Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

I used to hang around the art room a lot, and as I got older the figures got better. When I was twelve I brought one home and showed it to Mom. ‘What’s that supposed to be,’ she said, ‘a basketball player?’

‘He’s reaching for music he can’t hear,’ I said.

‘Aren’t we all?’ said Mom. ‘I hope they’re teaching you something useful at school; reaching for music you can’t hear is not going to pay a lot of bills when you’re older.’

Actually the figure wasn’t all that good; none of them were and after a while I stopped making them. I didn’t do any drawing or painting and I didn’t hang around the art room any more. I was good at maths and algebra and when I got to high school I did well in chemistry. I kept reading Dad’s notebook and I was understanding more of it all the time. There wasn’t much else happening. I read a lot; I had a girlfriend for a while, her name was Pearl; she ditched me for a quarterback on the high-school team. I still had my part-time job at the supermarket. Mom was always talking about saving for the future but there wasn’t a whole lot to save back then.

Finally the chemistry and the notebook began to pay off: in the high-school lab I produced a lump of malleable plastic but you couldn’t do anything with it that you couldn’t do with Silly Putty. In the notebook Dad had been trying out product names: Memoplast and Mnemoplast appeared several times so I knew I was looking for a plastic with a memory. I took over the basement workshop/lab and put in many hours there but it was slow going.

After graduating high school I got a job at Spectrum Displays in Eight Mile Road and worked my way up to making papier-mâché figures on chicken-wire armatures. Soaking strips of newspaper in flour-and-water paste and building up the forms on the chicken-wire was a restful and contemplative thing to do. The mixed-up bits of headlines gave me strange stories to think about: THREE DEAD IN STOLEN BASES AS INDIANS LOSE SENATE SUBCOMMITTEE. All human life was there in interesting variations, slowly assuming male and female form for Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other seasonal occasions. Sometimes they lifted their arms, sometimes not.

By the time I was in my twenties Mom had retired. She had two offers of marriage from men who seemed all right in their way but she didn’t accept either of them. ‘“Vanity of vanities,”’ she said to me. ‘There’s a time for gathering husbands and there’s a time for having less bother.’ She was heavily into Ecclesiastes around then and there was a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the kitchen sink. Her faith in Jesus was no longer what it had been; she used to sing her own version of ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’: ‘Thou art short but I am tall, Jesus, why are you so small?/ If you’ve got no help for me,/ Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.’

‘You never used to be a drinker,’ I said to her.

‘Your father’s name was Daniels, as in Jacks,’ she said. ‘Daniel, as in Jack. Or whatever. He died for my sins.’

‘Who?’

‘Your dad. I always put him down, never encouraged. Night he treed in the drove, drove in a tree, I told him …’ She trailed off into silence but she was still awake.

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Told him he was a failure and I was sorry I married him. Crying when he left the house.’

‘You or him?’

‘Him. Not a good wife. He died for my sins. Jesus, why are you so small? Don’t be like him, Sonny?’

‘Like Jesus?’

‘Like Dad. Be something, do something. My fault.’

I hugged her and said, ‘Don’t blame yourself,’ but I knew I wasn’t very convincing. With my arms around her I was remembering the Orpheus fountain at Cranbrook, the whisper of the spray and the droplets on the cool bronze.

I stayed on at Spectrum and I kept working on my basement chemistry. My mother needed more and more looking after as the years went by. When she was sixty-eight she had a stroke that paralysed her left side. At the hospital they did CT and MRI scans; they did EKGs and EEGs. Mom was looking very small. ‘She’s doing all right,’ the neurologist told me. ‘The brain does a surprising amount of self-repair. I think we’ll see improvement in her speech and left-side mobility.’

‘Ihha I, orihha ah I?’ said Mom.

‘Say again?’ I said.

She said again and there was something familiar in the rhythm but she had to repeat it several times before I thought I recognised the Clever Elsie quote: ‘Is it I, or is it not I?’ was what Elsie said after she fell asleep in a field and woke up with a fowler’s net and bells hung on her by her husband Hans. She was frightened and uncertain whether she was Clever Elsie or not. She went to her house but the door wouldn’t open, so she knocked at the window and said to Hans, ‘Is Elsie within?’‘Yes,’ said Hans, ‘she is within.’‘Ah, heavens!’ said Elsie. ‘Then it is not I.’ She tried other doors but when they heard the jingling of her bells no one would open for her. Then Elsie ran out of the village and was never seen again.

‘Is that it?’ I asked Mom. ‘Are you saying, “Is it I or is it not I?’”

She nodded vigorously and died.

She’d left instructions for her funeral; she’d asked for the simplest ceremony and that’s what she got. She hadn’t wanted anybody there except me so there were just the two of us and the minister. It was a grey November day, the deciduous trees black and bare after the first heavy rain of winter and the pines holding the chill and the wet. Among the surrounding tombstones were three angels, one of them turned towards us, two away. Crows in the pines looked on and quoted Ecclesiastes but the minister stuck to his text and insisted on the resurrection and the life. When he finished I read Psalm 137. The minister frowned when I got to the part about dashing the little ones against the stones but the crows called for an encore. The coffin was lowered into the grave and I threw a clod on top of it which just sounded like a lump of dirt hitting a wooden box. Shouting amongst themselves, the crows flapped away into the greyness and the minister and I departed while the gravediggers finished their work.

I hadn’t cried during the burial service; I felt as estranged from my mother’s death as I had from her life. When I went home I sat on our front steps and looked at the grass growing up through the cracks in the walk where I’d hammered the ants when my father died.

‘You never know,’ I said to the winter chill in the air. There was a row of new houses where there used to be trees; a man was working on his car in front of one of them. As I looked, the sky and the houses and the cars and the man all went flat, like wallpaper. It came to me, not for the first time, that I was a stranger in the country where I was born. I had friends whom I drank with and friends who invited me to dinner but sometimes it all seemed like TV with the sound turned off. I’d been reading Dickens and Trollope and a lot of British ghost stories. As I sat there under the grey wallpaper sky there came to mind the M. R. James story, ‘Casting the Runes’, and the slide show put on for the local children by Mr Karswell, in which

… this poor boy was followed, and at last pursued and overtaken, and either torn to pieces or somehow made away with, by a horrible hopping creature in white, which you saw at first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly …

There were other stories with London fogs, and newsboys running past the window shouting, ‘Dreadful murder in the Marylebone Road!’ while the landlord and his wife toasted a bit of cheese over a gas ring. Although I was well aware that the Victorian London of the stories was no longer to be found, England seemed a cosy place to me and I began to live there in my mind.