Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

‘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.

I asked Father John about the old Jesus and he said it hadn’t been wood but terracotta, shattered when the cross came down in a storm ten or more years ago and replaced a couple of years later by this one. The cross was the original one, restored.

Inside the doorway near the always-open chapel was a bulletin board to which were pinned an advertisement for Weight Watchers, handwritten notices from people looking for jobs and flats, and one that said CUT AND BLOW DRY. RING TONY.

Sometimes in the underground I close my eyes and the sound of the wheels on the rails and the surging and swaying of the carriage become the rolling passage of the years in the darkness of my mind: 1985 to 1993 rush towards me and away: my years with Giles.

He was a good-looking man, tall and blond, and his honest open face charmed everyone. He had strong hands, golden hairs on the backs of them in the lamplight. I used to feel safe in those hands but not quite safe enough to think of starting a family although Giles wanted to. He was good at starting things but so far hadn’t gone the distance with anything and I was the only steady provider in our marriage. When he got into doll’s houses I thought perhaps he’d found himself. He hadn’t done anything like that before but he was good with his hands, good with tools; he already had a pretty well-equipped workshop but there were enough saws, gouges, drills and whatnot that he lacked to give him some happy hours at the ironmonger’s.

He bought a book on the subject and built a beautiful nine-room Georgian house on a scale of one inch to one foot. He painted it but didn’t furnish it. It took him four months which wasn’t bad considering the work involved — the windows and doors alone took more hours than I’d have expected. We ate a lot of pistachios back then because he used the shells as cups for glue.

He put an ad with a photograph in Homes and Antiques and very quickly got a commission from a London collector to do a six-room Victorian house on the same scale as the Georgian one. ‘The full-size world’s too much for me,’ he said, ‘but at one inch to one foot I might do quite well.’ In six months he completed the Victorian house, painted and with electric lights but unfurnished, to the client’s satisfaction, got a cheque for seventeen hundred pounds, and we drank champagne for the first time since loft extensions.

Commissions for a Queen Anne and a Regency followed the Victorian house, and the workshop became a place of ongoing action and contentment for Giles. When he came upstairs for meals he was often whistling, and he carried himself like a man who was putting meat on the table.

His next client was a woman in Bristol who rang him up and asked him if he could make her a copy of a seventeenth-century doll’s house in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She was American and her name was Peggy Sue Wilson.

She sent Giles a museum booklet with detailed descriptions, illustrations, and measurements; it was obvious to me that this was a project that might take years. Giles of course was delighted at the prospect of conferences in Bristol and at least one trip to Amsterdam. This one was altogether a more serious undertaking than his last commission: the doll’s house of Petronella Dunois, the daughter of a high official in The Hague, was a square oak cabinet veneered with walnut that stood two metres high on its barley-twist legs and displayed frontally the peat loft, the linen room, the nursery, the lying-in room, the salon or ‘best room’, the cellar, the kitchen, and the dining room. Every room was full of family and/or servants, furniture and every kind of artefact, all of which Giles intended to copy along with the complete decoration of the rooms. Even the veneering was nothing simple: it was walnut marquetry in a geometrical pattern of rosettes and stars. To me this looked like a job for an army of artists and craftsmen but Giles said he could do it. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said with a crooked smile, ‘this isn’t the big world, it’s the little one.’