The Electric Michelangelo (8 page)

– Aye, go on and do it. No time to explain. Cy … Cyril. It’s all right.

Cy fumbled with his buttons and pulled his breeches down until they met the wet sand.

– Now. Try to point your feet down. Like standing on your tippy-toes.

Morris’s instructions were surprisingly calm. Cy looked up and found that the eyes regarding him were utterly placid. His friend was wearing an expression that Cy had seen before somewhere, on a face under a moustache, in an old photograph on the Trawlers’ Cooperative Society building wall. It was the look of knowing the sea, come what may. And it suddenly gave him comfort. So he pushed as hard as he could without really feeling his ankles move and took a deep breath.

Morris was counting.

– One, two …

On three the two boys heaved and wrenched and Cy slowly came up, peeling out of his trousers and his shoes as he did so with a loud sucking sound. The boys landed together in an untidy heap. They stood up quickly and looked back at the puddle of sand with the shed clothing inside. The vacated legs were squeezing together, shrinking in, and were full of mucky-looking water that was being displaced upwards, outwards, and filtering back through the sand like awful digestive juices in a stomach. Cy blew out a great lungful of air.

– Well. Bugger me sideways.

– Not on your nelly.

They walked back over the beach towards town, laughing about the predicament they had escaped. Cy’s bare legs were cold in the fresh breeze, he was careful to tread lightly as he walked, pulling his feet up quickly from the sand, for the sensation of his toes sinking down even a little, that closeness of damp pressure to his skin, was sickening now and made him feel light-headed. It was an anxiety that would never quite leave him. After the quicksands he could no longer sleep with the blankets close about him, boggarts under the bed or not. And if he happened to saturate his garments in the rain or the river or when he was dropped off the pier by the boys at full tide, it would never remain on his body long enough to dry and release the flesh beneath it from its clasp. He’d rather go stark bollock naked through the town than feel that terrible tight claustrophobia again. Morris Gibbs and Jonty Preston, though, were quick-thinking devils, and friends for life.

It was when the war was pulling its hardest on the continent, when Europeans were streaming hither and thither from their smashed-open homes and villages and fields like ants from a disturbed hill-nest, and official letters to mothers and wives were flowing with regularity through the letter boxes around the bay, that another wonder was bestowed upon Morecambe. If not for harmony’s sake then for counterplay. The pavilion fire of that same year was all but eclipsed by this new and celestial beauty. Aurora Borealis. The northern bloodlights.

It was not the crowded spectacle of the fire, nor an occasion of mass mesmerism, with all seats sold out for the performance. It was to be a private show. The town had long since known that it held one of the best positions in the country for observing this display, the tourist leaflets listing local attractions and entertainments made great mention of it, it was almost as compulsory a feature as leaving Blackpool off every local map and out of every visitor handbook. Aurora was not a stranger to the bay, for all her being the classiest act around. She was not the rarest sight, though many may have missed her that night, coming unannounced and under a dark cloak as she always did. Cy was almost sleeping when his mother knocked softly on his door and entered. Her face was softer than he had ever seen it, her eyes contained light stolen from every scrap and corner of the room it seemed, so it was dim about them, so at first his mind went out to thoughts of witchery, to her capabilities of subversion and collaboration in the parlour room. As if some sinister rite of passage bequeathed him was about to take place. Perhaps he never left his slumber, and his dreaming memory deluded him into his coming vision. But she took the covers back off him, reached for his hand and led him to the window. And fatefully he went with her.

Outside there was nothing but a red sky. Red long past sunset and long before sunrise. Red of an impossible hour. Red, and behind that struggling green, and behind that trapped and gentlest white. It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature’s grace, unhurried, the slowest, seeping effulgence. Lesser and greater than all light. Blood of the sky.

Cyril Parks left himself then. Perhaps it was the solitary quietude of this occurrence, which was kept under glass for they did not step outside to applaud Miss Borealis, though she was intensely lovely, or his condition, resting on the swaying anchor of sleep, ready ahoy, soon to be sent down to the depths and so susceptible to any form of sublimation. Perhaps it was holding his mother’s hand at the window as though she were a guide, neither witch nor widow nor angel at that moment, but simply a guide on the wasteland sand of the shore, and when she took her hand softly away from his he felt arrived. Perhaps this is what ended that first part of his life. He stepped out of it willingly. And for all his remaining youth and curiosity, the full store of energy set to keep him beating on until it finally wound down and fluttered out in his heart, he would have taken death right then, under Aurora’s beauty, and gone happily, knowing he had seen the last and brightest of all miracles.

Where one confusion ended two more were sure to take its place, wasn’t that how it went? Soon there was to be an entirely new batch of contentious issues to wrangle with. Life’s next riddles may well have stemmed from Cy’s discovery of the
Pisces
vaginales
in a science book during a weekly biology lesson, given as always and as it was currently being, by Colin Willacy, headmaster of Morecambe Grammar School. The
Pisces
vaginales.
It certainly had a funny ring to it. It had a funny shape to it also, there on the page, like a mangled anemone. Every Wednesday afternoon, prior to rugby, the class of boys was required to locate within their natural-history textbooks a fish native to the British Isles so that they could then march down to the bay’s shore, attempt to find the selected species and sketch the blighter into their notebooks, for Headmaster Willacy was quite the practitioner, favouring the methods of field research to classroom dissertation. He also possessed a boisterous, cane-happy left arm and a good aim for catapulting loose objects from the blackboard shelf at chattering individuals, but that was by the by. Star-slubbers, flukes, ink fish, barnacles, rays. The marine choices were many. Top marks were awarded for a successful find, which seemed a little random and circumstantial to Cy, though he made no mention of this theory. And if success was not to be had they were to draw whatever God may provide for them that day, as Mr Willacy forthrightly put it. The beach and God provided artistic and scientific bounty only when either felt moved to. They also provided a startling collection of oddities from time to time, items not grown within the nurturing womb of the ocean, but fashioned in the factories of smoky towns, delivered by trains, bought in haberdasheries and market places, then lost or discarded near water channels only to end up gallivanting right around the coast before arriving at Morecambe. Old shoes, pots and pans, gloves, bottles, pieces of motor cars, rubber devices with ambiguous functions. None of which carried any merit if it was drawn. Cy had a decent artistic hand. It was perhaps his finest talent, other than distance piddling. Since a relatively young age he had been able to copy an object from sight or memory, exact to its edges, true to its dimensions, faithful to its proportions, so he did not mind these excursions to the beach so very much and was largely keen, even when the bucketing rain smudged his charcoal and the strong wind flapped his notebook out of his hands.

– Sir. I’ve found mine. The
Pisces
vaginales.
That’s what I’ll hunt for today.

– What’s that Parks?

–
Pisces
vaginales,
sir. Recorded at Morecambe Bay in the eighteen hundreds according to the book. So called because it resembles the genitalia of a woman. What’s a genitalia, sir? Sir? It says here that they contract tightly when touched and emit a liquor like that of a vagina in coy … in coy … in coitu …

– My room, Parks! Immediately! The rest of you, on with your study. In silence. And if I hear a word …

Cy was marched down to the fusty, book-strewn office of Colin Willacy where all castigations and lectures were issued, and where, it was widely rumoured, the headmaster took a wee drop of port daily around about lunchtime. If you licked your hand before Old Willacy had a chance to whip it with his cane it didn’t hurt so very much. It still hurt, but was less likely to redden up and blister and smart all day. However, it turned out there were misdemeanours that did not warrant a caning. Much to his surprise and relief Cy did not get birched for his fishy transgression, though the headmaster paced about the room a good while before making this clear, giving Cy ample time to prepare his appendages for the onslaught of stinging wood. The old man removed his mortarboard and ran a hand lengthwise through his thinning white hair, smoothing long wayward strands of it along the dome of his pate. He adjusted his chalk-stained gown about him.

– Sit down, lad.

Willacy had never called him lad before. He was a funny old codger, with foibles and eccentricities, like insisting Cy write script with his unnatural right hand not his natural left, and a recurrently weepy, pus-crusted eye when it came to the examination period, but this term of endearment was a new one to Cy. He wiped his palms on his breeches leg and sat.

– Now, Cyril, I’m going to tell you this because I know you are without a father and it is a father’s duty to inform his offspring of such matters. I do not fault your mother for her neglect, indeed you’ve arrived at your inquisitiveness and speculation reasonably early it seems; then again you are a rather… tall fellow for your age, but, she shall not be blamed for ill preparation. However, we cannot have you running around declaring vulgarity to the world. That would not do. I shall try to be brief and I shall try to be frank.

Being brief and frank were not two of Colin Willacy’s strong points. In all fairness, Cy was of the opinion, he did not get off lightly. It was quite possibly one of the worst punishments he had ever received, and after a dire, meandering, inclusive speech containing every loathsome aspect of a curriculum Cy had no inclination to participate in, he left the headmaster’s quarters, pale and visibly shaken, so his pals were at first convinced he had taken the birching of a lifetime. He probably would have preferred a caning. The incident did not prevent him from sharing his new-found knowledge about the school yard, since he was now in possession of some remarkably formal terminology, some remarkably extensive slang words, and some remarkably modern concepts – Mr Willacy was, after all, a thorough teacher. Within a week several new rhymes had been introduced to Morecambe’s school yards, though Cy sincerely maintained,

whilst getting severely caned, that he was the author and distributor of none of them.

– French letter, French letter, on the spot, there’s nothing better.

– Fishy fanny, fanny fish, won’t you make a funny dish.

So it was that another mysterious world creaked open its door for him.

That July they were all treated to Gaynor Shearer’s obvious nipples, seen like broomhandles through her bathing suit as the chill wind off the Atlantic puckered her skin and the skin of all the other Bathing Beauties lined up on the promenade. They were in the midst of a four-day carnival in anticipation of armistice. Decorated horses and carriages had made their way through the streets in the parade, streaming with banners and leaving snowy trails of paper confetti in their wake. The beauties were officially daring to bare more than had ever been bared before. Had any of the Tory councillors been present at the pedestal that afternoon there may have been a swift dismantling of the exhibition, coats flung over scantily clad bodies – which would not have been entirely unwelcomed by the girls for the air was not a little nippy – and a general sense of spoiled fun. As it was the Bathing Beauties were not interrupted and they posed bravely on the platform, hips at hourglass angles, and with lunatic grins on their powdered faces which were in actuality jaw-locked grimaces of discomfort at being exposed to the elements in such a savage fashion. Cy and every other come-of-age lad in town of such proclivity marvelled at the show, which was nice and naughty at once, and stirred a new ingredient up in them, like batter which would thereafter coat every desirable woman in their lives. He came home immediately after the show and disappeared into his room, eyes a little fazed, gait a little obstructed, so that Reeda assumed her son to be sick with excessive eating. The affair was destined to become one of Morecambe Council’s annual pet peeves and one of England’s best-loved, male-melded, seaside-resort traditions. And though Gaynor’s were not the only nipples on display that day, they certainly were the most pronounced and most persistent and she was crowned queen of the first ever Morecambe Bathing Beauties competition.

On the third day of the carnival there was an ox roast on the prom. A beast from a nearby farm had been slaughtered and roasted on a massive medieval spit. It was set up on a pole resting between two trestles. The strong meaty fragrance drifted across the piers and through the streets, rumbling stomachs and suggesting to the whole of Morecambe that just around every corner was a gorgeous oven-warmed dinner. It was high season and the crowds thronged about the town, queuing for almost a mile to buy their ox sandwiches. Reeda Parks and her son had been helping the butcher carve and distribute the fare all day with the help of two other ladies. It was up to Cy to wrestle as best he could with the monstrous bottle of HP sauce, getting as little as possible on each sandwich – though it was a tad like riding a bicycle downhill without a handle-bar for steering or brakes for stopping – before one of the women whipped the bread together and handed it out to the next in line. Lomax, the butcher, a striped-aproned giant who seemed completely suitable for the task of slicing up such a carcass, was carving furiously and great portions of shredded brown flesh fell into the catch tray below, where Reeda and the others would retrieve it in accordance with the customers’ preferred tastes, lean or gristle or crackling. The butcher’s patter never tired, and never altered.

– Lancashire or Yorkshire, sir? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire, madam? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire sir? Meat or fat?

By the end of the afternoon if Cy never saw an ox sandwich again before departing the earth for more clement climes, or gruelling, furnace-like ones – he still had not ruled out that possibility – it would be entirely too soon.

The boys were cutting down an effigy of Kaiser Bill from the flagpole hook in Pedder Street ready to burn him that evening before the dance when Cy first got a whiff of what was to become, later on, his profession of choice. Though at the time, had this been revealed to him in Alva’s crystal ball or via some other tarot table, it would have seemed pure madness, he would have scoffed and laughed and asked for his carny-thieved jiggery-pokeried pennies back. But that was all to come.

Pedder Street was narrow and winding, one of the older parts of town, with moss on its walls, three churches nestled into its corners and a length of small, sunken-windowed, three-storeyed dwellings with sooty chimneys. It also contained some houses and businesses of ill-reputation, the Professor and Madame Johnson for example, spiritualists with the capability to reunite you with the souls of deceased loved ones and occasionally the departed infamous – communing, it seemed, was a bit like an open telephone line, you never quite knew who you might find on the other end – something Cy’s mother was vehemently against, and there were also houses where it was understood that many women lived at once and many gentlemen visited. From this end of town Cy could just about hear the clank and boom of rust-dead trawlers and German U-boats and submarines being dismantled at Ward’s Ship-Breakers and the strains of mendicant music being played by the blind fiddler at the old harbour. There was no political choice for stringing up the Kaiser in this particular street other than a convenient metal crooking from which to play out his demise and ridicule by hanging. Being still the tallest of the three, and therefore having the extra reach, Cy had climbed up the nearest building with a pair of garden shears to hack the villain loose. It was a question of balance and stretch, out-manoeuvring gravity, wielding the shears while slumped up the crumbling bricks, bandy-legged like a frog. Inelegantly, he held his arms out and with a quick snip removed the Kaiser’s bulging nose.

– Take that you daft little Prussian.

– No time for that now, Cy. It’s a shilling per hundred candles lit along the prom if we hurry.

– All right. Hold your horses.

There was a funny noise coming from the window on whose sill his foot was resting. The sash was cracked open a fraction and Cy could hear a buzzing like that generated inside a beehive when the workers are about to swarm. But it was less of a bumbling, husking animal effect and more the uniform drone of man-made apparatus, like a dentist’s drill. The sound was captivating. There were voices also, men’s voices, one of which was substantially louder and more commanding than the other. He leaned against the wall and tried to listen in to what was being said, while the boys below him waited, shuffling their feet.