The Bat Tattoo (18 page)

‘Delarue,’ I said faintly.

‘Whatever,’ said Christ. From his garment he took out a much-used stone notebook and a stub of stone pencil. As he leafed through the pages it was like the riffling of tombstones. He frowned, licked the point of the stone pencil, and made a note. ‘I regret to see,’ he said, ‘that you have done business with some people not of the best, have you not, my old?’

‘That was my father, Gottfried von Peng,’ I said. ‘Of his business affairs I know nothing.’

Again Christ flipped through the stone pages. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘did you inherit from him?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said.

‘It goes,’ he said. ‘With the money, the sins.’

‘That hardly seems fair.’

‘What can I tell you?’ he said with a smile. ‘Would you like to hear chapter and verse of how you’ve spent your time and your money since coming into your inheritance? Shall we speak, for example, of lewd toys?’

‘You must have a great many demands on your time,’ I said. ‘How can you concern yourself with such trifles?’

‘There are no trifles,’ said Christ. ‘There are no little things; everything is big. Dare one hope that when you wake up you’ll try to …’ At this point the great stone hands let go of me and I lost the rest of his words in the rush and roar of warm air as I fell.

‘Do better?’ I shouted as I woke up.

‘Didn’t I do it the way you like?’ said Victoria. ‘Wasn’t it good for you?’

‘Quiet!’ I said. ‘I’m trying not to lose the dream.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Victoria.

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.