In daytime the light of the sun seemed to be wasted over the glaring place, and when night came and the horizontal shadows took the legs off the piers, told them they did not exist any more, the garish floodlamps created rubbery cartilages and tissues of muscle underneath Coney that seemed to keep the entire island afloat on a large falsely illuminated lip. But it wasn’t only the Island that chilled him and set him on edge. Coney was just the exotic pet of an eccentric owner. The sickness went beyond it. Everywhere it seemed there were potential madmen and acts of sensibly plotted perfidy or fundamentally corrupt faith waiting to occur, and he did not know how people could stand it, how they could live day to day with that kind of potential in their back yard. Society was suddenly filled with loose hinges and smouldering fuses and he barely felt able to leave his home. Even in the tepid streets of Sheepshead Bay he felt he wanted to look over his shoulder. At any minute there might be weapons produced or chloroform gags or speeding vehicles revving their engines in alleyways ready to throw off their emergency brakes. Because where had Malcolm Sedak come from? He was just a face in the crowd, a darn in the fabric. He was just New York. He was just America. He had stepped out of its undergrowth with his plan and his pledges to God and his diabolically limp cock in order to tear Grace down, to dissolve her. And Cyril Parks hated him, wanted to hate him, had to, he aimed everything he had at the man. He fell into it with determination. But the hating seemed not to have an end or a floor and he kept on falling, his hatred escaped the confines of a single repulsive being, spreading systematically outwards, outwards. He hated the venue of Grace’s demise and got more and more tense within its walls until he fought with a complete stranger one night who had done nothing more than ask the sisters about that fateful evening in passing while smoking a cigar, and Valerie kicked him out. He hated the Island and was spiteful to his customers. He hated the stale smell of the subway and the meritless citizens who rode it and the ensigns of the country. So that more and more things were to blame.
Cy’s mindset was not helped by the compulsory and continual updates of Malcolm Sedak’s hospital incarceration by Henry Beausang, who worked in the institution and had access to all kinds of information. Like the crazy’s unrepentant stance. Like his cock’s happily restored ability to function. Like the colour of his supper plate. But Cy had to know about him, to feed his anger and his spite, to assure himself that Grace’s enemy was contained, and had not dissolved through a wall only to re-form in the outside world, like an old disease, like the plague.
When the first September chill came in off the Atlantic and refused to budge one morning, Claudia and Arturas came to see him and told him this would be their last season at the Island. Since he had not seen them in Varga owing to his banishment it came as a mild shock. They were going to California, by way of an enormously varied land mass. The beaches along the coast were golden and ripe with bodies awaiting ornamentation, Arturas said. And perhaps Claudia might try her hand at the movies, she could act lines or silently terrorize peroxide-blonde actresses with her sheer zombie size or as Frankenstein’s sutured bride.
— They better have good hotdogs in Los Angeles. It’s all I can say. Will you join us, my English friend?
— No. I’ve been thinking of joining up. Going back over. May as well be of some use.
Arturas gave Cy a look that was set painfully between disbelief and hazardous comprehension. As if something latent between them, a tiny, precious, unifying thing, which they had both always tried to protect in the middle of a nest of unmentionable conversation, in the middle of their professional rivalry, and in the middle of a grotesque and sundering war, had now been broken. Turo took Cy’s offered hand and shook it, and with his other hand he reached for the back of Cyril Parks’s neck, pulling him forward until their foreheads met.
— We will have a drink then in Varga, for old time’s sake?
— I can’t. I’m barred.
What he wanted to do was take hold of Grace’s hand and into it pass something of his own heart, but instead he held back, and he found himself watching her remove a cotton dress, a garment softer than candyfloss from a spinning machine which some friend or nurse had been thoughtful enough to get for her, to cover the fraught body. She unbuttoned it down and open through the front, making it into one long piece of material, and she slowly peeled and unwound herself out of it. Then she was naked in front of him but for her shoes. She had not put on underwear, her breasts and pubic region had been included in the savagery of the acid and were still healing. Before he could harness his horror, Cy was crying openly, an uncontrollable weeping that forbade neither his voice nor his face from expression. Grace stood before him, on the sidewalk next to his booth, with her dress in her hand and her scars open to the sky. She stood there as if she were a peep-show whore in a film about the undead. Or one of Coney Island’s monsters. Litter tumbled past them with an insistent, autumnal breeze behind it, empty wrappers, paper bags and cartons once containing food. And there amid the trash she was extraordinary against the familiar background of the alley but no less ruined.
She had walked with absolute care up to Cy as he was opening the booth, like someone recently woken from a spell of being knocked unconscious, and it was further than she had walked in three months, from the station to the end of Oceanic Walk, though he did not know of her small victory. He had not seen her once during the period of rehabilitation, having recoiled from the effort of trying to get to her as hard as he had initially made it. He was removing the lock from the hinge of the booth when he turned and saw her walking towards him, at first not recognizing her, for she moved like an old lady with well-retained posture and rheumatic difficulty. Then it was her hair with its traces of red and the dark features of her face that gave her away, and his blood froze for a moment before lurching forward again.
— Grace? My God, is that you!
She was almost to him when he spoke, treading with rigid care on the pavement, so even before she revealed her body to him he knew the damage must be extreme. And without a word she stood before him and stripped away her clothing.
If her eyes said love, if they said it to him then in accompaniment with the gesture, his clamouring heart and the racket of his blood drowned the message out, so he would never know for sure. He could not fathom the bravery of that exposure, somehow stronger than the twenty men and the team of Clydesdales it look to drag that ridiculous runaway motorbus from the sands of Morecambe Bay when he was a boy, after its steering pin had snapped and it had careered through the prom wall, decapitating passengers on its tumble. Stronger than the brawniest arm in the fairground slamming the mallet down on to the Beef-o-Meter to ring its bell. Stronger than diamond or atomic propulsion or wrought iron. Her. Naked. Scarred. The boards of the booth were not even fully down yet to provide her with some privacy inside. But her expression said that the landscape was irrelevant, she might have been lost in a desert or on the presidential lawn or on the moon for all she cared.
Early passers-by slowed to see if this was some kind of radically casual, unorganized treat, a show of Coney’s titillating spontaneity, shameless when it came to human dignity and the rules of physical conduct. Perhaps she was one of the ugly bodies they had been promised they would see, escaped from the big top. But Cyril Parks knew this show was for one man alone and no carnival barker would call a roll-up, roll-up. She gave him a full, wordless minute to see her, while his mouth contorted and he wiped at his eyes and tried to control himself.