In any case the men seemed to have reached an impasse in the discussion while his mind had been wandering. Eddie looked downright sulky while his friend had an expression of pinched impatience on his face. Cy turned to Eddie’s friend. He was a handsome fellow, with his cap on at a jocular, upturned angle suggesting that he was a man prone to humour and chaff.
— And what might your name be, sir?
— Richard Samuel Bender.
— Now then, this one I could do for you, Dick. I like to think a man can find the right woman in a crowd, by instinct if you will, and you went straight for her. Eddie’s loss, he missed her and she’s a beauty, but you picked her out. Better not to give her to another chap, she wouldn’t appreciate the handoff, eh? You picked her. Like you knew her. The amount of times I’ve seen that happen with a design you couldn’t count. But there’s something to it in this trade. Oh, yes. There’s something to it all right.
— Well, by God she is a little darling! It’s why I went for her.
— Oh, she is at that. I painted her up from scratch, there’s not another mermaid like her at Coney, and if there is she’s stolen off me and I’ll take it up with the thief because I wouldn’t sell her on as flash. Some of the others are standard. She’s not, she’s an original, see I’ve initialled the piece in the corner there, and if you look at her closely you’ll see my shading. I had a feeling somebody would choose her today would you believe?
— Dollar you say?
— Two dollars for two I’m afraid, Dickie. Freehand they take a little longer, and what with this rain set to clear up this afternoon I’ll be hard pressed to take less for the time. It gets busy quickly and if I’m stuck under-priced and out of time, well you understand that, being a business man right? But certainly, when Eddie’s chosen his tattoo, I’ll do the pair of you for that price, two for two. Not another freehander down here, and with that fine shading you know where that you pointed out to Eddie you’ll be wanting her done properly, I imagine. And if Eddie’s changed his mind, and there’s no crime to that, it happens that a man comes here on occasion and doesn’t fancy what he sees or gets a bit shy, and there’s no harm to it I say, well, then maybe just a dime extra, she is after all the siren that called to you.
— Siren, huh? Hey, I like that, like in that story with the sailor, that’s what I’ll tell people when they see her. She called to me. C’mon Eddie, you heard the man, what y’gonna get? We came down here for you, so don’t go getting stiff on me or you’ll lose us the deal.
Cy handed Eddie a manila book with the page open at the sports section of flash, telling him to take his time, or, if he wanted, the designs could be changed to suit him. In the middle of the page was the Dodgers’ logo.
— What do you say, Eddie lad, get yourself a lifelong season ticket? That’s a true sporting fan.
An hour and a half later the two had bled a little into his cotton rags and had gone through a simple, colourful metamorphosis, and he was two dollars better off. He told them to go and celebrate with an onion Polish, they should have worked up quite an appetite. He watched them walking back up the street a minute later in the rain, demolishing their food, shirts un-tucked and loose off the skin. They were slapping each other on their sore spots, blown up on the adrenalin of having passed through a gauntlet of minor pain and being in possession of motifs they would tell others were meant for them. The sausage vendor saluted him and he hung the mermaid back up on the wall. She was crisp around her curved edges and high-breasted, with a true green tail and red along her fins. He hadn’t lied. He had drawn her from the imagination, she had been one of his first designs, and she’d sat in between the pages of a book in a cupboard for a decade when Riley wouldn’t put her up on the Pedder Street shop wall. Now she was on display, with the salty sea air surrounding her. And as Cy thought about it, putting her back amid her oceanic sisters, he hadn’t lied either when he called her a siren.
Women and fish. It was a presumptuous and runic combination. There were some tattoos as obvious and simple in their symbolic identification as the red-flagged danger in nature or the colours of a nation. Sport was one thing, a contemporary religion to the masses, hearts and flowers were easily deciphered. Women and fish entwined was another thing altogether. That association had something instinctual to it, something primal, buried in the psyche. There were at least three dozen subtly different female fish icons in his booth — bare-breasted, bare-bottomed, arch-backed lovelies, with curved hips and hair rippling like the waves below them. They were reclining or pert on the wall, drawn riding on scaled creatures like lovers, joined with them, and gripping the harness of a whisker or gill or a reptilian tongue like a bridle on a horse as they rode, like hair on a man beneath them, the better with which to steer him. And they stirred men up, stirred up that savant batter within them. They were provocative and sultry and saucy. They were the women of the sea calling to sailors, they were finned beauties, slipping from shells, aphrodisiac as oysters. There were traditional mermaids, green tailed and cheeky, females with the lower halves of them become aquatic, human legs joined and sealed by scale, by soft, femoral meat-muscle. So that they were cuntless, or maybe they were all cunt, like their parts had been turned inside out and were spreading down their legs, melting over human limbs, becoming overt genital tails. That was all the mermaid symbol was. The sex of her. A reduction of image to the essence of what made a woman different. Then there were fish with women’s faces, women shrunk into their own symbolic parts. They were the Pisces vaginales, like that troublesomely aptly named species in Morecambe Bay for his interest in which Cy had ultimately taken a caning. Men had wed the two aspects together, and made them aesthetic. It was worship of the liquid territory between their legs. It was the smell of them. The way they were scented — it was their brine, like salt made inside the human body, that reek of the sea. And it was the feel of them inside, slippery, like fish-tail. And it was the taste, you could taste the sea in them, like in creatures manufactured by the ocean. All the slippery pictures of that deep wet place had men drawn to the tattoos on the walls like sailors to the come-hither songs of mermaids.