Russell Hoban - The Bat Tattoo

Dieter Scharf’s workshop was dark and cosy; it smelled of electrical wiring, oiled metal, and cheap cigars. A light bulb in a green metal shade looked down on various little engines and skeletal articulations that littered his work-bench; some looked as if they were arrested in mid-crawl or mid-hop, others were not that far advanced. Tools hung in their painted outlines on the wall. From this moment on, I thought: What? You never know.

Scharf didn’t look like an indoor type; he was a short sturdy man with a brown weathered face, sudden blue eyes, and big strong hands. He might have been a charcoal-burner in a haunted forest, and although his basement was in SW6 it felt far away and elsewhere. He watched me as I took in his workshop. There was a sampler on the wall in a carved rustic frame; the stitches were in faded orange, pink, and mauve:

EGAL WIE MAN SICH DREHT,

DER ARSCH BLEIBT IMMER HINTEN .

‘What does that say?’ I asked him.

‘“Whichever way you turn, your arse stays always behind.” My grandmother gave me that.’

‘Words to live by,’ I said.

On a little box on the wall there was a small wooden figure of a horseman in medieval dress. About a foot to the right of the horseman was another little box with nothing on top of it. Between the two boxes and connected to them by wires was a pushbutton. ‘This is Eustace Road,’ said Scharf.

‘St Eustace?’ I said, pointing to the wooden horseman.

‘Right.’

‘But where’s the stag?’

‘Push the button.’

When I did that, St Eustace sprang from his horse and fell to his knees; the lid of the other box slid aside as a stag reared up, a tiny Jesus popped out of its head with his arms outspread between the antlers, and Bing Crosby sang ‘White Christmas’.

‘The music’s a nice touch,’ I said.

‘Goes pretty good, I think,’ said Scharf. ‘There never was a St Eustace.’

‘Just as well for him and his family; in the story they ended up being roasted alive in a brazen bull.’

‘This will teach us not to talk to strange stags. Have you an interesting problem for me?’

‘I think so.’ I showed him my sketches and explained my requirements.

Scharf laid the sketches on his work-bench and perused them, humming ‘ Der Lindenbaum the while.

‘How come you’re humming that?’ I said.

‘It’s one of those songs that’s often in my head, it’s a goodbye song — he’s saying goodbye to his youth, his dreams, his hopes. The rustling of the branches speaks to him, offering rest; but for him there is no rest as off he goes on his winter journey. No rest for any of us, not?’

‘I guess not.’

He drummed on the sketches with his charcoal-burner’s fingers. ‘Someone has commissioned you to make this?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll do anything for money, yes?’

‘I’ll do a lot of things for money.’

‘I also. Have you met this person who commissions you to do this?’

‘No.’

‘What, a letter comes out of nowhere?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then a cheque?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wonderful.’ He spread out the sketches and lit one of his foul cigars. ‘You want both figures to be active, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘In any position and independent of a base?’

‘Yes.’

‘So for this we need radio control. There must be an aerial on each one and I think you don’t want the sort that sticks up as on a model car.’

‘No.’

‘We can do internal ones if the distances are short. Probably these are for indoor use, not?’

‘I doubt very much he’d be taking them outdoors.’

‘So internal is OK then. You want the whole articulated torso to be motorised or only the pelvis?’

‘Pelvis only — the articulation will allow the rest of the torso to move with it.’

‘Arms? Legs?’

‘They’ll stay in the position they’re put in except as the pelvis moves them.’

‘Your sketch indicates that his pimmel elevates and extends — a commanding member, this one.’

‘Well, you know, this whole thing is what it is.’

‘I can make it work. You want the batteries in the thighs?’

‘That’s what I’m hoping. Will that be a problem?’

‘No, we can do this. Let me make my calculations, and if you phone me tomorrow I can tell you how much this will cost.’

We said our goodbyes; I made my way through the cigar smoke and walked home thinking about Adelbert Delarue. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! What kind of man would pay that kind of money for such a thing? Obviously someone who had money to throw around, and he’d turned up at a time when I needed money. This whole thing began to feel like something fated. Not for the first time I tried to visualise M. Delarue: sometimes I saw him alone and scholarly in a booklined study; sometimes in action with a partner while watching my crash-test dummies. Occasionally St Eustace and company got into the picture; Eustace leapt off his horse, the stag reared up; Jesus popped out of its head and watched while the dummies did their thing and M. Delarue and partner (frequently a stern housekeeper) did theirs.

When I got home I worked out how to get the necessary parts out of my blocks of lime, then I made drawings, transferred them to the wood, clamped the first block in the Scopas Chops, picked up chisel and mallet, and got started on the male torso. The mallet blows and the bite of the chisel sounded good to me; as the shavings fell away from my blade I felt hooked-up, connected, and it occurred to me that this might be how artists felt. In six weeks my figures were ready for Dieter Scharf. The drilling and carving for the motor, battery, and wiring spaces had been ticklish but although I’d bought enough wood to allow for errors and wastage I hadn’t made any errors and I’d wasted nothing.

Dieter Scharf charged me twenty-five hundred pounds for radio controls and aerials, motors and installation. I painted the quartered yellow-and-black discs on the dummies and varnished them. The smooth hardness of the lime and the polished surfaces heightened the anatomical hyperbole so that even side by side in repose the figures had a beguiling lewdness. When the male dummy zoomed into readiness and the female received him they did what they were designed to do; their blind and expressionless faces radiated a mystic calm while their lower parts worked tirelessly. The primary receptive orifice, lined with foam rubber, maintained a discreet silence as the pelvises kept up a quiet clacking that was as cosy as the tick of a kitchen clock. I put a Walkman mechanism and two little speakers in the base, the top of which was upholstered like the back seat of a car. The audio was car-crash sound effects, and I looped the tape so that the noise was continuous. When I had the whole thing put together with the dummies bonking and the sound crashing I showed it to Dieter and he said, ‘There we have it — dummy sex on a road to nowhere.’

I faxed M. Delarue and he replied that I was to send the radio controls, described as being for models, via DHL. The base was to go the same way, described as a customised Walkman. The figures would be collected by his personal courier the next afternoon. At about three o’clock that day a very large man with a shaven head appeared at my door. He had a big smile, several gold teeth, and an unbroken nose; my guess was that the other man’s nose was normally the one to get broken. He was about seven feet tall and carried a Louis Vuitton holdall. His suit was expensive but his wrists and hands came out of the sleeves in a grappling sort of way. ‘I am Jean-Louis, arrived by Eurostar,’ he said. ‘Me, I am ready to roll.’ His taxi stood waiting.

‘Do you watch a lot of American TV?’ I said. ‘ Hill Street Blues repeats?’