Open ocean was a reflective, ponderous, dangerous place to be. A place of sickness and cabin-fever and contemplation, where it was said a person might meet up with their own self at a central axis travelling from another set of coordinates in life. There was something about the swollen surge of the sea that set the mind free, gave it a queer loose balance and direction like a compass riding on gimbals on the ship’s bridge. So that time spent alone seemed amplified by significance and conversations with fellow passengers, while often very welcome, could take on prematurely intimate or confidential proportions.
— Afternoon to you, Mr Parks. Looking a tad vexed today, if you don’t mind my saying.
— Hello, Harry. It’s a long way back now, isn’t it, England? Will we miss it, I wonder?
— I should think in the end we’ll manage without her. I’ll not miss the Scrubs, which is where I’d be residing presently if it were not for the ingenious garter of my good lady. Just a shame she missed the boat really. I’ll not mention her name in case the authorities tackle you anon about meeting me in the middle of this old stone boat called fate. Still, I’m sure America has its fair share of ingenious women.
— We’ll keep our fingers crossed, shan’t we?
Luckily for Cy, and perhaps because he had inherited his father’s sea-legs and nautical tolerance, he suffered from neither the sickness nor the fever. But he did fall into thinking, fell into the condition with heaviness. Or a great, weighty thinking fell on him, like a piano slipping its fastening as it was hauled up a building and landing on his head. Either way they met. In his slim bunk at night, to the churning purr of the engines and the ruck of propellers through dark water, in a cabin of twenty other snoring men, his mind went out to the things that had formed him and been farmed from him. In the deep baths of the washroom, with the soapy water mirroring the sea’s external motions, he could lie for hours and be oblivious to the minutes that passed, annoying the steward who had others queuing for the facility. As he dressed the bodies with ink stolen from the Captain’s helm or the first-class lounges, he thought of his life, its gains and losses. He thought of Riley and his mother. There were memories like artefacts, half-there and jagged, suggesting a shape that was apparent but unfinished, as if misused or harmed by something, or waiting to be completed. At the rail of the Adriatic, outside her glassed-in walkways, salt-water smeared like the windows of the Bayview, with Riley’s lyrical rain on the waves scented strongly like a woman in the throes of love, and the deck made slick and slippery, he leaned looking out with his face on his fist, as if stopped in time in a position of self-battery. The whole Atlantic surface was like a blue and white tablecloth to the edges of nowhere for him to lay his memories upon like dashed apart, salvaged crockery. And he thought about who he was and what he did and why.
What was it that had drawn him to the occupation of painting flesh, of permanent living art, and had kept him there through all the shit and shovel of Eliot Riley? What was he that he went to it and stayed put while the gentle humour of Morecambe evaporated around him in all but the tattoo barker’s showroom comedy? There were times when he could take no more from the man, no more abuse or inclusion in his province of mind, his wretched damaging honesty, the butchery of esteem, and he could have smashed Riley’s head against the wall like a turnip until his sneering voice stopped once and for all. There were times when he had looked at his dwindling bundle of money and got as far as the train station. Then turned back. Where was the reward for all that masochistic persistence and endurance? The dispatching of his youth. The decay of his happy childhood. The reluctant temper that was made unobstructed by following the big man’s example. What was it about the trade that was day to the night of Riley? Suddenly Cy wanted an answer. Without it he was a piece from the past in the ruins of a decade. But like the bawdy pauper king himself had once told him it was impossible to pin down the exact appeal and beauty of their folkish profession, butterfly-captured and gorgeously open for all to see. You couldn’t find the marrow or the quick of it to suck out, or set a flame to the wick of it and illuminate a room. Tattooing was like being called by a siren song, or the music of the spheres, impossible to resist, impossible to explain.
— Ask any one of us, lad, the good ones, not these buggers who do it for show, and we’ll all give the same answer. Why do we do it? Don’t fucking know.
No, he could not find the degree of precision that his own hand delivered during the colourful transformation of others, to explain it, to explain his own part in it, though he tried hard with his knuckles on his cheekbone and his hours at the deck rail. His trade was about conveying meaning, about visual abbreviation, an indication of what elements a creature was comprised. Like the red hourglass on the black widow spider. Like the fangs and poison and claws and stripes found in nature. It was a non-verbal language. It had inherent meaning. How many war signs and symbols had he tattooed? A thousand, more? How many predatory markings designed to elicit terror, how much hostile camouflage, how many death banners, daggers, skulls, slogans, how much battle pride?
Then there were the signs of sex, the big-titted women, the kitten girls, the exhibition of body parts, the twists on the spigot of breeding. Rude puns and come-ons. And there was love. Love in all its forms was boiled back to the red heart like beef to stock. All those hearts he had been commissioned to render. Heart after heart after red, red heart. Fat and full with True Love, with Mother, with Anita, with Josephine, with Clara inside, pierced by Cupid’s spindly arrows. Or broken, cut into two, torn open, Deceived written through the separated sections so that there could be no mistake as to why the damage had occurred. Such scars of emotion that would never heal! Or they would heal through his intervention, by being made secondary in ink. Because he could give pain a shape, and he could place it. And always the customers wanted to tell him about it. Their stories that had deserved an indelible memento. He was a funnel through which confidences and lives passed, became pigmented. His was a position of confidentiality, a tailor cutting round the balls of society, he would fashion the essence of a person, their experiences, into quick information or codification on the body where henceforth the public could read it from them. That was it. The tattoo was a jump too far. It was implicit. It was explicit. It was utter intimacy, intimacy with the whole basic fucking, killing, loving world. These were the prime colours of the life, were they not, the original three, and human beings simply mixed them up into civilized hues from there.
Riley had been right. Underneath all the rambling philosophy that went nowhere, that made Cy want to curse at him for such pretension, there was one thing the man had seen. He had seen people stripped bare, he had reduced them down into an essence, to experience, who they really were — angels and demons and lovers and everything strung in between. He cut them back and went from there. He seemed able to do it, to pull a picture off a wall, personalize and tattoo it. Riley had once told him that it was not those big titties on a bare arm that offended, not farting ladies, nor a marked face. Tattooing was on the black side, yes, not because it dealt largely with the rougher working classes, not because it meant that sex and danger and opinion got put about in pictures on people like a rude proclamation. The boldness of it wasn’t liked often, granted; the tattoo might even be considered ugly or primitive in itself. That counted towards their trade’s bad reputation, but it was not solely responsible for it. The matter of public disturbance was not as simple as violated flesh or visual shock. What had the big man said?