The Bat Tattoo

12 Roswell Clark

No word from Delarue since the letter in which he wanted to know what my talent was dreaming of, the letter in which he said he must not apply pressure. Pressure, of course, was exactly what I was now feeling. He’d been very generous in his three commissions and I’d taken his money; now he was expecting something of me. What? I felt it heavy on my back and clinging like a giant squid.

What was my patron doing now? Enjoying himself probably, without a care in the world as he waited for the mouse of me to bring forth some kind of mountain. My workroom is on the top floor of my house, with a north-facing skylight and large windows. The daylight in that room has a cool objectivity that is sometimes a little more than I can handle; a bad drawing looks worse in that light; a clumsy carving looks clumsier. My saws and my chisels and gouges, my rasps and rifflers hang in their proper places on the wall. If I were to die today they would still be there, saying, ‘What has he accomplished with us? What did his work amount to?’ Sometimes I feel as if the world is closed to me and I’m walking around and around it looking for a door.

There were scraps of lime in the bin where I keep leftover bits. These neat blond pieces of wood had once been parts of trees with leaves that stirred in the wind. Trees are living things; they have souls, they have significances; Odin, hanging on his tree through days and nights, acquired wisdom; Absalom was caught in a tree by his hair and was killed; Christ was crucified on the tree of his cross. Walk into a wood and you can feel the trees listening.

This bat tattoo, that’s a laugh. Did I think it was going to get me off the ground, make me fly? And now I feel as if the bat is expecting something from me along with Delarue.

I looked at the china nutcracker on my work-bench; he wouldn’t let expectations get him down, he’d crunch them: chomp, chomp. Of course he has the jaws for it. I mostly have music going when I’m working and I thought it might help to get me started now. I went through my CDs and selected a compilation of Argentine tango bands, and when it reached Carlos Gardel doing ‘El Carretero’ I began to feel a little more comfortable. I understood only a few of the words but I thought a carretero might be a man with a cart and a donkey. The song has an evening sound; I saw the carter making his way through dimly lit streets past low houses and I had the feeling of having already done a day’s work. It was still morning, however, and I hadn’t done anything at all, hadn’t earned the evening feeling, so I stopped the music and went out. ‘Take me somewhere,’ I said to my feet, and they headed for the North End Road.

In a few minutes I found myself at the Church of St John, standing in front of the fibreglass Jesus and thinking about wood and Tilman Riemenschneider. He did crucifixions and lamentations, he did annunciations and assumptions and he was never extravagant with facial expressions; he only went so far and he let the wood do the rest: Mary’s face when she receives the news of the Immaculate Conception and her face when she looks at the dead Christ, the face of Jesus living and dead and the faces of the mourning women — all of these listen with the ghosts of trees and now there is fibreglass. ‘Surf’s up,’ I said.

‘You talking to Jesus?’ said a deep voice behind me.

I turned. It was a member of the low-budget drinking community. I’d seen him the last time I was at the church: a black man, tall and burly, wearing jeans and a red T-shirt and holding a can of John Smith. He had the face of the black policeman in one of those buddy movies where the partner is white. His manner was discursive rather than aggressive. ‘Fibreglass is OK for surfboards,’ I said, ‘but Jesus deserves wood.’

He sipped his beer and thought about this for a while. I wondered where he stood on aesthetics.

‘Did you come here to pray?’ he said.

‘No. Did you?’

‘Prayers are for children.’ He pointed to the brass plaque in memory of the Fulham and Chelsea Battalion of the Church Lads’ Brigade. ‘Were their prayers answered?’

‘I doubt it.’

‘So you’re not praying. What do you want from Jesus?’

‘Nothing as far as I know.’

‘You wouldn’t be standing here,’ he said like a patient tutor, ‘if you weren’t looking for something from him.’

‘I don’t know. Messages, maybe.’

‘“By the rivers of Babylon,’” he said, ‘“there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.’”

‘Is that a message?’

‘It’s a psalm, Number 137.’

‘I know that. Do you remember Zion?’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

My mother had said that Zion was where it was a whole lot better than now and it was where you never get back to. The smell of oil and metal, cigarette smoke and Jack Daniel’s came back to me with the lamplight and shadows of my father’s workshop. Whatever he handled, whether a hammer or saw or a piece of wood, he handled in a way that made you feel good. He showed me how to use a screwdriver and a hammer and I tried to hold them the way he did. With an empty cotton spool, what they call a reel here, a washer, a rubber band and a wooden match he made me a spool tractor that crept along the basement floor until it was stopped by the skirting board. ‘I guess everybody does,’ I said. ‘There are all kinds of Zions.’ Thinking, as I said that, that the Zion I remembered had been Babylon to my mother.

‘There’s a lot of Babylon around here,’ he said, and went back to his colleagues. I made my way home slowly, seeing the spool tractor crash slowly into the skirting board.