Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

In this matter Riley displayed an uncharacteristic flexibility. He was not one for gangs or social gatherings, least of all those to which he was centrally located: it leached too greedily the black soil of his integrity. He was by nature a separatist, contrary, one who cut away from crowds in opinion, often for the sake of belligerence itself. Cy knew his own relations with the man to be in all likelihood a fluked and fashioned attempt to preserve what slim achievement or prowess the man saw in himself, ego clambering up from the chaos of his personality. For Eliot Riley, without his equipment in his hand, found his own company barely agreeable. Neither did he aspire to surround his too-often failing esteem with doting minions, as if for reassurance, those who might raise him up as the emperor of an underworld they gloried. He did not need these man-boys. But for the ill-bred idlers he seemed to find reserves of uneasy, almost familial permission. Some nights they were rewarded with the best of Riley’s banter, his winning bluff, an inclusive, Faginish greeting.

— Now then, my lads, what’ve y’got for me tonight?

To which there would be a chorus of eager, earnest reply. A fledgling effort to win the man over with a tale about some kind of injurious endeavour.

— Not a lot, nowt, not much really. Garry got his hand cut in a scrap with a fucker from Lancaster.

— Did he now. Well isn’t that a pretty story?

Other times they endured Riley’s pettiness along with Cy: a thrown vial of ink if business was slack, staining what was probably one of only two shirts belonging to the recipient, or silence, his empirical reducing of them all to the level of furniture.

They mulled about smoking and looking at the walls as back after back, shoulder after bicep, became coloured and etched to the sound of a motorized needle. Drinking was only permitted behind the curtain, from Riley’s stash, not in the waiting area. They knew this rule and did not break it. While the back room was kept warm, the outer room which passed as a waiting area where the flash adorned the walls was cold-Cold enough to dissuade all but the hardiest, most persevering from loitering. It was almost as if temperature was a test for endurance and admission. At any point, Riley could clear them out with a few curt words and that elaborately flickering eyelid. There was never any denying his potency within his own rooms, though the boys must have known he was not consistently god-like, was mortal in the public houses and bar rooms of Morecambe; they must have seen him softened on the tarmac and wooden piers of the towns at weekends. Stripped of swagger and royal-ruffian demeanour. Stripped of his money-clip and his clear vision in one eye for a week.

Eventually they did not try to woo Riley with tales of bravado to elicit admiration, affection or for qualification, a right to be present, at least not by a second or third visit when they knew it to be useless. Nor did they try for camaraderie with Cy, he was a lesser being in the scheme of things and as there was little paternal investment shown by the owner towards him they must have supposed that he was not a means by which to infiltrate the greater man. So the boys would sit shivering and smoking in twos or threes, staring down clients that entered the studio as if they were subdemons on the periphery of Hades, whose purpose was no more than to create a gargoyled atmosphere, more watchful and implicit and slightly unpleasant than it was a genuine threat. Many were already tattooed, and then better worked on by Eliot Riley, often displaying substandard, rough marks on their necks and hands so that Cy knew they had been to other less fussy and capable tattoo artists. Or they had tried to mark themselves, the self-inflicted rudimentary efforts done in school detention rooms or in the company of other street pals, during youthful misadventures. When they could afford it, and sometimes when they could not, Riley tidied them up, redressed old wounds, drained septic injuries, and added newer, doctored motifs, all the while scolding them for their past errors. There was something to be said for their loyalty to each other. If one lad was employed his wages might furnish a mate with a fresh tattoo. And though Riley was a stickler for payment, with these boys he often worked on a system of exchange and barter. A bag of tools for the scythed grim reaper or the death-before-dishonour badge. It was a relationship Cy found hard to comprehend. And only Riley might accept payment in kind, for Cy to consider it with any of his school friends was out of the question. Morris and Jonty were permitted in to the studio only in the capacity of paying customers, an opportunity which they never took.

The hangers-on arrived a few hours into the evening, alone like strays or in their small packs. If they were drunk they did not show it. If the curtain was left open they would watch the needle when Riley worked, entranced, as if it sewed the very secrets of virility and aggression into the skin. They browsed endlessly through flash, sifting through it for the best, death-maw images. Their conversation was amateur, imbued with the pressure to impress each other. Or it was lazy, lackadaisical. Eventually the dynamics within any one group would alter. Tension fermented. Habits and the haunt grew old. New thrills were required. A fight or a weariness with this association or a graduation into higher crime would see them gone. Or sensing that things were on the turn, like milk about to curdle, Riley would one night unlock the door and when the boys came by he’d stand in the doorway and refuse them entry, bullying one by grabbing a collar at random and throwing the brawny youth back into the street. As if lit by the sudden grounded rage of an abusive father. By then the group had accomplished the discredit it had set out to gain. And they were granted recognition for the anti-merits of such an inclement alliance by the community. By its nicer end, the authorities and toffs and round circles of the town, the ladies’ auxiliary, the big hotel owners, who considered them not unlike maggots in an infected carcass.

Cy had gone from a life of female, maternal company and influence to something thoroughly male and, as if to signify that, Eliot Riley tattooed a ship on the chest of Cyril Parks with the name of his dead father along the rigging. The piece was completed in one long and painful sitting, as if it were another test set up by Riley. It was as if the man could not bear to inscribe Reeda Parks’s name in death, just as he could not quite validate his affection during her life, and he became bristled with anger and refused when he was asked to by her lad. And so with the use of mirrors and patience and sheer will, Cyril Parks wrote Reeda’s name on himself permanently one night as soon as he felt capable of doing it justice. If he’d ever had any perspective on the female brain, thanks to his mother, within the following years he felt he’d lost it. Cy marvelled that any women made it through the door of Eleven Pedder Street, let alone stayed put in the waiting room until it was her turn in the chair. But they came, endured some crude and saucy confrontations in the waiting room, and often gave as good as got. They came not infrequently either, that was one of the best kept secrets of the industry, that the inches of female bodies walking around in the street were as colourful as they were under their slips and girdles. They chose smaller motifs than their male counterparts, in discreet places, their thighs, their bellies, their lower backs, which would never be shown naturally in public, like a man’s tattooed forearm when the sleeve was rolled back for toil, or the pride of a sailor’s knuckles. For them the matter was entirely personal. Only one or two were bolder, full-body tattooed, women from the circus when the carnivals rolled through Morecambe. For the others it was flowers and swallows and the names of lovers. They were guaranteed proper handling. Riley, for all his boorishness about the town enjoyed the professional respect of those who valued his skill. He was known to be a safe-scraper. And they knew that once their clothes were off, behind the curtain, there was no danger of impropriety with the man unless they wanted there to be; he had about him the air of someone so imbued with the minutiae of his profession, as with a doctor, a solicitor, a business man, that the weight of it grounded him, and won the genuine confidences of others. For this and other tradesman’s foibles, the frequent exchange of ink, the sterility of needles and rags for cleaning, Riley earned the reputation of a purist, strangely professional in an industry not truly applied to the snobbery and expected comportment of corporate, higher-class society. So that while his sloppy drinking habits and his loud bombastic mouth earned him the title of fool and drunkard, his skills, his standards, afforded him a constant supply of clients, including ladies in their heels and hoods, felt hats, crinoline petticoats, boas and brooches and occasionally in fox fur wraps.