The hangers-on arrived a few hours into the evening, alone like strays or in their small packs. If they were drunk they did not show it. If the curtain was left open they would watch the needle when Riley worked, entranced, as if it sewed the very secrets of virility and aggression into the skin. They browsed endlessly through flash, sifting through it for the best, death-maw images. Their conversation was amateur, imbued with the pressure to impress each other. Or it was lazy, lackadaisical. Eventually the dynamics within any one group would alter. Tension fermented. Habits and the haunt grew old. New thrills were required. A fight or a weariness with this association or a graduation into higher crime would see them gone. Or sensing that things were on the turn, like milk about to curdle, Riley would one night unlock the door and when the boys came by he’d stand in the doorway and refuse them entry, bullying one by grabbing a collar at random and throwing the brawny youth back into the street. As if lit by the sudden grounded rage of an abusive father. By then the group had accomplished the discredit it had set out to gain. And they were granted recognition for the anti-merits of such an inclement alliance by the community. By its nicer end, the authorities and toffs and round circles of the town, the ladies’ auxiliary, the big hotel owners, who considered them not unlike maggots in an infected carcass.
Cy had gone from a life of female, maternal company and influence to something thoroughly male and, as if to signify that, Eliot Riley tattooed a ship on the chest of Cyril Parks with the name of his dead father along the rigging. The piece was completed in one long and painful sitting, as if it were another test set up by Riley. It was as if the man could not bear to inscribe Reeda Parks’s name in death, just as he could not quite validate his affection during her life, and he became bristled with anger and refused when he was asked to by her lad. And so with the use of mirrors and patience and sheer will, Cyril Parks wrote Reeda’s name on himself permanently one night as soon as he felt capable of doing it justice. If he’d ever had any perspective on the female brain, thanks to his mother, within the following years he felt he’d lost it. Cy marvelled that any women made it through the door of Eleven Pedder Street, let alone stayed put in the waiting room until it was her turn in the chair. But they came, endured some crude and saucy confrontations in the waiting room, and often gave as good as got. They came not infrequently either, that was one of the best kept secrets of the industry, that the inches of female bodies walking around in the street were as colourful as they were under their slips and girdles. They chose smaller motifs than their male counterparts, in discreet places, their thighs, their bellies, their lower backs, which would never be shown naturally in public, like a man’s tattooed forearm when the sleeve was rolled back for toil, or the pride of a sailor’s knuckles. For them the matter was entirely personal. Only one or two were bolder, full-body tattooed, women from the circus when the carnivals rolled through Morecambe. For the others it was flowers and swallows and the names of lovers. They were guaranteed proper handling. Riley, for all his boorishness about the town enjoyed the professional respect of those who valued his skill. He was known to be a safe-scraper. And they knew that once their clothes were off, behind the curtain, there was no danger of impropriety with the man unless they wanted there to be; he had about him the air of someone so imbued with the minutiae of his profession, as with a doctor, a solicitor, a business man, that the weight of it grounded him, and won the genuine confidences of others. For this and other tradesman’s foibles, the frequent exchange of ink, the sterility of needles and rags for cleaning, Riley earned the reputation of a purist, strangely professional in an industry not truly applied to the snobbery and expected comportment of corporate, higher-class society. So that while his sloppy drinking habits and his loud bombastic mouth earned him the title of fool and drunkard, his skills, his standards, afforded him a constant supply of clients, including ladies in their heels and hoods, felt hats, crinoline petticoats, boas and brooches and occasionally in fox fur wraps.
But oh, they were hard to fathom, and Cy felt remote from them now. They were creatures of extraordinary endurance and unpredictability. Riley was right, they could smile through the treatment as if it were no more than a loofah brush massage. As if having marched straight to the shop from their covens. They were not as inclined to grip the wooden wall shackle for their discomfort as the men were, externalizing pain. Instead they held their own hands tightly, as if intent on retaining the sensation, their bodies became continuous units like the symbol for infinity. Their reaction to the work done on them was as varied as it could be extreme. Tears, hysterical laughter, absolute silent obduracy, quiet lunacy, resolve, sudden terror, mania, lasciviousness, sentiments from all the filler layers, all the fuller levels between defined emotions, like the white pulpy substance found inside the tough green skin of a split reed. A man would not do it that way, he would be happy, blasé, angry or bluffing something. So there was always that sense, that feeling that the female customers were closer to the mystery of the trade that Riley maintained was sacred and central. Nor could Riley crack them in his personal life, for all his keen eye into the caves and fissures of people’s minds, his forcipial ability to guide out an image or symbolic rendition of their traits if they were stuck or stalling amid the flash.
It was at the Pedder Street parlour that Cyril Parks graduated from the blue-balled frustrations and unconsummated altercations of sexual prelude to the real thing with women. Some of them came into the shop with their loins already aflame, and either he or Riley would be offered their rumps on heat if there was enough privacy. Some considered it essential gratuity. They came to have fire drawn on their white bodies, or flowers around their nipples, their nipples extended pinkly like rose petals across the breast, felines crouching near their vulvas. The hints of coitus. There was that aspect to the profession. The graphic, creamy rich slick of it, its spermary and ovum character. Marine life on an inner thigh, a snake resting coiled on a buttock or slithering into the shadow-crease of a bum. The base symbols of fucking, the vividly erotic. Some women came to inscribe their risqué nature on their bodies, to elicit wanton behaviour from the viewer or to declare their own, and they would desire Cy afterwards, being already mostly naked, being ready for more than the needle’s entry. The last scratch of pain leaving behind only sore proof of lust as it departed. Some of them wanted to see it through to the gasping, shuddering, juddering very end. So there was sex like gauze to cover their colourful wounds.
— Do you know what this swallow means, darling? Can you guess it? Well, I’ll show you. Take your trousers down. Come on, you’ll not be sorry. That’s right. Well, look at you, all truncheon meat and no helmet, constable. You better sit for this, hadn’t you?
Or they would take his hand and place it between their legs, wait for his response, his eyes complying, then they’d mould his cock into a pleasing shape like potters at the wheel, glaze him hard with the spit of their hot, kiln-oven mouths, so that he was in a state where they could use him. And some of them he liked, over and above the sucking and screwing, and he would have courted them were it not for the rigmarole of having to introduce them to his boss, the certainty of his malevolent interference. Riley, at his lewdest and most sordid, said not to be fooled by caresses and kisses, polite and tender exchanges, the lick of a tuss and the sweet discovery of that spot which got both parties banging together like shutters in a hurricane. He said that some women just liked the bite and the tear and the spite of tattooing and of coupling, that it was pain which got them wet and wanting. And if Cy was going to handle these ones in the parlour when Riley wasn’t around, randy and mucky and germ-ridden as they may be, he’d have do away with shy passes and gentle thrusting and considerate loving. He’d have to slap them and grip them and fist them and turn them around dog-mounted to blunt himself in, or put it in their arses.