The Bat Tattoo (8 page)

‘My older brother had tattoos,’ he said, ‘and I wanted to get tattooed too but I was only twelve then and I was too young. When I was fifteen I went back and got a tattoo and after that I kept coming in for more until they were sick of the sight of me. They said, “Why don’t you save up and get the tools and learn how to do it yourself?” So I did and it took me five years before I was ready to do it for money.’

‘Where did you go to learn it?’ I asked him.

‘I just practised on myself and my friends for the first three years.’

‘On yourself!’

‘Yes. Most tattoo artists have terrible-looking legs because that’s where you practise when you’re learning. You put your leg up on a chair and it’s easy to work on.’

His arms were illustrated so copiously that the designs merged in a jungle of pattern and colour from which faces, or perhaps not, peeped indistinctly. I followed him into the STRICTLY PRIVATE area and we went into a little fluorescent-lit room that looked very medical: a white enamel instrument table, glass shelving for more instruments and a tall shelf unit for coloured inks. An Anglepoise lamp gave additional light to a towel-covered arm rest; I’d given him a photo of the bowl with my bat a couple of days ago and he’d done an enlarged copy of the bat on tracing paper. Laying the tracing on carbon paper with the carbon side up he’d gone over the outline to prepare the tracing for transfer to my skin.

He put on latex gloves, sprayed my shoulder with antiseptic liquid, then shaved it, went over it with an alcoholic stick, and applied the transfer. When he lifted the tracing paper there was the dark-blue outline of my bat, about two and a quarter inches from wingtip to wingtip. After a few minutes for drying there was more antiseptic, then Vaseline to lubricate the skin. He prepared the disposable caps for the two inks, a light red and a dark red, and dipped the outlining machine into the dark red. Then I placed my arm on the arm rest, the gleaming little machine buzzingly approached my shoulder, the needle pricked my skin, and the eighteenth-century bat of the Yongzheng period taxied down the runway into the
new century on me. Would it get me off the ground? I was paying for the tattoo but was I a legitimate passenger or a stowaway?

Before this I hadn’t put my tattoo thoughts into words with any precision; I felt that in being tattooed I was offering myself to some unknown chance of luck; but now it came to me with simple clarity that I just wanted that bat to take me aboard and fly me out of where I was in myself.

When I’m in a pub with a few drinks in me I can talk more or less freely to strangers but I don’t like to lay out my whole history for everybody and it isn’t easy for me to type it out here. I’ll say what I can and maybe more at another time. At my present age of forty-seven my back story is not an album of happy memories. I was married for seven years; Jennifer died in a car crash in 1995. After that I kept mostly to myself for the next few years: I did some painting and drawing, some reading. I watched a lot of videos, went to museums and concerts, lived from day to day the best I could. I’d nothing much to say to anyone; I got fewer and fewer dinner invitations and became more and more boring to myself. But after a while I was ready to move on to whatever was next and that’s when I decided on a bat tattoo and met Sarah Varley. That encounter at the V & A was the sort of thing that sometimes leads to a closer acquaintance but I didn’t feel like starting with a new person; there was still too much unfinished business in my head.

Adelbert Delarue was much in my mind of course. He was delighted with the gorilla and particularly with the Bach tape. ‘So austere!’ he wrote. ‘This so noble primate with his grandeur priapic, how he resonates and echoes lost evolutionary memories while the music goes up and down and in and out with him. To this I respond with
my whole heart and
membrum virilis
also. With a friend I watch this moving art of yours and we find in it always new stimulation and new things to think about deeply. Those black-and-yellow discs, the eroticism of them! Life, what is it? Motion, to where does it take us? “
Ou sont les neiges d’antan?
”’

His cheque had arrived with his letter. A few weeks passed with no further word. Then one day another letter arrived:

My dear Roswell,

These so powerful works that you have executed for me have been a source of great satisfaction to me and I hope to you also. My friend and I (her name is Victoria Fawles and with her I improve my English) amuse ourselves with these creatures of wood and we with grease paint apply to ourselves the black-and-yellow discs of dummyhood. A carnival of strange sensations — who can define the boundaries of pleasure? My commissions are of course selfish but it is my desire that this money be useful to you. This talent of yours, of what does it dream? With what powerful themes has it not yet engaged? Ah, to be young and strong with the whole world before one! Think, search, open your mind and heart to what awaits you.

Good luck, dear friend,
Adelbert Delarue

PS. No, no, I must not apply pressure. Art is a mystery that in its own time happens as it will.

‘Young and strong with the whole world before one’! Well of course he didn’t know my age — it hadn’t come up in our correspondence — but what made him think I was young and strong? My limewood gorilla was young and strong but he never would grow old and he had batteries to power his
passions. At the moment I didn’t have any passions.

I didn’t like Delarue’s letter. Although he said that he ‘must not apply pressure’, that’s exactly what he was doing by attributing depths to my talent that simply weren’t there. ‘Powerful themes’! If I saw one coming towards me I’d cross to the other side of the road.

‘Try to hold still,’ said Mick Corbett. He paused every now and then to wipe away the blood and the excess ink. ‘All right?’ he said.

‘Fine.’

He completed the outline, then changed to a rotary machine for the shading and filling-in. I suppose the whole thing took about half an hour, and when it was finished he applied surgical spirits to clean the tattoo, patted it dry, put on a small amount of antiseptic cream, then a dressing which I was told to keep on for one hour. There followed instruction for the care of my bat and a photocopied sheet headed TATTOO AFTERCARE. My bat cost forty pounds which was unquestionably a bargain if it could fly me to a better place.

‘I hope it brings you luck,’ said Mick Corbett as I left. I’d told him the bat was a happiness symbol. I looked at my watch to note the time so I’d remember when to remove the dressing, then I crossed the road, went down to the corner, and turned left into the North End Road. I was feeling receptive and half-expecting something significant to happen. After passing Blockbusters I crossed the road to the tiny plaza next to the church. There’s a little raised garden with a couple of trees in it and a low retaining wall around it. This wall provides seating for a low-budget drinking community. Some of them look like pensioners, others are probably on the dole; I don’t know whether the population changes but the numbers always seem about the
same. Today there was a one-man splinter group who sat with his back against the church railings shouting something unintelligible in harsh monosyllables.

I walked past him and stopped outside the church, the Parish Church of St John, Walham Green. I’m in that part of the North End Road often but only now did I notice that the figure of Christ on the cross was not the one that used to be there. I remembered the old one as being made of wood and I remembered liking it. This new one was a fibreglass job as smooth as a surfboard and about the same colour as the dummy in my original Crash-Test toy. In face and form it was not unacceptably prettified but the high-gloss effect was perhaps a little slick for a redeemer. Jesus, I thought, you’ve come a long way since Tilman Riemenschneider.

The cross, a black one, seemed to be the old one, with the INRI scroll and the little roof over it. Towards the bottom of it was a brass plaque:

Originally erected
to the glory of God
and in memory
of members and past members
of the
17th Fulham and Chelsea Battalion
Church Lads’ Brigade
who gave their lives in the war.

Restored 1997
in memory of
Lois Child
(1901-1996)
a faithful parishioner.

At the foot of the cross were flowers in vases and little candles, some of them overturned, surrounded by a circle of whitewashed bricks.

In my field of vision was a plane tree leaning over an illegible headstone. The tree and the headstone were dark in the foreground of the picture in my eyes; beyond them there was a sunlit vista of North End Road with people and traffic: a practical demonstration of life beyond the grave. Despite the sunshine it was beginning to rain. The light darkened, the sky became grey; a spotlight bracketed to the ground illuminated a corner of the church without shedding much light on Jesus.

I doubted that there was a Church Lads’ Brigade in World War II; this memorial must have been erected after World War I. As the rain fell I imagined, helped by my recall of grainy newsreels, the Church Lads’ Brigade with fixed bayonets going out of the trenches, over the top towards the enemy while Jesus in large and small crucifixes, in paintings and sculpture, in wood and in various metals, died for their sins. And now in fibreglass.

I went into the church where I found Father John Hunter, the curate, a tall, squarely built man in cassock and dog collar. Balding, with close-cropped grey hair and spectacles, he looked as if he was careful of souls and wary of eggs. The thirty-nine buttons on his cassock symbolised the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and they were all buttoned up but I wondered if he ever found himself listening for something he couldn’t hear.

I asked Father John about the old Jesus and he said it hadn’t been wood but terracotta, shattered when the cross came down in a storm ten or more years ago and replaced a couple of years later by this one. The cross was the original one, restored.

Inside the doorway near the always-open chapel was a bulletin board to which were pinned an advertisement for Weight Watchers, handwritten notices from people looking for jobs and flats, and one that said CUT AND BLOW DRY. RING TONY.

Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of the carriage become the rolling passage of the years in the darkness of my mind: 1985 to 1993 rush towards me and away: my years with Giles.

He was a good-looking man, tall and blond, and his honest open face charmed everyone. He had strong hands, golden hairs on the backs of them in the lamplight. I used to feel safe in those hands but not quite safe enough to think of starting a family although Giles wanted to. He was good at starting things but so far hadn’t gone the distance with anything and I was the only steady provider in our marriage. When he got into doll’s houses I thought perhaps he’d found himself. He hadn’t done anything like that before but he was good with his hands, good with tools; he already had a pretty well-equipped workshop but there were enough saws, gouges, drills and whatnot that he lacked to give him some happy hours at the ironmonger’s.

He bought a book on the subject and built a beautiful nine-room Georgian house on a scale of one inch to one foot. He painted it but didn’t furnish it. It took him four
months which wasn’t bad considering the work involved — the windows and doors alone took more hours than I’d have expected. We ate a lot of pistachios back then because he used the shells as cups for glue.

He put an ad with a photograph in
Homes and Antiques
and very quickly got a commission from a London collector to do a six-room Victorian house on the same scale as the Georgian one. ‘The full-size world’s too much for me,’ he said, ‘but at one inch to one foot I might do quite well.’ In six months he completed the Victorian house, painted and with electric lights but unfurnished, to the client’s satisfaction, got a cheque for seventeen hundred pounds, and we drank champagne for the first time since loft extensions.

Commissions for a Queen Anne and a Regency followed the Victorian house, and the workshop became a place of ongoing action and contentment for Giles. When he came upstairs for meals he was often whistling, and he carried himself like a man who was putting meat on the table.

His next client was a woman in Bristol who rang him up and asked him if he could make her a copy of a seventeenth-century doll’s house in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She was American and her name was Peggy Sue Wilson.

She sent Giles a museum booklet with detailed descriptions, illustrations, and measurements; it was obvious to me that this was a project that might take years. Giles of course was delighted at the prospect of conferences in Bristol and at least one trip to Amsterdam. This one was altogether a more serious undertaking than his last commission: the doll’s house of Petronella Dunois, the daughter of a high official in The Hague, was a square oak cabinet veneered with walnut that stood two metres high on its barley-twist
legs and displayed frontally the peat loft, the linen room, the nursery, the lying-in room, the salon or ‘best room’, the cellar, the kitchen, and the dining room. Every room was full of family and/or servants, furniture and every kind of artefact, all of which Giles intended to copy along with the complete decoration of the rooms. Even the veneering was nothing simple: it was walnut marquetry in a geometrical pattern of rosettes and stars. To me this looked like a job for an army of artists and craftsmen but Giles said he could do it. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said with a crooked smile, ‘this isn’t the big world, it’s the little one.’

‘I hope you’re getting paid in full-size money,’ I said.

‘Don’t worry, I have a good feeling about this one but I can’t do an estimate until we go to Amsterdam and I see what the job entails.’

So Giles and Peggy Sue went to Amsterdam. He took photographs, made sketches and notes, and came home rather pleased with himself. ‘I’ll get fifteen thousand for the house with nothing in it,’ he said. ‘That’s not bad, is it? I’ll do a separate estimate for the furnishings, the decorations, and the figures when I’ve finished the house.’