Much later, with white in his hair and two world wars behind him, Cy would dream of America, and it would visit him as a series of faces. There were the faces of Brooklyn, that could break his heart with their history, their handsome melancholy, the wet-lit eyes that were, in cold weather, very prone to tears. He dreamt of Henry’s face, made prematurely old by violence, stupid with alcohol, but gorgeous from adventure as he bid Cy farewell by the station that crisp, culpable morning in the fall of 1940. Other friends put in appearances, Den, Claudia and Arturas, the sisters, in capacities that were helpful to him when his dreams were troubling. Grace was an infrequent vision. She came and went within pockets of darkness, wrathful and beautiful, dampness on her face as she bore his needle, weeping with empty rage as she lifted down the fire iron with heated sibilance on to her opponent in the terrible game she had played. Her eyes, once swirling so full of precarious, suggestive information, always appeared closed under the heavy brow. At times he woke up assured that, during the night, he had solved the eternal puzzle of who she really was, what had created her, but whatever nocturnal handiwork his brain had done, by morning it was always misplaced or deconstructed, picked apart by devious elves. He was left with just a stray idea — a sense that she was medieval after all, as he had imagined her on that first night by the fountain with her horse, but in straightforward cruelty and justice not courtly love. Or he became convinced that his imagination at that time, oft-inebriated as it was, had run riot, and she had never really had him hold a rag in the mouth of a man who was only his secondary enemy while she murdered his vision. He wished to see more of her but wishing only made her harder to invoke, resistant to his dreams, and perhaps that was his own return form of anopia, an eye for an eye, losing sight for lost sight. Sedak’s childish visage came and went in nightmares — accompanied by scenes of the fighting he had endured on behalf of one or other of the countries he had in his life been affiliated with, Cy had never been sure which — and it was the face of a restrained child about to be punished for a crime he suddenly understood, a juvenile soul taught by some unsuitable influence or example that he could express his tainted religion, his prejudicial extremes, that his hatred should be credited with self-tolerance in the land of the free. The blind, ruined face of his and Grace’s conspiracy came to Cy most spectacularly and horribly the night after he had stood in Lancaster court dock for non-payment of rates and had noticed an old branding iron hung above the judicial bench. He dreamt he was being dragged into the dark sockets of Sedak’s missing eyes. And he woke in a fit of sickness, and ran to the bathroom to vomit. There were the ordinary faces of the century in his dreams, by their thousand under wide-ribboned hats or tulip bonnets on the boardwalk, and there were those extraordinary faces — bearded, pigmy shrunken, half-human half-amphibian or reptile scaled. And sometimes, because the dreaming mind is truly a creature of sign and symbol, it was the emblematic face of Coney Island itself that came to him, looming above like a full oval moon, that dapper, lunatic caricature with a commodious grin and slick, centre-parted hair, mocking and mimicking the crowds from the double gateway of Steeplechase. This image had staying power, and when he looked into the mirror to shave come daylight it would seem that the face was trying to be his reflection, all he had to do was bring his smile into alignment.
Number eleven Pedder Street was dark and damp as he pushed open the door. It had the consecrated forlornness of a crypt, the sense of a threshold violated by his presence. The electricity had been cut for well over a decade when Cyril Parks finally collected the key from the solicitor’s office, so he flicked on his Zippo for illumination and burned away the cobwebs hanging from the doorway. He moved inside the downstairs rooms and put his duffle bag down on the floor, rubbed his aching leg. He had presumed the town would be streaming with nostalgia when he returned, the way a stone that is lifted out of water rushes with the memory of where it has been kept. But the streets from the train station to his destination had seemed no more vested than they ever had been when he was a resident. In the solstice twilight of the winter of 1946 he had come back to his hometown. As he walked the familiar roads he saw new places of business had opened, shops and hotels, though many of the older venues were still running and had made it through the war. But everything seemed smaller, sturdier than he recalled, and commonly organized after the anomie of his travels. The houses and churches and grander buildings of Morecambe Bay had always had a flat perspective with simple shadows at this time of day in December, he remembered, when the sun beat an early path over the harrowing Irish Sea, as if in an illustration from a nursery book. His returning eye was kinder than he expected, and it conveyed, with its visual wares, a sense of comfort. It was like stepping back into a place of sympathy, an old comfortable shoe, rather than revisiting a realm saturated with once-were spirits and cumbersome, erstwhile lives.
What he did remember vividly as he walked from the engine sheds past the Bayview and the old fairground to a familiar door on a small winding street, was that first premeditated journey to Eliot Riley’s quarters, when the night had been pronounced and dense brown and his will had had a life of its own. He remembered his boyish heart, knocking like an open window in a gale at the thought of encountering what lay beyond the complacency of the present. That walk had been fast and eager, with his long, youthful stride carrying him well, though trepidation had made it pass with super-awareness, slowness, the town reverberating and chiming with exhaustive materials. Now he moved with greater difficulty, and a heavy limp to his right leg gifted to him by the war, but it seemed to take no time at all to navigate the old place, and reach his destination, as if Morecambe had shrunk in the wash even though the town had bled through its borders since he had been away. And he wondered how his life had fitted into this snug place while seeming so grand and unruly for the characters and the incidents of it.
The walls of the Pedder Street parlour were bare and cracking. There were a couple of flash pictures still mounted on the walls that he had not bothered to collect up before he departed, or he had chosen to leave them behind, he could not recall. On a dusty rail there hung the musty velvet curtain with its theatrical tasselled bottom behind which the master had apprenticed his lad, and there was another private section where the apprentice had followed the lead of his dubious mentor. Cy could almost smell the pickled fish and stouty breath in the air, and hear the bawdy, chastising words about craftsmanship, and the hobnailed opinions on every other thing, coming from the ghost of Riley. But they came from a place far back in Cy’s mind that made them mannered and coloured like art and there was no emotional frottage or suffering to the recollection now, it was just life, just the pan-bright tones of what had been. There was an absence of keen junk about the place that most quickly abandoned dwellings have strewn about, so the house forgave him his hasty, barely put-together exit. There had never been many articles present anyway. Just the chairs for the customers in the waiting area where they once viewed the plethora of images and the wooden stools next to which were railings fixed on the wall. A fine sheen of lime dust covered the furniture. It could have been a small amateur stage vacated by players a long time ago at die bidding of a bankrupt production manager.