life’s journey. Twenty, for a rapid, press-gangless signature, acceptance of an invisible king’s shilling with its obverse decreeing he would join the ranks of the town’s eccentric subculture, and stand to attention and salute Eliot Riley. Such a small portion of life, and yet so filled with energy, force, momentum. Cy had told nobody of his plans to visit Riley, not quite knowing how to express the man’s appeal, nor describe his own curiosity, his sense of being summoned. He spoke of it to no one, though he passed by Jonty’s house as he walked the streets and he could have pebbled his window and held a conference about his intention, and he had crept past his mother’s room while her lamp was still shining and he knew her ear was always willing and her heart always open. But he went alone.
Cy arrived at the building on Pedder Street and knocked on the door, which was opened by a small, hatless, catgut-looking man who said nothing, and he came into a cold parlour. There was one other man sitting on a chair there – two more chairs were empty – his cap pulled over his face and he was leaning back, with folded arms, as if sleeping or laid out to rest dead in an upright coffin. But the walls, the walls were more than living, they were full and lost under black-bordered colour. It was the inside of a kaleidoscope. It was Aladdin’s cave, a store of pirates’ bounty. Pictures and motifs of dragons and angels and Christ and bones and flowers and hearts and weaponry hung from the walls. A curtain separated this room from another, or another section of it, and behind its tatty covering there was that noise, that noise again, like mechanical workers in a beehive, a determined machinist’s hum. The faint smell of antiseptic or spirits was in the air, something medicinal, like the waft from the bottle of witch hazel his mother had dabbed his cuts and scrapes with as a boy, and along side that Cy detected another fragrance, pleasant, female, ill-fitting, which he could not quite determine.
– Mr Riley? Sir?
The wasp-motor noise stopped and the curtain was drawn back sharply on its metal rings. There stood his potential employer, wearing his careless, navvie-wedding garb, wired needle in hand, looking like the sanest man in the asylum. Something had changed about him. His eyes had shifted focus. He looked quite calm. More at ease than Cy had ever seen him look before, at least of the two occasions that he’d met him, perhaps because now Cy was in his lair, on his common turf, and the host knew balls to brawn that here he was king of his own country. His broody, intense presence seemed now to be more self-assured swagger than the displaced arrogance of the bar and street.
– Late. Inside, lad, sharpish. I’d about give up on you, you little bugger.
Cy glanced at the two young men in the waiting area, who were watching him, the sleeper now awake and out from under his hat, unsmiling, bored or prejudicial or curious. There was a sense of vague challenge about them, so Cy knew right there and then what kind of environment this profession was surrounded by or founded on, what kind of landscape would be denied or chosen that night. He moved past them into the back room and the curtain was drawn screechingly closed again. Inside it was much warmer. This half of the room contained a coal fire, which was gently smoking. Damp rags had been hung about it and the enclosure felt soft-boiled like a warm vegetable. Humid, like Cy imagined the tropics to be. A man was sitting reversed on a chair, with his legs on either side of it, and he was gripping two wooden handles fixed to the wall. A cigarette holding a long, strained orange tip came from between his lips. He was naked from the waist up and sweating profusely. Above his belt was a patch of highly irritated red skin and inside that was half a hooded cobra snake, red, green, black, and yellow, its tail beginning along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column,
Cy arrived at the building on Pedder Street and knocked on the door, which was opened by a small, hatless, catgut-looking man who said nothing, and he came into a cold parlour. There was one other man sitting on a chair there – two more chairs were empty – his cap pulled over his face and he was leaning back, with folded arms, as if sleeping or laid out to rest dead in an upright coffin. But the walls, the walls were more than living, they were full and lost under black-bordered colour. It was the inside of a kaleidoscope. It was Aladdin’s cave, a store of pirates’ bounty. Pictures and motifs of dragons and angels and Christ and bones and flowers and hearts and weaponry hung from the walls. A curtain separated this room from another, or another section of it, and behind its tatty covering there was that noise, that noise again, like mechanical workers in a beehive, a determined machinist’s hum. The faint smell of antiseptic or spirits was in the air, something medicinal, like the waft from the bottle of witch hazel his mother had dabbed his cuts and scrapes with as a boy, and along side that Cy detected another fragrance, pleasant, female, ill-fitting, which he could not quite determine.
– Mr Riley? Sir?
The wasp-motor noise stopped and the curtain was drawn back sharply on its metal rings. There stood his potential employer, wearing his careless, navvie-wedding garb, wired needle in hand, looking like the sanest man in the asylum. Something had changed about him. His eyes had shifted focus. He looked quite calm. More at ease than Cy had ever seen him look before, at least of the two occasions that he’d met him, perhaps because now Cy was in his lair, on his common turf, and the host knew balls to brawn that here he was king of his own country. His broody, intense presence seemed now to be more self-assured swagger than the displaced arrogance of the bar and street.
– Late. Inside, lad, sharpish. I’d about give up on you, you little bugger.
Cy glanced at the two young men in the waiting area, who were watching him, the sleeper now awake and out from under his hat, unsmiling, bored or prejudicial or curious. There was a sense of vague challenge about them, so Cy knew right there and then what kind of environment this profession was surrounded by or founded on, what kind of landscape would be denied or chosen that night. He moved past them into the back room and the curtain was drawn screechingly closed again. Inside it was much warmer. This half of the room contained a coal fire, which was gently smoking. Damp rags had been hung about it and the enclosure felt soft-boiled like a warm vegetable. Humid, like Cy imagined the tropics to be. A man was sitting reversed on a chair, with his legs on either side of it, and he was gripping two wooden handles fixed to the wall. A cigarette holding a long, strained orange tip came from between his lips. He was naked from the waist up and sweating profusely. Above his belt was a patch of highly irritated red skin and inside that was half a hooded cobra snake, red, green, black, and yellow, its tail beginning along the slight depression between muscle and spinal column,
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