by Sarah Hall
Of the six tattooed women on the Luna podium Grace had been the newest and the least demurely dressed. The gallery had put in for a nude licence for her and been refused by the city authority, though she was always willing to do it, she said. She wore only a feeble bandeau around her breasts and a pair of short silks. The others, including Claudia, whose stage name was Mrs Bismarck, were clad as if for bathing, in long suits, and each had a circus card next to her foot. Their names were Nell Nerona, who had fake body make-up rather than authentic tattoos but said she had been abducted by Indians out west and painted while held hostage inside their wigwams, Texas Bobbie, Lovely Loretta, who had been at one time a bearded lady and had worked with Barnum and Bailey, Polly the Painted Pear, and the Lady of Many Eyes. Most were moonlighting from other circus professions, and they made more money than they knew what to do with, some had even bought stocks and shares. All but the last were dressed under their costumes in a jumble of assorted images – they had bootlaces tattooed on ankles, and portraits on their legs, hearts, doves, roses and ribbons, Allied flags, apostles and stars. Grace was the only attraction to consist of a single repetitive image. She was all eyes. And since there was a mesmerizing, confusing quality to her body, all the eyes watching the show were hers. By the third week in the gallery she had made close to a hundred dollars, four times as much as the tattoos had cost her. She had been booked to appear in a show at the Grand Theatre in Greenwich Village, and had even been invited to enter a beauty contest in Philadelphia.
Henry arrived at the booth as Cy was putting the last board up for the night. There was an awful, clear sobriety about him, though he had drunk almost a half bottle of Grey Goose in the bar by then on his night off, and in addition his blood was shimmering with several other ephedrine or opiate chemicals. He had a beautiful, soft, southern voice, Cy remembered thinking that night, like down on a Georgia peach, and that made the ensuing story seem like one even children would be entranced to hear, frightening and monstrous elements though there were. If anyone else had told Cyril Parks of the events minutes ago he might have laid out his fists before thinking of the guiltless messenger. Like Eliot Riley would have, when anger got the better of him, disabling his reason and he’d go about duffing the air, too drunk to reach the offender. Cy might have hooked the words right off another man’s face with his knuckles, having suddenly and fully inherited the bare-knuckle legacy of Riley, when he heard about Grace. But for that soft southern voice that made the story he was hearing into a happier imitation of the truth. Then, when the tale was told, Henry said he couldn’t truly tell how much morphine he’d given Grace. And that he might have given her so much morphine as to accidentally kill her, if the acid hadn’t killed her already. But her pain had been so bad it had made him sorry for her, sorry enough that his thumb went down twice on the plunger, once to the postoperative millimetre marker, then beyond it to that privileged realm meant for only those long acquainted with the lag. And what would Cy recommend he do with this?
Henry took a hand out of his pocket and his two fingers were still tucked through the brass loops of the syringe and his thumb was sitting on its plunger, so it looked like he was pulling out a bizarre revolver.
– It seems you ain’t the only man with Miss Grace’s blood on your needle, Mr Parks.
Then the two of them walked down to the end of Steeplechase Pier and took a weight from one of the crab traps stacked on the edge and they tied it round the syringe and the empty box of glass silos and tossed it all into the water.
In the aftermath, when Grace had been taken to the hospital, everyone wanted to know about the villain who had attacked her, what his name was, where he came from, what he ate for dinner. That was the talk at Coney Island. It was as if the rankness of the act was tantamount to the incident, and the crime won the day in terms of public curiosity and attention. Not many people asked about Grace, she had received only the vengeful smite of the newly infamous. And she was, in any case, a slut to trouble, was she not? Sedak was fined forty dollars to clean up the bar and he was remanded to the Brooklyn asylum. There was talk in the newspapers of getting restrictions put on the sales of chemical substances and fertilizers, tightening up the laws, until the distributors argued back in letters to the editors that such recourse would damage their private individual sales and send them under, and the debate blew away. This was America. Consumer freedom was what made the country great. And if the public could not be trusted with what they bought, that did not constitute a penalty in rights, did it?
Grace did not die. She struggled to keep her body a consistent element. Though she was not allowed visitors for fear of infection, the nurses kept Cy informed of her condition while he stayed at the hospital, which was not good, not good at all. He arrived the night of the attack and was greeted by a creeping crêpe-bandage and disinfectant smell identical to that which he had encountered in the Lancaster infirmary years ago, and he slept along the wooden chairs in the waiting room, while the floor was polished by a man with a loud machine spinning a buffer. In his dreams the noise became the sound of his electric needle as he put blue ink along the mastectomy-buckled chest of his mother.
– Are you a relative?
He was asked this simple question time and again, hourly, as if in the continual asking there might be some sudden change of status that allowed him access to Grace, because she had no one else, no blood connection, and that deeply troubled the nurses – that lack of an immediate family. The only answer he could give was a shake of his head and nonsense.
– She lives in my building. I painted her. She’s my Sistine Chapel, you see.
It was all the relationship he had to make his claim with. Then, towards the end of the first night, when he grew exhausted with hypnotic dreaming on the uncomfortable wooden chairs, and he grew desperate for news of her well-being, he began to unravel and he gave out confidential material.
– I love her, I’m in love with her, you see. She lives in my building with her horse, though I never see her there, ordinarily I see her at the bar and at work, and I love her.
The faces of the nurses were dull with work and unsmiling, but not unkind. He was polite enough, this man, if unkempt and odd and throwback looking. And love went a small way towards repairing the damage they imagined caused to Grace by her missing people. They would keep him informed, they said, as best they could.
For four days he lived in the hospital reception and waiting area, his eyes red ringed, his clothes becoming sweat stained, under the watchful and ever patience-diminishing gaze of the nurses as they moved past with metal trays bearing equipment and food and medication for patients. Occasionally there was a bustle to the uniformed women, a flap and squawk of activity, as an ambulance van howled up to the double doors of the hospital and a bloody wreck was admitted. Cy noticed the differing shapes of shotgun and revolver holes in bodies as they were wheeled past him, and he thought back to a time in the Bayview when he had first been made privy to the visceral despair of the human body, its remarkable waste. After each frenzy he would lie back down and stare at die fans on the damp-stained ceiling, the nurses looming above him like gulls. The walls began to shrink in. Just walking to the water fountain mounted on the tiled wall opposite the chairs seemed too far to travel. After two days he was disallowed use of the orderlies’ washroom. The antiseptic smell began to make him paranoid, convincing him the nurses knew Grace was dead but were not telling him so, and convincing him that all the women in the wards were destined to share the tragic fate of his mother, that if he ran in among them they would all seem beautiful and meaningful in their beds just because for the time being they were still living.
Claudia and Arturas came and sat silently next to him, then left, no more able to gain access to Grace that he. One or two other people came and went quickly, acquaintances of Grace’s, characters that were furtive and suspect and seemed unwilling to talk to him. He slept through the day while the tubular lights burned the back of his eyelids and he left the chairs
at night to wander the grounds when the air cooled and the receptionist ushered him out, her sympathy also at last waning. The third day he took a shit in an alleyway next to the kitchens at dusk and got some on his foot, so he was aware that he smelled of it back in the waiting room and that the nurses could smell it too, but he was beyond caring by then. He remembered the occasion he’d dressed up like a boggart in the Lune marshes and how the smell of dirt had stayed on him a week after he washed it off, how humiliated he’d felt. But even fouled and derelict, he would not leave to get cleaned up, he would stay for Grace’s sake. Superstition told him that desertion, even temporary, would signal her immediate death, and tiredness and hunger pumped that ominous sense around his wrecked and ransacked brain.
On the fourth evening his stomach was sore with famine and he began looking through the waste material at the back of the hospital for leftover food. He was seen by a doctor leaving for the night in his car who notified security and Cy was removed from the grounds with a stern warning. He walked several miles back to Sheepshead Bay with the soles of his feet thinning and blistering against the leather of his boots. It was a hot wet night in the streets of Brooklyn, and the humidity washed garbled phrases out of him that were slurred and pointless, the way the quicksand had loosened his tongue when he was a boy. There was a moment when he could not go on, from weariness and bitter sadness, and he sat down on a bench and held his stomach and his body cramped with sobs. An old woman walking past with her dog jabbed at him with her stick and in a hissing fit of conniption told him to go away. He kept moving, stopping only once more at an allnight store where he bought a quart of liquor. When he arrived home he drank it with determination and slept on a sheetless bed, he had not brought his washing down from the roof, not having been home since the morning of Grace’s attack, and now it was being rained wet again. Within an hour Señora Ubago had pinned a note on his door stating he was late with his rent.
In the morning he bought fresh boiled bagels from the bakery and fruit from the market, though by then his stomach resented the intrusion and he had to concentrate hard to resist being sick. He ate standing outside his building, gingerly, watching the living pass by, fearing the dead under their feet. On the way back to his room he paused next to Grace’s door and was suddenly horrified to think of the horse, unfed and unwatered, closed up in a tiny space. He had no idea where Maximus was, whether he had been left at the circus or not. The door was ajar very slightly and upon closer examination the wood around the lock was splintered and split. Evidently Claudia had had the same idea about the horse. Or some opportunistic felon, some nosy gumshoe, after hearing the news of her downfall, had taken the opportunity to burgle Grace while she was indisposed. He moved for the first time inside her apartment and it was like coming into the countryside. There were patches of hay in the corner and a warm barnyard smell enriched the air, the odour of livestock and rusk. Maximus had imprinted his character on her home as well as if he were a husband. Cy thought to himself again that it was simply implausible and impractical for her to have pulled off such a feat. And yet she had done it. A patchwork blanket was folded over the back of a chair, it was covered with coarse wiry horsehair and a few pieces of bridlery hung from a hat-stand, but there was no saddle to be found anywhere. The apartment was one of the smallest in the building and some nights Grace had kept the largest horse Cy had ever seen in it without the building manager’s knowledge. The old Jewess must surely have known! She must have known or suspected, or for ludicrous reasons agreed to it all. Though there was Grace in his mind’s eye, going to the trouble of putting sacking on the horse’s hooves as she led him back inside over the incriminating marble floor, asking for his cooperation to step high and quiet with her gypsy-blood whisper in his twitching ear. There she was, rugose and beautiful at once, arguing with strangers over any cause she saw fit, and giving up her body for a belief, or a move in a political game, or for nothing at all. It seemed such a stretch, so innately impossible when she was not here to prove it, but he had long ago given up on what was possible in life. In this city of a thousand impossibilities, the whole world could dream, with methods and strategies as appalling and wondrous as a war of angels. A trip to the bright white moon or to the green ocean floor was possible in Luna Park, buildings grown from magic beans were possible, eighty storeys high and more, Coney’s freaks were possible and Manhattan’s thronging, semi-harmonious crowds, the fine dance of people moving on sidewalks and between motor cars, all of it was possible. And love, love for a woman made of eyes was above all else possible.
As he looked around Grace became no less of an enigma. There were no tommy guns in cases, nor reams of money stashed in satchels to condemn her. Beside the quirks of evidence of her equestrian involvement the rest of the apartment was ordinary, like a stage set in a minimalist play. There were books stacked on an old table, he flipped one open and the print was in English. In a bowl were some apple cores, bitten through and turning brown. An empty sack of oats was peeled back on the wooden floor. In the kitchen the sink was plugged, filled a quarter full of water with straw floating in it, the smell of an animal’s thirst hanging just above the surface like a cloud of flies over a pond. The window was open and outside by a tree in the old courtyard was a pile of dry horseshit, and hanging from the window ledge, a bag that could be fixed to the animal’s hindquarters to catch its dirt. Nothing else but these few mean things told him of Grace, or gave him a leg-up into her life. She was as she came, self-contained and layered. She ate, slept, breathed.
He moved back towards the door and was about to leave when he noticed a strange artisan-looking object in the corner of the room on a bookcase. It was made of flat rectangular wooden slats stacked up on each other with fibres of paper in the very middle, like an old-fashioned press. There were four screws at the four corners of the contraption that bit firmly into the wood beneath them. He began to unscrew the bolts, a little at each corner in turn because the pulpy muscles of the press were keen to kilter out unevenly as it was opened. When the bolts were off he lifted out the boarding and between the centre paper was a pressed flower, so flat that it might have been paper itself if its brown-pink pigment against the white page had not distinguished it. It was a thing so frail that Cy dared not remove its ironed stamen and petals, seeming no more opaque and no more transparent than one layer of human skin from any race. He replaced the top of the press as best he could, it was a tricky fit and he was aware that the original positioning and frieze of the flower had been done with great care. Then he left and closed her door.
Upstairs he washed and shaved, put on a new pair of slacks and a clean blue shirt under his suspenders and he tied back his hair. He had looked like a vagrant for the last few days, like a wild dog rustling through rubbish and dirt with its nose. And he’d smelled like the drunks he had been hauling up from their own piss and blood and mistakes all his adult life. His mother had always said that a clean face and a pressed collar could get a ticket aboard a carriage to the city of London even if the change was wrong. Reeda Parks had never ridden a horse-drawn tram in Morecambe, let alone a train to the capital, but he thought of her philosophy tenderly as he paid for his ticket back to the hospital.
True enough his improved appearance opened the door for greater insight into Grace’s condition. The doctor, a short, greying, varicose man, shook his hand and described the injuries. It seemed she was still an undecided compound, not quite solid, not quite liquid, but something in between. Though her internal organs had been unscathed by the acid – if the shock of such a strong corrosive on her flesh was great, the alkali had been downright confusing – there were equations and proportions of damage to the skin which meant that this durable but delicate organ was presently working out of sync with the rest of the anatomy. And it could influence other organs. Such was the plexus fashion in which the human body relied upon each of its critical vessels and components for survival and harmony. At that moment Cy heard the voice of his mother again, trilling at t
he back of his head. One without the other we are made poorer, Cyril, remember that.
Only time would tell for Grace’s recovery, the doctor went on, and though he could say she should live, she was borderline damage percentage and that made things unduly complicated. Then the man cleared his throat confidently and looked at Cy as if waiting for a reply. Cy’s head was effervescing with information like seltzer powder dumped into a glass of water.
– I didn’t know skin was classed as an organ. I didn’t know that.
– Yes, it is. You do understand, then?
– Yes.
And so it was that in a hospital in southern Brooklyn Cyril Parks learned his final lesson about the medium of his profession. It was the body’s largest organ. He knew so much about skin, how it was essentially imperfect, but that was its very nature, how it told stories where the mouth did not, how it flexed, how it folded and faded, its shades and shapes, the provinces of geographic elasticity and density, how it aged, how it bled, how it housed his ink. But he did not know that it was an organ, like the liver or kidneys or the spleen. An organ, vital to life as the loving, brackish human heart.
