Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

Seamus gave me a long look. ‘Life,’ he said, ‘is a process of one goneness after another.’

‘That includes ideas,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll have to content myself with portraits and nudes for the time being.’

‘Yours is a hard life,’ said Seamus. ‘Try to find what consolations you can.’

‘Do my best,’ said Peter. He looked at his watch. ‘I’m off to meet Amaryllis. See you.’

‘What do you do?’ I asked Seamus after Peter had left.

‘I teach at the National Film School and I write for radio and television. The radio stuff’s been on the air; the television hasn’t been.’

‘Was there a time before you were doing that,’ I said, ‘when you knew that was what you wanted to do and you made it happen or did you just fall into it?’

‘Knowing what you want to do can be like the 14 bus,’ said Seamus. ‘Sometimes it’s a long time coming.’ Now it was his turn to look at his watch. ‘I must leave now. Nice meeting you.’ He shook my hand and left.

‘Not just the 14,’ I said. But he was gone. I had another coffee and thought about Sarah Varley whom I hadn’t seen since Judith Beheading Holofernes; I wondered what she did with herself when she wasn’t stalling out.

On my way back to Green Park tube station I was thinking about Peter and Amaryllis. She’s not only very beautiful, she’s bewitching, like the nymphs in the Waterhouse painting who drowned Hylas; and when I’d seen them together Peter seemed truly bewitched. Now he’d lost the empty space that his paintings came from. That, at least, was not one of my problems — I had more empty space than I knew what to do with.

Back at the studio the lime was waiting for me in that intimidatingly objective north light. The crucified wooden hand lay on the work-bench; I’d thought of putting it up on the wall but I’d hesitated — I didn’t want to be pushy. Now I decided that I would be pushy so I took some Blu-Tack and fastened it to the wall over the work-bench. ‘Anything you can do,’ I said, ‘will be greatly appreciated.’

The many faces and bodies of Christ were in my mind and I was expecting a long conversation with him but all that came to me was Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo . He was a typical Caravaggio in physique, very slight, almost girlish. He looked so meek, so submissive, so humble and unpretentious, that I didn’t quite know where to put myself with him.

As I faced my glued-together lime once more I found a thought in my mind: Let the wood come to you . So I did, and this time the adze didn’t bite me.

The world is full of ghosts: not the kind who groan and clank their chains, not even people ghosts, but the ghosts of the touches of hands on what has been used, worn, handled. Might it be a kind of metaphysical DNA, so that from the touch of a woman’s hand on a necklace, a man’s hand on a knife, the whole person might be called into being? Indeed, has the whole person ever ceased to be, ceased entirely?

Market trading is not a spiritual pursuit but maybe there is nothing that hasn’t got a spiritual side. All of us at our stalls selling the oddments of unknown lives, tarnished medals, broken watches, cloudy mirrors — are we not extending those lives beyond their deaths?

The wooden hand that I gave Roswell Clark, whose was the hand that carved it, whose ghost-touch still lingers on it? Will it let go of me now that I’d passed it on? Somehow I doubt it. Will it get a grip on him? Why do I get involved with unfinished men? Not a romantic involvement but I can feel myself willing him to do something, to make a big step forward. And he’s not eager to make that step. What can I say? I’m sorry about this.

I don’t think about Roswell Clark all the time; there are other things on my mind. I was greatly relieved to read in The Times that the Pope has apologised to the Greeks for the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the Crusaders. Elsewhere I saw that the German industrial giant, von Peng International Industries, had finally yielded to the demands of surviving ex-slave labourers. VPI was going to pay them each three thousand pounds while pointing out that the claims of the ex-slave labourers were not altogether justified by the quality of their work; VPI had paid the SS three Reichsmarks per day for each unskilled concentration-camp inmate, four for skilled ones, and one and a half for children; these costs and the compensation were both considered excessive by von Peng International but in the interests of leaving the past behind they were doing the handsome thing. Following on this report came the news that VPI was being restructured, their munitions, industrial chemical, telecommunications, steel-making, oil refining, and pharmaceutical divisions being decentralised under new management; this not surprisingly wiped a good deal of value off VPI shares but somehow the world staggers on and presumably VPI still has a bob or two with which to continue its many enterprises. VPI’s gallantry doesn’t quite rank with that of the gentleman who bought Maria Callas’s underwear and burnt it but it’s better than a poke in the eye with an electrified fence.

Hi. How you doing? This is R. Albert Streeter speaking, the same who was only a short time ago Adelbert Delarue. There was Delarue in Paris, now Hopla! here is Streeter in the Big Apple. The past is behind us. I am now an American billionaire. Big hat, much cattle, as we Yanks say. It goes; life goes on wherever it goes.

As in the song, so with me: the fundamental things do not change as time goes by. I have long been a patron of the arts and now I have in mind to make a larger commitment than before: yes, I think of opening a museum in London. I have acquired a first-class modern building designed by the internationally famous architect Wolfgang Krumm; with some alterations it will soon be ready for an exhibition of exciting and provocative works by artists competing for the R. Albert Streeter Prize of fifty thousand pounds. Folsom Bray, who was Director of the Post-Modern Gallery, will be Director of the R. Albert Streeter Museum and he will be as a chair for judges of suitable augustness. It is my especial desire to encourage artists whose talent has not yet been recognised and I hope there will be many interesting entries.

So, this ends my first report from the Big Apple, where the natives are always restless and the banks are friendly.

As I worked I asked myself from time to time, ‘Why am I doing this?’ Because it seems to want me to, was the only answer I could think of. I let the wood come to me and as I progressed safely from adze to chisel and gouge I watched my blades cutting away whatever wasn’t the it that I was doing. Or maybe it was doing me.

In The Times this morning there was a tiny little item from Bangalore. The people of Karnataka, it said, are worshipping a one hundred-tonne rock that fell off the back of a truck. This rock was on its way to a temple where it was going to be carved into an image of the monkey-god Hanuman. Every time I think of that I shake my head and smile. Very perceptive, those Karnatakans.

Christmas went away eventually, and by the middle of January London was functioning more or less fully. The new year seemed a thin and dreary thing but possibly that was post-Christmas depression.

I hadn’t talked to Roswell Clark since the Royal Academy, and that hadn’t really been a conversation. I was mentally leaning forward to help him uphill — I felt that he was climbing some kind of hill, perhaps pushing a big rock ahead of him, but I didn’t know what the hill was and I didn’t know what the rock was. What did he do with his time? ‘Private commissions’ was what he’d told me and that was all he’d told me. I wanted to see for myself what he was doing but I didn’t know where he lived and I didn’t have his telephone number. I’d seen him at the V & A, Covent Garden, and the Royal Academy. This being a Saturday I wasn’t at the Jubilee Market but it was my guess that he avoided that and the other two places on weekends.