Nobody truly knew when the decline began to occur. With hindsight, it would be easier for locals to blame certain aspects — the simultaneous decline of old industries, the closing of mills and foundries in the north that furnished the seaside resort with its weekly business, package holidays available cheaply on the continent, affordable airfares, or an outside world that just suddenly sped up and left Morecambe to its old-fashioned ways. Even Cyril Parks with his testy Coney Island radar, his American-honed sense of a fading amusement industry, could not quite predict or interpret or become attuned to the evolving ebb of life out of his hometown. At first he was too occupied with work to dwell on being back and living in the haunted house of his unhappiest years. The town was busier than ever in season and he could barely cope with the summer trade. He arrived home almost penniless but with a house in his name. He fixed up the neon sign and remounted it above the doorway. He bought ink from Lancaster, and fashioned some equipment. Then the crowds began to arrive and only one or two, the hardier, older holiday-makers in Sunday suits who had been coming there for their seaside break since they were short-trousered and their fathers were besuited, only they could remember a time when Eleven Pedder Street was run by the best and most notorious tattoo artist in the northern counties. Riley had otherwise faded into folklore, his wrangling personality and his drinking taking precedent over his art in the opinion of the community, and there was no need for Cyril Parks to be forgiven for treading on his grave. The money began to roll in. After a while Cy hung paintings on the walls upstairs and bought new curtains for the windows. He let the local children string up Guy Fawkes effigies early in November from the flagpole below the bedroom window. Within a couple of years he had installed a new central heating system, because he’d be jiggered if he’d keep fetching firewood, so the waiting area was no longer quite as Baltic in temperature as it once had been. His roots began to creep back down, finding and following the path they had made when he was young. He was, after all, sand-born and sand-bred. He was, after all, Morecambrian.
When the decade rolled past the half century, they were still coming via bursting trains from Manchester and Scotland, Oldham and Leeds, and they still wanted their arms and backs decorated. He kept thinking that maybe he wouldn’t stay, maybe he’d sell up and move somewhere new, start afresh. He had only come back like a homing pigeon, because some magnetic grain in his head had drawn him there after the war ran him out of good reasons to see the world. And he’d stayed by reasoning that while there was a dependable income he may as well benefit. Rationing was over, the larder spies retreated, and rich traditional dishes once more were set on the tables of hotels and guest houses next to swan-folded napkins — again speculation abounded about who was sending potted shrimp to another King George and the Duke of Windsor and Cy was reminded of the way his mother’s consumptives relished her treats and secretly assumed that it was she. Music flooded across the Atlantic from America, and in the local dancehalls the fashions of the day took their measure from the pinball-punching, Coca-Cola swilling, rocking and rolling USA. In that decade vacation venues stuffed visitors into every nook and cranny. The recommenced illuminations drew spectators in by their thousand, celebrities came to flip the switch and electrify peacocks and garlands that ran the length of the prom, and Cy turned out to watch the festivities too and celebrated. And it felt easily remembered, and it was easy to be home.
When things fell away they fell away fast, in the blink of an eye Cy thought, and before long establishments were closing, theatres were taking final curtain calls and arcades were dismantling their tuppenny attractions before the wrecking balls began. The northern workers just stopped coming. Motorists did not pull off the A6 at Carnforth but kept on going north to the pretty towns and mountains below the rain clouds. The Prom station closed. Smug jokes were made in other British pavilions about the once comedic-authority, now pathetic and brash-becoming town of Morecambe. By then Cy wasn’t leaving. Whether it was loyalty to the townsfolk or the dwindling if faithful crowds, or old age creeping in, wanderlust waning, or whether it was just the never-and-always-changing view across the bay that he so loved, he didn’t care to contemplate. You could go to new places but the heart still pumped the same blood about the veins, and influenced the behaviour of the same brain. Over the years he felt a gradual settlement such as he hadn’t known before. He was accompanied less and less by the ghosts of Riley and Reeda, of the war and America.
When, in the last column on the last page of a national paper in 1965, he read that New York’s Steeplechase was closing down, the last of the big Coney Parks to survive the war, he felt a twinge of regret and a tug at his sentimental sleeve but he wasn’t sorry not to have been there until the end. No, Morecambe Bay it would be, come high or low economic tides. For better or worse. And where would he have gone anyway, in search of that stripy carnival nostalgia, that simplicity of entertainment? The older seasidey ways he was used to were dying out. The lettered rock and the melting cones no longer brought sticky, sugary pleasure, the waves were too cold and bound with seaweed, the repetitive jokes and merry songs of the collective nation failed to rouse and remedy the modern weary spirit of the population. People did not want to make do with a shared washroom and tinned fruit when they could have private facilities abroad, the Mediterranean was warm and appealingly blue, the food was exotic and the children could split off from the parents so that each could have made-to-measure fun in the sun. Even the blind fiddler at the old harbour, who was now a hundred if a day, could have seen that the changes were unstoppable and the damage irreparable. And regardless of all that, besides the folding tatty umbrella of an industry that had always sheltered his trade, wherever he was in the world, fairground fed or not, those who came to him would remain the same. Tattooing was unto itself its very own art form, old as the hills and stranger than time. Whether in rich, far-flung resorts or condemned cottages, glamorous prestige or ragged poverty, human hearts and souls were variable and would always require painting.
Nina Shearer waltzed through the front door of Eleven Pedder Street in leather and torn trousers, with purple glitter on her cheekbones and Egyptian kohl around her eyes, on Cy’s sixty-fifth birthday, just as he was thinking about retiring. He was vaguely expecting her, at least he was in the habit of expecting unusual and meaningful events on significant calendar days. She herself was in the habit of tutting and sighing before almost every comment she uttered, as if perpetually annoyed or put upon by what she was about to say. Her hair was raked up at the sides above her ears by two painful-looking plastic combs and it was very difficult to tell how many colours of dye were present in it, or how many perms it had endured.
— D’ya do piercing here?
— No, love, I don’t.
— Why bloody not?
— I’m a tattooist. Not a sodding hairdresser.
— Well, I’ll just do it myself again then.
— Fine.
— Fine.
She stood with her hands on her hips looking boldly at the walls of the shop. Nothing about her surroundings appeared to intimidate her, the tattoo parlour may as well have been a florist’s. Not many people had that variety of astringency, thought Cy, that natural counter-balance, the wherewithal or presence to dampen fire or dry up floods. Only a handful of people he had ever met had the ability, reacting with their environment to take away an extreme quality of it, like pepper with salt or sugar with bitterness. He had a feeling his list might be about to go up by one. There were several piercings in the cartilage of her ears, through which heavy rings and several studs had been inserted. Her right eyebrow was swollen in a pink lump at the corner where a new jewel wound had recently been made. She couldn’t have been much beyond the age of eighteen and her make-up served only to make her seem younger, overdone as it was. Her eyes might have been a marshy green but as with all colours when set against the borders of black they seemed brighter, much brighter. She was pacing about in the shop, snapping her chewing-gum against her teeth and putting on a show. There was a restlessness to her, forthrightness, an echo of some of his favourite people, and Cy found the corner of his mouth pulling up in a smile.