The Weeping Women Hotel (34 page)

‘Do you
think you should call your patients big crybabies?’

‘What,
you don’t think we hate you all? And the religious ones
are
big
crybabies. See, deep down I don’t know what they really, truly believe. I do
know that if you’re a fervent believer you have this desperate air of needing
to be right all the time and if you’re religious you can be because you’ve got
the word of God in your head to tell you you’re right all the time and these
idiots feel all safe and snug on the surface seeing as the Lord is looking out
for their family and pets and their career in the civil service. Until he stops
of course. Then the world falls to bits and it’s terribly hard for them to get
it back.’

‘So in
some ways what you’re saying is,’ Harriet mused, ‘you’d actually be doing
somebody a favour by proving to them that their religion, what they believed
in, was nonsense. You’d be saving them pain in the future?’

But she
didn’t get an answer from her friend as Lulu was staring at a harmless-looking
man at the bar. ‘I’m sure that’s the bloke who’s been putting poison in my
rubbish bags,’ she said.

On the third day of
walking when they were a little way from the village there was a sudden
crashing up ahead of them on the trail; the Australian soldiers immediately
raised their rifles and slipped the safeties off but it was only one of the
doctors from Medicos Sin Sombreros, accompanied by a native guide, red-faced
and sweating. Ignoring the captain he located Helen halfway up the file and
reaching her breathlessly said, ‘Madam, we have found your husband, he is
injured but alive and God willing will make a full recovery.’

All the
emotions Helen had been holding back, like a hundred unwatched TV programmes
held on a digital hard-drive recorder, poured out of her now. Images of herself
as she had been before flashed into her vision, the endless pointless parties,
the conversations about nothing, her anger and intractability, her obsession
with Julio, all these could be recorded over now and they could start again.

In a
rush the party tumbled into the village square. On the rectangle made of
tightly packed earth an impatient group of natives stood waiting, short,
ageless and deep brown. These too joined the press of people heading for the
air-conditioned Portakabin that by day served as the clinic of Medicos Sin
Sombreros.

The
doctor, Helen and the SAS captain squeezed through the door first and then the
soldiers barred the way of the tribespeople who were forced to peer over each
other’s shoulders into the frigid air.

On
simple hospital beds, gauzy white mosquito nets giving the place the air of a
Tennessee Williams play, lay the rest of the Warbird party.

Toby
was in the centre bed. Helen frantically scrabbled under the net and crouching
by his side took her husband’s hand.

He was
in a bad way, bandaged and bruised, his skin purple and verdigris, a drip
disappeared into his arm, yet at her touch he woke. Prising his gluey eyes
apart he managed to croak, ‘Hi, babe.’

‘Oh
Toby,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m so glad you’re all right, I’ve been such a cow to you,
I’ve been so distracted lately I feel like I haven’t been there for you …’

‘No,
no, it’s OK,’ he replied feebly, patting her arm, ‘this was a thing … a thing
I had to do.’

‘I
drove you to-it …’

‘No,
no.’

‘Well,
everything’s going to be better from now on.’

‘I’m
sure it will be … and I did it, you know, I did it.’

‘Did
what, darling?’

‘Tested
myself, like I came here to. They kept us all tied up in the one longhouse;
things weren’t too rough until those others escaped then the bloke who was
leading the rebels, the one who was urging the tribespeople to turn their backs
on modern things, to drive out the white men, revive cannibalism, all that,
Chinese guy, very fit but well over sixty, dyed black hair, he went completely
mental, yelling at the natives and beating them with a stick.

‘All us
hostages got pretty sick with hunger and dehydration and malaria, so sick we
could hardly move. One night I had a dream, we were in the Admiral Codrington,
me, you, Harriet, Oscar and Katya and Oscar and Katya’s builder wearing quite a
restrained black and gold bikini and Polly Williams was there too. So Polly
Williams says to me, “You remember we were watching that documentary the other
week about social conditions in
London
in the 1950s?” Do you remember, babe, it was on BBC 4?’

‘I
think so, Toby, yes.’

‘Anyway
Polly Williams says, “And do you remember that the landladies who rented flats
used to have signs in their windows that read ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’
but what I want to know, Toby, is why were the dogs trying to rent flats? They
didn’t need their own flats, did they, the dogs? Not like the Blacks and the
Irish.” Then Polly Williams pointed to Oscar and Katya’s builder with his wing
and he said, “But he built them the flats, he was their friend and he built
them all the flats, the Blacks and the Irish and the Dogs …’

‘Right …’
Helen said.

‘Do you
see what Polly Williams was trying to tell me? Oscar and Katya’s builder, I
used to laugh at him because he was friendly with simple foreigners but I was
wrong. I was being a fool, a supercilious fool. So I got sort of talking to a
couple of them, the natives who were guarding us, in sign language and pidgin English.
Turns out they’d been enthusiastic at first but were going off the whole idea
of being rebels. Didn’t like being cruel to us or being nasty to Polly Williams
the parrot; they were worried that if he was killed his spirit would come back
and haunt them.

‘Apparently
the Chinese guy, his whole plan was he wanted to lure the Australians into a
trap, to jump on them out of the trees, seize their weapons. He had been
expecting to receive a big shipment of things that would help him march on
Port Moresby
and declare himself King of
Papua New Guinea or something but they hadn’t come through. So anyway one night
these friendly natives freed me and the other hostages and together with stones
and sticks we jumped the Chinese guy and his lieutenants while they slept.
Christ, Helen it was nasty … I didn’t know, babe, I could, I didn’t know they
could …‘ During the last few minutes Toby had become increasingly agitated, a
fuddled look rising in his eyes.

The
Spanish doctor lifted the mosquito net, a syringe in his hand. ‘Tovi,’ he said,
‘Tovi, you need to calm down,’ as he injected clear liquid into the prone man’s
arm.

‘Now
one thing, Helen,’ Toby said, grabbing her arm, ‘I need to tell you, one thing,
at the banquet tonight … at the banquet don’t, whatever you do don’t …‘ then
he slumped abruptly into unconsciousness.

As Toby had said there was
a banquet that night. The doctor told them, ‘Yes, I’m sorry about this but the
headman wants you to come and eat with the tribe tonight, it’s a big honour so
you can’t really refuse without giving offence.’

She
asked, ‘Are any of the hostages well enough to attend?’

‘No,
they are all sedated, they’ve had a tough time, but on the good side several of
the tribespeople have told me that Polly Williams was able to fly away in the
confusion and that they have seen him since sitting in a tree telling them wise
things.’

The
houses in the-village were divided into those for the men and those for the
women, all were built on stilts with open sides and intricately thatched roofs.
In the centre of the community to one side of the square there was a longer
house which was kept for ceremonial occasions such as the dinner tonight.

The
doctor, the captain and Helen arrived just as night abruptly fell. When they
trooped up the stairs, women led them to the middle of the hut and they sat
cross-legged in a circle on a woven mat alongside all the elders of the tribe,
several of whose ceremonial dress included red and yellow face paint and large
human-hair wigs trimmed with yellow everlasting daisies.

Helen
asked the SAS captain, ‘If they’d jumped on you out of the trees what do you
think would have happened?’

‘We’d
have shot them, I’d guess.’

‘Yes,
that’d be my guess too.’

Young
girls dressed only in long cloth skirts with garlands of flowers round their
necks entered bearing large roughly carved wooden bowls containing a thick,
gluey broth in which were suspended masses of strange tuber-like vegetables and
lumps of grey stringy meat. As the bowls of soup were placed in front of them,
there was a significant pause during which the headman climbed slowly to his
feet, made an expansive gesture extending both his arms out wide and, smiling
at his honoured guests, declared in a sonorous voice: ‘Soup, swoop, loop de
loop.’

Because she wanted something
from this party Harriet didn’t ask for a dress to wear but instead took out
from the very back of her wardrobe a Mary Quant minidress in black velvet shot through
with silver thread, already vintage when she bought it in her last year of
college from a shop called the Frock Exchange in Muswell Hill and already too
small for her to fit into. She chose to wear black suede high-heeled shoes by
Patrick Cox with it; these had been given to her by Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De
Castro.

She
phoned Patrick and told him that the Namibians would like to meet him but he’d
need to come to a party next door. Harriet detected a note of girlish panic in
his voice when he said, ‘Party, but I don’t have anything to wear to a party,
they wear sharp suits at those parties, I don’t have anything to wear, not a
sharp suit.’

Sighing,
she replied, ‘I’ll find you something.’ Rootling in the back amongst the
thinned-out ranks of hanging garments in her shop, Harriet finally located a
dark blue Hugo Boss suit in Patrick’s size that had had a couple of tiny holes
in it, brought into the shop by a City trader and never picked up.

‘I
don’t have any shoes apart from trainers,’ he then moaned. ‘You’ll get away
with that,’ Harriet said, ‘a suit and trainers is quite fashionable, and I’ll
bring you round a white shirt from Gap or somewhere.’

That
evening, in the coppery sunlight, Harriet strode round to Patrick’s flat in her
high heels, carrying the suit in a bag over her shoulder. When she’d been fat,
men on the street had often shouted insults at her about her weight, now
instead they came close and whispered entreaties and compliments, offers of
dinner or electrical goods; at first she’d liked it but after a while it seemed
the same as when she’d been obese.

Again
she thought about Old Fat Harriet. Wasn’t her new thin self a sort of
collaborator, keeping herself thin for a pack of gangsters? The old her had
been kind, considerate, had lots of friends, a good business and didn’t feel
sour and exhausted all the time.

Up in
Patrick’s bare flat the stiffness between them made her want to say something
nice to him so she said, ‘I must say it’s very clean in here.’

‘Well,
you know,’ he replied, ‘I never really had any hobbies as such. If any of the
women in the gym ask I always say “cleaning”. What I really like is to use a
cotton bud soaked in lemon oil to get at the space behind the taps in my
bathroom, an area a lot of people ignore, then later give the taps an extra
sparkle with a little glycerine. I find it’s easy to get the bloodstains out
of a white T-shirt with little dabs of detergent, followed by hydrogen peroxide
and then I rub on my secret weapon — unseasoned meat tenderiser. Of course I
use cold rather than warm water for this, only fools use warm water which would
just set the stains. To clean my floors I wipe the lino with one part fresh
milk mixed with one part turpentine.’

Then he
experienced a feeling of panic. Patrick had never got on with any of the
teachers at school but the ones he hated most were those who tried to be your
mate, who said, ‘Call me Steve,’ who offered you a fag or amphetamine tablets
and asked what kind of rap music you were into. Had he become that kind of
teacher? Should he have been more distant with Harriet, not got her into this?
Well, no, who was he kidding? In this situation it was Harriet his pupil who
was protecting him; he felt so out of his depth and suddenly wished he wasn’t
going to this parry but could instead stay in his flat repeatedly punching a
bucket of gravel to toughen up his knuckles.

Still, he had to admit to
feeling immensely proud entering the party with Harriet on his arm. Of course
he had been much closer to her, had touched her all over when they fought, but
there was something about the sweetness of her perfume, something about her dress
— what it revealed and what it hid, something about the material of her dress
and her body moving beneath it that prompted faint and unfamiliar stirrings
within him, feelings long suppressed but moving closer like a two-stroke
motorbike heard far off on a country road.

In the
big room the lights were low and the music loud, yet the darkness was alive
with a squirming of bodies that reminded Patrick of worms in a Tupperware box
when as a kid he used to go fishing.

Mr
Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro came towards the two of them; he took Harriet by
the hand, kissed her cheek, then shook hands with the younger man. ‘Ah, I
believe you are the fellow who would like to get his hands on the various …
shall we say hard-to-procure items.’