"…RUAN'S TATTOOS WAS CLOSED…"
Despite the early hour, I found a lot of shops already open. So I went shopping. I went to B&Q and bought a pair of coveralls plus a roll of bright green masking tape, and a pair of sturdy but lightweight boots from a shoe shop imaginatively called SHOE SHOP, which I suppose was a tactic designed to help the place get a mention when people did online searches for footwear establishments. Then I hit Superdrug for beauty products. From a Cash Converters, which is basically a pawn shop, I acquired a Black Widow catapult and a bag of marbles, and JJB sports supplied me with a plain black cotton beanie, goalkeeper's gloves and a rucksack to carry it all in. I was almost ready.
I knew that when the police went to Shoe Shop, they'd take away the crappy training shoes I'd left in the spot vacated by the boots I now wore, and if they managed some DNA or whatever tests on them, they'd find Tattoo-guy and he'd tell them about me. He'd say I was certainly the sort to steal shoes, since I'd stolen a pair from him. And with that the cops would know it was me in the CCTV videos, shown running from other shops with stolen gear, but I didn't care. As long as I completed my mission today.
RUAN'S TATTOOS was closed, but I rapped on the shutter and a guy wearing his products under a green tank top and matching football shorts appeared at a window above, waved me away and pointed to his wrist, as if saying it wasn't time to open yet. I tapped various places on my body, as if to show him what I wanted. He just looked at me, and continued to do so until I sat on the pavement, showing him I was willing to wait.
A minute later there were sounds coming from within the shop, behind the shutter, which abruptly drew itself up and coiled into a casing that someone had defaced with graffiti. The young guy covered in tattoos appeared behind the glass door, all but his head obscured by a large insider sticker of a dragon sucking on its own tail. The plate glass window to the left was similarly plastered with vinyl stickers of various sizes, showing off the tattooist's art. But I wasn't interested in his artwork. I wanted something else, something specific.
"Yeah, I do piercings," the tattooist answered, standing aside and allowing me to step through the door. The interior of the shop smelled of antiseptic or something.
"Yeah, I can do the forehead, no problemo," he said as I sat in a big, soft chair that took centre stage in the room, right before the window, so people could watch. I didn't get that. Some people liked to pretty themselves with cosmetic editing, but that didn't mean they wanted to watch open-face surgery live through a big window. Oh well. "For the forehead, I'd suggest titanium, but you can go for gold or surgical steel. Less chance of allergic reaction wi' that trio."
Titanium sounded good. It sounded strong and futuristic and suited my reasons for the piercings in the first place.
"No gun for body piercings," he said. "So I'll have to go upstairs and bring up my trinkets. Have to boot up the autoclave, too - that's for sterilization, you know? There's a form or two you can fill in while I get them."
When he was gone, I checked out the form. Name and address? I don't think so. John Smith, the famous false name, is also a very popular real one – sort of like PLAYER 1 in a computer game, a default name - a name chosen by parents who couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. John Smith, then. From?
There was a framed map of the world on one wall. I dribbled saliva on my finger, flicked that finger and noted where the spittle landed. It took three attempts to hit the map.
The tattooist came back carrying things in bags, like some detective exiting a crime scene, and a small pocket-sized folder. He held them up as he approached. "You should witness me opening these. All sterile and packaged, yeah?"
He took my form, handed me the folder, explained that it displayed illustrations of all his piercing jewellery, and then set about getting everything ready. At one point he looked over at me, my filled form in his hand.
"Bit pale for a Nigerian chap, aren't you?"
"Anemia," I replied, and he seemed satisfied by that answer - if only because he knew it meant nothing more truthful would be forthcoming.
I picked a yellow star-shaped stud about the size of a two pence piece – a star-shaped one, of course. The tattooist marked my head with a felt-tipped pen: one blob on each temple and a curving arc of four blobs across the top of my forehead. In the space below I wanted a circular stud, of similar size, that was coloured like a spiral kaleidoscope, but unfortunately, though he had such an item, he couldn't provide one that spun to hypnotise my enemies. He marked another blob on my head, below the middle of the arcing dots.
"Yeah, you can leave them uncovered today," he said in answer to a question. Then he said he was ready and led me to a chair in a corner, right in front of the window. I didn't like that: nobody was allowed to watch Spiderman slip out of his civvies and into his Spidey outfit.
"No, won't hurt much," he replied to another question. "But it may bleed. Don't let that bother you. There's a billion gallons of blood in the world. Chances are you'll see some of it sometime, eh?" He started to put on latex gloves. In a thousand sandwich shops across the world, ten thousand employees daily heard "Bend over" jokes about their surgical gloves. I decided not to make such a joke here.
"Okay, are you ready? Are you sure about this? You can change your mind now, if you want."
I looked at him. "Thank god for that. I thought you were going to hold me down." He missed the sarcasm and shook his head.
"Nope, you can change your mind. Do you want to?"
Now I shook mine. But in his eyes I saw something, something like a mixture of fear and wonder, and before I could help it, I told him I didn't have any money to pay for these piercings. And he nodded.
"Figured that, somehow. You've something big planned, haven't you? Hey, I don't want to know. Just the advertisement, cheers."
I grinned at him. I knew what he was thinking. I recalled how the sale of ball-pein hammers had increased after the conviction of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, who had used such a tool to batter his victims' heads in. Morbid fascination, I guess.
"Ruan's Tattoos, Far Cry Street," I said. "You can call it the Avenger Mask. Be all the rage amongst the kids."
He looked at me, thinking, obviously thinking. Kerching! Then he rushed away, but before I could get paranoid about what he might be doing, he returned with a camera and held it up and raised his eyebrows. "After? For the records."
"So long as it's not for the tabloids," I said, and then told him to get to work. He didn't object…
…"Try not to touch them for at least the rest of this day," he said as he dropped his tools into a sink of sterilized water. He took a towel and wiped more blood from my eyebrows, where gravity was holding roll call. The pain was strange - not a sharp pain that you'd expect from piercings, but a deep throb, as you might feel if you hung your head upside down for five minutes. It felt as if all the blood in my body had travelled to my head. Pull out one of the piercings, I thought, and it would be like pulling a finger from a hole in a dam. Blood would squirt in a thin, powerful jet across the room, smash the window and cut some passing car in half like wire through warm cheese.
"You're done, Avenger. Except for one more form, okay?"
"No more forms."
"My mistake, we're done here. Hey, can I ask, what is all this? Why the head jewellery?"
"You can ask."
He looked a bit suspicious. "I can ask, but you won't answer, right?"
I was looking at my head reflected in a hand-held mirror. There were no wall mirrors, which I found strange. Lots of artwork to look at, but no means to look at your own, except using the small mirror the tattooist kept by his work area. Maybe this was so he could quickly show a customer what they'd paid for and then get them out. He wouldn't want people hanging around doing biceps curls to stretch their new Celtic bands, after all. Seeing my face, and its new decoration, I realized there was something missing.
"One more thing," I said. Afterwards, I left, carrying my rucksack of items, including what I'
d gotten off the tattooist. He thanked me and promised to forget I existed - until the checkbook journalists came knocking, he admitted. I left him to his fantasy, or whatever you want to call it.
As soon as I got outside, I pulled my beanie from the rucksack and jammed it over my head, pulled it down so it covered my new forehead jewellery. When I turned my head, the beanie moved against my neck and pulled slightly at the star-shaped studs in my flesh, but it didn't hurt. It was nothing more than a niggling itch, which I was sure I could get used to. But I had to wear it, since I now had some new, very distinguishing marks, which needed to stay hidden when not "in use." Imagine Peter Parker walking round his city wearing his Spiderman mask - a slight clue, eh?
I kept the beanie on even when I was back in the van and driving. From now on, I would try to exist out of my uniform, so as to attempt to keep a part of my life distant from my hero persona. Although in this case I think the civilian in me was the persona, not the hero. I would play the part of a normal guy and exist in essence as Avenger.
I had one place left to visit. My girl's house, where all this would play out to an end. But I was planning to take the scenic route, because I had people other than myself to help now. Duty, and all that malarkey.