Read The Bat Tattoo for Free Online

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 Crash Test had been superseded by computer games and was barely ticking over in the US and UK although it was a little more lively on the Continent.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’dfound 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 ofthe 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 thousandpounds, 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