— They won’t be asking us to switch on the lights this year, will they boy? They won’t be asking us to put on our ties and dinner jackets and make a speech and throw that switch.
As if at every annual cusp Riley was giving Cy the opportunity to bow out from the underbelly operation. Or as if he was confirming Cy’s position at the helm of first-mate to the captain of a perpetually sinking ship. There was something unnerving and continually harrowing about the man’s embrace of pessimistic forces, how he thrived on conflict and ugliness, the malodorous aspects of life. Riley continued to manhandle people, to drink, to fight, even as he got slower, more pitiful, and less able to find ways to make other men want to challenge him. His hair greyed under his woollen hat. His good skin wrinkled. But his hand remained steady, and if he missed alcohol in the daytime his body did not show it by jerking and shaking when he needed it to be still. It was the one thing cherished by him — it was his saving grace. His redeeming talent. It countered his sooty mania. Until the inevitable happened, the inevitable opportunity of one longtime rival and his pals, from the bar or from the business, it was never clear, found him drunk or got him drunk and alone and took him to the old abandoned blacksmith’s stable out near Moffat Ravine, waited until he was sober, so that he would be clear with his fate, and laid his right hand on a table. Then another of them produced a claw-iron from a bag and showed it to an ever-resisting ever-raging Eliot Riley. And then he used it. Five gavel hammers for Riley’s guilty life. Five falling claw-iron pistons for his shuttle-bust fingers. Five colours to the pallet of the tattooer’s spectrum — black, red, yellow, for the bruises which took off every nail, above every shattered bone which grew back crooked, green and brown for the gangrene infection which took off his middle digit completely. So that his crippled hand would never hold his equipment with enough dexterity to use it ever again. So that his saving grace was damned.
But first Cy got the needle in his own hand. It happened one morning soon after Reeda’s death when Riley was sleeping late and heavy from the night’s drink, and as Cy was leaving the shop to buy bread a man asked him if he could have work done, and he accepted. He was tired of being told every time he got close to being an artist, to being a fully working tattooist, that some slip, some invisible flaw, some bloody unidentifiable cruel mystery of a failure had discredited him, made him ineligible for promotion, that he had failed Eliot Riley. He was tired of being filled with impotent anger and confusion, or sulking upstairs, tired of the snide, petty arguing, which always ensued from Cy’s failed examination, which the master thrived upon, flaring up to it like an itch that’s scratched.
— Well, I was going to let you start next week but you’ve blown it, lad. I had it all planned, you would have been sitting over there, happy as Larry, with your own kit. You’ve nobody to blame but yourself.
— What did I do wrong? I did fuck all!
— You know what you did. And if you need telling, that just proves what a stupid article you truly are.
Cy brought the customer inside, took the money, and prepared his body exactly as he’d seen Riley do a hundred times. He coloured in his first black-bordered image, bottom corner up to top so as not to smear the transfer, working in a small pool of ink, steadily, interpreting lines beneath it. And how the needle sang when it was put on someone else’s body! Like a tuning fork struck against a piece of wood. An entirely different melody than that made from working on his own leg. And his mind rushed out to all the aspects of chromatic nature, and came back within the image he was making. Whatever that image had been that he didn’t remember, but he did a decent job and the customer was happy. And by the time the man had put his shirt back on Riley was awake and downstairs and watching.
— About time you started pulling your weight around here, lad. Wondered when you’d get your finger out of your arse. Next time use your own chair, that one is mine.
— I don’t have a chair.
— Well best you get to the scrappy’s and buy one. Gun purrs like a cock that’s shooting, doesn’t it?
And then there was another tattoo and another. And fairly soon the electric singing was a familiar song. He went from standard designs to freehand images, though he was only permitted to work if Riley was out of the Pedder Street shop or there was more than one customer waiting at a time, like a young lion guarding a den when the alpha male was away.
What never changed was the voice within Cy’s mind in the moments before he began working, in the brief interval between the removal of clothing from a piece of flesh, administering the cleaning fluid, the grease, and the tactility of human against needle, during which time he would ask a simple one-word question.
— Ready?
And in that small portion of time he was really asking many things. He was seeking, one final, crucial time, an endorsement of the metamorphosis, for which he was in part responsible, and the customer was in part responsible. He was waiting for their signature on a contract they had drawn together, before he also wrote his own in ink. Because some did get up and leave the shop, right at that moment. And some had their faces fall half way through the procedure for they hadn’t truly decided. He might not even always vocalize the question, he might just have assumed they were hearing it, considering it, but always that small amount of time was set aside, an escape route out of the prison, a burning walkway from the flaming pavilion. On the outside it seemed to produce tension, that period of impending discomfort being so very quiet, and Riley continued to berate him for it, saying what he needed to do was talk the customer into comfort.
— Doesn’t matter if you’ve not got one interesting thing to say to them. Make up a story. Tell a joke. Saying nowt to them is like not having songs sung at their funeral or not having a toast at their wedding! Bad form is what it is, lad. It’s just not done.
But it was a doctrine of Cy’s religion, it was his own brand of ceremony. And oddly, there was no real silence in those moments. Not inside Cy’s mind anyway. In those seconds before he started, strange little hymns of thought chorused through his brain. Words that were a last-minute warning, words that were encouraging, or applauding. Like testimonies for those writing their histories on their bodies, because there was no better place for those chapters to be written. For those taking the insignia of the country, who were made of their nation. For those catching the name of the women they loved, who would love her in some permanent way always until they died or forgot her. For those selecting war armour, who would have conflict around them until they were too old and weak to lift a fist and their banners were meaningless. For those destroying and recreating themselves. For those bringing to their skin only that which their heart was capable of making. For those becoming a cipher of meaning. For those being reborn, selecting the organs of their lives, unravelling the probabilities of themselves, and turning away from their invisible, ether-blank souls. So frequently his mind said these things that in the end even he began not to hear it. He just let the silence tell it.