyptian kohl around her eyes, on Cy’s sixty-fifth birthday, just as he was thinking about retiring. He was vaguely expecting her, at least he was in the habit of expecting unusual and meaningful events on significant calendar days. She herself was in the habit of tutting and sighing before almost every comment she uttered, as if perpetually annoyed or put upon by what she was about to say. Her hair was raked up at the sides above her ears by two painful-looking plastic combs and it was very difficult to tell how many colours of dye were present in it, or how many perms it had endured.

  – D’ya do piercing here?

  – No, love, I don’t.

  – Why bloody not?

  – I’m a tattooist. Not a sodding hairdresser.

  – Well, I’ll just do it myself again then.

  – Fine.

  – Fine.

  She stood with her hands on her hips looking boldly at the walls of the shop. Nothing about her surroundings appeared to intimidate her, the tattoo parlour may as well have been a florist’s. Not many people had that variety of astringency, thought Cy, that natural counter-balance, the wherewithal or presence to dampen fire or dry up floods. Only a handful of people he had ever met had the ability, reacting with their environment to take away an extreme quality of it, like pepper with salt or sugar with bitterness. He had a feeling his list might be about to go up by one. There were several piercings in the cartilage of her ears, through which heavy rings and several studs had been inserted. Her right eyebrow was swollen in a pink lump at the corner where a new jewel wound had recently been made. She couldn’t have been much beyond the age of eighteen and her make-up served only to make her seem younger, overdone as it was. Her eyes might have been a marshy green but as with all colours when set against the borders of black they seemed brighter, much brighter. She was pacing about in the shop, snapping her chewing-gum against her teeth and putting on a show. There was a restlessness to her, forthrightness, an echo of some of his favourite people, and Cy found the corner of his mouth pulling up in a smile.

  – Can I help you, pet? Going to get something done, are you? Or just browsing?

  – Nice present for me mam on Mother’s Day that’d be, eh? Why don’t you cut your hair, it’s too thin to be worn long. Your scalp comes through. You look like an old hippie.

  – And you, young lady, look like trouble with a capital T. Go on, piss off.

  She looked at him, looked him over with her scornful, cheeky, eyes. Everything about her manner informed him that she would go in her own good time and not a moment before, there was no point in making his case. She looked back at the walls again, her arm bracelets rattling and tinkling as she reached up to touch the flash cards. Cy waited for her to finish her dramatic production. But either she was a thorough little madam or something had caught her attention, for she moved closer in to scrutinize the pictures.

  – How much?

  – How much for what?

  – Any of these.

  – Depends on the size and the time it takes. Or if you want it done freehand. That’s extra. Look in the corner, it should say.

  She stopped chewing and put her hands in the pockets of her leather coat. The burrs and brassiness seemed to be rubbing out of her. Her head dropped to one side. And there under the costumery and the kinks and claws stood a serious girl in admiration of what she saw, like a buff in an art gallery. Cy let her be a while and put the kettle on in the back room. When he came back out she was sitting on his work stool with one of his designs in his hand – it was the word ‘Mother’ with flowers woven through the lettering. There was a strange watery look in her eyes, as if she might be about to shed tears but also as if gladdened by inspiration. She began talking to him with the immediate confidentiality and the lack of inhibition of a thoughtful, expressive youth whose ideas are too large to contain, too important to go unsaid.

  – She’s had a rough time
lately, eh. Dad’s in the nick again since he got made redundant and the pub’s not doing well ‘cause everybody buggers off to Spain come summer these days. Who’d want to come to Morecambe anyway and sit in a deck chair in the pissing rain for their holiday or ride on a stinking donkey on the prom? Full of old cronies that just want to play bingo, not exactly a riveting venue, is it? I want to go to art college in Manchester but I’ll end up having to help out in the pub until I’m bloody sixty and past it, no doubt, ‘cause she says I’ve got to help out. Oh, it’s not her fault. He’s the one that kept nicking from the till so he could lose it all at the dogs. Fucking selfish prick. She’d skin me alive if I got this done but she’d like it really – she’d sit and cry for a bit but she’d be touched deep down, the silly cow. I’ve only got three pounds, mind, and it says five on the corner.

  – Well, all right, I approve, love. I approve. But don’t call your mother a cow. Tell you what, get yourself over to the corner shop and get us a bottle of silver top for some tea and we’ll talk about a price when you get back.

  He wasn’t sure that she would ever set foot in the property again. But ten minutes later, just as the teapot was beginning to stew, she waltzed back in with the milk and a packet of custard creams.

  Gaynor Shearer might have had nice big nipples and svelte buttocks in the days of the first Bathing Beauties, but her granddaughter Nina was a royal pain in the backside when she wanted to be, and quite frequently when she wasn’t even trying. She was of a new breed, loud, inquisitive to the point of interrogation, she had a filthy mouth, an unapologetic manner, and under it all Cy liked her very much. After four or five more visits, a couple of which were in the capacity of customer, the rest of which saw her turning up on rainy mornings, blagging tea, with bottles of milk pilfered from doorsteps in between the Horse and Farrier and Pedder Street, he offered to apprentice her. For the proposal he got a smile with her bottom jaw stuck far out and a loud kiss on the cheek.

  She had a genuine interest in the profession and it became apparent that her aspirations for art college were not built without the foundation of talent. She drew many new designs for the walls, abstracts, which were in vogue, and emblems she considered attractive to both sexes. She said that people did not know themselves anymore, not as they once had, and they did not know how to define their lives. Abstracts were old, mysterious, inexplicable, and that made sense, folk were drawn to them for that very reason. It was as close to sage philosophy as she got. Cy gave her the old art books that had once belonged to Eliot Riley, their condition was appalling but there was no sense in them going to waste, and she told him flippantly that Michelangelo was too old-fashioned for her liking, though his sketches were obviously not too bad. She preferred something with a bit of oomph. Van Gogh. Edvard Munch. Egon Schiele, the randy bugger. Matisse. At that Cy smiled and thought fleetingly about telling her his fantastic tale involving the great artist’s temporary reincarnation, and that there had been plenty of oomph in that bizarre existence. But he didn’t and before long she was rabbiting on about how the north of England needed a good art gallery, something to rival the Tate, and one of those dilapidated crusty old lords should donate an empty castle, lying around like an old Wellington boot as it would be, for those very purposes.

  There was a quality of susceptible stray animal to her as well as a smartness of mouth and a propensity for backchat. She tuned the radio to howling punk rock that gave Cy a headache and laughed at his records and cassettes of jazz and swing, saying he was an old relic who should be put in a museum. She nagged him constantly to cut his long hair and take out his ear-ring, reminding him so completely of Den Jones that he expected to walk outside during one of her lectures into the Brooklyn light and see the turrets of Coney Island puncturing the horizon in the distance and hear that faraway, once-upon-a-time hum of amusement park paradise and hell. She told unwelcome stories of getting with boys exactly to her liking in the grottos of the bay and the roller disco that made Cy blush and falsify coughing fits so he could leave the room. Sex was, in her book, a topic entirely open for discussion. Mostly she asked an endless drill of questions whose punches were seldom pulled and whose shameless promotions were never hidden. Why did he do this? Why did he do that? Why should she have to learn about motors and coils and welding and silly little gippy oily shitty parts when the stuff could be ordered out of a catalogue? What was so special about blue bloody ink and just what had he had to do with it all anyway? How did he get his gammy leg? Where were his medals? Did he believe in boggarts? Didn’t he think this boy really liked her because he’d given her a kiss down-you-know-where, or that lad was a dickhead because he thought women shouldn’t drive forklifts at the sausage factory? Shouldn’t tampons be available on the NHS and didn’t he think that if men had to have the curse of Eve every month they would be? Didn’t America seem like a marvellous country on the telly or at the pictures where everybody’s problems got sorted out and they were all happy? Why wasn’t he married? Was he queer? Why, and this question really intrigued her, did he always talk about love like there was an empty chair next to him at whatever table he sat?

  Occasionally Cy lost his rag, and yelled at her to shut up. But the raised voice fitted so perfectly and so sinisterly within the walls of the parlour, like a fist in a glove, or a pickaxe in a splintered trunk, that it shook him at his core and his outbursts never lasted more than a few moments. She required few apologies to resume her conversation. And though by the end of the day he often felt exhausted and irritated by her unrepentant, iridescent, volatile company, or like he was sloshing full and heavy with her mental bilge and sinking slowly, the shop was always a little too quiet after she had gone.

  – Can I start piercing folk?

  – No you bloody can’t. Not in my shop. It’s gimmickry. It´s for people who don’t understand the craft.

  Nina tutted loudly and tossed out the remaining inch of leafy tea from her cup into the sink. Cy was reading a book in his room, with his leg up on a stool, waiting for a customer to appear. This was an argument they had had before.

  – It´s not fair. You wouldn’t even have to do any of the work. I could be in charge of it.

  – Oh, it’s always lip from you, isn’t it? Never a moment’s peace. Does it say Nina Shearer’s tattoo parlour on that sign up there? Does it?

  – Fascist.

  Cy smiled and looked up from his book at her.

  – Speaking of, have you been to the polling station yet today, missy? Have you voted?

  – No. They’re all a bunch of great fat farts, why should I bother?

  – Listen. I don’t care if you never put a single tick in a single box, but you get yourself down that polling station right now. You’ve got your voting card?

  – Yes. But why the bloody hell should I go if I’m not ticking any boxes? You’ve gone soft in the head.

  – Well, go and write ‘you’re all a bunch of great fat farts’ across it and hand it in! At least they’ll know you’ve been there and had your say.

  Nina was giving him a look of bemused pity, as if commiserating with his insanity, his obviously retarded condition. Or as if he had suddenly grown another head. And damn it if Cy didn’t want to kick her up the backside and give her a hug both at once.

  – All I’m saying, pet, is that you shouldn’t take these things for granted. That’s all. Now off you go.

  With almost no effort at all on nature’s part and before Cy knew it, it was September again. That time of year when powerful news was broken to unsuspecting Lancashire lads and the clash of seasons brought unrest in the nether regions of the human spirit. A time when the women Cy had loved most dearly in his life had taken a step back into themselves in preparation for solitary struggles and departure. But he was as far away on the calendar from the anniversary of Eliot Riley’s demise as he could be and that was a favourable place to be. Cyril Parks was not unhappy. The days had that blue hue to them, with the rush of water along their sides, and they were refreshin
g. A storm in the night had tossed up timber and treasure in his dreams and he had seen his old booth spinning on the alleyway, oversized chess pieces were dancing with each other in Varga, Reeda was smoking an opium pipe made from a shell at the Bayview’s kitchen table with Riley, Jonty was kissing nurses in the war. And he had seen Grace, on horseback, riding fast across the open sands of the bay, standing up in her stirrups as if she might leap from the horse as she rode on into the ocean. His blood had been exhilarated when he woke, fiery, like electricity. And he felt young again. That morning he had walked along the path by the ravine, feeling the wind kiting his coat, pushing back against him, pushing him upright and straightening the bend in his long spine. His leg had not hurt so very much when usually it provided nothing but a deep dull ache in the steel-shanked bone. The air had been saturated with that unmistakable salty tonic that only coastal regions have, and he drew deep lungfuls down into him, laughing because it was unnecessary, because he didn’t have tuberculosis. He thought of Grace on the walk, the dark borders of her against which the lighter colours and aspects shone. He thought of her dark hair with its red undertraces, her hands gently pushing against the tattooed ship on his stomach as if she was launching what it carried, a heart pierced by a tall mast, and the way she always called him by his moniker, as if identity was only a matter of choice. He thought of her eyes, both real and tattooed, and he knew that she had never truly left him, not in the way old loves are eventually reconciled or abandoned. Somewhere in the world she was still living perhaps, still raging, and though he wouldn’t like the job of painting it, the world was getting smaller by the day, the corners around which she might walk were getting closer. She was subjective and brief and random in his life, but she was still strong in him, and interlocking, like crystal in stone, like roots in the earth. And his heart was densely occupied and his soul was lying fallow. It was why he had never married, it was why whenever his apprentice told him some unkown lady had called for him in the shop, his stomach always dropped and lurched. And it was why he had never taken away that empty chair of Nina’s remarking, even while courting others, even while getting near to that honest place where he should think about the possibilities of dying.