Often Cy wondered about the night of Riley’s assault, when his mind and faculty were murdered, for it marked the beginning of his death. Cy let his imagination go out to the possibilities of what occurred, he let it haunt him. There might have been a morning hawk above the ravine when the men held him down, moving with some kind of patience through the pale air, a calming tipped-winged movement above him, something to focus on as his eyes came out of their distorted vision shortly before they began. Like a piece of his spirit having got free. Those slow-waking hours between last orders and daybreak, as he waited for his abductors to take of him whatever they were going to take, his throat eventually becoming raw and hoarse with protestation, may have been the most acutely aware hours ever spent by Riley, when he suddenly noticed details like the smell of burning as the dew came on to the moor, or the rings under the feet of insects in an old barrel of water, treading as if with secret knowledge of the water’s masonry. And he might have noticed how a man’s face in barbarity will show traces of compassion even though it is already determined in its fulfilment of cruelty. Or he might have dulled himself away from reality, like some could under the needle in the chair, that numbing oriental style of slumber. Until the sensation of the claw hammer on his skin and bone came, like the purest thing Eliot Riley had ever felt in his life. It might have been purer than even electricity, Cy thought. Riley may have passed out more than once with pain and loss of blood on the four-mile walk back from the scene of his sick trial, his hand doubled in original size and screaming its condition. Cy would never know these things for sure, for he was never told what occurred. All he knew was that Eliot Riley arrived home shortly after the milk had been delivered on the doorstep, with the face of a dead man and his arm strung up inside his coat, looking like mince, looking like tendrils of riverweed when it was revealed. Then he sat down in his wooden chair and fell asleep. As if sleep was the next best thing to admitting defeat.
It took almost a year for Riley to finish dying. After he was sentenced by his assailants, abused, and exiled from his profession, he willed himself dead, like a bird in a cage that will not compromise its nature. He went about it methodically. He would kill himself with drink and depression and starvation. Half a bottle of liquor past possible human consumption a night. As little food as physically manageable before hunger sent him mad and ratching like a badger through the kitchen for scraps. All the melancholy he could summon about him, to eat away at his mind. Where once he had given pathetic assistance to Cy and Paddy when they half-carried him home, shuffling his feet, grunting for them to stop so he could vomit, now he was a dead-weight that often had to be dragged along the road and pavement. No more useful than a sack of potatoes. And if they weren’t careful he’d leave his head back and choke on his own sick and Cy would have to grope about in his soupy mouth for his missing tongue. There were times when the washroom above Eleven Pedder Street was such a mess with blood and shit and vomit and all three together that Cy wondered if the man had been swallowing his own needles, like Chatterton with his lacerated lunched-on poems in his attic. Again in his life he would have to remove the stinking, revolting waste of a suffering individual, like a nursemaid, like a bloody nursemaid. Not even false hope in the air this time, nor his mother’s noble acceptance. Just long, meaningless, suicidal death. Riley often stayed in his bed until the late afternoon, would not even answer if Cy knocked on his door. He lay bent round on the mattress like a baby under an old blanket, his breathing slower than any human lung should endure. Cy would try to get him to eat something, anything. A biscuit. A piece of cheese. He tempted him and tried to trick him into it like he was a fussy infant. Where once he had crept around him with cups of pacifying or demanded tea, now he trod heavily, bringing fresh brews in the hope that Riley would put something into his thinning, reddening body. Occasionally a sentence here and there in response, so Cy would become hopeful, if there were words issued there was part of a brain left over to see reason. If he had enough passion to curse, he had enough care to live.
— Leave me alone, boy. Can’t you see it, you fucking imbecile, can’t you see it’s all over now? I’m sleeping. I’m sleeping. Go away.
Still a lad, still a boy, to Eliot Riley, though Cy was well on his way to thirty. Though he played the youth, didn’t he? The tenderfoot, the loyal subject and the looby, as if to give the man his position back, restore him to his throne. He would try to get him involved with the trade again by asking foolish questions, whose answers he already knew. Where was the best place to store ink pigment in the winter so it wouldn’t spoil? Which was the best manufacturer to go to for the liquid black? As if he had forgotten his monthly trips to Hagan’s in Lancaster for the last ten years. Were brass or steel coils better for the new electric motor? The photography shop was closing down and selling off its goods, did the boss want him to get whatever old dry-point celluloid they may have left over for stencilling material? There were never any answers. Just a slammed door. A room empty of dialogue. Blue eyes paling and melting and dissolving against skin, like a glacier mint in a mouth.
He drank. Night and day, Riley drank whatever he could get hold of. When there was no money and Paddy wouldn’t serve him, for his own good, he stole bottles from shops. Or he went with groups of comrade-desolates around the slums of Moss Street to sup on rot and pauper’s brews. Even the alcohol spirit solution in the cupboard was taken so that it wasn’t safe to keep it, and Cy had to blend powder with distilled water to make his ink. And he was left thinking, thinking about a time when Riley had informed him, with crude gusto, that in this craft any solution could be used to dissolve and bind pigments — blood, spit, a woman’s juice, semen, piss — it was an ancient, resilient, inventive industry.
The customers still asked for him. His reputation did not cease to exist just because his will to go on without his loved and soul-fortifying profession did. Cy would have to explain that he was retired now, resting upstairs, unavailable, the way he had first lied about Riley’s fits to Jonty and Morris, and for it he would often lose a sale. What other honesty could he give them? That the man was dropped down in his own waste somewhere around the town, body parts foul like a gutter, crevices stinking of built-up dirt, and his mind no cleaner than a septic tank? That his once good, colourful Welsh skin was busting open with rag-ended capillaries and his hand was a disabled stump? That he’d become one of those desperately exploding men who mumble and yell at folk because they can’t or don’t want to speak clearly, and if let wander in that direction he would put his four-fingered hand on the train tracks because he was that bloody determined? That he was already dead, that he was already rotting? No.
Here was a young fellow working in the parlour of the greatest tattooer of northern England and the master was not around. There was something treacherous and suspicious about it, something not quite right. Together they might have tattooed the top of their country’s masses, alone he was implicated in some crime, or failed venture, and was suddenly without reputation. A ventriloquist’s wooden dummy without the speaker. For it seemed Cyril Parks could only live in Eliot Riley’s shadow if the shadow of his master still lived also.