Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Mornings and evenings he would pause outside her doorway, wondering if he should knock and ask her a question, something pithy and impressive, or ask her to join him for a drink. She seemed seldom to be home and when she was he often heard other voices in her rooms and shyness prevented him from announcing himself. And always, night after night, he would watch from his window for the silhouette theatre of her life to appear on the wall, her shape cut out by light like a paper chalked shape from a seamstress’s pattern. As if even the cast outline of her was enough encouragement for his affection to grow.

At Varga he watched her play in two Wednesday chess tournaments. Ordinarily he would not have bothered to observe them, he was not terribly fond of the game, and he knew only its most basic arrangements and rules. He preferred to sit at the bar counter and pass idle conversation with friends and new acquaintances, or simply soak up the atmosphere, sitting quietly after having barked and intimidated and prattled on at customers all day long. But now he stood against the doorjamb and twice watched her make it to the final round, and lose. She was apathetic towards those contestants that she beat, barely offering a handshake lest it distract her from her prevailing concentration, and almost spiteful in her mannerisms of exasperation when they stalled on the last few moves, crossing her arms, pinching the bridge of her nose, knocking on the table top. She was a player of tempo. She kept her own pace and lost patience if it was interfered with. Habitually she would touch the base of her neck when she played, the spot at the V of her hairline. When she was finally put out she was enthusiastic towards her victor, as if in unforeseen admiration of the competitive skills that had ousted her from the proceedings, but her display seemed to have about it the marked kiss of an impending assassination. It unnerved Cy, this lack of graciousness in winning and the fire in her eye that kindled over defeat, the passion of the high-duel. There was something backwards about it, arse over tit as Riley would have said. And indeed like Riley she seemed to thrive on certain conflict where other humans tiptoed on eggshells around it. Her voice rose in argument in the gaming room as readily as did the voices of others. But he did not want to liken her to Eliot Riley. And so quickly he put the similarities out of his mind. The observers liked to pass comment on the gaming and offer analysis of strategy. There was a strange thrill to their voices, a muffled equivalent to the screaming elation and post-match autopsy of a ball game. From this Cy gleaned snippets of information about Grace’s game and translated them into personality — he realized he could question strangers about her with it seeming to be no more than topical or sporting curiosity.

— Who is she playing tonight?

— Sedak. She has beaten him before. Then if she goes through she’ll meet Torlione who won last week.

— How is she doing?

— Bishop, three pawns apiece. She’ll take the rook next. Running round the queen as usual.

— What do you mean?

— Girl’s weakness is her queen. She won’t ever gambit, surrenders far too many pieces to protect her, leaves the king thin, priorities out of whack. Cost her plenty a game, I’ll tell you. Means she has to suffer twice as hard on the back end defending double, especially as it’s her favourite long attacking piece. Can’t have it both ways. Quite a common eccentricity, of course, but sentimentality always has a price. You play?

— Not really.

— Here’s the trick. You watch her — watch her go after the other queen like she’s got a fire under her hood. That there is the giveaway. Keeps her for a reason, see. And if queen takes queen chances are she won’t get taken — there’ll be cavalry. All of a sudden, Boom! Lightning down the passageway and it’s the only risk she’ll take with her. Beautiful to watch, that spontaneity, that charge, makes my night when she does it.

— Got a thing against her own kind, do you think? Bit of a harridan?

— Bit of a hellion. Got a thing against the best fighter, got a thing for disabling the heaviest weaponry. Someone like Torlione or Sedak will get scrambled by her eventually on a set-play, if she gets clear. Real tough to pull off that style, then again so was any war that went the wrong way. Little Joan of Arc, I call her.

— Is she a genius?

— Nothing to do with it, buddy. The formal mathematic play is a given here. They all have memories like elephants. Past that it’s all about being fearless. And lady luck.

A conspiratorial voice chipped in from the side.

— She sleeps with a black queen under her pillow I heard. Spooky woman. Brrrrh.

Cy and the commentator turned to see who had elaborated so audaciously on the discussion. It was Claudia. She winked at Cy and laughed, her orange hair bobbing.

— Oh, hello Claudia. Do you know Grace?

Claudia nodded, emphatically, still laughing. Then she suddenly became serious and paused to collect her thoughts. Cy fancied for a moment that she might have had a tear in the corner of the black explosion of powder around her eye.

— Ja. Of course, who does not know Grace! She is my good friend. Sie ist meine Königin.

Claudia had a secret that only Grace knew. She was obsessed with the baby incubator exhibition at Coney. She could not keep away from it. Outside there was a painted sign that read ‘Little babies who came before their time’, and there was a note that the youngest surviving infant to date had been born after just twenty-one weeks of pregnancy, though there was no formal medical verification that Claudia knew of to substantiate this claim. Cy had passed the place often but never been inside the show. He disapproved of it. It was one of the more extreme and less tasteful enterprises at the Island, a macabre maternity ward. Beyond the unseemliness of the place it also disturbed him on a sinister, childhood level, for it brought to mind the strange work of his mother, all the children of her unmaking, all the undone babies of Morecambe Bay. And even though he had long ago reconciled what his mother had undertaken as a sideline profession, he never went inside the exhibition, just in case all the sick infants within stood up in their cots and waved to him, intent on delivering messages from their ghostly British brothers and sisters, in the manner of Professor and Madame Johnson.

The show brought Claudia sadness finer than any requiem or any gravestone or anything beautiful or sorrowful that she could think of. On afternoons when she wasn’t working with her husband or rotating on the platform in the Human Picture Gallery at Luna, she would go off by herself and pay her dime and linger in the corridors of the exhibit. Looking into the room of plastic sheeted cots, where the city’s poor mothers brought their premature infants in the hope that they would be taken and saved, somehow miraculously transformed from the translucent, purple-limbed, bulging-eyed creatures they were into normal opaque, pink, brown or white skinned babies, like the children of fully termed mothers. Then, eventually, they would cry normally, tears of participatory complaint and appetite, not fatality, not like ratsbane-screaming rodents, but like hungry, healthy mammals eager for the breast. And their white drenched eyes would grow coloured telescopes to see the world.

She would stand in the greenhouse hallways, very, very still. She would watch the women dressed as nurses, she did not know if they were actually nurses, in stiffcaps and red-crossed aprons, thick medical shoes, drifting through the room on the other side of the window and monitoring the babies, patient as gardeners in a mushroom factory, gentle in amongst the planted glass beds. Claudia watched with bird-quick eyes and a worried forehead. She watched for the roll of an all-white eye, or for tiny purple hands to reach up and grasp the air — a sign of life, a sign of hunger, a sign of hopeful brain activity. And then when there was movement she would knock on the divider and point and point until a nurse’s attention was raised and the starched woman would move to the baby, smiling. Claudia watched for the mice-fast hearts to beat a little slower, a little less furiously and more privately behind their skin. There were tubes that she did not understand. There were suckling procedures that tugged at her own breast.