The Electric Michelangelo (23 page)

– 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.

– For the dead before you here, bless this place. For the lock, turn the key against good sense.

He unpacked his suitcase, it contained five shirts, two pairs of breeches, some shaving soap and his tattoo equipment and he took several long walks around the vicinity. He had a little money left over from the work on the ship, but he would need to find employment soon. And so he set out to explore the options. There were fish markets along the wharf and grocery stores that sold the foods of many nations, shore diners, chop and chow mein restaurants, barbershops and tackle huts. Bridges were being built and cobblestones were being uprooted to widen roads. When he looked into other dwellings in the neighbourhood he could see economical furnishings and delightful attempts to bend possessions into art, normalcy into creativity. Or perhaps there was in this country a new, incidental aesthetic to a coat hanging on a stand, a hat hung on a peg, the mosaic made against the wall from shadows of items on a table reaching too far, which he had not been aware of previously. The big houses on Lundy’s Row contained beautiful stained-glass fixtures that warmed the faces of their inhabitants. He enjoyed looking in people’s windows, he liked it even better than the infectious, inclusive conversations of neighbours on their stoops and in their gardens across the borough. It gave him a sense of serendipity, that here after all were other humans living in proximity, coincidentally and fully, and so for a time he was able to borrow the density of their lives to fill in his whittled-out own.

The building where he lived was old by local standards, not as old as the brownstones further into the district, but it was already shambolic, as if used thoroughly by its successive residents. Its bricks were crumbling and spreading apart, and there were several long fissures in the dull marble of the foyer floor. The structure seemed as if it had once been quite grand and rather than keep up with the times it had gone gently the way of a stubborn aristocratic decline. Harder times had come its way with the influx of more and more immigrants, lowlier tenants with menial occupations had moved in as nicer buildings along Voorhies went up. It had been divided further into smaller units, as a government under pressure, and yet the building held on to a proud grace, and its tenacity did not go unnoticed by Cy. It was built five stories high in the shape of the letter H and at night there was cinema in each corner of the structure made from the light of lamps projected on to the wing walls and the casters of people, revealing the contents and dramas of each living quarter opposite. Cy was granted access into the lives of strangers as they went about their evening business, before they drew the curtains. A kiss as two silhouettes met, a soup tureen placed in front of an elderly man, an ironing board pulled out, fastened, and a bottle of starch set upright as laundry was attended to.

Not many of his neighbours were known to him, beyond what habits and transactions the echoing pipes and slamming doors conveyed, the calls to each other in the hallway – Hey, Larry, get me some coffee, dark, twelve sugars – and the nocturnal cinematography generously provided. There were intriguing pieces of evidence which hinted at who might live inside. Letters in the foyer mail slots told him their names. Bierdronski. Vellum. Mr and Mrs Berger. Odours came from under the doors, cooking, cigar smoke, even the rich smell of the English countryside was detectable some days outside one of the first floor residences, number 104, and every time he passed by Cy paused momentarily, confused, enchanted, perhaps even a touch homesick for God knew what bucolic portion of his nation. Once he had even stopped a few minutes in the corridor, determined to define the fragrance. He bent close to the apartment door, closer than he had been to it ever before, close enough to qualify as a rudeness. It was a sweet ripe smell, stronger for his attendance, that was redolent of the marshes and the moors and the outer lying land around the bay. The scent of newly turned fields and useful earth and livestock. Inside there was a faint shuffling sound, but as you could never rely on the building’s erratic acoustics for authenticity, he was unsure if the noise was actually coming from the chamber beyond his ear. Then he heard a masculine snort, as if somebody inside was very sick with a deep chest cold. There was the rasping sound of a person perhaps breathing with immense difficulty just on the other side of the door or perhaps rubbing a beard along the wall, almost next to his ear. But he did not knock and introduce himself.