The Weeping Women Hotel (16 page)

‘That
woman whose bag was snatched, she could have used Shin Strike and Elbow Strike
to the Side of Head on the bloke who did it. That bus driver could have used
Split Fingers Cobra Eyeball Strike on the man who showed him his penis on the
N19 night bus, and if that other man had known Li Kuan Yu he wouldn’t have
driven into that elm tree in the park because he wouldn’t have been drunk.’

Patrick
said, ‘What interesting jobs you all have.’

There
was a self-satisfied murmur of assent at this.

‘I bet
you all went to university as well and got firsts or something.’

Another
hum of happy assent.

‘Well,
a good 2:1,’ said Katya.

Toby
came back in and handed a glass to Patrick. ‘There you go, Patrick, there’s
your … water.’

Patrick
took one sip of the clear liquid and immediately gagged. ‘Dear God!’ he said,
looking at his drink in an appalled fashion. ‘What’s that?’

Everybody
else stiffened with embarrassment; everyone in their social circle knew better
than to ever ask Toby for a soft drink at home. One of his most prized
possessions was a machine called a Colajet: this contraption of pipes, gas
cylinders and nozzles was advertised as making carbonated drinks, supposedly
‘as good as the real thing’ from a mixture of tap water and a selection of
disgusting syrups Toby kept in labelled bottles. Guests at Toby and Helen’s
were always being offered ‘tonic water’ that tasted like sump oil or
unpleasant-looking brown Cola the consistency of glue. They learned rapidly to
take their drinks straight or to bring their own mixers with them, but if he did
somehow slip them a drink from his machine the last thing they would do would
be to complain about it, since another rule of dinner at Harriet’s sister’s
house was that you didn’t upset Toby by confronting any aspect of his alternate
reality. There was an unspoken agreement that you didn’t do it since there was
a generalised fear that his fragile world might crumble like a
computer-generated parallel universe in a dystopian science fiction movie.

‘It’s
fizzy mineral water,’ Toby said.

‘Well,
it tastes disgusting,’ Patrick replied. ‘I asked you for tap water which is
perfectly fine to drink as it is. So could you get me that?’ Then he continued
with what he’d been saying, ignoring Toby who drifted back to the kitchen
looking as if he’d been punched in the face. ‘I left school when I was very
young me but it amazes me all the different sorts of things educated people
like you do. I look around and see all these incredible things — did you know
there’s a new kind of salmon-flavoured waffle coming on the market? Somebody
who went to college must have thought of that.’ Harriet knew Patrick and the
ways of Li Kuan Yu well enough by now to discern that the smiling, slightly
confused dinner guests were being led blindly into a trap just as the great
Samurai Musashi ensnared the three brothers of the Yoshioka Shogun at the
Sanjusangendo
Temple
, home to the thousand statues of Kannon. He pressed on, ‘But when
you think about it all these people are wasting their time because there is
only one thing in the world they should be working on.’

‘How do
you mean?’ asked Martin.

‘Well,’
Patrick replied, ‘let me ask you, what’s the greatest crime you can commit?’

Swei
Chiang spat, ‘Parking in a bloody bus lane according to Islington bloody
Council, though how else are you supposed to get your child to its piano
lessons on time? Tell me that.’

‘Murder,’
Oscar said.

‘Murder,
exactly, that’s right, Oscar. So we believe the worst thing you can do is to
kill somebody, because we think death is the worst thing that can happen to a
person. Yet at the same time we’re all going to die, aren’t we?’

‘S’pose
so …‘ mumbled Oscar.

‘But
not for a while,’ said Katya.

Patrick
ignored her. ‘And yet we meekly accept it. This terrible thing is going to
happen to you all.’ He pointed at them as he spoke. ‘And to all your children
and to all your pets and to everybody you’ve ever met and still you people with
all your talent and your brilliant minds you just shrug your shoulders and you
spend your time administering estates or sending dentists to the Great Barrier
Reef or teaching French or being in films when if you think about it you should
all be working on a cure for death twenty-four hours a day! Or at the very
least trying to make life longer for people until somebody else comes up with a
cure for death! So really, looking at the situation in the cold light of day
anything else you do is a complete and utter waste of time.’

‘I say!
Everybody’s very quiet in here!’ shouted Toby, as he entered carrying a big
soup tureen he’d had specially made for him by Spode of Derby.

During
Patrick’s speech Harriet had felt herself glowing inside like a toaster.
Usually her sister was the star of these Christmas dinners, everybody cooing
over her fantastic food and how lovely she looked and the funny things Timon said,
but here this year was her guest and he was saying all this brilliant,
fascinating stuff that had completely derailed the usual boring stream of
tediousness.

Added
to that there was the way he looked! Though it was winter he wore a simple
white T-shirt, its semi-see-through material stretched tight over the swelling
muscles of his arms and outlining the sturdy rippling contours of his body.
Patrick’s hair was cut close to his skull and his pallid blue eyes under long
pale eyelashes glittered with ferocious life so that he made everybody else
seated round the table seem waxy and inert by contrast.

Harriet
caught Katya running her eyes hungrily up and down Patrick’s torso, as well she
might, she thought, given the crumpled, stove-in posture of her own man; in
fact come to think of it there was a certain wolfish longing in Oscar’s own
gaze towards Patrick.

Toby
placed a steaming bowl in front of Patrick and said, ‘There you go, Patrick,
lovely soup, swoop, loop de loop.’

‘What
did you say?’ Patrick asked.

Later that evening she
walked with Patrick along the edge of the park, back towards the Watney Flats
where he lived.

‘Thanks
very much for that, Harriet,’ he said.

‘Yeah,
Christmas dinners like that remind you of what you haven’t missed.’

‘No,
no,’ he replied, ‘it’s good to mix from time to time with people. There’s
always something you can learn from them and it was nice to have home-cooked
food.’

Over
the road the Tin Can Man passed them rapidly walking south. Perhaps because it
was Christmas Day, rather than commenting on other people he was having one of
his anguished conversations. ‘Please,
Lynn
,’ he was saying, ‘you might at least allow me to see the kids
today. I’ve got everyone these really great presents … a rocking horse … a
Nintendo … a Ninja Turtle game …’

Even
Harriet knew the Ninja Turtles hadn’t been popular with kids for years.

‘I told
you I lost my phone for a few days … yes I know, Lynn, but if I could just
come and … no, Lynn … yes, Lynn … but please, darling, if I could just …‘
His desperate entreaties faded as they stopped at the flinty gateway to the
Watney Trust Flats.

‘Harriet,
I wanted to say …’

Suddenly
she wasn’t paying attention but was staring beadily over her friend’s shoulder.
‘Excuse me a minute, Patrick,’ she said.

A
number of seconds before, a battered whitish van with ladders on the roof had
pulled into a parking bay a few yards further along the pavement. The driver, a
large burly man, was locking the rust-streaked door as she reached him. ‘Excuse
me,’ she said, ‘in the cold my fingers go white and then blue, do you think
I’ve got thromboangitis obliterans?’

‘Eh
what, love?’ he asked, staring at this. wired-up bulky woman in confusion.

‘See,
I’m asking you this question because you’re a doctor, aren’t you?’

‘No, I
ain’t a doctor.’

‘Well,’
she said in a quiet voice, pointing to the white-painted space in which the van
was parked, ‘you’re parked in a doctor’s space.

The
builder stared back. ‘It’s Christmas Day, love,’ he said with a smirk, ‘the
doctor won’t be needing it.’

‘How do
you know?’ she spat. ‘They might be called out on an emergency to help a
seriously ill asthmatic refugee child and when they get to the surgery they’d
like to park, all tired and weary as they are since they’ve been on call for the
last thirty-six hours, in their own damned space.’

The big
man seemed inclined to argue but something in her manner made him reconsider.
‘I’ll move it,’ said the builder, climbing back into his vehicle.

Harriet
skipped back to Patrick who’d been watching motionless and tense.

‘I hate
people who park selfishly like that in disabled spaces and such, I’ve always
wanted to tell one of them off. And now I have … a little Christmas present
to myself. Now, what were you saying?’

Patrick
smiled and uncoiled his fists. ‘Would you have done that a month ago?’

‘What?’

‘Spoken
to that guy like that.’

She had
acted without thinking; now forced to reflect on her actions, Harriet said
uncertainly, ‘Well, I’ve thought about it loads of times but I’ve never …’

‘Acted?’

‘Yes,
you’re right.’

‘So
what’s changed?’

There
was a pause in which her new self caught up with the small alterations that had
already happened with her body. She said, ‘Li Kuan Yu?’

‘Li
Kuan Yu,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a sign that we need to work harder than ever then
you will be ready to move to a whole higher level of understanding. You have
this anger which could turn you into a really good fighter, Harriet.’

6

In the park for most of
the month of January the strong winds switched direction and now blew from the
east, though just as intensely as before. Snow fell heavily and froze over the
ground for nearly two weeks. When the park had been first laid out there had
been a municipal paddling pool built for local children to wade in. It lay
about twenty yards across the grass from Harriet’s front door, in the
north-western corner and within sight of her upstairs room. The pond was
constructed as a concrete oval (corners being considered hierarchical at the
time) and was half a metre deep. Of course she wasn’t there at the time since
this happened in the sixties but she knew what would have happened next: within
a week of its installation the shoddy concrete begins slowly to leak. Though
employees of the parks and gardens department are supposed to attend to it the
water is never changed or filtered or topped up so that after a month no
children will venture near its foetid surface and when in late autumn the water
finally all drains away into the surrounding soil the pool is not refilled.
This is not the end though — over the next two winters leaves from the trees
blow into the empty stained bowl and lie there, rainwater falls on them and
they rot down until a thick mould effectively seals the cracks in the concrete.
Further rainwater falls and refills the pool and thanks to the base of leaf
mould it is constantly oxygenated making it a much purer liquid than the
chlorinated acid with which the paddling pool had originally been filled.
Nevertheless, while the water is pure and clear the rotted vegetation lining
the bottom makes it appear black and sinister, especially since clutching tendrils
of floating sweet grass curl beneath the surface: the result is that it is
still shunned by the human population.

The
silt had built up over the years so that now around the edges of the pool couch
grass and ferns had seeded themselves, fringing the margins; beyond that
cracked willow formed a further barrier to the curious human. Some days while
on her way to the oak tree Harriet would force her way through the willow and
jump over the pond at its narrowest point before climbing to the oak’s highest
branches and throwing herself to the ground nine times.

Two
mornings a week at
6 a.m.
Patrick would come to her place to train and — especially if the weather was
bad — he would insist they went to the park. Sometimes as they tramped through
a hollow or along a grey tarmac path they would come upon prone figures lying
on a bench or sprawled across the dank earth inadequately wrapped in cardboard
and newspaper; usually these homeless were asleep, though from time to time
they were dead. These corpses were part of the ever-changing population of
drinkers and drug addicts in the park whose poisoned systems had given out on
them, yet despite this there always seemed to be new recruits whose intended
career path was that they planned to die alone during the night under cold and
unfriendly trees.

One
morning Patrick said to her, ‘Harriet, you know that guy who talks all the time
about people into his sardine tin?’

‘The
Tin Can Man, yeah.’

‘Did
you know he lives right here in the park, in a secret burrow in the ground?
It’s quite clever really, seeing as he’s nuts. He digs air shafts, storage
rooms, sleeping ledge, a system of channels to drain away rainwater, all kinds
of stuff like that.’