The Bat Tattoo

10 Sarah Varley

‘Stop it, Sarah,’ I said to myself. Because I could feel myself juicing up to make this man do better. He was failing in some way, he was putting out failure pheromones and they were getting me excited. Not for sex but for the hardcore depravity of trying to build towers out of wet dishcloths. He was very evasive in conversation; what was he hiding? For that matter, what was I hiding by turning my critical faculties on him rather than on myself?

How had Giles and I fallen in love? I met him in 1984 when I was twenty-eight. Twenty-eight! Sometimes that seems a hundred years ago. My name was Burton then and I was working at the Nikolai Chevorski Gallery in Cork Street. Chevorski always reminded me of the joke about the man who packaged goatshit and sold it as brain food. I was on the gallery staff because he’d seen me there the year before and offered me a job on the spot. He was a short man and he liked to have tall women around him. At the time I was with a small firm of auctioneers who were about to go out of business so I was happy to make the move.

The show at which I was hired by Mr Chevorski was entitled Haruspications and featured twenty-four large paintings of chicken guts by Winston Breck. Like most of the shows at that gallery it received a good deal of attention. Seymour Daly of The Times said, ‘Although it might be argued by some that Breck has chickened out, he has done it in a gutsy manner, and by doing it in our collective face he has forced us to see what we may have looked away from before this.’ Noah Thawle of the Guardian said, ‘Semiotically baleful in their revelation of what one would rather not see, these paintings with their anatomical mysteries have a visceral impact that augurs well for Breck’s future.’ Lucy Camaro of the Daily Telegraph predicted that ‘Breck’s paintings may well convert more than a few of his viewers to vegetarianism but inviting one, as they do, to descry a personal destiny in the mantic disembowelment of chickens, they exert a terrible fascination.’ Lena Waye of the Independent found ‘… the metaphor less than inspired. It may be that those who pay money for old rope will splash out on chicken guts; and the art market being what it is, they can always sell them at a profit.’

Before the show had even opened George Rubcek and Darius Fitzimmons had bought three of the paintings for their collection, so the word was out that the oracles had said yes. ‘I don’t really know much about this kind of brain food,’ I told Chevorski.

‘All you need to know,’ he said, ‘is that George Rubcek and Darius Fitzimmons have already bought three, so now the herd punters will pay big money to have him on their walls and they can dine out on it for two or three months.’

The evening a year later when I met Giles was the opening of Cyndie Dubuque’s show at the gallery. Giles arrived with a woman of fifty or so who was in somewhat better shape than she really was. She had dyed red hair with a frizzy perm and wore a blue leather jacket, white T-shirt, jeans that had been sprayed on, and brown cowboy boots. Giles was thirty at the time, not exactly a toy boy but I doubted that his connection with the enhanced mother-figure was altogether non-commercial. He was as ruggedly handsome as a film star and he looked at me the way a man who knows horses looks at a horse. I was a lot younger than I am now, which is to say that when I saw Giles I saw potential; I wasn’t sure what kind but I was willing to have a go at developing it.

Cyndie Dubuque was an American painter who’d dedicated herself to the celebration of the clitoris. This was back before the Internet when the clitoris still had some novelty value and the opening was well attended. I saw Seymour Daly, Noah Thawle, Lucy Camaro, Lena Waye, Thurston Fort of the Royal Academy, and Folsom Bray of the Post-Modern Gallery, whose praise added zeros to any price. George Rubcek, with a face like a sticky bun with two raisin eyes, was there. He said that Darius would have come but he was laid up with the flu. Darius is dead by now of AIDS and Cyndie Dubuque hasn’t been heard from for a long time but that evening was all go. The champagne wasn’t vintage but many of the chequebooks were, and Cyndie got so carried away that she had to be restrained from dropping her knickers and exhibiting the most recognisable feature of her self-portraits.

The champagne and caviare were being handed round by sleek young women in white shirts, red bow ties, very short black skirts, spike heels and black stockings that ended in a flash of thigh and red suspenders. These girls were provided by the caterer, Fizzy Lizzy, and would be somewhere else tomorrow; I as permanent staff was in a little black dress that was almost as short as the pelmets of the Fizzy Lizzy cupbearers but I wore tights instead of stockings and suspenders; this didn’t discourage Nikolai Chevorski from groping my bottom but he was just over five feet tall so his world-view was closer to the ground than most people’s.

While his frizzy-permed friend was talking to George Rubcek the as-yet-unmet Giles made his way through the minglers and networkers to me, his sexuality shimmering like a motorway mirage. ‘You look too real for this kind of thing,’ he said to me.

‘That’s because I’m getting paid for it. On my own time. I’m no realer than you are.’ I was reading him the way you read the little film blurbs in the TV schedule: ‘Predictable story attractively packaged but short on plausibility,’ this one said. It’s difficult for me to believe how cynical and naive I was at the same time back then. Not, however, cynical enough to avoid a man who needed improving.

I have a good collection of videotapes, among them favourites that I’ve watched several times by now: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown; We Don’t Want to Talk about It; The Red Squirrel; Junkmail; Near Dark; The Match Factory Girl. In Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown I identify with all of the women; in We Don’t Want to Talk about It I feel so sad for Marcello Mastroianni who falls in love with and marries a dwarf who leaves him to join a travelling circus; in The Red Squirrel I’m convinced that Julio Medem used the idea of Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, a tale of the American Civil War in which an apparent escape and return home are revealed to be happening only in the mind of a hanged man at the moment of death. I think the love story in The Red Squirrel is a posthumous one and I am haunted by the if-only of it. I love the unreliable postman in Junkmail who, having copied the keys left in a young woman’s mailbox, is hiding in her flat when she attempts suicide. He pulls her naked and dripping from the bath in which she’s overdosed and is about to drown and I’m so happy for them every time although God knows what they’ll do with each other after he follows her offscreen at the end. In Near Dark I’m touched by the vulnerability of the vampire girl and delighted when her lover unvampires her with a transfusion of his healthy blood.

Of these films the one that stays with me most is The Match Factory Girl, written and directed by Aki Kaurismaki. The match factory is in Finland, Helsinki maybe. We see the logs that once were living trees being stripped naked; we see them reduced to sheets of matchwood, we see boxes of matches, each one the same as the others, on a moving belt as the machinery clanks out the minutes and hours. Day in and day out Iris (pronounced Earriss) checks the boxes of matches as they come off the production line. Kati Outinen is Iris; she’s one of those unpretty actresses who can look beautiful or plain as required: in this film she looks plain. Iris lives with her middle-aged mother and the man who’s moved in with her mother. She hands over her pay every week and cooks and cleans for them while they drink vodka (none for her). On the TV news a man stands in front of a line of tanks which come to a stop in Tiananmen Square.

Iris goes to a dancehall where she is the only woman not asked to dance. She sits alone by the wall while the ensemble plays a tango and the man at the microphone sings, with subtitles:

Somewhere beyond the ocean

there is a distant land

where warm waves softly caress

its ever-joyful sands.

Varieties of lovely flowers

bloom all the year around.

No cares, no worries there,

no troubles, and no gloom.

Oh, if I could only reach

that land of dreams some day,

then I would never, ever fly

from paradise away.

The singer wears a white suit, a burgundy shirt, a white tie. He’s clean-shaven, has pomaded black hair. He’s backed by a violin, guitar, accordion, and drums. Behind the musicians is a backdrop on which a few trees droop wistfully against a glaucous sky as the couples revolve to the music. That tango and the words of the song open the floodgates to a sadness that doesn’t seem to be particularly mine; it’s a universal sadness. A singer and four musicians and a tango with a green-sky backdrop in a place of ice and snow!

Next payday Iris doesn’t give the whole pay envelope to her mother; she buys a red party dress, fixes herself up, and goes to a place with dancing and a bar where she’s picked up by a man who takes her home, sleeps with her, leaves some money on the bedside table the next morning, and goes off to work. This man (his name is Aarne) wants nothing more to do with her and when she asks to see him again he takes her to dinner and tells her to go away.

Iris is pregnant from that one night and she hopes for a happy family life with Aarne. He tells her to get rid of the baby and gives her money. She steps in front of a car, is knocked down, and loses the baby. While she’s in hospital her mother’s partner comes to give her an orange and tell her to find somewhere else to live.

When she gets out of hospital her brother takes her in. She buys rat poison and goes to Aarne’s flat where she says she won’t bother him any more but wants to have a goodbye drink with him. She puts rat poison in his drink, then goes to a bar where another man makes an approach. She puts rat poison in his drink, goes home, is allowed in by her mother, lays the table, and puts rat poison in the vodka for her mother and her mother’s boyfriend.

As she waits for them to die we hear the tango singer and his ensemble again and read the subtitles:

Oh, how could you turn

all my sweet dreams

into idle fancies?

The song continues and we see Iris again at her job in the match factory as the police come for her. Having stopped the tanks, she goes with them quietly.

When you give everything

only to be disappointed

the burden of memories

gets too hard to bear.

Why have I got so many videos that I watch more than once-made-up people acting out made-up stories? The people and the stories aren’t real but the ideas are: the ideas of true love and happiness, of lost love and sadness, life and death. We get such a little bit of time and it’s so hard to find a life-story that works for us. Why have I given the story of The Match Factory Girl and taken up all this space to do it in? I’m not sure. Iris’s story is nothing like mine but there’s something about it that won’t let go of me. Those tango songs!