The Electric Michelangelo (19 page)

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.

– About time you started pulling your weight around here, lad. Wondered when you’d get your finger out of your arse. Next time use your own chair, that one is mine.

– I don’t have a chair.

– Well best you get to the scrappy’s and buy one. Gun purrs like a cock that’s shooting, doesn’t it?

And then there was another tattoo and another. And fairly soon the electric singing was a familiar song. He went from standard designs to freehand images, though he was only permitted to work if Riley was out of the Pedder Street shop or there was more than one customer waiting at a time, like a young lion guarding a den when the alpha male was away.

What never changed was the voice within Cy’s mind in the moments before he began working, in the brief interval between the removal of clothing from a piece of flesh, administering the cleaning fluid, the grease, and the tactility of human against needle, during which time he would ask a simple one-word question.

– Ready?

And in that small portion of time he was really asking many things. He was seeking, one final, crucial time, an endorsement of the metamorphosis, for which he was in part responsible, and the customer was in part responsible. He was waiting for their signature on a contract they had drawn together, before he also wrote his own in ink. Because some did get up and leave the shop, right at that moment. And some had their faces fall half way through the procedure for they hadn’t truly decided. He might not even always vocalize the question, he might just have assumed they were hearing it, considering it, but always that small amount of time was set aside, an escape route out of the prison, a burning walkway from the flaming pavilion. On the outside it seemed to produce tension, that period of impending discomfort being so very quiet, and Riley continued to berate him for it, saying what he needed to do was talk the customer into comfort.

– Doesn’t matter if you’ve not got one interesting thing to say to them. Make up a story. Tell a joke. Saying nowt to them is like not having songs sung at their funeral or not having a toast at their wedding! Bad form is what it is, lad. It’s just not done.

But it was a doctrine of Cy’s religion, it was his own brand of ceremony. And oddly, there was no real silence in those moments. Not inside Cy’s mind anyway. In those seconds before he started, strange little hymns of thought chorused through his brain. Words that were a last-minute warning, words that were encouraging, or applauding. Like testimonies for those writing their histories on their bodies, because there was no better place for those chapters to be written. For those taking the insignia of the country, who were made of their nation. For those catching the name of the women they loved, who would love her in some permanent way always until they died or forgot her. For those selecting war armour, who would have conflict around them until they were too old and weak to lift a fist and their banners were meaningless. For those destroying and recreating themselves. For those bringing to their skin only that which their heart was capable of making. For those becoming a cipher of meaning. For those being reborn, selecting the organs of their lives, unravelling the probabilities of themselves, and turning away from their invisible, ether-blank souls. So frequently his mind said these things that in the end even he began not to hear it. He just let the silence tell it.

Often Cy wondered about the night of Riley’s assault, when his mind and faculty were murdered, for it marked the beginning of his death. Cy let his imagination go out to the possibilities of what occurred, he let it haunt him. There might have been a morning hawk above the ravine when the men held him down, moving with some kind of patience through the pale air, a calming tipped-winged movement above him, something to focus on as his eyes came out of their distorted vision shortly before they began. Like a piece of his spirit having got free. Those slow-waking hours between last orders and daybreak, as he waited for his abductors to take of him whatever they were going to take, his throat eventually becoming raw and hoarse with protestation, may have been the most acutely aware hours ever spent by Riley, when he suddenly noticed details like the smell of burning as the dew came on to the moor, or the rings under the feet of insects in an old barrel of water, treading as if with secret knowledge of the water’s masonry. And he might have noticed how a man’s face in barbarity will show traces of compassion even though it is already determined in its fulfilment of cruelty. Or he might have dulled himself away from reality, like some could under the needle in the chair, that numbing oriental style of slumber. Until the sensation of the claw hammer on his skin and bone came, like the purest thing Eliot Riley had ever felt in his life. It might have been purer than even electricity, Cy thought. Riley may have passed out more than once with pain and loss of blood on the four-mile walk back from the scene of his sick trial, his hand doubled in original size and screaming its condition. Cy would never know these things for sure, for he was never told what occurred. All he knew was that Eliot Riley arrived home shortly after the milk had been delivered on the doorstep, with the face of a dead man and his arm strung up inside his coat, looking like mince, looking like tendrils of riverweed when it was revealed. Then he sat down in his wooden chair and fell asleep. As if sleep was the next best thing to admitting defeat.

It took almost a year for Riley to finish dying. After he was sentenced by his assailants, abused, and exiled from his profession, he willed himself dead, like a bird in a cage that will not compromise its nature. He went about it methodically. He would kill himself with drink and depression and starvation. Half a bottle of liquor past possible human consumption a night. As little food as physically manageable before hunger sent him mad and ratching like a badger through the kitchen for scraps. All the melancholy he could summon about him, to eat away at his mind. Where once he had given pathetic assistance to Cy and Paddy when they half-carried him home, shuffling his feet, grunting for them to stop so he could vomit, now he was a dead-weight that often had to be dragged along the road and pavement. No more useful than a sack of potatoes. And if they weren’t careful he’d leave his head back and choke on his own sick and Cy would have to grope about in his soupy mouth for his missing tongue. There were times when the washroom above Eleven Pedder Street was such a mess with blood and shit and vomit and all three together that Cy wondered if the man had been swallowing his own needles, like Chatterton with his lacerated lunched-on poems in his attic. Again in his life he would have to remove the stinking, revolting waste of a suffering individual, like a nursemaid, like a bloody nursemaid. Not even false hope in the air this time, nor his mother’s noble acceptance. Just long, meaningless, suicidal death. Riley often stayed in his bed until the late afternoon, would not even answer if Cy knocked on his door. He lay bent round on the mattress like a baby under an old blanket, his breathing slower than any human lung should endure. Cy would try to get him to eat something, anything. A biscuit. A piece of cheese. He tempted him and tried to trick him into it like he was a fussy infant. Where once he had crept around him with cups of pacifying or demanded tea, now he trod heavily, bringing fresh brews in the hope that Riley would put something into his thinning, reddening body. Occasionally a sentence here and there in response, so Cy would become hopeful, if there were words issued there was part of a brain left over to see reason. If he had enough passion to curse, he had enough care to live.

– 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.