Sarah Hall: The Electric Michelangelo

And merciful breath. They looked at Cy with apology as they hacked and gurgled but also with a measure of determination on their ashen, bulging faces, which was at heart impersonal and informed him his presence mattered not in the affair. Whatever the Devil did with the by-product of the deal after it washed down the sink he did not care to know. He hated the pink wash of fluid that broke on their temples before the coughing began, for there were little giveaways of the disease he’d learned to interpret, and if he saw them in time and his mother was not around to prevent him, he would put down the fresh linens, the bars of pungent soap he was distributing, and back out of the room. Tuberculosis gave him the withering-willies. That and the other sick industrial legacies did not seem to bother his mother. She went about the hotel with no such trepidation. They needed the money to keep the hotel afloat and these guests were as welcome as any others, money was money after all. But Cy knew that Reeda Parks possessed a tolerance for these patients that went well beyond financial solvency and that many had lost their jobs due to poor health, so he suspected her rates must have been lower than those for ordinary folk. None of the other Morecambe boarding houses and hotels were as keen to take consumptives as Reeda. The Bayview Hotel had become known as a sanctuary, though it was not advertised outright in the papers as such. Even folk on their last legs often got room and board within, so that she acted as both bed-nurse and hostess. She was immune to the effluent, the slime, the smell and the sense of false hope that hung around their rooms like flies about finished with a corpse. She did not get that weak-kneed feeling when they coughed and spat. She didn’t object to the proximity of mucus and fluid and damp spillage in her environment. She was toad-like in that fashion. Nor was Cy encouraged towards a better frame of mind by her resolve. It was distressing to him that she abdicated her common share of distaste, and it made her seem overly stern, even a touch Gothic. But if he took it up with her she simply lost her temper.

— What ails you boy! What a cold heart you have! Cyril, they did not ask to be struck with this disease. They received it for a lifetime’s honest toil. I’m just looking after my own, as should you, my boy. We’re not all born with our hands and feet above deck, port-out starboard-home, now are we? Manners to strangers, whether your equals or your betters, should be one and the same, young man. One and the same. That is to say equal to the courtesy you pay yourself.

Still, this did not change the fact that the consumptives coughed up blood and phlegm into basins like unholy spawn and he could not abide it.

— Now take this shrimp up to Mrs Baxter and inform her that the Territorial Band is marching at three o’clock if she cares to take a turn on the prom. I shall be available to take her arm if she’s feeling wan.

The consumptives appreciated Reeda’s immunity and mistook it for compassion or some kind of heightened sense of social duty, and for her kindness they would often take her hand in theirs and kiss it with their roe-red mouths.

— Reeda, Reeda. You’re an absolute angel.

They sat next to the open bay windows of the hotel if they were too weak to stroll on the promenade with the rest of the summer masses in straw hats and with breeze-tugged umbrellas, letting the curtains blow in and eager for the wind on their faces. Their basins tucked like upturned helmets on their blanketed knees. They were desperate for air. More specifically, they were desperate for the air in Morecambe. They sucked it down in between their fits and held it inside their lungs like opium smokers in a den. They inhaled like they were performing exercises: loudly, with determination and regiment. They exhaled the way people sometimes did behind closed doors at night in the Bayview when all were abed and Cy was passing on the way to the kitchen for a glass of milk, letting out breathy noises as if their lungs were working a fraction beyond their control. Morecambe’s air was renowned, if not nationwide then reliably in the north, for its restorative properties, its tonic qualities. It was soft. That was how everyone described it, including the Morecambe Visitor and General Advertiser. Soft, soft air. Healing. Medicinal almost, and if only someone had known how to bottle it, fortunes could have been made worldwide. Beautifully soft. This was, in large part, a tourism ruse, but of course the claim was a feature endorsed in every advertisement for every hotel or boarding house in the town. See Naples and Die, see Morecambe and Live! they read. When a white lie was told here, it was told in bold. So as far as the unwitting, desperate, industrially ravaged workers of the north were concerned the air possessed mystical, salving, qualities. It might even save them from Old Chokey if they were lucky. They wanted to believe it, and so they did believe it. And in the end, with the proliferation of the claim, year after year, season after season, even Morecambrians half-believed what they were issuing as truth, thus their maintenance of the fib took on extremely convincing proportions. Including Reeda Parks’s.

— Cyril, if they ask for open windows, just open the windows, for pity’s sake, and fetch more blankets if it’s chilly. Best we let them have what they came for. Nothing like fresh air to improve the inflicted and we have plenty of it to spare, and it is very special.

Now Cyril Parks knew that this claim of miracle air was a fiction even at his age. The townsfolk of Morecambe were no more robust than anyone else he had met in England and they had access to it all the time. Locals still passed away in old age and were driven in carriages to the graveyard on Heysham Hill by men in tall black hats and horses with creaking black bridlery and sinister feather head-plumes. The consumptives sometimes died in the hotel while on holiday, if they had a sudden decline in condition and could not be transported to the sanatorium under Blencathra mountain, or home to loved ones in Glasgow, Bradford or the Yorkshire towns in time. Upon consideration the air was quite soft, he supposed; you didn’t particularly notice it going in and out, though he had no idea what hard air was like in comparison. The air over in Yorkshire seemed about the same when Cy had visited his Aunt Doris there, two Christmases ago, though the wind on the Yorkshire moors had had something different about it, a spirit that was not coastal, a tone that was dry and dirge-like, and it had sent shivers down his spine as it fluted and lamented during his stay, haunting the rocks and trees and grass. Perhaps London had hard air. Perhaps it was what they called a city phenomenon. Or perhaps the lack of sea had something to do with it. No. Morecambe’s air was not discomforting. It didn’t make your lungs bleed, unless they were bleeding already. The consumptives liked it, trusted it, used it. They could obviously tell the difference between a soft and hard climate where he could not.

There were times his mother caught him backing out of the hotel rooms looking disgusted, and he’d find her hand on the back of his neck. A cool hand that might have been, of late, near the puckered mouth of a consumptive. A hand that told him not to move back another inch. A hand that felt as pale as the sick body it had been joined with. And he would shiver. He imagined if he ever touched one of the customers with tuberculosis they would feel cold like snow, even on their necks where they should be warm. Like a stone house already abandoned. Or a candle, since their appearance was deadened like the waxwork figures in Madame Tussaud’s. But he was careful not to touch them, if at all possible. And he was careful to try not to look at the soupish mess in their basins, that substance with its disagreeable appearance which had led him to avoid eating stewed tomatoes and thick-shred marmalade for going on three years now purely because of the cursed similarities.

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