The Bat Tattoo

13 Sarah Varley

Every month Burnside Auctioneers in Ealing send me a catalogue; I make a pot of Earl Grey and start circling the lot numbers that look promising. It’s a three- or four-cup job to get through it and budget my fantasies, cosy reading all the way. The viewings are on Tuesdays, the auctions on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Burnside is nothing grand like Sotheby’s or Christie’s; it’s small and cramped and not comfortably laid out. The viewings are always a hurly-burly with people jostling one another and idly curious non-buyers taking up space and standing in front of things I want to see. Last Tuesday I found nothing terribly exciting in my price range. There was Lot 186, ‘A GERMAN.800 ART NOUVEAU 13-PIECE FRUIT SET by P & S Bruckman, the handles decorated with figures from mythology, cased £120-£180’. I was willing to go to one-thirty-five on that. With commission I’d be paying one-sixty so I’d try to resell it at one-ninety and would take one-eighty if I had to. It was nothing that made my heart beat faster and obviously I wasn’t going to get rich on it.

There were various other lots I was prepared to bid on, mostly silver or silver plate which I’d been having some luck with. I’m always hoping for treasures that others have passed by and a cardboard box caught my eye: Lot 339 was ‘A collection of treen’. No estimate. It was a jumble of unimpressive wooden artefacts: carvings of Krishna, Lakshmi, and Ganesha from the duty-free at Bombay, some boxes that might have been Tunbridge ware but weren’t, a miniature shoe, and a higgledy-piggledy of other bits and pieces not likely to set the world on fire.

Among the bits and pieces, all the way at the bottom of the box, was a painted wooden hand pierced by a wooden spike that nailed it to a fragment of a cross. The hand had been broken off a little way up the wrist and the whole thing was, by my tape measure, three and seven-eighths inches long. The painted blood was almost worn away as was the flesh colour. Shocking, that hand — the authority of it. It was a right hand; the index and middle fingers were curved reflexively around the spike in an effort to support the weight of the sagging body. Death by crucifixion, I remembered having read, was caused by the collapse of the diaphragm, and all of that pain and sorrow were in those two fingers. The carving was remarkable in the delicacy of its realistic detail, the beauty of the fingers and fingernails and wounded palm and veins of the wrist of that man whose symbolic blood was still drunk by his worshippers.

I know some hallmarks and some of the provenances of the things I buy and sell but I have vast areas of ignorance and this was from one of those. It was obviously very old, but although it probably came from something valuable it wouldn’t be worth much as a fragment. I wasn’t thinking of resale; I wanted it because it had spoken to me and couldn’t be ignored. I put it back in the bottom of the box and covered it with the higgledy-piggledy as well as I could, hoping to make Lot 339 as uninteresting as possible.

The next day at the auction I got the German art nouveau fruit set for one-thirty-five and I did all right with my other selections but although this is something I do for a living I was in a completely non-commercial state of arousal when Max Burgess, the auctioneer, called out, ‘Lot three thirty-nine, a collection of treen, possibly treasures for the discerning.’ Max is a gingery man, large and broad; he was a Petticoat Lane barrow boy before becoming an auctioneer and his style has nothing of the introvert. ‘Do I hear thirty-five?’ he enquired. ‘You don’t want to pass this by and later think: If only!’

Nobody responded. I’ve learned to avoid early foot and I kept my hand down. I saw Stephen Faulkes there, a spiteful little man who loves to bid things up and always knows when to jump off and leave me to pay over the odds. It was a grey day, threatening rain, and I’m prone to acts of desperation on grey days.

‘All right,’ said Max. ‘It’s that kind of day — caution is uppermost. Will someone say twenty-five and help me to move on?’

Faces of stone met this heartfelt request.

‘I have no shame,’ said Max. ‘My mind isn’t strong. I feel rejected. Is there a kind soul here to say ten pounds?’

Stephen Faulkes’s hand went up.

‘Ship ahoy!’ cried Max. ‘Rescue is at hand! Where ten appears surely twelve cannot be far behind?’

Myra Kaufmann went to twelve. By two-pound increments Max got us up to thirty-seven. True to form, Stephen took us to forty and I upped it to forty-five and got Lot 339, breathing hard. I would have gone higher; when I stop feeling that way about things I’ll know I’m dead.