Russell Hoban: The Bat Tattoo

I turned left, went round a corner, and there was a display case with various crockery on shelves. The woman who’d been crying on the steps was planted in front of it. Looking past her shoulder I saw a small bowl and a larger one, both with bats on them. The small bowl was pale green, the larger one white; the bats on both were red. I moved closer to see better and caught a faint scent of honeysuckle. Evidently I moved closer than I ought to have done because she turned and gave me a hard smile and said, ‘If you were a bit taller you’d be breathing down my neck.’

‘Sorry, I’ll go away and come back later. Do you think you’ll be finished here in fifteen minutes or so?’

She looked me up and down and I had a feeling that she didn’t like Americans. She was about six feet tall which made it more so. ‘I’m finished now,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen to that.’ She planted her foot on my chest, pulled out her spear, climbed into her chariot, and drove off, leaving me feeling surprisingly tired from so brief an encounter but free to give my full attention to the bats.

The card for the larger bowl described it as a ‘Lobed bowl, painted with bats, a symbol of happiness. Mark and Reign period of Yongzheng, 1722–1735. Julia C. Gulland gift.’ As I stood directly in front of it two of the lobes were visible with a pair of bats on each. In each pair one bat was pointing up and the other down. Their flight seemed full of unquenchable high spirits. They made the chair-cover bats look repressed, inhibited. The bottom one on the right, the upward-flying bat, was the one that I liked best: it was a Let’s-do-it! bat. Do what? No idea, but I could already feel it on my shoulder bringing me luck. Most of the time people wouldn’t know it was there but I would and it would make a big difference.

Batting a thousand and feeling good I took out my little Olympus mju-II which was loaded with Fuji 1600. The skylights ran the full length of the gallery and the daylight was more than adequate but just to be sure I shot the bowl with flash and without, from about a foot and a half and from further away. ‘Well done,’ I said, and put my camera back in the rucksack.

I had the bat I wanted but I felt, I don’t know, that I could have been a bit more of a gentleman in my second encounter with Boadicea. More English. Now that my bat was safely aboard I found myself wondering what her connection with it was. There were other non-bat bowls in that display case and there were other bats visible on the two bowls with bats but she’d been talking to my particular bat — it’s the kind of thing one instinctively knows. What did it mean to her?

I tried to guess what kind of life she had. Divorced, I thought, not widowed. Living on alimony? Maybe she had some kind of business. No nail polish. Did she do something with her hands? Antiques or something arts-and-craftsy? Maybe widowed, come to think of it — she could have worn the guy out. But the bat? A nocturnal animal. Was she a night person? Was the night a special time for her the way it is for me? ‘A symbol of happiness’. Was she looking for happiness? Not me. I was only looking for my self.

God, am I going to become an embarrassment to myself? Crying on the steps of the V & A! Not even on a bench but right there on the steps where people had to walk around me. A cry for help? From whom, from what? What am I going to do next, wander the streets in a nightdress?

The morning started off all right. I had a whole clear day ahead of me, nothing coming up except Chelsea on Saturday. Poached egg on toast, grapefruit juice, tea with lemon and The Times . I never bother with the top of the front page — it’s always some politician lying or cheating or caught with his trousers down. But there on the bottom:

WE’VE GOT ONLY 500M YEARS LEFT TO LIVE

The end of the world really is in sight. Scientists studying the fate of the Earth have warned that the expansion of the Sun will turn it into a desert in 500m years, much sooner than previously thought, write Polly Ghazi and Jonathan Leake .

The story went on to explain how this prediction had been arrived at; it seemed that previous calculations had given the Earth five billion years but suddenly, like Christmas, it was almost upon us. I’ll be long gone, I told myself, but it didn’t help. I reached inside my robe and touched my bat but that didn’t help either.

I suppose in five hundred million years Earth will long since have been deserted and there will be Earthlings living under domes on Mars and elsewhere but it won’t be the same, it won’t be Earth where when I was young you could sleep under the stars and wake up to see the mist rising from a lake you could swim in without vomiting. Earth where there used to be the Taj Mahal and the Himalayas, Bengal tigers and Peter Rabbit, Claude and Chardin and Haydn and The Goon Show . And eighteenth-century Chinese bowls with red bats, ‘symbol of happiness’. That’s when I started crying and I needed to go and look at my bat.

I splashed cold water on my face before I left and I was all right from my house down the New Kings Road to Parsons Green Lane and the tube station, still all right up the stairs and on to the platform. The sky was grey, it looked as if it no longer believed in itself.

A young woman stood near me on the platform: dark hair, short bob, dressed for business in a black suit, knee-length skirt, transparent black tights, black court shoes, lilac silk T-shirt, large black leather shoulder bag. Very attractive, with a sombre expression. She was reading the Penguin edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey when her mobile rang and she reached into the bag for it.

‘Hi,’ she said. I liked her voice. Pause. ‘Go ahead, I can talk.’ Pause. ‘We’ve been over this before, and you knew very well what you were getting into.’ Pause. ‘I know.’ Pause. ‘I know, Hilary, but this was not a for ever thing. You’d have liked there to be more but that’s all there was, so now you’ve got to move on to the next thing.’ Pause. ‘No, it isn’t easy for me to say, nothing’s easy for me. Here comes my train, I’ll talk to you later. Bye for now.’ She replaced the phone; there was no train in sight, and she returned to The Bridge of San Luis Rey .

When the train came we both got into the same carriage. She continued to read her book and I watched her and thought about her all the way to South Kensington. Was she breaking up with Hilary or only offering friendly advice? Was Hilary a man or a woman? I had the feeling that Hilary was a woman, and the woman I was watching was breaking up with her. Hilary, it seemed, had expected more. Poor Hilary. A cool customer, this one in the train, but she didn’t look very happy.

I never use the subway to the museums at South Ken; I don’t like the footsteps and the echoes and I always want to see the sky during that little walk to Cromwell Road. As always, it was solid with traffic, blatant with purpose, filling the day with emptiness. What’s happening to me? I thought — I didn’t use to feel this way.

The front of the V & A was partly covered with hoarding and there were men in hard hats doing I don’t know what. A white van with a ladder on top pulled up in front of the entrance steps and a hard-hat man got out, turned towards the workmen at the hoarding, and spoke into his mobile. For all I knew he was saying, ‘OK, let’s do it,’ and in a moment they’d blow up the museum with everything in it, all those fragile beauties and all the ghosts that lived there. Well, I thought, my mind is doing this, it’s nothing to do with me. But I was crying so I sat down on the steps.

There was this man, then, looking down at me and asking if I was all right. American. I don’t always have the proper responses to well-meaning people — all kinds of things get in the way sometimes. There was nothing objectionable about him. He was wearing jeans, a green anorak and a broad-brimmed green canvas hat, Timberlake boots, and had a rucksack slung from one shoulder. He was about my age, perhaps a year or two older, with nothing at all memorable about him; I guessed he often had trouble catching the waiter’s eye. I couldn’t tell if he was a tourist or not. He spoke quietly and his accent wasn’t as American as some I’ve heard. Maybe it was the state I was in, but he seemed a failed person to me. Failed at what? I don’t know — there was just that air about him and it put me off. He looked as if he expected to be rebuffed and I suppose I was brusque with him because of that. He was persistent, though, and after I said I was fine he said I didn’t look fine, so I told him I didn’t need help and he finally moved on.