The Bat Tattoo

18 Roswell Clark

I had another Jennifer dream. We were on a train, just the two of us. It was the 13.24 to I don’t know where. I tried to read our destination on my ticket but the letters wouldn’t form a name. I couldn’t read the names of the stations we passed through either. There was no one else in our carriage; the lighting was dim and kept flickering; there was rubbish on the tables and all over the floor, empty beer and soft-drink cans rolling about. We were both hungry and we’d expected to get something on the train but there was no announcement about a buffet car. When the conductor came through to punch our tickets I asked him, ‘Where are we going?’

He pointed to my ticket and said, ‘There.’ He looked like the manual-training teacher I’d had in junior high school: large freckled hands with part of his right index finger missing.

‘Where’s the buffet car?’ said Jennifer.

‘This train doesn’t exist,’ he said. ‘It’s a dream train so there’s no buffet car on it.’

‘Then how come there’s buffet-car rubbish all over the place?’ said Jennifer. ‘People have been eating and drinking buffet-car food and drink here.’

‘Not my problem,’ said the conductor. ‘Talk to the Transport Minister.’

‘If at least there were bar service!’ said Jennifer as I woke up. I was hungry and I felt sad because Jennifer had been hungry too and wanted a drink but there was nothing she could do about it because there wasn’t a Jennifer any more. Her hunger and her thirst, all of her wants are gone and the world goes on without her except when in the loneliness of death she visits me in a dream.

I had two fried eggs and bacon and toast and jam for breakfast. After my coffee I had a Glenfiddich for Jennifer. Then I had one for me because I was alive and could do that. ‘Here’s looking at you,’ I said to both of us. ‘I know I haven’t been doing much lately but I’m not idle; I’ve been making sketches.’ Which was true. I didn’t want to say anything more about it, even to myself. If there was really anything happening, I’d be the first to know.

My chisels and gouges hung in their pockets, sharp and ready to bite into wood or turn in my hand and plunge into my flesh. ‘I know it’s hard for you to hang about like this,’ I told them, ‘but maybe there’ll be work for you soon.’ I looked around at the workbench, the drawing table, the easel. I didn’t want to stay in the house; it was raining and I felt like walking in it.

I put on an anorak and my rain hat, then went to the jacket I’d last worn and got my house keys out of the right-hand pocket. I checked the left-hand pocket without remembering what was in it, then drew back suddenly as my fingers touched the crucified wooden hand Sarah Varley had given me. ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much — it’s just what I’ve always wanted.’ I put it on the drawing table, then picked it up again and put it in my anorak pocket.

Then it was like a cut from one scene to another in a film: I was in the North End Road standing by the railings of St John’s. It was a real November rain by now, wind spattering the yellow leaves that lay everywhere like fallen hours, days, years. Jesus on his cross was wet and gleaming. Suddenly I felt sorry for my smartass remarks about his fibreglass slickness; he was only a humble artefact, one of millions of images, some of them great and some of them not, reiterating the idea of this one who was called the son of God, crucified large and small, indoors and out, in marble, bronze, wood, and plastic, in wayside shrines and echoing cathedrals and little hand-held crosses, dying twenty-four hours a day for our sins.

The low-budget drinking community was not in its usual place but I had the feeling that Abraham Selby was going to turn up and after a while he did. This time he had an umbrella instead of a can of John Smith.

‘Dry day?’ I said.

‘Every day is not the same,’ he replied in such a preacherly way that I almost said Hallelujah.

‘A lot of them are, though,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Anything today?’

‘Messages, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you expecting any?’ I asked him.

‘Not for me — for you.’

‘I wasn’t expecting any either.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘How can you tell?’ Under the umbrella and without the John Smith he seemed different from his previous self.

‘Takes one to know one.’

‘You just said you weren’t expecting any messages.’

‘Not any more; I’ve passed my Selby date.’

‘But there was a time when you were expecting messages.’

‘There was a time when I was expecting a lot of things.’

‘Did you get any of them?’

‘Some that I wanted and some that I didn’t.’

The rain was sometimes drumming on my hat, sometimes slanting across my face; Jesus was on his cross doing his job regardless of the weather and the fingers of the crucified right hand were touching the fingers of my left hand in my pocket; the traffic behind us was hissing and revving and changing gears; the trees were swaying and losing more leaves; Selby was standing there nodding his head as if agreeing emphatically with what he’d just said and I was waiting for him to continue.

‘The other day in The Times,’ he said at length, ‘in my local dustbin, I saw that Maria Callas’s underwear was being sold at auction. I used to have a lot of her records. You look surprised.’

‘I thought you were going to say more about what you expected and what you got.’

‘Not today. Right now I’m thinking of God sitting up there in his office.’ He tilted his umbrella back to look up at where the rain was coming from; he was in preacher mode now. ‘Yes, brother, he’s sitting up there in his office …’

‘Hallelujah,’ I couldn’t help responding quietly.

Selby nodded several times. ‘Maybe he’s watching the world on closed-circuit TV. He’s looking at war and famine, fire and flood; he’s looking at rape and murder and unemployment and people sleeping rough …’

‘He sees it all,’ I affirmed.

‘Sees it all,’ Selby went on. ‘Sees it all and he’s smiling because it’s his world and he did it his way …’

‘That’s how he did it.’

‘Did it his way and there it is, all running smooth and easy. Then he sees Maria Callas’s underwear in that auction …’

‘His eye is on her knickers.’

‘His eye is on her knickers and he slaps his thigh and laughs and he says, “You got to hand it to me — I think of everything.”’

‘Tell it, brother.’

‘I just did.’

‘When you said he and his, were you doing it with a capital h or a small one?’

‘Small. Now I have to go home and think about this.’ Like a Punch-and-Judy man he packed up his little invisible church. ‘See you,’ he said, and walked away under his umbrella.

‘See you,’ I called through the rain, but I stayed where I was, looking at Jesus on his cross under that little roof that didn’t keep the rain off. ‘“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’” I asked him. I was trying to see his eyes but his face went completely blank. The next thing I knew I was out of the rain, sitting on a floor with my back against a wall. My hat was in a little puddle beside me, the crucified hand was still in my pocket, and the curate, Father John, was bending over me, looking concerned. Evidently I was in the church.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure. What happened?’

‘A couple of passersby found you lying on the pavement just outside and brought you in here. Do you know how you came to be lying there?’

‘I guess I must have fainted.’

‘Has this happened before? Are you subject to blackouts, fits of any kinds? Are you on any medication?’

‘No, this was a first and I’m not on any medication.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Thank you, I appreciate your kindness but I think I’ll just go home now.’

‘First let’s see if you’re fully ambulatory.’

I stood up and took a few careful steps. ‘It seems I am. Thanks again.’ I put on my hat, we shook hands, and I walked slowly out to the North End Road but I didn’t go home. I needed time to think but I didn’t want to be alone just then so I went to Eustace Road. The rain had stopped for a while and the sky had a heroic look, as in a Dutch seventeenth-century marine painting with ships and small craft in heavy seas. I had by now made a fair number of visits to Dieter Scharf but Eustace Road, the inanimate houses of it, always looked at me with suspicion.

Scharf’s stern-looking housekeeper had turned out to be quite an amiable woman whose name was Martha. When she saw me she said, ‘You look all verschwiemelt. Go to Dieter in the workshop; I bring you black coffee and maybe some Marillenschnaps, yes?’

‘Yes, please. Vielen Dank!’

As soon as I opened the basement door I got a whiff of the Dieter Scharf workshop smell: electrical wiring, oiled metal, solder, and cheap cigars. It wasn’t quite the same as my father’s workshop but it was close enough to make me feel cosy and comfortable. There in the darkness was the bright jumbly island of his work-bench under the green-metal-shaded bulb; and there was Dieter wreathed in vile blue smoke with his invisible charcoal-burner’s hut around him and a goblin-haunted forest in the shadows. He was sixty-three, so he wasn’t quite old enough to be my father and there was no Jack Daniel’s but I always felt safer in his workshop than in my own.

‘Wie geht’s?’ he said. He had begun little by little to bring simple German words and phrases into our conversation.

‘Gut,’ I replied, ‘und dir?’ Because we had quickly reached the familiar pronoun.

‘Man lebt,’ he said. ‘One lives, but from now until the new year I keep my head down and wait for the holidays to go away. I think perhaps there was a fourth wise man and he saw what was coming and stayed home.’

‘Do you do anything for Christmas?’

‘I drink very much and read Morgenstern until it’s over.’

‘Who’s Morgenstern?’

‘German poet, born 1871, died 1914. Good flavour, very sharp, very funny.’ From a shelf over the work-bench he took down a volume with a lot of mileage on it and let the book fall open where it would. ‘Listen to this — just take in the sound of it: “Der Werwolf: Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich von Weib und Kind und sich begab an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab und bat ihn: ‘Bitte, beuge mich!’” That’s only the beginning of the poem. This is about a werewolf who one night goes from his wife and children to the grave of a village schoolmaster and says to him, “Decline me!”’

‘Decline?’

‘Declension is what he wants. He wants to know the genitive and the dative and so on for Werwolf. The dead schoolmaster can only decline Werwolf in the singular but the werewolf wants the plural so his wife and children can be included. When the schoolmaster can’t do it the werewolf cries, he has tears running down. But he accepts this and he thanks the dead schoolmaster and goes home.’

At this point Martha came down the stairs with black coffee and Marillenschnaps for Dieter and me. ‘Get a glass and have one with us, Martha,’ he said.

‘Nein, danke, I have still the shopping to do. If I drink now you don’t get your frog-in-the-ditch for supper.’

‘Toad-in-the-hole,’ said Dieter.

‘Whatever,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t drink too much. The last time I schlepped you up the stairs I put out my back.’

‘We drink to your back and also your front, Martha,’ said Dieter as he poured for us and we raised our glasses. ‘Zwm wohl!’

Martha wagged a finger at him and disappeared upstairs.

‘Like this Schnaps is Morgenstern,’ said Dieter. ‘Clears the brain. Prosit!’

‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ I responded. We both sipped delicately but greedily. The Schnaps was chilled and it went down like bright and sparkling winters and left me with a cosy fire inside at which to warm myself.

‘What do you do about Christmas?’ he said.

‘I drink very much and read M. R. James.’

‘Mensch! Look what I have on my bench.’ He indicated something I’d been going to ask him about. On a base about four feet long and a foot and a half wide was a spooky little wood with black trunks and branches and dark leaves shadowing a path on which was the figure of a man in black with a very pale face. One shoulder was lifted as if to ward off an attack. Some paces behind him was something that was difficult to see clearly because Dieter had veiled some of the spaces between the trees with scrim cloth. It was a creature draped in white to halfway down its legs which were brown and speckled, the feet very nasty.

‘That’s from “Casting the Runes”,’ I said, ‘but in the story it’s a boy.’ There was a collected M. R. James on the work-bench, and I quickly found the lines which I almost knew by heart:

And this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly.

‘This I know,’ said Dieter, ‘but my client wants not a boy but a little man with a pale face. Press the button.’

When I did that, there sprang up from concealed speakers ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’. As if activated by the music, the thing with speckled legs began to hop in the most dreadful way, disappearing and reappearing among the trees as the man tried to double back and lose it. Dieter’s use of the scrim cloth was wonderful: the trunks of the trees revolved like the rollers of window blinds so that the action was sometimes obscured and sometimes clearly seen. ‘Jesus!’ I said as the hopping thing caught up with the man. Everything under the trees went dark as the Disney track continued its sugary vocal. Our glasses were empty and Dieter refilled them for either the fourth or fifth time; they were very small glasses. The fireside corner inside me was the cosiest place I’d been for a long time, and my head felt as if it would ping like crystal if I tapped it.

‘Heppy days,’ said Dieter.

‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ I replied. Alcohol makes me more American. ‘I suppose this is a commission?’

‘From a rich American,’ he said. ‘For this one I get fifteen thousand pounds.’

‘Not nearly enough. People are getting fifty thousand pounds for unemptied chamber pots these days and the pots aren’t even new. This thing here is museum-standard work — you should have got at least fifty thousand pounds.’

‘What did you get for the gorilla?’

‘Thirty thousand.’ At this Dieter’s lower jaw dropped. I’d paid him twenty-five hundred for the mechanism and motor but that left me with twenty-seven thousand five hundred for a crash-dummy primate that was nothing compared to the whole little horror show he’d put together for fifteen thousand.

‘Your millionaire is bigger than mine then,’ said Dieter. He shook his head philosophically and poured us both another Marillenschnaps.

I looked at the toy again. The sound was off; the dreadful hopping creature had returned to its original position among the trees, the man to his on the path. This scaled-down replication of an imaginary scene held a fascination that was disturbing. I turned from it to St Eustace on his horse on the wall. When I pressed the button the little Jesus appeared between the antlers of the stag and Eustace leapt from the saddle and knelt as before. ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,’ crooned Bing Crosby.

‘Do you ever feel like hopping through the woods and doing what the hopping creature does?’ I asked Dieter.

‘All the time,’ he answered, and raised his glass to me.