Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— Lordy, look at the time. I must get on or we’ll be wearing wet woollies all week. Perhaps you’ll tell me about it later on, about what you’ve been doing and how things are shaping up.

The summer of 1922 was to be a summer of disappointment, with little else for Cy to do than continue sitting mixing ink and filing needles, fixing electro-magnets and springs to the best of his ability and taking money from the customers. And not even enough scant pay to get him to the picture house on Saturday night to see Charlie Chaplin films or Marnau’s stoddering vampire, with Morris and Jonty, who would sub him the ticket price whenever they could, but had no steadier or more generous income than he did. They couldn’t understand Cy’s interest in tattooing. They couldn’t understand it under all his disappointment, his giving up of drawing — for Riley didn’t even let him hang up his good designs in the shop, though he had made plenty, nor when he was not freehanding did he let him trace the acetate stencils, print them with charcoal, Vaseline a back and leave a preliminary mark for Riley to finish, like a proper apprentice blocking in compositions for the master. And they could not understand Eliot Riley, with his scowls and his songs, his bear-baiting sneers and his never certain behaviour when they came to call for Cy. Had he fought in the war? they asked. Is that why he was such a bastard, is that why he had become so impossible, because he had some kind of battle shock disorder, like the twitching men returned to the town in 1918, who from time to time fell to their knees and howled in the streets of Morecambe? Was it mania? Was it depression? Was it both together? The boys were stumped for any other reason. They could not fathom Cy’s loyalty to this villain. They were befuddled and afraid and unable to relate to the man. For who in any right mind or any leap into a madhouse limbo could understand the workings and breakings of Eliot Riley?

When Reeda Parks’s breast began to invert she knew, in that portion of her heart where the tightest-bound and least-admitted of all secrets are kept, that her time had come. She watched her nipple retreat for five days, she became quieter and less certain of her work, leaving cupboards open and pastry half rolled. There were small pains in her body that she had not taken seriously before, had not let bother her — in her wrist, her abdomen, her upper back. Now they took on meaning. But she hadn’t seen it coming, she hadn’t seen it coming, that was what made her lean to the wall on which she had leaned after the deaths of the ideas of so many children, and weep. She took the time to observe her tall son across the table when they ate supper together, noticing his high forehead, the untidy locks of hair around his collar — he hated visiting the barber and would never let her cut it, and how his Adam’s apple moved in his throat when he swallowed, triangularly, like the corner shank on a steam-train wheel as it begins to piston. And how she could tell when he was thinking hard on something because his lips sometimes ghosted over words without realizing what they were doing, or he suddenly snorted or laughed out loud for no good reason. And she thought about how she loved him, all through herself, like muscle that held her up without her even feeling it. She visited the doctor and a surgery was planned, but within weeks it became apparent that there was little could be done, they couldn’t cut her back far enough, she was a blighted tree that had a cancer close around its trunk. She would not remain in Lancaster infirmary. She wanted the Bayview, where she could take the last of her life, so she could end it where she’d always made it. And she would take the opportunity to watch the pleasing motion of bay, that enormous living clock that had always been at the back of her when she worked, like a long, daily two-swing pendulum clock. She would open the window in her own room and let the sea’s breath invigorate the air around her, she did enjoy the cooler weather, there was a rousing, wakeful quality about it. As if clarity had been restored after the muggy, yawning heat of summer. There would be her Cyril. With her breast gone and her body faltering she would need to finally and fully wean him off her care.

He was destroyed only in so far as all young men who lose their mothers are but will recover. Before she left for the hospital he wouldn’t let her see his face, keeping it pressed into the crook of his elbow on the table for an hour. As if to take it out and let his eyes notice her new paleness and tiredness and the determination of her belief in her mortem-lot would be to admit her fate himself and say he gave it blessing, which he did not, he did not.

— They’ve got to cut the fly-walk off me, luvvie; if it doesn’t go the whole loaf will turn bad.

Finding somewhere within her another of her knell-captured allegories, another of her boiled-down for stock metaphors. It was September’s end. A full blustery September with water along its edges at night and a wet blue colour to its days. The town and bay were rushing along under a painter’s oil-stroked sky as they always did in autumn. The guests were all but gone, Reeda had finished another summer season, and to her credit everything was in order. She adjusted her books, summarized them, did not make a budget for the winter. It had been a fair summer, there was money enough to set Cyril up in a way that meant he could soon provide for himself. The bank was informed of the discontinuance of mortgage. Hotel furniture was sold off. There were no stacks of sheets brought out for mending, nor was a list of winter repairs for the hotel made. She went in for her already failed surgery, spent an agonizing week in hospital during which Cy visited every day, and she came home draining fluids through piping in her chest and unable to lift her right arm. She let her son rally round her, knowing he needed to feel useful. Then she summoned Eliot Riley, who took one look at her lying drained and smeary as an empty bottle of cream against the pillow and fell about weeping.

— Take your hat off, Eliot, and close the door. And I truly hope you’ve sobered.

— Of course I’m sober, woman! What do you take me for?

Cy was not in the room but he could half hear Riley in his distress, hear the serration at the pauses of his brittle, cuttlefish sentences and the use of his mother’s name over and over: Reeda, Reeda. For two people who saw each other infrequently as they did, their meetings were actuated, sentimental affairs. So that again Cy wondered if there was not some old abandoned, rusted chassis to their relationship, down under all the growth of years it might lie there still, hidden, even from them, but obstruction enough for them to clang their feet on when they came together. Perhaps in a time before his father, though Cy felt sure his mam would have told him back when he first asked to be Riley’s lad if there was a personal history which meant the employment proposal was improper. Towards the end of the discussion it was Reeda who did the talking and Riley listened. Her tone was matter of fact, occasionally she broke off, for her pain came intermittently, like the occasional taller waves in the bay that threw boats upwards and off their charted course. And he could make out one word that she repeated. If, if, if, so he knew there was choice somewhere in the matter.

As he left the Bayview, Riley walked past Cy without a word of consolation. Without a word at all. As if his own grief invested in the loss of Cy’s mother prevented him from such expressions and inclusions lest he break down again. His demeanour was that of an emoting ham, the theatrical pathos of a fan leaving a tragic opera. Like he was wrapped up in the misery and felt it more than even Cy, the son, who was dwarfed and discredited by such enthusiastic mourning. The minted eyes had swathes of red and grey about them. His big lips quavered. He had sympathy only for himself. Not for the first time Cy wanted to yell out or run his hand along the table crashing through objects and creating infernal noise, to assure Riley he was not invisible, not insignificant, actually. Riley was a sentimental, discriminate-hearted, impossibly rude and selfish man.