Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

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.

— Get on with it, would you, you great string bean?

— We haven’t got all night, nosey-Parker.

Such was the strain of his eavesdropping that Cy was having trouble balancing. He adjusted himself clumsily on the sill. It was at about that point in the proceedings when there was a telltale tinkle of glass pane being broken and the buzzing ceased and the cracked window suddenly slid up. A careless boot-toe, he had over-stepped the platform! A woollen-capped head arrived at the level of Cy’s foot. Two hands with colourfully stained fingers then came out on to the window ledge, one of them grasped Cy’s boot firmly, as if snaring a hare, and the man in the wool cap turned to look up. His eyes were a guttering glacial blue and unrelenting. They were as pale and transparent and fire-cold as a flame leaping out of a mineral-grained log in a grate. Eyes that you wouldn’t want to have to out-stare in an argument, thought Cy, that would make you feel like quarry in a dispute even before a word or curse was spoken, and he returned their gaze, spellbound. The vessels were large and round, containing bad emotion and amusement at once, indications of a personality that would travel the length and breadth of its own deficiencies as well as its redeeming traits, though the former seemed much more likely. And as the eyes observed him upwardly, there was something else to them too: not exactly shock, for here was a man probably not put into such conditions easily, Cy read of him, but soft-surprised cognition. Cy felt a strange perception also. As if some mutual knowledge of the other was casting itself about them. As if both their graves were simultaneously being trodden over. Cy remained perfectly still, partly in sympathetic curiosity, and partly because there did not seem to be another course of action which would not involve an untidy jump from a fair height with the open shearing blades, perhaps leaving one incarcerated leg behind on the sill, and uncomfortably stretching recently evolved and endeared parts of himself he wasn’t willing to stretch before he could wrestle free. Then there might be running and quite possibly a sound leathering from the pursuer if he was caught. After a few quiet, canny moments the eyes waned, the stained hand let go of his ankle, tapped his boot three times, and disappeared. The head retreated and the window sash banged shut, dislodging the remainder of the fractured glass pane. Jonty loud-whispered up to Cy, his hands cupped about his mouth.

— Get down. Get Kaiser Bill down. Hurry up, we can’t stop here. He’s a left-footer and a gype.

— Who’s a left-footer?

— Shhhhh! Mr Riley.

Above Cy another window suddenly opened and the figure of a man leaned out. He had a knife. Cy peered up as best he could without becoming dizzy and losing his footing. It was the same man as before, though he now seemed annoyed. There were keen gestures from his arms and irritation stacked along the veins in his neck. Moving swiftly he sawed through the roping of the Kaiser’s gallows and the doll slumped to the ground. The potty Hohenzollern helmet rattled and spun on the street and rag intestines burst out through the grey uniform. Without a word the window shut, slicing down with a final shucking sound like that of a guillotine. The boys hastily departed Pedder Street.

Afterwards, walking back along the pier and towing the Kaiser behind them in a barrow, Jonty told Cy and Morris that his dad said Mr Riley was an undesirable papist with a disgraceful occupation, who bought dead pigs’ heads from the butchers and took them home for ungodly purposes. Morris was not impressed at all.

— So, my mam eats fish cheeks, she says that’s the best part of the fish to eat. And sometimes the eyeballs, raw, she just picks them out and pops them in her mouth like aniseed balls!

— No, not to eat, you great pillock, to practise on, on the hide, with his needle. His mucky needle. He’s a scraper.

— What does he scrape?

— Don’t know exactly, father won’t tell me, but I know it isn’t nice.

Apparently there was more pointy ministry in the town than just Cy’s mother’s. When he got home Cy told his mam about the Kaiser, about Mr Riley and the pigs, hoping she might be able to clarify the situation.

— Well. I doubt very much whether Lomax would let go of his pigs’ heads to anyone, love, Catholic or not. Otherwise he’d not have any sausages to sell on Thursdays.

— Do we know Mr Riley?

— I know of him, love.

— What’s a scraper?

— It’s a man that does tattooing. Your dad had a tattoo on his shoulder. Lots of men of the sea do. Sort of like a club badge, though it’s quite a personal thing.

— Why was he not mad about the window pane? Why did he help us cut Kaiser Bill down? Is he a radical?

— Oh, goodness knows. Perhaps Mr Riley is a Bolshevik, son. I believe there are a few around.

Cy did not mention his feeling of déjà vu, that grave-robbing look between them of retrieving a body they both had some loon-moon claim to. It was as if the man had recognized him. It was as if he had been expecting him. That’s how the eyes had seemed.

There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning had been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.