Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Perhaps jolted by the man’s indelicacy, the woman started talking.

— Wednesday I’m to be married. This Wednesday as a matter of fact.

Riley was unimpressed.

— What kind of silly day is that for a wedding, love?

— Oh, I know. They’re busy Saturdays until Christmas.

It was Sunday afternoon. Still disaffected, Riley nodded, probably thinking she’d be accustomed to it by her marriage day. The woman’s eyes had finished leaking but remained thick with water like bottle bottoms.

— It’s funny, isn’t it? How you might put something breakable in a place where you know it’ll likely fall. My husband will like it, the tattoo. And, I didn’t want him to. That’s the thing of it. I didn’t want him to like it.

Then, composed, she stood, picked up her overcoat and left the shop. Wishing what exactly never happened Cy did not know. This trade, he thought and not for the first time, was located at the darker end of town in many more ways than one. And in the event of being stumped by human obscurity, he decided, you just had to let it pass you by.

Then one day Cy held the electric needle in his own hand and before he knew it ten years had passed by him! Ten years of Eliot Riley. Ten years in a storm of his behaviour and without the safe harbour of his mother. He had eventually stopped growing taller. He had learned to fight and evict brawlers from the vicinity, and to negotiate with the enemies of his employer. He had been enjoyed by women in the back room of Pedder Street, had seen some of his friends marry and produce children, he had become older, had become firmer, he had forgotten the exact face of Reeda, he had not visited the photograph of his father. And he could not remember what his first ever sold and paid for tattoo had been a picture of. A dragon. A butterfly. A heart. It didn’t matter. The shop now had neon lights around its doorway, to attract passers-by, though still no signs or monikers or gimmickry, for Riley was of an older bent that did without the new jive and jazz-coat trappings. It was in any case well-known that there were two unrelated freehanders working side by side behind separate curtains within. Like partners without equality. Like father and son without the intimate connection. But two freehanders under one roof. Now that was a rarity. Amid all the professional rivalry and the slander and the battle of one ego and one reputation raging against another, in a trade where tattoo artists still acquired sheets of images subversively from each other and crossed out the designer’s signature for their own, such collaboration was rare indeed. Eliot Riley had never suggested he move on, perhaps liking the position of authority of being the Pedder Street shop owner, and still the one they truly came for. And Cy had never chosen to leave, though he had the skills to set up on his own and frequently he had the bloody-minded will to do it.

He had grown to love the scent of skin. The way it told him something of the person in the chair. Their basic character, their occupation, their choice of artificial perfume spritzed on to that flexing medium with which he worked. The smell of skin was like the smell of an oil-primer. It signified the beginning of art. He had one leg entirely dedicated now to the hunt for a blue ink that was stable, he had messed up the appendage so badly under Riley’s duress that it didn’t really matter, his vanity was abandoned, and it became smudged and smeared with broken veins as pigment after pigment proved impossible to use. Twice he had mildly poisoned his blood, his ankle bone becoming manky with sores. The challenge of blue ink had become one of his inherited frustrations, passed down from the man who’d taught him how to paint, and how to hate, and, in conjunction, how, for his own sanity’s sake to save any piece of gilded faith or instrument of celebration from the wreckage of the relationship that he could. At the start of every illumination festival, as the gales blew the bulbed garlands out to sea, Riley would say the same thing to him with an aggressive humour.

— They won’t be asking us to switch on the lights this year, will they boy? They won’t be asking us to put on our ties and dinner jackets and make a speech and throw that switch.

As if at every annual cusp Riley was giving Cy the opportunity to bow out from the underbelly operation. Or as if he was confirming Cy’s position at the helm of first-mate to the captain of a perpetually sinking ship. There was something unnerving and continually harrowing about the man’s embrace of pessimistic forces, how he thrived on conflict and ugliness, the malodorous aspects of life. Riley continued to manhandle people, to drink, to fight, even as he got slower, more pitiful, and less able to find ways to make other men want to challenge him. His hair greyed under his woollen hat. His good skin wrinkled. But his hand remained steady, and if he missed alcohol in the daytime his body did not show it by jerking and shaking when he needed it to be still. It was the one thing cherished by him — it was his saving grace. His redeeming talent. It countered his sooty mania. Until the inevitable happened, the inevitable opportunity of one longtime rival and his pals, from the bar or from the business, it was never clear, found him drunk or got him drunk and alone and took him to the old abandoned blacksmith’s stable out near Moffat Ravine, waited until he was sober, so that he would be clear with his fate, and laid his right hand on a table. Then another of them produced a claw-iron from a bag and showed it to an ever-resisting ever-raging Eliot Riley. And then he used it. Five gavel hammers for Riley’s guilty life. Five falling claw-iron pistons for his shuttle-bust fingers. Five colours to the pallet of the tattooer’s spectrum — black, red, yellow, for the bruises which took off every nail, above every shattered bone which grew back crooked, green and brown for the gangrene infection which took off his middle digit completely. So that his crippled hand would never hold his equipment with enough dexterity to use it ever again. So that his saving grace was damned.

But first Cy got the needle in his own hand. It happened one morning soon after Reeda’s death when Riley was sleeping late and heavy from the night’s drink, and as Cy was leaving the shop to buy bread a man asked him if he could have work done, and he accepted. He was tired of being told every time he got close to being an artist, to being a fully working tattooist, that some slip, some invisible flaw, some bloody unidentifiable cruel mystery of a failure had discredited him, made him ineligible for promotion, that he had failed Eliot Riley. He was tired of being filled with impotent anger and confusion, or sulking upstairs, tired of the snide, petty arguing, which always ensued from Cy’s failed examination, which the master thrived upon, flaring up to it like an itch that’s scratched.

— Well, I was going to let you start next week but you’ve blown it, lad. I had it all planned, you would have been sitting over there, happy as Larry, with your own kit. You’ve nobody to blame but yourself.

— What did I do wrong? I did fuck all!

— You know what you did. And if you need telling, that just proves what a stupid article you truly are.

Cy brought the customer inside, took the money, and prepared his body exactly as he’d seen Riley do a hundred times. He coloured in his first black-bordered image, bottom corner up to top so as not to smear the transfer, working in a small pool of ink, steadily, interpreting lines beneath it. And how the needle sang when it was put on someone else’s body! Like a tuning fork struck against a piece of wood. An entirely different melody than that made from working on his own leg. And his mind rushed out to all the aspects of chromatic nature, and came back within the image he was making. Whatever that image had been that he didn’t remember, but he did a decent job and the customer was happy. And by the time the man had put his shirt back on Riley was awake and downstairs and watching.