— Tattooing distresses those it does, lad, because it’s as generous as a whore on her birthday. It’s human art that you can’t peel back off the human or put away in a dresser drawer. It’s an unselfish trade, is ours. I’ll tell you what it is, it’s personal socialism, lad. Everyone’s included, everyone gets to look in to a person and share them, like what they see or not. It says here I am, shit and come and all. Nationality, how I like my women, what does it for me. Just like a bullet hole into the guts and bowels. Oh aye, and I’ll tell you this, lad: a tattoo says more of a fellow looking at it that it can do of the man who’s got it on his back. And people don’t like each other half the time, they don’t like each other’s opinions or lives, they don’t want to sympathize with each other, they don’t want to share, so what they do is shoot the messenger. You and me. Scapegoats is what we are. What we do is in bad taste, they say, oh, it’s not artistic. When what it really is, is people like to keep each other strangers until they’ve judged. You remember that.
And Cy had not understood it then, thinking it just polite society’s snobbery, and thinking Riley a bag of talking shit, he had not really understood it until now, here, ensconced on F deck of the Adriatic, tattooing perhaps his five-hundredth ruptured heart. And the man on whose shoulder the heart was coming was sitting as silent as stone, with tears running down his face for the woman he had lost and left back in Warsaw or Prague or Moscow. As true to the image as a shadow to any dimensional thing. Suddenly Cy knew what it was all about. He saw past the red ink going into the skin. He saw through to the core of what he was doing, how he bestowed uncompromising communication upon the world, how he brought forth self. How he translated experience and identity into colour and shape. How he caught the echo of a person and engraved it on to them. How he functioned as the artistic hands of others, redundant in choosing subject maybe yet imperative in its delivery. That was the strange and impossible core of it.
Humans had gone well beyond the red hourglass and the simplicity of natural informative markings. They had evolved, complicated life, refined it, and lost touch. They had tried to push back the basics, the cruelty and poison, the seeds and urges, the nurture and beauty. The potential to love and kill, having loved and killed, the need to rut, could not be an initial introduction any more, set on a shoulder like a swarthy badge of life. Yet some would have it that way still, they would have the ordinary speech of identity, the colours of their landscape, that which they had in common with the rest of the human beings of the world, and Cyril Parks was just their scribe.
Eliot Riley was gone. He was contained by death, finished, and his life’s picture had become clear. Who he was, a drunk, a bastard, a master of ink. Blue eyed in Cy’s memory, brilliant and awful, loved and hated. The only flesh-and-blood father he had ever known. He was the definition of Eliot Riley, and he had left his mark. Like a force of nature, like an earthquake bending a river, a volcano scarring mountains with lava or lightning striking tree bark. Like a tattoo on Cy’s life. And only then, with the understanding and realization, through Riley’s own death, of that which the man had tried to convey alive, did Cy’s apprenticeship to him truly end.
— These buggers are open books.
Riley had once said this to Cy as another Ribble bus-load of drunken Scots arrived one September and spewed forth its cargo on to the promenade at Morecambe. The air had been cool that day and the sun seemed hot only when it reached Cy’s bare arms, as if not having done much work in warming up the space between. One of the passengers had clambered down the bus steps and gone to the railing at the edge of the seafront parade. He pissed off the platform as if standing at the public urinal while drinking from a brown bottle at the same time.
— Open books. But they know who they are. They can tell you with a punch or a stiff cock or a few words exactly who they are and where they come from. Take a country away from someone and it firms up their notions. Tells them what they want to be and what they don’t. Makes my job easier, son. A lot easier. No dawdling about deciding on a tattoo. They know what they want and why they want it.
— They want rampant lions and the St Andrew’s cross, no doubt, or Rangers colours, eh?
Cy remembered he had said this somewhat smugly, thinking himself capable of a certain amount of discerning and prediction after a year’s apprenticeship. The Scots were singing a song about virgins in Inverness, happy to have arrived at last on their annual holiday. Riley had been walking away from them but at this remark he stopped and turned back to Cy.
— No. No, lad. I paint hearts. And I paint souls. That’s what I do.
Back then it had seemed a ridiculous thing to say. Too much like the great Eliot Riley on a flight of fancy, getting wordy and profound, trying to make Cy feel like the village idiot again. But the comment stuck with Cy for some reason, perhaps because it sounded good, the sound of the words themselves had a note of quiet percussion to them, unlike Riley’s usual loud and boasting bluff, or perhaps just because aspects of the man were like burdock that got on to you and sank in. And Cy remembered what he said that afternoon. And then one day, years later and half way across the Atlantic Ocean, with a country lost from sight behind him, an old life scuppered and a new one about to be launched, it became true.
PART II
Babylon in Brooklyn
Coney Island lay colourful and flashing and ready for revelry under a dull coat of inclement weather. It was a slow day, with pedestrian business responding to the greyish skies overhead, the glitz and hum of the parks seeming all the more stark and garish for the lack of visitors to justify their existence. The mazed walkways, the decorated blinking gateways and turnstiles into the fairgrounds were almost deserted, the rides and the shows were quiet but for their own character exertion. On days like this the whole place gave the gimcrackery impression of a bright and showy and useless thing, or a clown vigorously juggling for empty rows of seating in a circus tent, primed and pathetic and somehow futile. Coney’s beach could seem as dire against the damp and drizzle as it could be inviting on days of clear sunshine. The sand looked logged with water, heavy and turgid. The Wonder Wheel in Luna Park was turning through the mist, providing a view of nothing but cloud for the few in its carriage seats, perhaps a stray patch of the city in the distance where there was an opening in the fog. For the past half hour Cy had been chatting with the hotdog vendor opposite his booth in the alley, smoking cigarettes, passing the time under the rattling, dripping awning of the meat stand. The grease-aproned man was stirring up his sauerkraut with a spoon and complaining halfheartedly about trade as if for something to do rather than with earnest concern.
— Half my stock will go bad if I can’t boil it by the week’s end. I’m going to have to ditch it with the fishermen for bait, the fish really go for the fat see, chicken bones too, go figure, or I end up eating fifty a day myself and I ain’t that hard a worker. Nobody will put up with old meat these days, not that I’d serve it mind with those sanitation chumps breathing down my neck. Listen, you come back when you leave and take a box of bratwurst home with you. Hate to see it go to waste. You gonna take off, board up early?