Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

The rooms above Eleven Pedder Street were cold and small, claustrophobic, like a cell or priest’s hole. Riley was not one for warmth but he was neat and he was tidy, which came as a surprise to Cy when he entered the domain. He had never been upstairs in all the time he had been warden to Riley and carted the drunk man home, preferring to leave him in the parlour downstairs or at the front door. Things were put away, stacked, or folded; washed at the sink the cups were shining in the bleached light of the kitchen as they dried, and there was a row of eggs on a dresser shelf as concise and uniform as a squadron. Or perhaps Riley was just deficient in acquiring domestic items, for the place was basic in appearance: chairs, table, plates, sink, bottles, food in stages of decay. And on the mantelpiece of the ever-empty fireplace were the skulls of several birds, hook-beaked, cranially fissured, delicate and predatory. A statue of the Virgin Mary stood on the very corner of the mantle as if any moment she might topple off, as if she were being tested in her balance or her own faith. Her hands were folded together in prayer, her head was bent and it seemed she was in fact looking over the precipice to the floor below. There were one or two other objects lying about, nothing distinguished, old art history books with splitting spines. The place itself was like a still-life painting. In Cy’s room, the room that Riley had prepared for him, was a mattress on the floor and four empty wooden vegetable crates to hold his possessions and clothing. There was a small window, from which the metal hook that had hung Kaiser Bill could be reached. A paint-peeling ceiling. Separating floorboards. It was monastic, it was bare and minimal, and he could not help but feel that he had stepped back in time to some artistic, suffering vault, which was appropriate to his new situation. There was an awful feel to the place — like it had been, for quite some time, waiting for him.

It became apparent that Cy had finished with school. He was sixteen, and Headmaster Willacy was no match for the law and logistics of Eliot Riley, for all his insistence that the boy had brains and should be allowed to continue. It became apparent that he was now a full-time employee and that in that one about turn half way to Yorkshire he had sold his soul to Riley. For better, for worse. He was not heckled for being late to work, for walking back to Eleven Pedder Street with his suitcase in hand a week after he was due. Riley had expected him to come after they boarded up the Bayview, just as Aunt Doris had expected him to come with her after they lowered the body of his mother into the ground, but there were no repercussions for his hiatus. He had given assurance to neither guardian of his plans, in truth he had not really spoken to anyone such was his grief. Riley simply opened the door and stepped aside and let him enter, and on his first day back in the shop, he proceeded with the first of his customized Lives of the Great Masters lectures. It was long overdue after his promise to Reeda, and came now as if in compensation for her death, and it had more than a note or two of personal fabrication and fiction to it. Though this one slackening of the bit in his mouth and the bridle would be the last courtesy Riley ever paid Cy. Ever after, he woke him with his morning pissing and his coughing. He woke him with his nocturnal smashing and his cussing, the occasional sound of his voice joined with another, its pitch become more female, as he grunted and groaned. He berated him for every minor fault and fumble at work. He made him skivvy to his every whim and fancy. He was unfair and cruel and tasteless with his comments. And he began to infect Cy with his maelstrom temperament. Cy found his shouting voice and the terrifying beauty of fists against a surface when the gates of control and reason are unhinged and the hooves of thick-packed, red-eyed beasts come thundering out. He had to concentrate, harder than he ever had in school, to tease out splinters of fulfilment and sanity and peace from the arrangement. And all the while he missed Reeda, missed her unmitigated kindness and her simple reasoning, the salve of benevolence with which she soothed his raw troubles and loosened the dirt of life that might if left untreated infect his spirit. And God, wasn’t life just lonely without her!

It was awful not to be in the Bayview for the first few summer seasons, with the sick but happy crowds. It was like being shown an amputated leg that had once held up his torso. At times he found himself automatically walking in the hotel’s direction, and he’d have to stop and remember his mother’s death and turn back on the way he had come. It was strange to pass by the graveyard and think of his mother, put away there, like her extra linens in the autumn in a dark cupboard. Betrayed by the soft air, which didn’t save her. There had been something certain about turn-over and survival at the Bayview Hotel, whether it was his mother’s financial acumen or her loyal guests or her ability to pin the bottom of the world up with her ethics and her tolerance and her mulish, working-woman’s patience, he did not know. Tattooing, as he came to understand it, was an altogether more precarious vocation and style of living. There could be no advertisements in the Visitor. There may have been more people around in the summer but there were no set seasons when it came to the compulsions and treasons and decisions of the human brain to change its packaging, to disguise its appearance or release its imprisoned identity. A man or woman had to refer to the discrete almanac of the mind to find those changeling cycles and tides and magnitudes, and arrive at the needle’s end of his or her own accord. Impulsively, erratically, naturally. So, now and again, other supplemental jobs had to be found. For Cy in hotel kitchens, dismantling fish heads and filleting spines from smoked bodies at the Trawlers’ Cooperative building with Morris, even sweeping the aisles of the theatre in the Alhambra on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Riley had his own methods for breaking even, some of which were legal, many of which were not. The least reliable source of income was his gambling, on horses, on hounds, and even on cockfights held in farms around the region. The most dangerous were his excursions with Paddy Broadbent to the city of Liverpool for unspecified purposes, which resulted in frequent scars and injuries though tired jubilation observed upon their return.

And the most remarkable, though if Cy thought about it perhaps it was somehow fitting, was Riley’s skill for training hawks. He was a part-time falconer, hence his penchant for displaying bird skulls like pieces of art on the mantle. Some family connection or learned relative had granted him membership to this singular game-keeping guild. He had in his time worked at three manor houses in the district, and one in East Yorkshire, riding with the aristocracy as they searched the moors and estate lands for hares and rabbits, and that employment opportunity seemed always to be open, so Cy guessed it was highly specialized. Business needed to be consistently bad for him to do it as he would need to spend guaranteed time during the juvenile months with the bird, weighing it on the leather wrist strap, fitting the tiny ankle brace, easing the hood and helmet on and off the bird until it trusted him to do it without fighting the darkness, during which period trade at Morecambe could suddenly pick up again. And Riley did not like these employers. He scorned their birthrights, their repressions and what they represented to the common man while he took their wages.

The outcome of breaking the outer layer of the bird’s wild nature was by no means certain. Rather than cooperate a bird of prey could will itself to death, Riley told him. They could be the stubbornest buggers, he said with admiration. He took Cy along with him just once on such an excursion. The lord was away from his manor and Riley brought his apprentice down to the mews. He put on a heavy greasy jacket and instructed Cy to be as quiet as he could. In the cage at the outskirts of the estate was a peregrine falcon, which took to Riley’s arm and sat blinking at him, razor strength and precision to its beak. It was as if the tidy, blue-winged bird was no more than an extension of the man himself, when he was focused and sharp and all instinct and energy travelled the length of the arm to one keen and cutting point. Cy felt it was wrong for him to be so close to the creature, it was of another world, defined by the remote levitating laws of a different dimension, and the falcon-gentle also knew this. A shrill cry came from it, like a woman being carved up within her. Its tongue like a beak within a beak, hard and melded and traced with pollen dampness like the lock stamen of an exotic flower. Riley stroked the bird and it turned to him with a look of coy and marginal tolerance. Then he showed Cy how, when you split open the compacted droppings of the bird, you might find tiny rodent skeletons and bones as soft and pliant as feathers inside. And there was something between them then, a lull, like the lowest tide of the year, or a sense of human archaeology. For an hour or two Cy felt untrammelled by loneliness, he felt a sympathy with the man, and his solitude lessened.