There were always fellows hanging around Riley’s studio. Men and boys drawn to the base intrigue of the profession, that which it represented, the disreputable image. They were males on the cusp of maturity, or just past where its borders were considered to be, those who wanted an endorsement of their manhood, their tougher qualities, and so they sought out models straddling the rawer end of society with which to affiliate themselves, from which to draw estimation, or perhaps identity. They would last the duration of Riley’s tolerance, or until his curt humour, his abuse, became unworthy of the thrill of association with the town’s best and most infamous tattoo artist. Until the myth of butchery and colouring skin was exploded for them or until professionally damaged flesh was no longer violence enough and trouble took them someplace new.
At heart Riley was a solitary, and though he was open to flattery, to appreciation of his showmanship, he did not require crowds to conduct business. In each of the other shops in town similar hangers-on might have been found; they amplified and reinforced the proprietor’s ego, his position as noncomformist hard man. They might be turned by the owner’s hand or barking command and aimed at potential troublemakers, the inevitable brawling, like the big dogs employed to guard the fairground rides from thieves and travelling gypsies out of season. But at Riley’s they served no such purpose. There was little titillation for them beyond the art. The curtain remained mostly closed when Eliot Riley was working. He himself waded in to any turbid situations, to break up fights, to threaten those angling for a scuffle, he did not need mercenary goons at his disposal. But he let the young men sit, two or three at a time, in the outer rooms of the building. For reasons that Cy could never completely grasp, his employer’s shop became host to a variety of scar-faced adolescents and potentially rough young men. Fighters, energetic loafers. Lads not unknown to the local constabulary and the courts. Dirty-faced, unshaven and hatless, they hung about. They had hair that suggested the slip from maternal care, or conventional pride, or employed and codified appearance, into near poverty and reckless self-opinion, the absence of standards. Occasionally an old seadog hung about for a week or so too before the character moved on to another out-of-season coastal town where obscurity and initial pity would bring him luck, drink, and while the vagrant was there Riley might be generous with a quarter-bottle of rum in passing. But the youths were always a guaranteed feature.
In this matter Riley displayed an uncharacteristic flexibility. He was not one for gangs or social gatherings, least of all those to which he was centrally located: it leached too greedily the black soil of his integrity. He was by nature a separatist, contrary, one who cut away from crowds in opinion, often for the sake of belligerence itself. Cy knew his own relations with the man to be in all likelihood a fluked and fashioned attempt to preserve what slim achievement or prowess the man saw in himself, ego clambering up from the chaos of his personality. For Eliot Riley, without his equipment in his hand, found his own company barely agreeable. Neither did he aspire to surround his too-often failing esteem with doting minions, as if for reassurance, those who might raise him up as the emperor of an underworld they gloried. He did not need these man-boys. But for the ill-bred idlers he seemed to find reserves of uneasy, almost familial permission. Some nights they were rewarded with the best of Riley’s banter, his winning bluff, an inclusive, Faginish greeting.
— Now then, my lads, what’ve y’got for me tonight?
To which there would be a chorus of eager, earnest reply. A fledgling effort to win the man over with a tale about some kind of injurious endeavour.
— Not a lot, nowt, not much really. Garry got his hand cut in a scrap with a fucker from Lancaster.
— Did he now. Well isn’t that a pretty story?
Other times they endured Riley’s pettiness along with Cy: a thrown vial of ink if business was slack, staining what was probably one of only two shirts belonging to the recipient, or silence, his empirical reducing of them all to the level of furniture.
They mulled about smoking and looking at the walls as back after back, shoulder after bicep, became coloured and etched to the sound of a motorized needle. Drinking was only permitted behind the curtain, from Riley’s stash, not in the waiting area. They knew this rule and did not break it. While the back room was kept warm, the outer room which passed as a waiting area where the flash adorned the walls was cold-Cold enough to dissuade all but the hardiest, most persevering from loitering. It was almost as if temperature was a test for endurance and admission. At any point, Riley could clear them out with a few curt words and that elaborately flickering eyelid. There was never any denying his potency within his own rooms, though the boys must have known he was not consistently god-like, was mortal in the public houses and bar rooms of Morecambe; they must have seen him softened on the tarmac and wooden piers of the towns at weekends. Stripped of swagger and royal-ruffian demeanour. Stripped of his money-clip and his clear vision in one eye for a week.
Eventually they did not try to woo Riley with tales of bravado to elicit admiration, affection or for qualification, a right to be present, at least not by a second or third visit when they knew it to be useless. Nor did they try for camaraderie with Cy, he was a lesser being in the scheme of things and as there was little paternal investment shown by the owner towards him they must have supposed that he was not a means by which to infiltrate the greater man. So the boys would sit shivering and smoking in twos or threes, staring down clients that entered the studio as if they were subdemons on the periphery of Hades, whose purpose was no more than to create a gargoyled atmosphere, more watchful and implicit and slightly unpleasant than it was a genuine threat. Many were already tattooed, and then better worked on by Eliot Riley, often displaying substandard, rough marks on their necks and hands so that Cy knew they had been to other less fussy and capable tattoo artists. Or they had tried to mark themselves, the self-inflicted rudimentary efforts done in school detention rooms or in the company of other street pals, during youthful misadventures. When they could afford it, and sometimes when they could not, Riley tidied them up, redressed old wounds, drained septic injuries, and added newer, doctored motifs, all the while scolding them for their past errors. There was something to be said for their loyalty to each other. If one lad was employed his wages might furnish a mate with a fresh tattoo. And though Riley was a stickler for payment, with these boys he often worked on a system of exchange and barter. A bag of tools for the scythed grim reaper or the death-before-dishonour badge. It was a relationship Cy found hard to comprehend. And only Riley might accept payment in kind, for Cy to consider it with any of his school friends was out of the question. Morris and Jonty were permitted in to the studio only in the capacity of paying customers, an opportunity which they never took.