The Bat Tattoo

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I thought a tattoo might be a good move. I’d reached the age of forty-seven without one but maybe the time had come. In one of my books there’s a photograph of a nineteenth-century Chinese chair cover with two really happy-looking bats on it and I imagined one of those bats on my shoulder bringing me luck. The chair cover was at the Victoria & Albert Museum so I went there to check it out.

It was one of those global-warming March days: people opening coats and jackets or carrying them. Tourists with maps and guides going up and down the steps while a woman sat there looking up at the grey sky with tears running down her face. There are benches to the right of the entrance but she was on those concrete steps which have very short risers; sitting on them brings your knees up too high — OK for a crying teenager but this was a woman in her mid-forties who didn’t strike me as a public crier. A big woman; even sat down she looked tall and broad with a strong weatherbeaten face, ruddy complexion, wide mouth, heroic nose. Almost I smelled salt air, saw her among barrels and cordage with other women at a long table filleting herring. Or pacing the shore, her shawl whipping in the wind, her eye to the sea.

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