The Weeping Women Hotel (15 page)

When
she told Lulu and Rose about the punching and the hitting thing Lulu asked, ‘So
in this barmy new upside-down world of yours are battered housewives really
good fighters because they get punched all the time?’

‘Is
this you still being cutting and unpleasant?’

‘No, it
just sounds a bit odd is all.’

‘We
worry about you, darling.’

‘Is
this some sort of cult you’re getting yourself involved in?’

Harriet
had told them emphatically, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’

Last
time she’d seen Patrick, she’d asked, ‘What are you going to be doing next
Monday?’

‘Monday?’
he replied thoughtfully. ‘Well, Mondays I usually start with Frog Jumps into
Lily Pond. I wake at dawn and start my exercises while still in bed with the
frog stretch exercise. I touch the soles of the feet together and flatten the
knees to the horizontal position; assuming this triangular shape I attempt to
bring the heels, keeping the soles of the feet together, up to the base of the mei
lo chakra point, situated midway in the perineum. I repeat this at least ninety
times. Then moving to standing position, I stretch skywards, extending
fingertips and moving on to tiptoes, again at least ninety times. Next I bring
arms to shoulder height extended horizontally and commence to make small
circles, moving to wider circles then full windmills, counter-clockwise then
clockwise. I perform nine hundred revolutions “until your arms rotate like
roundabouts at ‘
Wicksteed
Park
” as Sifu Po says. Then I go for my
nine-mile run. Why? Why do you ask?’

‘It’s
Christmas Day.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s
just my sister and her husband always make Christmas dinner for anybody who’s
still around in London; they’re always going on at me to bring someone, I never
did up to now but I thought, I dunno … I thought you might like to come.’

Underneath the flashing
red chilli .peppers lights, which were Harriet’s sole contribution to the day,
Martin and Swei Chiang were talking about their children’s education. Swei
Chiang said, ‘Of course we’d love to send the kids to the local state school
but it’s a jungle down there, there’s a shooting most days …‘

‘Well,
actually, somebody was squirted with a water pistol,’ Martin corrected.

‘But it
had acid in it.’

‘Diet
Doctor Pepper.’

‘Stop
correcting me, Martin!’

Facing
them across the table Oscar and Katya weren’t listening but instead were
arguing in hissy whispers.

‘I can’t
drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’

‘Well,
I can’t drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’

‘Well,
I can’t drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’

At the
far end of the table was Roland Malone, his hair sticking up in clumps, wrapped
inside a ratty torn anorak with a fur-lined hood that he wore up so it covered
his head completely. He had just been offered a part .in a gritty new British
film and was refusing to come out of character, so his family had gone on
holiday to
North Africa
without
him. He was speaking to nobody in particular at high speed in a strange nasal
‘northern’ accent.

‘The
trees are full of spiders, right? Waiting, hiding from the light, the
fist-in-the-face Nazis that vomit up car jack neutral spinsters — it’s all in
the Bible, man —
St Paul
’s
letter to the National Car Parking company complaining about a scratch on his
Nissan Micra that some clown …
Coco
? I’d rather have Horlicks if it’s all the same to you …’

Bored,
Harriet got up from the table unnoticed and went into the kitchen where her
sister was preparing the meal. Helen had decided to have a Slovakian Christmas
this year and her arm was halfway up a large carp, stuffing it with walnuts
that she’d already cooked separately.

‘Hi,
how’s it going out there?’ Helen asked, reaching for more nuts.

‘The
usual: Swei Chiang’s explaining that although she’s still a rampant socialist
they’ve just got to send their three-year-old to military academy because
there’s regular outbreaks of cannibalism at the local comprehensive. Oscar and
Katya are practising for the European bickering championships and Roland
…well…’

‘It’s
better than the time he was playing an SS officer in that mini-series with
Cybill Shepherd.’

‘Yeah,’
the older sister agreed. ‘He said if we didn’t finish the chocolate mousse he’d
made then he’d force us to dig our own graves and shoot us. Honestly, though,
it’s the same every time we meet, we could put our conversation on a fucking
tape loop then we could just eat our dinner and flip through magazines while the
tape played.’

‘I
thought you liked our Christmas dinners?’

‘Oh, I
suppose I do but, you know, Christmas is always a bit of a pain.’

‘I
don’t, know where you’re getting this sudden bad temper from, you’ve always
said you had a good time on all the other Christmases. I burnt my finger on the
carp, you know.’

At
college those on Harriet’s fashion course interested in designing costume for
the theatre were required to take a subsidiary drama course. Though unwilling
and shy at first she had found herself rather enjoying the workshops she took
part in.

One of
the exercises the teacher set their group was to take a page from a foreign
language phrase book and for them to try and dramatise it, to attempt to make
logical sense of the unrelated phrases.
‘Estoy enfermo,
I’m sick,’ one
would say.

Another
student would reply,
‘Estoy bien,
I’m well.’

‘Where
is the hospital/ambulance/doctor’s surgery?’ a third would ask.

‘I’m
going to be sick/faint/give birth.’

‘Where
is the bus station?’

‘Nos
divertimos mucho,
we had a lot of fun!’

‘Voy
a verle otra vez?
Am I going to see you. again?’

‘I have
been bitten by a dog!’

‘My car
has a flat battery/engine fire.’

With
their abrupt switches of topic and sudden dives into self-pity, conversations
with her sister reminded Harriet of these workshops fifteen years ago. Helen
had drummed into her older sister since they were kids that the idea of anybody
having a bad time at an event that she’d organised made her deeply uneasy.. She
knew Helen hated the very idea that she wasn’t enjoying herself now and hadn’t
enjoyed other Christmases —that’s why she’d let it slip; siblings know how to
push each other’s buttons, because they installed them. Or rather Helen didn’t
care whether Harriet was having a good time or not but she couldn’t stand her
showing that she was miserable. In the past Harriet would have been too
intimidated by the scene Helen might make to let her boredom show but she
suddenly didn’t want to put up with it any more; after all, this insistence on
everybody acting hysterically merry was simply another facet of her sister’s
egotism. Helen felt that her very presence in a room made it sparkle, so she
assumed if somebody was having a bad time it implied that there was some flaw
in her loveliness. Harriet decided it would probably be good for both of them
if in the future she didn’t try so hard to placate her sister.

It was all right for her,
Helen thought, Harriet didn’t have her responsibilities: Helen was a wife, she
was a mother, Harriet didn’t even look after her own appearance, never mind a
husband and son and all the distressed talking birds in the world. Plus looking
as good as Helen didn’t happen without her doing a huge amount of work while
her sister went out looking like a bag of potatoes. She knew now that Harriet would
never stick to this latest fitness regime any more than she’d stuck to any of
the others over the last fifteen years despite all the support and the
expensive equipment she’d given her. Helen had been glad when Harriet had
become friendly with this Patrick but she still didn’t understand why she had
invited her personal trainer weirdo to Christmas dinner.

Helen
would sometimes think after a particularly good night out or a pleasant weekend
that time should really stop now, since everything was perfectly balanced,
through her efforts all her friends were getting on, because of her constant
vigilance everybody was in good health. She would say to the universe while
dropping off to sleep, ‘OK that’ll do now, let’s stop it all, everything’s
perfect,’ and would be genuinely surprised to wake the next morning and find
that time was still grinding onwards. ‘I thought I told you to stop,’ she would
say grumpily to the universe, aware that her memories of the perfect night out
were already fading.

She
asked Harriet, ‘What time’s your friend coming?’

‘Two
forty-four.’

‘Two
forty-four? Not two forty-three or two forty-five?’

‘No, he
said two forty-four.’

She
glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘Well, it’s two forty-four now and—’

The
doorbell rang.

‘I’ll
get it!’ Toby shouted from the bedroom.

They
heard the cannonade of his feet running down the stairs then the door opening,
muffled conversation and the door closing.

‘Harriet,
your friend’s here!’ Toby shouted.

‘Two
forty-four,’ said Harriet as she left the kitchen.

In the
hallway Helen heard Toby ask, ‘So what can I get you to drink then, Patrick?’

‘Just
tap water, please,’ Patrick said.

‘Ah,
“Pointless Park Pop”.’

‘No,
tap water, please.’

‘That’s
what I said.’

‘What
did you say?’

‘Oh,
ah, I …‘ Normally Toby would stubbornly stick to his name for something in
the face of everybody’s confusion but there must have been some quality about
this Patrick that sapped his confidence so he said, ‘Tap water, yes …’

‘No,
didn’t you call it something else?’

God,
Toby! Helen thought. Stop being so pathetic.

‘Hi,
Patrick,’ Harriet called out.

‘I’ll
get your water,’ Toby said, scuttling into the kitchen. ‘Harriet’s friend’s
here,’ he said to his wife.

‘Come and sit down next to
me and meet everyone,’ Harriet said to Patrick, considering taking him by the
hand or arm but not daring to do so. Eventually she just sort of poked him with
her finger in the direction of the big living room where everybody was sitting
around the dining table. Patrick sat down in Toby’s chair: to Harriet his
straight-backed posture made a powerful contrast with the slumped, weak,
caved-in bodies of all the rest of them.

‘Everybody,
this is my friend Patrick.’

Patrick
stood up again and shook hands rather formally with them all. She could see
they were all confused by having somebody who wasn’t exactly the same as them
in their midst. So, trying the most obvious way to work out his place in the
hierarchy, Martin asked, ‘Hi, Patrick, and what do you do?’

‘Well,’
he replied, looking all serious, ‘I met Harriet at the gym. I’m an instructor
there but now we’ve been doing personal training together and I hope become
friends,’ and he gave a shy little smile.

They’d
never actually had a discussion about whether Li Kuan Yu was to be mentioned to
outsiders; clearly it wasn’t.

‘And
what do you all do?’ Patrick asked in turn.

‘Percussionists
Licensing Society.’

‘I’m
writing a book of recipes of food mentioned in the Bible — I made the
unleavened bread flavoured with bitter herbs that we’re having later.’

‘I plan
conferences for dentists,’ Katya said, ‘and Martin’s at Birkbeck College
University of London, professor of modern languages.’

‘What,
all of them?’ Patrick asked.

‘I’m
sorry?’

‘All of
the modern languages does he teach?’

‘No,
just French and German obviously.’

‘Right,
so he’s a French teacher.’

‘Well,
no, well, sort of …‘ Katya decided not to pursue it. ‘Of course you know
Roland, he’s a—’

Roland
Malone spoke up for himself. ‘Neck monkey!’ he shouted.

There
was an embarrassed silence during which Patrick stared levelly at him for
several seconds. ‘No you’re not, you’re an actor,’ he finally said. ‘I know
that because I’ve seen your picture a lot of times in the local paper.’

Though
Patrick seemed as far as anybody at the dojo could tell completely uninterested
in watching television, never went to the movies and didn’t read books, he
faithfully read the local paper every week. From it he would extract stories of
knifings, rapes and robberies (of which there seemed to be many), cut them from
the paper and read them out to Harriet in her room or to the dojo as they
practised. Then Patrick would ruefully explain exactly how the victims of these
assaults would have been able to beat their assailants if only they’d been
adepts of Li Kuan Yu.