He would not have a chance to open and look at Grace’s paper until after ten that night, when he finally boarded up the booth, the last customers sloped away and he went to Varga to wind down. He put it into his shirt pocket suspecting that there would be something either vaguely unacceptable or of direst meaning on the page, something which might throw a spanner in the works of their relationship, or prune his burgeoning affections. And he would need a strong drink in his hand when his suspicions were confirmed or confounded. Until then he would try not to think about it. He’d simply do his job. He’d be the crowd’s fearsome huckleberry.
War was a peculiar thing. Cy seemed to remember that from a long time ago when he was a stilt-legged boy, a fact gleaned from conversations along the promenade of Morecambe and the shenanigans of its residents. It brought out the best and the worst and the downright incomprehensible in people. It made them slough off the dead skin of reason and deepen the roots of nationality. They became creatures of habit, more so than ever before — he remembered the queues for tea at the kiosks of his hometown and the fund-raising dances and the well-attended meetings of every organization, which went on long after peace-day, long after they were essential strictures. For there was relief in repetition and routine. War sent people out looking for principles and decency and even fragments of God to be woven up in chain-mail and used as armour against all the bestial suffering and immoral wickedness inflicted by other human beings, those accused of creating a covenance with evil. But it also gave them an excuse to behave very badly themselves under the big black umbrella of a far worse phenomenon. He remembered that Morecambe’s courts had seemed fuller than ever during the Great War, of pick-pockets and bigamists and even bank robbers. He remembered that his mother had said some folk simply rang louder when the breath of war was blown through them. What would Reeda have made of this conflict now? With so much human fodder. Something so premeditated and sinister at the core of it, and seeming set to go on and on. He wondered how his countrymen and women were faring, the radio and newspaper reports were distressing to say the least. He wondered if he should write letters to Jonty and Morris, send friendly word. The talk in Brooklyn was angry and pessimistic, paranoid and ultimately impotent, there were tales of horror filtering through the Hasidic communities, and there were desperate attempts to contact foreign relatives, applications sent to official quarters to allow immigration. Shaken heads, candles lit in windows and synagogues.
If nothing else this war had created a boom within the tattooing industry. Not only were military motifs selling incredibly well, but the American government’s obscenity ruling meant that indecent markings would prevent entry into the navy or other forces, and so old work was being redone. Like the nude bathers and sexy dames of the film industry reformed under the rigid Hollywood codes, rude tattoos were now history, the era of naughty fun was over. Boys were being rejected daily for the promiscuously clefted, high-nippled lovelies on their bodies, and they were flocking to him for repair. The penalty for illicit liaisons was not irreversible. An applicant could get designs altered, that was the concession, they did after all want people to sign up, there was after all a war of unmitigated proportions going on, predicted to worsen very shortly. Now he was dressing all the naked women he once had drawn. Bare-breasts were slipping heavily behind snug new dresses. Pendulous buttocks were shimmying under frills and lace. The sassy maids were, with his help, pulling on some black shaded stockings to go with their heeled shoes and nurses’ uniforms. The boys were sheepish and sad to see their sweethearts going.
— Bye, Bessie, bye-bye, Marie. See you next time, honey. Thanks for a good time.
Cy tried to preserve elements of sexy candour to the girls, a jut of hip, a beckoning finger, lowered lashes, but he could not help feeling like some kind of puritan, a despotic father. No, it felt like the morning after, each girl was getting dressed and the trysting was over. So many lovers, and all of them leaving …
It was an eye. In the centre of Grace’s page there was an eye, immaculately open, static, unblinking. It looked almost hieroglyphic, black-rimmed, black-lashed, there was a lot of black ink to it in fact, and it was scrolled in a helix at the corners. He might have known there would be no birds or butterflies or delicate posies for her. Nor portraits of the presidents on her thighs or religious symbols, which four decades earlier the carnival women had first stunned the public with. The bar at Varga was crowded that night. He sat at the counter, and moved the empty glasses on the bar away from the piece of paper that was laid out in front of him like an after-school study, simplifying the clutter and chaos around the page.
— Scotch tonight?
— Thanks.
Valerie attended to him with her usual perfunctory duty and he returned to the image in front of him. The iris was green, green, the most mysterious of pigments, and it contained a substantial amount of non-detail, which gave the image an amulet appearance at its centre. There were no divisions like the true human eye contained or faint irregular spokes, quantitative information, flecks, inflections, broken sections, and percentages. Only a pure green sphere like a jewel or an old curse. It was unremitting, unforgiving. His head hurt just looking at the thing.
Riley’s voice joined him at the bar, swaggering into its most natural arena, telling him they were all witches, the women of the world. With their ability to manage pain, their smell of fresh and salt waters. And she was no different, his little Grace, his bold little poppit. No different at all. Some hereditary mange or vindictive spore or kinked strand of blood they shared made them wild, made them want to buck and nip and scratch. That’s why they would roll you over and climb on top when you were so far gone in lust you couldn’t defend yourself and they would look down with open eyes like they were taking something from you, like they were about to commit slaughter. His swarthy ghost here now, wanting to start a bitter conversation as ever with Cy that would make him seem clever and be validated just from provoking argument, from flicking an already twitchy nerve to make it jump. Cy was damned if he’d comply with him tonight, the old bugger.
— Go away, Eliot Riley. Go on, sling your hook.
— What’s that, hon?
Mary was watching him while her sister poured his drink from a dusty bottle into a tumbler. He shook his head and held up an apologetic hand. The whisky arrived in its glass over ice. He could not recall when exactly he had taken solely to hard liquor. But there were times that it seemed an appropriate drink, the only possible retort to the place in which he worked and his profession. He thought back to his first ever beverage, under the stewardship of Riley in the Dog and Partridge. Ale for junior. It seemed like such a long time ago. Varga was busy, bodies kept moving past him, knocking him gently from side to side. The door of the bar was open but there was no kind movement of air. It felt humid tonight, as if the atmosphere was preparing for one of the tremendous early-summer thunderstorms that New York often received, with purple spears of lightning and loud booming and crashing above as if some deity were spring-cleaning. His shirt was sticking to his lower back, he had been sweating with concentration all day. He sensed something on the way, a troublesome front, and he thought of the fishermen of Morecambe who could predict the weather patterns, who could taste the foreshadow of rain coming in off the Atlantic and who could say to land-lubbers that it was only an hour behind them in the great bay. Until an unforeseen storm rose up like the spastic finger of Poseidon and they simply disappeared, that is.