The City Under the Skin

by Geoff Nicholson

  “Down,” Marilyn said. “That way I can point my toes toward the North Pole.”

  Marilyn had already removed her boot, now she rolled off her sock and raised her long, lean, pale right foot. Zak didn’t think its appearance would be improved one bit by the addition of a tattoo, but he was well aware that his personal tastes were not being pandered to here.

  “At least a tattoo on the foot shows some commitment,” said Rose. “It’s going to hurt like hell, you know that? Top of the foot’s just skin and bone, no muscle, no flesh.”

  “I know,” said Marilyn. “You told me.”

  “And I don’t want you wriggling, jumping around, making involuntary movements.”

  “I won’t wriggle,” said Marilyn. “Involuntary movements I can’t do much about.”

  “You’ll be just fine,” said Rose, and she allowed herself the first smile of the day.

  The tattoo machine buzzed into life. Rose cradled Marilyn’s foot in one taut, nubbled hand, yet for all her talk of arthritis and unsteadiness, once she concentrated on the job, she was as sure and steady as a surgeon, or at least a pedicurist. She held the foot firmly and delicately, as though it were some small, nervous creature that needed to be soothed and calmed. She didn’t use flash or a stencil, didn’t even draw the design in advance: she was going freehand.

  Rose’s face showed determination and pleasure as the needles cut their first line into the flesh, drew their first ooze of blood. Zak found himself feeling just a little queasy as he watched, but fought against it: he was man enough not to throw up in the tattooist’s living room. Marilyn felt as if her foot were being stung by an unusually active and persistent jellyfish, or perhaps by carefully aligned cactus spikes: she had no direct, personal experience of either, but she could imagine. She felt as though tiny licks of flame were sparking from her foot up her leg and into her core, but she managed to be a good subject, to keep her body still and controlled. She could even hold a conversation.

  “Rose,” she said, “did you ever tattoo a treasure map on anybody?”

  “How’s that?”

  “You know x marks the spot, buried treasure, pieces of eight, gold doubloons.”

  “Like Long John Silver?”

  “That kind of thing,” said Marilyn.

  “Can’t say I ever did. But I would have if anybody had ever asked me to, though it seems kind of illogical to get somebody else to tattoo a treasure map for you. It means there’s at least one extra person who knows where the treasure’s buried. Why wouldn’t they go and grab the treasure for themselves?”

  “Unless the map is coded,” said Marilyn.

  It took a small effort on Zak’s part not to insist that all maps are coded, but he knew he’d feel better for not saying it.

  “A coded map?” said Rose. “What the hell is that? Still working on that ‘project’ of yours, are you? How’s it going?”

  “It’ll be going a lot better when you tell me what you promised to tell me.”

  “Oh, you drive a hard bargain.”

  Rose Scarlatti was silent for a good long time, and it did cross Marilyn’s mind that the old lady might be about to welsh on the deal. It was too late for new negotiations: her foot already had some significant markings.

  “Oh well,” said Rose, “maybe it’s nothing. It means something to me, but it might not mean anything to you. A long time ago, there was a kid, a weird little kid…”

  31. THE DISAPPEARING KID

  He blamed his mother. Why not? Anyone would. Everybody does. She was the one who made a man of him. And sure, his father played a part, did things to the mother that made her do things to the son, but Dad wasn’t around much, and then he wasn’t around at all. She decided the son wouldn’t be like the father. She didn’t have specific ambitions for him, none of the familiar, self-serving hopes for success, money, a good wife. She just didn’t want him to be a weak, useless man like his dad. That was her special project, to turn her boy into a little tough guy: after that he’d be on his own. Was it tough love? Well, it was certainly tough.

  It went pretty well. The boy didn’t resist. He learned not to be soft. He learned that if he got into trouble, he had to get himself out of it. He liked the karate classes, the playground scuffles. He wasn’t the biggest, wasn’t the most volatile, but when it came to it, he was the meanest. The little boy in him started to fade away.

  His mother wasn’t such a bad bitch, he would decide long after the event. She did what she thought she had to do. And gradually her project became more refined. Later, when he tried to work out exactly how old he was when it first happened, he couldn’t. It seemed to have been going on forever, seemed always to have been a part of his life, so it must have started when he was what? Eight years old? Six? Was that possible?

  They were in the car. Mother and son traveling fast, no seat belts, no conversation. He figured she’d been drinking. They’d been on an errand on the other side of the city, buying something, selling something, delivering something, and they were coming back through a neighborhood he’d been in before, though not often—crowded streets, rough at the edges, poor but striving, and still a good way from home—when suddenly she pulled the car over and said, “All right, time to get out.”

  He wondered what he’d done wrong. His mother was an angry woman at the best of times. Anything might cause her to get mad: something somebody said to her, something she saw on TV, though more often than not it was his doing. But this time he was pretty sure he hadn’t done anything wrong, and she didn’t sound angry at all, which was even more scary.

  “We’re going to make a man of you,” she said. “Get out of the car. I’ll see you when you’ve found your way home.”

  She almost made it sound natural, like the kind of thing all mothers and sons might do, something that could be fun, a game, though since he was the only one playing it, he couldn’t be sure about that.

  “All right,” he said, because no other reply was possible, and he got out of the car. He was still hoping, well, fantasizing more than hoping, because he knew how unlikely it was that she’d smile and say forget it, it was a joke, a test, that she was trying to make sure he wasn’t a crybaby, which he wasn’t. But he stood in the street and watched as his mother yanked the car door shut and drove away. She didn’t wave goodbye.

  He remained on the sidewalk, alone, dry-eyed, a long way from home, and he knew that in some sense he’d always be that way. He’d find his way back home all right. Of course he would. He knew his address, had a little money in his pocket and a tongue in his head, he could ask people the way, he could walk, he could get on a bus. He’d be just fine. And anticlimactic though it felt, he was fine. He got home soon enough, without incident that time, and without much fear, and he supposed his mother was pleased to see him, though she didn’t show it. A week later she did it again, and again the week after that, again and again, dropping him off in ever more distant, dubious, and unfamiliar parts of the city.

  He thought of buying a map and hiding it—his was the kind of home where it wasn’t hard to hide things—but he didn’t, because somehow that would have been cheating. And naturally he got lost once in a while, but never completely lost, and eventually he never got lost at all. Wherever he was in the city, he belonged there. And even if he couldn’t have told you the name of the street or the neighborhood he was in, it was only a matter of taking certain bearings, tuning into the geography, feeling the contours of the city, noting the direction of the light, the angles of the skyline, and then he knew exactly where he was: right at home.

  And as he walked he looked. He observed the various changing natures of the city, the characteristics of neighborhoods and communities, how people lived and why they lived that way, together or separately, in houses and hovels, in apartment blocks and tenements, richly or desperately, with dignity or defeat. He saw the clustering of life, of separate fates, the back and forth, the aggressions, the forms of symbiosis and parasitism, the flow, the exchange, the business.
And although he was just a kid, and although he couldn’t quite understand it all, and certainly couldn’t have articulated what it meant, he knew that he wanted to be a part of it, and at the top of it, and that sooner or later he would be.

  Increasingly he saw no reason to hurry back to his mother. He began to get into trouble, to make trouble for himself. It toughened him even more, and he reckoned that was the plan too. This wasn’t an exercise in keeping a clean nose. It was about taking the long way home, digging himself into holes, then digging himself out, deciding what needed to be done, surviving, flourishing.

  Trouble came in different forms. There was the obvious stuff that he couldn’t help doing: minor theft, shoplifting, a bit of pickpocketing. He learned a lot from it, especially about the separation of cause and effect, the unpredictable nature of consequences. He’d go into a store and lift half a dozen CDs, or go into a comic-book store and steal as much as he could hide under his coat, and despite the cameras and the alarms and even the security guards, he’d get away with it completely. Other times he’d take a single apple from a market stall and find himself chased halfway around the neighborhood by some deranged stallholder. This was useful knowledge.

  Adults were less of a problem than other kids. A boy on his own, even a tough-looking little kid, not from the neighborhood, that was an affront that couldn’t go unchallenged. He had to be taught that he was in the wrong place. He was yelled at, taunted, tripped up, shouldered off the sidewalk, told to hand over his money. He always made them regret it. It wasn’t that he always won the fights, yet somehow he had the knack of always making them feel like they’d lost. And when he had to, he ran. He saw no shame in running, and he wasn’t a bad runner, though he knew he had his limits.

  He found those limits one afternoon when he was thirteen years old. It happened on a bleak winter day, huddling under a furred gray sky, with the threat of snow in the air, and there on a corner were five kids who looked like fair game. They were foreign, very foreign, skins purple black, wearing the wrong clothes. They seemed out of place, and they’d have seemed out of place anywhere in this city. They were improbably tall, elongated, their limbs seemed to have too many segments. They were standing against a graffiti-tagged bus shelter, slouching, heads hanging, and still they towered above him: even so, he just couldn’t walk past without doing or saying something.

  Afterward he wondered if maybe they were young marathon runners in exile, but at the time that didn’t seem very likely: they were smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. And as he walked by them, he said, couldn’t help saying, “Hey, boys, don’t smoke. It’ll stunt your growth.” And really, how bad a thing was that to say? But they reacted as if he’d said something filthy about their mothers.

  All five boys straightened up, seemed to unfold simultaneously. They didn’t say anything, either to him or to one another, but something in them changed, so that they now looked regal and infinitely dangerous, and he could tell they had plans to do something terrible to him. One of them showed him a brief glimpse of a knife blade. He made an immediate break for it. He started to run more determinedly than he’d ever run before. Why was he so scared? Was it because they were black? Maybe. Certainly it was because they were so alien. He didn’t know what rules they’d play by if—when—they caught him.

  They ran beautifully: even in his panic, looking back over his shoulder, he could see that. He felt himself to be a tangle of arms, legs, and lungs working at odds, but these guys were fluid, effortless, their spindly legs scarcely touching the ground. He didn’t think they were even trying very hard; they were just toying with him. They could have pounced whenever they wanted to, but they didn’t want to, not yet: for now they were just wearing him out, exhausting him for the fun of it. He kept going as long as he could. It wasn’t a bad effort, but he knew he was running out of juice. Sooner or later, one way or another, the chase would come to a certain end.

  He needed to get off the street, find some protected space, a shop, a café, maybe even a bank, somewhere they wouldn’t follow and where they wouldn’t dare attack him even if they did. His eyes were watering with the cold and the exertion, and the street around him looked blurred and grubby, but if there was going to be salvation, it would have to be here. There was a row of small shops: a liquor store, a head shop, a place that sold old-fashioned stationery. He didn’t like the look of any of them, and careened past, and then he’d run out of all options but one. There was only one door, one store left. He had to go for it, whatever it was.

  He dashed up to the glass front door, didn’t even look inside, opened it just enough to slide through, then slammed it shut behind him and leaned up against it, gulping for air. His mind was empty and he didn’t know what he’d walked into. He blinked about him. It was very bright and still in there, and his first thought was he might have come into a dentist’s office. There was a noise coming from the back of the room that sounded like a dentist’s drill, and there was definitely somebody laid out back there, a woman who seemed to be suffering.

  However, the person doing the drilling didn’t look at all like a dentist. It was a woman with long black hair and tight jeans and bare arms, one of which had a sleeve of tattoos. She stopped what she was doing, looked up casually, and said, “What’s the matter, kid? Hellhound on your trail?” and that didn’t sound like the kind of thing a dentist would say. Then he noticed there were pictures all around the walls, bright colors and clear lines: skulls, hula girls, dice, hot rods, devils. He was in a tattooist’s studio.

  “No,” he said seriously, between breaths, “not hellhounds,” and he looked out through the window and saw that the five tall, thin black kids had regrouped on the other side of the street and were now waiting, pacing up and down, displaying a chilly patience.

  “Are those guys giving you trouble?” the tattooist said.

  He wasn’t a squealer, but in this case he didn’t need to be. It was obvious what was going on. The tattooist said to the woman on the table, “Hold on there, babe,” rummaged in a metal cabinet, and produced—he could hardly believe it—a crossbow. It appeared ultramodern, with a frame of brushed metal, a telescopic sight, and a rifle stock. It was a terrifying thing even to look at: he liked that.

  The tattooist went to the door, opened it, cocked the crossbow, inserted a stubby arrow, and fired it across the street. She didn’t seem to be aiming at anything in particular, and yet the arrow sliced a harsh, flat trajectory through the air, missing two of the boys by fractions of an inch, and lodging neatly, perfectly, in a telephone pole, making a sound like a bass string being thwacked. Alarmed and furious, the boys shouted something in an unrecognizable tongue and then sloped off, their composure and dignity re-forming around them as they went.

  The tattooist shouted after them, “Fuck off, you little racists.”

  Back in the tattoo studio, the kid was very, very impressed, and just a little confused. He’d needed help, and a woman had come to his aid. That was very weird. And why did it feel so good?

  “Come on, kid. Come over here and watch an artist at work.”

  Rose returned to her customer, to her tattooing. The woman on the table was lying prone with her arms bare and raised high above her head. There was a length of yellow silk draped across her breasts, though she didn’t seem much concerned with modesty. Her eyes were open, but they weren’t looking at anything. She was moaning quietly to herself, but the kid couldn’t tell if it was pain or something else.

  “Is she all right?” he asked.

  “Yeah. She’s fine,” said Rose. “She’s full of endorphins.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chemicals. When you’re in a lot of pain, the body releases these things called endorphins. They make the pain feel good after a while. Got that?”

  “I think so,” he said, though he wasn’t sure he had.

  “This young lady is in the middle of an endorphin rush,” said Rose. “That’s because I’m tattooing her armpits. That hurts like fuck, doesn’t it
, babe?”

  “Oh yes,” said the woman on the table. “Oh yes.”

  The kid peered into her left armpit, then the right. In the left, the tattoo was already complete, while the right was still a work in progress. When finished, the tattoos would be identical whirlpools of blue and purple foam, something both gothic and American Indian about them. They weren’t the woman’s only tattoos: she had swallows, poppies, butterflies, jungle creepers twining their way up her arms, a winged heart peeping out above the yellow silk, but the kid found himself transfixed by the armpit tattoos, the sheer weirdness of them. Why would she choose so much pain for a tattoo that so few would ever see?

  “So come on,” said Rose, “what’s your story?”

  While she continued with her work, the kid told her why he was there, about the “game” his mother made him play. Rose listened, and asked one or two questions, because at first she thought he might just be making it up, but the more it went on, the more sure she was that he was telling the truth.

  “And your mother is doing this why?” she said.

  “To make a man of me.”

  “You poor little devil,” said Rose.

  The tattooing went on for a long time, and although the kid could see it was a delicate, painstaking process, after a while the work itself wasn’t so fascinating to watch. The woman’s face, however, that was something else, something special. Within a frame of thick, tangled blond hair, her features were mobile and alive, alternating between certain pain and uncertain pleasure: lip-biting, tears in the eyes, a trembling mouth that was close to laughter but not close enough.

  He stayed till the very end of the process, until Rose had finished and the woman was thoroughly inked and wiped down. She sat up and held a mirror to her armpits. He couldn’t tell if the tattooing was any good or not, but maybe that didn’t even matter. He was far more intrigued by how pleased the woman was, how happy Rose was with her own handiwork, how much it meant to them both.