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.
— Look at it. It’s beautiful, Morris. It’s beautiful.
— It is at that.
And the two boys stood watching the impossibility of the entire western portion of the sky alight with burning snowflakes. When the dome finally tumbled it did so without grace. It sucked into itself the way a drunk finally gives in to stupor and folds inwards to the floor. The noise of it crashing down one hundred feet to the shore below was equally ignominious, it was the uncontrolled groaning of something large and restricted becoming uncharacteristically mobile. Though the fall looked to be an implosion of sorts, an inverted tumble, at the end of its descent it altered shape to thrust outwards. The crowds on the beach gasped. A flush of warmth moved past them, as did a small tidal wave of sparks and fireworks.
By this point Cy’s mother was looking for him. She had not liked the way in which the fire had leaped and streaked along the sand with the pavilion’s collapse, chasing after the stray wood it was intent on devouring. The faces of those watching the show were orange and shadowy, even her sicker guests looked momentarily healthy in the warm aura of the blaze. Those in the front row, closer to the volatile mass of cinder-spinning, roaring timber were only black silhouettes, and she could not see the one belonging to her boy. By the time she had reached the Bayview Hotel and checked that her guests did not need any calming spirits or rubs for their smoke-agitated chests, her son was already home, drinking milk in the kitchen with Morris Gibbs. His cheeks were blown red and his eyebrows were thinner than she remembered. And he had the look about him of a laudanum taker after a purchase. Lit up, let out and satisfied.
The next morning was Easter Sunday. Even for such a holy day the churches of the town were unusually packed for the morning services. Many had not felt at all comfortable with the previous night’s events, and were comforted even less by the image of a burning pathway leading to a fiery temple which had been presented to them. It was interpreted by multiple citizens on a personal level as possibly being prophetic, an indication of what might be awaiting them upon their deathbeds. Caring little for damnation or days of reckoning, all the boys of the town went down to the wreckage of the pavilion to ferret around. It was now a huge pile of debris that the tide had been in and out over, extinguishing any residual smoulder. Some were climbing on the blackened heap, others rooting through the rubble looking for treasure, fake gold-leafing from the roof, tapestry from within the ballroom. After serving breakfast in the hotel Cy slipped out and went down to the beach. He walked about with his hands in his pockets, kicking bits of decking and bricks, tarnished tiles. The lads around him were excited by the proximity of destruction, by the fact that something formerly so grand and spectacular was now demolished. A strange exuberance and exhilaration roused them and they shoved each other around. Their behaviour reminded him of Reeda’s comments about the present ugliness abroad that much of Europe was well and truly engaged in. She often said to him over the top of the morning paper that there was a certain pleasure for some people in violence. She said you could still hear it ringing in a few of the ones who came back from the war, and in those running the affair. Men especially suffered from this disposition, she informed him frankly and unapologetically. As if some were born hollow and there was a hole cut in their hearts that produced music when the breath of spite and madness was blown through them.
Cy looked up at the greyish March sky. Not a hint that it had once swum with flickering schooling light remained there. The fiery winter storm was gone. It seemed right that out of such beauty should come such awful devastation, he supposed, the things of the universe being equal and linked, like birth and death, his life for his father’s. Fee Lung, the Chinese magician who played in the pavilion every Friday night, was standing by the desecrated spire of the dome, now half-buried in the sand, shaking his head. He looked over at Cy and smiled pristinely, solemnly.
— Yes, yes, all is gone.
Next to his polished feet, half hidden by spoiled wood, there appeared to be a stringed instrument of some kind, smallish, charred at the neck, perhaps a violin that had miraculously avoided being consumed by the flames. Cy pointed to it and Fee Lung stooped to retrieve the charmed item, bringing it out from under the wreckage like a rabbit from a black top hat. The Viennese Orchestra had been booked to play in the Taj Mahal that very evening.
Beauty and destruction, thought Cy, now there’s a trick.