The Electric Michelangelo

by Sarah Hall

  But oh, they were hard to fathom, and Cy felt remote from them now. They were creatures of extraordinary endurance and unpredictability. Riley was right, they could smile through the treatment as if it were no more than a loofah brush massage. As if having marched straight to the shop from their covens. They were not as inclined to grip the wooden wall shackle for their discomfort as the men were, externalizing pain. Instead they held their own hands tightly, as if intent on retaining the sensation, their bodies became continuous units like the symbol for infinity. Their reaction to the work done on them was as varied as it could be extreme. Tears, hysterical laughter, absolute silent obduracy, quiet lunacy, resolve, sudden terror, mania, lasciviousness, sentiments from all the filler layers, all the fuller levels between defined emotions, like the white pulpy substance found inside the tough green skin of a split reed. A man would not do it that way, he would be happy, blasé, angry or bluffing something. So there was always that sense, that feeling that the female customers were closer to the mystery of the trade that Riley maintained was sacred and central. Nor could Riley crack them in his personal life, for all his keen eye into the caves and fissures of people’s minds, his forcipial ability to guide out an image or symbolic rendition of their traits if they were stuck or stalling amid the flash.

  It was at the Pedder Street parlour that Cyril Parks graduated from the blue-balled frustrations and unconsummated altercations of sexual prelude to the real thing with women. Some of them came into the shop with their loins already aflame, and either he or Riley would be offered their rumps on heat if there was enough privacy. Some considered it essential gratuity. They came to have fire drawn on their white bodies, or flowers around their nipples, their nipples extended pinkly like rose petals across the breast, felines crouching near their vulvas. The hints of coitus. There was that aspect to the profession. The graphic, creamy rich slick of it, its spermary and ovum character. Marine life on an inner thigh, a snake resting coiled on a buttock or slithering into the shadow-crease of a bum. The base symbols of fucking, the vividly erotic. Some women came to inscribe their risqué nature on their bodies, to elicit wanton behaviour from the viewer or to declare their own, and they would desire Cy afterwards, being already mostly naked, being ready for more than the needle’s entry. The last scratch of pain leaving behind only sore proof of lust as it departed. Some of them wanted to see it through to the gasping, shuddering, juddering very end. So there was sex like gauze to cover their colourful wounds.

  – Do you know what this swallow means, darling? Can you guess it? Well, I’ll show you. Take your trousers down. Come on, you’ll not be sorry. That’s right. Well, look at you, all truncheon meat and no helmet, constable. You better sit for this, hadn’t you?

  Or they would take his hand and place it between their legs, wait for his response, his eyes complying, then they’d mould his cock into a pleasing shape like potters at the wheel, glaze him hard with the spit of their hot, kiln-oven mouths, so that he was in a state where they could use him. And some of them he liked, over and above the sucking and screwing, and he would have courted them were it not for the rigmarole of having to introduce them to his boss, the certainty of his malevolent interference. Riley, at his lewdest and most sordid, said not to be fooled by caresses and kisses, polite and tender exchanges, the lick of a tuss and the sweet discovery of that spot which got both parties banging together like shutters in a hurricane. He said that some women just liked the bite and the tear and the spite of tattooing and of coupling, that it was pain which got them wet and wanting. And if Cy was going to handle these ones in the parlour when Riley wasn’t around, randy and mucky and germ-ridden as they may be, he’d have do away with shy passes and gentle thrusting and considerate loving. He’d have to slap them and grip them and fist them and turn them around dog-mounted to blunt himself in, or put it in their arses.

  Though they came less often than the men to Eleven Pedder Street, females carried with them intrigue, life’s oddest embolus in their blood, and they undid the work’s simplicity. Cy tried his best to wind his way through the skein grounds surrounding them but often felt lagging and lost.

  Once, there was a woman crying at the back of the building after her work was completed. Riley would not comfort her. For whatever unsympathetic reason, or cruelty, or voyeuristic detachment, he did not feel like he had enough invested in the situation to warrant it and he did not approach her. Instead, he went about cleaning the ink vials and left her be to soggy up her handkerchief with grief and snot. Human canvas could never be relied on for rational behaviour, especially not the female variety, Riley always said. She was sorry she’d had it done perhaps, thought Cy, that tiny black-red rose flower above the navel. A thumbnail’s length above it, Riley’s broad, stained nail the measure. Her face was all bunched together and full of concentration, as if crying were a matter that should be attended to with effort and determination, as if she was making herself do it. This Cy had never understood, whenever he’d seen it in women. They could turn to it with passion and dedication. The quality of adamant self-destruction at the back of it unsettled him, the way that people would risk against themselves, double up, self-destruct. For it seemed a betrayal of the worst kind, and he always felt he should try to stop the rebellion. Whether it was out of pity or penalty, he knew you only had to have your dying mother take your hand before taking the hands of weeping women became a reflex action. Not so for Riley. It seemed he felt nothing at all and he could watch the upset of others for hours while smoking, like being at the cinema. Or maybe one part of him was mentally slapping their hysterical faces. Cy had heard a few of the women Riley brought home with him reduced to this condition, their furious wailing seemed only to intensify through the walls when met with his executioner’s insensate reaction, his void of emotion, his catatonic stance. Then there was the smashing of breakable objects if something portable could be found to aid their performance, as if torment increased in volatility until it was met with the proper appreciation, as if that was a given emotional equation. Like upping the stakes in poker until a hand was called. And Cy could sympathize with them, could he not, for all the occasions he himself wanted to roar at Riley to be more human when met with his outstanding cruelty, as human as those who had shaped Cy’s life so far and set the kindly standard.

  But this one woman, now flowered just above her bellybutton, and still open-bloused so that her quaking belly was seen, seemed so strangely broken open when it was done that there were vast spaces of confusion Cy could not cross. And she was Riley’s customer, and it was the big man’s shop. If Riley could not go to her in comfort how could he? Tired of the noise, or perhaps impatient for the next customer, Riley finally spoke to her.

  – Stop it. No need for all this fuss. You’re just being silly. Stop it.

  Her eyes and her shaking head said she could not.

  – But of course you can. All you need to do is stand and pick up your overcoat, love, go home and pretend it never happened. You’ll get used to it. Look, you’ve a mole almost as big under your tit and there’s that mark up above your fanny that looks far worse! What’s that from? They operate on your tubing?

  This was Riley’s tenth commandment argument – thou shalt get used to it. Thou shalt not pick thy scab was number one. The other eight were entirely changeable. New drama-provided marks became old at some stage and ceased to offend, or to shock in the mirror. Surgical scars, by the onset of old age, were as familiar and bodily incorporated as a limb. The stretches of childbirth, like the lines on a brow, were simply mementos indicating the passage of life. Silky-looking bullet pools – there’d be a few of those in the shop, the business drew a crowd that was not unacquainted with attempted murder – were only a little bigger than vaccination scars or strawberry birthmarks. Tattoos could be briefly upsetting. But eventually they became ordinary components on the human anatomy. People went through life like well-handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring
life.

  Perhaps jolted by the man’s indelicacy, the woman started talking.

  – Wednesday I’m to be married. This Wednesday as a matter of fact.

  Riley was unimpressed.

  – What kind of silly day is that for a wedding, love?

  – Oh, I know. They’re busy Saturdays until Christmas.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Still disaffected, Riley nodded, probably thinking she’d be accustomed to it by her marriage day. The woman’s eyes had finished leaking but remained thick with water like bottle bottoms.

  – It’s funny, isn’t it? How you might put something breakable in a place where you know it’ll likely fall. My husband will like it, the tattoo. And, I didn’t want him to. That’s the thing of it. I didn’t want him to like it.

  Then, composed, she stood, picked up her overcoat and left the shop. Wishing what exactly never happened Cy did not know. This trade, he thought and not for the first time, was located at the darker end of town in many more ways than one. And in the event of being stumped by human obscurity, he decided, you just had to let it pass you by.

  Then one day Cy held the electric needle in his own hand and before he knew it ten years had passed by him! Ten years of Eliot Riley. Ten years in a storm of his behaviour and without the safe harbour of his mother. He had eventually stopped growing taller. He had learned to fight and evict brawlers from the vicinity, and to negotiate with the enemies of his employer. He had been enjoyed by women in the back room of Pedder Street, had seen some of his friends marry and produce children, he had become older, had become firmer, he had forgotten the exact face of Reeda, he had not visited the photograph of his father. And he could not remember what his first ever sold and paid for tattoo had been a picture of. A dragon. A butterfly. A heart. It didn’t matter. The shop now had neon lights around its doorway, to attract passers-by, though still no signs or monikers or gimmickry, for Riley was of an older bent that did without the new jive and jazz-coat trappings. It was in any case well-known that there were two unrelated freehanders working side by side behind separate curtains within. Like partners without equality. Like father and son without the intimate connection. But two freehanders under one roof. Now that was a rarity. Amid all the professional rivalry and the slander and the battle of one ego and one reputation raging against another, in a trade where tattoo artists still acquired sheets of images subversively from each other and crossed out the designer’s signature for their own, such collaboration was rare indeed. Eliot Riley had never suggested he move on, perhaps liking the position of authority of being the Pedder Street shop owner, and still the one they truly came for. And Cy had never chosen to leave, though he had the skills to set up on his own and frequently he had the bloody-minded will to do it.

  He had grown to love the scent of skin. The way it told him something of the person in the chair. Their basic character, their occupation, their choice of artificial perfume spritzed on to that flexing medium with which he worked. The smell of skin was like the smell of an oil-primer. It signified the beginning of art. He had one leg entirely dedicated now to the hunt for a blue ink that was stable, he had messed up the appendage so badly under Riley’s duress that it didn’t really matter, his vanity was abandoned, and it became smudged and smeared with broken veins as pigment after pigment proved impossible to use. Twice he had mildly poisoned his blood, his ankle bone becoming manky with sores. The challenge of blue ink had become one of his inherited frustrations, passed down from the man who’d taught him how to paint, and how to hate, and, in conjunction, how, for his own sanity’s sake to save any piece of gilded faith or instrument of celebration from the wreckage of the relationship that he could. At the start of every illumination festival, as the gales blew the bulbed garlands out to sea, Riley would say the same thing to him with an aggressive humour.

  – They won’t be asking us to switch on the lights this year, will they boy? They won’t be asking us to put on our ties and dinner jackets and make a speech and throw that switch.

  As if at every annual cusp Riley was giving Cy the opportunity to bow out from the underbelly operation. Or as if he was confirming Cy’s position at the helm of first-mate to the captain of a perpetually sinking ship. There was something unnerving and continually harrowing about the man’s embrace of pessimistic forces, how he thrived on conflict and ugliness, the malodorous aspects of life. Riley continued to manhandle people, to drink, to fight, even as he got slower, more pitiful, and less able to find ways to make other men want to challenge him. His hair greyed under his woollen hat. His good skin wrinkled. But his hand remained steady, and if he missed alcohol in the daytime his body did not show it by jerking and shaking when he needed it to be still. It was the one thing cherished by him – it was his saving grace. His redeeming talent. It countered his sooty mania. Until the inevitable happened, the inevitable opportunity of one longtime rival and his pals, from the bar or from the business, it was never clear, found him drunk or got him drunk and alone and took him to the old abandoned blacksmith’s stable out near Moffat Ravine, waited until he was sober, so that he would be clear with his fate, and laid his right hand on a table. Then another of them produced a claw-iron from a bag and showed it to an ever-resisting ever-raging Eliot Riley. And then he used it. Five gavel hammers for Riley’s guilty life. Five falling claw-iron pistons for his shuttle-bust fingers. Five colours to the pallet of the tattooer’s spectrum – black, red, yellow, for the bruises which took off every nail, above every shattered bone which grew back crooked, green and brown for the gangrene infection which took off his middle digit completely. So that his crippled hand would never hold his equipment with enough dexterity to use it ever again. So that his saving grace was damned.

  But first Cy got the needle in his own hand. It happened one morning soon after Reeda’s death when Riley was sleeping late and heavy from the night’s drink, and as Cy was leaving the shop to buy bread a man asked him if he could have work done, and he accepted. He was tired of being told every time he got close to being an artist, to being a fully working tattooist, that some slip, some invisible flaw, some bloody unidentifiable cruel mystery of a failure had discredited him, made him ineligible for promotion, that he had failed Eliot Riley. He was tired of being filled with impotent anger and confusion, or sulking upstairs, tired of the snide, petty arguing, which always ensued from Cy’s failed examination, which the master thrived upon, flaring up to it like an itch that’s scratched.

  – Well, I was going to let you start next week but you’ve blown it, lad. I had it all planned, you would have been sitting over there, happy as Larry, with your own kit. You’ve nobody to blame but yourself.

  – What did I do wrong? I did fuck all!

  – You know what you did. And if you need telling, that just proves what a stupid article you truly are.

  Cy brought the customer inside, took the money, and prepared his body exactly as he’d seen Riley do a hundred times. He coloured in his first black-bordered image, bottom corner up to top so as not to smear the transfer, working in a small pool of ink, steadily, interpreting lines beneath it. And how the needle sang when it was put on someone else’s body! Like a tuning fork struck against a piece of wood. An entirely different melody than that made from working on his own leg. And his mind rushed out to all the aspects of chromatic nature, and came back within the image he was making. Whatever that image had been that he didn’t remember, but he did a decent job and the customer was happy. And by the time the man had put his shirt back on Riley was awake and downstairs and watching.

  – About time you started pulling your weight around here, lad. Wondered when you’d get your finger out of your arse. Next time use your own chair, that one is mine.

  – I don’t have a chair.

  – Well best you get to the scrappy’s and buy one. Gun purrs like a cock that’s shooting, doesn’t it?

  And then there was another tattoo and another. And fairly soon the electric singing was a familiar song. He went from stand
ard designs to freehand images, though he was only permitted to work if Riley was out of the Pedder Street shop or there was more than one customer waiting at a time, like a young lion guarding a den when the alpha male was away.

  What never changed was the voice within Cy’s mind in the moments before he began working, in the brief interval between the removal of clothing from a piece of flesh, administering the cleaning fluid, the grease, and the tactility of human against needle, during which time he would ask a simple one-word question.

  – Ready?

  And in that small portion of time he was really asking many things. He was seeking, one final, crucial time, an endorsement of the metamorphosis, for which he was in part responsible, and the customer was in part responsible. He was waiting for their signature on a contract they had drawn together, before he also wrote his own in ink. Because some did get up and leave the shop, right at that moment. And some had their faces fall half way through the procedure for they hadn’t truly decided. He might not even always vocalize the question, he might just have assumed they were hearing it, considering it, but always that small amount of time was set aside, an escape route out of the prison, a burning walkway from the flaming pavilion. On the outside it seemed to produce tension, that period of impending discomfort being so very quiet, and Riley continued to berate him for it, saying what he needed to do was talk the customer into comfort.