I felt doubly bereft when Giles was gone — propping him up had propped me up as well. Some weeks after his death I was in the V & A browsing in Chinese ceramics when I happened on my bat. ‘Off my own bat, that’s how I’ll have to do it now,’ I said to myself, and that’s how I’ve done it ever since, with the tattoo to help me. Being alone is a lonely thing but that’s all there is and in five hundred million years it won’t really matter any more.
3 Roswell Clark
Sometimes when people hear my name for the first time they give me strange looks or nod their heads knowingly and say ‘Mmm hmm’ or even ‘Oh yes’. It was my father who chose that name for me. I didn’t know it was anything out of the ordinary until I was nine, the year he died. I came home from school one day with a black eye and he asked me what happened. We were in our basement where the bulb over the work-bench in its green metal shade picked up the glitters and gleams of tools and a jumble of glass vessels and tubing. He was an inventor, and the place smelled of oil, metal, wood, rubber, Jack Daniel’s (a bottle and glass are beside me as I write this; it has a wood-smoky smell and taste; it seems to me as I drink that the flavour is peculiarly American — long rifles; coonskin caps; ‘D. Boon killed a bar on this tree in the year 1760’) and something sharply chemical. I see him by the light of the green-shaded bulb, his face half in shadow; average height, average build; blue jeans, navy sweatshirt, sneakers. Brown hair, round face, glasses; he always looked surprised. He had a quiet and thoughtful way of speaking when he’d been drinking. ‘What happened?’ he said.
‘George Kubat said you and Mom were aliens.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did. What’s an alien?’
Dad heaved a big sigh. ‘Roswell,’ he said, ‘back in 1947 there was something that happened at Roswell, New Mexico. People said they saw things — flying saucers. Then something crashed near there and they reported finding debris and the bodies of alien beings.’
‘But what are alien beings, Dad?’
‘Beings from outer space, from another planet. The government hushed everything up and said that nothing happened but a lot of people still think something did happen and it’s been covered up.’
‘And that’s why you named me Roswell?’
‘Well, I gave you that name because …’ He seemed to have lost the rest of what he was going to say.
‘Because what, Dad?’
‘What, son?’ He was leaning his folded arms on the work-bench and his eyes were closed. Sometimes he dozed off standing there like that.
‘You were going to tell me why you gave me my name.’
‘Yes. Because … Because you never know.’
‘Never know what?’
‘All kinds of things. Mysteries, life is full of them, whether it’s UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle or whatever. And the government is always saying there’s nothing out there.’ He swept his arm to take in the whole basement workshop and knocked over the Jack Daniel’s which was stoppered and didn’t spill. ‘Saying this is all there is.’
‘You mean …?’
‘I mean this whole thing we call reality that you wake up in every morning and go to sleep in every night. Not just the government, ordinary people too.’
‘Ordinary people what?’ It was hard to follow him sometimes.
‘Only seeing what’s in front of them or behind them. Just because the past is what it was doesn’t mean the future can’t be something else.’
I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. I said, ‘Is that why you named me Roswell?’
He went quiet and I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at me as if we were resuming a completely different conversation. ‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said. He tapped a flask with some blue liquid in it and smiled at me. ‘“From this moment on,”’ he sang quietly, ‘“no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs, from this moment on …”’ Then he did fall asleep standing at his work-bench.
He was not a big success as an inventor; he often started out with something that led to something else that went nowhere. There was a self-winding hourglass. Why? I don’t know but I remember what it looked like: the hourglass was supported by an arm that held the waist of it. When the sand ran into the bottom part the weight of it released a spring that flipped the hourglass over and wound itself up to do it again. After a while it ran down because of what Dad called ‘the energy deficit’. ‘If I could just lick that,’ he said, ‘I’d have perpetual motion.’
Mom came down to the basement looking for something just then. ‘Perpetual bullshit,’ she said.
My father owned the house but we never had much and I don’t know what we’d have done if my mother hadn’t always worked, mostly as a waitress. I had a newspaper route until I was old enough to work in the supermarket after school and on Saturdays. This was back in the sixties and Mom was a handsome woman then, fair-haired and taller than Dad, with blue eyes that seemed used to miles and miles of distance. Her maiden name had been Lindstrom and she looked like one of those pioneers who’d settled the Midwest, trailing a rope behind their covered wagons to help them steer a straight course through the tall grass of the prairies. Men liked to be waited on by her and tipped her well.
As soon as she got home from work she’d take her shoes off and put on a pair of fleece-lined slippers. Sometimes if she wasn’t too tired she’d read to me, more often than not from her Bible which was bound in black leather with HOLY BIBLE stamped in gold on the cover and spine. It had what I thought of as a Presbyterian smell; if I closed my eyes I saw men in black with large hard hands and stiff collars. There was a blue ribbon bookmark and the type was good and black, the columns of text very strong, like verbal pillars to support the roof of faith. Sometimes the numbers of the verses seemed like eyes that watched me. I still have that Bible. On the flyleaf is written, in a firm and faithful hand:
Presented to our daughter Rachael
on her seventh birthday, March 21st, 1930
by Christian and Ursula Lindstrom
Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain:
but a woman that feareth the Lord,
she shall be praised.
Proverbs, 31.30
Mom skipped around between the Old and New Testaments when she read to me; she’d use a verse as a point of departure for a one- or two-minute sermon. I recall Matthew 5.13 — she was very intense when she did that one:
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?
She always paused there. ‘You hear that, Sonny? Remember that, and don’t you lose your savour.’
‘What’s my savour, Mom?’
‘Just remember the words — you’ll understand them when you’re older.’
Now and then for a special treat she’d read to me from Grimm’s Fairy Tales; her favourites were ‘The Goose-Girl’ and ‘Clever Elsie’, both women who were hard done by. She read those not in her Bible voice but in a younger and more intimate way. When she did the part where Clever Elsie got turned away from her own house it gave me goose pimples.
Dad read to me sometimes too; he liked Andersen: his favourite was ‘The Tinder-Box’ in which the soldier ended up rich and married the princess. I could never understand how that soldier was able to lift the dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen — that dog would have had to be at least as big as a house. ‘I’ve given that a lot of thought,’ said Dad. ‘The soldier was down inside the hollow tree when he saw that dog, and because it was a magic place everything around the dog got bigger, the inside of the tree and the soldier too; that’s how come he could lift it — he sort of grew into the job.’ Dad’s name was Daniel. If anyone asked him, ‘As in the lion’s den?’ he answered, ‘No, as in Jack.’