The Weeping Women Hotel (29 page)

‘There
are six different kinds of soup!’ Julio said in wonder, stating at the
stainless-steel tureens.

Soup,
swoop, loop de loop, she was surprised to think but at least didn’t say out
loud.

Helen
helped herself to a small bowl of hot and sour and sat down; she took a couple
of sips but found herself oddly unable to enjoy the food in front of her. In
turn she tried to listen to what Julio was saying but instead all she could
think about was what item of food she was going to have next. She said to
herself, As soon as I get through this hot and sour, I’ll have a bowl of
chicken and sweetcorn. Yet once an overflowing white bowl of wallpaper paste
was in front of her her mind was already churning over which starters she was
going to choose. First time round I’ll stick to dumplings and the smaller
spring rolls, she thought. Then on the second run I’ll go for chicken wings,
grilled prawns in chilli sauce and the Peking duck with hoi sin wrapped in
pancakes. After her fourth trip to the servery for satay sticks, seaweed and
char sui buns Helen thought if she forced herself to pause for a while her
mania might subside, but as she sat at the table, her fingers fidgeting on the
polished wood trying to listen to what her companion was saying, she could only
count down the seconds until she would be able to return to the buffet.

Through
the disturbing thoughts of Chinese food dancing across her mind Julio seemed to
be going on about the time when he had first come to
Britain
as a refugee from Fascism. From what information managed to fight
its way past the dumplings and spare ribs singing their siren songs, she was
able to gather that he had in those days been a much more significant figure,
almost at the centre of trendy
London
life. He babbled about the takeover of the magazine
Puppetry
Today
by a group of Marxists, of the early days of
The Muppet Show
at
Elstree studios and he made a violent denunciation of the man who’d had his
hand up Roland Rat.

Halfway through one
particular tale of a drunken wrestling march with a ventriloquist’s dummy who
Julio had mistakenly thought was a dwarf that had been shouting insults at him,
Helen could sit still no longer. She jumped up and ran back to the counter,
this time for main course food, and returned to the table carrying a plate
piled high with a massive mess of curries, sweet and sour pork in a strange
orange sauce, chicken legs and wrinkled beef and black beans. Abandoning her
chopsticks she also brought back with her a big spoon from the servery so that
she could shovel food into her mouth more effectively until there was a sharp
pain, across her chest and a sheet of sweat was running down her face, but
still she was unable to stop.

Used to
having her rapt attention, after a while Julio lapsed into silence. He ate in a
different way to Helen, laying out his choices in a pattern on the plate then
raising it to his lips slowly, taking tiny little bites of each morsel like a
rodent. From time to time he would surreptitiously slip a chicken wing wrapped
in a napkin or a peanut-sauce-coated satay stick into her handbag with a stagey
wink.

In the humid night air
they came out of the back of
Shopping
City
and headed
towards home accompanied by the bass beat of the air-conditioning units. The
mismatched couple slipped past the wheely bins piled high with rubbish, their
feet sliding on the greasy service road, the future behind them and solid
Edwardian suburbia in front. Soon Helen and Julio passed the old-fashioned
Italian restaurant now shuttered and boarded up. Helen had only stopped eating
when Julio decided he wanted to leave. ‘I haven’t had any puddings,’ she moaned
like a petulant child.

‘Chinese
desserts are always a disappointment, just sponge cakes with soya veans in
them,’ he said, unbending, then taking her under the arm led her to the cash
desk to pay for them both and afterwards out of the shopping centre.

‘So did
you enjoy that?’ Helen asked as she waddled down the tree-lined hill and over
the railway bridge, the pain in her chest slowly transferring itself to her
stomach.

‘No,’
be said, sighing, ‘I feel soiled …‘

‘Well,’
she replied, relieved to understand why he’d wanted to leave so abruptly, ‘that
can happen if you eat too much Chinese food but it’s nothing to be ashamed of,
we can go back to your place to change your trousers then you’ll be-.—’

‘No! I
mean. I feel dirty, I tried to enjoy going to that place but there is something
terribly wrong with such avundance, for people to dine every night as if they
were at the wedding of the King of China for nine pounds and ninety-fibe
pence.’

Helen
found herself thinking, Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s only dinner! then gasped, she
was arguing with Julio Spuciek! The man who had always agreed with her, whose
opinion always concurred with hers, was talking miserable crap. Confusion
filled her mind.

Not
noticing any change in Helen’s manner, the old man grumbled on. ‘I went to
B&Q only last week. I went in there only to get a right-angle square and a
hammer but for the price of these two things I could buy a complete set in its
own box, comprising over one hundred and fifty different tools, ratchet heads,
socket sets, screwdrivers, craft knife, so many things for so little money It
made me weep right there in the hardware section to see it.’

They
came to a stop outside the Watney Flats. He said, ‘May I ask you something,
Helen?’

‘Of
course.’

‘Does
your husband have a toolbox?’

‘A
what?’

‘A
toolbox. Well, not necessarily a toolbox but does he have some tools, a
selection of screwdrivers and what do they call them,
llaves Ingles
—
Allen keys — does he have a few of those with a rusty saw perhaps and a hammer
in a carrier bag?’

‘Why do
you ask?’ she said. ‘Do you want Toby to do some repairs for you?’

‘Oh no,
it’s just that there is a certain type of man who has a toolbox, perhaps
nothing fancy, with different compartments for screws and nails but at least he
has some tools in a drawer or on a shelf and he is a man who can do things,
change a plug, put up a picture, fix a leaky hose on the dishwasher perhaps, a
man who thinks a little about the world outside himself, a man who can help
others. Then there is another type, a certain type who doesn’t have these
things, who cannot do these things, often a weak creature suffering from
allergies and intolerances, who only thinks about the world inside themselves,
who works in an office perhaps or a limp creature reading the news on the
radio. I’m not sure this is truly a man.’

‘Do you
have a toolkit, Julio?’

‘Of
course I do, I told you, a complete set in its own box, over one hundred and.
fifty different tools, ratchet heads, socket sets, screwdrivers, craft knife,
so many things for so little money. So does he, your husband?’

Helen
tried to think whether Toby had a toolkit or not; certainly she couldn’t recall
him ever .doing any repairs. ‘Yes, I’m certain he does,’ she said, then changed
her mind to speak the truth, ‘No, he doesn’t, I’m pretty certain he doesn’t,
no, but he does play football every Thursday.’

‘That
is something but not enough,’ the Argentinian replied like a High Court judge
summing up in a murder case. ‘You are married to a weak man and a woman who
marries a weak man is … a woman who likes weak men. Goodnight, Helen.’

Then he
turned into the flats, leaving her alone on the pavement.

‘Why
does your handbag smell of meat?’ Toby asked groggily as Helen came to bed.

She
said, ‘I do love you, you know, Toby.’

Coming
slightly more awake he said, ‘I’ve booked on to the
Papua
New Guinea
trip. I spoke to your boss today and he
said it’d be fine. I know you don’t want me to do it but it’s something I have
to do to test myself.’

‘Well,
I was against it but I don’t know now,’ Helen said. She didn’t add that she
didn’t know about anything any more.

Every year there was held
in and around the wooden hut and. the playground in the park what Toby referred
to as ‘The Pointless Park County Show’ and what the council called a Community
Sharing Experience. On a hot ‘summer Saturday under the spreading sycamore and
horse chestnut trees small, dark, silent men and women from the local Colombian
population manned a pasting-table stall serving maize buns and stews of chicken
simmered with plantain; the Turks and Kurds sold grilled meat and fluffy bread
studded with caraway seeds cooked on smoking charcoal grills; Punjabi women
produced polystyrene tubs of dhal and thick vegetable curries; and the
elderly, shrivelled, little white men and women of the local Communist Party
Branch stood behind a stall that offered spindly, unwell-looking house plants
and the works of Joseph Stalin.

Mr
Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro and his group of young associates had mounted a
splendid stall supposedly representing something called the Namibian Disaster
Relief Fund Steering Committee, which everybody steered well clear of.

‘Which
particular disaster would that be?’ Harriet asked Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De
Castro.

‘Well,
there’s always some bloody disaster happening somewhere over there,’ he
replied, then added in immigrant-speak ‘innit?’ making her laugh.

On a
small stage with a howling sound system, between the compulsory Caribbean steel
band and a samba school of overweight social workers led by Oscar and Katya’s
builder (who had turned up for work at their house one day offering no explanation
for his abrupt disappearance and who was dressed today in a sparkling yellow
bra/thong combination, glistening yellow gossamer wings rippling behind him
topped off with a towering green and black feathered headdress), the regulars
at the dojo were scheduled to give a demonstration of the deadly martial art of
Li Kuan Yu.

‘The
pale creepy one’s looking sick with worry!’ Harriet heard the Tin Can Man,
hidden in the undergrowth, shout into his phone.

Patrick told himself he
should be reasonably confident over how their Li Kuan Yu demonstration would
go. He knew you wouldn’t have seen such a thing in Martin’s time but then Martin
hadn’t faced the problems he had to face. Patrick had asked the community
centre people if they could perform at the community fair knowing, since he’d
been attending it from childhood himself, that they’d be grateful for anything
to break the usual tedious parade of well-meaning multi-ethnic crap. The reason
he’d decided they should perform was to instil a greater sense of solidarity at
the dojo. Recently there had come a number of threats from outside: a bloke
purporting to be a genuine Shaolin monk had opened a dojo in ‘Wood Green
teaching Southern Crane kung fu and since then three members of his dojo had
stopped coming. Patrick didn’t think it was a coincidence. Jack reported that
this man — the monk in Wood Green — had stated in an internet chat room that as
a fighting style Li Kuan Yu was ‘monkey poo’. ‘That’s very nice language for a
man of the cloth to use,’ was all that Patrick said to Jack.

He went
round to the houses of the people who’d dropped out, trying to persuade them to
come back, but they either said point-blank that they wouldn’t return or hid
behind their curtains and refused to answer the doorbell. Patrick made
disparaging comments about them to the other students but inside he felt like
his authority was being undermined. Perhaps Jack sensed this too — the old man
being the only one who had also been taught by Martin Po, Patrick had often
suspected he’d always been resentful that the sifu had appointed Patrick his
successor rather than Jack. Of course maybe, Patrick thought, if he told him
about the huge amount of money that he’d handed over for the privilege of being
made new sifu he might shut up about it. Perhaps he’d stop contradicting
Patrick at practice, constantly suggesting that the Founder would not have done
certain things as Patrick said they should be done.

If he was honest Patrick
had to admit that he didn’t like Jack, he was one of those people who could
instantly sense the weaknesses and insecurities of others. He’d sidled up to
the younger man one evening after practice at the dojo.

“Arriet’s
doin’ well, ain’t she?’ he said, which was odd for a start, since he didn’t
usually praise anyone. ‘Surprisin’ considerin’.’

‘Considerin’
what?’ Patrick asked.

‘Well,
I was walkin’ Rufus,’ (that was his dog) ‘round the park, about four in the mornin’
it was. Me insomnia’s been playin’ me up lately and 1 saw your ‘Arriet comin’
out of ‘er neighbour’s flat all dressed up like a tart. You know,
those
neighbours.’

He
wasn’t entirely surprised to hear that Harriet hadn’t been telling him the
truth about what she got up to when she wasn’t training, knowing already that
she was disobeying his orders on whom she socialised with. OK, you could
understand why she kept on seeing her sister and her brother-in-law, people
said family bonds were strong. What was unacceptable was her not dropping those
two awful women she hung around with, who smoked and drank and whose internal
chi must be all over the place, even though he’d more or less ordered her to
stop seeing them. Now to discover that she was staying up all night with a gang
of … well, whatever they were. He found that hard to bear.