The Weeping Women Hotel (10 page)

‘Ow,’
she yelped.

Immediately
Patrick’s face was centimetres from her own. ‘Get back into your fucking
stance, get back into your fucking stance.‘

The
agony was just beginning to subside when he suddenly flew from the opposite
direction and kicked the shaking fat woman in the other shin.

‘Ow,
Christ!’ she yelped again, but quickly stepped back into her stance without
being told.

After
he had kicked Harriet’s shins three more times Patrick said, ‘Right, follow
me.’

In
turning to try and follow she fell heavily and awkwardly to the ground, pain
shooting into her palms. He did not wait, however, and as she lay twisted on
the floor she heard his steps descending the stairs. Harriet could have let
Patrick leave then and might have been free of him, but propelled by an
indistinct fear she thrust herself upright and followed in a rush, bashing her
shoulder on the doorway as she raced breathlessly down the stairs after him.

The
front door was open and she could just see his feet disappearing over the road
as she slalomed down the corridor and into the street.

Glimpsing
Patrick disappearing into the park, Harriet was forced into a waddling,
ungainly run in order to catch him up as he steadily pressed across the muddy
grass and through the dripping undergrowth towards the centre of the greenery.
Stepping straight into a laurel bush that wetly slapped her in the face she
realised they had come to the very heart of the park, a place where she had not
ventured for years.

It was
strangely silent in this shallow bowl, the sides sloping gently down to the
ancient oak tree right at the core soaking up all noise from the outside world,
the only sound the delicate patter of rain on leaves. The edge of the bowl was
ringed in an almost impenetrable tangle of bramble, dog rose, laurel, beech
tree and scraggly pine. Looking down she saw that her stretch pants were torn
and her legs were bleeding from forcing her way unwittingly through the thorns.

Patrick
stopped by the oak tree and waited while Harriet staggered up to him. The
first fork of the oak tree was about five feet above the ground. Patrick
pointed to it and said to her, ‘Climb up there.’

‘What,
where?’

‘Climb
up to that first branch of the tree.’

‘I
can’t climb.’ Despite what had just gone on between them she thought it still
seemed particularly cruel of him to expect somebody as fat as her to climb a
tree.

‘I’ll
give you a boost.’

‘No,
no, no. I’ll be too heavy.’

‘No,
you won’t.’

He
cupped his hands, Harriet tried to bend her leg to fit into them but couldn’t
get her foot high enough. With a sigh Patrick bent a little lower, she put her
foot into his fingers and realised how strong he was as he more or less threw
her into the tree. Harriet clung on desperately to the flaking grey wood as it
dug into her stomach, knocking the air out of her as she hung over the branch.

‘Stand
up,’ Patrick ordered.

With
great difficulty she managed to lever herself upright so that she stood swaying
unsteadily on the branch, forced to embrace the trunk of the oak tree like a
lover just to steady herself.

Patrick’s
chest was now level with the woman’s feet as he said quietly, ‘Now jump.’

‘Jump?’
she squeaked.

‘Jump,’
he repeated quietly.

In
Harriet’s mind there suddenly appeared an image of the shelf for tinned fish at
the supermarket: there were so many different kinds of tuna that sometimes she
stood for fifteen minutes trying to choose between tuna chunks in brine or tuna
steaks in sunflower oil or tuna chunks in olive oil. She understood there was
a sort of freedom in having no choice at all, so with her mind temporarily at
peace and without further argument she stepped off-the brittle branch and into
the empty air.

Nothing
happened then a lot happened. She struck the ground and her legs twisted
beneath her as her body pitched forward, her glasses fell off and, stretching
out her hands to protect herself tumbling forward, her soft pink palms scraped
along the stony soil beneath the tree tearing the skin wide open, her chin hit
the ground jarring the neck and her teeth dug into her lip splitting it open,
blood spurting in an arc to land at Patrick’s feet.

‘OK,’
he said, ‘training’s over for today.’ Then he squatted down next to her fat
exhausted body.

‘Now
here’s your homework. Tomorrow I want you to get up at six in the morning and
come here and climb to that branch and jump from there nine times. Nine times,
do you get it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah?
I want you to do that every day. Now if you want, of course, you can not do
that, you can not do that just like you’ve not been doing your exercises even
though you promised you would, but next week, next week, I’m goin’ to come to
your shop and get you and we’ll come here and you’re going to jump from that
second branch.’ He pointed upwards to a cleft in the tree that was much, much
higher than the limb from which she had so recently launched herself at such
great cost. ‘And if you haven’t jumped nine times a day from the first branch
then there’s a possibility you’ll die when you jump from that second branch,
certainly you’ll break somethin’, leg or arm, nose or jaw, suffer terrible
pain. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Then he
left.

Some psycho-dynamic
therapist that Harriet had seen for a few increasingly unhappy and insane months
in the late 1990s had suggested as part of her treatment that grown-up Harriet
wrote a letter to ‘Little Harriet’, as she was encouraged to refer to her
troubled teenage self back in 1982. when she had been fourteen years old. She
wrote:

Dear Little Harriet,

I think
you’ve got
it into
your
head
that you are unattractive to boys but you are actually a strong confident
young girl, they are just morons who are frightened by your interesting ideas
and your massive intelligence. You should just ask them out and see what
happens and not be afraid of rejection.

You should be kinder to your mum when she gets sick because you’ll
feel bad about it later and your mum really does love you even though you are
always being criticised and nagged and having your choice of clothes denigrated
by somebody who dresses like a nineteenth-century gypsy herself.

Lots of love,

Your grown-up self Big Harriet.

But then at the end of the
letter she couldn’t stop herself adding:

PS In 1985
Everton will win the Cup Final 1—0 against Aston Villa, ‘Big’ Dave Watson
scoring in the ninetieth minute.

As Harriet lay on the
moist ground peeling damp leaves off her face she reflected that maybe it was
this sort of smart-arse behaviour, this inability to commit herself fully to
anything, to turn everything into a joke, that had always sunk her attempts to climb
out of the holes that her personality had dug for itself. But it occurred to
her now that she had always refused to take anything seriously in the hope that
if she didn’t take things seriously then they couldn’t become serious. Now,
though, they had become serious anyway; this time there was never any chance
that she wouldn’t go to the park early every morning, climb the oak tree and
throw herself from its lowest branch nine times.

All through the week the
October weather remained stormy: gales swept in from the south-west stripping
leaves from the trees, while the rain saturated the ground so that water lay in
boggy pools all over the park sucking her trainers down into their clammy
depths as Harriet walked each dark early morning to the oak tree, treading
through the muddy, decaying flowerbeds and stepping around pyramids of damp
cardboard that covered lumpy sleeping bags.

It was
hard for her to describe her feelings even to herself during those next seven
days; she thought the Germans probably had a mile-long word for it that
translated as ‘deathfearsexiness’. That was the closest she could come; she
had given herself over to someone whom she was paying forty pounds an hour to kick
her in the shins and make her jump out of a tree.

She was
impatient for what was going to happen next and at the same time terrified of
it (how far would things go before she tried to refuse and what would happen
then?). One minute Harriet would be giddy with exhilaration then the following
one waves of humiliation and shame would sweep through her body. Yet, taking
stock, she felt that over all these contradictory sensations was a feeling
that she was more alive than she’d been for years. Somehow out of her lying and
cowardice a special, secret thing had happened to Harriet: looking at her
friends and her sister she thought to herself that whatever love, success or
happiness they had managed to attain there’d never been anybody she knew who’d
been caught up in anything like this, a matter both so dark and so dangerous.

The
first day on her own she had to bring a small set of kitchen steps with her in
order to get to the first branch; clumsily Harriet scrambled up into the arms
of the oak tree, hesitated, felt sixteen different things at the same time and
then flung herself from the branch nine times. First of all she fell very
badly, scraping her knees and swallowing great clumps of damp earth, but by the
middle of the week Harriet had dispensed with the steps and was managing to
remain upright when landing, soaking up the impact with bent legs, until it
dawned on her that she was landing in the horse stance that Patrick had shown
her upstairs in the shop.

‘Don’t you want some more
wine?’ Lulu asked her as she sat in the pub on the Saturday night.

‘No
thanks, Lu, I’m happy with my water. ‘‘Nobody’s happy with water.’

‘I seem
to be.’

‘What’s
up with you?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why
have you stopped smoking?’ ‘Dunno.’

‘Why
have you only ordered a starter?’

‘S’all
I want.’

Her
interrogation was cut short by the arrival of their dinner. Like many of the
new-style food pubs the Admiral Codrington served sloppily prepared ingredients
on cheap white plates plonked down on paper tablecloths, to be eaten with
shoddy cutlery and brought to the table by an insufficient number of
woolly-minded unemployed conceptual artists, while still charging prices that
would have seemed quite steep at the swankiest hotel in
Monte Carlo
. In the toilets, instead of
music they played the speeches of Martin Luther King.

‘I
didn’t order the butternut squash,’ Harriet said.

‘My sea
bass is cold,’ said Rose.

‘Don’t
make a fuss, it’ll be fine, just eat it! Just eat it!’ hissed Lulu.

‘No!’
Harriet suddenly said, slamming down her puny tin fork with so much force that
it bent. She called out to the waiter, ‘Cosmo, excuse me, excuse me but our food’s
not right!’ Unfortunately the waiter wasn’t able to hear her as he was doing a
little dance for the barman and the other waitress.

However
when the bill came she said to him, ‘What’s this?’ The waiter looked all
confused. ‘It’s the optional fourteen and a half per cent service charge.’

‘Well,
take it off,’ Harriet said. ‘The service was poor, so I don’t want to leave an
optional tip.’

‘What’s
got into you?’ Rose hissed.

‘I’ve
been trying my best,’ the waiter said with a quiver in his voice, ‘it just, it
just, you know, gets really busy in here.’

‘Well,
that’s not my problem, is it? The service wasn’t good enough.’

A woman
who’d been eating silently with a young girl who had no eyebrows and a
colourful bandanna on her head leant across from an adjacent table. ‘Please,
please,’ she exclaimed plaintively, staring at Harriet, ‘it’s my daughter’s
birthday tomorrow and she’s going into hospital for a cancer operation and
you’re ruining our night out making a fuss like this.’

‘Oh,
Christ!’ cried the waiter, turning to the woman. ‘I forgot to bring your cake,
I’m so, so, sooo, sorry …’

‘Please,
please don’t give it another thought,’ said the woman.
‘You
haven’t
destroyed our evening.’

‘So tell me again why you
wanted to make Cosmo cry?’ Lulu asked as they walked to her house.

‘I
cancelled my television,’ Harriet replied. ‘I cancelled my television. Rang
them up and said, “I don’t want this crappy TV and video any more.” They said I
had a binding contract and they’d take me to court if I didn’t keep it up. I
said they could stuff their contract so then they said OK but actually they
couldn’t be bothered coming and picking their equipment up because it would
cost them too much and so the guy on the phone sold me both the TV and the
video for twenty-five pounds. I’ve been renting off them for ten years: in that
time I’ve spent over four thousand pounds and they sold me both for twenty-five
quid!’