The Bat Tattoo

21Roswell Clark

Imagine a man climbing out of his office window and standing on a ledge forty storeys above the street. He’s about to jump and maybe he asks himself, ‘How did I get here?’ It’s a heavy question but the answer is very simple: he got here because one thing led to another and this is jump time.

Since finishing the gorilla I’d made a second trip to Tiranti’s for bigger chisels and gouges, a lignum vitae mallet, bench screws, and two adzes, one with a curved edge and one straight. I picked up the straight-edge adze, hefted the weight of it and felt its intention move up my arm. Then I went to Moss & Co for more lime.

The underground station at Hammersmith Broadway was manic with Christmas decorations, as was King Street when I crossed to it. It was raining, which somewhat moderated the visual din and seemed friendly. Walking to Dimes Place with the rain gently screening me from evil influences I felt that things might go well. In Dimes Place the old paving stones glistened their welcome and opened the familiar perspective of sheds in which the timbers and the forest spirits waited. ‘Ebony, Iroko, Jelutong and Lime,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that I’m ready for what I’m probably going to do.’ I touched the fingers of the crucified hand in my pocket as I entered the Lime shed. ‘What do you think?’ I said to the quiet leaning timbers, the attentive spirits of the wood. ‘Please be honest with me.’

Be unsure, they said. Be humble.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

That’s all there is, they said.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll go with that.’ I had intended to make a clay model before going to the wood but now I found that I wanted no intermediate steps. I had sketches, I had what was in my head, and I wanted to feel my tools cutting away everything that was not the image in my mind. I went to the office, showed Stuart Duncan various scraps of paper with measurements, did the necessary calculations with him, bought the wood for delivery the next day, and went home.

That evening I watched Mercy Mission — the Rescue of Flight 771 on video. The events in this story actually happened and the people are real. On a Christmas-Eve morning a young flyer and his partner take off from San Francisco to deliver two used Cessna crop-dusting planes to Sydney. Their Flight 771 is in four stages over the Pacific with stops at Honolulu, Pago Pago, and Norfolk Island. These planes were not designed for long-distance flight and are ill equipped; the whole thing is a bad idea but the pilot and his pregnant wife need the money badly.

All goes well as far as Pago Pago but when they take off on Christmas morning the partner crashes and although he’s unhurt his plane is destroyed. He goes home and now our young pilot, who has no long-distance experience, flies on alone. Norfolk Island is a tiny speck on his map and he’s navigating by compass and dead reckoning, hoping that he’s compensating correctly for crosswinds.

Fourteen hours out of Pago Pago he’s a half-hour overdue at Norfolk Island and there’s no land in sight. He’s lost over the ocean and running out of fuel with night coming on. He calls Auckland but he’s not within range of their radar so he’s not on their screens; his automatic direction finder is broken and he can’t tell them where he is. No search-and-rescue team can find him before he has to ditch; the best Auckland can do is patch him through to a veteran pilot on a New Zealand Air flight from Fiji to Auckland with a planeload of passengers.

Before he can be helped the exhausted young man must be located. Determined to save him from death in the sea, the older man, with unflagging ingenuity, finds him after many tries and leads him to Auckland. By this time our pilot has been flying for more than twenty-three hours. The rescuer lands first; he watches the little Cessna glide in and out of the darkness and the rain with an empty tank; then he half carries the young man out of the plane. I cry every time I see that little plane glide in empty.

Tomorrow when the wood arrived I’d cut pieces to size, glue them as necessary, wait for the glue to dry, and then get started on my first uncommissioned woodcarving.

Tomorrow came, and the wood. I sawed, I glued with Evo-Stik, and I waited until the next day. I was very nervous; the block of lime was screwed to the bench and my tools lay beside it, all of them razor-sharp and just as ready to bite into my flesh as the wood. Something needed to be said or done before I put my hand to the work. Prayer? Would it be right for an atheist to pray? I recalled various times when I’d said ‘Please’ in matters large and small. ‘Please let me get there on time.’ ‘Please let me not drop this.’ ‘Please let there be hot water.’ Was I talking to the train, the light bulb and ladder, the boiler? To what, then? The wood was waiting with my guide lines pencilled in.

I poured myself a large Jack Daniel’s; after all, this was the launch of something. Then I put on Peggy Lee, ‘Is That All There Is?’. That didn’t do it for me, so I went to Boney M and ‘Rivers of Babylon’, listened to that track once, then tried Mahalia Jackson singing America’s Favourite Hymns, starting with Track 5, ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. I imagined her singing with her eyes closed, her hands clasped, joyous and secure in her connection with Jesus. Carried along by her fervour, I let the CD run to its end, then I put on Patsy Cline singing ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’. A different style but there was nothing lost in the change from one singer to the other: they were both hooked up to something that wasn’t there for me. And yet …

One more large Jack Daniel’s and I took up the mallet and the straight-edge adze. ‘Please,’ I said to the wood. I struck a tentative blow, the adze slipped and bit me in the leg. It didn’t find the femoral artery but there was a lot of blood so I bandaged it as well as I could, pressed down hard on it with my hand, and called a minicab to take me to Chelsea & Westminster Accident and Emergency.

‘You’ve got blood all over your trousers,’ said the driver. ‘I don’t want it all over my car.’ I’ve seen faces like his in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch but better done.

‘Give me five minutes,’ I said. I went back into the house, wrapped a towel and several plastic carrier bags around the offending leg, took a couple of turns with ducting tape to hold them in place, grabbed a book for the waiting room, and tried the minicab again. ‘OK?’ I said. ‘No blood.’

‘If there is, you’ll pay for the upholstery,’ said my Samaritan, and off we went.

This being a Tuesday morning traffic was fairly light at Accident and Emergency. I gave one of the receptionists my details and joined the other accidents and emergencies among rumpled newspapers and magazines and Styrofoam cups of coffee and soft drinks. There were two Muslim women accompanied by men and small children, a large man with a MOTHER tattoo on his arm, a youth with his arm in a sling, and a young woman who was reading Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Nobody was bloody but me. Outside the Fulham Road provided its usual soundtrack while in the waiting room an atmosphere of truancy and withdrawal from the world prevailed.

The book I’d brought with me was Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defense. I was at the point where chess had overflowed its boundaries to pervade everything and the grandmaster Luzhin saw the shadows on the floor grouping to attack him when my name was called by the triage nurse in her little cubicle.

‘You’re quite a package,’ she said. She had a Scots accent and looked like short shrift but with a friendly grin. She spread some paper towels on the floor, unwrapped me, and told me to pop off my trousers. ‘What happened?’ she said.

‘I was working on a woodcarving when the adze slipped.’

‘Accident-prone, are you?’

‘I didn’t use to be but maybe I am now.’

She cleaned the wound, which was only oozing now, put on a temporary dressing, and solved the bloody-trousers problem by giving me a hospital dressing-gown and steering me into a cubicle for express stitching by Dr Kohn, a young man who looked as if he knew too much. ‘You should get an anatomy book if you want to do the job right,’ he said with a straight face. ‘You missed the artery by about an inch.’

‘Very funny. Do I look suicidal?’

‘No more than others I’ve seen but you never know — a lot of accidents aren’t strictly accidental.’ He raised his eyebrows and looked at me knowingly.

‘Thank you for your input. If I had my notebook with me I’d write that down.’

‘Maybe you can remember it.’

‘I’ll try. Thanks for the stitches.’

A pair of hospital pyjamas was found for me and a plastic bag for my trousers. I phoned for a minicab and went home.

I didn’t feel quite ready to pick up adze and mallet again, and although my leg hurt I could walk normally, so after lunch I took myself to the Royal Academy of Art to see The Genius of Rome exhibition. This exhibition, drawing on so many museum and private collections, was as remarkable logistically as artistically and was unlikely ever to happen again. Painters from all over Europe who had worked in Rome between 1592 and 1623 such as Rubens, Bril, and van Honthorst were represented along with Caravaggio, Caracci, Saraceni, Gentileschi, and the other native Italians.

A slowly moving procession of eyes met, again and again across the centuries, the eyes of lute players, courtesans and low life, Christ and the Virgin, the penitent Magdalene, and a variety of saints and Old Testament figures. The modernity of the faces was startling — I’ve seen Caravaggio’s gypsy fortune-teller at the cashier’s window in Lloyds, d’ Arpino’s Virgin reading the Sun on the District Line, Gentileschi’s St Francis selling vegetables in the North End Road, and everybody’s Christs everywhere. These many faces of Christ spoke to me and asked questions but for the time being I avoided this dialogue and gave my attention to the landscapes of Paul Bril.

I was much intrigued by a small one, only thirty-two centimetres wide, oil on copper, The Campo Vaccino with a Gypsy Woman Reading a Palm. There were some good-looking Roman ruins in the foreground, middle distance, and far distance. The near ones were in shade, making as it were a proscenium through which to view the far sunlit ones. There were many people and cattle. The figures nearest the viewer were deeply shadowed; the eye moved beyond them to the gypsy, her client, and the others grouped with them, and from them to the further sunlit figures. The campo, the ruins, the trees and sky and the divisions of space, light, and shadow were the main action; the gypsy and her group gave scale and emphasis to the visual planes of near, middle, and far. The colour, although austere and restrained, had a richness about it. If I had been able to stand in the real Campo Vaccino with the ruins and figures arranged as in the picture it would not have had the peculiar charm of the painting because the visual planes would not have been so ordered, so beguilingly presented. Everything in the picture was real but Paul Bril had restaged it so that the eye and the mind of the viewer could better contain it. Yes! I thought, if I could only see my life with the light and shadow and colours of near, middle, and far, I could … What?

I smelled honeysuckle and saw Sarah Varley looking at the same picture. ‘If only reality could pull itself together like that,’ I said.

‘I wonder why it is that we like to look at architectural ruins,’ she said.

‘Maybe looking at them makes us feel that humans can outlast brick and stone.’

‘Humans can outlast all kinds of things …’ She seemed about to say more but she stopped. ‘I’ll move on,’ she said. ‘I find it difficult to adjust my viewing pace to anyone else’s.’ Off she went.

I’m a pretty fast viewer myself and sometimes I saw her nearby but I was careful not to catch up with her. She paused thoughtfully for quite a long time at a painting which I found to be, when I reached it, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes. However dirty the job, it had fallen to Judith to do it and she was equal to it; from the expression on her face you might have thought she was filleting herring.

I liked Leonard Bramer’s little oil-on-copper The Fall of Simon Magus. A horse and an idle spectator occupied the foreground; beyond them was Peter with a halo, kneeling and putting the whammy on Simon while, some little distance away, Nero watched from his throne. Simon Magus, falling through the dark air above them, his garments fluttering about him, was the smallest person in the picture. Well, he had ideas above his station so what could he expect?

‘What an embarrassing comedown for poor old Simon Magus,’ said an American accent to my right. It was Peter Diggs, a painter who teaches at the Royal College of Art. He lives close by in Fulham and we bump into each other from time to time.

‘No one seems to be taking much notice,’ I said. ‘He probably thought he was the main character in this scene but he’s quite small in the overall picture.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

‘Yes, but sometimes we’re smaller than other times.’

He raised his eyebrows at that, then looked at his watch. ‘Got time for a coffee after this?’

‘Yes.’ We went along pretty quickly and were soon in Gallery 8 and the last part of the exhibition. We did the room clockwise, and so came to Caravaggio’s The Madonna di Loreto before the last wall and his The Entombment. The humble pilgrim couple with dirty bare feet, kneeling at the door with hands clasped prayerfully, looked up at the Virgin with the Child in her arms. ‘Just imagine,’ I said, ‘making that pilgrimage to the Virgin and having her answer the door.’

‘Her name was Lena. According to one of my books she sat for Caravaggio so often that a notary called Pasqualone became jealous; Caravaggio wounded him in a duel or a fight of some kind and had to get out of Rome so he went to Genoa.’

‘With Lena?’

‘I don’t think so; the book doesn’t say.’

‘She looks like a woman men might fight over. I wonder if being the Virgin in that painting had any effect on her life; I wonder how she felt about it as she got older.’

‘You think, maybe years later, she’d go to the church where the picture was hanging and tell people, “That’s me, that’s how I used to look.’”

I thought she might have done that. ‘And after all,’ I said, ‘she used to be a virgin too.’

‘Up to a point, certainly.’

Now we were stood in front of The Entombment. Through the galleries I had seen Christ taken by soldiers, mocked, crowned with thorns, shown to the populace, and crucified. His face and body had changed from one painter to the next and even Caravaggio’s Christs differed one from the other, but now all these images had mingled and precipitated this heavy mortal residue of the dead Christ being lowered on to a stone slab. His mouth was open, holding a silence.

I needed to be alone after that but I’d said I’d have coffee with Peter so I did. The ground-floor restaurant murmured and clattered around us; the lamps accentuated the dimming of the winter afternoon beyond the windows. ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Peter. ‘I think I’ve come between you and your thoughts.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘They won’t go away. How’s your work going?’

‘Nothing much happening at the moment. My paintings used to come from an emptiness in me; now I’ve lost that empty space.’

‘How did you lose it?’

‘It got filled up with Amaryllis.’

‘Worse things could happen.’

‘Oh, I’m not complaining — I’m happier than I’ve ever been; it’s just that I feel a little strange, like when you come out of a cinema into bright sunlight.’

‘Maybe you need mental dark glasses.’

‘I’ll work on that. There’s Seamus Flannery.’ He waved to a man carrying a tray. ‘Seamus!’ he said. ‘Come and sit with us.’

Seamus was a pleasant-looking man, bald and somewhat portly. I guessed him to be a few years older than I. He said, ‘Hi,’ put his coffee and scone on the table, got rid of his tray, and shook hands with me while Peter introduced us. ‘That’s some exhibition,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to come back two or three more times.’

‘Harold would have been here every day making notes,’ said Peter. ‘Harold Klein,’ he said to me, ‘an art historian friend of ours who died two years ago.’

‘Of a 14 bus,’ said Seamus.

‘“Of a 14 bus”?’ I said.

‘He stepped in front of it,’ said Seamus. ‘He and the 14 had a very complex relationship.’

I shook my head in condolence and also to express that there was nowt so queer as folk.

‘As I was looking at the paintings,’ said Seamus, ‘I was thinking of things to say to Harold but there isn’t any Harold any more. I wonder if you ever get used to that kind of thing.’

‘After a while it stops,’ I said, ‘and you just shake your head from time to time when you think of how all the days and nights of that person are gone out of the world; what they did, what they said — all gone.’

Seamus gave me a long look. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is a process of one goneness after another.’

‘That includes ideas,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll have to content myself with portraits and nudes for the time being.’

‘Yours is a hard life,’ said Seamus. ‘Try to find what consolations you can.’

‘Do my best,’ said Peter. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m off to meet Amaryllis. See you.’

‘What do you do?’ I asked Seamus after Peter had left.

‘I teach at the National Film School and I write for radio and television. The radio stuff’s been on the air; the television hasn’t been.’

‘Was there a time before you were doing that,’ I said, ‘when you knew that was what you wanted to do and you made it happen or did you just fall into it?’

‘Knowing what you want to do can be like the 14 bus,’ said Seamus. ‘Sometimes it’s a long time coming.’ Now it was his turn to look at his watch. ‘I must leave now. Nice meeting you.’ He shook my hand and left.

‘Not just the 14,’ I said. But he was gone. I had another coffee and thought about Sarah Varley whom I hadn’t seen since Judith Beheading Holofernes; I wondered what she did with herself when she wasn’t stalling out.

On my way back to Green Park tube station I was thinking about Peter and Amaryllis. She’s not only very beautiful, she’s bewitching, like the nymphs in the Waterhouse painting who drowned Hylas; and when I’d seen them together Peter seemed truly bewitched. Now he’d lost the empty space that his paintings came from. That, at least, was not one of my problems — I had more empty space than I knew what to do with.

Back at the studio the lime was waiting for me in that intimidatingly objective north light. The crucified wooden hand lay on the work-bench; I’d thought of putting it up on the wall but I’d hesitated — I didn’t want to be pushy. Now I decided that I would be pushy so I took some Blu-Tack and fastened it to the wall over the work-bench. ‘Anything you can do,’ I said, ‘will be greatly appreciated.’

The many faces and bodies of Christ were in my mind and I was expecting a long conversation with him but all that came to me was Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo. He was a typical Caravaggio in physique, very slight, almost girlish. He looked so meek, so submissive, so humble and unpretentious, that I didn’t quite know where to put myself with him.

As I faced my glued-together lime once more I found a thought in my mind: Let the wood come to you. So I did, and this time the adze didn’t bite me.