Before this I hadn’t put my tattoo thoughts into words with any precision; I felt that in being tattooed I was offering myself to some unknown chance of luck; but now it came to me with simple clarity that I just wanted that bat to take me aboard and fly me out of where I was in myself.
When I’m in a pub with a few drinks in me I can talk more or less freely to strangers but I don’t like to lay out my whole history for everybody and it isn’t easy for me to type it out here. I’ll say what I can and maybe more at another time. At my present age of forty-seven my back story is not an album of happy memories. I was married for seven years; Jennifer died in a car crash in 1995. After that I kept mostly to myself for the next few years: I did some painting and drawing, some reading. I watched a lot of videos, went to museums and concerts, lived from day to day the best I could. I’d nothing much to say to anyone; I got fewer and fewer dinner invitations and became more and more boring to myself. But after a while I was ready to move on to whatever was next and that’s when I decided on a bat tattoo and met Sarah Varley. That encounter at the V & A was the sort of thing that sometimes leads to a closer acquaintance but I didn’t feel like starting with a new person; there was still too much unfinished business in my head.
Adelbert Delarue was much in my mind of course. He was delighted with the gorilla and particularly with the Bach tape. ‘So austere!’ he wrote. ‘This so noble primate with his grandeur priapic, how he resonates and echoes lost evolutionary memories while the music goes up and down and in and out with him. To this I respond with my whole heart and membrum virilis also. With a friend I watch this moving art of yours and we find in it always new stimulation and new things to think about deeply. Those black-and-yellow discs, the eroticism of them! Life, what is it? Motion, to where does it take us? “Ou sont les neiges d’antan?”’
His cheque had arrived with his letter. A few weeks passed with no further word. Then one day another letter arrived:
My dear Roswell,
These so powerful works that you have executed for me have been a source of great satisfaction to me and I hope to you also. My friend and I (her name is Victoria Fawles and with her I improve my English) amuse ourselves with these creatures of wood and we with grease paint apply to ourselves the black-and-yellow discs of dummyhood. A carnival of strange sensations — who can define the boundaries of pleasure? My commissions are of course selfish but it is my desire that this money be useful to you. This talent of yours, of what does it dream? With what powerful themes has it not yet engaged? Ah, to be young and strong with the whole world before one! Think, search, open your mind and heart to what awaits you.
Good luck, dear friend,
Adelbert Delarue
PS. No, no, I must not apply pressure. Art is a mystery that in its own time happens as it will.
‘Young and strong with the whole world before one’! Well of course he didn’t know my age — it hadn’t come up in our correspondence — but what made him think I was young and strong? My limewood gorilla was young and strong but he never would grow old and he had batteries to power his passions. At the moment I didn’t have any passions.
I didn’t like Delarue’s letter. Although he said that he ‘must not apply pressure’, that’s exactly what he was doing by attributing depths to my talent that simply weren’t there. ‘Powerful themes’! If I saw one coming towards me I’d cross to the other side of the road.
‘Try to hold still,’ said Mick Corbett. He paused every now and then to wipe away the blood and the excess ink. ‘All right?’ he said.
‘Fine.’
He completed the outline, then changed to a rotary machine for the shading and filling-in. I suppose the whole thing took about half an hour, and when it was finished he applied surgical spirits to clean the tattoo, patted it dry, put on a small amount of antiseptic cream, then a dressing which I was told to keep on for one hour. There followed instruction for the care of my bat and a photocopied sheet headed TATTOO AFTERCARE. My bat cost forty pounds which was unquestionably a bargain if it could fly me to a better place.
‘I hope it brings you luck,’ said Mick Corbett as I left. I’d told him the bat was a happiness symbol. I looked at my watch to note the time so I’d remember when to remove the dressing, then I crossed the road, went down to the corner, and turned left into the North End Road. I was feeling receptive and half-expecting something significant to happen. After passing Blockbusters I crossed the road to the tiny plaza next to the church. There’s a little raised garden with a couple of trees in it and a low retaining wall around it. This wall provides seating for a low-budget drinking community. Some of them look like pensioners, others are probably on the dole; I don’t know whether the population changes but the numbers always seem about the same. Today there was a one-man splinter group who sat with his back against the church railings shouting something unintelligible in harsh monosyllables.
I walked past him and stopped outside the church, the Parish Church of St John, Walham Green. I’m in that part of the North End Road often but only now did I notice that the figure of Christ on the cross was not the one that used to be there. I remembered the old one as being made of wood and I remembered liking it. This new one was a fibreglass job as smooth as a surfboard and about the same colour as the dummy in my original Crash-Test toy. In face and form it was not unacceptably prettified but the high-gloss effect was perhaps a little slick for a redeemer. Jesus, I thought, you’ve come a long way since Tilman Riemenschneider.
The cross, a black one, seemed to be the old one, with the INRI scroll and the little roof over it. Towards the bottom of it was a brass plaque:
Originally erected
to the glory of God
and in memory
of members and past members
of the
17th Fulham and Chelsea Battalion
Church Lads’ Brigade
who gave their lives in the war.
Restored 1997
in memory of
Lois Child
(1901–1996)
a faithful parishioner.
At the foot of the cross were flowers in vases and little candles, some of them overturned, surrounded by a circle of whitewashed bricks.
In my field of vision was a plane tree leaning over an illegible headstone. The tree and the headstone were dark in the foreground of the picture in my eyes; beyond them there was a sunlit vista of North End Road with people and traffic: a practical demonstration of life beyond the grave. Despite the sunshine it was beginning to rain. The light darkened, the sky became grey; a spotlight bracketed to the ground illuminated a corner of the church without shedding much light on Jesus.
I doubted that there was a Church Lads’ Brigade in World War II; this memorial must have been erected after World War I. As the rain fell I imagined, helped by my recall of grainy newsreels, the Church Lads’ Brigade with fixed bayonets going out of the trenches, over the top towards the enemy while Jesus in large and small crucifixes, in paintings and sculpture, in wood and in various metals, died for their sins. And now in fibreglass.
I went into the church where I found Father John Hunter, the curate, a tall, squarely built man in cassock and dog collar. Balding, with close-cropped grey hair and spectacles, he looked as if he was careful of souls and wary of eggs. The thirty-nine buttons on his cassock symbolised the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion and they were all buttoned up but I wondered if he ever found himself listening for something he couldn’t hear.