Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

But oh, they were hard to fathom, and Cy felt remote from them now. They were creatures of extraordinary endurance and unpredictability. Riley was right, they could smile through the treatment as if it were no more than a loofah brush massage. As if having marched straight to the shop from their covens. They were not as inclined to grip the wooden wall shackle for their discomfort as the men were, externalizing pain. Instead they held their own hands tightly, as if intent on retaining the sensation, their bodies became continuous units like the symbol for infinity. Their reaction to the work done on them was as varied as it could be extreme. Tears, hysterical laughter, absolute silent obduracy, quiet lunacy, resolve, sudden terror, mania, lasciviousness, sentiments from all the filler layers, all the fuller levels between defined emotions, like the white pulpy substance found inside the tough green skin of a split reed. A man would not do it that way, he would be happy, blasé, angry or bluffing something. So there was always that sense, that feeling that the female customers were closer to the mystery of the trade that Riley maintained was sacred and central. Nor could Riley crack them in his personal life, for all his keen eye into the caves and fissures of people’s minds, his forcipial ability to guide out an image or symbolic rendition of their traits if they were stuck or stalling amid the flash.

It was at the Pedder Street parlour that Cyril Parks graduated from the blue-balled frustrations and unconsummated altercations of sexual prelude to the real thing with women. Some of them came into the shop with their loins already aflame, and either he or Riley would be offered their rumps on heat if there was enough privacy. Some considered it essential gratuity. They came to have fire drawn on their white bodies, or flowers around their nipples, their nipples extended pinkly like rose petals across the breast, felines crouching near their vulvas. The hints of coitus. There was that aspect to the profession. The graphic, creamy rich slick of it, its spermary and ovum character. Marine life on an inner thigh, a snake resting coiled on a buttock or slithering into the shadow-crease of a bum. The base symbols of fucking, the vividly erotic. Some women came to inscribe their risqué nature on their bodies, to elicit wanton behaviour from the viewer or to declare their own, and they would desire Cy afterwards, being already mostly naked, being ready for more than the needle’s entry. The last scratch of pain leaving behind only sore proof of lust as it departed. Some of them wanted to see it through to the gasping, shuddering, juddering very end. So there was sex like gauze to cover their colourful wounds.

— Do you know what this swallow means, darling? Can you guess it? Well, I’ll show you. Take your trousers down. Come on, you’ll not be sorry. That’s right. Well, look at you, all truncheon meat and no helmet, constable. You better sit for this, hadn’t you?

Or they would take his hand and place it between their legs, wait for his response, his eyes complying, then they’d mould his cock into a pleasing shape like potters at the wheel, glaze him hard with the spit of their hot, kiln-oven mouths, so that he was in a state where they could use him. And some of them he liked, over and above the sucking and screwing, and he would have courted them were it not for the rigmarole of having to introduce them to his boss, the certainty of his malevolent interference. Riley, at his lewdest and most sordid, said not to be fooled by caresses and kisses, polite and tender exchanges, the lick of a tuss and the sweet discovery of that spot which got both parties banging together like shutters in a hurricane. He said that some women just liked the bite and the tear and the spite of tattooing and of coupling, that it was pain which got them wet and wanting. And if Cy was going to handle these ones in the parlour when Riley wasn’t around, randy and mucky and germ-ridden as they may be, he’d have do away with shy passes and gentle thrusting and considerate loving. He’d have to slap them and grip them and fist them and turn them around dog-mounted to blunt himself in, or put it in their arses.

Though they came less often than the men to Eleven Pedder Street, females carried with them intrigue, life’s oddest embolus in their blood, and they undid the work’s simplicity. Cy tried his best to wind his way through the skein grounds surrounding them but often felt lagging and lost.

Once, there was a woman crying at the back of the building after her work was completed. Riley would not comfort her. For whatever unsympathetic reason, or cruelty, or voyeuristic detachment, he did not feel like he had enough invested in the situation to warrant it and he did not approach her. Instead, he went about cleaning the ink vials and left her be to soggy up her handkerchief with grief and snot. Human canvas could never be relied on for rational behaviour, especially not the female variety, Riley always said. She was sorry she’d had it done perhaps, thought Cy, that tiny black-red rose flower above the navel. A thumbnail’s length above it, Riley’s broad, stained nail the measure. Her face was all bunched together and full of concentration, as if crying were a matter that should be attended to with effort and determination, as if she was making herself do it. This Cy had never understood, whenever he’d seen it in women. They could turn to it with passion and dedication. The quality of adamant self-destruction at the back of it unsettled him, the way that people would risk against themselves, double up, self-destruct. For it seemed a betrayal of the worst kind, and he always felt he should try to stop the rebellion. Whether it was out of pity or penalty, he knew you only had to have your dying mother take your hand before taking the hands of weeping women became a reflex action. Not so for Riley. It seemed he felt nothing at all and he could watch the upset of others for hours while smoking, like being at the cinema. Or maybe one part of him was mentally slapping their hysterical faces. Cy had heard a few of the women Riley brought home with him reduced to this condition, their furious wailing seemed only to intensify through the walls when met with his executioner’s insensate reaction, his void of emotion, his catatonic stance. Then there was the smashing of breakable objects if something portable could be found to aid their performance, as if torment increased in volatility until it was met with the proper appreciation, as if that was a given emotional equation. Like upping the stakes in poker until a hand was called. And Cy could sympathize with them, could he not, for all the occasions he himself wanted to roar at Riley to be more human when met with his outstanding cruelty, as human as those who had shaped Cy’s life so far and set the kindly standard.

But this one woman, now flowered just above her bellybutton, and still open-bloused so that her quaking belly was seen, seemed so strangely broken open when it was done that there were vast spaces of confusion Cy could not cross. And she was Riley’s customer, and it was the big man’s shop. If Riley could not go to her in comfort how could he? Tired of the noise, or perhaps impatient for the next customer, Riley finally spoke to her.

— Stop it. No need for all this fuss. You’re just being silly. Stop it.

Her eyes and her shaking head said she could not.

— But of course you can. All you need to do is stand and pick up your overcoat, love, go home and pretend it never happened. You’ll get used to it. Look, you’ve a mole almost as big under your tit and there’s that mark up above your fanny that looks far worse! What’s that from? They operate on your tubing?

This was Riley’s tenth commandment argument — thou shalt get used to it. Thou shalt not pick thy scab was number one. The other eight were entirely changeable. New drama-provided marks became old at some stage and ceased to offend, or to shock in the mirror. Surgical scars, by the onset of old age, were as familiar and bodily incorporated as a limb. The stretches of childbirth, like the lines on a brow, were simply mementos indicating the passage of life. Silky-looking bullet pools — there’d be a few of those in the shop, the business drew a crowd that was not unacquainted with attempted murder — were only a little bigger than vaccination scars or strawberry birthmarks. Tattoos could be briefly upsetting. But eventually they became ordinary components on the human anatomy. People went through life like well-handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.