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.
Outside the shop, in life, Riley was a failure. He was society’s satirical, ugly cousin. He drank, offended, was loud, misunderstood. None could see him at work, and if they did they were too busy undergoing what was painful to notice his sudden clear eye, his steady hand, the hymns of his singing heart. So he turned this wrong territory in on himself, knowing that outside he was an unwelcome conduit, become dislodged from the one room other than a confessional box where the souls of men and women could travel freely. He went without that minister’s identity. He went too far, got obstinate about his courtship of living wrongly and loudly and creating effrontery. Where Reeda milled the good of life, he harvested the ill and took it to market where he shouted out his wares. He believed deeply that he did not like himself, and he liked others less. Just as he did not like the environment of unpainted flesh, and normalcy, life’s plug of decency that tried to stop up the devil’s half of life. And he lived as if trying to siphon out that darker portion, with alcohol, with banter, with bad habits, bad politics, bad language, obloquy, anguish and despair.
— Not that I would, love, with a tuss as big as a cathedral my organ’s play would seem too small. Set me up again, Paddy. What do you mean you’ve called last orders? I never heard, and what with Miss York Cathedral here you’d think there’d have been an echo.