The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  The offer was not illustrious. Not overly tempting or pitched all that well. At this point, Eliot Riley hadn’t entirely sold Cy on the profession. He still had not made it clear exactly why Cyril Parks was his chosen target and Cy was not informed that Riley had visited the print shop on Strickland Street a couple of times when he was absent with no apparent motive or request for work. What had caught Riley’s eye initially were the bold designs on the wooden signs that hung in the windows to advertise Greene’s service, painted by the boy. The renditions of high-and low-skirted women holding cigarettes, joker faces, bubble lettering and scrolling borders. He had loitered about the shop front, several times, flicking through scripts and letting out the occasional grunt. The work was very good. It described an illustrator who had both imagination and dexterity of hand. He’d seen the boy working through the window, a long loose shank of a fellow, scruffy and soulful, but careful with his ink in his rolled-back shirtsleeve. And he remembered him, remembered him climbing up the shop building, remembered the look on his face, grey-eyed and ash-bark-whittled, like his mother’s. It was a risk for Riley, that surveillance – Greene had seen him in Hagan’s Manufacturing in Lancaster on occasion when both were purchasing supplies of ink, knew him for what he truly was, not the sign painter he professed to be because there was only one in Morecambe Bay, though Greene had thankfully not made mention, suppliers could get shy in their support of the tattooing industry, or downright vicious. Discretion aside, Reginald Greene would not want him in the print shop. That would suggest appreciation, friendship, or secondary distribution of ink – ink, the only thing Eliot Riley and Reginald Greene had in common other than a masculine set of tackle! Their difference as great as collaborating with the living compared to working with the dead. So Riley had waited for the busier moments and was quick about his perusal of Cyril Parks’s work.

  Eliot Riley knew he was not popular with many of the businesses in Morecambe, which frowned on the seedier aspects of the town in which they were located, nor the Council, nor the sanitation department, for similar reasons. But that did not alter the fact that in summer the crowds flocked to his shop, the way they flocked to the pie rooms and the ghost-train rides and the ballrooms, wanting to take home an altogether more permanent holiday souvenir. Something they could call their own and never have it taken off them. He was just as much a part of the town’s leisure and entertainment features as the other businesses, and sometimes made better money.

  Then the last Saturday of November 1921, a handful of years after meeting the lad, he decided to make his move. He wasn’t sure why he chose that moment over any other. Maybe just because the boy was getting taller and older. Maybe just because he was passing him in the street. As Cy was locking up and leaving work, Riley collared him and said there was a better job for him if he wanted it, better than blocking in signs and calligraphy and being forced to produce insipid, uninspired art. And he took him to the pub where the boy spent near on all his wages on ale and listened to him talk.

  Outside the Dog and Partridge two hours later the wind had calmed, having lost the spouse’s quarrel with the sea, and it was replaced by a gentle roar inside Cy’s ears from the merry passage of drink around his body. Riley took hold of him and suddenly became serious. The drawbridge lifted in his face, he clouded over, and he seemed to Cyril, through a pair of eyes that were for once in his life not truly well behaving, incredibly angry. The man appeared thunderous with concentration and premeditation, as if some kind of vendetta were in operation. It was the look of a bully about to strike. The look of a man closed up sentimentally from those he faces and about to pull a trigger. Perhaps it was the broken window, thought Cy, perhaps that was what this meeting had really been all about, though it seemed a little unfair to be holding a grudge this long and Riley had made no mention. He’d seen a pocket full of coin and not claimed compensation.

  – You have until eleven o’clock tonight to give me an answer. I’ve someone coming in at ten if you want to see what it’s about. Won’t take me more than an hour. Eleven Pedder Street, door with the split lock and the Jewish looking lights in the window. You know it? Yes, you know it.

  Cy nodded. Something about the length of time Riley said his work would take gave the scenario an official feel, gave it credibility and made Cy nervous in his stomach, as if a doctor’s appointment had been scheduled, as if he were about to enter the rooking parlour room in which his mother worked with Mrs Preston.

  – Ask for me if someone else answers. Don’t take guff off any of them. This is important, boy.

  And Riley placed his hand around the back of Cy’s neck and seemed to tighten his grip on the hairline.

  – This is important, boy.

  He said it again, quietly. There was the manure smell of stout on his breath, and pickled herring. For a brief second Cy thought the man might be about to kiss him on the forehead with his large lips. He held very still. Those eyes looking at him! Desperate and dying blue, like the top of the sky when the sun is sinking. Then Riley released him, stood back, untucked and pulled up his painter’s shirt and exposed five inches of gut sporting some of the strangest compositions of ink that Cy had ever seen. He was bright like the skin of a tropical creature, like he was half-lizard. And then the man was gone, arched-legged up the wet, leaf-blown street.

  Cy almost didn’t go. There were taut fibres within him that told him to stay at home, stay put at the Bayview after supper, go to his bedroom and read or sit with his mother at the kitchen table, which always made her happy. He should find the boys and throw stones into the sea. Anything other. He could not eat much of his dinner, being fairly well filled with ale from the afternoon, and as he forked the kale around his plate he remembered the blue-fascination of eyes, and the profound words, hearing them as well as if a light chanting curse had been laid upon him. This is important, boy. He had an inkling that within this choice there was one path, flat as the promenade, which doubled back and led somewhere he had already been, and another path that led somewhere high and low and haunted, like the trail alongside Moffat Ravine, where land fell sharply away and black space opened like a channel to the underworld. Or like one of the wending tracks on the Yorkshire moors by his Aunt Doris, which led away to nothing, and only sick animals or werewolves or madmen would choose to take them. And he’d a sense that if he saw Riley twice in that same day it would mean consent, it would make it certain, because Riley was a strong whirlpool of himself taking others in, because he was conviction. And while his manner was tawdry, the ink stains on his fingers were so very oddly compelling. When Cy thought of Riley it felt fated, like water was already tunnelling past him. Some rip current had already taken him, and he was going without fighting. He was going. Not to say yes, for he didn’t think he would, not to say no, because he was not sure refusal was yet ready in him. Just going.

  It was a ten-minute walk to Pedder Street, give or take, having climbed from the washroom window out into a liver-brown night whose character made his belly turn. The town was mostly empty for the weather and the season. The waves on the shore were moderate, though fortified by darkness and imagination they echoed louder than their size. But the bricks and the gutters and the slates and the car wheels seemed precise and clear and absolute to Cy during the late walk, and owing nothing, as if electricity had lately passed through his body. His hands were deep in his pockets, and his tall body was hoisted backwards and forwards like a spinnaker by the breathing sea. His shoes loud against the pavement. Yes. He was going. Not in keeping with nor against his own will, just going. Past the creaking wooden fairground rides in the park – the spindle-some tumbling teacups and the Ring-o-Rounder – which were laid up for winter, and the empty toffee-apple stalls, past the Alhambra picture house and dancehall closed for the night and past Professor and Madame Johnson’s where they held communion with dead husbands and wives, ancestors, impending progeny and walk-ins, the lost souls of unreconciled lives. Until there were the droll Hebrew candles in the window, t
here was the door with the split lock, and there was his heart hammering a knock on it to open.

  How long had it taken? How long for him to be convinced he would learn that intimate and colourful language? That folkish tongue, spoken in symbols and essence and tokens. It took no longer than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to decide a life’s journey. Twenty, for a rapid, press-gangless signature, acceptance of an invisible king’s shilling with its obverse decreeing he would join the ranks of the town’s eccentric subculture, and stand to attention and salute Eliot Riley. Such a small portion of life, and yet so filled with energy, force, momentum. Cy had told nobody of his plans to visit Riley, not quite knowing how to express the man’s appeal, nor describe his own curiosity, his sense of being summoned. He spoke of it to no one, though he passed by Jonty’s house as he walked the streets and he could have pebbled his window and held a conference about his intention, and he had crept past his mother’s room while her lamp was still shining and he knew her ear was always willing and her heart always open. But he went alone.

  Cy arrived at the building on Pedder Street and knocked on the door, which was opened by a small, hatless, catgut-looking man who said nothing, and he came into a cold parlour. There was one other man sitting on a chair there – two more chairs were empty – his cap pulled over his face and he was leaning back, with folded arms, as if sleeping or laid out to rest dead in an upright coffin. But the walls, the walls were more than living, they were full and lost under black-bordered colour. It was the inside of a kaleidoscope. It was Aladdin’s cave, a store of pirates’ bounty. Pictures and motifs of dragons and angels and Christ and bones and flowers and hearts and weaponry hung from the walls. A curtain separated this room from another, or another section of it, and behind its tatty covering there was that noise, that noise again, like mechanical workers in a beehive, a determined machinist’s hum. The faint smell of antiseptic or spirits was in the air, something medicinal, like the waft from the bottle of witch hazel his mother had dabbed his cuts and scrapes with as a boy, and along side that Cy detected another fragrance, pleasant, female, ill-fitting, which he could not quite determine.

  – Mr Riley? Sir?

  The wasp-motor noise stopped and the curtain was drawn back sharply on its metal rings. There stood his potential employer, wearing his careless, navvie-wedding garb, wired needle in hand, looking like the sanest man in the asylum. Something had changed about him. His eyes had shifted focus. He looked quite calm. More at ease than Cy had ever seen him look before, at least of the two occasions that he’d met him, perhaps because now Cy was in his lair, on his common turf, and the host knew balls to brawn that here he was king of his own country. His broody, intense presence seemed now to be more self-assured swagger than the displaced arrogance of the bar and street.

  – Late. Inside, lad, sharpish. I’d about give up on you, you little bugger.

  Cy glanced at the two young men in the waiting area, who were watching him, the sleeper now awake and out from under his hat, unsmiling, bored or prejudicial or curious. There was a sense of vague challenge about them, so Cy knew right there and then what kind of environment this profession was surrounded by or founded on, what kind of landscape would be denied or chosen that night. He moved past them into the back room and the curtain was drawn screechingly closed again. Inside it was much warmer. This half of the room contained a coal fire, which was gently smoking. Damp rags had been hung about it and the enclosure felt soft-boiled like a warm vegetable. Humid, like Cy imagined the tropics to be. A man was sitting reversed on a chair, with his legs on either side of it, and he was gripping two wooden handles fixed to the wall. A cigarette holding a long, strained orange tip came from between his lips. He was naked from the waist up and sweating profusely. Above his belt was a patch of highly irritated red skin and inside that was half a hooded cobra snake, red, green, black, and yellow, its tail beginning along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column, the finished body coiled round a dagger that ran the first length of his backbone. Cy could tell that the hooded neck and head would be drawn to the right of the dagger’s handle, there was a pale grey stencil mark there to indicate a border, at the point where the opposite depression became a flank. On the table next to Eliot Riley and his now-quiet tattoo equipment were four vials of ink. Riley gave him a look that told him he was expected to behave himself, though what behaviour was warranted Cy did not exactly know, probably humility, because he was now inside the monarch’s personal chamber. The man straddling the chair looked at him also, a hooded look of pure, unadulterated, knew-his-own-venom superiority.

  Eliot Riley began talking then, a speedy flow of vocabulary, which wove jokes into stories into opinions into questions.

  – … I’ll tell you this for nowt, when the lucky bastard woke up and her sister was there as well, what do you think he said? ‘Susan I’ve always said your family was a good lot‚’ he said, ‘but I can’t for the life of me remember where I put that fucking ring just now. Perhaps the pair of you can remind me.’ And then her and her sister top and tailed the fella …

  It was performance talk. Talky-talk. Some of the best Cy had ever heard. Like the vendors on the promenade selling wares to the hustled masses, but better, detailed, tailored, or as if a many-tongued demon had possessed the teller. And Riley was sweating as he talked, almost as much as the man in the chair was sweating. A bottle of open whisky on the floor between their feet. Somewhere in the midst of all the dialogue the electric hurring noise switched back on and the needle was inked, lowered down on to the snake’s decapitated body and it began to do its work. Riley dipped his needle, scratched the back, and wiped the surface. Over and over. All the while looming the conversation, pausing to let his customer reply if he was going to, using those words to complement his own swarthy, rough-thread tapestry. Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.

  – No more whisky now or you’ll bleed too much.

  Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.

  – … in the alley and he had her legs round his waist and he was giving her one when she said she had to go. You know, go. So he said he dropped her and she went right there in front of him, said she didn’t care …

  It seemed that Riley had almost forgotten Cy’s presence. Until, about five minutes into the work and mid-snake-muscle, he glanced back and gestured with his head – an impatient jerk to the side for Cy to approach. Then what Eliot Riley did was bring Cyril Parks in very close to the lower back being tattooed on the chair while the customer gritted his teeth and continued sweating. Cy saw fine lines being set in under a slight wash of blood. There was close black hatching, diagonal upon diagonal, done in a way to cheat the eye into a shadow, into artificial dimension. More water than blood was the leakage really, a strange combined fluid that reminded him of something else, the Bayview’s discharge basins with their wet-farmed contents. The customer’s knuckles protruded yellowy from under his hands’ skin as he gripped the wooden railing, which creaked a fraction under the strong fingers. Riley paused for whisky. After ten more minutes the customer stood wearing art. The snake and dagger flexed on his back, weeping a little as he bent for his shirt. The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment. No argument Riley could have made in the street or the bar would have been more convincing and he had known it, and Cy knew then why Riley had wanted him to come see, why it was important, boy.

  – It’ll bleed a little colour, give it a day or two of rest. Now, it’s not a wound, so don’t treat it as such. Don’t bathe it for a while, give it a chance to scab up. Don’t soap it ‘til the scab comes off and don’t put pure cotton right against it ‘til it’s dried out. That’s important, it’ll wick the ink out, make it duller. And listen to me now. Let that scab come off of its own accord! If you’re not happy with the lines come back. You will be, but if not come back, I’ll work you right – if the scab’s been messed with, mind, I’ll know and there’ll be no alterations done free.

  Riley’s words sounded half w
ise-man’s lecture, half witch-doctor’s ramble. And part scold, and part commandment. Then he glanced at Cy and asked the man to stay on for a minute, he needed a witness so this ludicrous goggle-eyed boy wouldn’t have him arrested for perversity. The customer nodded, took a permissive slug of whisky and rolled the tension out of his jaw with his hand. Then Riley stripped himself out of his clothes and boots, until he was completely naked, and he stood proud and unfocused like a glass-eyed, taxidermy tiger at the edge of the jungle. Except he wasn’t naked. He was tightly dressed with ink. The section of gut seen earlier that day had only been the tip of a vast and ornamental iceberg. Riley’s good, smooth, Welsh-looking skin appeared not to have many borders remaining on it. He was an assemblage of abstract patterns and cartoon images, reptiles, birds, dragons, like a fishing net cast into the ocean and catching a bizarre school of fantastic objects. Black lines courted and controlled colour, right up to the hilt of his genitals. His elbows, the backs of the knees, every raised plateau of muscle was taken. He turned his arms as if twisting two invisible dials in front of him for Cy to see the complete designs ringing them. The left arm contained some kind of Eden, the right was as full of animals as Noah’s ark. He lifted a leg and along the sole of his right foot was a passage of writing, the words too tiny to be read. Cyril Parks was speechless. He had never seen a living thing so camouflaged with art.