by Sarah Hall
He leaned back out from the bar and looked into the gaming room again. The bodies within were shifting like pieces of sand in an egg-timer and finally they emptied to one side. And there was Grace, sitting across from someone Cy could not see, the first opponent of the evening. She was wearing the same kick-pleated skirt and blouse as the night he had first met her. But her hair was down, it reached to the edge of her back’s curve and a little beyond, so that an inch or two of it hung above the depression and curled in the air. They had not begun playing the match, she always wore her hair back when she played, he knew this irrelevancy to be true of her, if not much else. She looked beautiful from this far away, in profile, her strong features amended by smoky light. Before Cy realized that he was staring at her indulgently she met his gaze. He put up his hand in a small diplomatic wave, Grace nodded her head. She did not smile fondly at him as she had earlier in the day, and he thought perhaps she had not recognized him. Then, refuting this assumption and still looking his way, she held up her hands in a flamboyant European gesture, the palms tipped up, and she shrugged, as if saying she did not know the answer to some question that had been recently posed, or she was asking for his comment. He understood. He smiled so that she would know her idea was good, plausible, logistical. So she would come to see him tomorrow. And maybe, just maybe, it would be their beginning.
By three in the afternoon the next day it was apparent that she was not going to show up at the booth. He had waited all morning with growing anticipation and nervousness for her arrival, missing his lunch break because he did not want to risk leaving the vicinity in case she took it upon herself to choose that exact moment to come. Nor did he dash across to the hotdog vendor for quick, convenient sustenance, conscious as he was that the flavour of onion and spicy meat on his tongue might carry and impose itself upon her. Between customers he would stand and try to spy the tall black head of the horse moving down the alleyway as Grace led him. She had said she would be working at three. And now it was past that. The day had trickled away and with it the chance of seeing her privately. Disappointment sat in him like wet coal in a grate, resilient and cold, and it would do nothing but extinguish any flame of optimism he tried to pass over it – that she might have had an emergency, that she might have forgotten a pre-existing appointment, she might not have changed her mind about the work but instead some kind of prosaic if nefarious conspiracy had ensnared her, kept her from him. And at any moment she might appear in her purple circus costume with plimsoll slippers on her arched feet and apologies in her so-dark, sloe-dark eyes. No. No. She simply wasn’t coming.
At around about the same post-meridian hour as of the previous night, and with a dangerously empty belly, Cyril Parks was occupying the very same stool in Varga Oyster Bar that his backside had collaborated with twenty four hours earlier, drinking the rest of his bottle of whisky. On this occasion he had removed the vessel from Valerie’s hand as she first began to pour and set a wad of notes on the counter top. He would not have minded the presence of a friend or two that night, somebody to pass conversation with, Turo, Henry, one of the alley vendors perhaps, just so that he would not be left alone with the voice of Eliot Riley in his head and the urge to drink it quiet. There were one or two familiar faces in the bar, no one he particularly cared to invite to join him for company’s sake. He may as well settle in with the rough stuff for another harangued and haunted evening, hastening the point at which the phantom presence of his former employer was annulled to the best of his drinking abilities. Grace’s piece of paper was still in his pocket, he had carried it with him since she set it next to his equipment as if it were some precious treaty. He couldn’t help feeling that there was a riddle to it he was compelled or obliged to solve. And perhaps the solving of it would bear her to him, in reward, ridiculously enchanted though that notion seemed.
What was she thinking with this damnable green and black eye? How would Riley have strutted into her psyche and found that out? What personality-picking remark would he have selected to open her up? And how would she have responded? He could suddenly see the two of them in his mind clearly, Grace and Riley, squaring up against each other, eyes straining open and wearing expressions like fighting cocks about to strut and peck and sever the ligaments in each other’s necks. It was a horrible image. Thankfully, he could console himself that while he found occasional similarities between them in temperament – the blowhard singularity, the egoism, the jingo – he was sure each would have tolerated the other not one jot. No, Riley couldn’t have cracked her if ever he’d have cared to set about it. Not even the great correspondent to human messages as Riley had entitled himself, with his provocative commentary and his manipulative conversations with people that led them to disrobe all their secrets, not even he could have unscrambled her code. And what did Eliot Riley know of women anyway, with his crude ballads mocking their names and his references to their tusses and their sagging tits, trawling his deep-sea nets through the murkier levels of their equanimity and dredging up primordial rage and banshee curses the like of which they had never before issued nor knew they could, and their tempers and their tears? And what of his curious relationship with Reeda Parks, which proved enduringly affectionate but was never converted into proper courtship, instead it was left eternally void? Who did he think he was to have once asked if he’d have to apprentice Cy in the ways of women as well as the trade?
– Fuck you, Eliot.
– You might want to eat something tonight, honey. The shrimp is real good, fresh in today. Shall I have a plate made up for you? C’mon, why don’t you eat something?
Cy shook his head to Mary’s offer, took the picture out of his pocket and opened it.
– What you got there, hon?
– Oh, just some work. It’s a funny thing.
As kindly as her sister was regarding him, Valerie seemed equally cankerous and careless. And he wondered again if a deal had been struck at birth that they would split their personalities where their bodies were not.
– How long you been here?
– About seven years.
– That so. Well. It isn’t right to talk to nobody like you do. You should stop being so broody and so self-involved. Don’t you know it distracts people? Don’t you know they won’t care to have you around, the ones that want you now. Why, you must be about as dumb as dirt.
Cy smiled at Valerie, unoffended, and turned his attention away. He’d a mind that the eye spoke subtly of rejection, looking at it now he felt that quality. It was cold and it unsettled him, and he was not easily unsettled by the work he did. Thinking back over all the strange images he had tattooed on all the odd folk, he could not say this was the most unusual by any means. Not when compared to broadswords slicing open Asian heads and cartoon characters with cocks the size of lampposts and fish and chip packets on a shaved venal mound. But the eye was in a league of its own. It had meaning upon meaning, there were currents writhing under currents where that symbol was concerned, like the sea. He had the distinct impression that Grace possessed a fast-flowing undertow also, a restlessness behind her own dark eyes. His mother had had that feature too, as if she were always busy behind her face. Like she had movement in her which was kept from him behind those two grey, clandestine portals, a river within herself. He thought of his mother’s working eyes, her eyes after she’d walked the promenade with her stubborn, politicking friends, her young son at her side, and her brass plate empty all those years. He thought of her quirks and her strengths, her scruples and her ignominy, that thing about her which had prompted Mrs Kirkstall of the Grand Hotel in Morecambe to grasp her firmly by the wrist and ask, Reeda, whatever’s in you?
He poured more whisky into his glass. His head hurt from concentration, and the drink now decanting his brain cells. He knew he should eat a decent meal, or go home, sleep, wake up the next day without that feeling of parchment and pickle in his body. But he had hold of an idea now, an idea about his mother and Grace. An idea about the eye. And he did no
t want to let it slip away, he wanted to muster up the answer, and in any case turning his attention to it had made Riley’s marring monologues seem temporarily distant, replaced.
The page on which the eye was printed was old and parchment-like, and it had a serrated edge, a give-away. It had been torn from a book, quite mercilessly. The tear was rough, perhaps the crime had been done quickly, in the presence of those that could punish or disapprove. Cy folded the paper closed. Yes, there was a bit of witchery to that after all, to that theft. The destruction of sacred material was vaguely occult, certainly abhorrent, wasn’t that what he and the boys at school had been taught? And they had been birched hard over an open, suspended palm when any kind of destruction of written script occurred, it was one of Colin Willacy’s pet peeves. His grammar-school standards of comportment were right there now, prancing alongside him like a collarless dog at heel, tame and ludicrous amid the riffraff and rabble of Coney Island. But had Grace not had her reasons for the crime? Had it not been justified?
He imagined her ripping the page from a leather bound book in an old library full of antiquated material written in another language, while guns cack-cack-cacked outside and townsfolk ran about helter-skelter and pell-mell, and fell in the street. Fires swept through buildings. Children were hoisted into the arms of those that they should not be lifted by and carried away from their childhood, and religious men had their throats cut as they prayed. And it was the brutal, old world that had made her do it, the world that was now once again exploding, perhaps reminding her of what, in another life, she had been forced to see. All those stories her eyes had told him when they met! What had she seen, and brought to America like an invisible souvenir of the past? It must be similar to the anguished tales throughout this refugee city. Brooklyn itself was full of recovery and reckoning, was it not? Old and new, the stories of immigrant Poles and Russians and Czechs were told in sorrowful ritual and stitched into the patchwork quilt of the place. Was that the purpose of the eye, a declaration of all that she had seen?
Grace was probably playing chess in the back room right now, he could go in there and pull her up from her seat, shake her and demand that she explain herself, and why she hadn’t come to him that day when she said she would. Or he could kiss her and wait. He stood up, swerved hard to the right and abruptly sat again. He had accomplished what he set out to do. He was drunk. And it was late. The bar was winding down, the last greasy plates of seafood being collected. The picture of the all-seeing, witness eye on the bar counter in front of him was blurry now, shifting like lotus on the surface of water. Two-thirds of a bottle of O-be-joyful and his idea about Grace was almost good enough. Almost a good enough fiction to convince him and make him right about the image, so that by the soft-hearted direction of Providence she would come to him, if he concentrated hard on his invention of her violent, war-torn past. He put his sore head in his hands and closed his eyes and the drastic visions and the tender parable crumbled like a vase under the caterpillar track of a tank on a road through a deserted village, an artefact fallen from a cart and left behind after the exodus of residents, their internment in ghettos and camps, only to be ground to dust.
They were at the water’s edge. A swarf of broken shells littered the shoreline, the beach was all sediment, strewn with them. High tide had the boats shifting against their moorings and echoing the lapping melody of the waves inside their hulls. He felt that his body was clean and blank and unwritten. Grace had on a dress made of pieces of old thrift ribbon and mélange clothing. Her hair was unbound. From her came a quiet, elegiac song he had never heard before, with lyrics he could not understand. Then she spoke.
– I think Claudia is a little upset with me.
– Why do you say that?
– She thinks I should have gone to Turo. I’ve known him longer. She thinks it is an insult to his reputation.
– I can see how she might believe that.
She turned to him. There was a smear of blood in the corner of her mouth. A small purple bruise along her cheek made up of many tiny blue and red dots.
– You can see nothing. You don’t know what to choose.
– You remind me of someone, Grace.
– I know, that guy you always talk to when you’re drunk.
– No. Not him. Some women my mother used to know.
A trickle of blood ran from her mouth. She must have felt it for she wiped at it with the collar of her dress. As she pulled the garment up to her face the first button of it came undone. Looking down at her he could see the swell of one of her breasts revealed, the skin brightening where her chest bone pushed up against it. He felt unafraid.
– And she liked them, these women?
– Yes, very much. They were good friends.
He was certain she would not prevent him as he reached for her and she did not. Her mouth did not taste like blood, the tongue moving against his lips was warm. But her body felt cold, too cold for the temperature of the dream. After they had kissed, her face was bruised worse, severely so, black and sunken and concussed on the side like rotting fruit, and one iris was leaking ink into the white part of her eye. A gash had formed along her jaw and there was a wet red bubble in her nostril. He slipped his hand into her open dress, ran a thumb down across her nipple, he felt his blood move, swelling fuller in his veins, and felt himself beginning to harden. She sighed, and brought her own hand up to his and held it, moved with it on the outside of her dress as he touched her, guiding it. He could hear the keel music and the ruptured tambour of shingle washing up against the shore, like the sound of keys on a metal ring or a trowel scraping loose mortar off a wall.
When Cy woke his face was on the sticky, fishy counter, and the room was empty except for two drunks in the corner arguing unskilfully with the sisters about payment. Through the retreating haze of alcohol he could see the glass in his hand was empty. The whisky bottle was gone. He thought he could hear the sea but he was not sure if it was just the sonic residue of his dream.
– Is she here?
– Is who here, honey?
– Reeda. No. Is, I mean, is Grace still here?
The twins approached him at the bar. Mary reached over and squeezed his leg.
– Just you left now, hon. Come upstairs for the night, if you like. It’s a long walk home.
She had her hand an inch from his flaring crotch. The tip of her forefinger was agitating gently, as if smudging charcoal on a drawing. Valerie seemed to be at the other end of the room, gathering empty glasses, though she was only ever at her sister’s hip. So that was how it was done between them, he thought. Just by consideration, just by remuneration. Or in the slick, erroneous moments of distraction when the other was engaged.
– Thank you. But I should go. I’m useless after that amount of scotch. A complete rum-dum, if you know what I’m getting at.
– Oh. OK. Wait then while I find you some cold cuts to take. I’m betting you live off nothing but graveyard stew.
The twins moved into the kitchens together. On the bar next to Cy was a stack of old chessboards and some loose rolling pieces. The gaming was over for the night as was every other use for the bar. He rubbed his face, which felt numb, and blinked hard to restore his vision. Slowly he took the folded piece of parchment from his shirt pocket again and opened it. Even as he looked at the eye it looked back, so that he couldn’t really see it and have it be assessed – not in the way that seen things are taken and consumed by the viewer. That was the source of trouble with the image. The eye outmanoeuvred his gaze, it failed to be inanimate and resisted being used or judged as an object. It was like the swans of Morecambe that could pull out of quicksand the moment they sensed the draw. Truly, he did not know who was primarily looking at whom, Cyril Parks or the eye, because his gaze was mirrored, deflected, equalled. It was as if the image was playing a game with him.
A second later he found he was on his feet and walking fast back towards Sheepshead Bay, without having collected his picnic or saying good
bye to the sisters. Then flagging down a late-travelling car as it passed him heading in the right direction.
Grace did not appear angry to be roused so late. There was little surprise on her face when she saw Cy there, tall in the corridor and bending towards her doorway, as if she was well acquainted with such nocturnal intrusions. He had not needed to bang on the door long for her to come and open it, which meant that he had not the time to reconsider his actions or contemplate the possibility that she may have company in her bed.
– Are we on fire?
– What’s it called when you finish a game the winner? Checkmate? But what about when nobody can win? That happens also, yes? How about when it’s a draw?
Grace yawned, ran her thumb under the strap of her nightgown which had slipped down off her shoulder.
– Perpetual check.
– Look. It’s not up to me of course, and I would never talk anyone into something permanent that they were not convinced of, but you see, I think that you should do it. I think you should have the tattoos. Even if it’s not by me. Even if you go elsewhere. I think it would be … spectacular.