The Electric Michelangelo Read online

  Frequently one or two of the women came back to the hotel in the afternoon for sandwiches after the pier walk, though most stayed out while his mother returned to her hotel chores. Once settled round the kitchen table with a pot of tea they would continue their talking about votes in louder, more irritated tones. Other times Cy and his mother would return alone, and Reeda would ferociously pound chicken liver into pâté for dinner that night. On the way back to the Bayview there would be trouble if his mother ran into one of the other hotel owners. The arguments were without exception begun by other women. Mrs Thelma Kirkstall from the Grand Hotel once caught hold of his mother’s wrist as she passed by and hissed at her.

  – My Ronnie saw you out on the promenade again. Reeda, you silly cow, why don’t you get another husband instead of all this nonsense. Whatever’s in you?

  Cy’s mother stood looking at Mrs Kirkstall, just looking at her and not moving until the woman took her hand off Reeda’s wrist, then she turned and walked away. The woman went to pat Cy’s head but Cy made as if to buckle his shoe, though it was already firmly buckled, half unwilling to be touched by the woman who had grabbed his mother, half suspecting that Mrs Kirkstall may also have touched consumptives in her time. He looked up at her squinting face, crumpled like a discarded fish and chip wrapper. She had a badly done permanent wave and cracked dry lips.

  – Poor lad, she’ll raise you to wring out her skirts if you’re not careful. You’ll end up selling ladies’ bloomers and shoes in Anderson’s. Come by ours if you want sometime. Mr Kirkstall will show you all you need to know, eh? Come round and he’ll give you a wee drop of man’s talk. There’s a good lad.

  And she boxed the air like a March rabbit, upright and punching on its hind legs. Cy unhinged and re-buckled his shoe, then ran down the street after his striding mother.

  – Skirt-wringer!

  He heard the woman shouting after him and when he caught up with Reeda he found she was cussing under her breath as bitterly as he had ever heard her cuss.

  There were better ways to make money in Morecambe than passing round brass plates, Cy would find out. There were in fact more schemes for making money in the town than there were grains of imported Blackpool sand on the shores of the bay. Most of the lesser enterprises were unsurprisingly thought up by children, and Cyril Parks’s gang was not innocent in this regard. The adult spiritualists, fortune tellers, novelty kiosk vendors, hoteliers, whores, the town planners and the contractors may have made more money and lost it out of season but the desperate entrepreneurial efforts of the young peddlers, hustlers and downright petty rogues were remarkable, breathtaking and prolific. Cy liked to think of his peers as the best inventors of the day, unfettered by trivial, traditional constraints, like guarantees or liability. If the town’s tourist industry operated on the premise of vague flight-of-fancy fibbery with regard to its assets, beauty surrounding and health abounding, Morecambrians living to be 120 years of age on average because of the miraculous air, and so on and so forth, the individual juvenile protagonist was far more venturesome and frequently exposed in his swindlery. ‘Buyer Beware’ was the motto of the trio. Children annually sold tickets for tours to see the local boggarts, monsters, spirits and wee folk of the area, who supposedly lived in the dunes, the bushes surrounding the town and out in the Lune marshes. The boggarts themselves ranged from convenient stray dogs, vagrant tramps and drunks, to friends and younger siblings dressed in raggedy clothing with twigs entwined in their hair and mud on their faces. When, one summer, they ran out of suitable candidates for the role, Cy and Morris and Jonty drew lots to see who would have to dress up and cover himself with muck for the occasion. Cy lost the draw, though Jonty later confessed to having fixed it earlier on with Morris as revenge for Cy peeing on his leg.

  – Why does the boggart have to have dog shit on him? Can I not just sit in the mud for a bit? It’s all the same.

  – No it’s not, stupid. All boggarts roll around in it ‘cause it keeps people away who want to kill them. Can’t have a boggart without shit as anyone knows! Do you want your sherbet dip or not, Parksie?

  Jonty winked at Morris and Cy eventually consented to the indignity.

  They dressed him up in a pair of old waders belonging to Morris’s dad, which stank to high heaven of flukes, and they stuffed grass into the holes of his shirt, around the collar and up the sleeves. Cy had brought a pocketful of potato peelings from the kitchen of the Bayview and he stuffed them into his mouth and practised his groaning while his pals went on the search for fresh shit. They came back over the marshes with two sticks on the ends of which was a nasty mess and proceeded to poke Cy with them while giggling and putting their noses against their sleeves. He protested through a mouth of peel.

  – That’s foul. Get off, it’s enough.

  – Wait here while we find our customers. And don’t wash the dirt off, Cyril Parks.

  Half an hour later, he was still sitting miserably in the swampy grass of the Lune marshes feeling thoroughly sick at the smell of himself and the rooty, soily taste of uncooked potato. He’d got bored watching the sea in the distance rolling in, shallow and foamy, watching the fishermen moving their hazelwood baulks, and collecting their shrimp. Try as he might he could not imagine being a fisherman like his father had been, not because the industry was not a good one, it provided food for the town, but because there was a quality of uncertainty, you could never be sure what the sea would bestow and what it would reserve for itself – he had seen many a fleet come back to the bay without so much as a mackerel scale or a halibut tail in the hold, the expressions of the men long and webbed, as if casting nets within themselves. Similarly, the clouds in the sky had ceased to form interesting patterns. He looked at the horizon where the sun would be disappearing in a few hours, and he remembered what his mother had told him about that as a very young child – that the sun’s light never went out at night, it just went over to Ireland and then it went to America, then right around the world until it came back up again the other side in the morning. And it was like a lamp that all lost souls could follow. After the watching and the ruminating there was nothing left to do but putrefy in his own revolting stench. Then he heard a whistle, the signal for him to hide and ready himself for his performance. He ducked down in a puddle of water and parted the reeds to watch for the approach of the unsuspecting tourist. He could hear Jonty’s voice warbling away, matter of fact, and informative, as if he were giving a tour of the Winter Gardens.

  – Right around these parts he was last spotted, madam. He was eating the skull of an animal – crunch, crunch – they have very powerful jaws you see. Now they are quite smelly, so be warned. You may want to prepare yourself just in case he comes in close.

  – Goodness gracious. Is it safe? I mean, won’t it be quite cross with us if we tread near its home?

  – Oh, they don’t have homes, madam. They range around and wail at night. Sometimes they approach farms to eat the chickens and they make necklaces out of the feathers, but there’s never been a complaint of one attacking a human being. At least not in Morecambe, in Blackpool possibly. Just a little further, madam. Right around here. Super day, isn’t it?

  – Quite lovely.

  The lady did not sound convinced, suddenly preoccupied by the thought of powerful jaws and headless chickens, no doubt. But it mattered not; that question was the code-sign for the boggart to reveal itself. Cy leaped up out of the marsh, wailed, and disappeared behind a clump of grass.

  – Over there, madam! Do you see it? Crouched behind that hummock.

  – No … Where!

  Cy began groaning and jumped up into the air again. This time he remained in view and came stumbling towards the lady. His bare feet were filthy with mud and his hair looked like a bird’s nest. She was standing stock-still as if she knew a hunter had her in his rifle sites and she must freeze or perish. Cy roared and spat a potato skin at her. She obliged him with a scream.

  – Shooo. Shoo, you nasty, smelly thing
. Get away from me. Go on! No, wait, wait, is that a boy, is that a poor little boy under all that disgusting mess?

  The boggart turned around and ruthlessly showed her its bare backside. Behind her Jonty and Morris were now helpless with laughter. The woman screamed again and lifted her skirt and began to totter speedily over the moor back towards the town. She was still screaming when she reached the promenade. Suddenly Jonty was running after her.

  – Bugger it! Hey, missis, the shilling! Stop, you haven’t paid. You owe us a shilling. Tell everyone you saw a genuine boggart and who showed you …

  From the next customer the boys made sure to take payment first. The resulting sherbet was delicious and did a fine job of ridding his tongue of the terrible taste of un-scrubbed potato, but Cy was certain that he could still smell the shit on himself for the whole of the next week, even after several baths, and that guests in the hotel were covering their faces when he leaned past them to ladle soup from the tureen into their bowls in the dining room.

  When the local boys tired of acting as tour guides some of them would try to outrun the Bore for bets, that sweeping tidal wave created as two Atlantic currents, one from the north of Ireland and one from the south, met up and converged in the direction of Morecambe’s shore. Cy, having a healthy respect for the sea, which had casually robbed him of his father, considered this scheme to be ridiculous and foolhardy in the extreme, did not mind saying so, and would not participate in any wager. The Bore came in faster than a grown man could sprint, let alone a penny-pinching stump-legged junior. It was one of the fastest tides in the British Isles and on more than one occasion every year lifeboats were sent out to collect a drowning soul who had underestimated its maritime throttle.

  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 pas
sed 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.