There was the perpetual hum of electrical rides heard from the train carriage several stops away. The dull scream of voices, the insulated booms and hoots and toots of barges and cannons and carts. Fountains of metal scaffolding erupted on the horizon dropping stomachless couples on fast parachute rides to the ground, fortune machines spat balls out through their mouths so you could know what was coming your way on behalf of God or Ganesha or whatever celestial benefactor or patron you chose. A cacophony of technology was employed to make people rapid and exhilarated. Steeplechase made Morecambe’s ghost train look like a caterpillar crawling beside a great wooden and iron python. Cy could not believe the construction when he first laid eyes upon it — people were bent over horses that rushed along undulating tracks as if being sucked into the mouth of hell on apocalyptic steeds. The massive parks whooped and hollered and honked and echoed with the hubbub of customers letting off steam. Women had their skirts blown over their heads, if not by the strong coastal wind on the wide boardwalk, then by air pumps in the Blow-Hole, a theatre full of mirrors and vents, while men had their bottoms paddled mechanically to the delight of recently molested onlookers in an amphitheatre. There was the buzz, buzz, buzz of adrenalin everywhere, from the loss of gravity on the spinning rides, to the awe-invoking tattoo guns and the shrieking commotion over the freaks, the spectacle of a three-headed cow. Voyeurism was key to any attraction, because Americans at leisure wanted to witness something to take away thought and replace it with emotion, they wanted beautiful smut, a punch in the gut. There was that pivotal ocular quality to anything on offer. The devouring eye.
And Cy found himself having to bind and fortify himself with British-borrowed opinion so as to remain firm on his feet, tolerating the place perhaps only up to what would have been the limit of Riley’s credulous mind, an imagination which had more elasticity than most of those owned by his compatriots. For there were nasty things on offer at Coney, worse than basins of blood and jokes about ejaculation, worse than accidental sewage and the double-jointed torsion of performers. The parks fizzed with rough energy and raw spirit for all the nice hats of the visitors and the tidy rows of black motor cars parked in municipal lots behind the enormous pavilions and arcades. Riley would have appreciated that spirit. He had possessed a taste for the absurd, the rotten apple of entertainment, the wrong side of the brain. And he could have appreciated the awful individual eccentricity of each and every attraction. The whimsy, the grotesque, the bizarre, it was Sodom’s own wicked comedy room where mule women and savages sent the crowds into a frenzy of disgust and gaping mortification. Riley would have said there was more honesty at Coney than in the Bible or any other spiritual verse, because it read the stupefying human soul accurately at both ends. It was no wonder he had never gone to confession in all the years Cy knew him, as his faith decreed he should; it would have combed out what balance deviance in the man provided and he would have keeled over on to the priest. People wanted to laugh and to loathe, it was simple nature, he would have said, pointing to the freaks as they tumbled and crawled about on stage, hermaphrodites in fishnet and conjoined twins, the horrors of the body become biologically lazy or gone wild. In the freak shows you could have anything, any dark nightmare from the mind made real. And there was the slam of bodies against each other for the sake of fun in motorized carriages, the rowing bark of sea lions in pools, babies painted with pancake make-up on the walkways, with spikes glued on their heads like Liberty herself. Row after row after row of old Russian men took to the plateau of sand behind the domes and palace turrets of Coney and out towards Brighton Beach every morning, bending and stretching in exercise before taking to the water in the milkchurn light of eastern daybreak. If Cy got there early enough in the day he’d see them swim out like suited penguins and return to the shore flapping off cold blue Atlantic water minutes later. It was super-sized seaside mayhem.
This was Morecambe of international proportions and inconceivable wealth, it was Morecambe gone putrid and suffering without any of its former inhibitions, as if the Tory councillors had packed up their belongings and documents banning distasteful shows and left town, taking their collective prudish notions for ever with them and leaving the occult industries to ferment and sprout and run amok. Here there was far too much attention to detail, far too much gruesome investigation into what would titillate and far too much anarchy of demeanour, and it blew Cy away as if he’d placed a gun to his head and squeezed the trigger. As if this truly was the nation’s purgatory, where any prurient display was advocated, any misdemeanour was acquitted, any sin suspended before a hopelessly hung celestial jury. Or would that have ultimately trumped Riley, taken away his role as contrarian and endorser of all things repellent as well as alluring? Would it have sent him into a sulk of scorn and fury that his brilliance and humour and ornery distinctiveness would be lost in low-level mediocrity in a place like this, lost in the shuffle of New York’s terrible versatility, its many pinnacles, its deco skyscrapers and baroque muses? What was one more drunk amid the clutter and spill of human bodies and empty bottles on the Bowery? What was one more tattoo artist in the parks that were already filled with electric masters? What was one more harlequin soul in such a vast double-diamond-edged circus? What was one more crucified saint or criminal on an already stained and overcrowded Calvary?
When the Adriatic slid in past Manhattan to Ellis Island Cy might never have been more malleable in his life, never more able to dictate self, and Riley’s ghost might have been exorcized then and there, put asunder, had his apprentice concentrated on that possibility instead of surrendering to incredulity. New York was a dream of architecture and vertical economy, of uncompromising coexistence. Suddenly everybody at the ship’s rail had offered one another cigarettes, needing some kind of filter, some kind of method to take it all in, compressed tobacco was the easiest and only filtration tool available so they sucked away at smoke, though some drew out cameras to put a lens between them and what was too much. Cy would never know the city, he thought that moment as the boat blasted her arrival, not the way he knew the back streets and districts and the tides of Morecambe Bay. It was a squall of urban settlement, a storm of existence coming closer on the horizon, and he gripped the deck rail tighter, dizzy with what he saw. He would have to find some corner of it to huddle down in, it was all he would be able to do. Compared to the impending city, the water on which they were afloat seemed to be the only stable thing. Suddenly he wanted that old-timey’s hold and fast written on his own fingers so that he could keep himself from going overboard, tumbling back-to-front and headlong up the tall buildings with the glass reflections telling him he was falling in many ways, up past windows and spires and skyscrapers and up past height itself, up through the sky and out into space. New York was the sacred centre of all pilgrimages, the big catcher’s mitt for every nation’s Diaspora. And Cyril Parks did not even know why he had come!