And the most remarkable, though if Cy thought about it perhaps it was somehow fitting, was Riley’s skill for training hawks. He was a part-time falconer, hence his penchant for displaying bird skulls like pieces of art on the mantle. Some family connection or learned relative had granted him membership to this singular game-keeping guild. He had in his time worked at three manor houses in the district, and one in East Yorkshire, riding with the aristocracy as they searched the moors and estate lands for hares and rabbits, and that employment opportunity seemed always to be open, so Cy guessed it was highly specialized. Business needed to be consistently bad for him to do it as he would need to spend guaranteed time during the juvenile months with the bird, weighing it on the leather wrist strap, fitting the tiny ankle brace, easing the hood and helmet on and off the bird until it trusted him to do it without fighting the darkness, during which period trade at Morecambe could suddenly pick up again. And Riley did not like these employers. He scorned their birthrights, their repressions and what they represented to the common man while he took their wages.
The outcome of breaking the outer layer of the bird’s wild nature was by no means certain. Rather than cooperate a bird of prey could will itself to death, Riley told him. They could be the stubbornest buggers, he said with admiration. He took Cy along with him just once on such an excursion. The lord was away from his manor and Riley brought his apprentice down to the mews. He put on a heavy greasy jacket and instructed Cy to be as quiet as he could. In the cage at the outskirts of the estate was a peregrine falcon, which took to Riley’s arm and sat blinking at him, razor strength and precision to its beak. It was as if the tidy, blue-winged bird was no more than an extension of the man himself, when he was focused and sharp and all instinct and energy travelled the length of the arm to one keen and cutting point. Cy felt it was wrong for him to be so close to the creature, it was of another world, defined by the remote levitating laws of a different dimension, and the falcon-gentle also knew this. A shrill cry came from it, like a woman being carved up within her. Its tongue like a beak within a beak, hard and melded and traced with pollen dampness like the lock stamen of an exotic flower. Riley stroked the bird and it turned to him with a look of coy and marginal tolerance. Then he showed Cy how, when you split open the compacted droppings of the bird, you might find tiny rodent skeletons and bones as soft and pliant as feathers inside. And there was something between them then, a lull, like the lowest tide of the year, or a sense of human archaeology. For an hour or two Cy felt untrammelled by loneliness, he felt a sympathy with the man, and his solitude lessened.
But always there were the times of seizure, when thoughtful doctrine and moments of kindness or enlightenment were lost. Times when the man took back every decent thing he issued. Like the sea coming quick up the shore, opaque and silty and fouling, to retrieve its temporary leavings. Cy was no longer just an associate, just an orderly who collected the wandering drunken madman from the piers and alleyways of Morecambe, he was not indulged with satisfactory distance any more. He was Riley’s Boy. He was implicated in his behaviour. The stories that went about town, that bit at Riley’s ragged temper and fanned the flame of belligerence within him, now included Cyril Parks — he was the antidote to all the venom, the one they’d come searching for to talk the man off a half-beaten body and retract the knife nicking a throbbing jugular, or to help Paddy carry the purpling, moaning body from the Dog and Partridge to the rooms above the tattoo parlour, and sometimes to fetch the doctor when Riley was pissing blood. Cy was the tidy, busy suffix by name and then by nature, the coda at the end of all the stories. The story of Riley drunk at the carnival and livid, overturning a float carrying rice-throwers, sending children flying, because the drains of Pedder Street were blocked up with rice and Riley’s pipes were overflowing so he had to see his own shit, he had to smell his own shit, and it was too close to something in him or of him to simply clean it up without roaring down the culprits and blaming them for his stench. And Cy had to talky-talk the mothers away from their primordial fury over their children’s injuries, for they would have lynched the goading, unrepentant Riley, torn him into shreds, he saw it in their faces, had there not been a grey-eyed boy between them, like a single, durable ash tree between two quaking mountains. The story of the fire in 1925, that took away the central pier, a slow fire this time without a helpful blizzard, that meant the looters could first charge through the abandoned buildings over the sea and help themselves to what the owners couldn’t carry, and Riley and six other men sat drinking beer as fast as their oesophagus tunnels could convey it to their stomachs in the Pier bar. Then just Riley, daft with alcohol and alone, pouring another glass of ale as the fire crept past him on the counter, singeing his jacket sleeve, until, hearing that some skinflint idiot was left inside the now-prodigal inferno, Cy ran in and screamed murder at Riley and called him Eliot and hit him for the first time in his jaw to get him to follow him out. Jack-Frost eyes couldn’t quite decide whether to pummel his lackey for laying one on him or shake his hand for the rescue operation as the pier collapsed behind them, so in the end he did neither, just stared at the boy. The story of the General Strike in ’26, when Riley made a point of shutting up the shop, politically, with a banner hung in the window, while all the other businesses scabbed the order, and he went about the town like a proletariat crusader unhooking the horses from their trams and throwing their bells into the ocean, until he was arrested for being a public nuisance. The bail money spent from the sum that Reeda had left her son was never recovered by Cyril Parks from he whom it had saved. And it was more than any wage the man had ever paid him.
The art lessons, if they could be called such a thing, had no formal structure and no chronology. They had decidedly riprap foundations. They came whenever Riley felt like sharing his wisdom, axe-hewn from history and varnished into hard fact-like items by his own resinous, sap-seeping philosophy. How Raphael faked his genius, fooled the world with his too-posed, too-pretty, too-poncy figures, the more refined and idealized he got the more he gave back what the Renaissance had recovered from the Dark-Age graves of mighty empires, namely the accurately imperfect human anatomy. How Dante Gabriel Rossetti went grave robbing to retrieve some poems he had coffined with his lover, because art and desecration were as close as an incestuous brother and sister. How Rembrandt painted his portrait face from adolescence into death and wasn’t afraid to show just what an ugly bugger he had been, because ugly was simply beauty in a place across the river. How Courbet, Gustave Courbet, now there was a rabble-leader, there was a people’s hero, armed with undeniable talent had won his way into the most prestigious gallery in his native country and shocked the whole of France with his masterpiece, The Stone Breakers, as well as if he’d laid his castrated tackle in a dish before Le Salon. How Edouard Manet had put a slut along a sacred icon’s bed, posing her with symbols of her wayward cunt, how he’d cut the childbearing hips off every woman in artistic memory to say that she was pleasure without responsibility, how he’d made a whore out of faithful, chaste tradition. How Caravaggio had painted the portrait of a poor carpenter, possibly his own father, and dared to say that the son of God was surrogated to this old, this broken-bodied, callused-handed worker. And there was Blake with his mutative, folded-together mind and his temporal visions and his careful illustrations of heaven and hell, of tigers and lambs, the opposing hemispheres of humans. These were the things of art. Taken by the rich from the poor, but a poor man’s currency no less. They were beautiful and they were malignant and they were the things of genius.