The Electric Michelangelo (9 page)

– Get on with it, would you, you great string bean?

– We haven’t got all night, nosey-Parker.

Such was the strain of his eavesdropping that Cy was having trouble balancing. He adjusted himself clumsily on the sill. It was at about that point in the proceedings when there was a telltale tinkle of glass pane being broken and the buzzing ceased and the cracked window suddenly slid up. A careless boot-toe, he had over-stepped the platform! A woollen-capped head arrived at the level of Cy’s foot. Two hands with colourfully stained fingers then came out on to the window ledge, one of them grasped Cy’s boot firmly, as if snaring a hare, and the man in the wool cap turned to look up. His eyes were a guttering glacial blue and unrelenting. They were as pale and transparent and fire-cold as a flame leaping out of a mineral-grained log in a grate. Eyes that you wouldn’t want to have to out-stare in an argument, thought Cy, that would make you feel like quarry in a dispute even before a word or curse was spoken, and he returned their gaze, spellbound. The vessels were large and round, containing bad emotion and amusement at once, indications of a personality that would travel the length and breadth of its own deficiencies as well as its redeeming traits, though the former seemed much more likely. And as the eyes observed him upwardly, there was something else to them too: not exactly shock, for here was a man probably not put into such conditions easily, Cy read of him, but soft-surprised cognition. Cy felt a strange perception also. As if some mutual knowledge of the other was casting itself about them. As if both their graves were simultaneously being trodden over. Cy remained perfectly still, partly in sympathetic curiosity, and partly because there did not seem to be another course of action which would not involve an untidy jump from a fair height with the open shearing blades, perhaps leaving one incarcerated leg behind on the sill, and uncomfortably stretching recently evolved and endeared parts of himself he wasn’t willing to stretch before he could wrestle free. Then there might be running and quite possibly a sound leathering from the pursuer if he was caught. After a few quiet, canny moments the eyes waned, the stained hand let go of his ankle, tapped his boot three times, and disappeared. The head retreated and the window sash banged shut, dislodging the remainder of the fractured glass pane. Jonty loud-whispered up to Cy, his hands cupped about his mouth.

– Get down. Get Kaiser Bill down. Hurry up, we can’t stop here. He’s a left-footer and a gype.

– Who’s a left-footer?

– Shhhhh! Mr Riley.

Above Cy another window suddenly opened and the figure of a man leaned out. He had a knife. Cy peered up as best he could without becoming dizzy and losing his footing. It was the same man as before, though he now seemed annoyed. There were keen gestures from his arms and irritation stacked along the veins in his neck. Moving swiftly he sawed through the roping of the Kaiser’s gallows and the doll slumped to the ground. The potty Hohenzollern helmet rattled and spun on the street and rag intestines burst out through the grey uniform. Without a word the window shut, slicing down with a final shucking sound like that of a guillotine. The boys hastily departed Pedder Street.

Afterwards, walking back along the pier and towing the Kaiser behind them in a barrow, Jonty told Cy and Morris that his dad said Mr Riley was an undesirable papist with a disgraceful occupation, who bought dead pigs’ heads from the butchers and took them home for ungodly purposes. Morris was not impressed at all.

– So, my mam eats fish cheeks, she says that’s the best part of the fish to eat. And sometimes the eyeballs, raw, she just picks them out and pops them in her mouth like aniseed balls!

– No, not to eat, you great pillock, to practise on, on the hide, with his needle. His mucky needle. He’s a scraper.

– What does he scrape?

– Don’t know exactly, father won’t tell me, but I know it isn’t nice.

Apparently there was more pointy ministry in the town than just Cy’s mother’s. When he got home Cy told his mam about the Kaiser, about Mr Riley and the pigs, hoping she might be able to clarify the situation.

– Well. I doubt very much whether Lomax would let go of his pigs’ heads to anyone, love, Catholic or not. Otherwise he’d not have any sausages to sell on Thursdays.

– Do we know Mr Riley?

– I know of him, love.

– What’s a scraper?

– It’s a man that does tattooing. Your dad had a tattoo on his shoulder. Lots of men of the sea do. Sort of like a club badge, though it’s quite a personal thing.

– Why was he not mad about the window pane? Why did he help us cut Kaiser Bill down? Is he a radical?

– Oh, goodness knows. Perhaps Mr Riley is a Bolshevik, son. I believe there are a few around.

Cy did not mention his feeling of déjà vu, that grave-robbing look between them of retrieving a body they both had some loon-moon claim to. It was as if the man had recognized him. It was as if he had been expecting him. That’s how the eyes had seemed.

There were times when initial introductions were so vested with something other as to confuse and distract and entrance both parties, Cy would realize later. And only further into relationships when you knew the person better, and their place in your life became clear, if there was love, if there was hate, if there was deepness of any kind, only then did you understand that the embers of meaning had been present all along and glowing since that first moment you laid eyes on them. As if you already knew them before you came to know them. As if some rift had bent time.

Eva Brennan, on the other hand, gave him no such early forecast that she would trample on his heart. Life had been ticking along just fine until she stepped a dainty foot through the Bayview’s door with her mother and father two years later, lent like the weather, like the bright borrowed days in the northern counties that early guest season of 1920. She was the loveliest thing Cy had ever seen, beside Aurora Borealis and Gaynor’s nipples. She was fourteen. She was blonde. And had freckles on the backs of her arms. She didn’t have tuberculosis. Her mother had made her a flower bonnet to wear in the Easter parade, with blue cornflowers in it that made her eyes seem darker and sadder. In the citrus light of the spring bay parade the hair on her temples had an aura of something fairy-spun. For three days Cy tried to tell her that he liked her by giving her an extra large helping of cabbage at dinner, and hanging her coat up on the stand whenever she came in. She always smiled at him. As if curious and waiting. When he lay in bed at night and thought of her two rooms away his legs and chest ached, as if he’d spent the day on the school’s pitches at the bottom of a scrum, and his now basally controllable cock rose, bowed, and rose again. There was only one thing for it – he would have to enlist the help of the boys in order to woo her. Jonty had had more experience with girls, being not averse to handing out his mother’s beauty potions in the school yard and having kissed two at least for payment to the best of Cy’s knowledge, which was two more than he ever had. He invited his friends over to formulate a plan of action. Morris said he would rather go fishing than watch anyone fumbling with a girl, and that Cy could hook her
Pisces
vaginales
if he wanted, but he himself fancied a nice flounder for his supper. Morris hadn’t quite got the hang of girls. Jonty was only too happy to assist.

– Does she have big bosomers?

– Biggish.

– Bigger than a bee sting?

– Yes.

– Marvellous.

On the last day of the Brennans’ seaside vacation Cy and Eva and Jonty went for a walk along the beach. Jonty was always good for getting people talking. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. It was low tide and Cy was determined to find a shell or two to add to Eva’s collection. He walked down to the waterline keeping his eyes peeled for a worthy specimen – something she could put on her vanity dresser when she went back home to Yorkshire, and she’d remember him and write him letters glancing up at it, pink and glazed inside with the light coming through it like thin bone china, sitting next to a hairbrush spun with her blonde hair. And she’d sign her name with an X at the bottom of the page signifying their first kiss on the shore at Morecambe, shortly to be undertaken. So peeled were his eyes between bubbled seaweed and smooth shingle, that he drifted off away from the other two as they chatted. So peeled were they that he missed their abbreviated courtship, the giggle of innuendo, the not-so-accidental brush of hands together as they strolled, the sharing of an ice-cone – trailing tongues along the paths made in the vanilla cream by each other. When he looked up, finally defeated in his search for a suitable love-token, he could see them standing very close together. And Eva put her arms up round Jonty’s neck, and gave him the kiss that was supposed to be Cy’s. Every bone in Cy’s body let go of its neighbour and clattered down inside him to the sick soles of his shoes. It was as if somebody had taken a wrecking ball not only to his skeleton but to his porcelain-baked, sea-delicate, pink-lit aspirations as well. When they were done kissing Eva turned to Cy and waved, then tickled Jonty in his ribs, and she went alone back up the beach steps to the prom and then back to the Bayview Hotel, where she packed her suitcase full of bonnets and shells and that afternoon left on the train to Yorkshire with her parents. Cy would probably have been too tall to kiss her anyway, Jonty informed him as they sat on the bathing pool wall later that day, even if he had got round to it, and his you-know-what would have likely bayoneted her in the stomach.

There were to be other kisses for Cyril Parks, with girls of varying statures. He drank extra milk for mending his weakened spirit and bones and put himself back together. He forgave Jonty, who hadn’t known the whole truth of the matter, he insisted, and bit by bit Cy acquainted himself with the messy, mistimed, warm and wet-patched world of courting. But Eva Brennan had done her part and remodelled his anatomy, if for no other reason than she was the first to break him. His bones felt still a little weak, as if once having been dislocated from each other they would never again bear quite such romantic weight. And he stopped riding the toboggans and the wooden coasters in the fun parks of Morecambe, not being able to take pleasure in the sensation of being boneless any more, the feeling of having something falling out of him, like hope falling down brittle as calcium dust to the empty shore.

Boggarts and eels and bore-running behind them, the boys found part-time employment around the town so as to be able to help out at home, purchase tickets to the pictures and chips from the kiosks. Cy got a job after school and on Saturday afternoons at the print shop on Strickland Street. The printers was owned by Reginald Greene, who droned on about the war and how he’d never sleep another full night for the perpetual ringing in his ears of explosions, and how his wife was as cold as a fish when she moved past him after his return and that he might as well have perished in the bloody trenches for all she cared. Greene paid him enough to keep him amused at weekends and some went to his mother, which gave her a proud look every time an envelope was handed to her and she would mark it up in its own separate column on the page of her weekly accounting log. Then she would produce Stanley Parks’s old curved pipe from the kitchen drawer, pack it with tobacco and have a smoke. Cy was never sure his mother truly enjoyed smoking for she sneezed frequently as she partook and her eyes watered. The act seemed more compulsive and obligatory than a pleasurable habit, but he knew better than to question it. Reeda had her ways.