Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

There were broken rules about broken rules at Coney. Everybody claiming residency or employment there lived by them and almost nobody understood them. Visitors acted out, as they never would at home. The Island’s business folk delved into the most absurd, most stigmatic, most contemporary corners of their brains and sold their wares. That was the saying, that anything goes. The human fracas, the folly, the malediction, coming from deregulation and eternal carnival was as natural as the hysterical behaviour of small children when provided with a corpse in velvet pageboy attire and a Ouija board. Cy had learned that you didn’t refer to the strange constitution of the place, because by nature it warped in the mind, slipped will-o-the-wisp from the hands of definition and litigation and could quite possibly send you raving mad as you chased after it. Better to just merry-go-round at Coney, up and down, to the creepy tinkling music of the mechanical hammer-driven pianos and the operatic wail of sirens and the grunting percussion of bumper cars. Better to just ride the anarchy like one of his tattoos of bare-breasted women riding fork-tongued serpents in the foam of a green sea. So he listened to the group berating Grace and he neglected to defend her, as his procedural, gentlemanly, elsewhere-located self might have.

He would not have a chance to open and look at Grace’s paper until after ten that night, when he finally boarded up the booth, the last customers sloped away and he went to Varga to wind down. He put it into his shirt pocket suspecting that there would be something either vaguely unacceptable or of direst meaning on the page, something which might throw a spanner in the works of their relationship, or prune his burgeoning affections. And he would need a strong drink in his hand when his suspicions were confirmed or confounded. Until then he would try not to think about it. He’d simply do his job. He’d be the crowd’s fearsome huckleberry.

War was a peculiar thing. Cy seemed to remember that from a long time ago when he was a stilt-legged boy, a fact gleaned from conversations along the promenade of Morecambe and the shenanigans of its residents. It brought out the best and the worst and the downright incomprehensible in people. It made them slough off the dead skin of reason and deepen the roots of nationality. They became creatures of habit, more so than ever before — he remembered the queues for tea at the kiosks of his hometown and the fund-raising dances and the well-attended meetings of every organization, which went on long after peace-day, long after they were essential strictures. For there was relief in repetition and routine. War sent people out looking for principles and decency and even fragments of God to be woven up in chain-mail and used as armour against all the bestial suffering and immoral wickedness inflicted by other human beings, those accused of creating a covenance with evil. But it also gave them an excuse to behave very badly themselves under the big black umbrella of a far worse phenomenon. He remembered that Morecambe’s courts had seemed fuller than ever during the Great War, of pick-pockets and bigamists and even bank robbers. He remembered that his mother had said some folk simply rang louder when the breath of war was blown through them. What would Reeda have made of this conflict now? With so much human fodder. Something so premeditated and sinister at the core of it, and seeming set to go on and on. He wondered how his countrymen and women were faring, the radio and newspaper reports were distressing to say the least. He wondered if he should write letters to Jonty and Morris, send friendly word. The talk in Brooklyn was angry and pessimistic, paranoid and ultimately impotent, there were tales of horror filtering through the Hasidic communities, and there were desperate attempts to contact foreign relatives, applications sent to official quarters to allow immigration. Shaken heads, candles lit in windows and synagogues.

If nothing else this war had created a boom within the tattooing industry. Not only were military motifs selling incredibly well, but the American government’s obscenity ruling meant that indecent markings would prevent entry into the navy or other forces, and so old work was being redone. Like the nude bathers and sexy dames of the film industry reformed under the rigid Hollywood codes, rude tattoos were now history, the era of naughty fun was over. Boys were being rejected daily for the promiscuously clefted, high-nippled lovelies on their bodies, and they were flocking to him for repair. The penalty for illicit liaisons was not irreversible. An applicant could get designs altered, that was the concession, they did after all want people to sign up, there was after all a war of unmitigated proportions going on, predicted to worsen very shortly. Now he was dressing all the naked women he once had drawn. Bare-breasts were slipping heavily behind snug new dresses. Pendulous buttocks were shimmying under frills and lace. The sassy maids were, with his help, pulling on some black shaded stockings to go with their heeled shoes and nurses’ uniforms. The boys were sheepish and sad to see their sweethearts going.

— Bye, Bessie, bye-bye, Marie. See you next time, honey. Thanks for a good time.

Cy tried to preserve elements of sexy candour to the girls, a jut of hip, a beckoning finger, lowered lashes, but he could not help feeling like some kind of puritan, a despotic father. No, it felt like the morning after, each girl was getting dressed and the trysting was over. So many lovers, and all of them leaving …

It was an eye. In the centre of Grace’s page there was an eye, immaculately open, static, unblinking. It looked almost hieroglyphic, black-rimmed, black-lashed, there was a lot of black ink to it in fact, and it was scrolled in a helix at the corners. He might have known there would be no birds or butterflies or delicate posies for her. Nor portraits of the presidents on her thighs or religious symbols, which four decades earlier the carnival women had first stunned the public with. The bar at Varga was crowded that night. He sat at the counter, and moved the empty glasses on the bar away from the piece of paper that was laid out in front of him like an after-school study, simplifying the clutter and chaos around the page.

— Scotch tonight?

— Thanks.

Valerie attended to him with her usual perfunctory duty and he returned to the image in front of him. The iris was green, green, the most mysterious of pigments, and it contained a substantial amount of non-detail, which gave the image an amulet appearance at its centre. There were no divisions like the true human eye contained or faint irregular spokes, quantitative information, flecks, inflections, broken sections, and percentages. Only a pure green sphere like a jewel or an old curse. It was unremitting, unforgiving. His head hurt just looking at the thing.

Riley’s voice joined him at the bar, swaggering into its most natural arena, telling him they were all witches, the women of the world. With their ability to manage pain, their smell of fresh and salt waters. And she was no different, his little Grace, his bold little poppit. No different at all. Some hereditary mange or vindictive spore or kinked strand of blood they shared made them wild, made them want to buck and nip and scratch. That’s why they would roll you over and climb on top when you were so far gone in lust you couldn’t defend yourself and they would look down with open eyes like they were taking something from you, like they were about to commit slaughter. His swarthy ghost here now, wanting to start a bitter conversation as ever with Cy that would make him seem clever and be validated just from provoking argument, from flicking an already twitchy nerve to make it jump. Cy was damned if he’d comply with him tonight, the old bugger.