Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Having finished his tale with drama and emphasis, Henry pulled out his almost empty bottle and took a swill and he held it out to the nearest policeman. Oh and the cell keys, incidentally, he said, were hanging tidily back up on a hook by the gate, as if someone had only been fixing to borrow them all along. Nobody had even thought to look for them where they belonged.

Charles Henry Beausang the Third spent four hours lying to the police about possible suspects and mapping his whereabouts in the hospital all evening for them. The elevator’s switch had been thrown between floors and the hatch opened and the cops had a hard time believing that this had not been brought to the attention of anyone earlier. One or two other points did not add up. Nobody had been roused by the smoke in the corridor. And, given the time the fire began, and when the injuries were perpetrated, there should have been more smoke. None of the doors on the lower level had been forced and the night watchman, well acquainted with the sauce as he was too, had seen nobody entering or leaving by the reception door. Yeah it was fishy, said the inspector, fishy, fishy, fishy. Then again if the hospital was run by drunks and half-wits, what could you expect. There followed some severe lectures about the inappropriate imbibing of alcohol on duty and the fact that this establishment housed some of the region’s rankest criminals, put there by the hard work of the city’s police department. All this Henry took with credible humility and shame, the bloodless blush of a professional flim-flam man. He did not know how long it would take the police to find Malcolm Sedak’s records in order to piece together the puzzle of who might have been involved with the crime. The man himself was incomprehensible when he spoke. He babbled like a child with night-terrors and kept trying to touch his missing eyes behind the bandages.

What Henry Beausang omitted to tell the authorities was that he had left the back door of the hospital specifically unlocked, he had presented the watchman with a bottle of rum, and he had loitered up on the third floor an hour longer than necessary. Nor did he mention that he had left open a window on the second floor so that the smoke might billow out evasively, just as he had been instructed to do.

By the time the police detectives had reached the booth on Oceanic Walk, The Electric Michelangelo had dismantled his place of work for the winter. By the time they reached Den Jones’s barbershop, via the eventual cooperation of some remarkably tight-lipped and unhelpful Coney informers, several dead-ends, one or two obvious decoys, Cyril Parks was no longer anywhere to be found in the country. Nor was Sedak’s original victim around to throw light upon a very dark matter. In fact there was no record of this woman in existence at all other than her recent medical file. The city was becoming ever more a place where ghosts and demons could live their half-lives unknown and uncharted by the authorities, it seemed. The investigation was perhaps more abbreviated than it needed to be, but nobody felt truly torn up for the victim. This was after all a vague quid pro quo affair, and the file was permanently closed, or at least relegated to a spot at the back of a very full cabinet, by January of 1941. Yes, Den Jones finally confirmed, there had been an Englishman tattooing in the back room for a couple of years — but he had gone up to Montreal or Toronto as far as he knew. Something about the Canadian Air Force and doing his duty in these troubled times. To the best of Den’s knowledge he had never so much as stepped out with a girl to the movies or the music hall, let alone revenged a lady made of tattooed eyes.

Much later, with white in his hair and two world wars behind him, Cy would dream of America, and it would visit him as a series of faces. There were the faces of Brooklyn, that could break his heart with their history, their handsome melancholy, the wet-lit eyes that were, in cold weather, very prone to tears. He dreamt of Henry’s face, made prematurely old by violence, stupid with alcohol, but gorgeous from adventure as he bid Cy farewell by the station that crisp, culpable morning in the fall of 1940. Other friends put in appearances, Den, Claudia and Arturas, the sisters, in capacities that were helpful to him when his dreams were troubling. Grace was an infrequent vision. She came and went within pockets of darkness, wrathful and beautiful, dampness on her face as she bore his needle, weeping with empty rage as she lifted down the fire iron with heated sibilance on to her opponent in the terrible game she had played. Her eyes, once swirling so full of precarious, suggestive information, always appeared closed under the heavy brow. At times he woke up assured that, during the night, he had solved the eternal puzzle of who she really was, what had created her, but whatever nocturnal handiwork his brain had done, by morning it was always misplaced or deconstructed, picked apart by devious elves. He was left with just a stray idea — a sense that she was medieval after all, as he had imagined her on that first night by the fountain with her horse, but in straightforward cruelty and justice not courtly love. Or he became convinced that his imagination at that time, oft-inebriated as it was, had run riot, and she had never really had him hold a rag in the mouth of a man who was only his secondary enemy while she murdered his vision. He wished to see more of her but wishing only made her harder to invoke, resistant to his dreams, and perhaps that was his own return form of anopia, an eye for an eye, losing sight for lost sight. Sedak’s childish visage came and went in nightmares — accompanied by scenes of the fighting he had endured on behalf of one or other of the countries he had in his life been affiliated with, Cy had never been sure which — and it was the face of a restrained child about to be punished for a crime he suddenly understood, a juvenile soul taught by some unsuitable influence or example that he could express his tainted religion, his prejudicial extremes, that his hatred should be credited with self-tolerance in the land of the free. The blind, ruined face of his and Grace’s conspiracy came to Cy most spectacularly and horribly the night after he had stood in Lancaster court dock for non-payment of rates and had noticed an old branding iron hung above the judicial bench. He dreamt he was being dragged into the dark sockets of Sedak’s missing eyes. And he woke in a fit of sickness, and ran to the bathroom to vomit. There were the ordinary faces of the century in his dreams, by their thousand under wide-ribboned hats or tulip bonnets on the boardwalk, and there were those extraordinary faces — bearded, pigmy shrunken, half-human half-amphibian or reptile scaled. And sometimes, because the dreaming mind is truly a creature of sign and symbol, it was the emblematic face of Coney Island itself that came to him, looming above like a full oval moon, that dapper, lunatic caricature with a commodious grin and slick, centre-parted hair, mocking and mimicking the crowds from the double gateway of Steeplechase. This image had staying power, and when he looked into the mirror to shave come daylight it would seem that the face was trying to be his reflection, all he had to do was bring his smile into alignment.

Number eleven Pedder Street was dark and damp as he pushed open the door. It had the consecrated forlornness of a crypt, the sense of a threshold violated by his presence. The electricity had been cut for well over a decade when Cyril Parks finally collected the key from the solicitor’s office, so he flicked on his Zippo for illumination and burned away the cobwebs hanging from the doorway. He moved inside the downstairs rooms and put his duffle bag down on the floor, rubbed his aching leg. He had presumed the town would be streaming with nostalgia when he returned, the way a stone that is lifted out of water rushes with the memory of where it has been kept. But the streets from the train station to his destination had seemed no more vested than they ever had been when he was a resident. In the solstice twilight of the winter of 1946 he had come back to his hometown. As he walked the familiar roads he saw new places of business had opened, shops and hotels, though many of the older venues were still running and had made it through the war. But everything seemed smaller, sturdier than he recalled, and commonly organized after the anomie of his travels. The houses and churches and grander buildings of Morecambe Bay had always had a flat perspective with simple shadows at this time of day in December, he remembered, when the sun beat an early path over the harrowing Irish Sea, as if in an illustration from a nursery book. His returning eye was kinder than he expected, and it conveyed, with its visual wares, a sense of comfort. It was like stepping back into a place of sympathy, an old comfortable shoe, rather than revisiting a realm saturated with once-were spirits and cumbersome, erstwhile lives.