Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— 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.