Read The Bat Tattoo Online

Authors: Russell Hoban

Tags: #Literature, #U.S.A., #20th Century, #American Literature, #21st Century, #Britain, #Expatriate Literature, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #British History

The Bat Tattoo (6 page)

BOOK: The Bat Tattoo
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When I got home I worked out how to get the necessary parts out of my blocks of lime, then I made drawings, transferred them to the wood, clamped the first block in the Scopas Chops, picked up chisel and mallet, and got started on the male torso. The mallet blows and the bite of the chisel sounded good to me; as the shavings fell away from my blade I felt hooked-up, connected, and it occurred to me that this might be how artists felt. In six weeks my figures were ready for Dieter Scharf. The drilling and carving for the motor, battery, and wiring spaces had been ticklish but although I’d bought enough wood to allow for errors and wastage I hadn’t made any errors and I’d wasted nothing.

Dieter Scharf charged me twenty-five hundred pounds for radio controls and aerials, motors and installation. I painted the quartered yellow-and-black discs on the dummies and varnished them. The smooth hardness of the lime and the polished surfaces heightened the anatomical hyperbole so that even side by side in repose the figures had a beguiling lewdness. When the male dummy zoomed into readiness and the female received him they did what they were designed to do; their blind and expressionless faces radiated a mystic calm while their lower parts worked tirelessly. The primary receptive orifice, lined with foam rubber, maintained a discreet silence as the pelvises kept up a quiet clacking that
was as cosy as the tick of a kitchen clock. I put a Walkman mechanism and two little speakers in the base, the top of which was upholstered like the back seat of a car. The audio was car-crash sound effects, and I looped the tape so that the noise was continuous. When I had the whole thing put together with the dummies bonking and the sound crashing I showed it to Dieter and he said, ‘There we have it — dummy sex on a road to nowhere.’

I faxed M. Delarue and he replied that I was to send the radio controls, described as being for models, via DHL. The base was to go the same way, described as a customised Walkman. The figures would be collected by his personal courier the next afternoon. At about three o’clock that day a very large man with a shaven head appeared at my door. He had a big smile, several gold teeth, and an unbroken nose; my guess was that the other man’s nose was normally the one to get broken. He was about seven feet tall and carried a Louis Vuitton holdall. His suit was expensive but his wrists and hands came out of the sleeves in a grappling sort of way. ‘I am Jean-Louis, arrived by Eurostar,’ he said. ‘Me, I am ready to roll.’ His taxi stood waiting.

‘Do you watch a lot of American TV?’ I said. ‘
Hill Street Blues
repeats?’

‘You got it. I come from M. Delarue. Here is ID, also message.’ He pulled out a wallet and showed me a driver’s licence which identified him as Jean-Louis Galantière.

‘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 modern 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.”’

BOOK: The Bat Tattoo
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