Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— What’s black and white and red all over? A Moffat Ravine newspaper. Get it, get it? Read all over … He probably found them together eh? Doing the Queen Victoria shuffle. Daft bugger should of joined in.

There were absurd and treacherous and dark elements to be found in people that Riley could understand and even be amused or thrilled by, where others could not fathom their existence, and had to rely on standard judgments — it was horror and sin and evil and lunacy in the world. And Riley would simply call it truth, truth, as true as any high achievement, love or God or beatific goodness. One without the other was a falseness, he said. Humans were black and white with too much red blood inside, just like that Moffat Ravine newspaper.

He was a vessel through which these messages passed, for better or for worse. What he pulled out of people and drew on them was as varied and degenerate as it was honourable and illuminating. On his walls were warrior signs and heads with swords clean through them, women on their knees bending naked towards men’s cocks, next to Christ on his cross, the scales of justice and doves with olive branches. From all the world’s distilled meanings, from the chaotic jumble, Riley located human totems and gifted them to their patrons. A man was his soul of a lion, his courage. A man was his profession at sea. A man was the flag of his nation. A woman was her dead child’s name. A woman was her ability to use her body for pleasure, or her inability to ever truly expose herself because she had had a black brassiere tattooed on her chest. A woman was as abstract as the abstract spiral on her back.

It did not take an age to come to know these things of Eliot Riley. And so the first time Cy happened across him with his friends, drunk and beaten and raving on the central pier, his slurring madman’s words were not completely senseless. Jonty and Morris looked on with horror and confusion as the indigent, broken-looking man raised one arm and called out to Cy.

— Boy, come here. Listen. I’m a fucking midwife, boy, that’s what I do, spread their fucking legs open and I catch their little babies and all their shit and blood from pushing and they never even bloody know it … hahaha … they never know they’re birthing themselves, a fucking midwife I am. I am.

— What the bloody hell’s he on about, Cyril? Come away and leave him.

— Got to get used to it, boy. Got to get used to the shit and quim. Smell’s not so bad after a bit. Oh, we’re all soaking wet with it, yes we are … hahaha … you little buggers too, you fuckers with your mammies’ clean hands on you… and your bright hopeful ideas …

— Go on home, lads, I’ll be all right. I’d better stop here. Mr Riley has a condition, see, it comes in fits. Go on now. See you tomorrow.

Cy bent down and began to lift his employer to his feet. And Riley smiled at him, a pleased, pitying smile that was wetted by the tears from his eyes and the effluent from his mouth, a smile that was both moved by and derisive of this complicit new comradeship.

Before long Cy could see that Riley was torn in two, he was Janus-looking. Perhaps it was the humanity of his craft that allowed him this quality, this taking or leaving of life’s mucky mire as well as its lovely sandy beaches, the ropes strung round both poles. Perhaps he had come of his trade well-fitting with a character already formed and suitable, or perhaps the trade had made him. Of fowl and egg, Cy would never truly know which had arrived first.

Outside the shop, in life, Riley was a failure. He was society’s satirical, ugly cousin. He drank, offended, was loud, misunderstood. None could see him at work, and if they did they were too busy undergoing what was painful to notice his sudden clear eye, his steady hand, the hymns of his singing heart. So he turned this wrong territory in on himself, knowing that outside he was an unwelcome conduit, become dislodged from the one room other than a confessional box where the souls of men and women could travel freely. He went without that minister’s identity. He went too far, got obstinate about his courtship of living wrongly and loudly and creating effrontery. Where Reeda milled the good of life, he harvested the ill and took it to market where he shouted out his wares. He believed deeply that he did not like himself, and he liked others less. Just as he did not like the environment of unpainted flesh, and normalcy, life’s plug of decency that tried to stop up the devil’s half of life. And he lived as if trying to siphon out that darker portion, with alcohol, with banter, with bad habits, bad politics, bad language, obloquy, anguish and despair.

— Not that I would, love, with a tuss as big as a cathedral my organ’s play would seem too small. Set me up again, Paddy. What do you mean you’ve called last orders? I never heard, and what with Miss York Cathedral here you’d think there’d have been an echo.

All with suicidal desperation, if in hitting rock bottom that useless, disliked and disliking half of himself would abandon ship. Around him he created a mentality of a wet, wintry self-defeat. There were the brawls, the complaints, the lasting rivalries where Eliot Riley never came out the winner. He was barred from six public houses in the town for his conduct, had tried the patience of Paddy Broadbent on more than one occasion. He was notorious. But in his rooms he could embroider the human body with beauty and he was glorious. His reputation for it brought men and women in from as far afield as Belfast and Nottingham, Stirling and Glasgow, by appointment in the winter and in the summer months they queued outside his door. The brighter part of the man kept them coming, kept them coming back so that he could dress them in new, perfect, custom-fitting clothing. Give them their lasting souvenirs. Give them their natural markings. Give them a picture of and for themselves.

The two halves of his soul were split, one great and dexterous, the other destitute and murderous. And only Cy knew both for what they were. Only he could see the both sides, as he worked alongside the man in eminence and walked alongside the man in disgrace, and saw him love and saw him hate. And very early on in knowing him it struck Cy that there was something absolutely suiting about Eliot Riley and Morecambe Bay. Both were tidal and schizophrenic, two seasons right, two seasons wrong.

— Don’t even bother asking when you’ll get a go, sonny Jim. You’ll pick up a needle when I say so and not before. And first off it’ll be on those sticky celery legs you own, sunshine, not a paying customer.

It was no privilege and no honour working for Riley in those first months. And there were no civilized lessons about the great artistic masters as promised to Reeda Parks over tea and crumpets. Riley liked to talk about himself and he liked to give opinions. And he liked to show off. He was a freehander. He could gather a piece of linen skin and mark it with ink confidently if he chose to, without any preliminary work. It meant he could veer from the standard flash and boost his reputation with inventiveness and charge more money, but it also gave him a vastly engorged ego. If he saw the potential of it in Cy, through the bold designs in the print shop window, he passed on not one word of the prophecy. He was old-school, he said, proud to be it. He abhorred gimmicks, sloganeering, all the mock-surgery stuff, the laboratory coats, stethoscopes, the monikers, the aliases, Doc, Captain Red, Painless Andy, though he understood the need for rapport, for entertainment during the procedure, which was a different matter, and he delivered it nightly. He could pinpoint a proclivity for discrimination or the style of comedy a man preferred and would arrive there within a minute.