The Bat Tattoo (24 page)

‘There you have it,’ I said. ‘Nobody can bray like Folsom.’

‘He’s the man, all right,’ said Roswell. ‘I need you to take your clothes off again.’

‘Are you going to take advantage of me, squire?’

‘First a few longer poses,’ he said, and followed me up to the studio. When I was
au naturel
he had no chair for me, only the blanket on the floor. ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is you in various attitudes of listening: standing, sitting, lying down — as many different ones as you can think of.’

‘Listening?’

‘Listening.’

‘For what?’

‘That we don’t know yet,’ he said. ‘It could take years.’

So there I was, wearing nothing but my bat tattoo. Which seemed to have a lot of lift in it. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I believe it could.’

To be a patron of the arts of painting and sculpture has been my delight. But now do I question whether I had not done better to buy a soccer team or found a leper colony. The competition to which I gave my name at the museum of the same name has produced a catalogue of fifty entries. I ask myself for what have these been chosen, what attributes? There is of course a place for dustbins and their contents, for used tampons and dirty underwear, but I weep to think that my museum is that place. Is this all there is?

‘Be tranquil,’ I say to myself. ‘It does not import, no.’ The money comes in faster than I can spend it. In my pocket it lights a fire and I extinguish this fire in one way or another. Sometimes with a Peng, sometimes with a whimper.

Ennui is the enemy constantly to be fought; cries once passionate become, with time, yawns of boredom. Someone has sent me a cutting from a London newspaper in which appears a photograph of Roswell Clark with a crash-dummy crucifixion. To this I say both ‘Ho-hum’ and ‘Thank you, no’. A crucified crash-dummy is not, may I say,
comme il faut?
‘Anything goes,’ says an old song. But although one may take the boy out of the Jesuits one does not take the Jesuits out of
the boy. Indeed, I have had enough of crash-dummies; they are so ‘last-year’, as one says. I had high hopes for Clark, and perhaps he may yet do something from which will spread ever-widening ripples; I wish him luck but my interest has moved elsewhere.

As to automata, couplings whether human or bestial, however diverse the partners, are of limited stimulation; horror has more depth in its eroticism. On my table the dark wood surrounds the little man; whichever way he turns, the horrible hopping thing is behind him; always it overtakes him as he knows it will. Does he perhaps long for this consummation? Does his desire incline to this ultimate surrender?

M. R. James is indeed
premier cru
but in H. P. Lovecraft might there be a riper, non-Euclidean delight — a more delicious shudder? Yes, I wonder what Dieter Scharf will do with Cthulhu, rising from the deeps of the ancient past to find love. Doing it his way.

For help in my researches, given most graciously, I am indebted to: Justine Lewis and Ming Wilson of the Far Eastern Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum; Lorraine Bewick, Anthony Green, and Henry Grey of Alec Tiranti Ltd; Stuart Duncan of Moss & Co; Mick Corbett and Gary Maclaren of the Fulham Tattoo Centre; Father John Hunter of the Parish Church of St John, Walham Green; Jane Pountney; Cathy Price of the Cranbrook Archive; Stanley Levy; Robert Ellis; and my son Ben. Dominic Power read many drafts and gave me useful comments. My wife Gundula assisted in innumerable ways in London and Autun.

Russell Hoban (1925-2011) was the author of many extraordinary novels including
Turtle Diary, Angelica Lost and Found and his masterpiece, Riddley Walker.
He also wrote some classic books for children including
The Mouse and his Child and the Frances
books. Born in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, USA, he lived in London from 1969 until his death.

NOVELS

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz
Kleinzeit
Turtle Diary
Riddley Walker
Pilgermann
The Medusa Frequency
Fremder
Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer
Angelica’s Grotto
Amaryllis Night and Day
The Bat Tattoo
Her Name Was Lola
Come Dance With Me
Linger Awhile
My Tango with Barbara Strozzi
Angelica Lost and Found

POETRY
The Pedalling Man
The Last of the Wallendas and Other Poems

COLLECTIONS
The Moment Under the moment

FOR CHILDREN
The Mouse and His Child
The Frances Books
The Trokeville Way

RIDDLEY WALKER
Russell Hoban £6.99 0 7475 5904 X

A Twentieth-Anniversary Edition with an Introduction by Will Self

Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same.

Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word,
Riddley Walkeris
the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. Desolate, dangerous and harrowing, it is a modern masterpiece.

This is what literature is meant to be’ Anthony Burgess

AMARYLLIS NIGHT AND DAY
Russell Hoban £6.99 0 7475 5381 5

The first time Peter Oiggs saw Amaryllis was in a dream. She was at a bus stop where the street sign said Balsamic, although there was nothing vinegary about the place. The bus was unthinkably tall, made of yeliow, orange and pink rice paper, lit from within like a Japanese lantern. ‘Trust me, I’m a weirdo,’ says Amaryllis as she and Peter embark on their nocturnal experimentation, which leaves no one on quite the same footing with reality…

‘Tantalising, fresh and inventive … Hoban writes about grown-up love with an extraordinary unsentimental yearning’
Literary Review

THE MEDUSA FREQUENCY
Russell Hoban £6.99 0 7475 5909 0

An inexplicable message flashing on the screen of his computer at 3 a.m. heralds the beginning of a startling quest for frustrated author Herman Orff. Taking up the offer of a cure for writer‘s block leads him ‘to those places in your head that you can’t get to on your own’, and plunges him into a world inhabited by a combination of characters from myth and reality: the talking head of Orpheus; a lost love; the young girl of Vermeer’s famous portrait - and a frequency of Medusas.

‘Russell Hoban is our Ur-novelist, a maverick voice that is like no other’
Sunday Telegraph

To order from Bookpost P0Box29 Douglas Isle of Man IM991BQ
www.bookpost.co.uk
email: [email protected] fax: 01624 837033 tel: 01624 836000

www.bloomsbury.com/russellhoban

MR RINYO-CLACTON’S OFFER
Russell Hoban £6.99 0 7475 6165 6

He was in formal gear, black tie. A tall man and broad, rosy cheeks, sparkling eyes, military moustache, black hair greying at the temples…

Jonathan Fitch is distraught when his girlfriend, Serafina, leaves him. And so desperate that when the peculiar Mr Rinyo-Clacton offers him one million pounds and only one year to live, he agrees to the proposal. But soon both Fitch and Serafina find themselves embroiled in Rinyo-Clacton’s strange sadistic games, and Fitch begins to wonder quite what it is that he has agreed to…

‘Russell Hoban’s imagination knows no bounds… darkly funny and profound’ The Times

FREMDER
Russell Hoban £6.99 0 7475 6164 8

More and more I find that life is a series of disappearances followed usually but not always by reappearances…

Fourth Galaxy, 4 November 2052. In the black sparkle of deep space a figure in a blue overall tumbles over and over, drifting … No space suit, no helmet, no oxygen. He can’t be alive, can he? But he is. First Navigator Fremder Gorn is the only survivor when the Corporation tanker
Clever Daughter
disappears. And everyone, including Fremder himself, would like to know how he did it.

‘Recalls Orwell’s 1984and Wells’s
The Time Machine
… A revelation’
Guardian