INAUDIBLE FREQUENCIES

Nora Thurkle

THEY CALL HER THE BAT LADY, INEVITABLY. She wears thick glasses, sensible fleeces and walking boots encrusted with mud. She looks older than she is. She has advertised in the local shop for an apprentice, someone to take in the bats, nurse and release them after she snuffs it. Two years ago, her brother died at 62 of what they said was an aneurysm, alone in the office of his taxi firm. The receptionist found him next morning. He’d had a ready meal in the microwave, a new Swindon Town season ticket in the post, his summer holiday booked in Tenerife.

She keeps them in the little utility room off the side of her crumbling end-of-terrace. It’s a converted garage, brick-walled but damp and draughty even in summer. She has a high foldable chair that she perches on sometimes if she is in there for a long time, but usually she just stands, until she has to stamp her feet to get the feeling back. On winter evenings, when she takes her socks off, the skin around her toes is mottled purple.

The cages are metal, with white paint that’s chipping off in places, and lined with torn newspaper. She uses old towels and cotton T-shirts to keep them warm and give them somewhere to hide. She has a roll of binbags handy for emptying the cages every day. Bats shit a lot.

*

Her current patients are a common pipistrelle which she’s had since it was a pup, two noctules and a Daubenton’s, which she doesn’t normally get in this part of the town. Two cages are empty. ‘Good morning, good morning,’ she murmurs, stepping into the utility room and turning on the light. She uses a low-voltage bulb of course, their eyes are sensitive, although they’re not blind like people say. There are all sorts of misconceptions out there about bats.

She examines the pipistrelle’s leavings under her microscope. No sign of parasites. She was surprised by the glitter in their stool when she first started doing this. Wings and exoskeletons, when digested, retain their sparkle.

She weighs the bat on her old kitchen scale, which is held together with duct tape and has a fault in the digital display so that some of the little bars in the numbers don’t show. She can still read it if she thinks logically. The bat is docile, lying there with its chest rapidly rising and falling, watching her with its tiny marble eyes. She writes on her clipboard. The bat lady keeps records of their weights so that she knows when they’re healthy enough to be released.

She strokes the pipistrelle’s soft belly, indulging herself before she pops it back into its cage. There’s no point putting it off; this one is nearly ready to go. When she takes off her gloves, the bat lady’s hands are as pink as raw meat. The skin wrinkles below the knuckles, pulling away from the fingers in ridges.

 *

People know where to find her; she’s lived in the same house since she was born. She greets new neighbours with homemade cake and accepts people’s parcels when they’re out. She’s also not afraid to knock on doors or car windows if things get too noisy. The only time she’s ever had a problem was when the people across the road got that security light outside their front door. It was activated by squirrels and cars driving past, a sudden bleached glare. She told them about how artificial light disrupts bats’ natural cycles and makes them more vulnerable to predators, but they still didn’t take it down until she started writing to the council. They don’t acknowledge her now, but she couldn’t care less.

Everyone knows where she is, so she’s not surprised when a young girl turns up at the door, having seen her advert. She’s the first and only respondent. Fat and pretty with that awful waist-length, rough-ended hair that teenage girls hide behind. The pockets on her jeans are a bit too high for her hands to fall naturally into them, so she stands awkwardly, her elbows bowed out. She’s wearing a hoodie and grubby but sturdy trainers. Practical. The bat lady invites her in.

‘We’ve got eighteen types of bat in the UK. You won’t see them all around here, of course. Most commonly you get pipistrelles – common or soprano – noctules, Daubenton’s, sometimes natterer’s or serotines.’ She has a chart on the wall depicting British bats, and stabs her finger at it as she names them. The chart is curling at the corners and often comes loose; two mornings out of three she has to pick it up from the floor. ‘I used to get brown long-eared bats every now and then, but the last one was years ago. And that one had been caught by a cat and died soon after. Bloody cats.’ She shakes her head. ‘Bat numbers are dropping all round. Cats, cars, street lights, too many buildings. But people bring them to me from miles away, so it’s still worth keeping it up.’

The girl is just gawping at her; she hasn’t touched anything or said a word since she introduced herself. Jamie, her name is, which in the bat lady’s opinion is a boy’s name, but she doesn’t care what people call themselves. People can do what they want as far as she’s concerned, as long as they respect the nature around them, which too few of them do.

‘You want to look at the bats?’

‘Yeah!’ says Jamie, her eyes wide. ‘Yes, please. I’d love to.’

She’s gentle with them, doesn’t touch until the bat lady tells her to. She helps clean out the cages and isn’t squeamish about the smell or the amount of shit. She holds each bat gently in her cupped hands, peering down at them misty-eyed, while the bat lady tips out the contents of the cages into the bin. Jamie is wearing the bat lady’s spare gloves. They’re worn through at the joint between thumb and forefinger on the left hand. ‘Watch out for that,’ says the bat lady when she puts them on. ‘You don’t want to get rabies. Dangerous creatures. One bite can be all it takes.’

Jamie’s eyes are wide.

‘Oh, I’m only having you on. Nobody’s died of rabies in this country for years. You can get vaccinated, if you decide to take this on.’ She remembers the hassle of getting her own vaccination. The doctor didn’t seem to accept that she needed to look after the bats, that it was as good as her job. It took several visits and a lot of persuading. The receptionist got sick of seeing her.

‘And bats don’t suck your blood, either, so don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwise.’

Jamie smiles. So does the bat lady, facing away from her.

 *

The bat lady gets up in the dark and goes into the utility room, flicks on the light. She picks up the bat poster from the floor and smooths it back onto the wall, pressing down the corners. She feeds them and changes the bedding in the cages. She weighs them. The pipistrelle has gained even since yesterday. It might as well go this evening. Jamie can do her first release.

There’s a cat prowling around the front of the house, a big black-and-white one with a scabby nose. She aims a kick, hisses at it. It scuttles away round the corner and turns back to look at her, insolent. She bends down to get something to throw, but by the time she stands up again the cat is gone.

She texts Jamie to ask her about doing the release this evening. She’s not expecting a reply yet, remembering how late her daughter used to sleep when she was a teenager. Her daughter moved to New Zealand. She has two kids, seven and four. The bat lady hasn’t met the youngest one. She isn’t going to make that plane journey with her bad circulation. Her daughter always says she’s saving up to come over.

The phone beeps a couple of minutes later, surprising her. Jamie is keen to come along. They arrange a time.

They don’t talk much that evening as they walk from the bat lady’s house to the common half a mile away, where there’s already a colony of pipistrelles living in the trees. It’s humid out, has been all day, but Jamie wears the same hoodie again, her hair loose, sitting roughly over the hood and her shoulders. It makes the bat lady feel uncomfortable just to look at her, feeling the sweat beneath her arms and in the thin hairs on her upper lip.

The bat lady is carrying the bat in a stiff mesh case, lined with the old T-shirt she had kept in its cage. When they arrive, there are a couple of dog walkers on the other side of the common, but nobody too close. There is a van parked in the area at the edge of the common which is only supposed to be used by council vehicles. They walk past, and the bat lady clocks the logo and the brand name on the side – Hod Developments.

She sets the case down among the trees and crouches on the dry grass to unzip it. ‘Want to do the honours?’ she says to Jamie, cupping the bat in her hands as she stands up.

She places the T-shirt over Jamie’s hand and lets the bat crawl gently onto it, then Jamie lifts her hand in the air. They’re not too close to the trees, there is enough space for the bat to fly. It army-crawls a few inches upwards. Then the pipistrelle shifts and drops from Jamie’s hand. She gasps, but the bat flickers upwards towards the trees, and then it is gone.

‘The next one will probably be the bigger of the two noctules,’ she tells Jamie as they pack up the mesh case. ‘Its wing’s nearly healed. I’ll show you tomorrow. Or we could go and take a look now, if you like?’

‘I told my mum I’d be home after this,’ says Jamie. ‘I live over that way.’ She points across the other side of the common, the opposite side to the bat lady’s house.

‘Well, you didn’t need to walk all the way to my house then. We could have just met here. Why didn’t you say?’  

‘I dunno,’ says Jamie. She is blushing, pulling at the ends of her hair. ‘I better go. Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow?’ That inane rising intonation at the end of the sentence. Is she asking a question or not?

‘I expect so,’ says the bat lady.

She takes a longer route walking home. It’s still hours too early for her to be able to sleep. She detours past the building site where Hod Developments knocked down the 1950s bungalows last year. There’s no trace now, no new construction either, just brambles and tatty fencing.

She’s been following the court case closely. The survey showed there was a colony of soprano pipistrelles in there. That should have meant that construction stopped, but the developers went ahead anyway. They were fined £15,000, which sounded like a lot to the bat lady, but of course they had money to spare. It was a calculation that worked for them. They’re putting up a block of flats in town now, near the Asda, she’s seen the branded hoardings.

The bat lady goes back to the common with a camera and takes pictures of the van from multiple angles. She attaches them in an email to the council, referring to specific local parking laws. When she is finished, she takes her time feeding all the bats and then giving each one water individually. She likes the gentle weight of them on her hand, no heavier than a coin, the grateful way they sip the droplets from the pipette like a baby at a breast. She smooths the smaller noctule’s back with the side of her gloved finger, its claws flexing and clutching ecstatically at nothing.

 *

‘You might want to tie your hair back, don’t want anybody getting tangled up in it,’ says the bat lady as Jamie does the weighing.

‘I thought that was a myth?’ says Jamie, a self-conscious hand at her collar. She’s smiling a little, getting wise to the bat lady’s teasing. Good.

‘Doesn’t it get in your way?’

‘Not really.’ Like every time she is asked a question, Jamie hunches her shoulders, making herself smaller. The bat lady finds it a little tiresome.

‘Let’s have a look at this one. I’ll show you how to check the wings.’

She opens it out very gently, stretching the tissuey membrane. The healed tear is a lighter contour between the bat’s fourth and fifth digits, topographical. The wing springs back perfectly when she releases it. She shows Jamie the photograph she took when she first received the noctule. ‘Must have been a cat,’ she says as Jamie takes in the image, the wing ripped almost in half. ‘But they can heal fine with the right care.’ She remembers bringing it in shivering in her hands, exhausted and dehydrated. She stayed all night in the utility room, keeping herself awake with cups of tea and crosswords in the newspapers she hadn’t got around to throwing away, checking the bat every half hour. Topping up the water and squeezing mealworms right into its mouth. Amoxicillin drops for days in case of infection, and she gave it the newest heat lamp.

Jamie asks about echolocation, so the bat lady explains. ‘They bounce their voices off the objects around them. It’s like the ultrasound they do when a woman’s pregnant. The echoes shade in the empty space to make an image.’

They let the bat fly. It flaps clumsily to a high shelf and hangs there, swaying, waits a few minutes and moves to the other side of the room, clinging to the extractor fan. Every time it moves Jamie and the bat lady applaud gently. The bat flits around the room, resting between its short flights. ‘We’ll do that every day, build up its stamina,’ says the bat lady. She lets Jamie recapture the noctule in a tea towel and put it away.

 *

This room was still just a garage the first time she flew a rehabilitated bat, so they did it in the kitchen when their mum was out. Her brother had found it trapped in the shed and gently, gently folded it into a towel. He showed it to her and she recoiled from its spidery fingers and furtive, mousy odour. But he gave it water and warmth and then asked her if she wanted to test its flying. It butted frantically against the window, so they knew it was ready to go. She used an old cloth to clean up the guano from around the taps and folded it into a little parcel before putting it in the bin – Mum would go mad if she knew.

They went looking for bats some evenings. The summer holidays were the best time for it. Sometimes they found a rabbit, a squirrel or even a hedgehog. Hedgehogs ate cat food, he told her, and they stashed tins of it under her bed.

When he was fifteen, her brother got a girlfriend, and then he left school. She remembered hanging around him while he shaved for his first day of work, watching him manipulate the fabric slip of his tie into a neat knot and tuck the end into his waistband. She held onto her words until he was nearly out the door and then blurted, ‘Can we look for animals later?’

‘Don’t see why not,’ he said, but he went for drinks after work and she was nervous to go out on her own, went to bed before he got in.

 *

The bat lady has read that you lose higher frequencies in your hearing as you get older, so she’s not surprised when Jamie remarks on the bats’ electronic chatter, though it is barely audible to her own ears. ‘They sound like my phone when the battery’s dying,’ Jamie says. That would be the only thing she could think to compare it with, thinks the bat lady. Bloody young people.

‘I was thinking,’ says Jamie, ‘about putting down vet nursing for my uni applications. Or zoology, even.’

‘Oh yeah?’ says the bat lady.

‘Then I could do more of this. Find out more about how to care for animals, how to get more involved in conservation. I dunno. Maybe I won’t have the grades. But then I could go for an animal care apprenticeship, maybe.’

‘This is an apprenticeship, of sorts,’ says the bat lady.

‘Yeah,’ says Jamie, and pauses, swallows some words. A few minutes pass. ‘Want me to weigh them?’ Jamie asks.

‘If you like,’ says the bat lady.

The smaller noctule hasn’t been gaining weight. She is beginning to think it isn’t going to make it, but she doesn’t tell Jamie this. When Jamie is gone, the bat lady takes off her glove, against best practice, and holds the noctule in her bare hand. It doesn’t move; its fur is patchy. She brings it close to her face, holds its soft body to her cheek.

 *

They release the bigger noctule a few nights later, after days of successful flights. Jamie heads home across the common. She is going to visit a university the next day and has an early start. The bat lady walks a circuit before she goes home, using up some time. That Hod Developments van is there again, parked illegally. She’s heard nothing back from the council.

The bat lady walks home. The folding chair hangs on a hook on the wall of the utility room. She lifts it off, reeling a little from its uneven weight, the metal frame always heavier than she remembers. She leaves the bat poster where it lies on the floor. She drag-carries the chair half a mile to the edge of the common, where she lifts it with difficulty onto the bonnet of the van, then thrusts it forward against the windscreen. Spiderweb cracks bloom on its surface and it buckles inwards. The bat lady pulls the chair back and hits the windscreen with it again, getting into the corners to finish the job.

She expects someone to stop her, to hear a siren approaching, but no one comes. She smashes the headlights and the wing mirrors. She slams the chair’s rubber feet against the driver’s door, the dent she makes springing back, until she pulls the feet off. It makes a hideous noise, metal against metal. She does the side panels and the bonnet. She drops the chair and kicks the sides of the van until her foot throbs.

The bat lady unfolds the chair, its joints loose now, and sits on it to watch the bats she has disturbed from the surrounding trees. They spool in and out of the branches, precise, guided by the echoes of their own voices rebounding in the emptiness, rolling together in the helix of flight.