— Late. Inside, lad, sharpish. I’d about give up on you, you little bugger.
Cy glanced at the two young men in the waiting area, who were watching him, the sleeper now awake and out from under his hat, unsmiling, bored or prejudicial or curious. There was a sense of vague challenge about them, so Cy knew right there and then what kind of environment this profession was surrounded by or founded on, what kind of landscape would be denied or chosen that night. He moved past them into the back room and the curtain was drawn screechingly closed again. Inside it was much warmer. This half of the room contained a coal fire, which was gently smoking. Damp rags had been hung about it and the enclosure felt soft-boiled like a warm vegetable. Humid, like Cy imagined the tropics to be. A man was sitting reversed on a chair, with his legs on either side of it, and he was gripping two wooden handles fixed to the wall. A cigarette holding a long, strained orange tip came from between his lips. He was naked from the waist up and sweating profusely. Above his belt was a patch of highly irritated red skin and inside that was half a hooded cobra snake, red, green, black, and yellow, its tail beginning along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column, the finished body coiled round a dagger that ran the first length of his backbone. Cy could tell that the hooded neck and head would be drawn to the right of the dagger’s handle, there was a pale grey stencil mark there to indicate a border, at the point where the opposite depression became a flank. On the table next to Eliot Riley and his now-quiet tattoo equipment were four vials of ink. Riley gave him a look that told him he was expected to behave himself, though what behaviour was warranted Cy did not exactly know, probably humility, because he was now inside the monarch’s personal chamber. The man straddling the chair looked at him also, a hooded look of pure, unadulterated, knew-his-own-venom superiority.
Eliot Riley began talking then, a speedy flow of vocabulary, which wove jokes into stories into opinions into questions.
— … I’ll tell you this for nowt, when the lucky bastard woke up and her sister was there as well, what do you think he said? ‘Susan I’ve always said your family was a good lot‚’ he said, ‘but I can’t for the life of me remember where I put that fucking ring just now. Perhaps the pair of you can remind me.’ And then her and her sister top and tailed the fella …
It was performance talk. Talky-talk. Some of the best Cy had ever heard. Like the vendors on the promenade selling wares to the hustled masses, but better, detailed, tailored, or as if a many-tongued demon had possessed the teller. And Riley was sweating as he talked, almost as much as the man in the chair was sweating. A bottle of open whisky on the floor between their feet. Somewhere in the midst of all the dialogue the electric hurring noise switched back on and the needle was inked, lowered down on to the snake’s decapitated body and it began to do its work. Riley dipped his needle, scratched the back, and wiped the surface. Over and over. All the while looming the conversation, pausing to let his customer reply if he was going to, using those words to complement his own swarthy, rough-thread tapestry. Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.
— No more whisky now or you’ll bleed too much.
Dip, etch, wipe. Talky-talk.
— … in the alley and he had her legs round his waist and he was giving her one when she said she had to go. You know, go. So he said he dropped her and she went right there in front of him, said she didn’t care …
It seemed that Riley had almost forgotten Cy’s presence. Until, about five minutes into the work and mid-snake-muscle, he glanced back and gestured with his head — an impatient jerk to the side for Cy to approach. Then what Eliot Riley did was bring Cyril Parks in very close to the lower back being tattooed on the chair while the customer gritted his teeth and continued sweating. Cy saw fine lines being set in under a slight wash of blood. There was close black hatching, diagonal upon diagonal, done in a way to cheat the eye into a shadow, into artificial dimension. More water than blood was the leakage really, a strange combined fluid that reminded him of something else, the Bayview’s discharge basins with their wet-farmed contents. The customer’s knuckles protruded yellowy from under his hands’ skin as he gripped the wooden railing, which creaked a fraction under the strong fingers. Riley paused for whisky. After ten more minutes the customer stood wearing art. The snake and dagger flexed on his back, weeping a little as he bent for his shirt. The man had added to his body in a way that was brave and timeless and beyond adornment. No argument Riley could have made in the street or the bar would have been more convincing and he had known it, and Cy knew then why Riley had wanted him to come see, why it was important, boy.
— It’ll bleed a little colour, give it a day or two of rest. Now, it’s not a wound, so don’t treat it as such. Don’t bathe it for a while, give it a chance to scab up. Don’t soap it ‘til the scab comes off and don’t put pure cotton right against it ‘til it’s dried out. That’s important, it’ll wick the ink out, make it duller. And listen to me now. Let that scab come off of its own accord! If you’re not happy with the lines come back. You will be, but if not come back, I’ll work you right — if the scab’s been messed with, mind, I’ll know and there’ll be no alterations done free.
Riley’s words sounded half wise-man’s lecture, half witch-doctor’s ramble. And part scold, and part commandment. Then he glanced at Cy and asked the man to stay on for a minute, he needed a witness so this ludicrous goggle-eyed boy wouldn’t have him arrested for perversity. The customer nodded, took a permissive slug of whisky and rolled the tension out of his jaw with his hand. Then Riley stripped himself out of his clothes and boots, until he was completely naked, and he stood proud and unfocused like a glass-eyed, taxidermy tiger at the edge of the jungle. Except he wasn’t naked. He was tightly dressed with ink. The section of gut seen earlier that day had only been the tip of a vast and ornamental iceberg. Riley’s good, smooth, Welsh-looking skin appeared not to have many borders remaining on it. He was an assemblage of abstract patterns and cartoon images, reptiles, birds, dragons, like a fishing net cast into the ocean and catching a bizarre school of fantastic objects. Black lines courted and controlled colour, right up to the hilt of his genitals. His elbows, the backs of the knees, every raised plateau of muscle was taken. He turned his arms as if twisting two invisible dials in front of him for Cy to see the complete designs ringing them. The left arm contained some kind of Eden, the right was as full of animals as Noah’s ark. He lifted a leg and along the sole of his right foot was a passage of writing, the words too tiny to be read. Cyril Parks was speechless. He had never seen a living thing so camouflaged with art.
After he had dressed his painted, taproot body and dismissed the customer, for he had already taken payment from him prior to starting, Riley claimed every piece on his body, either by design or executed by his own hand, and he made as if to cuff Cy’s head when the enquiry was made, more in earnest than jest, how and by what contortion exactly Riley had managed to tattoo the rose garden blooming down his back. And true to the brash assertion of being a three-dimensional master and genius that Riley had made on Strickland Street that afternoon in the rain, one or two pieces had tried to step outwards off his naked body, right off his body into life. Like magic, like an illusion, or a trick of light, or some other unspecified miracle, one or other of which, that night in late November, according to Cyril Parks there seemed to be.
Reeda was not overly pleased to hear about the prospect of her son’s new apprenticeship. In fact she simmered hotly while she spoke like a pan of broth left on the hob too long, her words beginning to stick together. He was fifteen years old. There was his schooling to consider. And his after-study work at the print shop. Eliot Riley was definitely a drinker, she knew that to be true of him. Those partial to drink were hiding faults and dishonesty, they were sloppy souls, even the ones with pleasant manners and fine noses. Reeda Parks was an honest if occasionally private woman who did not appreciate those with untidy dispositions. That Reeda had noticed Riley’s nose, and that Riley had commented upon his mother’s ankles did not pass Cy by without first clipping him like a buggersome fingernail on the back of an earlobe. Her answer sounded dangerously like a no.