The Electric Michelangelo (20 page)

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. 

And wasn’t that about right for the fucker, thought Cy.

The body was wrapped and prepared for burial at sea and it was taken out on a chartered fishing vessel into the Irish Channel and dumped overboard without ceremony as the sun was setting, so that Riley, with his Celtic looks and his split identity might have found his way into some ancient Gaelic paradise by accident, if God and the Devil were not quick enough to settle the dispute over him. Cy leaned on the side of the boat and watched the sunset on the waves. What had his mother told him as a boy in her spinner-woman nursery-time way? That when the sun went away its light never went out, it only went to Ireland, and then it went to America, and then right around the world until it came back in the morning. And it was some kind of lamp for all lost souls to follow. So he watched it leaving, turning a slow red corner of the earth, the sky above it pale blue and doomed with intensity before it shut down, like Riley’s eyes. Behind him somewhere was Morecambe Bay, with its strange long tide and all his life’s history. His home. The place that had shaped him from its sand and clay. The place that had set him up well in the first half of life only to make room for his faltering and to allow his tumble in the next half. Because wasn’t he fallen? Wasn’t he as lost and low as he could possibly be? Like one of the ragged souls of Reeda’s fables. The boat wallowed gently in the current for a time, then began back to shore. And at that moment Cy did not want his home, majestic or malfeasant‚ he would have renounced it gladly, and paid all the money he had ever owned and a tithe on all he would ever earn to have the fishing vessel come about and head west in the wake of the sun.

Late that night he took a drink at the Dog and Partridge with Paddy and toasted Eliot Riley, though neither of them spoke beyond that of the man lest his recently departed spirit become blackened with the pluming particles of ill-thought and defamation. Paddy reached behind the bar and pulled out a bottle of whisky and poured a dram for Cy, his first proof liquor ever. The fumes were as wretched as the taste but he took the contents of the glass whole.

– What of Cyril Parks next then? Get yourself a pretty missy and raise a brood? Will you be able to cope with all the trade this summer?

Cy shook his head and shrugged.

– Well. You could become a travelling man. Find yourself a circus to join. See the world. Send me some postcards to put up in the bar and impress people with my connections.

– Is the world a better place than Morecambe then, Paddy?

– Well, I believe it’s bigger. And there are no doubt fewer donkeys. Some people say it’s a small world, of course. But, I wouldn’t like to have to paint it.

The next day Cy locked the door of Eleven Pedder Street and took a train to the city of Liverpool, then took a hire carriage out to the docks, where he met with an acquaintance of Paddy Broadbent behind the dripping dolly crane. The woman sold him counterfeit passport and papers and permits, rolling the money received into the handle of her umbrella and never looking Cy in the face. Then he bought a third-class ticket, with the last of Reeda’s money, on a ship bound for America.

The
Adriatic
was a four-mast, four steam-engine, Harland & Wolff built monster. She’d run the Atlantic for twenty-five years since her Belfast birth, ferrying immigrants, cargo and the wealthy backwards and forwards to the new world, when she wasn’t vacationing in the Mediterranean, and she’d seen every kind of weather. She’d held Russians and Polish Jews, Lithuanians and Czechoslovakians, who first made passage through the North Sea and took a train to reach her, and thousands of Irish Catholics who took steamers from their native ports to Liverpool docks. She held oil, and coal, the belongings of many nations, and occasionally lowing, bleating cattle. The rich luxuriated in her polished dining rooms, or the indoor pool, the Turkish bath, while the poor were sent down towards the lower decks, near her two propellers, where the noise of her motion was mature and continuous. She was the last of the Big Four vessel quartet run by White Star liners, a fine old lady retired in her later years now to the summer transatlantic passage. In May of 1933 Cyril Parks boarded her, one year before the Cunard–White Star merger, one year before she would be laid up permanently then sold to the Japanese and broken up for parts. To Cy she was magnificent, simply because she was whole and moving. He’d seen so many battered, wrecked and ravaged vessels out at Ward’s Ship-breakers – they looked like noble prehistoric beasts bonded and tortured – that the
Adriatic
was miraculous in her capacity and condition. At first her groans and internal knocking and the noise of her robust metallic sashaying left him uneasy, for it seemed that parts of the structure were unhappy in their bolted proximity with each other and were trying to separate. Then it became apparent that she was simply living, her sounds became the music of a giant iron body, breathing, digesting, beating, and it was comforting. The wake behind the ship was tremendous, like Moby Dick spouting water through a blow-hole. Almost three thousand passengers doing seventeen knots had their hats tugged off by the ocean breeze when they came out to grip the railing, to bid farewell to the continent slipping away behind them, or to play shuffleboard on the middle decks. They were citizens of a small city floating out to a promised land.