The Bat Tattoo (4 page)

‘All there is to what, Dad?’

‘All there is to what I can tell you.’ He rubbed the top of my head and gave me a hug. We had our cooler with us and we went and sat down on the lawn to eat our ham-and-cheese sandwiches and drink our drinks. Dad had his regular beer, Stroh’s; I had a soft drink called Vernor’s. I can almost remember the taste of it: sweet and gingery and the first swallow made you sneeze. While we ate and drank we watched the fountain people and the ducklings and the other visitors. That was the only time I ever saw the Orpheus fountain. Even after I was old enough to drive there myself I didn’t; I was afraid I might not feel what I felt that time with Dad. It was something that I saved inside me.

After Dad died and then got smashed up again as a crash-test dummy I didn’t do very well in school and I didn’t feel much like talking to anybody. Mr Falco, the art teacher, gave me some clay and modelling tools. ‘Maybe your fingers feel like talking,’ he said. I tried to make a figure like the ones in the fountain but it wouldn’t stand up; the legs gave way and the arms fell off. Mr Falco showed me how to make an armature, and then I did a figure of a man reaching for the music he couldn’t hear. It wasn’t very good but Mr Falco said it wasn’t bad for a first time with clay.

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.

There was still work to be done in the basement but I was getting closer until finally, too late for my mother to see my success, I achieved Mnemoplast. I had a plastic that could be pushed, pulled, squeezed and crumpled but would return to the shape it had been cast in. As I worked in the basement I’d been trying to come up with a commercial application. I wondered what Dad would have done with it; I saw him dead and strapped into a car that crashed into a wall and then the idea came to me.

I patented Mnemoplast, then it took me a little over a year to get my design worked out and production set
up but eventually I had my commercial application: Crash Test. It was produced and marketed by Merlin, Inc. for sixty-four-ninety-nine in the US and thirty-nine pounds ninety-nine pence here. It came in a glossy colourfully printed box and when you took it out of the box it felt good in the hand, not cheap. The battery-powered car was nicely detailed but of no recognisable make. When it hit whatever it was aimed at it crumpled and bits of it flew off as well as bits of the driver but it uncrumpled quickly and the loose bits of car and driver were easy to fit back on.

Crash Test appeared in US shops in October 1987, and though sixty-four-ninety-nine was a hefty price it quickly became the Christmas present that parents who couldn’t afford it bought for their kids. The same thing happened when it came out here in November. The distributors had calculated correctly that a strong start in the US would cause a buying frenzy here at the later date. When stocks ran out in less than a month on both sides of the Atlantic there were auctions in which Crash Test changed hands at outrageous prices.

It isn’t always easy to say why people do the things they do. I sold the house, moved to London, and bought a house in Fulham. I feel like a stranger here too but I
am
a stranger so it’s all right. I married a woman I met here and maybe I’ll say more about that later.

When I went to the V & A to look for the chair-cover bats I was a widower. By then I’d been living in London for eight years. Crash Test had been superseded by computer games and was barely ticking over in the US and UK although it was a little more lively on the Continent. I hadn’t come up with any other commercial ideas or ideas of any other kind; I’d been drawing and painting a little: early on I’d
found a life class and I made some OK sketches; I went water-colouring along the Thames; I did some oils also, a few nothing-special street scenes.

There came a time, however, when I had to put artistic development aside and give some serious thought to bringing in money. I’d reached a point where I really had to make something happen before too long when, early in 1999, Merlin forwarded a letter to me from Paris:

Dear Creator of Crash Test,

In the window of a shop I have seen Crash Test and immediately it draws me to itself. I see it demonstrated, see the dummy at the wheel knowing nothing, expecting nothing. The car starts up, not controlled by the dummy but by a hand above him, all-powerful. At speed it hurtles forward into a wall, CRASH! The car is smashed, the doors fly off, the windows also, the dummy’s head, his arms, his legs! Alas! he is destroyed. But no, the all-powerful hand reassembles him, makes the car again like new, and once again Mr Dummy, who from experience has learned nothing, hurtles to his dismemberment.

I purchase the toy, I take it home where it comes out of its box as we come all new into the world. Now I am the all-powerful hand of Mr Dummy’s destiny. CRASH! we go, and CRASH! again. ‘Bravo!’ I cry with vigour and enthusiasm. I applaud, I approve with delight your most profoundly metaphorical demonstration of the human condition. What are we all but dummies doomed to crash head-on into the death that speeds towards us? And for what are we being tested? Who can offer to this mystery an answer that will bear examination? No one! Yes, you have hit the eye of
the bull with this so deep perception of
la comédie humaine
.

Please be so kind as to respond to this letter. I wish to commission privately works from you and I make to you the assurance that you will be well recompensed for the exercise of your most interesting talent.

With admiration and intense good wishes,

Adelbert Delarue

M. Delarue’s address was in the Avenue Montaigne which made me think that he probably wasn’t short of a franc or two. Eager to develop this promising connection, I wrote back and said that I’d be interested to hear what he had in mind. Within a week I had his reply with a cheque drawn on Coutts for five thousand pounds. His letter explained that this was a down payment for the work and that five thousand more would be coming my way on delivery.

He went on to describe what he wanted: a crash-dummy couple, ‘man and woman anatomically complete, with functional parts and receptive orifices’, engaged in sexual intercourse. The figures were to be thirty centimetres tall. They were not to be one composite unit but two independent dummies capable of assuming all positions possible for humans. They were to be ‘electrically activated’ and there was to be sound — he didn’t specify what kind.

My first impulse was just to return M. Delarue’s cheque but then I began to have second thoughts. In Crash Test I was showing a dummy being dismembered; how was that better than showing two dummies having a bit of fun? I could find no moral high ground so the question was simply how much the traffic would bear. I sent back the cheque and wrote that I couldn’t do what he wanted for less than twenty thousand
pounds, half of it payable up front. By return of post I got a cheque for ten thousand pounds and the go-ahead. Twenty thousand pounds for a bonking toy! Obviously he was some kind of a nutter but the cheque was good. I’d half expected him to back off when I upped the price but now if I kept the money this thing was going to be for real. I decided to keep the money, and from that moment on I had a patron. I was to let M. Delarue know when the figures were ready and he would send a courier to take delivery and pay me the other ten thousand pounds.