Though they came less often than the men to Eleven Pedder Street, females carried with them intrigue, life’s oddest embolus in their blood, and they undid the work’s simplicity. Cy tried his best to wind his way through the skein grounds surrounding them but often felt lagging and lost.
Once, there was a woman crying at the back of the building after her work was completed. Riley would not comfort her. For whatever unsympathetic reason, or cruelty, or voyeuristic detachment, he did not feel like he had enough invested in the situation to warrant it and he did not approach her. Instead, he went about cleaning the ink vials and left her be to soggy up her handkerchief with grief and snot. Human canvas could never be relied on for rational behaviour, especially not the female variety, Riley always said. She was sorry she’d had it done perhaps, thought Cy, that tiny black-red rose flower above the navel. A thumbnail’s length above it, Riley’s broad, stained nail the measure. Her face was all bunched together and full of concentration, as if crying were a matter that should be attended to with effort and determination, as if she was making herself do it. This Cy had never understood, whenever he’d seen it in women. They could turn to it with passion and dedication. The quality of adamant self-destruction at the back of it unsettled him, the way that people would risk against themselves, double up, self-destruct. For it seemed a betrayal of the worst kind, and he always felt he should try to stop the rebellion. Whether it was out of pity or penalty, he knew you only had to have your dying mother take your hand before taking the hands of weeping women became a reflex action. Not so for Riley. It seemed he felt nothing at all and he could watch the upset of others for hours while smoking, like being at the cinema. Or maybe one part of him was mentally slapping their hysterical faces. Cy had heard a few of the women Riley brought home with him reduced to this condition, their furious wailing seemed only to intensify through the walls when met with his executioner’s insensate reaction, his void of emotion, his catatonic stance. Then there was the smashing of breakable objects if something portable could be found to aid their performance, as if torment increased in volatility until it was met with the proper appreciation, as if that was a given emotional equation. Like upping the stakes in poker until a hand was called. And Cy could sympathize with them, could he not, for all the occasions he himself wanted to roar at Riley to be more human when met with his outstanding cruelty, as human as those who had shaped Cy’s life so far and set the kindly standard.
But this one woman, now flowered just above her bellybutton, and still open-bloused so that her quaking belly was seen, seemed so strangely broken open when it was done that there were vast spaces of confusion Cy could not cross. And she was Riley’s customer, and it was the big man’s shop. If Riley could not go to her in comfort how could he? Tired of the noise, or perhaps impatient for the next customer, Riley finally spoke to her.
— Stop it. No need for all this fuss. You’re just being silly. Stop it.
Her eyes and her shaking head said she could not.
— But of course you can. All you need to do is stand and pick up your overcoat, love, go home and pretend it never happened. You’ll get used to it. Look, you’ve a mole almost as big under your tit and there’s that mark up above your fanny that looks far worse! What’s that from? They operate on your tubing?
This was Riley’s tenth commandment argument — thou shalt get used to it. Thou shalt not pick thy scab was number one. The other eight were entirely changeable. New drama-provided marks became old at some stage and ceased to offend, or to shock in the mirror. Surgical scars, by the onset of old age, were as familiar and bodily incorporated as a limb. The stretches of childbirth, like the lines on a brow, were simply mementos indicating the passage of life. Silky-looking bullet pools — there’d be a few of those in the shop, the business drew a crowd that was not unacquainted with attempted murder — were only a little bigger than vaccination scars or strawberry birthmarks. Tattoos could be briefly upsetting. But eventually they became ordinary components on the human anatomy. People went through life like well-handled jugs, collecting chips and scrapes and stains from wear and tear, from holding and pouring life.
Perhaps jolted by the man’s indelicacy, the woman started talking.
— Wednesday I’m to be married. This Wednesday as a matter of fact.
Riley was unimpressed.
— What kind of silly day is that for a wedding, love?
— Oh, I know. They’re busy Saturdays until Christmas.
It was Sunday afternoon. Still disaffected, Riley nodded, probably thinking she’d be accustomed to it by her marriage day. The woman’s eyes had finished leaking but remained thick with water like bottle bottoms.
— It’s funny, isn’t it? How you might put something breakable in a place where you know it’ll likely fall. My husband will like it, the tattoo. And, I didn’t want him to. That’s the thing of it. I didn’t want him to like it.
Then, composed, she stood, picked up her overcoat and left the shop. Wishing what exactly never happened Cy did not know. This trade, he thought and not for the first time, was located at the darker end of town in many more ways than one. And in the event of being stumped by human obscurity, he decided, you just had to let it pass you by.
Then one day Cy held the electric needle in his own hand and before he knew it ten years had passed by him! Ten years of Eliot Riley. Ten years in a storm of his behaviour and without the safe harbour of his mother. He had eventually stopped growing taller. He had learned to fight and evict brawlers from the vicinity, and to negotiate with the enemies of his employer. He had been enjoyed by women in the back room of Pedder Street, had seen some of his friends marry and produce children, he had become older, had become firmer, he had forgotten the exact face of Reeda, he had not visited the photograph of his father. And he could not remember what his first ever sold and paid for tattoo had been a picture of. A dragon. A butterfly. A heart. It didn’t matter. The shop now had neon lights around its doorway, to attract passers-by, though still no signs or monikers or gimmickry, for Riley was of an older bent that did without the new jive and jazz-coat trappings. It was in any case well-known that there were two unrelated freehanders working side by side behind separate curtains within. Like partners without equality. Like father and son without the intimate connection. But two freehanders under one roof. Now that was a rarity. Amid all the professional rivalry and the slander and the battle of one ego and one reputation raging against another, in a trade where tattoo artists still acquired sheets of images subversively from each other and crossed out the designer’s signature for their own, such collaboration was rare indeed. Eliot Riley had never suggested he move on, perhaps liking the position of authority of being the Pedder Street shop owner, and still the one they truly came for. And Cy had never chosen to leave, though he had the skills to set up on his own and frequently he had the bloody-minded will to do it.
He had grown to love the scent of skin. The way it told him something of the person in the chair. Their basic character, their occupation, their choice of artificial perfume spritzed on to that flexing medium with which he worked. The smell of skin was like the smell of an oil-primer. It signified the beginning of art. He had one leg entirely dedicated now to the hunt for a blue ink that was stable, he had messed up the appendage so badly under Riley’s duress that it didn’t really matter, his vanity was abandoned, and it became smudged and smeared with broken veins as pigment after pigment proved impossible to use. Twice he had mildly poisoned his blood, his ankle bone becoming manky with sores. The challenge of blue ink had become one of his inherited frustrations, passed down from the man who’d taught him how to paint, and how to hate, and, in conjunction, how, for his own sanity’s sake to save any piece of gilded faith or instrument of celebration from the wreckage of the relationship that he could. At the start of every illumination festival, as the gales blew the bulbed garlands out to sea, Riley would say the same thing to him with an aggressive humour.