Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Reeda had written to her sister Doris, informing her of the situation. She arrived a week later, smelling of old lace and apprehension, and Cy was sent to meet her at the station. Doris scuttled about in the Bayview kitchen, pasting food down into something manageable for his mother, and she read her articles from the Visitor, about the bus which had crashed through the prom rail to the shore killing three passengers, about which of the town’s prostitutes had been arrested, as if Morecambe was a venue somewhere across the country, not a place just outside the window. Reeda’s hair thinned to the point where she kept a headscarf on her at all times like a clay-baked caul. Her limbs and organs began to fail her, one day she simply could not get out of bed, and Cy was once again required to empty basins of waste — her bile ducts sent into frenzy, her lungs like blighted branches, her bowels leaking. There was more and more blood in her waters, as the cancer moved further in. And there was a lot of pain, times when his mother cinched in on the bed and held her breath for long minutes, before releasing it and panting dryly like a heat-exhausted dog. Her grey gunmetal eyes went out to some place stranded between the conscious oracle of her ill fortune and a bed-of-nails of sleep. The doctor called by with stronger medication for her to take, and when she refused it, saying she would not waste her last hours and days with red dreams or a mouth too cottony to speak, her sister ground down the tablets and mixed it with her broth, asking Cy for forgiveness as she did so. As if he now held the map to Reeda’s mind, and might direct them in their search for a rational, befitting, governed end. As if his complicity might unkill her thinking, suffering death.

She wanted her son. When everyone else in the room became a stranger, she wanted him. To sit with her if he would, and remember her with a measure of sweet and a measure of savoury when it was over, like all well-prepared dishes both parts together made the other complementary and better. Her words quick now as if she wanted them expelled, as if they were her deadlined duty and not to be relished or appraised as a glass-blown object passed gently between hands and turned over.

— One without the other we are all made poorer. Remember that of all of us, Cyril. Remember it of Mr Riley. He is what he is and he’s more a mirror than any man you’ll meet. We did our bit, didn’t we, love? We did our bit here.

He did not know which pieces of life she was speaking about. He didn’t know but he took her hand as she had once taken his to lead him to the blood-lit window, and he wished for a white horse on the shore to see her safely through the mist. Then, after four months of struggling, her death grew and hatched one night from the repeating, withering body and she was gone. Reeda Parks, in all her graceless, earthed and ordinary wisdom, was gone.

The Ladies of Leeds arrived the day of the funeral and laid flowers on Reeda’s grave, dressed in long, out-of-fashion skirts as if for a royal funeral. Cy had not seen them since his youth and did not know his mother was still in correspondence with them. But he remembered their complementary, stirred-up faces as they filed into the Bayview for her wake, and washed the dishes and made Doris feel uncomfortable. That night they each lit candles on the promenade and joined hands. They were tearless, resolute. There was something martial to their movements, a quality of drilled and synchronous ceremony beneath their ruffles, like the softest military salute. It was the second of March, in 1923, and one of the ladies came to Cy and passed him a candle as he stood by the Bayview door watching the gunner’s flames pinking up the ladies’ hands. This day, eleven years ago, she said, London rattled and shook with the sound of rocks and sticks breaking Parliament’s windows, and though she wasn’t there, your mother’s heart was one of those rocks, like the rocks that will one day smash all the prejudices of her country.

She had said he would have to make a choice — go with his Aunt Doris to Yorkshire, if he wanted, or stay with Mr Riley, who would take him in as boarder and apprentice, if he wanted. If, if, if. And there again was that forking road unfolding and dividing, and him knowing there was a route of moderate, well-put-together living, or a way of life bitter-sacrificed and bitter-gained, of damning and enlightening direction. The path of shallow passing, or the path that cut right through him — the path of Riley’s influence and Riley’s needle inserted like a catheter into the deepest soul chamber of him, into the worst and best places of him, which would never be removed, or if it was scar-tissue would for ever keep the channel open.

So when Cy got as far as the brown moors of Yorkshire on the train, and heard the reeding wind again across the rock formations, he kissed his Aunt Doris goodbye and thanked her, then got off at the very next station and bought a one-way ticket back to Morecambe Bay.

— Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti, who became known to the world and its dog as Michelangelo, was born in 1475 and died in 1564. That made him eighty-nine years old. Not a bad age for a bugger back then. Now, there wasn’t a lot the man couldn’t do, which was quite common for that period. Not like today, where men just sit around with their cocks in their hands waiting for a job to come along, and only being skilled enough to mortar brick or dig out coal or count up taxes, one at a time. Depression or not, lad, it was harder back then, so I’ve more respect for what got done. No, this was a different time. When men could set to on any task and get it done. So Michelangelo was a painter, an architect, a sculptor and a poet. All things relevant to our trade. Some say Leonardo was the tip-top-tradey of that period, and fair play, he wasn’t a village idiot, but the truth is Michelangelo had a calling and was his own boss in a way none of the rest were, even while he took work for bread and butter. That’s why his painting got all long and stretchy, and not everybody’s cup of tea. He had something go through him towards the end. Let me tell you, any man that sees it in himself to paint the hand of God is something a bit special. Now the thing to remember about Michelangelo is this; he’d a bugger of a time getting blue paint. Just like us. It was expensive back then, see, hard to manage, and it was only used for very special things, like our Holy Mother’s robes. If there’s one thing we could do to live up to Michelangelo, it’s crack this bastard riddle with blue ink. Speaking of tea, what say you pop upstairs and put the kettle on, lad?

There were five colours in the tattooing pallet, and a limited archive of symbols to cover the spectrum of life and death. Five colours to capture all the joys and sorrows of the world and hold them down against a piece of body. Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world right then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother’s sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing.