The Weeping Women Hotel (33 page)

‘Is
there somewhere else you’d rather be?’ Helen asked her sister.

‘Well,
no, there was a thing in Dagenham I was invited to but I’m happy to be here
instead. With my beloved friends and family.’

‘So how
long will you be away?’ Lulu enquired, turning to Toby.

‘Well,
the trip there will take nearly a week. We fly to Perth in Australia, then on
to Darwin in the Northern Territories, take a smaller plane to Port Moresby,
then a Land-Rover and finally we walk up into the Southern Highlands. After
that it depends on how negotiations go, but I expect to be back within three
weeks.’

‘Isn’t
it dangerous? Aren’t there cannibals and stuff?’ Rose enquired.

‘Oh no,
there used to be years ago but that’s all died out. The towns can be a bit
rough actually but once you’re in the jungle it’s fine.’

After
that there were more drinks, toasts to Toby Harriet gave him a tropical hat
with corks dangling from it. He thought there might have been dancing at some
point.

He did
recall he said to Harriet, ‘Hat, you know when something bad happens to a
couple? Say one of them is arrested for some terrible crime, like those women
who were convicted of killing their kids on the say-so of that mad old
paediatrician and all the husbands said, “I’ll stand by you forever, darling. I
believe totally that you’re innocent, I know absolutely you didn’t do it.”’

‘Yeah?’

‘I
really admire those men but I don’t think I’d ever do that. Personally, I think
I’d pretty much believe anything bad about anyone that anyone told me. If
somebody came up to me and said you were a murderer or Helen was a robot or was
having an affair with a horse I’d more or less believe them right away, even if
they weren’t somebody I knew particularly well.’

Harriet
laughed, which made her look more lovely than ever to Toby, then said, ‘You’re
giving yourself away there, Toby Because what you’re saying about other people
is what you believe about yourself. You would never believe somebody else no
matter how dose they were to you would be incapable of doing some terrible
thing because you believe that you’re capable of doing something truly awful
yourself.’

‘Oh, Christ,
does it?’ he exclaimed. ‘I just thought it was a funny quirky thing I was
telling you so you’d find me amusing.

I
didn’t think I was accidentally giving stuff away, shit! But, Hat, I just sort
of assumed that those men, say, who stuck by their wives they were doing it for
other reasons. That they didn’t really believe their partners were innocent.’

‘No,
they really believed their partners were innocent.’

‘Blimey,
do they?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you
feel you’d behave like that?’

‘Yes, I
do. See, you’ve just told me you think that you’re a potential killer or
something worse. But I won’t believe it of you, even if there’s documentary
evidence backed up with CCTV footage and sworn statements from members of the
clergy and the House of Lords.’

‘I
don’t know whether to be pleased or not, you’re saying that you don’t think I’m
capable of anything above the banal.’

‘Yes,
but in a good way, Toby.’

‘Night,
night, Angel,’ the Tin Can Man was saying as they came out of the pub long
after
midnight
, ‘give the kids
a kiss for me and tell them I’ll see them soon.’

From across the pub seeing
Toby and Harriet talking with their heads so close together like they shared
some sort of secret made Helen feel somehow horribly alone; the irresistible
urge rose in her to talk about Julio so since there was nobody else around she
was forced to speak to Lulu and Rose, even though they were both rubbery with
drunkenness.

‘This
erm … friend of mine,’ she said, ‘guy I know, he says that women when they
have a crisis in their lives they want to run away and work in a hotel. How
weird is that?’

‘Oh
yeah, sure …‘ said Rose, trying to focus on her, ‘it’s in
Eastbourne
.’

‘No,
it’s not,’ Lulu contested hotly, ‘it’s in the
Lake
District
about five and a half miles outside Keswick
on the A66. Big half-timbered place, I’m going to be looking after the plumbing
once I go nuts.’

‘Well,
my place is definitely in Eastbourne,’ Rose persisted, on the seafront, painted
a sort of rusty blue. I’ll work on reception after I go mad.’ Then, putting on
the sort of fluting voice she thought a receptionist might use, said, ‘Do you
have any baggage, madam? Can I order you a newspaper in the morning? Could I
take the imprint of a credit card for room service items?’ She smiled
triumphantly at the two other women. ‘See, I could do that.’

12

Soft grey cloud the colour
of gravel hung low over the rainforest. The platoon of Australian SAS
soldiers, their sweat-rimmed tropical hats, baggy shorts, knee-length socks,
unshaven chins and black MI6 rifles cradled in their arms making them look like
a troupe of dissolute boy scouts on a high school killing spree, had walked
with Helen across the mountains from where the road from Port Moresby had run
out, hacking their way through the malodorous, leech-dripping foliage for three
long days. As they pushed through the clinging jungle Helen was pleased to
discover that although admittedly not carrying a heavy pack she was more or
less able to keep up with the Aussie soldiers; she guessed that natural fitness
must run in her family.

When
she had seen Toby off in the minicab to Heathrow Airport Helen had felt no
concerns for his safety. The plan had been for Toby and the rest of the
negotiating team, protected by a detachment of the Papuan New Guinean army, to
trek to a ‘village in the Highlands where they would meet representatives of
the rebels who’d taken Polly Williams. Warbird had been through negotiations of
this kind a number of times before and they’d always been able to buy the
natives off with the equivalent of a bag of balloons and a pencil. Helen had
spoken to Toby once from Australia and again on a landline from Port Moresby,
but since then nothing. She wasn’t disturbed by this — communications were
bound to be difficult.

So when
the director of Warbird had come into her office looking all serious she had
suspected nothing. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘we’ve just had a message from the UK
Consulate in Port Moresby that Toby’s party may have been taken hostage by
rebels and the troops who were supposed to be protecting them have fled.’

She sat
silent for a second. The thing was that since her last meeting with Julio at
the Pointless Park County Show it had become much, much harder for her to know
what to think about anything; she was adrift now without Julio’s guiding voice
telling her she was right all the time. She felt like the population of one of
those little Baltic countries that had gone overnight from communism to
unrestrained capitalism, and the one clear message of the government radio
station had been replaced with a thousand different exhortations.

To
Helen’s shame the first thing she could think to ask was, ‘Any news of Polly
Williams?’

‘For
God’s sake, Helen,’ he said, ‘aren’t you worried about your husband?’

The days and nights were
at their hottest now, the pub folded back its doors and drinkers often carried
bottles and glasses across the road to sit sprawled in groups on the edges of
the park where the uncut grass was as glossy as the brushed coat of a racehorse
and in places grew waist-high. Rose bay willow herb and foxglove hung heavy
with swollen red flowers, there was ragwort, wild parsnip and yellow buttercup
in profusion. In the middle of the night, as a recently arrived owl hunted for
rodents, Harriet saw from her living room window the Tin Can Man creep from his
hiding place somewhere in the centre of the park to feed himself on the wild
strawberries that grew in abundance. In the night-time silence she heard him
tell Lynn, ‘They’re tinier but many times more delicious than the commercial
variety’ To her mind the two of them seemed to be getting on much better these
days, maybe there’d be a reconciliation; how would that work?

One of
Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro’s underlings came into her overheated shop,
where she was staring hopelessly at a dinner jacket as if it was the corpse of
a beloved pet that she needed to bury in the-back yard, and said, ‘The boss
says he’s having another party tomorrow night and why don’t you bring your
friend who wants the things so we can talk about it.’

‘Oh,
OK, great,’ Harriet said, putting the jacket aside. ‘I’ll phone him and tell
him it’s on.’

Nobody was particularly
happy for Helen to be attached to the rescue party as liaison but she had
insisted and since Warbird was paying for a Hercules transport aircraft, which
should have been delivering famine relief to the Sudan, to be kept on permanent
standby at Port Moresby and for the soldiers’ ammunition no one felt able to
stop her, especially given her determined but demented demeanour. In the
churning washing machine of her mind a tiny degree of certainty was beginning
to return. Now she had a project to concentrate on, a project that was to
restore the world completely to the way it had been. If she could just get Toby
back safe then everything would follow; maybe at a later date she might even be
able to seek out Julio and heal his unhinged mind. She castigated herself that
she should have realised the devastating effect torture can have on a person.
It was clear to her now that the old man’s experiences in the Chupaderos had given
him an unpleasantly negative view of the world; it was hardly surprising given
the terrible things that had been done to him and she should have understood
this.

Despite
the seriousness of their mission Helen was pleased to find she was able to take
a good deal of pleasure in the mindless physicality of walking. It struck her
as odd how so much of the vegetation that blocked their path was a vigorous,
feral version of the pot plants you found tamed back in everybody’s home: from
time to time she had the odd sensation that she was chopping her way through
the gardening department of a large B&Q. On the second day, climbing
upwards along the muddy path, they had picked up three of the original party
sent by Warbird to negotiate the release of Polly Williams the parrot. Confused
and dehydrated, the trio had no up-to-date news of what had happened to Toby
and the rest of the party; instead they babbled about the treachery of their
Papuan army guards and of being held in terrible conditions by the rebel tribesmen
before managing to escape through a hole eaten by termites in the longhouse in
which they’d been held. Fed and watered as best they could, the survivors had
been sent back down the track with a couple of soldiers to wait for the
Land-Rovers at the rendezvous site.

Helen
had spoken to Timon the day before on the satellite phone; he’d been sent to
stay at Martin and Swei Chiang’s place in Andalusia. ‘Why can’t I go and stay
with Auntie Hat?’ he’d asked for the hundredth time. She told him he should be
grateful to be able to enjoy the splendours of Seville and Granada.

‘Any news of Toby?’ Rose
asked Harriet in the pub that night.

‘No,
but I’m sure he’ll be all right.’

‘Why?’
asked Rose.

‘Dunno,’
Harriet replied glumly. ‘Just trying to stay positive. You know, I dislike
everything about them but I’m beginning to think life would be a lot easier if
you could be one of those religious people that thinks God’s watching over
them and everything’s going to turn out fine in the end and that life isn’t
really dangerous and a big random nothing.’

Lulu
said, ‘Oh that only works as long as things are going well.’

‘How do
you mean? I’m always reading in the paper or hearing on the radio that
religious believers have better lives. They always tell everyone they do.’

‘Well,
you say that, kitten,’ her friend replied, ‘but some of them are lying and as
for the rest, well, when they have a crisis the religious people suffer post
traumatic stress disorder much, much more severely than those like us who don’t
believe in anything.’

‘Really?
Wow …‘ Harriet’s awed tone wasn’t solely for the information she’d just been
given but was also because it always came as a shock to her when Lulu showed
any signs of having special knowledge and expertise and wasn’t just a crazy
woman who drank and acted mad for a living. Helen, on the other hand, had
always refused to accept Lulu’s eminence.

‘But, Hel,’
Harriet would always say to her sister. ‘She studied for five years.’

And her
sister would inevitably reply, ‘It doesn’t matter how long you study something
if the thing you’re studying is idiotic and wrong in the first place and the
person studying it is a drunken whore.’

Harriet
asked Lulu, ‘But don’t the religious people live longer, suffer less stress,
have better hair then?’

‘Yeah,
up to a point, except that’s only as long as nothing bad ever happens to them
ever. But if they do have some sort of a disaster, couple of family members
killed in a car crash, severe illness or losing their house keys then wallop!
They fold like a map, go around tearing at their clothes, weeping, stamping on
their bishop’s mitre and wailing about God having forsaken them and how could
it happen to them and what kind of a world is this we’re living in? Where are
their personal angels now they need them? And yadda yadda yadda, blackness,
despair, the horror, the horror, all that. The big crybabies!’