Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

— Siren, huh? Hey, I like that, like in that story with the sailor, that’s what I’ll tell people when they see her. She called to me. C’mon Eddie, you heard the man, what y’gonna get? We came down here for you, so don’t go getting stiff on me or you’ll lose us the deal.

Cy handed Eddie a manila book with the page open at the sports section of flash, telling him to take his time, or, if he wanted, the designs could be changed to suit him. In the middle of the page was the Dodgers’ logo.

— What do you say, Eddie lad, get yourself a lifelong season ticket? That’s a true sporting fan.

An hour and a half later the two had bled a little into his cotton rags and had gone through a simple, colourful metamorphosis, and he was two dollars better off. He told them to go and celebrate with an onion Polish, they should have worked up quite an appetite. He watched them walking back up the street a minute later in the rain, demolishing their food, shirts un-tucked and loose off the skin. They were slapping each other on their sore spots, blown up on the adrenalin of having passed through a gauntlet of minor pain and being in possession of motifs they would tell others were meant for them. The sausage vendor saluted him and he hung the mermaid back up on the wall. She was crisp around her curved edges and high-breasted, with a true green tail and red along her fins. He hadn’t lied. He had drawn her from the imagination, she had been one of his first designs, and she’d sat in between the pages of a book in a cupboard for a decade when Riley wouldn’t put her up on the Pedder Street shop wall. Now she was on display, with the salty sea air surrounding her. And as Cy thought about it, putting her back amid her oceanic sisters, he hadn’t lied either when he called her a siren.

Women and fish. It was a presumptuous and runic combination. There were some tattoos as obvious and simple in their symbolic identification as the red-flagged danger in nature or the colours of a nation. Sport was one thing, a contemporary religion to the masses, hearts and flowers were easily deciphered. Women and fish entwined was another thing altogether. That association had something instinctual to it, something primal, buried in the psyche. There were at least three dozen subtly different female fish icons in his booth — bare-breasted, bare-bottomed, arch-backed lovelies, with curved hips and hair rippling like the waves below them. They were reclining or pert on the wall, drawn riding on scaled creatures like lovers, joined with them, and gripping the harness of a whisker or gill or a reptilian tongue like a bridle on a horse as they rode, like hair on a man beneath them, the better with which to steer him. And they stirred men up, stirred up that savant batter within them. They were provocative and sultry and saucy. They were the women of the sea calling to sailors, they were finned beauties, slipping from shells, aphrodisiac as oysters. There were traditional mermaids, green tailed and cheeky, females with the lower halves of them become aquatic, human legs joined and sealed by scale, by soft, femoral meat-muscle. So that they were cuntless, or maybe they were all cunt, like their parts had been turned inside out and were spreading down their legs, melting over human limbs, becoming overt genital tails. That was all the mermaid symbol was. The sex of her. A reduction of image to the essence of what made a woman different. Then there were fish with women’s faces, women shrunk into their own symbolic parts. They were the Pisces vaginales, like that troublesomely aptly named species in Morecambe Bay for his interest in which Cy had ultimately taken a caning. Men had wed the two aspects together, and made them aesthetic. It was worship of the liquid territory between their legs. It was the smell of them. The way they were scented — it was their brine, like salt made inside the human body, that reek of the sea. And it was the feel of them inside, slippery, like fish-tail. And it was the taste, you could taste the sea in them, like in creatures manufactured by the ocean. All the slippery pictures of that deep wet place had men drawn to the tattoos on the walls like sailors to the come-hither songs of mermaids.

The designs had become perfected over the years, since delirious sailors had first spotted them cavorting off the bow-wave or blowing kisses to the departing stern. Those voluptuous chimeras sheathed in scales. Men had eventually reduced it down to that passion, that desire for the place, that symbol of her, and the ones that chose the flash wanted to put its rudimentary marker on their flesh permanently, like the wet smell of a woman on their skin after she lifted off them. It was permanent intimate homage, a venereal badge of proclivity. It was eternal sex. When they looked at the mermaid they knew what she meant, somewhere in them, not very far down in the subconscious, was that knowledge. And Cy knew what it meant when he drew mermaids or naked women straddle-riding sea-serpents. And Riley had known all along and he’d said on more than one occasion that the reason women cried so readily was they were too full of saltwater like the sea, and he’d even put the notion of it in his dying speech. And if some men didn’t admit to knowing the derivation of the She-Fish image which they instinctively liked best on the walls of Cy’s booth, and paid him to transfer on to them, their cocks would know it and nod a little when, after the colour healed and the crust came off the tattoo, there she was in all her glory in the mirror, bright on the shoulder, top half woman, bottom half cunt-fish.

Some days it was abundantly clear to him that men were truly still mesmerized by women, obsessed with their definition and their difference, and that all he was doing with his ink and his needle was recording the history of the female sex through the symbolic vision of another species.

When he arrived in the greatest city on earth Cyril Parks still had with him most of the designs from the shop in Morecambe, and he would soon collect new ones in America that would adorn the summer booth or be bound in books for customers to flip through. Walking down the steep gangplank of the ship he had over three hundred designs and variations on designs, all told. He was going to be the Electric Michelangelo. He was going to be his own master. He was going to renew life, taking the best of the old and making it modern. Other than the copious flash, he had fewer possessions than ever though, it seemed, and if he tried to remember what he had once owned, those things that had been kept above the Pedder Street shop in old crates or in the Bayview Hotel on the windowsill or under the bed, his memory failed him, produced small black voids. In his scramble to get away he had brought almost nothing with him, he had left behind as much of his old existence as he could.

He was now the falsely legal resident of a new country, his mind went out no further than his current situation in ambition, and he still was not fixing himself down with gathered material weight, not in the way that Reeda had positioned cups in her cupboards over the years, pictures along the walls, and manifest pieces of herself throughout the hotel, nor the way Riley marked his territory with eggs in a row, the last structure of skull of the birds he trained, put on his mantle like objects of art, and his thick, possessive handwriting in his vagabond books.

The apartment in the building into which Cy moved was swabbed clean and raw and it was scented of sparse, woody emptiness like the deck of an antique ship after disembarkation. It had a chair, washing facilities, adequate space and acoustics that elaborated on tales told by the daily lives of other residents. He came to it unremarkably, indiscriminately, via a contact provided to him by the cousin of a friend of a man he had tattooed on board the Adriatic, and that was the way of New York City, a million corresponding pathways could open up from one handshake, or a meaningful cigarette shared. The building was located in Sheepshead Bay, a provincial town of Brooklyn not far from where he would soon work, a place where he could watch the fishing boats to-ing and fro-ing in the harbour, or the cranes on Emmons Avenue winching construction material on the banks, and where children sold clams and paper-wrapped fish by the water’s edge or out of wooden shacks. By the shipping lanes, in the district’s restaurants, there always seemed to be unassuming music being played, accordions and flutes and stringed instruments rhyming with each other, and it was a place of labour and banter and bustle. He paid a rental deposit to a tiny, old Sephardic Jew, a lady with hands warped and clawed and folded over like dead bird’s feet, and with spinning, white-blind eyes, and he was given a key. She put a limp talon to his chest in welcome.