by Sarah Hall
– Yes.
– Jesus Christ! Alrighty then, missy, no need to get crazy. Why the hell did you have to go and say all that for, anyway?
The young man turned to face Cy, to find out where his allegiances lay.
– This your girl? ‘Cause, she sure is a swell lady. A real charmer.
Cy suddenly breathed out as if he’d been struck in the stomach and winded. The torque of the situation amazed him. Where had it come from, that sudden capsizing squall on a slightly choppy ocean? Grace was like a dripping tap that had broken its seal and flooded the kitchen. Oh, she reminded him of Riley, she did, who at the flick of a switch could become overblown and would attack the most insignificant foes with his thorough, histrionic rage, crushing them like a steamroller over a blade of wavering grass. He could only think that one of the soldiers had hurt her, touched a nerve as if something hot had been put on a cavity-brittle tooth. Perhaps she had been an orphan of the Great War?
– Look, lads. If you’ve got muck on your arms I strongly suggest you go and wash it off down at the beach so it doesn’t go into the bloodstream. Go on now. Your money’s good, you’re settled up, I’ll not mess with you. Be about another ten minutes here.
He put a little northern into his tone. It meant nothing to them geographically, of course, he doubted if they had even heard of Lancashire, though the short, peaking syllables spoke universally, put obvious obstructions into the conversational landscape. He was annoyed with the crowd distracting him from Grace and annoyed that the soldiers had brought this mercurial side out in her. And he was disconcerted by the way in which Grace herself could call into question everyone’s conduct simply via her presence, by the generous and offensive way she spoke to complete strangers, and her lewd and razing wisdom. The youngster on the stool was getting edgier by the minute. His pals had just been told to clear off and they were disappearing down the alley. He had only half a tattoo. And he did not want to be left alone with Grace, who could very well be disturbed in the head, and a tattoo artist who was possibly sympathetic towards her dementia. Nor did he appreciate the news that skin needed treatment his had not received before tattooing.
– Hey, buster. Why didn’t you tell me to do that? You didn’t tell me to wash up. This sanitary? This gonna get infected? They gonna have to cut my balls off?
– Don’t worry, I’ll cut ’em off myself if you don’t stop jumping round like a snared rabbit. Dicky an’ all. Hold still, lad, or you’ll have a dagger that looks like the captain’s missing mate and a needle sticking out the other side of your arm. It does not say Septic Sid on my sign, does it?
The humour-threat was Riley’s stock in trade. Cyril Parks had instinctually flipped through his memory for a response to losing control of the situation and he had found Riley’s split personality, his ability to wed two strong aspects of his character together for professional purposes. Comedy and Ferocity. These two were the husband and the wife of presentation in the tattooing industry, Eliot Riley had told him on more than one occasion. The old ball and chain. To control the crowds there was no better combination than gruff and foolery, for they book-ended any form of disorder or trouble, and there was disorder and trouble a-plenty in this trade.
Grace put her small hand on Cy’s shoulder then. The lightness of it calmed him. It was the first time she had touched him and it felt like the passage of light. She passed a sheet of folded paper between the wires of his equipment to the counter next to the coloured vials. Moving through the air past him, she was fragrant of unperfumed skin, the scent of her undisclosed origins or the smell of the weather.
– If you can copy it I will come back tomorrow morning. Eventually I want many, everywhere. All over, if you can do it. You’ll know best how to place them and the rest of how it goes. I work at three o’clock. Maximus will be with me. Can he be tethered to the booth, do you think?
– Only if he doesn’t drag us all into the water or start eating my hair again.
She smiled, harmlessly. The storm in her had passed, if ever it had been a threat.
– I’ll bring some mints. It will distract him. You’ll be in Varga tonight? You’ll tell me if it is at all possible?
– Of course. Though I’m sure it will be. You did say full body? You’re sure about that?
– Sure. Until I am gone, poof, no more.
She watched him work, gently and ruthlessly with the implement, the way passers-by would linger and watch him. It was an artistic procedure after all, the way painterly hands moved with premeditation, leaving behind a trail of ink, and it could be oddly subduing and soothing. Or perhaps she was hypnotized by the sound of mechanical embroidery as so many others were. Her eyes were slow over his hand for a moment or two, he could feel them there, and he was pleased that she stayed on and pleased that his hand remained adept. He felt suddenly proud of his work, prouder than he ever had before. He wished he could stop work and talk to her, perhaps to reassure himself that she was only very fierce when under threat, but there was the rest of the group to consider and the bright sun in the alley would mean more crowds later in the day. He took small glances at her in between attending to the smears on the man with a lint rag, catching only portions of her body in his peripheral vision, corners of the brown dress at her hip, dark red hair pinned back off her recessive face, abstract pieces. Of the things she said there were always references to other more important matters, it seemed; she was never far from sermon. She reminded him of Morecambe’s councillors and ministers that way.
The soldiers came back from the sea, two of them were soaked through after having been thrown in, and they loitered beside the booth, keeping a moderate distance from Grace. She had acted like an astringent on their free-flowing bravado. Or perhaps the cold water had sobered them. Whatever the sedation, they had simmered down a little now. But as Grace walked away one of them looked up and whistled after her. The whistle followed her walk for a few paces, dribbling wet on her calves and heels, a last attempt to better her, or a last flush arrow aimed at her composure with a message tied to its shaft saying she was still a woman after all, and this fact alone had drawn the man’s bow. She paused, turned, walked back and stood in front of the largest man with the largest smirk on his face, interpreting him to be the whistler. He sucked in his belly, blew up his chest with his lungs, expecting a bitter pass, a strike to the face, blushing chastising, the usual gender haggling. Cy was about to stand up and intervene when Grace put her thumb in her mouth, licked it, and then reached up and ran it wetly over some imagined grime on the man’s cheek, collecting the flesh of his face in a ripple at its edge, like a mammal cleaning her own defenceless young. It was a small gesture but it resonated loudly, and seemed as wrong as her name. Then she was gone to a quiet exit, to a few sly, unheard comments.
– What a loony. Probably queer in the head, probably into other girls, right boys?
– Yeah, or sick fetishes. All that crazy stuff about little girls! I never heard anything like it!
It was apparent to them that Grace was deranged in her mind, and in her style, like everything else they had been led to expect was deranged one way or another in this sprawling, rabid mass of pavilions and fairground rides. So they let her go, unsettled by her and yet able to reconcile somewhere within themselves that unsettlement was just her function while they visited Coney, just as Cy’s function was to tattoo and hurt them and scare them a little with his dour gruff and his loud ink, just as the fire-swallowers and the contortionists and freaks would shortly create some kind of disturbance in the gut if they paid their dime’s entrance into the amusement parks.
There were broken rules about broken rules at Coney. Everybody claiming residency or employment there lived by them and almost nobody understood them. Visitors acted out, as they never would at home. The Island’s business folk delved into the most absurd, most stigmatic, most contemporary corners of their brains and sold their wares. That was the saying, that anything goes. The human fracas, the folly, the malediction, com
ing from deregulation and eternal carnival was as natural as the hysterical behaviour of small children when provided with a corpse in velvet pageboy attire and a Ouija board. Cy had learned that you didn’t refer to the strange constitution of the place, because by nature it warped in the mind, slipped will-o-the-wisp from the hands of definition and litigation and could quite possibly send you raving mad as you chased after it. Better to just merry-go-round at Coney, up and down, to the creepy tinkling music of the mechanical hammer-driven pianos and the operatic wail of sirens and the grunting percussion of bumper cars. Better to just ride the anarchy like one of his tattoos of bare-breasted women riding fork-tongued serpents in the foam of a green sea. So he listened to the group berating Grace and he neglected to defend her, as his procedural, gentlemanly, elsewhere-located self might have.
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 M
orecambe 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.
Cy leaned back on his stool and peered into the gaming room. It was too full and too smoky to see if Grace was playing yet tonight. Grubby, crumpled money was being passed between hands. He rubbed his face, took a long drink and felt the liquid burn his gums and throat. Valerie poured more whisky into his glass and set the bottle on the counter next to him, tapped it with a red fingernail. He must have had that look to him, the expression of a swimmer far out at sea in need of a life-ring or an exhausted miner groping for a canister of oil in the obsidian blackness as his lamp flickers out, for Valerie was not one for any kind of compromised distress, hers was not a half-way house. He returned his attention to the page. Yes, he could easily copy this design. It was not difficult. He could tell Grace he would tattoo her. And of course he would be happy to work on her, to have her company in his booth, get to know her and her body a little better. But at the heart of the matter, he did not understand Grace’s eye. Why on earth did she want it? What was the point of one image repeated? Why not mix it up a bit? Partly it was too simple, ridiculously simple, and he knew he must be missing the point of it all. Or she was doing it merely for her act in the circus perhaps, but it seemed a far length to go to. Again he had the sense that he must concentrate hard, double-clutch the gears in his brain because of her. He lit a cigarette, parked it in the corner of his mouth and set about finishing off a generous glass of whisky. An eye, over and over. How many times would she want it done? How much would he charge? He had wished to impress her with feathery detail and delicate shading, to give her body flight. He liked the idea of women and winged creations. Like angels or harpies, these designs always looked suitable on them, their bodies housed the compositions so well, along breastbones, on shoulders, along their backs which had perhaps once already contained the stub and stem of wings, depending on how you might regard them. He had wanted to show off his skills, have her select some of his own designs, and he had wanted to have some kind of personal artistic partnership with her, like Arturas and Claudia.
