The Bat Tattoo

22 Sarah Varley

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman’s hand on a necklace, a man’s hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, ceased entirely?

Market trading is not a spiritual pursuit but maybe there is nothing that hasn’t got a spiritual side. All of us at our stalls selling the oddments of unknown lives, tarnished medals, broken watches, cloudy mirrors — are we not extending those lives beyond their deaths?

The wooden hand that I gave Roswell Clark, whose was the hand that carved it, whose ghost-touch still lingers on it? Will it let go of me now that I’d passed it on? Somehow I doubt it. Will it get a grip on him? Why do I get involved with unfinished men? Not a romantic involvement but I can feel myself willing him to do something, to make a big step forward. And he’s not eager to make that step. What can I say? I’m sorry about this.

I don’t think about Roswell Clark all the time; there are other things on my mind. I was greatly relieved to read in The Times that the Pope has apologised to the Greeks for the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders. Elsewhere I saw that the German industrial giant, von Peng International Industries, had finally yielded to the demands of surviving ex-slave labourers. VPI was going to pay them each three thousand pounds while pointing out that the claims of the ex-slave labourers were not altogether justified by the quality of their work; VPI had paid the SS three Reichsmarks per day for each unskilled concentration-camp inmate, four for skilled ones, and one and a half for children; these costs and the compensation were both considered excessive by von Peng International but in the interests of leaving the past behind they were doing the handsome thing. Following on this report came the news that VPI was being restructured, their munitions, industrial chemical, telecommunications, steel-making, oil refining, and pharmaceutical divisions being decentralised under new management; this not surprisingly wiped a good deal of value off VPI shares but somehow the world staggers on and presumably VPI still has a bob or two with which to continue its many enterprises. VPI’s gallantry doesn’t quite rank with that of the gentleman who bought Maria Callas’s underwear and burnt it but it’s better than a poke in the eye with an electrified fence.