Read Online The Bat Tattoo by Russell Hoban - Free Book Online

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 andby 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:
BOYFRIEND:
See, it hits the net every time. Same weight as you, approximately same body mass — can’t miss
.
WOMAN:
Your calculations worked out all right, I can see that. And it worked perfectly when you did it
.
BOYFRIEND:
You don’t look comfortable with it. Look, you don’t have to do this. We needn’t do every single thing the same
.
WOMAN:
No, I want to do it, I really do. It’s one of those things I have to do
.
BOYFRIEND:
But you look scared and you’re shaking
.
WOMAN:
You know how I am — I shook before all of our bungee jumps too
.
BOYFRIEND:
OK, if you’re sure
.
WOMAN:
I’m sure
.
    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