The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  Riley was the only man Cy knew to find humour in the pieces of flesh found tidily wrapped up in newspaper and smudging the print at the bottom of Moffat Ravine, the only man to laugh out loud when the news reached the town that Dr Ruxton of Lancaster was finally hanged at Strangeways gallows for the ghastly murder and butchery of his wife and nurse, to the blessed relief of the entire nation.

  – What’s black and white and red all over? A Moffat Ravine newspaper. Get it, get it? Read all over … He probably found them together eh? Doing the Queen Victoria shuffle. Daft bugger should of joined in.

  There were absurd and treacherous and dark elements to be found in people that Riley could understand and even be amused or thrilled by, where others could not fathom their existence, and had to rely on standard judgments – it was horror and sin and evil and lunacy in the world. And Riley would simply call it truth, truth, as true as any high achievement, love or God or beatific goodness. One without the other was a falseness, he said. Humans were black and white with too much red blood inside, just like that Moffat Ravine newspaper.

  He was a vessel through which these messages passed, for better or for worse. What he pulled out of people and drew on them was as varied and degenerate as it was honourable and illuminating. On his walls were warrior signs and heads with swords clean through them, women on their knees bending naked towards men’s cocks, next to Christ on his cross, the scales of justice and doves with olive branches. From all the world’s distilled meanings, from the chaotic jumble, Riley located human totems and gifted them to their patrons. A man was his soul of a lion, his courage. A man was his profession at sea. A man was the flag of his nation. A woman was her dead child’s name. A woman was her ability to use her body for pleasure, or her inability to ever truly expose herself because she had had a black brassiere tattooed on her chest. A woman was as abstract as the abstract spiral on her back.

  It did not take an age to come to know these things of Eliot Riley. And so the first time Cy happened across him with his friends, drunk and beaten and raving on the central pier, his slurring madman’s words were not completely senseless. Jonty and Morris looked on with horror and confusion as the indigent, broken-looking man raised one arm and called out to Cy.

  – Boy, come here. Listen. I’m a fucking midwife, boy, that’s what I do, spread their fucking legs open and I catch their little babies and all their shit and blood from pushing and they never even bloody know it … hahaha … they never know they’re birthing themselves, a fucking midwife I am. I am.

  – What the bloody hell’s he on about, Cyril? Come away and leave him.

  – Got to get used to it, boy. Got to get used to the shit and quim. Smell’s not so bad after a bit. Oh, we’re all soaking wet with it, yes we are … hahaha … you little buggers too, you fuckers with your mammies’ clean hands on you… and your bright hopeful ideas …

  – Go on home, lads, I’ll be all right. I’d better stop here. Mr Riley has a condition, see, it comes in fits. Go on now. See you tomorrow.

  Cy bent down and began to lift his employer to his feet. And Riley smiled at him, a pleased, pitying smile that was wetted by the tears from his eyes and the effluent from his mouth, a smile that was both moved by and derisive of this complicit new comradeship.

  Before long Cy could see that Riley was torn in two, he was Janus-looking. Perhaps it was the humanity of his craft that allowed him this quality, this taking or leaving of life’s mucky mire as well as its lovely sandy beaches, the ropes strung round both poles. Perhaps he had come of his trade well-fitting with a character already formed and suitable, or perhaps the trade had made him. Of fowl and egg, Cy would never truly know which had arrived first.

  Outside the shop, in life, Riley was a failure. He was society’s satirical, ugly cousin. He drank, offended, was loud, misunderstood. None could see him at work, and if they did they were too busy undergoing what was painful to notice his sudden clear eye, his steady hand, the hymns of his singing heart. So he turned this wrong territory in on himself, knowing that outside he was an unwelcome conduit, become dislodged from the one room other than a confessional box where the souls of men and women could travel freely. He went without that minister’s identity. He went too far, got obstinate about his courtship of living wrongly and loudly and creating effrontery. Where Reeda milled the good of life, he harvested the ill and took it to market where he shouted out his wares. He believed deeply that he did not like himself, and he liked others less. Just as he did not like the environment of unpainted flesh, and normalcy, life’s plug of decency that tried to stop up the devil’s half of life. And he lived as if trying to siphon out that darker portion, with alcohol, with banter, with bad habits, bad politics, bad language, obloquy, anguish and despair.

  – Not that I would, love, with a tuss as big as a cathedral my organ’s play would seem too small. Set me up again, Paddy. What do you mean you’ve called last orders? I never heard, and what with Miss York Cathedral here you’d think there’d have been an echo.

  All with suicidal desperation, if in hitting rock bottom that useless, disliked and disliking half of himself would abandon ship. Around him he created a mentality of a wet, wintry self-defeat. There were the brawls, the complaints, the lasting rivalries where Eliot Riley never came out the winner. He was barred from six public houses in the town for his conduct, had tried the patience of Paddy Broadbent on more than one occasion. He was notorious. But in his rooms he could embroider the human body with beauty and he was glorious. His reputation for it brought men and women in from as far afield as Belfast and Nottingham, Stirling and Glasgow, by appointment in the winter and in the summer months they queued outside his door. The brighter part of the man kept them coming, kept them coming back so that he could dress them in new, perfect, custom-fitting clothing. Give them their lasting souvenirs. Give them their natural markings. Give them a picture of and for themselves.

  The two halves of his soul were split, one great and dexterous, the other destitute and murderous. And only Cy knew both for what they were. Only he could see the both sides, as he worked alongside the man in eminence and walked alongside the man in disgrace, and saw him love and saw him hate. And very early on in knowing him it struck Cy that there was something absolutely suiting about Eliot Riley and Morecambe Bay. Both were tidal and schizophrenic, two seasons right, two seasons wrong.

  – Don’t even bother asking when you’ll get a go, sonny Jim. You’ll pick up a needle when I say so and not before. And first off it’ll be on those sticky celery legs you own, sunshine, not a paying customer.

  It was no privilege and no honour working for Riley in those first months. And there were no civilized lessons about the great artistic masters as promised to Reeda Parks over tea and crumpets. Riley liked to talk about himself and he liked to give opinions. And he liked to show off. He was a freehander. He could gather a piece of linen skin and mark it with ink confidently if he chose to, without any preliminary work. It meant he could veer from the standard flash and boost his reputation with inventiveness and charge more money, but it also gave him a vastly engorged ego. If he saw the potential of it in Cy, through the bold designs in the print shop window, he passed on not one word of the prophecy. He was old-school, he said, proud to be it. He abhorred gimmicks, sloganeering, all the mock-surgery stuff, the laboratory coats, stethoscopes, the monikers, the aliases, Doc, Captain Red, Painless Andy, though he understood the need for rapport, for entertainment during the procedure, which was a different matter, and he delivered it nightly. He could pinpoint a proclivity for discrimination or the style of comedy a man preferred and would arrive there within a minute.

  – What about these votes for women, eh? There’s a reason they’re going to repeal prohibition in America, isn’t there? There’s a reason drink is needed over there again now. What say you? Eh?

  There was often so much bluff and showmanship present in the room that the customer would be hard pressed to dwell all that much on the scratchy sensation bot
hering them. There were stories told about whores and virgins and fights, about acquaintances caught short of the law, about the man he had been taught by, Black Percy, who had beheaded another man with his father’s army sabre right before Riley’s eyes. Riley had come through an industry that was as colourful as chintz, that was wholly self-sufficient and home-skilled, where equipment had to be constructed by the individual tattoo artist, handmade from convenient objects, electric doorbells, drills, industrial drive mechanisms, factory parts, medical quills, everything was bent, filed down, soldered and fixed. Ink had to be acquired under the guise of another profession, but established contacts could then be trusted, he told Cy. It was useful to know people at warehouses, scrappies, repair shops, and hospitals – Riley recommended going down on the nurses. Coils could now be bought for the machinery, mostly meant for other trades but easily adapted, though he continued to fashion every piece to suit his tastes wherever possible. And so would Cy learn to, so help him.

  The man took him on a tour of every tattoo artist in Lancaster and Blackpool and sent him round the ones in Morecambe solo, window-shopping, to see how not to do it. If there was anything different to be found within it was not the designs, which were derivative, it was the men who ran them, somehow modern in their dress and criminal in their demeanour, compared to Eliot Riley, half seadog, half aristocrat groom, the atavist, who most days, working or not, donned the dull black morning jacket, the woollen hat, the gloves with the finger ends cut out. Where the others embraced the ritzy persona of the profession Riley might have been the original mould of it, the genuine article.

  It was a constant battle to keep the stone room warm that winter, the air was drawn out by the grey slurrying sea in the bay down at the end of Pedder Street, which seemed to heave out any heat from the building on its long retreat to low tide. Cy spent much of his time fetching firewood from the beach for the grate, so Riley could save money on coal, feeling demoted and cheated out of the warm comfort and the dependable clack-clack of the big press in the printers. Riley insisted on warmth for the customer section of the room behind the curtain, he had a thing about working on warm skin. He said it was better to get it into a temperate condition, it became readier to receive colour. There was the added frustration for Cy of being taught how to engineer all the fiddly equipment and getting it endlessly wrong. Piece after piece was rejected for being ground poorly, soldered at the wrong angle, botched and buggered and wasted. Riley often tossing them back into the box of metal parts without so much as a proper glance at the workmanship, judging it already shoddy. Had he wanted a career in mechanics Cy would have gone to work for a motor company or as a fitter at the foundry, he often thought to himself bitterly. There was, however, not a pig’s head in sight, much to Cy’s relief.

  In February of that year, Riley had Cy begin his practice on his own cold, goose-pimpled shin, surrendering a leg, as he’d been informed he’d have to. And he’d also have to make a little visit to pay his respects to the primary creators of the trade. So it was tap-tap-tap on his shin with a bamboo block and a hammer, Riley slapping Cy’s face when the pain got him teary and his concentration lapsed and he dropped the equipment, saying no more. He would learn the traditions, from beginning to end, and respect them, bellowed Riley.

  – Now pick up that fucking mallet, boy. Or get out.

  It may have been the electric age of needles but tattooing was as ancient as the mummies being pried from their sarcophaguses in the Egyptian desert, and if chiselled ink was good enough for the Pharaohs, it was certainly good enough for Cyril bloody Parks. Then, milliner’s needles lashed to a stick, leaving thick rivers of colour, destroying a white leg with black practice. Oh, the bastard was old-school all right.

  In addition, there were the personal comments, which the man took no great shame in making.

  – Your problem, lad, is your natural inclination towards silence. Get it out, sonny. You’re too dour, you need to perk up a bit, find some character. They won’t credit you for just the ink, lad. Besides, the ladies do not like a dullard in their beds – how many have already fallen asleep under you, eh lad? Or on top of you for that matter. Or are you still a novice in that regard? Don’t tell me I’ll have to apprentice you in that field too.

  Sour, wet laughter.

  – Look. A bit of self-examination and melancholy is all right later on in the night, with a drop of something to accompany, but in front of the customer you’ll have to perk up, do you understand? Work on your patter, I can’t let you loose on the summer crowd if you’re going to bore them into a coma. Zest, lad, zest! And get yourself greased up properly by a woman!

  Such was the disappointment and frustration of the commencement of his apprenticeship. Countless times Cy nearly put down what he was carrying, firewood, needles, cartridges of ink, and left the shop on Pedder Street, never to return. Countless times he curled a fist up at his side and wished to God he could let it fly in Riley’s general direction. Countless times he found the shop closed and empty and he’d have to search the streets for Riley, only to find him stained and stinking in some corner. And he’d lie to his mother that Riley wasn’t drinking, that Riley didn’t need him as a crutch to limp home with, and that he wasn’t up half the night on weekends tending to the lush, making him oversleep and late for school on Monday morning, that Riley was a kinder tutor and that of all those great artists now known to him, Michelangelo was his favourite painter. Michelangelo. A name pulled out of thin air one day, to assure Reeda that everything was all right, that he hadn’t taken a wrong path, that he wasn’t lost and inches from the edge of a cliff. Though he had only to watch Eliot Riley at work on a customer, see the true colour finding its way into skin, and he felt all the antagonism and resentment absconding. Because from this brutish man could come humane and brilliant art.

  – Are you feeling ill, love? You’ve a paleness to you these last few days.

  – Oh, no, I’m grand thanks, Mam.

  – You’ve not quarrelled with El … with Mr Riley, have you?

  – No.

  His mother put down her washing basket and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  – Because that would be a shame.

  – No, I’m just tired.

  – Well. When I’m weary I tell myself if I can manage just one more chore for the day it’ll be one less to do tomorrow. Of course it’s funny, there always seems to be an abundance of chores and they never get any fewer, do they? It’s a bit like a bottomless well, so you just have to keep working. Folk can be like that too, Cyril. It’s what makes them so infuriating and it’s what endears them to us. Your father could drive me to despair and ruination with his forgetfulness of the milk lid and his silly ideas about who should sit on the Council and who shouldn’t, depending on if they wore a skirt or long trousers.

  This was the first time he had ever heard his mother venture a criticism of his father, a remark that was less than a noble memorial of his exemplary character. Cy turned to look up at her. She seemed nervous but also relieved.

  – Lordy, look at the time. I must get on or we’ll be wearing wet woollies all week. Perhaps you’ll tell me about it later on, about what you’ve been doing and how things are shaping up.

  The summer of 1922 was to be a summer of disappointment, with little else for Cy to do than continue sitting mixing ink and filing needles, fixing electro-magnets and springs to the best of his ability and taking money from the customers. And not even enough scant pay to get him to the picture house on Saturday night to see Charlie Chaplin films or Marnau’s stoddering vampire, with Morris and Jonty, who would sub him the ticket price whenever they could, but had no steadier or more generous income than he did. They couldn’t understand Cy’s interest in tattooing. They couldn’t understand it under all his disappointment, his giving up of drawing – for Riley didn’t even let him hang up his good designs in the shop, though he had made plenty, nor when he was not freehanding did he let him trace the acetate stencils, print them with charcoal, V
aseline a back and leave a preliminary mark for Riley to finish, like a proper apprentice blocking in compositions for the master. And they could not understand Eliot Riley, with his scowls and his songs, his bear-baiting sneers and his never certain behaviour when they came to call for Cy. Had he fought in the war? they asked. Is that why he was such a bastard, is that why he had become so impossible, because he had some kind of battle shock disorder, like the twitching men returned to the town in 1918, who from time to time fell to their knees and howled in the streets of Morecambe? Was it mania? Was it depression? Was it both together? The boys were stumped for any other reason. They could not fathom Cy’s loyalty to this villain. They were befuddled and afraid and unable to relate to the man. For who in any right mind or any leap into a madhouse limbo could understand the workings and breakings of Eliot Riley?

  When Reeda Parks’s breast began to invert she knew, in that portion of her heart where the tightest-bound and least-admitted of all secrets are kept, that her time had come. She watched her nipple retreat for five days, she became quieter and less certain of her work, leaving cupboards open and pastry half rolled. There were small pains in her body that she had not taken seriously before, had not let bother her – in her wrist, her abdomen, her upper back. Now they took on meaning. But she hadn’t seen it coming, she hadn’t seen it coming, that was what made her lean to the wall on which she had leaned after the deaths of the ideas of so many children, and weep. She took the time to observe her tall son across the table when they ate supper together, noticing his high forehead, the untidy locks of hair around his collar – he hated visiting the barber and would never let her cut it, and how his Adam’s apple moved in his throat when he swallowed, triangularly, like the corner shank on a steam-train wheel as it begins to piston. And how she could tell when he was thinking hard on something because his lips sometimes ghosted over words without realizing what they were doing, or he suddenly snorted or laughed out loud for no good reason. And she thought about how she loved him, all through herself, like muscle that held her up without her even feeling it. She visited the doctor and a surgery was planned, but within weeks it became apparent that there was little could be done, they couldn’t cut her back far enough, she was a blighted tree that had a cancer close around its trunk. She would not remain in Lancaster infirmary. She wanted the Bayview, where she could take the last of her life, so she could end it where she’d always made it. And she would take the opportunity to watch the pleasing motion of bay, that enormous living clock that had always been at the back of her when she worked, like a long, daily two-swing pendulum clock. She would open the window in her own room and let the sea’s breath invigorate the air around her, she did enjoy the cooler weather, there was a rousing, wakeful quality about it. As if clarity had been restored after the muggy, yawning heat of summer. There would be her Cyril. With her breast gone and her body faltering she would need to finally and fully wean him off her care.