more permanent impressions

Mr. Hickey whistles as he works.

It is impossible to ignore what is being done to him in one of his most secret places – Mr. Hickey has chosen for his canvas the soft corner of Goodsir’s thigh, just beneath the crease of his buttocks, and the smarting cold air raises the coarse hairs on his legs to remind him of the graceless position in which he is bound – face-down and spread-limbed in a creaking patent tent with only a canvas flap and Mr. Hickey’s reputation between his degradation and the whole world. He has surrendered to the steady pricking like the punch of a sewing needle through cloth, and to the pressing-in of the soot – mixed with grease and God-knows-what. God may know but Goodsir would rather not. The stink suggests piss.

If Hickey had meant only to mutilate him, he’d have no shortage of implements at his disposal – sawblades and hot knife blades and hooks and chisels, hands and teeth and tongue and prick. The knife he carries with him was once a doctor’s knife – rifled from Stanley’s or McDonald’s things, no doubt. Hickey carries it with him always. This repurposing of tools is merely thrift, using the thin steel bodkin to prick and prick, rather than to press and probe. The pain is not so difficult to bear – hauling and hiking have given him an unimaginable tolerance for discomfort. Far worse is the loathsome attention in every neat pinprick of pain, the warmth of another man’s hands, the heat of his breath.

A number of the men are tattooed with anchors or crosses or the names of sweethearts – there must be men in every port who perform such alterations. The natives have their own fashion in this, wary girls with chevrons of neat blue down their cheeks and old Esquimaux seamstresses as lined in ink as they are lined with wrinkles. Only the women, regardless of age, never the men. They must find the sight of tattooed Englishmen rather queer. He’ll have to ask Lady Silence what she makes of such things, Goodsir thinks, and if he were not already balancing on the bare edge of his endurance that giddy thought would send him over.

“There you are,” Mr. Hickey says somewhere behind him, and from his voice he can only be smiling. “Engraved, like a South Seas islander.” He clasps Goodsir’s thigh companionably and burnishes his handiwork – his thumb smears ink or blood in a warm track. It makes Goodsir gasp.

There’s a pair of initials burned into his skin, each letter distinct – but no matter how he strains his neck and twists his bound arms, he cannot read them. C H, he can only suppose – a memorial only as indelible as the flesh it stands on. Better off carving on bone, or scratching the letters into a brass button. When Goodsir is dead, the flesh will be cut from the backs of his thighs, from his buttocks, from his calves. Mr. Hickey only stakes his claim.