Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

The next morning the apartment was cold from the open window and the rain which the daylight had brought with it. Before waking he had dreamt a succession of rapid, gritty dreams, his mind slipping and jamming from the leak of hard alcohol into his brain, flickering through meaningless images in photo-frenzy, stuttering like the heavy stroboscope projectors in the Tunnel of Terror at Coney. With each misfiring shutter came another epileptic reel of pictures, of him running and ducking to avoid being skewered and torn apart by a giant crochet pick, him trapped in a sunken submarine at the bottom of an underwater canyon, its blue emergency lamp pulsing. At one point he woke only to find he had been telegraphed to another dream where his room was on board a train rattling along the edge of a mountain pass, Carpathian steep, with the tracks about to tip over, and he panicked to think he may never be restored to truthful existence. Finally it was the sound of the rain that woke him, like the long dark whispering hair of a woman being pulled across his ear. Soothingly.

Cy lit a cigarette in bed, pulled up the covers and tried to rub away his sore head. He thought of Grace. The sharpness and discordance of her had faded — the lawyerly intonation, the knife, the snappy dialogue — leaving an unformed image that could be fashioned into a smooth idea of a woman he might like to know and possibly touch. She was beautiful through the hair and mouth and eyes, he remembered. With the vague look of Salome about her — he had seen the dancer in a painting in one of Riley’s old art books, pale and dark and intent, John’s severed head behind her on a tray — perhaps if Grace held herself that way or let down her hair? She was undoubtedly clever and wilful, which was, if he was honest about it, nothing short of arousing to him, and he just plain admired the fact that she managed to house a horse in her room. The idea itself was baffling. That she got away with the covert dressage was brilliant. He had a sense that he liked her, very much, and not so far away from that prospect was the notion that he could love her, perhaps. He shivered, huddled down further in his bed, listening to the brickish drip of water outside the window. He could love her. Couldn’t he? There was the potential. There was the rub. It was unclear if this was truly a resolution in his mind or simply an acknowledgement of a lesser kind. Perhaps, he thought, it is only ever a combination of the two — as if holding open the door for an ancient creature taught to enter with bound feet. It felt like another strangely exotic moment in his life, the pairing of Grace and love, not dissimilar to the day he had agreed to be Riley’s lad, within half an hour or less of seeing Riley at work, of seeing the man’s own magnificent coloured body. Maybe it was even as ludicrous as that first sighting of Eva Brennan, with her English-garden eyes and her freckled arms, when his heart came undone. That feeling of being befallen, of something preordained and unavoidable and uncontrollable at work, like the diaphanous flutter of Fate’s lungs, the sluicing of its digestive system, its marrowy brewing of new blood.

He lay in bed for a while with a headache from the previous night’s drink and a dry throat, looking at his ceiling and thinking back over the years of encountering women. He thought of the way he had set an affair in motion between Jonty and Eva, whom he had loved when he was thirteen years old. And after introducing them he had watched them first kiss on the pebbled mucky beach of Morecambe Bay as the tide was going out, feeling something heavy collapse down through him to the ground. He could remember that sensation as clear and awful as if it had happened only yesterday. Eva had left him romantically vulnerable, he liked to think, and that’s why he had avoided love ever since, even if he had been with a few women in the parlour of Pedder Street after his needle had finished on them, their breathing fast together, their bodies aching and after a point coordinating. But it had been so long ago, that original offence, that the face of the girl he held responsible was gone, and only the feeling of damage remained. Now he was the true keeper of the experience. He had wanted to preserve it as Riley had kept his tattoos fresh and bright with Nivea lotion, because it seemed a meaningful thing to do. And in polishing it up like a brass fixture he had worn it down to its hub, until it was nothing. Eva could no longer be conjured up to explain his aversion and trepidation in matters of the heart. She would not suffice as an icon of pain and disappointment, her ghost, her sign could no longer be used convincingly to hold him back.

Since her, his mother had passed away, and though it had not been his choice to love Reeda and there had been no catastrophic disqualification of her love for her son, it was a wrenching emotional blow to lose her in the end. From that he had healed. It had been a less personal loss of love. Riley had scarred him up far worse with his fanatical abuse, he had opened channels in Cy that meant if he wasn’t careful to keep them covered or pursed closed, the unstemmed passage of fury and scorn might occur, the overspill of reservoirs on the darker side of him. Riley had made him want to hate and fight, he had shaded Cy in. For a full decade the big man had been an excuse for sabotaging potential relations — he could not court with Riley as a manipulative joker in the deck, a scathing father who would tell a girl about her cunt over a cup of tea and a slice of cake. Dwelling on it he knew there was now an absence of a male plan-foiler or a symbol of female loss to propel towards an affair in order to avoid it or break it. There was nobody but he, alone, to ruin love. And now there was Grace, Grace with her dark eyes and her qualities and her horse.

He rose from bed and poured a glass of water and drank it. Then he drank another and refilled his glass. He felt hollow in his torso. Spacious. And nervous to be thinking about that which he was thinking. There was a strong presence in the room and he turned round suddenly to look behind him as if having caught sight of another being, but nothing was there, just a rumpled bed. Then he had the definite sensation of something moving on the periphery, just out of sight, waiting at the edge of him, restlessly, treading between memories, between his ribs and lungs, and nudging softly at the vacant chamber, knocking very timidly. Wasn’t it always a question of opening doors? His mother and Mrs Preston behind the sororal, screeching parlour door? Eliot Riley on the other side of number eleven Pedder Street? The blue cabin door at the top of the gangplank walkway up to the Adriatic ? A key in the lock of a door in America that turned the wrong way? His heart was empty now and something of a mystery. And so one rainy spring morning at the start of a new decade he lifted the latch, opened it, and let Grace in.

After that she seemed to be everywhere, but nowhere convenient that he could talk to her or put in his eyes an expression that would inform her of what was on his mind. He saw her riding down the boardwalk on Maximus, seated high above the throngs of people, all the strolling couples and the sugar-smeared, skipping children, the men in straw summer hats with canes and the ladies perspiring against mink in the rolling wicker chairs pushed by young black men. She was in costume, with a suit of sequin and a comb of purple feathers in her hair. She was standing up on the horse’s rump bare footed, rising and falling steadily as he moved, dropping circus flyers to the pedestrians below. He tried to attract her attention but the crowd was too thick and noisy. Later that day he closed the booth for an hour and went to watch her perform in the circus. He had not been since witnessing the demise of Lulu, had sworn he would never return, but it seemed to be a mitigating motive. To loud trombone music and cymbal clashes the horse cantered briskly into the tent then round the ring with his tail held out while Grace swapped her feet with her hands on his back. She was strong, lithe, well constructed. But the face under the make-up seemed not to be hers.