— Go on, Parksie, those great long legs will hit the bottom before you drown.
— Aye. We’ll not wander off and leave you.
It was amusing up over the ankles, sort of tickling and soft. Cy laughed to his friends and said that it was grand. But then the sand began to work faster and after a few seconds his knees were gone and it was not soft any more, it was cold and wet, like a big, pillowy tongue up his trouser legs. It was nasty. There was an unmistakable feeling of being swallowed. Sucked on like a lollipop, like the bigger boys said Lucy Willacy, the headmaster’s daughter, had done to their dickies but not as nice, he assumed.
— What’s it like now?
As ever, Morris and Jonty were keen to know the exact details of the experience. Cy didn’t reply. It was like being buried, he thought. Like swimming in Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Like amputation of his legs so that he suddenly felt shorter, a good deal smaller, and he could not say with certainty that he had toes any more. He got to just past his knees and said to his friends enough and to pull him out. So they tried pulling. But he kept going down, he did not start coming up. The sand had opened its monstrous gullet and begun its gurgitation. Mid-thigh now, he lost his balance, swayed, but was unable to adjust the position of his legs and he tipped over to one side. His left hand was caught by the sand and sucked on. He dragged it out, covered in a new, gluey brown skin.
Then panic, panic, panic was all Cy felt, getting quicker in him and bigger. He was stuck. Too stuck. He was being eaten. Jonty and Morris had him by the shoulders and arms and were jerking at him but he was still going down. He tried to talk and started stumbling over bits of speech, rambling about nothing.
— Mam’s cutlery … she’ll bust us over the chops … I … I… want to go, come back, Dad … Lu, Lu, Lucy, then if I don’t … of God, oh God … Ah, ah …
And the ranting was replaced by yelling. He was low enough to feel the compression of sand on the end of his dicky and it was not a marvellous sensation in the slightest. He was now half-wearing the beach.
Morris Gibbs bent suddenly and put a hand over Cy’s mouth.
— Shut up, you idiot. Undo your trews. Quick sharp, eh.
— What? It’s not funny Morris, it’s not –
— Aye, go on and do it. No time to explain. Cy … Cyril. It’s all right.
Cy fumbled with his buttons and pulled his breeches down until they met the wet sand.
— Now. Try to point your feet down. Like standing on your tippy-toes.
Morris’s instructions were surprisingly calm. Cy looked up and found that the eyes regarding him were utterly placid. His friend was wearing an expression that Cy had seen before somewhere, on a face under a moustache, in an old photograph on the Trawlers’ Cooperative Society building wall. It was the look of knowing the sea, come what may. And it suddenly gave him comfort. So he pushed as hard as he could without really feeling his ankles move and took a deep breath.
Morris was counting.
— One, two …
On three the two boys heaved and wrenched and Cy slowly came up, peeling out of his trousers and his shoes as he did so with a loud sucking sound. The boys landed together in an untidy heap. They stood up quickly and looked back at the puddle of sand with the shed clothing inside. The vacated legs were squeezing together, shrinking in, and were full of mucky-looking water that was being displaced upwards, outwards, and filtering back through the sand like awful digestive juices in a stomach. Cy blew out a great lungful of air.
— Well. Bugger me sideways.
— Not on your nelly.
They walked back over the beach towards town, laughing about the predicament they had escaped. Cy’s bare legs were cold in the fresh breeze, he was careful to tread lightly as he walked, pulling his feet up quickly from the sand, for the sensation of his toes sinking down even a little, that closeness of damp pressure to his skin, was sickening now and made him feel light-headed. It was an anxiety that would never quite leave him. After the quicksands he could no longer sleep with the blankets close about him, boggarts under the bed or not. And if he happened to saturate his garments in the rain or the river or when he was dropped off the pier by the boys at full tide, it would never remain on his body long enough to dry and release the flesh beneath it from its clasp. He’d rather go stark bollock naked through the town than feel that terrible tight claustrophobia again. Morris Gibbs and Jonty Preston, though, were quick-thinking devils, and friends for life.
It was when the war was pulling its hardest on the continent, when Europeans were streaming hither and thither from their smashed-open homes and villages and fields like ants from a disturbed hill-nest, and official letters to mothers and wives were flowing with regularity through the letter boxes around the bay, that another wonder was bestowed upon Morecambe. If not for harmony’s sake then for counterplay. The pavilion fire of that same year was all but eclipsed by this new and celestial beauty. Aurora Borealis. The northern bloodlights.
It was not the crowded spectacle of the fire, nor an occasion of mass mesmerism, with all seats sold out for the performance. It was to be a private show. The town had long since known that it held one of the best positions in the country for observing this display, the tourist leaflets listing local attractions and entertainments made great mention of it, it was almost as compulsory a feature as leaving Blackpool off every local map and out of every visitor handbook. Aurora was not a stranger to the bay, for all her being the classiest act around. She was not the rarest sight, though many may have missed her that night, coming unannounced and under a dark cloak as she always did. Cy was almost sleeping when his mother knocked softly on his door and entered. Her face was softer than he had ever seen it, her eyes contained light stolen from every scrap and corner of the room it seemed, so it was dim 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.