The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall

Author:Sarah Hall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

Coney Island, as it turned out, was Morecambe’s richer, zany American relative. A fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicked smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far. The family resemblance was there for displaced Lancashire folk to see upon arrival if they cared to. Both were made up of a multitude of interdependent entertainment cells designed to remove a person from the dimension of ordinary life. Both sat sublimely and noisomely next to water, defining themselves in relation to the sea. Had anyone with latitudinal skills measured the direction of their gaze, the two resorts probably faced each other across that vast and busy piece of ocean water – give or take a small land mass positioned in between, Manx and Irish populated – like a pair of gargoyles, one smiling cheerfully, the other laughing maniacally. Both purveyed a bawdy sense of humour when it came to the indelicate human body, with its gases and growths and ganglions, and both acknowledged the desire of its inquisitive mind to be shocked and appalled and entertained and mystified. Cy had never heard of the place until he arrived in the country, until he got into the slipstream of immigrants flushing through the massive borough city of Brooklyn, but when he got there it seemed like fulfilling a prophecy. Within weeks, he had secured a rental tattoo booth on Oceanic Walk, one of the honky-tonk alleys that ran through the catacombs of amusement facilities at the Island, only three hops, skips and jumps from Coney’s boardwalk and beach. It was a good tip from Arturas and Claudia, and a natural progression for Cy. He went where the work was, because he had been born of that peculiar seaside-growing odd-fruit-bearing family tree, because he was sired from that dynasty. Looking back it was as simple as that. Go to America, make up a name, aim for the ringing, singing, screaming, teeming water’s edge. There was a sense of graduation to his life now, as if he had found the doorway to another level of the same happy, haunted hotel, the same colourful house of torture, the same quarantined wonderland, where the insanity of the population was just brighter and more intense and extended, because it had the freedom to be so, because this was America. The Electric Michelangelo belonged, Cy sensed it. Because Coney itself was like the work of his moniker’s original, towards the end of his life, when something went vain and vivid in his brain and the result was a painted world that was past real, surreal, mannered from psychosis and all the more poignant for it.

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