The Bat Tattoo

25 Sarah Varley

Christmas went away eventually, and by the middle of January London was functioning more or less fully. The new year seemed a thin and dreary thing but possibly that was post-Christmas depression.

I hadn’t talked to Roswell Clark since the Royal Academy, and that hadn’t really been a conversation. I was mentally leaning forward to help him uphill — I felt that he was climbing some kind of hill, perhaps pushing a big rock ahead of him, but I didn’t know what the hill was and I didn’t know what the rock was. What did he do with his time? ‘Private commissions’ was what he’d told me and that was all he’d told me. I wanted to see for myself what he was doing but I didn’t know where he lived and I didn’t have his telephone number. I’d seen him at the V & A, Covent Garden, and the Royal Academy. This being a Saturday I wasn’t at the Jubilee Market but it was my guess that he avoided that and the other two places on weekends.

Whatever he was doing, why did it matter so much to me? My first impression of him was that he was a failer but were my first impressions to be trusted completely? My experience with Giles had left me feeling that I was attracted to men who needed improving. Was I attracted to Roswell Clark? Not really, I told myself, but I couldn’t help being curious about him.

I had the feeling he might be local, near rather than far. This was a free Saturday; I could do what I liked. I put on a coat and a woollen hat and went out with no particular destination in mind but wondering if I might run into him. The day was dismal, cold and grey. For no reason at all I crossed Parsons Green and paused at the White Horse pub. The tables outside were empty; inside there were only a few people. It was a little after three and I don’t usually drink that early in the day but I got a glass of Merlot and took it over to a table.

A young couple came in; the woman sat down at a nearby table while the man went to fetch the drinks. She was very pretty, nice figure, wearing tight jeans and a loose Fair Isle pullover. She looked a little truculent. What have you got to look truculent about? I thought. You’re young, you’re pretty, your whole life is before you.

The man came to the table with two pints, put one in front of her, sat down, and lifted his glass to her but she didn’t respond. He was a nice-looking City type and his manner made me think that he was the one who always made an effort to please. It won’t help, I thought. ‘Well, Hilary …’ he said.

‘Well, what?’

‘Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you?’

She took a good pull at her pint before answering. ‘Our expectations aren’t the same.’

‘How do they differ?’

‘You seem to think we have a basis for a long-term future.’

‘What is it you think we have?’

‘Had. It was one of those interim things, and you knew that very well from the outset. You’d have liked there to be more but that’s all there was and you’ve had it, so now it’s time for you to move on to the next thing.’

‘That’s easy for you to say.’

‘Right, everything’s easy for me, Andrew — that’s why I have such a great life. I have to go now.’ She got up and walked out, leaving her unfinished pint on the table. Andrew watched her leave, then finished her pint and his, smacked the table once with his hand, and went to the bar for another pint.

Poor Andrew, I thought. I finished my wine and left, shaking my head over the non-easiness of everything. I had things I could have been doing at home but I didn’t feel like doing any of them so I wandered down Basuto Road to Eel Brook Common, then over to the Fulham Road where I fetched up at Coffee Republic drinking coffee and accepting the fact that I wasn’t going to bump into Roswell Clark.

On Monday morning Roswell appeared at the Jubilee Market, looking as if he’d been dragged backwards through a very thick hedge. ‘Well, here I am,’ he said as if he knew I’d been looking for him. I could feel myself blushing.

‘What’s up?’ I said.

‘Well, I’ve done something,’ he said, ‘OK?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You’ve wanted something from me, haven’t you? You forced that wooden hand on me because you knew it would start working on me, which it did. And now I’ve done something.’

‘What?’

‘Would you like to come see it?’

‘Yes, I would.’

‘When?’

‘This evening?’

‘When this evening?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Fulham, SW6. Kempson Road.’ He wrote down the address and gave it to me.

‘You’re quite close — I can be there about eight.’

‘Right. See you.’ And he was gone so quickly that it almost seemed I’d imagined the whole thing but there was the address in my hand.

For the rest of the day my mind was busy with what Roswell had said about my wanting something from him. I’m always surprised when things I say or do have an effect on people, and I was flustered by his words but not displeased. I couldn’t help putting out I-want-to-improve-you pheromones and he had responded appropriately.

Sometimes I observe myself as from a distance doing this or that and it isn’t what I usually do but I’ve learned not to ask myself too many questions. I left the Jubilee Market at three, took my trolley and rucksack and shoulder bag home, went to Marks & Spencer at Marble Arch, bought a pair of peach-coloured silk knickers with lace inserts, went home, had a long shower, dabbed on some Ma Griffe, tried on three or four outfits, and finally settled on a navy Jean Muir and a pink cashmere cardigan that I got at a charity shop. With black tights and high-heeled black boots. ‘Do you want to talk about this?’ said my mirror self.

‘No,’ I answered. I had a cup of tea and scanned The Times, in which it was reported under the line ORKNEY’S GIFT TO EROTICISM:

The erotic combination of suspender and stocking that launched a million pin-ups was patented in 1896 by two young islanders who saw the potential in an idea for holding up baggy farm overalls. Andrew Thomson and James Drever, 22, apprentice tailors, went to California and lodged a patent for ‘a clasp serving to secure the stocking’.

Giles sometimes, not as often as he’d have liked, talked me into wearing suspenders and stockings for him; he said that the division of female flesh by straps or harness of any kind excited him. Now he and his needs were no longer part of the world and I was in tights. I shook myself and looked at my watch: quarter to eight.

From Doria Road to Kempson is a short walk past Parsons Green and across Eel Brook Common. The air was cold and still with a feeling of impending snow. The street lamps, the lights in windows everywhere, and the people who passed me all seemed part of a silent background that heightened my separateness. I found the house, rang the bell, and the door opened immediately as if Roswell had been standing behind it. ‘You’re here,’ he said.

‘Well, that was the arrangement, wasn’t it?’

‘Sorry, please come in. I’m really glad to see you.’

‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘You seem a little …’ I could smell that he’d been drinking but drunk wasn’t the word I was looking for.

‘I am,’ he said. He helped me out of my coat and hung it in the hall. ‘You look great,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you dressed up before.’

‘Thank you. This seemed something of an occasion.’

‘I suppose it is, in one way or another. The studio’s on the top floor.’

I followed him up the stairs past a living room full of books and not too much furniture, a cosy-looking study, and a very sparsely furnished bedroom. The studio was two storeys high with a skylight; for a moment we stood in darkness looking up at the sky, then Roswell switched on two banks of fluorescent lights and there leapt into view a crucified crash-dummy. ‘Oh my God,’ I said.

Up there on the cross it looked enormous at first but then I realised it was only life-size. The cross was leaning against the wall as if the figure had just been nailed to it and raised up to hang there until dead. The figure was of pale wood, unpainted except for the usual black-and-yellow discs, the blood from the wound in its side and those in its hands and feet; there was also a little blood from the shiny chromium crown of thorns on its bald and eyeless head. The figure was more elongated than the dummies I’d seen in photographs and on television; this had an El Greco effect that accentuated the pain not visible on the blankness of the face. The cross was of a rough dark wood that heightened the pale vulnerability of the body. There was no INRI.

After the first shock a wave of sadness swept over me; my throat ached and my nose tingled and I thought I might cry but I didn’t. This sadness wasn’t from the crash-dummy Christ but from thinking of the poorness of spirit that had led Roswell to spend all those hours carving it. His soul must be absolutely skint, I thought, for him to come up with this. The reduction of Christ to a dummy made to crash into the wall of our sins, the stripping of a complex and haunting idea to a simplistic metaphor, made me so sorry for Roswell that my heart opened to him and I wanted to take him in my arms and rock him like a baby. I realised that I was standing there looking gobsmacked and I tried to find something to say.

‘Drink?’ said Roswell. He seemed calmer now.

‘Please.’ There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on a workbench and I pointed to it. ‘That’ll do nicely.’

He poured large ones for both of us and we clinked glasses. ‘He dies for our sins,’ he said, and just for a moment I wondered if he was crazy. I was feeling a little crazy myself. The thing was so in-your-face, so asking for trouble, that I half expected the police to arrive at any moment. ‘Is this one of your private commissions?’ I said.

‘No, this is off my own bat. It just sort of came to me.’

We drank in silence for a while, then I said, ‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘No idea. I had no plans beyond carving the figure.’

‘Can you get it through the door?’

‘It comes apart, the arms are pegged into the body and so on. Getting it out of here is no problem but where would I take it?’

Another silence, then I heard myself say, ‘Have you thought of exhibiting it?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘This thing that I did, I don’t understand it. It’s as if my hands had something in mind that they wanted to show me but I haven’t figured out what it is. Showing it publicly would seem like betraying a confidence.’

‘On the other hand, maybe seeing it on public view would make clear to you what it’s about.’

‘I suppose that’s a possibility.’

‘Nikolai Chevorski used to say that it’s the viewer who completes a work of art. I think he was right about that.’

‘Well, you’ve viewed it, so now it’s complete.’

‘You know what I mean — it wants to get out into the world.’

‘I don’t know, Sarah.’

‘You’ve heard about the new art museum?’

‘You mean the American one?’

‘Yes, the R. Albert Streeter Museum of Art. There’s a competition and a fifty-thousand-pound prize.’

‘What, you think I should enter this?’

‘Yes.’ I was beginning to see prospects opening before him and I was feeling good. ‘Yes,’ I repeated, ‘enter it.’

‘You really think I should?’

‘Yes. If it’s accepted for the show it’s bound to get a lot of attention and even if it doesn’t win it’s likely to make things happen for you.’ As I said this I was well aware that he was well aware that I’d given him no response to the piece other than my initial shock and this practical suggestion.

‘You want things to happen for me?’ he said. My glass was empty and he refilled it, his own as well.

‘Are you trying to get me drunk?’

‘Yes. You haven’t answered my question.’

‘What was the question?’

‘Do you want things to happen for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Should I be honest with you?’

‘Are you sure you want to go that far on the first date?’

‘Is that what this is?’

‘I think so,’ and he kissed me. It was a serious kiss and I felt like a twenty-year-old. With forty-four years of experience.

‘Maybe I won’t be honest with you just yet,’ I said.

‘Good thinking.’ He took me by the hand, switched off the studio lights, and we went down to the bedroom where I saw the little china nutcracker standing at attention on the bedside table, shouldering his sword and grinning with all his teeth.

‘Take the evening off,’ I said, and turned him to face the wall.

Afterwards, as we lay in each other’s arms feeling rather pleased with ourselves, I hummed a bit of the song from West Side Story. ‘I feel pretty,’ I said.

He kissed me in various places. ‘You’re better than pretty — there’s a lot of you and all of it’s beautiful.’ He went back to his kissing.

‘I admire your attention to detail,’ I said. ‘You make me enjoy being a big woman.’

‘Pretty knickers!’ he said, picking them up from where they’d fallen.

‘They’re new. I wore them in case I got knocked down by a bus on the way here.’

‘I admire your foresight. Now they’re historic.’ He climbed over me so he could rub the bat on his left shoulder against the bat on my left shoulder.

‘A historic meeting,’ I said.

‘Destiny, you think?’

‘Destiny expands to fill the knickers available for it; that’s Varley’s Law.’

‘I’ve always been law-abiding, Mrs Varley.’

‘Good. Now that we’re over the hump, so to speak, can I be honest with you even though it’s still the first date?’

‘Will it hurt?’

‘I’m not sure, but I need to do it.’

‘All right, do it.’ He wrapped me around him and held me close. ‘But first tell me that this isn’t all there is.’

‘This isn’t all there is,’ I said with my mouth close to his ear.

‘And tell me that you’re not going away after you’re done being honest.’ He was kissing my neck.

‘I’m not going away,’ I murmured, and kissed him here and there.

‘OK, I’m ready.’

‘Part of what attracted me to you,’ I said, ‘was that I could see you needed work.’

‘Work as in employment?’

‘No, work as in a house that needs work. I’m a man-improver, I can’t help it. Will you throw me out now?’

He clasped my bottom firmly with both hands. ‘I don’t think I can let go of you. Feel free to improve me — I always need work.’

So I worked on him a little and he declared himself much improved. By then we were both hungry but didn’t feel like going out so we went down to the kitchen in knickers and T-shirts (he gave me one of his) and Roswell made salami and eggs with oven chips and there was champagne to go with it, three bottles waiting in the fridge.

‘You expected to have something to celebrate?’ I asked.

‘I always keep some chilled in case I get seduced by an ardent woman in silk knickers.’

‘Yes, it’s good to be prepared for these things.’ He had put on a Thelonious Monk CD, and ‘Round Midnight’ traced its shadowy yesterdays while we ate and drank. The kitchen was a bit ramshackle, with a fluorescent light flickering under the bottom shelf of a unit that had been united in a marriage of convenience with a pine dresser; there were brightly coloured cabinets stuck here and there on the walls, a DIY exhaust fan over the cooker, and a bachelor-not-coping-all-that-well look about the place that warmed my heart. A tidy little spice rack on the wall, however, hinted at a woman’s presence. ‘You’re not married, are you?’ I said.

He gave me a startled look. ‘Was,’ he said. ‘She died seven years ago.’

‘My husband died in 1993.’ Then there was silence as we both looked into the middle distance.

‘This table,’ said Roswell, caressing that scarred and variously scorched item, ‘is a plain deal table.’

‘Yes, I can see that.’

‘Back in the States I used to read a lot of English authors and the stories often featured plain deal tables. I always wanted one.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘A plain deal table is a plain deal: what you see is what you get. You might even say it’s a quinsettentially English kind of thing.’

‘Quinsettentialism is good,’ he said, pouring more Moët & Chandon. I was feeling cosy and uneasy at the same time: cosy because of the Jack Daniel’s, the lovemaking, the salami and eggs, and the Moët & Chandon; uneasy because I didn’t know where each of us stood in relation to the crash-dummy crucifixion. If it was accepted for the exhibition it would certainly get him noticed and it would likely end up in the collection of some cutting-edge aesthete for whom last week’s shocker was, well, last week. What was I going to say if he asked me what I actually thought of it? After the champagne came Marillenschnaps, so although my brain felt beautifully crystalline by then I did more nodding and smiling than talking while my critical faculty, like some dreadful hopping creature, pursued me through the dark forest of my thoughts.

Fortunately he didn’t ask my opinion on the crucifixion as art. For the rest of the evening we exchanged histories and got more and more comfortable with each other. We went to bed around three o’clock in the morning, and although I was feeling tired by then the drink seemed to make me wakeful rather than sleepy. For a long time we lay quietly like two spoons, his front against my back. Roswell’s breathing sounded wakeful too but neither of us spoke; I think we were both getting used to the idea that maybe we weren’t alone any more. We fell asleep after a while and when we woke up each of us found the other still there: nobody had gone away. ‘You can look now,’ I said to the nutcracker. I turned him around so he could see how things stood and he seemed pleased.