by Sarah Hall
– Doesn’t matter if you’ve not got one interesting thing to say to them. Make up a story. Tell a joke. Saying nowt to them is like not having songs sung at their funeral or not having a toast at their wedding! Bad form is what it is, lad. It’s just not done.
But it was a doctrine of Cy’s religion, it was his own brand of ceremony. And oddly, there was no real silence in those moments. Not inside Cy’s mind anyway. In those seconds before he started, strange little hymns of thought chorused through his brain. Words that were a last-minute warning, words that were encouraging, or applauding. Like testimonies for those writing their histories on their bodies, because there was no better place for those chapters to be written. For those taking the insignia of the country, who were made of their nation. For those catching the name of the women they loved, who would love her in some permanent way always until they died or forgot her. For those selecting war armour, who would have conflict around them until they were too old and weak to lift a fist and their banners were meaningless. For those destroying and recreating themselves. For those bringing to their skin only that which their heart was capable of making. For those becoming a cipher of meaning. For those being reborn, selecting the organs of their lives, unravelling the probabilities of themselves, and turning away from their invisible, ether-blank souls. So frequently his mind said these things that in the end even he began not to hear it. He just let the silence tell it.
Often Cy wondered about the night of Riley’s assault, when his mind and faculty were murdered, for it marked the beginning of his death. Cy let his imagination go out to the possibilities of what occurred, he let it haunt him. There might have been a morning hawk above the ravine when the men held him down, moving with some kind of patience through the pale air, a calming tipped-winged movement above him, something to focus on as his eyes came out of their distorted vision shortly before they began. Like a piece of his spirit having got free. Those slow-waking hours between last orders and daybreak, as he waited for his abductors to take of him whatever they were going to take, his throat eventually becoming raw and hoarse with protestation, may have been the most acutely aware hours ever spent by Riley, when he suddenly noticed details like the smell of burning as the dew came on to the moor, or the rings under the feet of insects in an old barrel of water, treading as if with secret knowledge of the water’s masonry. And he might have noticed how a man’s face in barbarity will show traces of compassion even though it is already determined in its fulfilment of cruelty. Or he might have dulled himself away from reality, like some could under the needle in the chair, that numbing oriental style of slumber. Until the sensation of the claw hammer on his skin and bone came, like the purest thing Eliot Riley had ever felt in his life. It might have been purer than even electricity, Cy thought. Riley may have passed out more than once with pain and loss of blood on the four-mile walk back from the scene of his sick trial, his hand doubled in original size and screaming its condition. Cy would never know these things for sure, for he was never told what occurred. All he knew was that Eliot Riley arrived home shortly after the milk had been delivered on the doorstep, with the face of a dead man and his arm strung up inside his coat, looking like mince, looking like tendrils of riverweed when it was revealed. Then he sat down in his wooden chair and fell asleep. As if sleep was the next best thing to admitting defeat.
It took almost a year for Riley to finish dying. After he was sentenced by his assailants, abused, and exiled from his profession, he willed himself dead, like a bird in a cage that will not compromise its nature. He went about it methodically. He would kill himself with drink and depression and starvation. Half a bottle of liquor past possible human consumption a night. As little food as physically manageable before hunger sent him mad and ratching like a badger through the kitchen for scraps. All the melancholy he could summon about him, to eat away at his mind. Where once he had given pathetic assistance to Cy and Paddy when they half-carried him home, shuffling his feet, grunting for them to stop so he could vomit, now he was a dead-weight that often had to be dragged along the road and pavement. No more useful than a sack of potatoes. And if they weren’t careful he’d leave his head back and choke on his own sick and Cy would have to grope about in his soupy mouth for his missing tongue. There were times when the washroom above Eleven Pedder Street was such a mess with blood and shit and vomit and all three together that Cy wondered if the man had been swallowing his own needles, like Chatterton with his lacerated lunched-on poems in his attic. Again in his life he would have to remove the stinking, revolting waste of a suffering individual, like a nursemaid, like a bloody nursemaid. Not even false hope in the air this time, nor his mother’s noble acceptance. Just long, meaningless, suicidal death. Riley often stayed in his bed until the late afternoon, would not even answer if Cy knocked on his door. He lay bent round on the mattress like a baby under an old blanket, his breathing slower than any human lung should endure. Cy would try to get him to eat something, anything. A biscuit. A piece of cheese. He tempted him and tried to trick him into it like he was a fussy infant. Where once he had crept around him with cups of pacifying or demanded tea, now he trod heavily, bringing fresh brews in the hope that Riley would put something into his thinning, reddening body. Occasionally a sentence here and there in response, so Cy would become hopeful, if there were words issued there was part of a brain left over to see reason. If he had enough passion to curse, he had enough care to live.
– Leave me alone, boy. Can’t you see it, you fucking imbecile, can’t you see it’s all over now? I’m sleeping. I’m sleeping. Go away.
Still a lad, still a boy, to Eliot Riley, though Cy was well on his way to thirty. Though he played the youth, didn’t he? The tenderfoot, the loyal subject and the looby, as if to give the man his position back, restore him to his throne. He would try to get him involved with the trade again by asking foolish questions, whose answers he already knew. Where was the best place to store ink pigment in the winter so it wouldn’t spoil? Which was the best manufacturer to go to for the liquid black? As if he had forgotten his monthly trips to Hagan’s in Lancaster for the last ten years. Were brass or steel coils better for the new electric motor? The photography shop was closing down and selling off its goods, did the boss want him to get whatever old dry-point celluloid they may have left over for stencilling material? There were never any answers. Just a slammed door. A room empty of dialogue. Blue eyes paling and melting and dissolving against skin, like a glacier mint in a mouth.
He drank. Night and day, Riley drank whatever he could get hold of. When there was no money and Paddy wouldn’t serve him, for his own good, he stole bottles from shops. Or he went with groups of comrade-desolates around the slums of Moss Street to sup on rot and pauper’s brews. Even the alcohol spirit solution in the cupboard was taken so that it wasn’t safe to keep it, and Cy had to blend powder with distilled water to make his ink. And he was left thinking, thinking about a time when Riley had informed him, with crude gusto, that in this craft any solution could be used to dissolve and bind pigments – blood, spit, a woman’s juice, semen, piss – it was an ancient, resilient, inventive industry.
The customers still asked for him. His reputation did not cease to exist just because his will to go on without his loved and soul-fortifying profession did. Cy would have to explain that he was retired now, resting upstairs, unavailable, the way he had first lied about Riley’s fits to Jonty and Morris, and for it he would often lose a sale. What other honesty could he give them? That the man was dropped down in his own waste somewhere around the town, body parts foul like a gutter, crevices stinking of built-up dirt, and his mind no cleaner than a septic tank? That his once good, colourful Welsh skin was busting open with rag-ended capillaries and his hand was a disabled stump? That he’d become one of those desperately exploding men who mumble and yell at folk because they can’t or don’t want to speak clearly, and if let wander in that direction he would put his four-fingered hand on the train tracks because he was t
hat bloody determined? That he was already dead, that he was already rotting? No.
Here was a young fellow working in the parlour of the greatest tattooer of northern England and the master was not around. There was something treacherous and suspicious about it, something not quite right. Together they might have tattooed the top of their country’s masses, alone he was implicated in some crime, or failed venture, and was suddenly without reputation. A ventriloquist’s wooden dummy without the speaker. For it seemed Cyril Parks could only live in Eliot Riley’s shadow if the shadow of his master still lived also.
It was a life completed by the last sour joke of Eliot Riley dying on April the first, appropriately bad-humoured until the end. But it was not plain old-fashioned dying, not passing on as a natural last function of the body, or being triumphed over by a disease like Cy’s mother had been, that would have been too simple and not had enough of a bastard’s composition to it. He got hold of something rank and poisonous that would sit for a while in his gut removing its lining and then making him pour blood up from his mouth like a fountain. It was bleach. Ordinary washing bleach, of the kind that kept white collars white in the nicer houses of Morecambe Bay, the kind that had cleansed the Bayview’s tuberculosis basins. He’d gone from wine bottles in pockets and a bad charm to his philosophy and swagger, to caustic industrial solvent that robbed his body of its ability to clot blood and its ability to stop heaving. By the close of it there was enough blood in his room to mop the floors with. Enough to paint the sky with. Most of it not in any basin, for Riley was twisting and writhing on the floor and unable to control his sickness – the regurgitation of every evil thing that was in him, every drop of loathsome emotion that spewed forth like an exorcism. And when it was gone, so too would he be, because hemispheres cannot live one without the other, for those born in two parts, black and white hearted. So his final empty unequal peace would last but a few minutes. He made it home from wherever he had taken his terrible potion and up the stairs before the demise of his body really started, so that he could have Cy see him, and hear him as he spoke more words than he had said all bitter year. With the last of his blue eyes and his fat-lipped mouth he said that finally something shackled had been removed from him, like the manacles of Socrates before his hemlock execution. And though in great pain from the holes being punched in his stomach and in pain from his tattered life, there was at last a deeper absence of agony in him, which was a pleasure for knowing well the other. Between great choking mouthfuls he gave his soft departure, as if to a son he’d always wanted but never had it in him to acknowledge, making his potential to beget and brook and love apparent, making it impossible to wholly hate the man, making it impossible to ever take his catheter needle out.
– Good lad. Good lad. Shop’s yours now. Left to you, officially. You’ll be grand, if you stay by the sea. That’s the trick, we’re meant to be by water, folk like you and me. No more than a stone’s throw from her. She’s our muse, lad. She smells like a woman in your bed when the rain hits her, did you know that? That’s where you’ll have them put me. Out at sea. Make me a promise, make it your word. Out at sea. You’ve your mother’s eyes, lad, you’ve her eyes.
And Cy didn’t know if he was weeping for his dead mother, or his dead and dying fathers, or because there was just death in the red room. Or because it was over and his ship had broken free of the rocks and was miraculously still afloat, even though the captain was strung up in the crow’s nest with his throat slit wide open, and not a soul left on board knew how to sail.
The body was released to the authorities and then claimed back by Cyril Parks. It was a remarkable body, for all its ruination and its infiltration with drink, the sagging skin and sorry legacy of abuse. There were whole worlds and stories written on it. It was as a piece of polished heather root or something that had been kept in the ground and under the force of heat and pressure of many ages had become gem-like. And on the sole of the right foot, in tiny curving script, was the poem, not recognized by the undertaker but recognized by Cy as he had taken Riley’s boots off on the bed when he lay still, flooded with his own rust-red waters. It was the only time he had removed the man’s boots, though many, many times he had wrestled his fully clothed, limp body into positions where it could be left to sober. And on this last, post-mortem occasion, with his hands trembling as they untied the laces, he had needed to do it, to make the episode formal, a proper Maundy gesture amid the squalor of the room. It was a poem, which Riley had fancied as meaningful and had stolen as a possession of his own. Like the books in his rooms, like the dissembling ideas of art with their approbation of only the most controversial agenda.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright‚
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
And wasn’t that about right for the fucker, thought Cy.
The body was wrapped and prepared for burial at sea and it was taken out on a chartered fishing vessel into the Irish Channel and dumped overboard without ceremony as the sun was setting, so that Riley, with his Celtic looks and his split identity might have found his way into some ancient Gaelic paradise by accident, if God and the Devil were not quick enough to settle the dispute over him. Cy leaned on the side of the boat and watched the sunset on the waves. What had his mother told him as a boy in her spinner-woman nursery-time way? That when the sun went away its light never went out, it only went to Ireland, and then it went to America, and then right around the world until it came back in the morning. And it was some kind of lamp for all lost souls to follow. So he watched it leaving, turning a slow red corner of the earth, the sky above it pale blue and doomed with intensity before it shut down, like Riley’s eyes. Behind him somewhere was Morecambe Bay, with its strange long tide and all his life’s history. His home. The place that had shaped him from its sand and clay. The place that had set him up well in the first half of life only to make room for his faltering and to allow his tumble in the next half. Because wasn’t he fallen? Wasn’t he as lost and low as he could possibly be? Like one of the ragged souls of Reeda’s fables. The boat wallowed gently in the current for a time, then began back to shore. And at that moment Cy did not want his home, majestic or malfeasant‚ he would have renounced it gladly, and paid all the money he had ever owned and a tithe on all he would ever earn to have the fishing vessel come about and head west in the wake of the sun.
Late that night he took a drink at the Dog and Partridge with Paddy and toasted Eliot Riley, though neither of them spoke beyond that of the man lest his recently departed spirit become blackened with the pluming particles of ill-thought and defamation. Paddy reached behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of whisky and poured a dram for Cy, his first proof liquor ever. The fumes were as wretched as the taste but he took the contents of the glass whole.
– What of Cyril Parks next then? Get yourself a pretty missy and raise a brood? Will you be able to cope with all the trade this summer?
Cy shook his head and shrugged.
– Well. You could become a travelling man. Find yourself a circus to join. See the world. Send me some postcards to put up in the bar and impress people with my connections.
– Is the world a better place than Morecambe then, Paddy?
– Well, I believe it’s bigger. And there are no doubt fewer donkeys. Some people say it’s a small world, of course. But, I wouldn’t like to have to paint it.
The next day Cy locked the door of Eleven Pedder Street and took a train to the city of Liverpool, then took a hire carriage out to the docks, where he met with an acquaintance of Paddy Broadbent behind the dripping dolly crane. The woman sold him counterfeit passport and papers and permits, rolling the money received into the handle of her umbrella and never looking Cy in the face. Then he bought a third-class ticket, with the last of Reeda’s money, on a ship bound for America.
The Adriatic was a four-mast, four steam-engine, Harland & Wolff built monster. She’d run the
Atlantic for twenty-five years since her Belfast birth, ferrying immigrants, cargo and the wealthy backwards and forwards to the new world, when she wasn’t vacationing in the Mediterranean, and she’d seen every kind of weather. She’d held Russians and Polish Jews, Lithuanians and Czechoslovakians, who first made passage through the North Sea and took a train to reach her, and thousands of Irish Catholics who took steamers from their native ports to Liverpool docks. She held oil, and coal, the belongings of many nations, and occasionally lowing, bleating cattle. The rich luxuriated in her polished dining rooms, or the indoor pool, the Turkish bath, while the poor were sent down towards the lower decks, near her two propellers, where the noise of her motion was mature and continuous. She was the last of the Big Four vessel quartet run by White Star liners, a fine old lady retired in her later years now to the summer transatlantic passage. In May of 1933 Cyril Parks boarded her, one year before the Cunard–White Star merger, one year before she would be laid up permanently then sold to the Japanese and broken up for parts. To Cy she was magnificent, simply because she was whole and moving. He’d seen so many battered, wrecked and ravaged vessels out at Ward’s Ship-breakers – they looked like noble prehistoric beasts bonded and tortured – that the Adriatic was miraculous in her capacity and condition. At first her groans and internal knocking and the noise of her robust metallic sashaying left him uneasy, for it seemed that parts of the structure were unhappy in their bolted proximity with each other and were trying to separate. Then it became apparent that she was simply living, her sounds became the music of a giant iron body, breathing, digesting, beating, and it was comforting. The wake behind the ship was tremendous, like Moby Dick spouting water through a blow-hole. Almost three thousand passengers doing seventeen knots had their hats tugged off by the ocean breeze when they came out to grip the railing, to bid farewell to the continent slipping away behind them, or to play shuffleboard on the middle decks. They were citizens of a small city floating out to a promised land.