Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— Leave me alone, boy. Can’t you see it, you fucking imbecile, can’t you see it’s all over now? I’m sleeping. I’m sleeping. Go away.

Still a lad, still a boy, to Eliot Riley, though Cy was well on his way to thirty. Though he played the youth, didn’t he? The tenderfoot, the loyal subject and the looby, as if to give the man his position back, restore him to his throne. He would try to get him involved with the trade again by asking foolish questions, whose answers he already knew. Where was the best place to store ink pigment in the winter so it wouldn’t spoil? Which was the best manufacturer to go to for the liquid black? As if he had forgotten his monthly trips to Hagan’s in Lancaster for the last ten years. Were brass or steel coils better for the new electric motor? The photography shop was closing down and selling off its goods, did the boss want him to get whatever old dry-point celluloid they may have left over for stencilling material? There were never any answers. Just a slammed door. A room empty of dialogue. Blue eyes paling and melting and dissolving against skin, like a glacier mint in a mouth.

He drank. Night and day, Riley drank whatever he could get hold of. When there was no money and Paddy wouldn’t serve him, for his own good, he stole bottles from shops. Or he went with groups of comrade-desolates around the slums of Moss Street to sup on rot and pauper’s brews. Even the alcohol spirit solution in the cupboard was taken so that it wasn’t safe to keep it, and Cy had to blend powder with distilled water to make his ink. And he was left thinking, thinking about a time when Riley had informed him, with crude gusto, that in this craft any solution could be used to dissolve and bind pigments — blood, spit, a woman’s juice, semen, piss — it was an ancient, resilient, inventive industry.

The customers still asked for him. His reputation did not cease to exist just because his will to go on without his loved and soul-fortifying profession did. Cy would have to explain that he was retired now, resting upstairs, unavailable, the way he had first lied about Riley’s fits to Jonty and Morris, and for it he would often lose a sale. What other honesty could he give them? That the man was dropped down in his own waste somewhere around the town, body parts foul like a gutter, crevices stinking of built-up dirt, and his mind no cleaner than a septic tank? That his once good, colourful Welsh skin was busting open with rag-ended capillaries and his hand was a disabled stump? That he’d become one of those desperately exploding men who mumble and yell at folk because they can’t or don’t want to speak clearly, and if let wander in that direction he would put his four-fingered hand on the train tracks because he was that bloody determined? That he was already dead, that he was already rotting? No.

Here was a young fellow working in the parlour of the greatest tattooer of northern England and the master was not around. There was something treacherous and suspicious about it, something not quite right. Together they might have tattooed the top of their country’s masses, alone he was implicated in some crime, or failed venture, and was suddenly without reputation. A ventriloquist’s wooden dummy without the speaker. For it seemed Cyril Parks could only live in Eliot Riley’s shadow if the shadow of his master still lived also.

It was a life completed by the last sour joke of Eliot Riley dying on April the first, appropriately bad-humoured until the end. But it was not plain old-fashioned dying, not passing on as a natural last function of the body, or being triumphed over by a disease like Cy’s mother had been, that would have been too simple and not had enough of a bastard’s composition to it. He got hold of something rank and poisonous that would sit for a while in his gut removing its lining and then making him pour blood up from his mouth like a fountain. It was bleach. Ordinary washing bleach, of the kind that kept white collars white in the nicer houses of Morecambe Bay, the kind that had cleansed the Bayview’s tuberculosis basins. He’d gone from wine bottles in pockets and a bad charm to his philosophy and swagger, to caustic industrial solvent that robbed his body of its ability to clot blood and its ability to stop heaving. By the close of it there was enough blood in his room to mop the floors with. Enough to paint the sky with. Most of it not in any basin, for Riley was twisting and writhing on the floor and unable to control his sickness — the regurgitation of every evil thing that was in him, every drop of loathsome emotion that spewed forth like an exorcism. And when it was gone, so too would he be, because hemispheres cannot live one without the other, for those born in two parts, black and white hearted. So his final empty unequal peace would last but a few minutes. He made it home from wherever he had taken his terrible potion and up the stairs before the demise of his body really started, so that he could have Cy see him, and hear him as he spoke more words than he had said all bitter year. With the last of his blue eyes and his fat-lipped mouth he said that finally something shackled had been removed from him, like the manacles of Socrates before his hemlock execution. And though in great pain from the holes being punched in his stomach and in pain from his tattered life, there was at last a deeper absence of agony in him, which was a pleasure for knowing well the other. Between great choking mouthfuls he gave his soft departure, as if to a son he’d always wanted but never had it in him to acknowledge, making his potential to beget and brook and love apparent, making it impossible to wholly hate the man, making it impossible to ever take his catheter needle out.

— Good lad. Good lad. Shop’s yours now. Left to you, officially. You’ll be grand, if you stay by the sea. That’s the trick, we’re meant to be by water, folk like you and me. No more than a stone’s throw from her. She’s our muse, lad. She smells like a woman in your bed when the rain hits her, did you know that? That’s where you’ll have them put me. Out at sea. Make me a promise, make it your word. Out at sea. You’ve your mother’s eyes, lad, you’ve her eyes.

And Cy didn’t know if he was weeping for his dead mother, or his dead and dying fathers, or because there was just death in the red room. Or because it was over and his ship had broken free of the rocks and was miraculously still afloat, even though the captain was strung up in the crow’s nest with his throat slit wide open, and not a soul left on board knew how to sail.

The body was released to the authorities and then claimed back by Cyril Parks. It was a remarkable body, for all its ruination and its infiltration with drink, the sagging skin and sorry legacy of abuse. There were whole worlds and stories written on it. It was as a piece of polished heather root or something that had been kept in the ground and under the force of heat and pressure of many ages had become gem-like. And on the sole of the right foot, in tiny curving script, was the poem, not recognized by the undertaker but recognized by Cy as he had taken Riley’s boots off on the bed when he lay still, flooded with his own rust-red waters. It was the only time he had removed the man’s boots, though many, many times he had wrestled his fully clothed, limp body into positions where it could be left to sober. And on this last, post-mortem occasion, with his hands trembling as they untied the laces, he had needed to do it, to make the episode formal, a proper Maundy gesture amid the squalor of the room. It was a poem, which Riley had fancied as meaningful and had stolen as a possession of his own. Like the books in his rooms, like the dissembling ideas of art with their approbation of only the most controversial agenda.