Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

They were always so grateful. Grateful to have their basins emptied and disinfected so they could cough into them clean again as if to convince themselves that there wasn’t so much blood and disease coming out of them, and grateful to be holidaying in Morecambe where there was soft air. All told, it was a sorry state of affairs. Especially as he knew that Morecambe’s air wouldn’t save them, these strange, pale, red-mouthed ghouls who smelled slightly metallic or like vegetables fermenting, who preferred their windows to be open and liked to consume potted shrimp almost as much as the King of England himself did. A very sorry state.

Once, after catching him in the act of slipping his basin-emptying duties, having spotted a telltale sour-cherry glaze on the face of a customer as he had, Reeda sat him down at the kitchen table, and with the stern sympathy which was her calling card she instructed him to buck up.

— Look, love, I know it’s not the cat’s whiskers to have to care for these folk in this manner. But, honest to goodness, you’re beginning to riddle my grate with your behaviour. I don’t wish to judge you uncharitably, son, but I do consider it a rudeness. Now pull your socks up. I’ve not the time to tend to everything myself. Some might think us foolish for taking those we do. You might think us foolish. But these people deserve a little holiday as well as anyone. And some deserve it more. They’ve worked their lives away digging the coal that keeps you warm, and fixing the threads that bind your pant-seat, and I won’t have you spoil their fun. You’ll simply have to find a way to cope, please.

Her eyes, the colour of a smithy’s anvil. She had, of course, a guilt-inducing and persuasive case. Also, if his mother had more than her fair share of consumptives in the hotel in the spring and summer seasons, compared with the other guest houses of the town, she also never complained about her gas bills, or worried that the present war would rob her of her best customers.

Reeda Parks had run the Bayview Hotel for seven years, since Cy’s father had died in the Mothering Sunday storm of 1907, captaining the Sylvia Rose when it went down with three other local fishing vessels, never to be recovered. There was a photograph of him in the hall of the Morecambe Trawlers’ Cooperative Society building, moustached, wellingtoned and sou’westered, leaning an elbow on a stack of heave nets piled on the stern of the boat. So Cy had come to know his father as a man who had only one position, upright, at work, dead, and he could never really imagine him otherwise, not sitting in a chair smoking a pipe or snoozing full-bellied after Sunday lunch, nor lifting a pint of frothy ale, nor shaving at the mirror. There was a pocket watch and a pair of cufflinks which Cy had inherited, when it became apparent the Sylvia Rose was not going to find her way back to the great bay, though they seemed to have little to do with the man in the photograph, who would undoubtedly tell the time via the position of the sun in the sky and whose oilskin was fixed at the wrist by a rough string tie which his salt-cracked hand could manage better.

The day after the storm Cyril Parks was born. He gave his first scream while the last of the south-westerly gale blew out, having taken the sea walls, the new jetty, most of the west end promenade and eleven fishermen of the town with it. Reeda said afterwards that the troublesome weather front had brought only one thing worth having, her son, even if it had also taken a husband. She said she’d been made a mother on the back of Mothering Sunday and she could not complain about that. The storm had been one of the annually expected disturbances, folklore had some saying it would be a monster, wicked as it had been in 1853 when the town was all but swallowed by the Irish Sea, and that the men who went out that morning were madmen who didn’t heed the caution. Reeda Parks disputed this, often without the slightest provocation, turning from what she was doing suddenly to confront her son, as if she had heard a phantom slur to her husband’s name from some imaginary quarter.

— Your father was a good fisherman. He knew the sea as well as anybody can know it, there was salt in his blood. The sea will give when it faces you and take when it turns away. And your father was the first to say that. He did right by his crew, and he did right by his family. He was not a reckless sort. There was only one occasion he ever acted heedlessly, it was in my defence as he saw it, and that doesn’t concern you. He was a good man, Stanley Parks. You remember that of him.

Cy knew to sit and listen to her and not interrupt when she spoke of his father. There was an unconditional sort of praise that she paid him, but he could see from the crease in her brow and the concentration in her eyes that it had been worked upon. Whatever information came from her about the man had passed through a mill of some kind, so that it was lighter, finer and more easily kneaded into the dough of his young life than it might have been if he had lived and she had made comment upon him. He sensed that his mother had prepared her statements, they were benign, considerate, sifted, and he wondered if all good wishes and positive outlooks did not require first crafting in some fashion. When he was old enough Cy went to the town library and looked in an old newspaper for an account of the storm. A full spring tide had met a bay full of rainwater from the estuary mouth of the river, and the run-off from the Lune marshes, for it had been raining solidly for a month. The land was a full sponge trying to squeeze itself out, and with the help of the wind the already strangely tempered body of bay water had become livid, sending waves inland taller than Alderman Birkett’s Clocktower. Boats had broken their moorings and were strewn along the promenade, land-locked and splintered, silt and jetsam was everywhere and the wreckage to the front of the town looked like Morecambe had been visited by a drunken giant.

Reeda Parks had been solely responsible for the hotel’s upkeep since then, though she was already well acquainted with its management. She did it with a minimum of grace, with wearyless effort and very much out of habit. Her hair grew thinner and her son grew taller. Summers were lucrative, winters were penny-pinching. Whatever financial weather the Bayview encountered Reeda Parks etched it down in her small notebooks, firmly in pencil, figures to spend and figures to save, allotments of income and expenditure, money for food, for upkeep, for bills and for advertising. She was not alone in her financial stringency. If there was one thing the guest house owners of Morecambe Bay took seriously it was the necessity for annual duration of the summer season’s income. When Cyril was old enough to carry things she set him to work in the sixteen rooms, and she never took a second husband. Her reptilian ability to manage the sick provided the hotel with its minimum stability. The mines and mills and the poverty of the north continued to provide the working classes with wheezes and diseases. The Morecambe Visitor continued to promote the restorative seaside air that could cure them. And Reeda Parks continued to cater for them during their brief leisure time. She always managed a full house in the softer months, and the Bayview was clandestinely known as a sanctuary for the ill. So when Mr Baxter died of black lung, his sick wife naturally continued to vacation once a year there, loyal to the end, and eternally speculating about whose potted shrimp was worthy of the royal palate.

There was something almost storybook about Cy’s birth and his father’s death, so closely were they allied. Reeda spoke of the matter in sweeping, tale-mongerish tones to him, using words like ‘deceased’ and ‘destined’ and nodding her head with a deep expression on her face — her face in those moments was an etched region where significance and yarn and solemnity combined and understood the fates, the gods, the loving, brackish, tossed-together and torn-asunder human heart. With that face alone she could give credence to the fairytale correlation of suffering and joy, of gain and loss, of life and death. As if all meaningful events and altered fortunes took place together and on celebration days to justify a star-crossed calendar. As if Cyril Parks from the very moment of his mortuary nativity was destined to find that out. Fires on Easter Sunday, funerals on April the first or anniversaries, the events would come and seem greater for their timing than they would have otherwise. Thus, it went beyond his mother’s old-timey, rhymey tongue, throughout the winding streets and cheap hotel porches, past the Methodist churches, the seaside enterprises, the public houses, the novelty stages and the fishing factories; small troubles loomed large, were given generous lip-service, yarns were daily fare, luck was just another word for happiness, tragedy became a strand of time that wove itself into the ordinary folklore stitching of Morecambe Bay’s history. And if you wanted, you could catch it all in allegories and pictures, memories and scriptures, in facial expressions and human productions. It was an anecdotal sort of town.