Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

What he did remember vividly as he walked from the engine sheds past the Bayview and the old fairground to a familiar door on a small winding street, was that first premeditated journey to Eliot Riley’s quarters, when the night had been pronounced and dense brown and his will had had a life of its own. He remembered his boyish heart, knocking like an open window in a gale at the thought of encountering what lay beyond the complacency of the present. That walk had been fast and eager, with his long, youthful stride carrying him well, though trepidation had made it pass with super-awareness, slowness, the town reverberating and chiming with exhaustive materials. Now he moved with greater difficulty, and a heavy limp to his right leg gifted to him by the war, but it seemed to take no time at all to navigate the old place, and reach his destination, as if Morecambe had shrunk in the wash even though the town had bled through its borders since he had been away. And he wondered how his life had fitted into this snug place while seeming so grand and unruly for the characters and the incidents of it.

The walls of the Pedder Street parlour were bare and cracking. There were a couple of flash pictures still mounted on the walls that he had not bothered to collect up before he departed, or he had chosen to leave them behind, he could not recall. On a dusty rail there hung the musty velvet curtain with its theatrical tasselled bottom behind which the master had apprenticed his lad, and there was another private section where the apprentice had followed the lead of his dubious mentor. Cy could almost smell the pickled fish and stouty breath in the air, and hear the bawdy, chastising words about craftsmanship, and the hobnailed opinions on every other thing, coming from the ghost of Riley. But they came from a place far back in Cy’s mind that made them mannered and coloured like art and there was no emotional frottage or suffering to the recollection now, it was just life, just the pan-bright tones of what had been. There was an absence of keen junk about the place that most quickly abandoned dwellings have strewn about, so the house forgave him his hasty, barely put-together exit. There had never been many articles present anyway. Just the chairs for the customers in the waiting area where they once viewed the plethora of images and the wooden stools next to which were railings fixed on the wall. A fine sheen of lime dust covered the furniture. It could have been a small amateur stage vacated by players a long time ago at die bidding of a bankrupt production manager.

He went upstairs with his flaring lighter beginning to singe his thumb. He waited for a moment in the blackness for the casing to cool before bringing back the flame. There were the bedrooms and the small kitchen, the old bath that had been filled with cold water and a drunken man on many occasions. On the chimney mantel the bird skulls were lined up, though a couple of them had collapsed in fragments under a shroud of dust. He wandered through the shadowy rooms, watching the light pass over Riley’s old books, the statue of the Virgin Mary, tenacious as ever at the edge of the shelf, and what was left in the wooden crates that had once held his meagre possessions — some old clothing, stiff and mothy in heaps, a sketch book, a set of watercolours and a brush, a gunpowder tea tin in which there were his father’s cufflinks and a photograph or two taken inside the Bayview during happier times. After a while he remembered the Jewish menorah that had sat preposterously in the window downstairs, that had wound up in Riley’s possession through he knew not what ridiculous turn, and he went to find it. There were a few grubby, waxy stubs left in the tiers which he set the flame to and this provided enough light for him to wash his face with his last ration of serviceman’s soap in the bathroom sink, after first letting the water run clear of sediment and rust.

The sea in the bay was out and almost beyond sight, which was a disappointment the next morning as he approached the promenade, he had wanted to get close enough to it to feel the spray, but it meant that there was plenty of driftwood and kindling on the beach for him to collect for the fireplace. The previous night had been cold, with one military blanket only and his coat as protection against the frosty, stony air. It seemed he had not come so far really in two decades, he thought to himself, picking up debris on the shoreline for the Pedder Street parlour. The Lake Distict fells were a misty smear along the horizon. He had remembered them as mountains which were taller, fuller, the way landscape in paintings becomes exaggerated. In the shallow basin of the empty bay were a number of slimy, weed-covered anti-landing-craft obstructions that spoiled the view across the counties giving the vista a modern, interfered-with look. Post-war relics dotted the town behind him also, pill boxes near the piers and the ugly shelters built on the Sunshine Slopes. But other than this the town seemed unscathed by the conflict itself — he’d bought a copy of the Visitor that morning and it seemed like the same old paper that ever it was, with the same contentious, conservative opinions, the same gamely gossip and extravagant advertisements. Morecambe still had its pluck and it still professed to having soft air.

As he strolled along the bare flats there was the pungent smell of long, deep silt, like the creational clay of the world, and he thought about all the folk of Morecambe Bay he had known. He thought of his mother. Later, he would go and lay flowers on Reeda’s grave and clear away the moss and dirt from the carved lettering of her headstone. He knew the visit would bring him a gentle peace and in a way he was looking forward to it, though the graveyard overlooking the sea was a forlorn place. He would tell his mother about America, and that she would have been glad she wasn’t around for the next war for it had trumped the last in terms of horror. Before he knew it he had walked as far as the Trawlers’ Cooperative building and since he was of a mind to do the respectful rounds he decided to pay his regards to the photograph of his father, leaning, as he inevitably still would be, on the stern of the Sylvia Rose. But the door of the construction was locked and bolted and the handle would do no more than rattle under its chain.

— What do you need, pal? We’re shut up for the holidays until the social on New Year’s Eve.

Cy turned to see a middle-aged man with dark red hair and a long mackintosh coat approaching him. He was about to say it didn’t matter, that it was just a courtesy visit, but the man suddenly stopped in his tracks and peered hard. Then he executed a small clog on the pavement and put his hands in the air.

— Cyril Parks, as I live and bloody breathe! Is that you, you great string bean? Course it is, I’d know that great long lank of Lancashire lad anywhere.

— Morris? Morris Gibbs.

The two shook warmly and clumsily, cradling each other’s elbows with their free hands. Their eyes locked for a spell, disarmed and intrigued at once. It was as if neither had reconciled his own age until that point in his life, until confronted with a face from his youth that was now older, aged privately and separately. Morris shook his head, bemused.

— Well, what you been up to, Parksie? Must be, what, going on fifteen years now.

— Oh. This, that and the other. You know.

— I do indeed. Indeed I do. Still practising on pig heads?

— No, I’ve moved on to their arses now.

Morris laughed loudly and slapped him on the back.

— Well good for you. Fancy a jar? Come on, we’ll have a bit of a yarn and catch up. Not busy, are you?