Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

It was a ten-minute walk to Pedder Street, give or take, having climbed from the washroom window out into a liver-brown night whose character made his belly turn. The town was mostly empty for the weather and the season. The waves on the shore were moderate, though fortified by darkness and imagination they echoed louder than their size. But the bricks and the gutters and the slates and the car wheels seemed precise and clear and absolute to Cy during the late walk, and owing nothing, as if electricity had lately passed through his body. His hands were deep in his pockets, and his tall body was hoisted backwards and forwards like a spinnaker by the breathing sea. His shoes loud against the pavement. Yes. He was going. Not in keeping with nor against his own will, just going. Past the creaking wooden fairground rides in the park — the spindle-some tumbling teacups and the Ring-o-Rounder — which were laid up for winter, and the empty toffee-apple stalls, past the Alhambra picture house and dancehall closed for the night and past Professor and Madame Johnson’s where they held communion with dead husbands and wives, ancestors, impending progeny and walk-ins, the lost souls of unreconciled lives. Until there were the droll Hebrew candles in the window, there was the door with the split lock, and there was his heart hammering a knock on it to open.

How long had it taken? How long for him to be convinced he would learn that intimate and colourful language? That folkish tongue, spoken in symbols and essence and tokens. It took no longer than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes to decide a life’s journey. Twenty, for a rapid, press-gangless signature, acceptance of an invisible king’s shilling with its obverse decreeing he would join the ranks of the town’s eccentric subculture, and stand to attention and salute Eliot Riley. Such a small portion of life, and yet so filled with energy, force, momentum. Cy had told nobody of his plans to visit Riley, not quite knowing how to express the man’s appeal, nor describe his own curiosity, his sense of being summoned. He spoke of it to no one, though he passed by Jonty’s house as he walked the streets and he could have pebbled his window and held a conference about his intention, and he had crept past his mother’s room while her lamp was still shining and he knew her ear was always willing and her heart always open. But he went alone.

Cy arrived at the building on Pedder Street and knocked on the door, which was opened by a small, hatless, catgut-looking man who said nothing, and he came into a cold parlour. There was one other man sitting on a chair there — two more chairs were empty — his cap pulled over his face and he was leaning back, with folded arms, as if sleeping or laid out to rest dead in an upright coffin. But the walls, the walls were more than living, they were full and lost under black-bordered colour. It was the inside of a kaleidoscope. It was Aladdin’s cave, a store of pirates’ bounty. Pictures and motifs of dragons and angels and Christ and bones and flowers and hearts and weaponry hung from the walls. A curtain separated this room from another, or another section of it, and behind its tatty covering there was that noise, that noise again, like mechanical workers in a beehive, a determined machinist’s hum. The faint smell of antiseptic or spirits was in the air, something medicinal, like the waft from the bottle of witch hazel his mother had dabbed his cuts and scrapes with as a boy, and along side that Cy detected another fragrance, pleasant, female, ill-fitting, which he could not quite determine.

— Mr Riley? Sir?

The wasp-motor noise stopped and the curtain was drawn back sharply on its metal rings. There stood his potential employer, wearing his careless, navvie-wedding garb, wired needle in hand, looking like the sanest man in the asylum. Something had changed about him. His eyes had shifted focus. He looked quite calm. More at ease than Cy had ever seen him look before, at least of the two occasions that he’d met him, perhaps because now Cy was in his lair, on his common turf, and the host knew balls to brawn that here he was king of his own country. His broody, intense presence seemed now to be more self-assured swagger than the displaced arrogance of the bar and street.

— Late. Inside, lad, sharpish. I’d about give up on you, you little bugger.

Cy glanced at the two young men in the waiting area, who were watching him, the sleeper now awake and out from under his hat, unsmiling, bored or prejudicial or curious. There was a sense of vague challenge about them, so Cy knew right there and then what kind of environment this profession was surrounded by or founded on, what kind of landscape would be denied or chosen that night. He moved past them into the back room and the curtain was drawn screechingly closed again. Inside it was much warmer. This half of the room contained a coal fire, which was gently smoking. Damp rags had been hung about it and the enclosure felt soft-boiled like a warm vegetable. Humid, like Cy imagined the tropics to be. A man was sitting reversed on a chair, with his legs on either side of it, and he was gripping two wooden handles fixed to the wall. A cigarette holding a long, strained orange tip came from between his lips. He was naked from the waist up and sweating profusely. Above his belt was a patch of highly irritated red skin and inside that was half a hooded cobra snake, red, green, black, and yellow, its tail beginning along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column, the finished body coiled round a dagger that ran the first length of his backbone. Cy could tell that the hooded neck and head would be drawn to the right of the dagger’s handle, there was a pale grey stencil mark there to indicate a border, at the point where the opposite depression became a flank. On the table next to Eliot Riley and his now-quiet tattoo equipment were four vials of ink. Riley gave him a look that told him he was expected to behave himself, though what behaviour was warranted Cy did not exactly know, probably humility, because he was now inside the monarch’s personal chamber. The man straddling the chair looked at him also, a hooded look of pure, unadulterated, knew-his-own-venom superiority.

Eliot Riley began talking then, a speedy flow of vocabulary, which wove jokes into stories into opinions into questions.

— … I’ll tell you this for nowt, when the lucky bastard woke up and her sister was there as well, what do you think he said? ‘Susan I’ve always said your family was a good lot‚’ he said, ‘but I can’t for the life of me remember where I put that fucking ring just now. Perhaps the pair of you can remind me.’ And then her and her sister top and tailed the fella …

It was performance talk. Talky-talk. Some of the best Cy had ever heard. Like the vendors on the promenade selling wares to the hustled masses, but better, detailed, tailored, or as if a many-tongued demon had possessed the teller. And Riley was sweating as he talked, almost as much as the man in the chair was sweating. A bottle of open whisky on the floor between their feet. Somewhere in the midst of all the dialogue the electric hurring noise switched back on and the needle was inked, lowered down on to the snake’s decapitated body and it began to do its work. Riley dipped his needle, scratched the back, and wiped the surface. Over and over. All the while looming the conversation, pausing to let his customer reply if he was going to, using those words to complement his own swarthy, rough-thread tapestry. Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.

— No more whisky now or you’ll bleed too much.

Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.

— … in the alley and he had her legs round his waist and he was giving her one when she said she had to go. You know, go. So he said he dropped her and she went right there in front of him, said she didn’t care …