The Bat Tattoo (7 page)

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but I don’t remember what’s next.’

‘Now we come to it,’ he said, ‘Daniel 2.44: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” That’s God’s Kingdom, and Jesus is its King.’

‘Not Jehovah?’

‘No, Jehovah appointed Jesus King in 1914.’

‘And he’s been King ever since,’ said the woman.

‘He’s doing a lot better than Prince Charles, isn’t he,’ I said.

Both of them looked at me with their heads at a slight angle. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Can we leave this brochure with you?’ There was a tri-ethnic group of faces on the cover.
What Does God Require of Us?
was the title, correctly spelled.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘The blood is the life, isn’t it?’

‘Sorry?’ said the man.

‘The blood is the life, isn’t it?’

‘That’s what God says.’

‘Dracula said the same thing. That’s why Renfield ate flies. What about the Jehovah’s Witness who lost five pints of blood in a machete attack? Did you see it in
The Times?
’

‘We heard about it.’

‘Why don’t Jehovah’s Witnesses accept blood transfusions?’

‘It says right here,’ said the man, opening the brochure to the appropriate page, ‘“We must not take into our bodies in any way other people’s blood or even our own blood that has been stored (Acts 21.25).”’

‘Hang on,’ I said. I went and got my King James version off the shelf and looked up Acts 21.25. Returning to my visitors I read aloud: ‘“As touching the Gentiles which believe, we have written and concluded that they observe no such thing, save only that they keep themselves from things offered to idols, and from blood, and from strangled, and from fornication.” That isn’t what I’d call a clear-cut prohibition of transfusions,’ I said.

‘Jehovah’s requirement is in those words,’ said the man, ‘and Jehovah’s Witnesses obey it.’

‘But this bloke,’ I said, ‘renounced his Jehovah’s Witnesshood because the blood is the life and he wanted a transfusion so he could go on living.’

‘Not everyone has the faith to uphold God’s laws,’ said the man smoothly. ‘Thank you for your time and your interest. We must be going.’ And they went, still with their heads at an angle. The brochure had a back-of-a-cereal-box quality but obviously it works for the people who go around ringing doorbells to share their enlightenment with the rest of us. If there were a Jehovah, it’s just the sort of thing he might do as an audience warm-up for Armageddon. I
am
actually a believer: I have faith that there’s nothing that cares about us one way or the other.

After the Jehovah’s Witnesses left I went out to the garden where I grazed safely on the
Sunday Times
and the
Observer
and drank many cups of lemon tea. The usual blackbird, the husband, was standing on the fence and zicking to his wife and children. I think they may be nesting in the camellia bush which is too low to be safe but I haven’t wanted to disturb them by getting close enough to see. It’s such a peaceful sound, that zicking; it reminds me that the seasons still arrive at their appointed times, more or less.

I was much impressed by the daring of a forty-four-year-old woman (my age exactly) of whom there were several photographs in the
Sunday Times
. Her boyfriend had spent two years and three thousand pounds building a medieval siege engine, a trebuchet — a big one with a one-tonne lead counterweight. The idea was to use it for hurling people one hundred and twenty feet through the air into a safety net. The thing had been tested with crash dummies and
by the boyfriend whose trajectory went as planned. Both the woman and the boyfriend (fifteen years younger) are members of the Dangerous Sports Club. A portrait photo showed her before the slinging looking about as worried as I’d look in that situation. Not that I’d ever allow such a thing to happen.

In the event she flew through the air as planned but when she landed in the safety net she bounced out, fell thirty feet to the ground, and broke her pelvis. I kept going back to the photo of her before she became a human missile. Dread was the only word for the expression on her face as she weighed one thing against another. ‘She was shaking with fear,’ the boyfriend was quoted as saying. She was in a stable condition in hospital, according to the
Sunday Times
report. I imagined her watching when the crash-dummy did what she was planning to do. I saw it hurtling through the air in a graceful parabola, its yellow-and-black discs making its flight easy for the eye to follow. I imagined the conversation with her boyfriend:

Her face haunts me. I wonder if she and the boyfriend are still together.

At 4.30 Monday morning it’s still really Sunday night. I woke up from a dream in which I arrived at the platform just as the train was pulling out. I ran as fast as I could but I wasn’t fast enough. So I was awake before the alarm went off; it was only ten minutes to four. I tried without success to get back to sleep, finally rolled out of bed at half-past feeling hard done by, had breakfast, did my nervous trips to the loo, put on my rucksack that almost drives me into the ground every time, slung a shoulder bag almost as heavy, and trundled my bursting trolley bag out into the foredawn.

It had rained Sunday night, so there was a little freshness in the air. As I came out of Doria Road into the New Kings Road the birds were pretending that the world was new and the sky held that very delicate innocent blue that only early risers see. The Green Café and Delicatessen showed no signs of life except the rubbish bags heaped on the pavement. Phase 8’s window was an exercise in boredom — all beige skirts and tops, hardly a strong start for the week. Jenesis was better, all mauve and vigorously so. The Candles shop, offering picnic hampers and other things in wickerwork, also displayed candles of various kinds and maintained its identity in a world of change. Shopkeepers have an obligation, I think, to display their wares in a way that will give the early and late passersby something to go on with.

Starbuck’s Coffee had a cosy night light going but was still
not open; the Fulham E-Bar with its nocturnal blue neon was obviously not awake at 5.00. At the corner of Parsons Green Lane I nodded to the two telephone boxes that stood like a pair of lanterns and paused to acknowledge the trees which were still embracing the night. I admire those trees; fashions come and go but the trees still maintain their original identity, their unfashionable mystery. They hold last night’s darkness like lovers reluctant to let go.

As I walked, the sky lost its innocent blue and paled towards the reality of Monday morning. St Dionis Church and Mission Hall, Headquarters of the Second Fulham Parsons Green Scout Troop and the Second Fulham St Dionis Girl Guide Company, approached and receded. Sometimes I am astonished that there should be buildings built and institutions maintained to string out the brevity of human life over successive generations; trees don’t do that, they just hold on to the darkness and accept the light night after night and day after day without pretensions to permanence.

The Freedom Brewing Company, the Chairs place, Wurtford Solicitors … Very good: one downs a pint, sits in a chair, draws up a will, and proceeds to Co-operative Funeral Services, where a man in Bermuda shorts was co-operating with two bulging and heavy dustbin bags. And the day hadn’t even begun. The Civilised Car-Hire Company probably offered transport to and from funerals but I trundled on to the tube station, took a deep breath, negotiated the turnstile and heaved self and impedimenta step by step up the stairs to the platform which commanded a view of Parsons Green, St Dionis Church, and the hunting grounds of Harrington Lowndes Estate Agents: ANY OTHER CHOICE COULD BE DISAPPOINTING. Oh dear.
Every day is so full of large and small choices and I make so many wrong ones.

Always it is interesting, is it not? to look rearward from the present moment to those earlier present moments from which it has arisen. If one perspicaciously from effects to causes traces the development of anything, one sees with clarity how infallibly one thing leads to another. And yet sometimes it is easier from the present to look forward and predict an outcome than it is from an outcome to look backward and determine a cause. But at every moment of every day and in the night as well, like newly hatched turtles racing to the sea, causes are hurrying to their effects. To me it seems that each of us is the effect of past causes and the cause of new effects.

And who am I? Herewith I introduce myself: Adelbert Delarue at your service, patron of the arts and champion of the insufficiently recognised. The events of this history have in these pages not yet run their course but in reality they are already in the past and I have been asked to make my small but I hope useful contribution.

May I speak briefly of guilt? Who is there without it? Guilt can be inherited like money and I have been living comfortably on the interest of what was left to me. One makes one’s arrangements. My name was not in the beginning
Delarue, no. I was christened Adelbert von Peng. Ha ha, what a funny name. Peng means bang in German, and my father was Ludwig von Peng who was, three guesses, yes? a munitions maker. Ho ho. Such fun. From these roots a little distance is not a bad thing, is it? My fortune is discreetly deployed in many places: I don’t even know where all of it is but I employ those who do the deploying and they know where to find it.

Art! What is there more wonderful? From the acorn grows the oak and from talent comes maybe a real artist who from nothing makes something, who from here, there, out of the air, plucks an idea that takes us all to a place where we never before have been. Crash-dummies, what a conception, truly. What a metaphor.

It was a day full of bright sunlight, the kind that makes you blink when you come out of a cinema matinée with nothing but reality ahead of you. I was standing in front of the Fulham Tattoo Centre. Jesus, I thought, is this really me about to go into a tattoo parlour? Although beautiful young models and other sleek and chic people now sport tattoos, often in places somewhat off the beaten track, I am old enough to associate tattoo parlours with drunken sailors, neon signs with missing letters, and pawnshops offering knuckle-dusters and flick knives. It isn’t like that now: nothing nocturnal, the Fulham Tattoo Centre stood in the respectable broad daylight of the Fulham Road between a continental grocer and a launderette. Writ large on the windows in red outlined with yellow were the words TATTOO, BODY PIERCING, and the telephone number. Body piercing, I reflected, has been celebrated by Christianity for centuries in paintings and sculpture and I have seen Sacred-Heart tattoos from time to time. Peoples with other gods do both and turn up in
National Geographic
.

WARNING, said a sign in the window:

NO
PERSON TATTOOED
UNDER THE
INFLUENCE OF
DRINK OF DRUGS.

Inside there were further admonitions:

IF YOU ARE IN
A RUSH DON’T
EXPECT ME TO BE.
A GOOD
TATTOO
TAKES TIME
TO DO.

And:

TATTOOS LAST
A LIFETIME, SO
MAKE SURE YOU
GET THE BEST.

A lifetime! What about me? Was I going to last a lifetime? The tattoo would have to take its chances with me.

The walls were decked with dragons, devils, daggers, hearts, flowers, skeletons, Chinese ideographs and abstract repeat patterns that you might see in a typographic catalogue. There was a display case containing a variety of ornaments meant to be attached to or passed through the wearer’s flesh.
There were large colour photographs of a naked oriental woman whose body was completely covered with what appeared to be either one long story or a series of colourful abstractions. My attention was diverted by two young black women, one tall and pretty, the other short and plain, both with studs in their noses. They were perusing floral designs.

‘Where?’ said the pretty one.

‘Where would you do it?’ said the plain one.

‘Here.’ She put her hand just above the pubic area. ‘What about you?’

‘I’d do mine a little higher up,’ said the plain one.

A large white man with a broken nose came in. He was wearing a T-shirt, had a Union Jack on his right arm and nothing on his left. He stood for a while in front of a red devil design, then left looking thoughtful. SOOTTAT, said the red-and-yellow letters on the window as I looked out. This is all there is, said the Fulham Road.

‘Mr Clark,’ said Mick Corbett, the tattoo artist, as he emerged from that part of the studio where the work was done, ‘I’m ready for you now.’ A tall man in his thirties, serious-looking, he had a very small dark moustache and a beard that was little more than a chin-outliner; the close-cropped receding hair on top of his head was equally minimal. I’d asked him earlier how he came to take up tattooing.