Riley insisted on a drink before work, every day, as Cy found out during this first hour of the man’s company.
— To relax the hand and oil up the humour. Men like humour from a tattoo artist, to put them at ease. Lesson number one, cut up the tension before the skin, sonny, that’s a free lesson ‘cause you’ve not give me an answer to my offer yet. Two pints please, Paddy, best make it ale for junior.
The barkeep served them and continued wiping. Riley paid for his own drink and jerked his head to the side towards the barman for Cy to take care of his own payment. As luck would have it, Greene had given him his wages that afternoon, so he was not short of money. He reached into his pocket and set several coins on the bar, not knowing how much the cost of a drink was. The barman took his due and left the rest, a tug of a smile pulling at the corner of his bearded mouth.
— First pint a man imbibes he should have paid for off his own back with wage from honest work. Eh? Isn’t that right, Paddy? Paddy Broadbent, Cyril Parks. Oh, and listen lad, call me Riley. Eliot was my mother’s worst idea. Cheers.
— Cyril was my mother’s worst idea.
Cy attempted some humour of his own, being somewhat nervous about the man’s company and about venturing in to his first ever pint of ale.
— Don’t bad-mouth your mam, boy. She’ll not take kindly to hearing about it.
Cy’s damp, fledgling banter dried up. Riley made him uneasy and charmed him at once, and it was a hangman’s charm of the kind that keeps the crowd nervously enthralled. Cy might have left earlier than he did but for the man’s compelling combination, that and the sense he had stepped across a threshold with this individual, which joined them in a rebels’ pact of some variety. Four drinks into the afternoon Riley’s lessons were expanding, philosophically, and Cy was feeling a very dull and blurrish head on him, trying to keep up with his employer’s pace. The trade was changing, Riley insisted, wasn’t what it should be. Some bad characters were getting in on it. He didn’t elaborate on what exactly constituted a bad character, and Cy was left wondering what murkier levels lay beneath Riley himself who elicited notoriety for his faith and his founding, and who had a reputation of practising his craft on the severed heads of farmyard animals. It was those without a calling that Riley scorned, those for whom the profession was about self-inflation, braggery, and big-man’s sport, those who relished the coarse top coat of it all. They were scrapers, scratchers and scoundrels, he was an artist through which anomalous human messages were conveyed.
As stout gave way to spirit, Riley proceeded on to personal matters. There was no way Cy should consider him a father figure, that was absolutely clear. Not unless his mother could be brought into the equation.
— Fine legged woman, your mother, I saw her at the fishmonger’s last Thursday buying cod for her guests at the hotel. A good ankle on her. Oh, yes. A fine woman.
Spitting laughter from the man. He went on with the conversation again, while the room sailed out to sea a little further for Cy and he swayed on his stool. No. Riley did not need the obligation of a son, not even a part grown-up and useful one. This was business, open and shut. He had seen Cy’s work at the printers, his hand was fair. Fair was flattery in his book, he’d say no more than that. Riley thought it unfortunate and somewhat foolish not to bestow upon the world his extraordinary gift when he passed away, at this juncture the man left off for a moment, crossed himself profoundly and then in reverse, kissed the back of his wrist and took a lengthy swill of drink. He’d been considering an apprentice for a time now. Found one, potentially. That was that. Death did not scare him, by the way, no. All death would do was secure his place in history as the considerable artist that he was, the way Van Gogh’s life was celebrated after he’d lived it out in poverty. Had Cy heard of Van Gogh? And as far as he was aware he was not up for that prize soon, he did not have a dicky ticker, nor a tricky dicky, spitting laughter, so there was little rush in the matter of bequeathed craftsmanship and genius endowed. Cy should find himself some patience, maybe by the summer he’d be ready to help out with the barrage of holiday-makers wanting tattoos, oh yes, barrage, for his was not a slender occupation. And Riley was ready to teach. Because there came a point in every man’s life …
The offer was not illustrious. Not overly tempting or pitched all that well. At this point, Eliot Riley hadn’t entirely sold Cy on the profession. He still had not made it clear exactly why Cyril Parks was his chosen target and Cy was not informed that Riley had visited the print shop on Strickland Street a couple of times when he was absent with no apparent motive or request for work. What had caught Riley’s eye initially were the bold designs on the wooden signs that hung in the windows to advertise Greene’s service, painted by the boy. The renditions of high-and low-skirted women holding cigarettes, joker faces, bubble lettering and scrolling borders. He had loitered about the shop front, several times, flicking through scripts and letting out the occasional grunt. The work was very good. It described an illustrator who had both imagination and dexterity of hand. He’d seen the boy working through the window, a long loose shank of a fellow, scruffy and soulful, but careful with his ink in his rolled-back shirtsleeve. And he remembered him, remembered him climbing up the shop building, remembered the look on his face, grey-eyed and ash-bark-whittled, like his mother’s. It was a risk for Riley, that surveillance — Greene had seen him in Hagan’s Manufacturing in Lancaster on occasion when both were purchasing supplies of ink, knew him for what he truly was, not the sign painter he professed to be because there was only one in Morecambe Bay, though Greene had thankfully not made mention, suppliers could get shy in their support of the tattooing industry, or downright vicious. Discretion aside, Reginald Greene would not want him in the print shop. That would suggest appreciation, friendship, or secondary distribution of ink — ink, the only thing Eliot Riley and Reginald Greene had in common other than a masculine set of tackle! Their difference as great as collaborating with the living compared to working with the dead. So Riley had waited for the busier moments and was quick about his perusal of Cyril Parks’s work.
Eliot Riley knew he was not popular with many of the businesses in Morecambe, which frowned on the seedier aspects of the town in which they were located, nor the Council, nor the sanitation department, for similar reasons. But that did not alter the fact that in summer the crowds flocked to his shop, the way they flocked to the pie rooms and the ghost-train rides and the ballrooms, wanting to take home an altogether more permanent holiday souvenir. Something they could call their own and never have it taken off them. He was just as much a part of the town’s leisure and entertainment features as the other businesses, and sometimes made better money.
Then the last Saturday of November 1921, a handful of years after meeting the lad, he decided to make his move. He wasn’t sure why he chose that moment over any other. Maybe just because the boy was getting taller and older. Maybe just because he was passing him in the street. As Cy was locking up and leaving work, Riley collared him and said there was a better job for him if he wanted it, better than blocking in signs and calligraphy and being forced to produce insipid, uninspired art. And he took him to the pub where the boy spent near on all his wages on ale and listened to him talk.
Outside the Dog and Partridge two hours later the wind had calmed, having lost the spouse’s quarrel with the sea, and it was replaced by a gentle roar inside Cy’s ears from the merry passage of drink around his body. Riley took hold of him and suddenly became serious. The drawbridge lifted in his face, he clouded over, and he seemed to Cyril, through a pair of eyes that were for once in his life not truly well behaving, incredibly angry. The man appeared thunderous with concentration and premeditation, as if some kind of vendetta were in operation. It was the look of a bully about to strike. The look of a man closed up sentimentally from those he faces and about to pull a trigger. Perhaps it was the broken window, thought Cy, perhaps that was what this meeting had really been all about, though it seemed a little unfair to be holding a grudge this long and Riley had made no mention. He’d seen a pocket full of coin and not claimed compensation.