Read Online The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sarah Hall
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about them, so at first his mind went out to thoughts of witchery, to her capabilities of subversion and collaboration in the parlour room. As if some sinister rite of passage bequeathed him was about to take place. Perhaps he never left his slumber, and his dreaming memory deluded him into his coming vision. But she took the covers back off him, reached for his hand and led him to the window. And fatefully he went with her.
Outside there was nothing but a red sky. Red long past sunset and long before sunrise. Red of an impossible hour. Red, and behind that struggling green, and behind that trapped and gentlest white. It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature’s grace, unhurried, the slowest, seeping effulgence. Lesser and greater than all light. Blood of the sky.
Cyril Parks left himself then. Perhaps it was the solitary quietude of this occurrence, which was kept under glass for they did not step outside to applaud Miss Borealis, though she was intensely lovely, or his condition, resting on the swaying anchor of sleep, ready ahoy, soon to be sent down to the depths and so susceptible to any form of sublimation. Perhaps it was holding his mother’s hand at the window as though she were a guide, neither witch nor widow nor angel at that moment, but simply a guide on the wasteland sand of the shore, and when she took her hand softly away from his he felt arrived. Perhaps this is what ended that first part of his life. He stepped out of it willingly. And for all his remaining youth and curiosity, the full store of energy set to keep him beating on until it finally wound down and fluttered out in his heart, he would have taken death right then, under Aurora’s beauty, and gone happily, knowing he had seen the last and brightest of all miracles.
– The Kaiser and the Queen of Morecambe –
Where one confusion ended two more were sure to take its place, wasn’t that how it went? Soon there was to be an entirely new batch of contentious issues to wrangle with. Life’s next riddles may well have stemmed from Cy’s discovery of the Pisces vaginales in a science book during a weekly biology lesson, given as always and as it was currently being, by Colin Willacy, headmaster of Morecambe Grammar School. The Pisces vaginales. It certainly had a funny ring to it. It had a funny shape to it also, there on the page, like a mangled anemone. Every Wednesday afternoon, prior to rugby, the class of boys was required to locate within their natural-history textbooks a fish native to the British Isles so that they could then march down to the bay’s shore, attempt to find the selected species and sketch the blighter into their notebooks, for Headmaster Willacy was quite the practitioner, favouring the methods of field research to classroom dissertation. He also possessed a boisterous, cane-happy left arm and a good aim for catapulting loose objects from the blackboard shelf at chattering individuals, but that was by the by. Star-slubbers, flukes, ink fish, barnacles, rays. The marine choices were many. Top marks were awarded for a successful find, which seemed a little random and circumstantial to Cy, though he made no mention of this theory. And if success was not to be had they were to draw whatever God may provide for them that day, as Mr Willacy forthrightly put it. The beach and God provided artistic and scientific bounty only when either felt moved to. They also provided a startling collection of oddities from time to time, items not grown within the nurturing womb of the ocean, but fashioned in the factories of smoky towns, delivered by trains, bought in haberdasheries and market places, then lost or discarded near water channels only to end up gallivanting right around the coast before arriving at Morecambe. Old shoes, pots and pans, gloves, bottles, pieces of motor cars, rubber devices with ambiguous functions.
Outside there was nothing but a red sky. Red long past sunset and long before sunrise. Red of an impossible hour. Red, and behind that struggling green, and behind that trapped and gentlest white. It was light that had neither the impatience of fire, nor the snap of electricity, nor the fluttering sway of a candle. It was light that was nature’s grace, unhurried, the slowest, seeping effulgence. Lesser and greater than all light. Blood of the sky.
Cyril Parks left himself then. Perhaps it was the solitary quietude of this occurrence, which was kept under glass for they did not step outside to applaud Miss Borealis, though she was intensely lovely, or his condition, resting on the swaying anchor of sleep, ready ahoy, soon to be sent down to the depths and so susceptible to any form of sublimation. Perhaps it was holding his mother’s hand at the window as though she were a guide, neither witch nor widow nor angel at that moment, but simply a guide on the wasteland sand of the shore, and when she took her hand softly away from his he felt arrived. Perhaps this is what ended that first part of his life. He stepped out of it willingly. And for all his remaining youth and curiosity, the full store of energy set to keep him beating on until it finally wound down and fluttered out in his heart, he would have taken death right then, under Aurora’s beauty, and gone happily, knowing he had seen the last and brightest of all miracles.
– The Kaiser and the Queen of Morecambe –
Where one confusion ended two more were sure to take its place, wasn’t that how it went? Soon there was to be an entirely new batch of contentious issues to wrangle with. Life’s next riddles may well have stemmed from Cy’s discovery of the Pisces vaginales in a science book during a weekly biology lesson, given as always and as it was currently being, by Colin Willacy, headmaster of Morecambe Grammar School. The Pisces vaginales. It certainly had a funny ring to it. It had a funny shape to it also, there on the page, like a mangled anemone. Every Wednesday afternoon, prior to rugby, the class of boys was required to locate within their natural-history textbooks a fish native to the British Isles so that they could then march down to the bay’s shore, attempt to find the selected species and sketch the blighter into their notebooks, for Headmaster Willacy was quite the practitioner, favouring the methods of field research to classroom dissertation. He also possessed a boisterous, cane-happy left arm and a good aim for catapulting loose objects from the blackboard shelf at chattering individuals, but that was by the by. Star-slubbers, flukes, ink fish, barnacles, rays. The marine choices were many. Top marks were awarded for a successful find, which seemed a little random and circumstantial to Cy, though he made no mention of this theory. And if success was not to be had they were to draw whatever God may provide for them that day, as Mr Willacy forthrightly put it. The beach and God provided artistic and scientific bounty only when either felt moved to. They also provided a startling collection of oddities from time to time, items not grown within the nurturing womb of the ocean, but fashioned in the factories of smoky towns, delivered by trains, bought in haberdasheries and market places, then lost or discarded near water channels only to end up gallivanting right around the coast before arriving at Morecambe. Old shoes, pots and pans, gloves, bottles, pieces of motor cars, rubber devices with ambiguous functions.
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