Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— Look at it. It’s beautiful, Morris. It’s beautiful.

— It is at that.

And the two boys stood watching the impossibility of the entire western portion of the sky alight with burning snowflakes. When the dome finally tumbled it did so without grace. It sucked into itself the way a drunk finally gives in to stupor and folds inwards to the floor. The noise of it crashing down one hundred feet to the shore below was equally ignominious, it was the uncontrolled groaning of something large and restricted becoming uncharacteristically mobile. Though the fall looked to be an implosion of sorts, an inverted tumble, at the end of its descent it altered shape to thrust outwards. The crowds on the beach gasped. A flush of warmth moved past them, as did a small tidal wave of sparks and fireworks.

By this point Cy’s mother was looking for him. She had not liked the way in which the fire had leaped and streaked along the sand with the pavilion’s collapse, chasing after the stray wood it was intent on devouring. The faces of those watching the show were orange and shadowy, even her sicker guests looked momentarily healthy in the warm aura of the blaze. Those in the front row, closer to the volatile mass of cinder-spinning, roaring timber were only black silhouettes, and she could not see the one belonging to her boy. By the time she had reached the Bayview Hotel and checked that her guests did not need any calming spirits or rubs for their smoke-agitated chests, her son was already home, drinking milk in the kitchen with Morris Gibbs. His cheeks were blown red and his eyebrows were thinner than she remembered. And he had the look about him of a laudanum taker after a purchase. Lit up, let out and satisfied.

The next morning was Easter Sunday. Even for such a holy day the churches of the town were unusually packed for the morning services. Many had not felt at all comfortable with the previous night’s events, and were comforted even less by the image of a burning pathway leading to a fiery temple which had been presented to them. It was interpreted by multiple citizens on a personal level as possibly being prophetic, an indication of what might be awaiting them upon their deathbeds. Caring little for damnation or days of reckoning, all the boys of the town went down to the wreckage of the pavilion to ferret around. It was now a huge pile of debris that the tide had been in and out over, extinguishing any residual smoulder. Some were climbing on the blackened heap, others rooting through the rubble looking for treasure, fake gold-leafing from the roof, tapestry from within the ballroom. After serving breakfast in the hotel Cy slipped out and went down to the beach. He walked about with his hands in his pockets, kicking bits of decking and bricks, tarnished tiles. The lads around him were excited by the proximity of destruction, by the fact that something formerly so grand and spectacular was now demolished. A strange exuberance and exhilaration roused them and they shoved each other around. Their behaviour reminded him of Reeda’s comments about the present ugliness abroad that much of Europe was well and truly engaged in. She often said to him over the top of the morning paper that there was a certain pleasure for some people in violence. She said you could still hear it ringing in a few of the ones who came back from the war, and in those running the affair. Men especially suffered from this disposition, she informed him frankly and unapologetically. As if some were born hollow and there was a hole cut in their hearts that produced music when the breath of spite and madness was blown through them.

Cy looked up at the greyish March sky. Not a hint that it had once swum with flickering schooling light remained there. The fiery winter storm was gone. It seemed right that out of such beauty should come such awful devastation, he supposed, the things of the universe being equal and linked, like birth and death, his life for his father’s. Fee Lung, the Chinese magician who played in the pavilion every Friday night, was standing by the desecrated spire of the dome, now half-buried in the sand, shaking his head. He looked over at Cy and smiled pristinely, solemnly.

— Yes, yes, all is gone.

Next to his polished feet, half hidden by spoiled wood, there appeared to be a stringed instrument of some kind, smallish, charred at the neck, perhaps a violin that had miraculously avoided being consumed by the flames. Cy pointed to it and Fee Lung stooped to retrieve the charmed item, bringing it out from under the wreckage like a rabbit from a black top hat. The Viennese Orchestra had been booked to play in the Taj Mahal that very evening.

Beauty and destruction, thought Cy, now there’s a trick.

His mother was right. War was a peculiar thing. It suited some and sullied others. It combed the region thinner of its men and provided conveyor-belt work and wagon-driving skills for women. Loved ones were lost, new loves were found. Soldiers arrived and marched on the prom, soldiers disappeared and died at Ypres and the Somme. Mrs Gardner of number 42 West Street claimed a widow’s pension for her deceased husband, then married to become Mrs Burton, until Mr Gardner arrived home on one leg and off she went to court for bigamy. Many families retired to Morecambe when husbands and fathers returned from abroad, having faced the worst that life could offer they were now content to live in the cheeriest place they could remember, and new houses were built to accommodate those coming in. The Tower, incomplete and scarcely rivalling those neighbouring structures it was supposed to rival, was stripped of excess metal for the war effort, rendered skeletal, though the dancehalls still made a roaring profit and provided funds for the returning wounded, and the picture houses boomed, providing a shadowy haven for potentially doomed couples to explore inside each other’s clothing while they had the chance. In people’s eyes there were strange lights that Cy had never seen before. Often it was a sad luminescence, weary with grief, light in a minor key, like the death-glow of the moon when it’s left behind in the winter day sky, stranded long after night has departed. Sometimes, as in the eyes of the White Lund women, the lights were new and budding, as useful as fresh stars emerging against a world of blackness. Then the stars went out when the girls were told their sweethearts would not be coming home. It was a time of light and dark, of good and bad. The war gave people purpose and it also brought them pain. Either way the town came through the troubles with remarkable resilience. It wept for the unfortunate, then gathered itself up and in a spirit of continuing humour it told a joke or two. Reeda said to Cy that Morecambe was needed more than ever in these years. And perhaps escape was the best prescription for the nation’s suffering, a way for the north to keep up morale. For those used to scraping by with very little money and holidaying cheap at the seaside resort the pinch of the war was no deterrent. Reeda’s consumptives were unfit for any kind of duty and were as faithful to the Bayview as ever. There may have been more day-trippers to the coast and fewer boarders through the years of conflict, but by and by the income of the town remained the same. Though the war changed something in folk slightly, Cy could tell. When people made mention of it, it was never certain what they would offer you. If asked they could be enraged or sullen, broken or mending, hopeful or raving. So for a time he had the feeling the ground was never quite firm beneath his feet.