Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Eva Brennan, on the other hand, gave him no such early forecast that she would trample on his heart. Life had been ticking along just fine until she stepped a dainty foot through the Bayview’s door with her mother and father two years later, lent like the weather, like the bright borrowed days in the northern counties that early guest season of 1920. She was the loveliest thing Cy had ever seen, beside Aurora Borealis and Gaynor’s nipples. She was fourteen. She was blonde. And had freckles on the backs of her arms. She didn’t have tuberculosis. Her mother had made her a flower bonnet to wear in the Easter parade, with blue cornflowers in it that made her eyes seem darker and sadder. In the citrus light of the spring bay parade the hair on her temples had an aura of something fairy-spun. For three days Cy tried to tell her that he liked her by giving her an extra large helping of cabbage at dinner, and hanging her coat up on the stand whenever she came in. She always smiled at him. As if curious and waiting. When he lay in bed at night and thought of her two rooms away his legs and chest ached, as if he’d spent the day on the school’s pitches at the bottom of a scrum, and his now basally controllable cock rose, bowed, and rose again. There was only one thing for it — he would have to enlist the help of the boys in order to woo her. Jonty had had more experience with girls, being not averse to handing out his mother’s beauty potions in the school yard and having kissed two at least for payment to the best of Cy’s knowledge, which was two more than he ever had. He invited his friends over to formulate a plan of action. Morris said he would rather go fishing than watch anyone fumbling with a girl, and that Cy could hook her Pisces vaginales if he wanted, but he himself fancied a nice flounder for his supper. Morris hadn’t quite got the hang of girls. Jonty was only too happy to assist.

— Does she have big bosomers?

— Biggish.

— Bigger than a bee sting?

— Yes.

— Marvellous.

On the last day of the Brennans’ seaside vacation Cy and Eva and Jonty went for a walk along the beach. Jonty was always good for getting people talking. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. It was low tide and Cy was determined to find a shell or two to add to Eva’s collection. He walked down to the waterline keeping his eyes peeled for a worthy specimen — something she could put on her vanity dresser when she went back home to Yorkshire, and she’d remember him and write him letters glancing up at it, pink and glazed inside with the light coming through it like thin bone china, sitting next to a hairbrush spun with her blonde hair. And she’d sign her name with an X at the bottom of the page signifying their first kiss on the shore at Morecambe, shortly to be undertaken. So peeled were his eyes between bubbled seaweed and smooth shingle, that he drifted off away from the other two as they chatted. So peeled were they that he missed their abbreviated courtship, the giggle of innuendo, the not-so-accidental brush of hands together as they strolled, the sharing of an ice-cone — trailing tongues along the paths made in the vanilla cream by each other. When he looked up, finally defeated in his search for a suitable love-token, he could see them standing very close together. And Eva put her arms up round Jonty’s neck, and gave him the kiss that was supposed to be Cy’s. Every bone in Cy’s body let go of its neighbour and clattered down inside him to the sick soles of his shoes. It was as if somebody had taken a wrecking ball not only to his skeleton but to his porcelain-baked, sea-delicate, pink-lit aspirations as well. When they were done kissing Eva turned to Cy and waved, then tickled Jonty in his ribs, and she went alone back up the beach steps to the prom and then back to the Bayview Hotel, where she packed her suitcase full of bonnets and shells and that afternoon left on the train to Yorkshire with her parents. Cy would probably have been too tall to kiss her anyway, Jonty informed him as they sat on the bathing pool wall later that day, even if he had got round to it, and his you-know-what would have likely bayoneted her in the stomach.

There were to be other kisses for Cyril Parks, with girls of varying statures. He drank extra milk for mending his weakened spirit and bones and put himself back together. He forgave Jonty, who hadn’t known the whole truth of the matter, he insisted, and bit by bit Cy acquainted himself with the messy, mistimed, warm and wet-patched world of courting. But Eva Brennan had done her part and remodelled his anatomy, if for no other reason than she was the first to break him. His bones felt still a little weak, as if once having been dislocated from each other they would never again bear quite such romantic weight. And he stopped riding the toboggans and the wooden coasters in the fun parks of Morecambe, not being able to take pleasure in the sensation of being boneless any more, the feeling of having something falling out of him, like hope falling down brittle as calcium dust to the empty shore.

Boggarts and eels and bore-running behind them, the boys found part-time employment around the town so as to be able to help out at home, purchase tickets to the pictures and chips from the kiosks. Cy got a job after school and on Saturday afternoons at the print shop on Strickland Street. The printers was owned by Reginald Greene, who droned on about the war and how he’d never sleep another full night for the perpetual ringing in his ears of explosions, and how his wife was as cold as a fish when she moved past him after his return and that he might as well have perished in the bloody trenches for all she cared. Greene paid him enough to keep him amused at weekends and some went to his mother, which gave her a proud look every time an envelope was handed to her and she would mark it up in its own separate column on the page of her weekly accounting log. Then she would produce Stanley Parks’s old curved pipe from the kitchen drawer, pack it with tobacco and have a smoke. Cy was never sure his mother truly enjoyed smoking for she sneezed frequently as she partook and her eyes watered. The act seemed more compulsive and obligatory than a pleasurable habit, but he knew better than to question it. Reeda had her ways.

The work at the printers was decent, straightforward and repetitive, giving him a chance to develop his artistic proclivity and perfect his lettering. There was something satisfying about surrounding bright paints with fat black borders. There was something pleasing about blocking and keeping colour. It was a nice job. And for a time he felt well suited and well spent in life. Aside from the wrinkling up of girls’ skirts and shortly thereafter the wrinkling up of their foreheads in protest, the tedium of Greene’s curmudgeonly company with its nocturnally repressed urges, and the occasional cauliflower ear or black eye received while flanking on the school rugby pitches, if there were years in his life which he would call smooth and peaceful and easy it would be these. Even so, at the back of that thought, at the bottom of his memory, in the rafters of his mind, he knew some alternate state of being must soon exist, a converse influence, that which weighed down the rusty pan on the darker side of the scales to balance its shiny partner. The things of the universe being equal as they always were.

Eliot Riley swore he was the first man to try graduated black shading and make it work, though Cy would hear that claim repeated in the booths of Coney Island a decade later. Riley could create an illusion on a flat surface of skin. The things he could do with black ink and shading on flesh were quasi-magical. He was an engraver, like William Blake. He was a sculptor, he was a Bernini, had Cy heard of Bernini?