Russell Hoban: The Bat Tattoo

I went in, checked my things, took the lift to Level D, and turned the corner into the long daylit gallery eager for my fix. The cool grey light refreshed my spirit immediately; it was what these beautiful things lived in, the air they breathed, a medium of non-forgetting. There was no one else in the gallery.

I’m sure that other people have their little rituals; I can’t be the only one. I took up my station facing the lobed bowl with the four red bats that were visible from where I stood. Mine is the lower one on the right, the upward-flying bat. With my right hand I reached into my jumper and touched the identical bat tattooed on my left shoulder. Ordinarily I do the whole thing in silence but this time I said very quietly, ‘Yongzheng, this is Sarah Varley requesting permission to feel better.’

Just then I heard footsteps so I took my hand out of my jumper and tried to look like everyone else. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that it was the man who’d spoken to me on the steps. This time he just stood behind me trying to see around me until I turned and was rather unkind to him. His only response was to ask me if I’d be finished in fifteen minutes or so. Americans! There was nothing for me to do but walk away although I was sure that he had designs on my bat. I hadn’t had my full fix and I was frustrated and deeply resentful at the intrusion.

I went round the corner towards the lift but then on impulse I moved back to where I could see him. He had his camera out and was taking pictures of the bowl with my bat. The day had started badly and now I seemed to be in danger of losing it altogether. Taking what was left of it back home was like carrying water in my hands.

What was my bat to that man? What did he want with it, why did he need it? Why couldn’t he find something else to get interested in? That sort of thing happens to me too often at auctions: when I want something it attracts other dealers who jump in and even if it’s a lot they don’t fancy they’ll bid it up out of sheer perversity and then drop out so I’m stuck with paying more than I’d planned to.

Between Earls Court and West Brompton the train stopped as if reality had run out of film and for a while there was silence except for a City type who said into his mobile, ‘I’m stuck here between Earls Court and West Brompton.’ When the train started he made another call and said, ‘Now we’re moving again.’

Think about something else, I said to myself. I thought about what I’d pack for Chelsea, reviewing costume jewellery, handbags, dresses, china, and various oddments. Should I loosen up and take the minaudière? I wondered. The hammer price at Christie’s last year was two-forty and I’d been saving it as an investment but I needed to create some excitement at my stall so it mightn’t be a bad idea to bring it out into the world. While imagining how it would look on the stall I found myself at home without having noticed how I got there. ‘ Collectors’ Lot , I’m home,’ I said, and switched on Channel 4 in time to catch a man whose obsession was the history of dentures. ‘Amazing,’ said Debbie Thrower, flashing her own original dentition as he showed her a pair of Chinese choppers exquisitely carved in ivory. That reminded me that I had an appointment coming up in a fortnight with Mr Sharif for two implants in my lower jaw, so I switched off the denture man and went down to the kitchen to sort through my treasures.

‘Yes!’ I said, as my own space settled cosily around me. I took off my boots, got a started bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon blanc out of the fridge and poured myself a glass. ‘There!’ I said. ‘That’s better, isn’t it? At least if he gets my bat tattooed on his arm I need never know about it.’

I took the minaudière out of its case and set it on the table. Lot 24, it had been:

An Art Deco minaudière, of hinged cylindrical form, the exterior with black enamel and marcasite decoration, the interior with compact, mirror and aide-mémoire , and with inscription ‘BUDAPEST 1934’, with cord suspension, and tassel concealing a lipstick, in a fitted case.

Inside the case BARUCH, BUDAPEST was printed on the velvet in gold capitals. How had it arrived in London? Could it have belonged to a Jewish woman who left Hungary some time after 1934? Was she tall and elegant? Short and stout? Was her husband in business? This wasn’t something a poor woman would have carried, she’d have had to have the clothes to go with it. Where were her frocks now? For that matter, where was she? I took the minaudière in my hands and closed my eyes as I’d seen clairvoyants do in films. It felt like another time, another life, but nothing came to me.

Nonetheless, I am in my small way a medium — I traffic in ghosts and the possessions, as often as not, of the dead. Almost all of the things I buy and sell were once in someone else’s hands: necklaces from long-gone bosoms, rings from fingers long since departed in one way or another. And the punters, untroubled by ghosts, haggle. If I say, ‘Fifteen pounds,’ they look shrewd and say, ‘Ten?’ So I let it go for twelve; it cost me five.

Why had that man looked so failed? He wasn’t memorable in any way except that.

Have you known anyone else with that look, Mrs Varley?

Objection!

Objection overruled. Witness will answer the question.

Well, yes, come to think of it, I have.

Would you name that person, please.

Giles Varley.

Any relation?

My husband. Late husband.

Thank you. Nothing further .

Giles had blue eyes, a face you could trust, a winning smile, and he worked hard. Bank managers pressed loans upon him and extended his overdrafts as he moved from one failure to another. I did my best to be a supportive wife; I propped him up as well as I could but it was like trying to build a tower out of wet dishcloths, and if I hadn’t been stalling out regularly we’d have gone hungry. In all his ventures he had the necessary capital and skills and knowledge; he had everything except the knack of succeeding. He failed in antique clocks; he failed in stripped pine; he failed in picture-framing; he failed in loft-extensions but when he went into doll’s houses he was quite successful until he found a way out with a bottle of sleeping tablets and half a bottle of Scotch. He left me with a house, a scattering of unpaid bills, and the conviction that if I’d tried harder he might have been a big man in doll’s houses. Giles was a lovely man, really, but if there was one thing I learned from our nine years together it was that you can’t turn a failer into a succeeder and you might as well not bother trying.

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.

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.