The Bat Tattoo (16 page)

He nodded. ‘Anything today?’

‘Messages, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were you expecting any?’ I asked him.

‘Not for me — for you.’

‘I wasn’t expecting any either.’

‘Sure you were.’

‘How can you tell?’ Under the umbrella and without the John Smith he seemed different from his previous self.

‘Takes one to know one.’

‘You just said you weren’t expecting any messages.’

‘Not any more; I’ve passed my Selby date.’

‘But there was a time when you were expecting messages.’

‘There was a time when I was expecting a lot of things.’

‘Did you get any of them?’

‘Some that I wanted and some that I didn’t.’

The rain was sometimes drumming on my hat, sometimes slanting across my face; Jesus was on his cross doing his job regardless of the weather and the fingers of the crucified right hand were touching the fingers of my left hand in my pocket; the traffic behind us was hissing and revving and changing gears; the trees were swaying and losing more leaves; Selby was standing there nodding his head as if agreeing emphatically with what he’d just said and I was waiting for him to continue.

‘The other day in
The Times
,’ he said at length, ‘in my local dustbin, I saw that Maria Callas’s underwear was being sold at auction. I used to have a lot of her records. You look surprised.’

‘I thought you were going to say more about what you expected and what you got.’

‘Not today. Right now I’m thinking of God sitting up there in his office.’ He tilted his umbrella back to look up at where the rain was coming from; he was in preacher mode now. ‘Yes, brother, he’s sitting up there in his office …’

‘Hallelujah,’ I couldn’t help responding quietly.

Selby nodded several times. ‘Maybe he’s watching the world on closed-circuit TV. He’s looking at war and famine, fire and flood; he’s looking at rape and murder and unemployment and people sleeping rough …’

‘He sees it all,’ I affirmed.

‘Sees it all,’ Selby went on. ‘Sees it all and he’s smiling because it’s his world and he did it his way …’

‘That’s how he did it.’

‘Did it his way and there it is, all running smooth and easy. Then he sees Maria Callas’s underwear in that auction …’

‘His eye is on her knickers.’

‘His eye is on her knickers and he slaps his thigh and laughs and he says, “You got to hand it to me — I think of everything.”’

‘Tell it, brother.’

‘I just did.’

‘When you said
he
and
his
, were you doing it with a capital
h
or a small one?’

‘Small. Now I have to go home and think about this.’ Like a Punch-and-Judy man he packed up his little invisible church. ‘See you,’ he said, and walked away under his umbrella.

‘See you,’ I called through the rain, but I stayed where I was, looking at Jesus on his cross under that little roof that didn’t keep the rain off. ‘“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’” I asked him. I was trying to see his eyes but his face went completely blank. The next thing I knew I was out of the rain, sitting on a floor with my back against a wall. My hat was in a little puddle beside me, the crucified hand was still in my pocket, and the curate, Father John, was bending over me, looking concerned. Evidently I was in the church.

‘Are you all right?’ he said.

‘I’m not sure. What happened?’

‘A couple of passersby found you lying on the pavement just outside and brought you in here. Do you know how you came to be lying there?’

‘I guess I must have fainted.’

‘Has this happened before? Are you subject to blackouts, fits of any kinds? Are you on any medication?’

‘No, this was a first and I’m not on any medication.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Thank you, I appreciate your kindness but I think I’ll just go home now.’

‘First let’s see if you’re fully ambulatory.’

I stood up and took a few careful steps. ‘It seems I am. Thanks again.’ I put on my hat, we shook hands, and I walked slowly out to the North End Road but I didn’t go home. I needed time to think but I didn’t want to be alone just then so I went to Eustace Road. The rain had stopped for a while and the sky had a heroic look, as in a Dutch seventeenth-century marine painting with ships and small craft in heavy seas. I had by now made a fair number of visits to Dieter Scharf but Eustace Road, the inanimate houses of it, always looked at me with suspicion.

Scharf’s stern-looking housekeeper had turned out to be quite an amiable woman whose name was Martha. When she saw me she said, ‘You look all
verschwiemelt
. Go to Dieter in the workshop; I bring you black coffee and maybe some
Marillenschnaps
, yes?’

‘Yes, please.
Vielen Dank!
’

As soon as I opened the basement door I got a whiff of the Dieter Scharf workshop smell: electrical wiring, oiled metal, solder, and cheap cigars. It wasn’t quite the same as my father’s workshop but it was close enough to make me feel cosy and comfortable. There in the darkness was the bright jumbly island of his work-bench under the green-metal-shaded bulb; and there was Dieter wreathed in vile blue smoke with his invisible charcoal-burner’s hut around him and a goblin-haunted forest in the shadows. He was sixty-three, so he wasn’t quite old enough to be my father
and there was no Jack Daniel’s but I always felt safer in his workshop than in my own.

‘
Wie geht’s?
’ he said. He had begun little by little to bring simple German words and phrases into our conversation.

‘
Gut
,’ I replied, ‘
und dir?
’ Because we had quickly reached the familiar pronoun.

‘
Man lebt
,’ he said. ‘One lives, but from now until the new year I keep my head down and wait for the holidays to go away. I think perhaps there was a fourth wise man and he saw what was coming and stayed home.’

‘Do you do anything for Christmas?’

‘I drink very much and read Morgenstern until it’s over.’

‘Who’s Morgenstern?’

‘German poet, born 1871, died 1914. Good flavour, very sharp, very funny.’ From a shelf over the work-bench he took down a volume with a lot of mileage on it and let the book fall open where it would. ‘Listen to this — just take in the sound of it:
“Der Werwolf: Ein Werwolf eines Nachts entwich von Weib und Kind und sich begab an eines Dorfschullehrers Grab und bat ihn: ‘Bitte, beuge mich!’”
That’s only the beginning of the poem. This is about a werewolf who one night goes from his wife and children to the grave of a village schoolmaster and says to him, “Decline me!”’

‘Decline?’

‘Declension is what he wants. He wants to know the genitive and the dative and so on for
Werwolf
. The dead schoolmaster can only decline
Werwolf
in the singular but the werewolf wants the plural so his wife and children can be included. When the schoolmaster can’t do it the werewolf cries, he has tears running down. But he accepts this and he thanks the dead schoolmaster and goes home.’

At this point Martha came down the stairs with black coffee
and
Marillenschnaps
for Dieter and me. ‘Get a glass and have one with us, Martha,’ he said.

‘
Nein, danke
, I have still the shopping to do. If I drink now you don’t get your frog-in-the-ditch for supper.’

‘Toad-in-the-hole,’ said Dieter.

‘Whatever,’ said Martha. ‘Don’t drink too much. The last time I schlepped you up the stairs I put out my back.’

‘We drink to your back and also your front, Martha,’ said Dieter as he poured for us and we raised our glasses.
‘Zwm wohl!
’

Martha wagged a finger at him and disappeared upstairs.

‘Like this
Schnaps
is Morgenstern,’ said Dieter. ‘Clears the brain.
Prosit!
’

‘Here’s looking at you, kid,’ I responded. We both sipped delicately but greedily. The
Schnaps
was chilled and it went down like bright and sparkling winters and left me with a cosy fire inside at which to warm myself.

‘What do you do about Christmas?’ he said.

‘I drink very much and read M. R. James.’

‘
Mensch!
Look what I have on my bench.’ He indicated something I’d been going to ask him about. On a base about four feet long and a foot and a half wide was a spooky little wood with black trunks and branches and dark leaves shadowing a path on which was the figure of a man in black with a very pale face. One shoulder was lifted as if to ward off an attack. Some paces behind him was something that was difficult to see clearly because Dieter had veiled some of the spaces between the trees with scrim cloth. It was a creature draped in white to halfway down its legs which were brown and speckled, the feet very nasty.

‘That’s from “Casting the Runes”,’ I said, ‘but in the story it’s a boy.’ There was a collected M. R. James on the
work-bench, and I quickly found the lines which I almost knew by heart:

And 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 first dodging about among the trees, and gradually it appeared more and more plainly.

‘This I know,’ said Dieter, ‘but my client wants not a boy but a little man with a pale face. Press the button.’

When I did that, there sprang up from concealed speakers ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come’. As if activated by the music, the thing with speckled legs began to hop in the most dreadful way, disappearing and reappearing among the trees as the man tried to double back and lose it. Dieter’s use of the scrim cloth was wonderful: the trunks of the trees revolved like the rollers of window blinds so that the action was sometimes obscured and sometimes clearly seen. ‘Jesus!’ I said as the hopping thing caught up with the man. Everything under the trees went dark as the Disney track continued its sugary vocal. Our glasses were empty and Dieter refilled them for either the fourth or fifth time; they were very small glasses. The fireside corner inside me was the cosiest place I’d been for a long time, and my head felt as if it would ping like crystal if I tapped it.

‘Heppy days,’ said Dieter.

‘Here’s mud in your eye,’ I replied. Alcohol makes me more American. ‘I suppose this is a commission?’

‘From a rich American,’ he said. ‘For this one I get fifteen thousand pounds.’

‘Not nearly enough. People are getting fifty thousand
pounds for unemptied chamber pots these days and the pots aren’t even new. This thing here is museum-standard work — you should have got at least fifty thousand pounds.’

‘What did you get for the gorilla?’

‘Thirty thousand.’ At this Dieter’s lower jaw dropped. I’d paid him twenty-five hundred for the mechanism and motor but that left me with twenty-seven thousand five hundred for a crash-dummy primate that was nothing compared to the whole little horror show he’d put together for fifteen thousand.

‘Your millionaire is bigger than mine then,’ said Dieter. He shook his head philosophically and poured us both another
Marillenschnaps
.

I looked at the toy again. The sound was off; the dreadful hopping creature had returned to its original position among the trees, the man to his on the path. This scaled-down replication of an imaginary scene held a fascination that was disturbing. I turned from it to St Eustace on his horse on the wall. When I pressed the button the little Jesus appeared between the antlers of the stag and Eustace leapt from the saddle and knelt as before. ‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,’ crooned Bing Crosby.

‘Do you ever feel like hopping through the woods and doing what the hopping creature does?’ I asked Dieter.

‘All the time,’ he answered, and raised his glass to me.

Sometimes little good things happen, like a break in heavy grey clouds and a bit of blue sky shining through; I read in
The Times
the other day that a secret buyer had acquired all of Maria Callas’s underwear that was being auctioned in Paris and vowed to burn it to save her ‘dignity and honour’: definitely a bit of blue sky, that.

There’s been a lot of rain lately and I’m surprised at how often I find myself on the banks of the Euphrates; that’s an operatic allusion, and I can’t do many of those because I know very little about opera. Giles and I used to go to the ENO sometimes but I hadn’t been for years when Linda gave me a ticket for
Nabucco;
she was going to visit a daughter who was ill and she wouldn’t take any money for the ticket. I’ll get to the Euphrates shortly.

I wanted to give myself time for a leisurely coffee before the seven-thirty start of the opera, so I left the house at quarter-past six. It was warm for December and raining. The houses and shops were aggressive with Christmas illumination and decorations; the lamps on Parsons Green and the two lantern-like telephone boxes, the figures in ones and twos moving into and out of the lamplight all
heightened the singleness of my footsteps. The platform at the top of the station stairs was bustling and festive with people coming and going with shopping bags, and the houses and flats they were coming from or going to were made cosy in my imagination because of the rain all around us.

When I changed to the Piccadilly Line at Earls Court the early evening crush wasn’t too bad and I found a seat, took
Middlemarch
out of my bag — I’d first read it years ago — and settled down comfortably with it. I couldn’t help shaking my head and smiling at Mrs Cadwallader’s remark on page 537 of my Penguin edition: ‘“We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”’ After a few moments I stopped smiling. I don’t care about calling things by the same names as other people but I was wondering whether I’d always called things by the names that were true for me: what I had with Giles, for example. We’d gone to the opera, to concerts, to films; we’d done what lovers do and I’d chosen him as a life partner. He turned out to be a non-finisher, a faller-by-the-wayside. Had I wanted someone I could work on and improve? Was I a faller-by-the-wayside-saver?