Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright‚

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And wasn’t that about right for the fucker, thought Cy.

The body was wrapped and prepared for burial at sea and it was taken out on a chartered fishing vessel into the Irish Channel and dumped overboard without ceremony as the sun was setting, so that Riley, with his Celtic looks and his split identity might have found his way into some ancient Gaelic paradise by accident, if God and the Devil were not quick enough to settle the dispute over him. Cy leaned on the side of the boat and watched the sunset on the waves. What had his mother told him as a boy in her spinner-woman nursery-time way? That when the sun went away its light never went out, it only went to Ireland, and then it went to America, and then right around the world until it came back in the morning. And it was some kind of lamp for all lost souls to follow. So he watched it leaving, turning a slow red corner of the earth, the sky above it pale blue and doomed with intensity before it shut down, like Riley’s eyes. Behind him somewhere was Morecambe Bay, with its strange long tide and all his life’s history. His home. The place that had shaped him from its sand and clay. The place that had set him up well in the first half of life only to make room for his faltering and to allow his tumble in the next half. Because wasn’t he fallen? Wasn’t he as lost and low as he could possibly be? Like one of the ragged souls of Reeda’s fables. The boat wallowed gently in the current for a time, then began back to shore. And at that moment Cy did not want his home, majestic or malfeasant‚ he would have renounced it gladly, and paid all the money he had ever owned and a tithe on all he would ever earn to have the fishing vessel come about and head west in the wake of the sun.

Late that night he took a drink at the Dog and Partridge with Paddy and toasted Eliot Riley, though neither of them spoke beyond that of the man lest his recently departed spirit become blackened with the pluming particles of ill-thought and defamation. Paddy reached behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of whisky and poured a dram for Cy, his first proof liquor ever. The fumes were as wretched as the taste but he took the contents of the glass whole.

— What of Cyril Parks next then? Get yourself a pretty missy and raise a brood? Will you be able to cope with all the trade this summer?

Cy shook his head and shrugged.

— Well. You could become a travelling man. Find yourself a circus to join. See the world. Send me some postcards to put up in the bar and impress people with my connections.

— Is the world a better place than Morecambe then, Paddy?

— Well, I believe it’s bigger. And there are no doubt fewer donkeys. Some people say it’s a small world, of course. But, I wouldn’t like to have to paint it.

The next day Cy locked the door of Eleven Pedder Street and took a train to the city of Liverpool, then took a hire carriage out to the docks, where he met with an acquaintance of Paddy Broadbent behind the dripping dolly crane. The woman sold him counterfeit passport and papers and permits, rolling the money received into the handle of her umbrella and never looking Cy in the face. Then he bought a third-class ticket, with the last of Reeda’s money, on a ship bound for America.

The Adriatic was a four-mast, four steam-engine, Harland & Wolff built monster. She’d run the Atlantic for twenty-five years since her Belfast birth, ferrying immigrants, cargo and the wealthy backwards and forwards to the new world, when she wasn’t vacationing in the Mediterranean, and she’d seen every kind of weather. She’d held Russians and Polish Jews, Lithuanians and Czechoslovakians, who first made passage through the North Sea and took a train to reach her, and thousands of Irish Catholics who took steamers from their native ports to Liverpool docks. She held oil, and coal, the belongings of many nations, and occasionally lowing, bleating cattle. The rich luxuriated in her polished dining rooms, or the indoor pool, the Turkish bath, while the poor were sent down towards the lower decks, near her two propellers, where the noise of her motion was mature and continuous. She was the last of the Big Four vessel quartet run by White Star liners, a fine old lady retired in her later years now to the summer transatlantic passage. In May of 1933 Cyril Parks boarded her, one year before the Cunard — White Star merger, one year before she would be laid up permanently then sold to the Japanese and broken up for parts. To Cy she was magnificent, simply because she was whole and moving. He’d seen so many battered, wrecked and ravaged vessels out at Ward’s Ship-breakers — they looked like noble prehistoric beasts bonded and tortured — that the Adriatic was miraculous in her capacity and condition. At first her groans and internal knocking and the noise of her robust metallic sashaying left him uneasy, for it seemed that parts of the structure were unhappy in their bolted proximity with each other and were trying to separate. Then it became apparent that she was simply living, her sounds became the music of a giant iron body, breathing, digesting, beating, and it was comforting. The wake behind the ship was tremendous, like Moby Dick spouting water through a blow-hole. Almost three thousand passengers doing seventeen knots had their hats tugged off by the ocean breeze when they came out to grip the railing, to bid farewell to the continent slipping away behind them, or to play shuffleboard on the middle decks. They were citizens of a small city floating out to a promised land.

There was work for Cy on board the ship, more work than he ever imagined or expected, in the third-class cabins and the sailors’ quarters, many wanted motifs done, to celebrate new beginnings, or finished struggles. And with both of these sentiments Cyril Parks could certainly sympathize. In his suitcase he had his equipment and four books of bound-together manila flash, Riley’s designs cut down from the walls of the shop and his own never before displayed pictures. Each page was dedicated to a certain theme, skulls, hearts, lovelies. That which had covered the walls of the parlour could now fit in a large pocket. He set up a little station on F deck where they came to him and waited their turn, browsing through the notebooks, often pointing to a tattoo without knowing the English word for it, writing the names of loved ones down on scraps of paper so that he could spell them out with unfamiliar letters and etch it through a heart. So that left-behind wives or sweethearts or daughters were not so very much forgotten.

The Adriatic ’s sailors went in for women, patriotism, and souvenirs. Codes. Their codes were precise and adhered to as men of the navy, there were rules at sea, similar to those which would only permit a soldier to wear a medal if it had been won in service. There were anchors for crossing the Atlantic, turtles for passing the equator, and dragons for being stationed in China. Often barnyard animals on the balls of their fists, which was an old, old tradition that still prevailed, animals that liked to keep dry and would scramble out of water quickly in a panic should they need to. Roosters. Pigs. It was ugly flash, but Cy was nobody to deny a man his superstition. The men followed strict, professional qualifications, would not have a mark done without having earned credit for it and they wanted to assure him of entitlement with stories of voyages as he prepared and stencilled their shoulder.