Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Morris Gibbs’s older brother, Terrance, was perhaps the most fortunate of all the youngsters in town trying to make some pocket money. He had been wading around barefoot and dredging cockles from the sandy rocks with his father and Morris out on the Jacky John Skears one day when he trod on something wriggling and writhing and he found the eel. The Eel. Not just any eel, for it took all three of them to yank the beast from the sand hole it was hell bent on squirming into. It was a monster, a creature that rivalled all the sea-devils and sturgeon and Greenland whales and curious, unnamed specimens ever tossed up on the shore for unsuspecting Morecambrians to find. It was the granddaddy of all eels. The struggle to catch it was for many years to come a frequently told yarn in the Gibbs home, Mrs Gibbs remained ever sad not to have been able to dice it up and have a preposterously large spitchcock fry, Mr Gibbs adding inches to the beast with every retelling of its capture, not to mention fangs, prehistoric spines and red eyes made of rubies. As legend was soon to have it, Morris’s dad had been busy with the pronged rake that day while Terrance was emptying bucketloads of fish into the cart. Morris was giving the silty-covered horse her nosebag of oats and adjusting her blanket when Terrance let out a yell so loud both brother and father thought he’d stepped on a Portuguese man o’ war. The eel was coiled in a puddle of water in a depression in the beach next to a boulder, trying for all its slippery life to make that boulder a shield above it. Terrance had already begun to wrestle it out when the two came over to help. Thus ensued a battle of Argonaut proportions. Boots were dug in. Sludge was shovelled out. Waists were grasped and hauled. The Gibbs men finally prevailed. It turned out to be sixty-four inches long, and nineteen inches in girth, the largest eel ever found and recorded in Morecambe history. For the whole summer long Terrance took it round the pubs and the promenade and charged a penny a look at the creature, concertina-snug in a large glass jar, which had once held Edmondson’s pickled eggs. Alive or dead it was hard to say, but the eel impressed many a man and distressed many a lady that summer. By the end of the season, much to his younger brother’s envy, Terrance had enough money for a brand new shining bicycle from Lancaster.

The sand-bred citizens of the town seemed born with a sense of what might make their fortunes. If there was a tale to be told or a whimsy to be shown or a skill to be extorted, very possibly only the Lord God himself could put a stop to it in Morecambe Bay. In summer, copper coins shuffled through the pockets and purses of townsfolk faster than they could be counted by the tellers in the bank. Professional entertainment was bigger business still, and on the occasions when he and Reeda were invited along by guests of the hotel to the shows Cy marvelled at what was on offer inside the pavilions and gardens, what strange and exotic talents could earn a decent wage. There were male impersonators and jugglers, vaudevillians, dames and geishas, ghost train operators, acrobats and circus ringmasters. Grease-coated-throated men ate fire and then drove home in brand-new cars. At the monkey castle blue-bottomed primates swung from the rafters and chattered loudly amongst themselves while the crowds bought and tossed them nuts and peel. Miss India Rubber, contortionist extraordinaire, could put both legs behind her shoulders so her backside was cushioning her skull and then walk crab-like from the stage of the Taj Mahal to the end of the western pier and back again — she would patrol through the crowds after the show with her live boa constrictor, letting it sit on the shoulders of dare-devil boys and girls for another extra penny from their parents. It was rumoured that she was so wealthy she owned a flat in the city of Manchester which was home to not less than one thousand poisonous snakes and spiders imported from the Amazon. Fat comedians with cigars in their mouths shook the bellies of the visitors with gags about mothers-in-law and brothels. And there was that favourite rude old chestnut as the curtain went up to commence every show:

— Where are we all tonight, ladies and gentlemen?

— More-cambe.

— And is there more come here ladies and gentlemen? Ooh sorry Sally-Ann, that’s a bit naughty, isn’t it?

Short of a visit to the towers or the museums of London, and within the bounds of imagination and reason, there was nothing more thrilling and funny and silly that turned a profit to be found anywhere outside the chuckle-creased corners of the bay.

In March of 1917, sometime between the hours of ten and eleven at night, a faulty fuse sparked on the western pier, inside its most majestic building. The little smoulder gathered strength and in the strong sea breeze it spun into a persistent glut of flame. Then the fire, suddenly very confident, spread to the ground-floor ceiling of the structure and lay upside down across its rafters. The great pavilion of the Taj Mahal went up in a blaze the likes of which the town had never seen before. The golden dome of the building shone in the darkness as reddish flames leaped upwards from the wooden strutting of the deck. Within twenty minutes the fire had created a bright Pharos of light to alert those not yet abed and to wake those who were. Cy pulled back the curtain of his window. He’d been reading when an undefined patch of light, out of keeping with the glare of the streetlamps on the promenade, caught his eye. His mother at her window saw wings of orange curving up the sides of the main dome, mimicking its shape, tormenting it with the authority to destroy it. Both ran to the front door, knocking awake their guests. An opportunistic buzz quickly went through Morecambe. It soon reached the back end of the town, those properties without a view of the fiery pavilion, through to the slums of Moss Street and the train station, all were invited to the show.

The townsfolk and the first of the season’s visitors made their way out of their houses and hotels and down to the beach, awed and hurriedly, as if late for the performance, though it looked in no danger of finishing before time. They came fully dressed or in nightgowns and slippers, rolling rags and winkie caps, caring nothing for appearance, drawn to the scene as if hypnotized, swaying quickly but thickly, like the frantic slowness towards the end of a strong dream. The tide was low, the entire mud beach stretching out for the spectators to take to like the apron of a stage. And take to it they did, thousands of people, standing close together on the sands, watching extraordinary light floating out above the bay. The wooden walkway to the pavilion had become a burning road above them, an almost biblical vision some said, and others passed that thought along.

Fire itself would have been incendiary beauty enough for one evening. But then, it snowed. First it snowed lightly, a flake or two on the heads of the bemused onlookers, like winter waving a handkerchief from a distant carriage of the train taking it away. Somebody close to Cy in the crowd cheered, presuming the snow would extinguish the blaze, as if one tear could put out the fire of a tormented heart! Then the wind turned, switched tracks, and brought with it an entire fast batch of plump snow, a blizzard in fact. Those in undergarments and long shirts shivered and reached for spouses and children for warmth, and some reached for convenient strangers. Those with rotting chests wheezed and coughed but did not go inside. Reeda’s consumptives benefited from her foresight and blessed her as she handed out a stack of woollen blankets. Cy found Morris Gibbs in the crowd, for his red hair seemed like a portion of fire itself in the light, and he pulled on his arm. They walked closer to the blaze, so close Cy could feel his face changing texture, crisping, broiling. Behind him Morris had hiked his jumper over his head for protection from the heat and was looking through the neck of it so the scope of his vision could have been no larger than that seen through a penny slot machine. The fire leaned slightly to the right, at an angle appropriate to the wind. The snow blew fast to the right, arced upwards, fell, was chaotic, then resumed its course. Cy looked up. Oh. The snow. The snow was on fire. How could that be? Though he had mastered none of the sciences yet in junior school, he understood that the two elements were seldom in cahoots, let alone conjoined. And yet it was so. Fire and ice. There above him. The brilliant snow moved like thousands of migrating, flaming birds across the sky, flocking, reforming, conflagrating. It was like meteors swarming and rushing on some swift and undisclosed passage, riding the rapids of the cosmos. Or like being spun with his eyes open in a circle on a clear night except that he was standing still and the sky was whirling of its own accord. It was like pieces of a mirror being smashed in the heavens, in a fury of narcissistic disappointment. He was ten years old and dizzy with amazement.