The Bat Tattoo
‘Nice name,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘It goes.’
The note from M. Delarue confirmed that my visitor was who he said he was and would give me a cheque for twenty thousand pounds as soon as he received the figures from me. Ten thousand of this was a down payment on a new commission: a crash-dummy mastiff for which he was again offering twenty thousand pounds. The mastiff was to have the usual fully functional parts and was to be made to the same scale as the male and female dummies.
‘OK?’ said Jean-Louis, looking at his watch. ‘We are burning daylight, pardner.’
‘You like John Wayne?’
‘In my book he is Number One. With him no one takes liberties. You give me merchandise, I give you money, I am out of here, yes?’ He opened the Louis Vuitton and let loose a powerful aroma of dirty socks. ‘My cover,’ he explained. ‘The douanier looks not too close.’
‘Are you sure you’ll get through Customs all right?’
‘No problem. I am as one invisible.’
‘You’re a whole lot of invisible,’ I said.
‘Rest you tranquil — it goes.’
I removed the batteries from the figures and put them in a small bag which I gave Jean-Louis with the written operating instructions. ‘What an équipement,’ he said when he saw the male figure.
‘Life is short but Art is long,’ I replied.
He wrapped each figure separately in dirty socks, put them into hidden side compartments in the Louis Vuitton and closed it. He gave me the cheque and we shook hands. ‘Au revoir,’ he said.
‘Au revoir. Would you like something before you go? One for the road?’
‘Have you perhaps the Jack Daniel’s? A small one only.’
I fetched the bottle and two glasses, and poured us both large ones, confident that M. Delarue could afford the taxi’s waiting time. ‘Santé,’ said Jean-Louis as we clinked glasses.
‘Here’s looking at you,’ I returned. ‘Are you just a courier or do you do other work for M. Delarue?’
‘I am his chauffeur.’
‘What sort of a man is M. Delarue?’
‘Rich,’ he answered, then made a gesture of zipping his lips, after which he raised an admonitory index finger.
‘Right, no more questions about him. What did you do before you became his chauffeur?’
‘Time.’
‘Ah.’ I was going to ask him what he did the time for but thought better of it, so we drank companionably but without conversation from then on until he left, and thus ended the first transaction with my new patron.
The next morning a fax arrived in which M. Delarue said that he was delighted, his satisfaction was greater than expected; the action of the figures together with the sound produced an experience without parallel. He was lost in admiration and looked forward with eager anticipation to the mastiff.
It’s astonishing, really, how quickly the strange becomes the usual. Whoever and whatever M. Delarue was, he was willing and able to pay handsomely for his playthings and I now settled into the role of providing him with the wooden objects of his desire. As I began my mastiff research I wondered what the end of all this would be. In the meantime, craftsmanship and the moral obligation to do the job right took over. As well as something else which I’ve already touched on: these wooden erotica excited me; not only erotically but — dare I use the word? — artistically. Working with wood felt good; it put new heart into me. I was beginning to feel like an artist, beginning to wonder what I might carve when I finished with M. Delarue’s commissions.
I looked at mastiffs in books, I talked to mastiff breeders on the telephone, I went to Watford to photograph a dog called Longmoor’s Dark Dandy and paid his owner fifty pounds. Remarking my interest in the animal’s private parts, he smiled knowingly and asked for twenty-five pounds more, which I paid with a cryptic smile. Although he obviously had theories, I very much doubted that he could imagine what my research was for.
On my return I bought more wood, made my clay model, just a little hyperbolised, went to the lime, thoroughly enjoyed the carving, and ended up with a crash-dummy mastiff that could confidently collide with the best society.
As before, Dieter Scharf supplied the pelvic motor. ‘It didn’t take us long to get down on all fours, did it,’ he said.
Although no sound had been requested I looped a tape of Maria Callas singing ‘E strano! E strano!’ and the aria that follows in Act One of La Traviata, ‘Ah, forse e lui che l’anima …’, ‘Ah, perhaps he is the one …’ The finishing touch on my crash-dummy creatures was always the yellow-and-black-quartered discs; these came to have an almost mystical quality for me, particularly when they were in motion.
Jean-Louis and I did the business as before, and Bonzo was received as enthusiastically as the first figures had been. ‘The animal is all that one could wish,’ wrote M. Delarue, ‘and the music — what a touch!’ The cheque Jean-Louis had given me brought the total up to fifty-five thousand pounds, fifteen thousand of which was a down payment on the next commission. ‘It is my hope,’ he wrote, ‘that your earnings from these commissions will gain for you a little non-commercial time in which to follow your art wherever it leads.’
My art! Although I was beginning to feel like an artist I hadn’t been thinking of what I did as art but perhaps a rethink was in order. This was a time when unmade beds and used condoms were fetching high prices, and certainly my crash-dummies were no less — maybe even more — art than those.
M. Delarue’s next request was for a crash-dummy gorilla with the usual specs. Feeling that he might have underpaid me on the first two commissions, he was offering thirty thousand pounds, confident that my work, as always, would exceed expectations. That would bring the total up to seventy thousand pounds for my art. Maybe with a capital A: my Art. A crash-dummy gorilla, OK. Having done the others, I found no reason to draw the line at this one. But what did he want from me besides his crash-dummy bonking menagerie? What was he expecting me to do with this time that his money was buying for me?
Never mind, I said to myself, just make a good gorilla. I decided not to visit the Regent’s Park Zoo. When I last went there, some years ago, there was a female gorilla licking her urine off the floor. Was that her way, I wondered, of saying, ‘Is it I or is it not I?’ I had National Geographics, I had a video of David Attenborough whispering his narration while chewing vegetation and hanging out with a silverback and his troupe; and I had my own idea of gorilla-in-itself, a creature likely to be the dominant member in any relationship. I rigorously maintained my standards and eventually achieved a wooden gorilla with whom a wooden woman might crash any party of the appropriate scale with complete assurance.
I thought of my gorilla woodenly dreaming of African mountains while doing what I’d been paid to make him do. I gave Jean-Louis a tape to take with him for the gorilla-and-partner soundtrack: : Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. I couldn’t find a recording by Marie-Claire Alain on that wonderful organ in Flensborg, Sweden that sounds as if it was made from the salt-encrusted timbers of Noah’s Ark so I went with Albert Schweitzer at the Parish Church in Gunsbach, Alsace. On reflection I was pleased with that choice; I thought Schweitzer and the gorilla would get on well together.
4
Sarah Varley
You can do it either way, really: Monet defined his forms with light; Chardin with darkness. Monet’s figures, his flowers, his rocks, his boats and his sea all partake of the light; they mingle with it; one can’t say exactly where the light leaves off and they begin. Chardin’s people, his animals alive and dead, his still lifes all husband carefully the light allotted to them in the darkness that defines them. Chardin died in 1779, Monet in 1926. Certainly Monet’s is the more modern approach but I am a Chardin sort of person. At the exhibition at the Royal Academy I stood in front of his paintings caught by the lucent mystery of a glass of water, the quiet crucifixion of a hare. No, I am not modern.
In my buying and selling I’m closer to the mode
rn era; I’ve got Clarice Cliff and Susy Cooper china, Kosta and Orrefors glass. In costume jewellery I’ve got two Schiaparelli, three Trifari and one Kramer at present, a few things that go back to the twenties and earlier but mostly they’re from the forties and fifties: coloured glass, marcasite, paste. I like cheerful things that sparkle and I like to see women smiling as they put them on.
Saturday went well at Chelsea Town Hall. I bought almost as much as I sold but they were things I expect to do all right with. I had the usual timewasters who blocked the stall without buying anything but nothing was stolen and there was a really nice Japanese woman who appreciated what I had on display and bought two of my most expensive necklaces. It isn’t just the money, it’s the recognition I crave — the little smile and nod and the look that says, ‘Ah yes, you know what’s good.’
On Mondays I do Covent Garden, the Jubilee Market, so on Sunday I look at my stock and decide what to take; it’s the sort of thing that tends to fill the time available for it. I was luxuriating in indecision when the doorbell rang and I knew it would be Jehovah’s Witnesses. I hadn’t seen any for a long time and I’d begun to wonder whether they were an endangered species. These two looked diffident but daring, like animals returning to an old habitat but taking nothing for granted. One was a white man, slight and bespectacled, who looked like a stamp collector. He was wearing a suit and a tie. The other was a black woman, tall and delicate, soberly dressed, who seemed remote but committed. They stood on the doorstep, prepared for rejection but modestly hopeful.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
‘Good morning,’ said the man, looking slightly more confident. ‘We’re going round encouraging people to read the Word of God and take comfort and guidance from it.’
‘I’ve read the Old Testament and the New Testament and the Apocrypha,’ I said. ‘I made notes at the time but I can’t give you chapter and verse.’
‘So you don’t turn to the Word of God regularly?’ said the woman, gently but with a little edge to it.
‘No. What’s your message for the present time?’
‘This is a time of adversity, isn’t it?’ said the man. ‘I mean, look around you — is this what you’d call a good time?’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘It isn’t; it’s a time of adversity and this is God’s answer to a world that has turned away from Him. Do you remember Daniel 2. 44?’
‘No.’ The sun was doing its Sunday-afternoon thing: five hundred million years left to live. Peter Rabbit on Mars?
‘… kingdoms,’ said the man. The woman nodded.
‘What?’ I said.
‘Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, Daniel 2.1,’ said the man. ‘“His spirit was troubled, and his sleep brake from him.”’
‘I remember Belshazzar’s feast but not Nebuchadnezzar’s dream.’
‘Nebuchadnezzar,’ said the man, ‘had a dream in which he saw a great image. “This image’s head was of fine gold …”’
‘That’s the one with feet of clay,’ I said. ‘Right?’
‘Right,’ said the man. He took out his little Bible in which the passage was underlined. ‘Daniel 2.42,’ he said triumphantly. ‘“And as the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.” And in the next verse: “And whereas thou sawest iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men: but they shall not cleave one to another, even as iron is not mixed with clay.”’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I don’t remember what’s next.’
‘Now we come to it,’ he said, ‘Daniel 2.44: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” That’s God’s Kingdom, and Jesus is its King.’
‘Not Jehovah?’
‘No, Jehovah appointed Jesus King in 1914.’
‘And he’s been King ever since,’ said the woman.
‘He’s doing a lot better than Prince Charles, isn’t he,’ I said.
Both of them looked at me with their heads at a slight angle. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Can we leave this brochure with you?’ There was a tri-ethnic group of faces on the cover. What Does God Require of Us? was the title, correctly spelled.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘The blood is the life, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry?’ said the man.
‘The blood is the life, isn’t it?’
‘That’s what God says.’
‘Dracula said the same thing. That’s why Renfield ate flies. What about the Jehovah’s Witness who lost five pints of blood in a machete attack? Did you see it in The Times?’
‘We heard about it.’
‘Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses accept blood transfusions?’
‘It says right here,’ said the man, opening the brochure to the appropriate page, ‘“We must not take into our bodies in any way other people’s blood or even our own blood that has been stored (Acts 21.25).”’
‘Hang on,’ I said. I went and got my King James version off the shelf and looked up Acts 21.25. Returning to my visitors I read aloud: ‘“As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication.” That isn’t what I’d call a clear-cut prohibition of transfusions,’ I said.
‘Jehovah’s requirement is in those words,’ said the man, ‘and Jehovah’s Witnesses obey it.’
‘But this bloke,’ I said, ‘renounced his Jehovah’s Witnesshood because the blood is the life and he wanted a transfusion so he could go on living.’
‘Not everyone has the faith to uphold God’s laws,’ said the man smoothly. ‘Thank you for your time and your interest. We must be going.’ And they went, still with their heads at an angle. The brochure had a back-of-a-cereal-box quality but obviously it works for the people who go around ringing doorbells to share their enlightenment with the rest of us. If there were a Jehovah, it’s just the sort of thing he might do as an audience warm-up for Armageddon. I am actually a believer: I have faith that there’s nothing that cares about us one way or the other.
After the Jehovah’s Witnesses left I went out to the garden where I grazed safely on the Sunday Times and the Observer and drank many cups of lemon tea. The usual blackbird, the husband, was standing on the fence and zicking to his wife and children. I think they may be nesting in the camellia bush which is too low to be safe but I haven’t wanted to disturb them by getting close enough to see. It’s such a peaceful sound, that zicking; it reminds me that the seasons still arrive at their appointed times, more or less.
I was much impressed by the daring of a forty-four-year-old woman (my age exactly) of whom there were several photographs in the Sunday Times. Her boyfriend had spent two years and three thousand pounds building a medieval siege engine, a trebuchet — a big one with a one-tonne lead counterweight. The idea was to use it for hurling people one hundred and twenty feet through the air into a safety net. The thing had been tested with crash dummies and by the boyfriend whose trajectory went as planned. Both the woman and the boyfriend (fifteen years younger) are members of the Dangerous Sports Club. A portrait photo showed her before the slinging looking about as worried as I’d look in that situation. Not that I’d ever allow such a thing to happen.
In the event she flew through the air as planned but when she landed in the safety net she bounced out, fell thirty feet to the ground, and broke her pelvis. I kept going back to the photo of her before she became a human missile. Dread was the only word for the expression on her face as she weighed one thing against another. ‘She was shaking with fear,’ the boyfriend was quoted as saying. She was in a stable condition in hospital, according to the Sunday Times report. I imagined her watching when the crash-dummy did what
she was planning to do. I saw it hurtling through the air in a graceful parabola, its yellow-and-black discs making its flight easy for the eye to follow. I imagined the conversation with her boyfriend:
BOYFRIEND:
See, it hits the net every time. Same weight as you, approximately same body mass — can’t miss.
WOMAN:
Your calculations worked out all right, I can see that. And it worked perfectly when you did it.
BOYFRIEND:
You don’t look comfortable with it. Look, you don’t have to do this. We needn’t do every single thing the same.
WOMAN:
No, I want to do it, I really do. It’s one of those things I have to do.
BOYFRIEND:
But you look scared and you’re shaking.
WOMAN:
You know how I am — I shook before all of our bungee jumps too.
BOYFRIEND:
OK, if you’re sure.
WOMAN:
I’m sure.
Her face haunts me. I wonder if she and the boyfriend are still together.
At 4.30 Monday morning it’s still really Sunday night. I woke up from a dream in which I arrived at the platform just as the train was pulling out. I ran as fast as I could but I wasn’t fast enough. So I was awake before the alarm went off; it was only ten minutes to four. I tried without success to get back to sleep, finally rolled out of bed at half-past feeling hard done by, had breakfast, did my nervous trips to the loo, put on my rucksack that almost drives me into the ground every time, slung a shoulder bag almost as heavy, and trundled my bursting trolley bag out into the foredawn.