Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

As he looked around Grace became no less of an enigma. There were no tommy guns in cases, nor reams of money stashed in satchels to condemn her. Beside the quirks of evidence of her equestrian involvement the rest of the apartment was ordinary, like a stage set in a minimalist play. There were books stacked on an old table, he flipped one open and the print was in English. In a bowl were some apple cores, bitten through and turning brown. An empty sack of oats was peeled back on the wooden floor. In the kitchen the sink was plugged, filled a quarter full of water with straw floating in it, the smell of an animal’s thirst hanging just above the surface like a cloud of flies over a pond. The window was open and outside by a tree in the old courtyard was a pile of dry horseshit, and hanging from the window ledge, a bag that could be fixed to the animal’s hindquarters to catch its dirt. Nothing else but these few mean things told him of Grace, or gave him a leg-up into her life. She was as she came, self-contained and layered. She ate, slept, breathed.

He moved back towards the door and was about to leave when he noticed a strange artisan-looking object in the corner of the room on a bookcase. It was made of flat rectangular wooden slats stacked up on each other with fibres of paper in the very middle, like an old-fashioned press. There were four screws at the four corners of the contraption that bit firmly into the wood beneath them. He began to unscrew the bolts, a little at each corner in turn because the pulpy muscles of the press were keen to kilter out unevenly as it was opened. When the bolts were off he lifted out the boarding and between the centre paper was a pressed flower, so flat that it might have been paper itself if its brown-pink pigment against the white page had not distinguished it. It was a thing so frail that Cy dared not remove its ironed stamen and petals, seeming no more opaque and no more transparent than one layer of human skin from any race. He replaced the top of the press as best he could, it was a tricky fit and he was aware that the original positioning and frieze of the flower had been done with great care. Then he left and closed her door.

Upstairs he washed and shaved, put on a new pair of slacks and a clean blue shirt under his suspenders and he tied back his hair. He had looked like a vagrant for the last few days, like a wild dog rustling through rubbish and dirt with its nose. And he’d smelled like the drunks he had been hauling up from their own piss and blood and mistakes all his adult life. His mother had always said that a clean face and a pressed collar could get a ticket aboard a carriage to the city of London even if the change was wrong. Reeda Parks had never ridden a horse-drawn tram in Morecambe, let alone a train to the capital, but he thought of her philosophy tenderly as he paid for his ticket back to the hospital.

True enough his improved appearance opened the door for greater insight into Grace’s condition. The doctor, a short, greying, varicose man, shook his hand and described the injuries. It seemed she was still an undecided compound, not quite solid, not quite liquid, but something in between. Though her internal organs had been unscathed by the acid — if the shock of such a strong corrosive on her flesh was great, the alkali had been downright confusing — there were equations and proportions of damage to the skin which meant that this durable but delicate organ was presently working out of sync with the rest of the anatomy. And it could influence other organs. Such was the plexus fashion in which the human body relied upon each of its critical vessels and components for survival and harmony. At that moment Cy heard the voice of his mother again, trilling at the back of his head. One without the other we are made poorer, Cyril, remember that.

Only time would tell for Grace’s recovery, the doctor went on, and though he could say she should live, she was borderline damage percentage and that made things unduly complicated. Then the man cleared his throat confidently and looked at Cy as if waiting for a reply. Cy’s head was effervescing with information like seltzer powder dumped into a glass of water.

— I didn’t know skin was classed as an organ. I didn’t know that.

— Yes, it is. You do understand, then?

— Yes.

And so it was that in a hospital in southern Brooklyn Cyril Parks learned his final lesson about the medium of his profession. It was the body’s largest organ. He knew so much about skin, how it was essentially imperfect, but that was its very nature, how it told stories where the mouth did not, how it flexed, how it folded and faded, its shades and shapes, the provinces of geographic elasticity and density, how it aged, how it bled, how it housed his ink. But he did not know that it was an organ, like the liver or kidneys or the spleen. An organ, vital to life as the loving, brackish human heart.

The sister of the women’s ward told him to go home. They did not know how long Grace would be there, she was very sick. Each day was as unpredictable as the last as far as her injuries were concerned. She told him to get back to work at the factory. He’d been courteous to stay so long but he should concern himself with the security of his job, she said, mistaking the ink staining the rims of his fingernails for perpetual conveyor-belt grime. When his lady friend got better, if she got well enough to leave, she would come and find him no doubt. Sister’s eyes were dense and shining dully like cannon shot, they said she understood he loved this poor, broken woman, but it was time to pull his life together now. She opened and closed the situation for him, and he was grateful to her for that. Sister was a tall woman that finally reminded him of his mother, thin-haired, possessed of abilities to comprehend and ignore bodily excretions beyond the capacity of her peers — she had in her hand a jar of something pale blue-grey and intestinal suspended in liquid and resting on her papers as if it were an ordinary glass of drinking water. There was a watch pinned upside-down on her uniform so she could time health as she took pulses.

Cy had known that one day he would meet someone in the image of Reeda Parks, he’d suspected all along there were others of her kind, and Reeda had been following him around in his memory for hours, weeks, years it seemed, vying for precedence with Riley. Now she stood before him, resurrected, with a page of notes about her patients and the exact quantities of their medication pencilled darkly in a column, the essential anatomical waste in her hand, and her sufferable maternal dogma. And he knew if he really wanted this woman here before him now to be the ghost of his dead mother, this indulgent and purgatorial country would oblige him and endorse that wish, making the apparition real, come to him to shore up his soul in its time of distress. So he kissed her cheek quickly because he missed Reeda, he did, and though Sister was perhaps a little intrigued by the gesture she nodded, glad as all matriarchs are that her advice had been acknowledged, and he left her to her duties.

He might have tattooed five hundred people that summer or he might only have tattooed five. The rest of the season was passed in a blur, with him stewing, brooding, festering, gathering all communication up in a tight knot at the back of his mind and putting the fear of God into anyone who sat in the chair for work. Nobody cared to guess at the despair behind the frown and the complete lack of verbal engagement did wonders for his reputation. Perversely he thrilled the customers with his convincing portrayal of one of the most authentic, stony bruisers in the profession, for silence is the most threatening proposition of them all, a vacuum that will hold all the fears and treachery of those it confronts and still have room for more. Rumours even went around that he had cut out his own tongue for a dare before force-feeding it to a rival. His hands cooperated, they were reliable that way, and there was more trade than ever, but the rest of him was retired. On the lathe of his rage he reduced to sawdust all the pleasantries and banter he had once laid down. He had always been inclined towards a quiet disposition, Eliot Riley had disliked it of him, and it seemed he had been forcing talk all his adult life, for one reason or another. Now he had not the will nor the encouragement to produce one single unwarranted word. His mind felt alien and hectored at Coney, the whiz-bang-boom and hurly-burly of the place harassed him, made him dizzy. There were bizarre conversations that he simply could not comprehend.