The Electric Michelangelo (17 page)

The art lessons, if they could be called such a thing, had no formal structure and no chronology. They had decidedly riprap foundations. They came whenever Riley felt like sharing his wisdom, axe-hewn from history and varnished into hard fact-like items by his own resinous, sap-seeping philosophy. How Raphael faked his genius, fooled the world with his too-posed, too-pretty, too-poncy figures, the more refined and idealized he got the more he gave back what the Renaissance had recovered from the Dark-Age graves of mighty empires, namely the accurately imperfect human anatomy. How Dante Gabriel Rossetti went grave robbing to retrieve some poems he had coffined with his lover, because art and desecration were as close as an incestuous brother and sister. How Rembrandt painted his portrait face from adolescence into death and wasn’t afraid to show just what an ugly bugger he had been, because ugly was simply beauty in a place across the river. How Courbet, Gustave Courbet, now there was a rabble-leader, there was a people’s hero, armed with undeniable talent had won his way into the most prestigious gallery in his native country and shocked the whole of France with his masterpiece,
The
Stone
Breakers,
as well as if he’d laid his castrated tackle in a dish before Le Salon. How Edouard Manet had put a slut along a sacred icon’s bed, posing her with symbols of her wayward cunt, how he’d cut the childbearing hips off every woman in artistic memory to say that she was pleasure without responsibility, how he’d made a whore out of faithful, chaste tradition. How Caravaggio had painted the portrait of a poor carpenter, possibly his own father, and dared to say that the son of God was surrogated to this old, this broken-bodied, callused-handed worker. And there was Blake with his mutative, folded-together mind and his temporal visions and his careful illustrations of heaven and hell, of tigers and lambs, the opposing hemispheres of humans. These were the things of art. Taken by the rich from the poor, but a poor man’s currency no less. They were beautiful and they were malignant and they were the things of genius.

There were always fellows hanging around Riley’s studio. Men and boys drawn to the base intrigue of the profession, that which it represented, the disreputable image. They were males on the cusp of maturity, or just past where its borders were considered to be, those who wanted an endorsement of their manhood, their tougher qualities, and so they sought out models straddling the rawer end of society with which to affiliate themselves, from which to draw estimation, or perhaps identity. They would last the duration of Riley’s tolerance, or until his curt humour, his abuse, became unworthy of the thrill of association with the town’s best and most infamous tattoo artist. Until the myth of butchery and colouring skin was exploded for them or until professionally damaged flesh was no longer violence enough and trouble took them someplace new.

At heart Riley was a solitary, and though he was open to flattery, to appreciation of his showmanship, he did not require crowds to conduct business. In each of the other shops in town similar hangers-on might have been found; they amplified and reinforced the proprietor’s ego, his position as noncomformist hard man. They might be turned by the owner’s hand or barking command and aimed at potential troublemakers, the inevitable brawling, like the big dogs employed to guard the fairground rides from thieves and travelling gypsies out of season. But at Riley’s they served no such purpose. There was little titillation for them beyond the art. The curtain remained mostly closed when Eliot Riley was working. He himself waded in to any turbid situations, to break up fights, to threaten those angling for a scuffle, he did not need mercenary goons at his disposal. But he let the young men sit, two or three at a time, in the outer rooms of the building. For reasons that Cy could never completely grasp, his employer’s shop became host to a variety of scar-faced adolescents and potentially rough young men. Fighters, energetic loafers. Lads not unknown to the local constabulary and the courts. Dirty-faced, unshaven and hatless, they hung about. They had hair that suggested the slip from maternal care, or conventional pride, or employed and codified appearance, into near poverty and reckless self-opinion, the absence of standards. Occasionally an old seadog hung about for a week or so too before the character moved on to another out-of-season coastal town where obscurity and initial pity would bring him luck, drink, and while the vagrant was there Riley might be generous with a quarter-bottle of rum in passing. But the youths were always a guaranteed feature.

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.