Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— What about these votes for women, eh? There’s a reason they’re going to repeal prohibition in America, isn’t there? There’s a reason drink is needed over there again now. What say you? Eh?

There was often so much bluff and showmanship present in the room that the customer would be hard pressed to dwell all that much on the scratchy sensation bothering them. There were stories told about whores and virgins and fights, about acquaintances caught short of the law, about the man he had been taught by, Black Percy, who had beheaded another man with his father’s army sabre right before Riley’s eyes. Riley had come through an industry that was as colourful as chintz, that was wholly self-sufficient and home-skilled, where equipment had to be constructed by the individual tattoo artist, handmade from convenient objects, electric doorbells, drills, industrial drive mechanisms, factory parts, medical quills, everything was bent, filed down, soldered and fixed. Ink had to be acquired under the guise of another profession, but established contacts could then be trusted, he told Cy. It was useful to know people at warehouses, scrappies, repair shops, and hospitals — Riley recommended going down on the nurses. Coils could now be bought for the machinery, mostly meant for other trades but easily adapted, though he continued to fashion every piece to suit his tastes wherever possible. And so would Cy learn to, so help him.

The man took him on a tour of every tattoo artist in Lancaster and Blackpool and sent him round the ones in Morecambe solo, window-shopping, to see how not to do it. If there was anything different to be found within it was not the designs, which were derivative, it was the men who ran them, somehow modern in their dress and criminal in their demeanour, compared to Eliot Riley, half seadog, half aristocrat groom, the atavist, who most days, working or not, donned the dull black morning jacket, the woollen hat, the gloves with the finger ends cut out. Where the others embraced the ritzy persona of the profession Riley might have been the original mould of it, the genuine article.

It was a constant battle to keep the stone room warm that winter, the air was drawn out by the grey slurrying sea in the bay down at the end of Pedder Street, which seemed to heave out any heat from the building on its long retreat to low tide. Cy spent much of his time fetching firewood from the beach for the grate, so Riley could save money on coal, feeling demoted and cheated out of the warm comfort and the dependable clack-clack of the big press in the printers. Riley insisted on warmth for the customer section of the room behind the curtain, he had a thing about working on warm skin. He said it was better to get it into a temperate condition, it became readier to receive colour. There was the added frustration for Cy of being taught how to engineer all the fiddly equipment and getting it endlessly wrong. Piece after piece was rejected for being ground poorly, soldered at the wrong angle, botched and buggered and wasted. Riley often tossing them back into the box of metal parts without so much as a proper glance at the workmanship, judging it already shoddy. Had he wanted a career in mechanics Cy would have gone to work for a motor company or as a fitter at the foundry, he often thought to himself bitterly. There was, however, not a pig’s head in sight, much to Cy’s relief.

In February of that year, Riley had Cy begin his practice on his own cold, goose-pimpled shin, surrendering a leg, as he’d been informed he’d have to. And he’d also have to make a little visit to pay his respects to the primary creators of the trade. So it was tap-tap-tap on his shin with a bamboo block and a hammer, Riley slapping Cy’s face when the pain got him teary and his concentration lapsed and he dropped the equipment, saying no more. He would learn the traditions, from beginning to end, and respect them, bellowed Riley.

— Now pick up that fucking mallet, boy. Or get out.

It may have been the electric age of needles but tattooing was as ancient as the mummies being pried from their sarcophaguses in the Egyptian desert, and if chiselled ink was good enough for the Pharaohs, it was certainly good enough for Cyril bloody Parks. Then, milliner’s needles lashed to a stick, leaving thick rivers of colour, destroying a white leg with black practice. Oh, the bastard was old-school all right.

In addition, there were the personal comments, which the man took no great shame in making.

— Your problem, lad, is your natural inclination towards silence. Get it out, sonny. You’re too dour, you need to perk up a bit, find some character. They won’t credit you for just the ink, lad. Besides, the ladies do not like a dullard in their beds — how many have already fallen asleep under you, eh lad? Or on top of you for that matter. Or are you still a novice in that regard? Don’t tell me I’ll have to apprentice you in that field too.

Sour, wet laughter.

— Look. A bit of self-examination and melancholy is all right later on in the night, with a drop of something to accompany, but in front of the customer you’ll have to perk up, do you understand? Work on your patter, I can’t let you loose on the summer crowd if you’re going to bore them into a coma. Zest, lad, zest! And get yourself greased up properly by a woman!

Such was the disappointment and frustration of the commencement of his apprenticeship. Countless times Cy nearly put down what he was carrying, firewood, needles, cartridges of ink, and left the shop on Pedder Street, never to return. Countless times he curled a fist up at his side and wished to God he could let it fly in Riley’s general direction. Countless times he found the shop closed and empty and he’d have to search the streets for Riley, only to find him stained and stinking in some corner. And he’d lie to his mother that Riley wasn’t drinking, that Riley didn’t need him as a crutch to limp home with, and that he wasn’t up half the night on weekends tending to the lush, making him oversleep and late for school on Monday morning, that Riley was a kinder tutor and that of all those great artists now known to him, Michelangelo was his favourite painter. Michelangelo. A name pulled out of thin air one day, to assure Reeda that everything was all right, that he hadn’t taken a wrong path, that he wasn’t lost and inches from the edge of a cliff. Though he had only to watch Eliot Riley at work on a customer, see the true colour finding its way into skin, and he felt all the antagonism and resentment absconding. Because from this brutish man could come humane and brilliant art.

— Are you feeling ill, love? You’ve a paleness to you these last few days.

— Oh, no, I’m grand thanks, Mam.

— You’ve not quarrelled with El … with Mr Riley, have you?

— No.

His mother put down her washing basket and placed a hand on his shoulder.

— Because that would be a shame.

— No, I’m just tired.

— Well. When I’m weary I tell myself if I can manage just one more chore for the day it’ll be one less to do tomorrow. Of course it’s funny, there always seems to be an abundance of chores and they never get any fewer, do they? It’s a bit like a bottomless well, so you just have to keep working. Folk can be like that too, Cyril. It’s what makes them so infuriating and it’s what endears them to us. Your father could drive me to despair and ruination with his forgetfulness of the milk lid and his silly ideas about who should sit on the Council and who shouldn’t, depending on if they wore a skirt or long trousers.

This was the first time he had ever heard his mother venture a criticism of his father, a remark that was less than a noble memorial of his exemplary character. Cy turned to look up at her. She seemed nervous but also relieved.