Sarah Hall: The Electric Michelangelo

— All fur coat and no knickers, am I wrong, Muriel, or am I right? Talk about salvage, she won’t salvage much of her own brass or her own pride dressed like that!

It was not a pleasanter friendship either, where they pinned each other’s hair or shared a powder compact at the mirror in the public lavatories. No, theirs was a partnership on an altogether different level, a darker level. That is to say the two mothers had a relationship which meant Mrs Preston only visited the Bayview late at night, a hooded cloak about her, a small leather case in hand, and in the company of different ladies who might be very young and filled with tears, or older, weary-looking and gaunt, as if haggard from an insubstantial diet or excessive work. And always sore they were when they left, and sometimes needing to be carried and sometimes vomiting into a bowl. It was something of the shadowy world that bound Mrs Parks and Mrs Preston.

The latter was a large-small woman, rotund but petite, and she ran, with the assistance of her husband who was banished from the house from three in the afternoon until suppertime and her daughter who was sentenced to remain incarcerated at the house for those same hours, a small residential and apothecary venue on Lord Street, which catered to the rather eccentric pseudo-medical needs of Morecambe’s public. In her front room, ‘The Surgery’, as a sign read on the door, she had bottles of hair-restoring lotion which smelled of old varnish, devices for scouring hard spots at the elbow or heel, poultice presses for headaches, acid for warts, salts for bellyaches, roots for excessive libido, roots for dwindling libido — the boys hadn’t the foggiest what a libido was but it did sound painful and poorly behaved — talismans for love, crystals for luck, snuff powders for melancholia, jars with handwritten labels and with dubious inscriptions such as ‘Marvin’s Magical Cold Cream, Never Age a Day, Never See a Wrinkle’. Her potions and concoctions bordered on the tinker gypsy variety, though she had a clientele who showed surprising fealty and were willing to undergo the crudest, most suspect and experimental of treatments if they proved affordable, in the hope that they would become younger and prettier and stronger. Or at the very least not quite so ailed, so warty or so deviant.

Mrs Preston’s true speciality was electro-therapy. It was all the rage in town, but Jonty’s mother professed, and was widely held to be, the most skilled local administrator of the best medical panacea since leeches. The boys had no end of paralysing amusement with her equipment when she left it in an unlocked dresser. The headpiece was adjustable and looked rather like a fishing net had bred somewhat unsuccessfully with a hairdresser’s perm dryer. The settings were easy to master, though the unleashed voltage did not necessarily correspond with the mark indicated, for it seemed electricity often had a mind of its own. Above all else the gear was far too tempting to resist, sitting in the dresser like a toy from Frankenstein’s workshop. Since Cy was the tallest of the three boys he was frequently the test-subject for increased voltage, the theory being, according to the other two, that the longer the legs the further the electricity had to travel and the more diluted and harmless it became. Once treatment began there was always a moment when the entire world went rigid and buzzing and illuminated and Cy felt like he was part of a working machine, deprived of independent motion and yoked by magnificent force, or like a bulb in a lamp on the prom exuding luminescence. His arms and feet were lost to him, his muscles championed by a sudden ceasing rust, but they were not rendered useless, quite the opposite, there was passage through him, along his veins and arteries, along his skin and all the parts of him that usually felt of nothing. He could sense a rush of energy. He became a bridge to somewhere splendid. And afterwards, when the power crackled off, the world was crisp at the edges and tingled. Since the experiments did not kill him, Jonty and Morris then wanted their turn, and they fought over the hybrid headset. After a time all three of them upped the bets on who could endure the switch the longest. The medical miracle got into the brain and singed away reason.

— I’m a star! I’m a star in the sky!

Electricity. What a mystery and a marvel! Like wasp stings in your bones. Like lightning harnessing you, whipping your whole body and riding you around the room. Theirs was an intrepid, fearless leap through the zapping doorway of the dazzling new electrical age. Mrs Preston, of course, got wise to the illicit use of her therapy equipment, which always seemed to be set too high when she came to use it again on a patient. And once or twice she shocked the curled hair straight on an unsuspecting soul, and had to produce some rapid explanation. Ever after she kept it in a suitcase under the bed in her room, which the boys were forbidden to enter on pain of a sound hiding. There were other intriguing oddities at Jonty’s parents’ house. The beauty was you never quite knew what you might find rummaging through the drawers and cupboards of the Surgery.

— Look at this thing, Jont. Your mam’s name is Widdershin Winny. So’s your pissy sister’s.

— So? Your mam’s a tuppenny street walker with a pole up her crack. And she smells like a dog’s backside.

— Yes, well, his mam lives in Garlands ‘cause she’s a lunatic.

It was all fun and gaming until Cy came across a small leather case tucked away at the back of one cabinet, which he recognized and which, when the catch was released, folded out to reveal several long, sharp metal instruments strapped against a velvet inlay, one curved at the very end with a tiny overlay designed for picking, plucking, tearing, like a seagull’s bill. The chill hands of every dead sailor in Morecambe trailed the length of Cyril Parks’s spine.

— Jonty. What’s this for?

— Mam’s crochet and knitting kit. She’s useless at it, mind, as best I can see — never makes us anything. She doesn’t send socks to the trenches either. Now then. Look at this fetching item.

Untroubled by the discovery, Jonty had a string of dried vole skins about his head. Cy didn’t mention that the case was used by his mother in the Bayview some nights and he was fairly convinced that knitting was not quite such the brutal and exhausting hobby for the women that the sounds within the parlour suggested. Not knitting at all going on in fact, he suspected. Not where there was a locked-door brew of hocus-pocus and basins of blood and the mystery women called out clamorously as if they were night-ravens.

On these nights of careful company and whispers and bird-like screeches, Cy gradually began to tolerate what was sinister and wonder about the night-wound ministry on the other side of the wall. The keyhole seemed to expand a fraction each time he stood holding breath outside the door, as if bidding him use it. Like his eye had once upon a time been summoned to the consumptives’ waste before Satan had shown him a gallery the other side of his squeamishness. And so one night Cy bent forward and peeked. And inside was a terrible story that couldn’t ever be told in friendly childish pictures made from red paint. It was the Devil’s joyless laboratory and in it his dabblings were mirthless, invasive, and they produced wet slop like pulled fish-gut when the gulls have flocked and pecked and ruined a catch. And Cy would never, never look again.

There was no name for what he saw, and no possible explanation for him at that age had Reeda wanted to present him with a tricky revelation. If one lesson was to be learned by her son that night, it was that there were practices which went beyond a doctor’s formal world of medicine, and which ordinary folk might be better versed in. Because his mother undertook them and she was not a bookishly educated woman. There were rituals in blood, aspects of the human body which lived beyond official stewardship and out towards an altogether stranger keeping. So when the town authorities announced stiffer gaol sentences for local abortionists caught and prosecuted successfully, without having any connection to the term for such a thing he did not know to be afeared for the safety of his mother. Having not the vocabulary to discern relevance, there was no crime that she conformed to, she was no official malefactress. And if she was indeed a witch in all her raised-leg, sharp-hooked female rites with Mrs Preston, she was still his mother who also clothed and fed and loved him.