Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— You live in my building. Second floor. The Electric Michelangelo. Works at Coney, drinks in Varga, doesn’t play in the tournaments. English, northern. Doesn’t mind Germans. Doesn’t mind drunks. Doesn’t say much, unless he’s had whisky and is arguing with ghosts.

She had just reduced him to his basic existence, and addressed his foibles. It was a touch disconcerting, this ability, particularly given that he knew nothing of the woman in retaliation. He suddenly felt very careless, slovenly, and as if he had, ever since disembarking from the Adriatic, been observed closely through spy-glasses or by shady, doorway-concealed officials without his knowledge.

— I’m Grace. This is Maximus.

— Oh. Hello. Actually my name is Cyril. Cy. So where do you keep him? Does the building have stables?

Grace tipped her head to the side for a moment. The horse was nosing Cy’s unkempt locks again.

— He really likes you. He likes your hair, he thinks it’s his feed. He lives with me. He’s my guardian, better than a dog. I can put him up against a door when the invaders arrive.

— I don’t really understand. Lives with you where?

— Prosze. In my apartment, Electric Michelangelo, where else, have you seen the mess in the storage rooms? Not always, but sometimes it’s necessary, there is not always room in the circus stables. And I don’t like the way he gets treated down there. They can be cruel and stupid. You cannot put a horse in a stall next to a snow leopard or a lion. They do this and they wonder why he kicks down the door and tramples the side of the enclosure. Fucking idiots. He could have broken a leg. Poor Maximus.

Her expression did not allow for any doubt that she was telling the truth. And then the last of the thick, addling smoke blew away and Cy remembered the shadow-box menagerie below him on the wall in his first week of residence. And the fecund, agrarian smell in the hallway outside 104 was identified without the use of forensics or snooping guesses and given its correct label. Horse.

— Good Lord! I thought so. I mean at first I thought I was quite mad to imagine it — I thought I was being a dozy article. It has bothered me since I saw his outline, I’ll confess. How is that possible. Is it allowed?

— I told you, it’s a secret past this street right here. Señora would telephone the butchers if she knew. I tell her it is the paprika in the stews that smells strong, since she cooks only rice what can she say? But back there the whole world knows. We work in Luna.

— I won’t tell a soul, you have my word. Bloody hell, nobody would believe it anyway.

The conversation became momentarily cloudy again.

— So there’s no man?

— No man?

— In your apartment? With you? With a chest complaint, a cold? An old man, perhaps your father?

— An old man with a cold, no I don’t think so. Just Maximus, but he has no cold. He had a cough last month. I gave him camphor oil in his hay, it seemed to work just fine. He’s better now, aren’t you, Maximus?

There was a matter-of-fact tone to her voice, an austerity, and yet it also had a quality of bemusement, not exactly sham presentation, but an internal humour, as if either option were available as evidence for the listener and would be upheld in a court of law. And there was the trace of an accent, at least her voice morphed convincingly through several accents, Slavic, French, Hungarian, more like a child raised by multilingual parents than a spoiled girl in a playhouse dressing-room trying on different personalities along with her costumes. And yet, right at the very back of the voice, like indistinguishable static noise on the radio, there was a note of preservation, it was an accent that had been held on to deliberately when it could have been discarded — perhaps kept alive because of her chosen proximity to first-generation immigrants, perhaps through sentimentality or pride. She was watching him now‚ and occasionally glancing at the horse by the fountain. Her brows were dark but her face was pale and vividly sloped, with prominent, Tartar cheekbones. Cy could think of nothing else worthwhile to say. Following the recent disclosure, he felt small talk would be a meagre offering. This woman made him want to be very sure of himself, to stretch his brain an inch more and grasp what was going. And in that sense she was magnetic, pulling on thought and concentration, bringing him to her without moving herself.

He accompanied her home. Or perhaps he was himself accompanied, he didn’t rightly know that night. Maximus was immaculately trained, it seemed; he followed Grace with the click of her tongue, passing patches of grass that a less well-behaved animal would have dropped its head into and locked its neck. It appeared there was no need for a rein or a bit. Their conversation seemed to Cy to be serious and effortful and somehow a failure, though the next morning he could remember nothing of it past her name, the bold whimsy of her keeping a horse in her apartment, and the image of her turning somersaults on the animal’s back in the Luna circus. He remembered wanting to ask her if the horse was housebroken and not finding the courage, thinking it a frivolous thing. At the door of their building she removed her coat from her arm and under it were four hemp potato sacks and four lengths of string. She clicked her tongue again and Maximus lifted up his rear hind leg. Grace put it between her legs and between the pleats of her skirt. She fitted a sack over the thick unshod hoof and tied it on. This was repeated for the remaining three hooves — the beast was utterly compliant and on the last hoof Grace took out a blue-handled pocket-knife from her skirt, unhinged a tool and scraped a stone and some debris out of the depression. It was obviously a well-practised manoeuvre, both parties knew it by heart. She opened the door, took a look inside, gestured, and both Cy and the horse entered the old marble foyer. To his amazement the horse moved almost silently down the corridor, stepping high as if over small streams or boulders with each forward motion. Grace turned a key in the lock of her door and the horse ducked its long head as it went inside, into the darkness, like a pit pony entering a mine. She turned to Cy and before he forgot all about the details, he was aware of a small line at the top of her nose where her brow met in an expression of fortification and the humour lines surrounding her eyes. In the dim hallway her irises were so dark they seemed pupil-less, deep, vertigo inducing. There was a languid, sombre curve to her bottom lip. He could find a loveliness to her face as he looked at her that was underlaid with something aged and earnest. She was compelling in a way, and he wondered if he should perhaps lean in and kiss her, he was drunk enough to warrant it. He was about to when she made a sound under her breath, a murmur of enjoyment which also contained marginal dissatisfaction, as if she was tasting a spoonful of soup and trying to decide which ingredient to add next. Then she spoke.

— Yeah, anyway. I’m going to come and find you soon, Electric Michelangelo. I need your help with something. I think the time is right for a change.

She offered him a smile, and then she closed the door. He waited politely for a moment and then turned and went up to his apartment, walked to the window with a chair and sat to watch the brick wall opposite. Sunrise was a few hours away, it was deathly dark, and if Grace was still up and about with the lights on he might see her doppelgänger puppet again, acting out a simplified shadow edition of what she was doing. After a while he felt too tired to focus his eyes. Dually, he was certain that somewhere below him in the building was a woman who would never yawn and drowse, she would either be fully awake and wary of all her surroundings, or unconscious. He opened his window and blew a kiss to the empty brick wall. Then he lay down on his bed and slept off the incident of meeting Grace like it was balanced on the back of a black stallion galloping away from him or balanced on a temporary filament of night.