An intimacy of bats

In envy of echolocation

The bats have not been entirely honest with me. All this time, while roosting in the loft, wrapped in their leathery cloaks of invisibility, they have been listening. I thought that they were asleep when I gently, gently lifted the wooden hatch, the curtains drawn in the room below to keep out all but the faintest light. I am trying just to be Room Service. Come to change the sheets. Discreetly. I won’t be a moment. The old torn cloth which I laid out to catch their droppings is whisked away to the laundry and another in its place.

Long-eared Brown Bats. A large family group, old and young. A proper community. They cuddle tightly together in the apex of the roof. Too close to count. Always in exactly the same place. The previous owner of our one-bedroom ramshackle cottage in the hills of Donegal told us that he had bought an ultrasound deterrent and they had left. We joked that we’d have paid him half as much again if they’d stayed. At any rate, he thought we were joking. Happily, we got the bats and didn’t have to pay extra.

All day, every day, we know they are there, a few feet above us. Often we find ourselves standing still and speechless, as if we had forgotten what we had come for, just underneath where they are roosting. We hold the chalice of their presence and listen intently for the sound of their silence. Is this grace? It seems that it might be.

Of course the world continues to turn. We chatter and babble. People visit and there is talk of weighty matters. We eat, we write, we griddle the old Stanley peat stove and cough when it smokes, brow-beaten by an easterly wind.

All the while the bats are listening carefully. We are the first of our kind that they have encountered. This cottage, whose floor is simply the earth beaten flat and overlain with giant flagstones, has only now, with our arrival, been separated from the long lineage of the people of this place. The responsibility weighs heavily on us.

We listen to the speech of the tribe whose land this is and try to form the sounds with our clumsy tongues. They tell us only some of their stories. We quietly uncover myths of our own and talk respectfully to the two rounded hills which are actually a mare and her foal, resting here these last few million years.

Mostly we talk a lot of nonsense, no different from the people who lived here before. Even indigenous people’s days are full of tittle-tattle and minutiae. That’s fine. The bats have filters. They can pick the signal from out of the noise. What they glean from our chatter disturbs them. It makes them wonder if they should intervene.

It is clear to them from the outset that we think we know things. That we lack humility. From us they also hear, for the first time, the state of the world and how deeply we are hurting it. The old man and woman who had lived here for so many decades before us were born in the age when things were possible. When many roads and paths were open for the taking. Nobody had updated this childless couple on the journey’s progress. So the bats are only now hearing how far down the last cul-de-sac we have driven. They frown and confer. Something must be done.

In the evening, at the failing of light, we see them emerge from beneath the lead flashings around the chimney. They move sideways over the slates, grotesquely crab-like. Horror-film  gargoyles come to life. What is this as yet unnamed emotion, part love, part terror, that we feel for them?

As soon as they are airborne we know that they must be speaking to the trees, to the walls, to the empty taciturn darkness. To the moths. They are touching everything with the fingertips of their voice. But we are grown old and there is no chance that our ears can reach up even to the lowest rungs of their frequency ladder. They have to find another way to reach us.

She came alone. Into our dreams, through an open window. Like a giant butterfly. We have so achingly little of the untamed animal left in us. But still we knew she was with us in the bedroom, without sight or sound or smell. She fluttered in and out between dream and waking as if there were no divide.

Her overtures made, she lands on the curtain and waits. So vulnerable that the stars hold their breath. The long fingerbones of her wings are as fragile as the stalks of summer grass gone to seed.  

By the swaying yellow glow of a single candle I go to her and offer my cupped hands. I dare not speak. What catastrophe of thunder and earthquake would my voice be to her? And what use would my words be to me? I would hear them going outbound through the bones of my skull, dull and brutish, impinging on the world like conquerors. But I would not hear them return in the way that she receives an answer to her call. This is what she has risked her life to tell us. She is trying to remind us that a voice is only the ache of an amputated limb if we do not hear the world’s response. And if we could learn again to hear creation’s reply it might, even now, allow us to turn away from our own destruction.    

She blinks. Her mouth opens and sound comes out. I cannot hear it but her voice reflects off my face and she receives back the echo which is now partly her, partly me. Is this heaven? It feels that it must be.

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