The Bat Tattoo Read Free Page B

thing but that’s all there is and in five hundred million years it won’t really matter any more.

3
Roswell Clark
    Sometimes when people hear my name for the first time they give me strange looks or nod their heads knowingly and say ‘Mmm hmm’ or even ‘Oh yes’. It was my father who chose that name for me. I didn’t know it was anything out of the ordinary until I was nine, the year he died. I came home from school one day with a black eye and he asked me what happened. We were in our basement where the bulb over the work-bench in its green metal shade picked up the glitters and gleams of tools and a jumble of glass vessels and tubing. He was an inventor, and the place smelled of oil, metal, wood, rubber, Jack Daniel’s (a bottle and glass are beside me as I write this; it has a wood-smoky smell and taste; it seems to me as I drink that the flavour is peculiarly American — long rifles; coonskin caps; ‘D. Boon killed a bar on this tree in the year 1760’) and something sharply chemical. I see him by the light of the green-shaded bulb, his face half in shadow; average height, average build; blue jeans, navy sweatshirt, sneakers. Brown hair, round face, glasses; he always looked surprised. He had a quiet and thoughtful way of speaking when he’d been drinking. ‘What happened?’ he said.
    ‘George Kubat said you and Mom were aliens.’
    ‘Who won?’
    ‘I did. What’s an alien?’
    Dad heaved a big sigh. ‘Roswell,’ he said, ‘back in 1947 there was something that happened at Roswell, New Mexico. People said they saw things — flying saucers. Then something crashed near there and they reported finding debris and the bodies of alien beings.’
    ‘But what
are
alien beings, Dad?’
    ‘Beings from outer space, from another planet. The government hushed everything up and said that nothing happened but a lot of people still think something
did
happen and it’s been covered up.’
    ‘And that’s why you named me Roswell?’
    ‘Well, I gave you that name because …’ He seemed to have lost the rest of what he was going to say.
    ‘Because what, Dad?’
    ‘What, son?’ He was leaning his folded arms on the work-bench and his eyes were closed. Sometimes he dozed off standing there like that.
    ‘You were going to tell me why you gave me my name.’
    ‘Yes. Because … Because you never know.’
    ‘Never know what?’
    ‘All kinds of things. Mysteries, life is full of them, whether it’s UFOs or the Bermuda Triangle or whatever. And the government is always saying there’s nothing out there.’ He swept his arm to take in the whole basement workshop and knocked over the Jack Daniel’s which was stoppered and didn’t spill. ‘Saying this is all there is.’
    ‘You mean …?’
    ‘I mean this whole thing we call reality that you wakeup in every morning and go to sleep in every night. Not just the government, ordinary people too.’
    ‘Ordinary people what?’ It was hard to follow him sometimes.
    ‘Only seeing what’s in front of them or behind them. Just because the past is what it was doesn’t mean the future can’t be something else.’
    I waited for him to go on but he didn’t. I said, ‘Is that why you named me Roswell?’
    He went quiet and I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he looked at me as if we were resuming a completely different conversation. ‘It won’t always be like this,’ he said. He tapped a flask with some blue liquid in it and smiled at me. ‘“From this moment on,”’ he sang quietly, ‘“no more blue songs, only whoop-dee-doo songs, from this moment on …”’ Then he did fall asleep standing at his work-bench.
    He was not a big success as an inventor; he often started out with something that led to something else that went nowhere. There was a self-winding hourglass. Why? I don’t know but I remember what it looked like: the hourglass was supported by an arm that held the waist of it. When the sand ran into the bottom part the weight of it released