The Electric Michelangelo (13 page)

Here Cy’s mother appeared to be stumped, which was a rarity. Riley was winding himself up into a tame fury over the apparently criminal and substandard education at Morecambe Grammar School. His enormous pale eyes were in a cultivated temper, insulted and assaulting, and Reeda reached and tugged the hem down on her skirt. He was leaning towards her with one arm resting on his leg, his teacup tipping at a hazardous angle. She had pitifully little with which to counter his mock academics or his advancing eyes or his rhetoric. Cy wanted to pitch in that he did, in actual fact, know who Leonardo da Vinci was. Just not Bernini, who hadn’t got a look in to the conversation that afternoon either. But it did not seem to be a three-way conversation, if it had ever been intended as one.

– Well, I’ll have a word with Colin Willacy … perhaps something can be done … and I’ll mention your concern …

– No, Reeda, no! You’ll not! I plan to teach the lad myself, don’t I?

Sanctity of the body, and of the mind which was housed within it, did not exist in Riley’s rooms, that is to say it existed only within the scope the man himself deemed suitable and sacred. Nor did respect for lackeys and flunkies exist. Nor was any former knowledge of anything much useful. Tattooing was a dreamscape type of world, where strange occurrences and dark-wrought ideas, if not normal, were almost commonplace. Within number eleven Pedder Street hideous, painful, often screaming regurgitations of human skin went on. A month in and it seemed to Cy that he was an explorer summiting only the foothills of a bizarre and primitive island. There was the grinding of sharp implements into dart-like points, which would be soldered to a drive shaft, the grinding of pigments to mix with alcohol, the grinding of both aspects into frail swathes of skin, and the grinding of the bossy expedition leader on his nerves. Because Cy was made to feel, almost every day, like a blundering idiot with all the handy skills of a caveman wielding a flat rock.

– You ground the needle down too far, it’s bloody useless. This coil burnt out too fast, you didn’t fit it properly. There’s too much powder in my ink solution, mix it carefully, part by part like I showed you, we’re not running an artists’ retreat here lad. You’ll be going to Lancaster for more supplies docked out of your own wages if you keep this malarkey up. Come to think, I could fancy one of Donaldson’s oatcakes right about now. So, off you toddle.

Wages? There had been no wages.

– How will I get there?

– Shanks’s bloody pony, sonny. You’ve got legs in working, haven’t you? Go on, lad.

There was one aspect of the trade that Cy managed to conquer immediately. The odder, danker, gorier ends of physicality had been presented to him and reconciled at a tender age, so the actual tattooing process did not bother him, and if Riley was impressed with one thing it was the boy’s ability to stomach the bodily indelicacies of the profession. Not that he ever voiced it. Riley himself was utterly unperturbed and unaffected by blood, gore, and odour. If there was one similarity between Riley and Reeda, one thing they had in common at root, it was their indiscriminate ability to tolerate the organic human body.

Customers were bullied into stripping, often half naked – Riley wanted to see a whole canvas before beginning a work, placement within borders was vital. Ladies were included, though if he was doing a titty-job, or hip work, requiring them to expose breasts or certain vulnerable areas below the waist, he’d instruct them to bring a friend along with them for the appointment, as witness to his proper conduct. All flesh was capable of blood and sweat, female flesh included. Riley found no reverence in it the way Cy still felt a little awe, and a little flex at the front of his trouser, if he was behind the curtain while a woman had her skirts gathered up about her while Riley manipulated a tight plane of skin on her inner thigh and punctured it. Women were an occasional distraction for Riley, each one resulted in another portrait somewhere on his own leg, if there was space, and if they were worthy – worth usually being defined by them terminating the relationship, not vice-versa – and he would produce a drunken little verse to wish them bon voyage when the affair ended. Helena Skeet, barmaid at the Dog and Partridge on nights when Paddy Broadbent was a little worse for wear, was one such muse.

– Over the coun-ter, she might let you mount-her, but then in the morning, there’ll be no more whoring, and it’s off to the doc-ter for warts on your cock-ker …

Riley enjoyed working on a woman’s form no more than a man’s, it seemed. It provided as difficult a landscape as any to pave with ink He enjoyed them in his bed only for as long as they did not truly know one another.

His teaching methods and lectures started well but always seemed to descend into petty opinion, as if his top half was gentrified but below the belt-buckle he was all rogue, and couldn’t help spoiling his better part.

– Now, while lacking the indulgence of manly hair, though you’re not always guaranteed that up north here lad, ha-ah-ha, there are often more internal fatty parts in women, I call them bitty-bags, you can call ‘em whatever you want. Like a little purse of water and you’ve got to take care around them ‘cause they can dilute pigment or throw off a line. Especially arses. One thing I will say, they often take it better than a man. Pain, that is. Probably the residue of tolerance left over from when they were all bloody witches and got stoned or burned or drowned for it, eh lad? Never tell your mother I said that, by the way.

People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience. They were either in possession of the ability to tell a good joke or lacking it; he preferred the former. What Riley excelled at was his profession, his art. And art it was without question, Cy had seen that when he came initially into Riley’s tatty little room, twenty to eleven at night, with a mind to consider the strange employment proposal. Or at the very least ask the strange man to leave him alone and stop accosting him after work. There was something about the way Riley’s wrist broke no more than a fraction when holding the gun and his hand glided with authority, as if being pulled by a magnet in the elbow, not dictated to by the fingers, exerting more pressure over muscle, less over patches of loose skin, to produce an absolute uniform line, that left Cy unable to reconcile the skill with the man. It was remarkable that someone so flaccid and bawdy could then be so intricate and precise.

Riley’s own arms were exquisite. Even the older fading ink remained tight in its rivers. Riley explained that he tended to them with lotion daily, the way others would shine silverware with polish or wax a car incessantly to keep that heirloom conditioned. It explained the strange out-of-place fragrance of the shop. It was lady’s Nivea lotion. Floral and sweet smelling and, what’s more, expensive. He had that good, smooth, olive skin, complementing his dark hair, at least that which protruded from under his permanently worn woollen hat and prickled his chin was dark. The skin provided a very good background for his luminous modern frescos, none of which showed below his wrist cuff, or above his shirt collar, those were the borders of his craft. But under his hide it was another story, it was a soul half blackened with some kind of loathing and scorn. Eliot Riley was a drinker, Cy’s mother had been right. And he was a poor drinker. One that let the demons of the bottle into his head when he tipped it back, demons that went about unloosing all the trouble they could find stashed in the catacombs of his mind. Every tragic thing that had ever happened, every self-doubt, every delusion, freed itself from bondage and revisited him when he drank.

Perhaps he had something of a Welshman or a Celt about him after all, some dual identity, a dispossession, a longing. Inside his rooms was his private, celebrating heart, outside a dislocation from his self-determined red and black and rich green legacy. He was a man split in half, as if he had been born in two, and the pieces appeared not ever to have been joined as a healthy whole, for they vied constantly with each other. At work he wore the expression of a man consumed, whose trade dealt with expression, and minutiae, the exploitation of details and colour perforation. And he loved the bi-tonal beauty he could give people. He was unconditional that way. His eyes sang in concentration when he went to this half of himself, ink was the natural language of his heart, he could not be more in the throne of a motherland when he took his equipment in hand. Then he was bard-like, king-like, god-like, waging accurate and beautiful war over the bodies of those willing to allow his definition and rendition of beauty.

Oh, but it was a strange land to be ruler of, violent, sexual, bold, uncompromising, subversive, curious, and oftentimes tasteless to others – the middle-upper classes, the Tory councillors, the snobbish businesses, who all said it was not art. What he did was not art. Outside the antiseptic, illustrated room on Pedder Street there was the Eliot Riley who was frowned at in the street, challenged in bars, named by the press as disreputable, and of his own inebriated volition was morally redundant. A man of yellow-blue, ale-driven eyes, of vomit on a Saturday night and untimely, sour-spitting laughter that quickly spoiled the mood of those in his company. He was the product of a damaged religion. He was the devil-sick Catholic about town. Cy would be taken to the pub before or after work and treated to the man’s poor taste and his public indiscretion. Other men came and went as public house acquaintances with a passing interest in what he did for a living, or wishing to borrow his reputation for their inferior needs, but they were finally sickened by him, and abandoned his presence for good. He was wicked, he was pernicious, and he infected others like a noxious spill.

Riley was the only man Cy knew to find humour in the pieces of flesh found tidily wrapped up in newspaper and smudging the print at the bottom of Moffat Ravine, the only man to laugh out loud when the news reached the town that Dr Ruxton of Lancaster was finally hanged at Strangeways gallows for the ghastly murder and butchery of his wife and nurse, to the blessed relief of the entire nation.

– What’s black and white and red all over? A Moffat Ravine newspaper. Get it, get it? Read all over … He probably found them together eh? Doing the Queen Victoria shuffle. Daft bugger should of joined in.

There were absurd and treacherous and dark elements to be found in people that Riley could understand and even be amused or thrilled by, where others could not fathom their existence, and had to rely on standard judgments – it was horror and sin and evil and lunacy in the world. And Riley would simply call it truth, truth, as true as any high achievement, love or God or beatific goodness. One without the other was a falseness, he said. Humans were black and white with too much red blood inside, just like that Moffat Ravine newspaper.

He was a vessel through which these messages passed, for better or for worse. What he pulled out of people and drew on them was as varied and degenerate as it was honourable and illuminating. On his walls were warrior signs and heads with swords clean through them, women on their knees bending naked towards men’s cocks, next to Christ on his cross, the scales of justice and doves with olive branches. From all the world’s distilled meanings, from the chaotic jumble, Riley located human totems and gifted them to their patrons. A man was his soul of a lion, his courage. A man was his profession at sea. A man was the flag of his nation. A woman was her dead child’s name. A woman was her ability to use her body for pleasure, or her inability to ever truly expose herself because she had had a black brassiere tattooed on her chest. A woman was as abstract as the abstract spiral on her back.

It did not take an age to come to know these things of Eliot Riley. And so the first time Cy happened across him with his friends, drunk and beaten and raving on the central pier, his slurring madman’s words were not completely senseless. Jonty and Morris looked on with horror and confusion as the indigent, broken-looking man raised one arm and called out to Cy.

– Boy, come here. Listen. I’m a fucking midwife, boy, that’s what I do, spread their fucking legs open and I catch their little babies and all their shit and blood from pushing and they never even bloody know it … hahaha … they never know they’re birthing themselves, a fucking midwife I am. I am.

– What the bloody hell’s he on about, Cyril? Come away and leave him.

– Got to get used to it, boy. Got to get used to the shit and quim. Smell’s not so bad after a bit. Oh, we’re all soaking wet with it, yes we are … hahaha … you little buggers too, you fuckers with your mammies’ clean hands on you… and your bright hopeful ideas …

– Go on home, lads, I’ll be all right. I’d better stop here. Mr Riley has a condition, see, it comes in fits. Go on now. See you tomorrow.

Cy bent down and began to lift his employer to his feet. And Riley smiled at him, a pleased, pitying smile that was wetted by the tears from his eyes and the effluent from his mouth, a smile that was both moved by and derisive of this complicit new comradeship.

Before long Cy could see that Riley was torn in two, he was Janus-looking. Perhaps it was the humanity of his craft that allowed him this quality, this taking or leaving of life’s mucky mire as well as its lovely sandy beaches, the ropes strung round both poles. Perhaps he had come of his trade well-fitting with a character already formed and suitable, or perhaps the trade had made him. Of fowl and egg, Cy would never truly know which had arrived first.