Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

What he wanted to do was take hold of Grace’s hand and into it pass something of his own heart, but instead he held back, and he found himself watching her remove a cotton dress, a garment softer than candyfloss from a spinning machine which some friend or nurse had been thoughtful enough to get for her, to cover the fraught body. She unbuttoned it down and open through the front, making it into one long piece of material, and she slowly peeled and unwound herself out of it. Then she was naked in front of him but for her shoes. She had not put on underwear, her breasts and pubic region had been included in the savagery of the acid and were still healing. Before he could harness his horror, Cy was crying openly, an uncontrollable weeping that forbade neither his voice nor his face from expression. Grace stood before him, on the sidewalk next to his booth, with her dress in her hand and her scars open to the sky. She stood there as if she were a peep-show whore in a film about the undead. Or one of Coney Island’s monsters. Litter tumbled past them with an insistent, autumnal breeze behind it, empty wrappers, paper bags and cartons once containing food. And there amid the trash she was extraordinary against the familiar background of the alley but no less ruined.

She had walked with absolute care up to Cy as he was opening the booth, like someone recently woken from a spell of being knocked unconscious, and it was further than she had walked in three months, from the station to the end of Oceanic Walk, though he did not know of her small victory. He had not seen her once during the period of rehabilitation, having recoiled from the effort of trying to get to her as hard as he had initially made it. He was removing the lock from the hinge of the booth when he turned and saw her walking towards him, at first not recognizing her, for she moved like an old lady with well-retained posture and rheumatic difficulty. Then it was her hair with its traces of red and the dark features of her face that gave her away, and his blood froze for a moment before lurching forward again.

— Grace? My God, is that you!

She was almost to him when he spoke, treading with rigid care on the pavement, so even before she revealed her body to him he knew the damage must be extreme. And without a word she stood before him and stripped away her clothing.

If her eyes said love, if they said it to him then in accompaniment with the gesture, his clamouring heart and the racket of his blood drowned the message out, so he would never know for sure. He could not fathom the bravery of that exposure, somehow stronger than the twenty men and the team of Clydesdales it look to drag that ridiculous runaway motorbus from the sands of Morecambe Bay when he was a boy, after its steering pin had snapped and it had careered through the prom wall, decapitating passengers on its tumble. Stronger than the brawniest arm in the fairground slamming the mallet down on to the Beef-o-Meter to ring its bell. Stronger than diamond or atomic propulsion or wrought iron. Her. Naked. Scarred. The boards of the booth were not even fully down yet to provide her with some privacy inside. But her expression said that the landscape was irrelevant, she might have been lost in a desert or on the presidential lawn or on the moon for all she cared.

Early passers-by slowed to see if this was some kind of radically casual, unorganized treat, a show of Coney’s titillating spontaneity, shameless when it came to human dignity and the rules of physical conduct. Perhaps she was one of the ugly bodies they had been promised they would see, escaped from the big top. But Cyril Parks knew this show was for one man alone and no carnival barker would call a roll-up, roll-up. She gave him a full, wordless minute to see her, while his mouth contorted and he wiped at his eyes and tried to control himself.

Her stomach was tight and hard as wood ash, collected in lumps and ridges, so she would never be able to bend over and slip a strap through the buckle of her shoe again, she would always have to retrieve a dropped item by bringing her upright body down on bent legs, blind to whatever was underneath her. Her pubic hair was mostly gone, just a few strands remained below a bald patch, so she looked like a little girl. He could see the slit line of her against a stripped membrane. Her left breast was made smaller than the right by the acid, which had swept through fatty tissue with abandon, and the nipple there looked like a piece of misshapen rock, chipped glass. The tattooed eyes on her torso had been erased in places, in others they had washed together in bizarre, nondescript patches of concentrated dye. Green from the largest ruptured iris on her abdomen had collected above her appendix, and it seemed in comparison a beautiful emerald seam against the strip-mined earth of the rest of her. No. She was like a fresco with a jar of paint stripper knocked over her. She had run, dried and hardened. Several of the eyes on her arms, legs and back had survived, but otherwise she was as streaky as an abstract painting. She put a hand up to his face and moved his tears away with the heel of her palm. She gave him those moments before she spoke, she had probably not in any case known how to prepare him verbally for the sight. Nothing she could have said would have cleared the way.

— So. The doctors can move skin around on your body now. From here to here, they cut it off and put it back on. This is called a skin graft, they can only just do this thing. Mostly it still doesn’t work. It is amazing that they can do that, I think.

Cy took a chestful of air and nodded, his diaphragm shuddering. He put his hands on his hips and tried to breathe calmly through gritted teeth, he felt as if he had been running fast for the last few minutes. But he did not look away from her. And then she reminded him of something. Her voice with its different, unlocated accent and the dark white and grey body with its patches of green — she was like a thing which he had encountered only twice as a boy from the train window as he rode to his Aunt Doris’s house, and he had thought it haunting and raw even then. It was the rock pavements of the Yorkshire moors where the earth’s bone surfaced in bands and petrified rivers against the swaying grass and the living ground. She was now in part dead, like the stone of the moors, while regions of her still grew, and her tone was the dirge-like song of the wind.

A man in front of them on the other side of the street whistled in their direction and crossed over to get a more intimate view of the nude woman.

— Turn around girly-girl, let’s see your better side.

Grace obliged him, turning around inanimately like a gigot on a spit, and the man stopped coming and took his eyes off her. He adjusted his collar and hurried away.

Cy took the boards of the booth down quickly, his hands shaking as he stacked them, and they both stepped into the small enclosure. He offered her a seat and she shook her head.

— It takes too long. Up and down. Not worth it any more. But, I’m finding ways.

He sat down on the stool. He had to sit. He had to remember to breathe, to tell his lungs to operate. He was now in a direct line with her midriff, the region of the worst damage. There was amazing detail to the scarring. The hospital gauze had left cross-hatching on the plateaus of skin. There were peaks like miniature mountain ranges, black gullies. Those wounds! She had always said it would be about body, hadn’t she, that the battleground had been chosen by others and a war would be fought there, and won or lost? Hers had been the site of an almighty uprising, on a territory mapped out and claimed by an administration that had every intention of preserving empire and dictating the law of the land to its colony. So all she could do was find a way to overwhelm the government with quick wits, a trick of the light in battle using shields and mirrors and superb body armour, blinding them for long enough to disable their forces and vanquish them. And for a time the victory flags had flown across her body. How must that have felt for her, he wondered. Like a full brass plate and a cheer from the crowd? Like Liberty’s fiery torch? And he had known what she was up against all along, hadn’t he, him with his booth walls drowning under images of sex and stylized female bodies? Yes, he had known.