‘Yes,’ he lisped, his eyes cast downwards.
‘You’ll need to make an appointment. What sort of tattoo did you want? Was there anything on the walls that caught your fancy?’
‘No.’ He said it dismissively, as if it were obvious that the designs on display were of no interest. ‘I’ve brought a picture with me. Um, do you do custom designs?’
‘Sure. Let’s have a look at it.’
He finally came through the short passage to my parlour, moving in a decidedly lackadaisical manner as if even the act of walking was still a new and curious thing to him. He stood in front of me and fished something out of a scraggy carrier bag.
Now that I could see him properly he no longer appeared the grey, wraithlike silhouette he had when viewed through the filter of the corridor, whose corners were wispy with dust. His white skin seemed to shine. I was quite dazzled. He almost gave off a natural halo, blurring the air around him into a shining mist. I was reminded of the way that the Pre-Raphaelites made their models’ complexions so pale they were almost silvery, glowing through the mist of whatever legend they happened to be depicting at the time. I thought of wounded knights, their blood half lost, faint and trembling. But mingled with this unhealthiness, this fey suggestion of something reared in darkness for death, was a refreshing brightness, as if the Boy had brought the outside sunshine and breezes in with him on his skin. Suddenly he didn’t seem so uncertain a creature either. It was as if he proceeded in everything through his sense of touch, had no rules to guide him but the ultra-sensitivity of his hands, his face, his skin. In those few seconds he appeared to me an awesome canvas, one that I hardly dared take my needle to.
He had produced a comic book, immaculately preserved, but from the speed with which he located the desired page, obviously well read.
‘Here. This picture.’ He cocked his head. ‘Or perhaps this one,’ and he pointed to two separate frames on the same page. The picture he pointed to was a cute, girly character with dead white skin, black spiky hair and Cleopatra-like eye make-up. I flicked through the pages and saw the same character depicted in a more realistic, adult form, as a sort of Gothic chick. I turned back to the original picture, the little girl cartoon version of the character. She was standing on grass so green it was like Eden, an Eden of English summer holidays in the countryside.
‘Baz,’ I said without looking at him, ‘have we got any appointments this afternoon?’
I knew we hadn’t, but I wanted to remind Baz that he was supposed to be a working partner. He flicked lazily through the black appointment book.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘This design is pretty small,’ I said. ‘If you can hang around a little for me to prepare a stencil and stuff then we can do it today.’
The boy nodded.
‘Which one is it then? This one or this one?’
The Boy thought for a moment and, once again without speaking, pointed to the picture of the figure leaning forward on tiptoes, lips pouting, about to kiss someone.
I took the comic book to the back bench, pushed aside some of my scrolled pencil sketches, and set to work on a stencil of the design in question. Barry motioned and laconically told the Boy to ‘Siddown’, which he did. Soon a couple of friends, Jools and Steve, came by, and both looked at the Boy with obvious amusement and curiosity. Everyone began asking questions, which he answered briefly and politely, never putting any questions of his own. I observed this all half-occupied with my work. It occurred to me that the Boy was like a lamb, oblivious and innocent in a den of wolves. That is perhaps too harsh a judgment to level at my friends, but nonetheless that is the comparison that sprang most readily and persistently to my mind. It is surprising, half distracted as I was, that the final tattoo should have turned out as it did. Barry went out to get some cans of beer, and Jools and Steve soon moved on too, so by the time I had completed the stencil I was alone in my studio with the Boy.
‘Where do you want it?’
‘Here.’ The boy indicated his right upper arm.
I asked him to roll up his sleeve and held the stencil up to his arm to judge where it would be best positioned.
‘OK. Can do. You like comics then?’ I asked.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve never seen this character before. She’s a wee bit weird, isn’t she? What’s the comic called?’
‘Well, the character is Death. I don’t know what the comic is called. I mean, there’s not a regular series. This is a, a what-do-you-call-’em, a spin-off type thing.’
‘Death is a girl?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I always thought Death was a skeleton in a hood with a big scythe. He is on the wall out in the waiting room. You don’t want one of them?’
‘No, no, no. Death is a girl.’
‘Right you are. So why do you want death impregnated in your skin, might I ask? You don’t think it’s a bit morbid?’
I had tattooed Death and his black cape, like the spreading wings of a luxuriant decay, on the taut, sweating bodies of more people than I cared to count, and never before questioned if it was morbid. But there was something rather earnest and purposeful about the Boy. He had obviously thought well about his reasons for having a tattoo, to the extent he even seemed a little shy that his deep personal motives were obvious, making him vulnerable.
‘I don’t know about morbid. It’s just, this is how I want Death to come to me, like springtime. Maybe you can get that feeling from the picture too. If you could give that same feeling to the tattoo . . .Then she would always be with me to the hour of my death.’
I had often been given very precise instructions by customers, or very vague but exacting instructions, and had always tried to stick to them as much as I could. This usually required an immense effort of concentration. However, there was something so unexpected about the instructions I was given by the Boy that I could not have forgotten them if I tried. I could now only view the design through the filter of those instructions. I could not reinterpret it in any other way.
‘Take off your shirt, please.’
‘And my T-shirt?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
The Boy was wearing a shirt with some William Morris-style design on it, and beneath that a T-shirt of some band that he liked, which he now removed, messing up his hair as he dragged the T-shirt inside out over his skinny arms. He was shallow-chested, slightly potbellied with puppy fat, and his arms and torso were even whiter than his face. Not the usual muscular physique that is given as representing male beauty, but with a purity about it consisting of lack of strenuous exercise and a life of shade, irresponsibility and daydreams. Really, it was an astonishing body, speaking as an artist. Nothing was disproportionate. It was a perfect model of weedy grace. One thing that I noticed, almost with the same alarm I might have noticed a flick-knife, was a flash of silver dangling in the stiff, shallow plain, flushed with dark hair, between his slight pectorals. It was a crucifix, a symbol cruel with nails and thorns. A symbol so often associated with a kind of asexuality, and a kind of pacifism, seeing it swing there in front of the Boy’s male cleavage, while he bent forwards, his stomach creasing around his belly-button, naked to the worn tops of his jeans, I suddenly associated it instead with sexuality and brutality. It could just as easily have been a Hell’s Angel’s ammunition belt or a nipple piercing.
‘You believe in that, do you?’ I nodded to the crucifix. I don’t usually ask such questions of my customers, but something about the Boy’s scant conversation made a kind of non-intellectual, strangers’ profundity the only natural way of speaking.
‘What is there to believe in?’
‘So you don’t believe in it?’
‘What’s there to disbelieve?’
He seemed genuinely puzzled.
‘I wear this the same way I’ll wear your tattoo. It’s a sort of accessory.’
In my parlour there is a chair, or couch, for customers to sit in when they are being tattooed. It
is very much like a dentist’s chair. I asked the Boy to sit in it and started up the engine of my sound system. For me the act of tattooing is a physical thing, a performance, like stepping into a boxing ring. When I am in the middle of my work, thoughts and words are not necessary. Everything else is preparation, rest, survival. When I am tattooing the waiting and talking are over. I am living. Everything that slipped out of its own outline when you tried to understand, to define, to make connections and correspondences, returns to its outline, is single and complete. The electric guitars were revving. I thought of the ammunition belts the Boy had brought to mind a moment before. Cartridges exploding one by one in quick succession. I thought of the working of my own needle, faster than any sewing machine. I took hold of the Boy’s upper arm and sprayed it with shaving foam. I scraped the foam and light hairs cleanly from the chosen area, applied a layer of unguent, slapping it like wallpaper paste to the bald, pink skin. I pressed the stencil tightly against the flaccid muscle. I fixed the head on the arm of my needle, like someone assembling a rifle.
‘Is this going to hurt?’ asked the Boy. ‘Will I have trouble keeping my arm still?’
‘Naah. It’s not that bad. Some people get really terrified before they come. But it’s not worth it. I’m just going to put the needle to your arm and you’ll see. Okay?’
The Boy looked almost indifferent, but somewhere I sensed him tense almost imperceptibly.
The smell of antiseptic, like the rippling of adrenaline, was in my nostrils. My needle was poised like that of a dentist over his arm. There was a moment of cringing, exquisite anticipation, and then I applied the needle to his flesh. He stiffened a little, but his face remained passive.
‘There! That wasn’t so bad, was it?’
‘No.’
And so the tattoo began. I gripped his arm as if holding on for my life, and when I removed my hand to reposition it I saw my finger-marks in red and white. My needle furrowed through his flesh at one with the churning, dirty chaos of the guitars, which formed the background to my work. Now that skin was entrusted to me utterly to handle as roughly as I, the expert, felt necessary, it was as if I was granted a special insight into the skin and its wearer. It became luminous to my vision and it suddenly occurred to me as an obvious and indisputable fact, clear as the smarting redness of the flesh, that the skin that I was burrowing into, in a sort of ritual scarring, had never been caressed by a woman. That was the source of its airy purity. It actually breathed a blissful aura of being untouched, and was so much more sensitive and responsive for that. His beauty was of that simple male kind, like daylight, angular, Apollonian, so different to the excessive beauty of the female, a fertile abundance of curves tainted with seduction, ripe and full of the tendency towards decay, like pure water clouded with the slight tinge of blood. It seemed weird and profound to me that we were both males, supposedly sterile, but that our meeting would produce a female offspring. A female! What did she know of all this? And yet it was appropriate somehow that she should materialise between us. She was to be impregnated in the flesh no woman had touched, an Immaculate Conception: Death.
‘I don’t usually do designs this small,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be a bit tricky. It may not turn out as good as the picture. Well, we’ll give it a go.’
And I began to sweat like a doctor deep in the garish, tangled complications of surgery. I wiped the seeping blood from his arm. He sat the way some children sit when having stitches, docile, almost limp, resigning themselves peacefully to the suffering as if it were a mother’s hand stroking their fevered forehead.
Barry came back with the beer, cracked a can open and slurped at it, watching silently like a government artist watching afternoon TV in a bedsit. He ventured a few comments about the design. ‘She’s a bit of a weird bird, isn’t she? She your type?’ And slightly more thoughtfully, picking up the comic in one hand and inspecting it, ‘Nice style. It’s like a kind of morbid Disney.’
The Boy’s only response was to smile and laugh.
‘Disney is morbid,’ I interjected at the last comment, not taking my eyes off the Fabergé-like miniature I was working on.
At last it was finished, inked in, highlighted, tinted and titivated by my needle. I looked at the result and a grin of satisfaction seemed to rise spontaneously from my guts to my mug. It was good work, after all. The girl Death stood on her tiptoes as lightly as a soap bubble blown from a plastic wand, her lips pouting to kiss the air. Beneath her feet was a patch of turf I could almost smell, merging with the white loam of the Boy’s flesh that I had freshly turned with my digging needle. The whole thing seemed to sparkle like dewy grass. It was something to be proud of. The smallness of the design had given me the necessary spur to excel myself in subtlety and intricate detail.
‘So! Your first time!’ I said. ‘Not a bad debut! It didn’t hurt too much, did it?’
The Boy tilted his head.
‘Well, it did hurt, but it was strangely pleasant. It felt like being sliced by a scalpel, or a cheese wire. And at the same time it was as if a trickle of sand were running through my flesh, eroding it away. Hmm. It really did hurt, but then, facing up to what we want is often painful. The hardest thing we can do.’
Barry swapped a glance with me when the Boy murmured these last few words, as if to say, ‘Has he been like this all the time?’ Yes, it was rather difficult to imagine how a boy who spoke like that habitually, fluently, had made it this far in the world.
I washed off the beading blood from the Boy’s arm, treated its soreness with stinging antiseptic and cold ointment, and dressed it like a wound. I gave him the usual instructions, to remove the dressing in three hours and bathe the tattoo in hot water, and afterwards not to get it wet or pick at the developing scab. I gave him some ointments to treat it with daily and told him to come back in about a week or so, when the scab had withered and dropped off, for me to check that it was okay and add any touches that might be needed.
The Boy fished out the agreed sum of fifty quid from his pocket, where the notes had become sadly crumpled. ‘Forty’s fine,’ I said, waving away the final tenner. I was pleased with the tattoo, and hardly felt like taking money for it at all.
So that was the first of my encounters with the Boy. It had lasted three or four hours, but even now I feel as if the thirty odd years of my life leading up to it were like the long prologue of a film before the titles start. That afternoon, marked by the bloody stigmata of my needle, became my Anno Domini.
When the Boy dutifully returned in twelve days time there was no trace of a scab, and the Little Girl Death who had so newly sloughed the dross of dried blood had gained such a lustre since her inception that I could hardly believe it was my own work. The colours of the design shimmered and iridesced like the fanning plumes of a peacock’s tail, and the figure herself had such an expressive attitude about her, like a newborn lamb gambolling in its first spring, that the tattoo almost seemed to move with the light, flickering as the images on schoolgirls’ rulers do. To be astonished at one’s own work is involuntarily to disclaim it. I had no more created this tattoo than a father can be said to create their daughter.
Just as the Boy had seemed vulnerable about his specific wishes, so now I felt vulnerable about my fulfilment of those wishes. The tattoo was too nakedly brilliant, it was almost painful, and I called Barry across to see it with distinct apprehension. But if the tattoo had given him any insight into the heart that had been the medium of its creation, it was the kind of insight that one can never frame in words, and simply has to assume is commonly understood. On these occasions, instead of naming the insight, any commentary takes the form of the most general praise.
Barry whistled when he looked at the Boy’s arm. ‘Wow! That’s something! That’s really quite something! You’re coming out with some weird shit, Shane my son! But I like it. Very different.’
It was hard to ignore the fact that there was something unnatural about the tattoo. Still, Barry’s obvious approval had re
assured me that people generally are more broadminded than we give them credit for when entrusted with something like a deep and honest personal confidence. Perhaps it was pride in my new creation, or perhaps it was a quality the Boy had of arousing your curiosity, but I felt the need, like the need for a cigarette, to invite the Boy out for a drink with me and some mates. There was definitely something addictive about him, in the sense that enigma is addictive. Asking him questions was irresistible, yet his answers never really dispelled the enigma. You just had to ask another question, and another, nibbling away with questions while your hunger for a final answer kept niggling away in your gut.
I suggested a pub to the Boy and he nodded as if already thirsty. I had to have a photo of the tattoo for the shop’s album, but the camera’s batteries were used up. So Barry sent the Boy on an errand for some new ones, and some film, as if his having been tattooed had now made him a junior member of staff, a tea boy or something. Still, the Boy complied readily enough, even as if he was the shop’s official, waged tea boy. He came back slightly out of breath having had to search for the precise film Barry had requested and being unable to find it at the shop Barry had given him directions to. It had taken some time, but he had completed his mission, following his instructions to the letter.
The pub was the Fo’c’s’le, and we met on a weekday evening, in the dingy games room, where torn PVC seats lined the smoke stained walls. The Fo’c’s’le is situated, appropriately enough, right next to a beach. A sturdy, slanting stone wall, built in imitation of battlements, meets the pebbles below. At high tide a spray-wreathed sea breaks and sloshes heavily against it, as if it were a real fo’c’s’le. The regulars, or at least half of them, could be mistaken for old sea dogs, too. The other half are the young unemployed, petty criminals, blaggers, bullshitters, bullies, youths in skin tight T-shirts who seem to spend their whole lives ‘hanging out’, those who smell of patchouli oil, and those whose names are scandalised in bus shelters, delinquent animal torturers and pullers of moonies, people who will never escape the dead end of their home town and their lowly social position. Many of them are my customers. The Fo’c’s’le is one of my haunts. I feel as comfortable amongst its creaking, ashtray-filthy wood fittings as a soaked mac hung on the coat stand.
Morbid Tales Page 20
