The Weeping Women Hotel (35 page)

‘That’s
right,’ Patrick replied, trying to keep his voice neutral.

‘Well,
let us sit down and discuss it.’ He led the couple to a low table in the corner
where the noise was slightly less.

‘Would
you like a drink?’

‘Of
course. A white wine, the good stuff not the crap you’d give to anyone else,’
Harriet said, smiling fondly.

Patrick
tried to ask for a tomato juice but Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said, ‘No,
you must have a drink with us.’

‘I
couldn’t …’

‘Tell
him, Harriet, tell him he must have a drink with us, we will be offended if he
does not.’

‘C’mon,
Patrick,’ she said, ‘one drink that’s all, don’t be a stiff.’

A
bottle of white wine was soon brought to their table. Harriet took a glass and
handed it to him.

‘Well,
I suppose so.’

Patrick
took a sip of the wine; it was cold and oily and sharp at the same time. He
wondered how they’d managed to get so many more sensations into a drink since
he’d last had one.

Seeing
the direction Patrick was looking in, Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro smiled
and asked, ‘You like that, do you?’ He hadn’t known he’d been staring but when
the Namibian spoke Patrick realised he’d been gazing at a redheaded woman who’d
been dancing almost naked in front of an elderly, moustachioed, white-haired
gent with a silver-topped walking stick.

Patrick
thought he’d emptied his wine glass but it seemed to be full again. Taking
another long pull he replied, ‘She seems like a nice girl.’

‘Would
you like me to get her to dance for you?’

‘Oh,
c’mon, Akbar!’ he heard Harriet say.

‘What?’
he asked, turning to her. ‘Patrick’s a grown-up, if he’d like a dance he should
have a dance.’

‘I
would like a dance,’ he said.

‘See,
he would like a dance.’

He
smiled at Harriet, his pupil, his friend; she seemed to be scowling back at him
but he was the sifu. Like Akbar said, he could do what he wanted. Mr Iqubal
Fitzherbert De Castro summoned one of his young men who went and brought the
girl over; she couldn’t have been more than twenty and she still wasn’t as
pretty as his Harriet but on the upside she was more or less naked.

‘You ‘ave
to keep your hands by your side,’ she explained to Patrick.

‘Right,’
he said.

Then
she began to dance in front of him; it was a bit like when they went to museums
and art galleries with the school — you couldn’t touch anything there either
and this was confusing too but in a different way. Her bottom was so close to
him that he could see the tiny bumps on’ her skin, at other times a breast came
so near it went all blurred in his vision. To Patrick it seemed impossible that
somebody could do this in front of you without being yours to do with as you
wished.

When
she had finished Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro tucked a twenty pound note
into her thong; the younger man wanted him to buy him another one and at the
same time for it never to happen again.

‘Would
you like another one?’

‘Yes,’
he said, feeling like some sort of sultan in a film, ‘but a different girl.’

This
one was older with black hair but a much better dancer.

As he called another girl
over to dance Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro caught Harriet looking at him.
She didn’t know quite what he read in her face but while the new dancer
wriggled for the mesmerised, unhearing Patrick, the older man said to her,
‘That man who shouts into the sardine tin he loved us at first, he would come
around all the time and I must admit it was good to have him there, to talk to
him like I talk to you.

‘Then
after a time he became disenchanted with us and quite abusive; one thing he
said, he said people like me and my associates are shown on the TV and in movies
as being as diverse as ordinary people, some are nice, some are nasty, but he
said it wasn’t the truth, he said you cannot do what we do and be nice, because
of what we do every one of us is horrible, horrible people.’

Hours later Patrick and
Harriet came out of the flat into the hot, lethargic night air scented with the
musky odour of the climbing roses that grew in the gardens of the nearby
houses. Harriet’s observation was that Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro had
looked Patrick over and found him not worthy of exploiting with his silly list
of impossible things. She calculated that he had drunk nearly a whole bottle of
wine which must have been quite a shock to his system after whatever it was,
nine years? Harriet couldn’t remember if he’d he stopped drinking at the same
time as he’d stopped spilling his seed; was not drinking supposed to help make
him immortal as well or was there no connection?

In the
end who cares? she thought to herself, it was all crap anyway; it might be good
if he appreciated that then he might be a bit less of a freak.

Harriet said, ‘Let’s take
a walk in the park.’ When they reached the edge of the grass she paused and
resting one hand on his shoulder took off her high-heeled shoes. The earth was
warm under her feet as they crossed the springy turf, coloured grey under the
sodium lights but turning silvery as they pressed deeper towards the trees
where the only illumination was starlight.

The
wine had given Patrick a kind of loose feeling inside and this made him want to
try and let Harriet know a little more of what kind of man he was and how much
she meant to him. He knew he had somehow lost her over the last few months,
lost her admiration and respect and it might be a way to get her back. Patrick
said, his eyes a little unfocused and his brow dusted with sweat, ‘You know,
Harriet, I hear the women talk at the gym and from what they say it seems
there’s this thing between friends where if one of them does something —
juggling, cooking, accountancy — then everybody has to pretend to them that
they’re brilliant at it. If you go to watch a performance or eat dinner at
their house everybody has to act like it’s brilliant even if it isn’t. Thing is
though’ —his voice rough with sentiment — ‘the special thing, Harriet, is
you’re beautiful and a friend and I can say honestly that you are really good
at Li Kuan Yu, you know that, don’t you? Almost as good as me in fact.’

Better
than you, she thought to herself but just said, ‘Thank you very much.’

He
said, ‘Did you ever see any of those early Clint Eastwood movies?’

‘The
cowboy ones?’

‘Yeah,
those. The guy he plays in them movies, he’s got this blank face, hasn’t he?
And everybody takes that to mean that he’s really brave and cool but really a
guy who has to keep his face that straight all the time, he must be terrified
of showing his feelings, scared that if he lets anybody see who he really is
they’ll hate him.’

They’d
reached the oak tree; she reached out for him and said, ‘Kiss me,’ and he said,
‘No,’ once as Harriet pressed him back against the rough bark but soon her lips
were on his and his hands were reaching under her dress. Quickly Harriet took
her pants off, slipped her dress over her head, then she dragged the jacket and
T-shirt from his body, undid his belt and slipped her hands down the front of
his trousers beneath his underpants. It had been such a long time since
Harriet had had sex with a man that she’d forgotten how hot cocks could get
when they were really hard and filled with blood; she felt as if she was
holding the wooden handle of an expensive French frying pan or one of those
things you put in your gloves on freezing cold days to keep your hands warm.

Their
bodies were familiar to each other through fighting and the way they touched
now was sort of the same but very different; they pawed and pulled at one
another, Harriet caressing his whole torso, feeling the muscles shift against
one another under the translucent skin before they both began to concentrate
their questing hands and mouths exclusively on each other’s secret places.

‘It’s gone, you took it!’
he screamed.

‘What?’

‘My
immortality! You’ve stolen it!’

They
had fallen asleep underneath the branches of the oak tree. After perhaps an
hour, slowly surfacing, Harriet had got up and found her dress in one of the
lower branches and pulled it on before going back to lie next to him, her cheek
against his chest.

She was
wondering how long it would be before she could wake Patrick or maybe simply
leave him there to creep back to her own warm, welcoming bed when he had come
to with a sudden jolt, knocked her aside and scrabbled to his feet still naked.
Harriet slowly got up so that she was facing him.

She
couldn’t say it made her feel good that the recollection of what they’d done a
little while ago, the first sex she’d had in years, produced that sort of
reaction.

‘Nine
years!’ he shouted. ‘Nine years of not spilling my fucking seed. Not touching a
woman or even myself; can you imagine what that’s like when you’re a young man
only in your twenties? Do you understand what you’ve done?’

‘As far
as I can see all I’ve done is to give you a really good night out and a fuck.’

‘You’ve
stolen my immortality! You got down on your knees and with your dirty little
lips sucked my immortality out of me! You straddled me and pulled out my
power!’

‘And I
enjoyed doing it too.’

His
voice rising hysterically Patrick yelled, ‘Now I’ll have to save up my fluids
for another nine years before I’m safe and who knows what’ll happen in that
time. I could be killed at any moment!’ And he actually looked around for
lurking predators as he said this.

‘Oh,
don’t be such an idiot, can’t you see all that stuff was mystical crap? I’ve
done you a favour by taking your stupid fluids. Maybe now you can start to live
a proper life in the real world and have some fun.’

As she
finished speaking he took a step back and gave her two hard rapid punches to
the face, the first almost certainly breaking her nose. She staggered back,
bumping into the tree, blood and snot rolling down over her lips and chin.

‘Oh Christ,’
he said, looking horrified and holding his cupped hands to his face. She took
advantage of him leaving his body wide open to punch him between the legs with
her right fist. For a follow-up Harriet tried to kick him with her left leg,
but Patrick countered by hooking under her ankle with his foot, unbalancing her
and sending her’ slamming backwards to the ground, banging the back of her head
hard on the solid soil as she landed, leaving her stunned for a second. Keeping
to Harriet’s side Patrick lifted his leg and tried to stamp down on his
adversary’s face. Rolling sideways, just missing his plummeting foot as it hit
the ground raising a cloud of dust, she snapped back and grabbed his stamping
leg; finding the nerve point four inches above the ankle on the inside with her
thumb, she pressed hard. As the paralysing pain shot through Patrick he buckled
slightly; taking advantage of his temporary weakness she grabbed the lower leg
up to the knee and jerked. They both fell backwards, Harriet on top, Patrick
legs apart, disoriented. She went for his eyes with a split two-finger strike;
it failed because Patrick raised his hand edge outward along the nose.

As she
raked and gouged, he flipped her over, drew back his fist and punched again,
hitting Harriet full in the face breaking her cheekbone. She struck back,
snapping upwards with an open palm blow which landed perfectly under his jaw
and jolted his head back.

It
wasn’t enough. Patrick straddled her and pushing the shoulders down crossed his
wrists over her collarbone. Grabbing Harriet’s top for leverage, he dug his
knuckles into the carotid arteries and pressed down. The light was going out in
her head, fading into a warm, welcoming silence when she heard a distant
screaming that sounded confusingly as if it was approaching from beneath the
ground. Groggily she wondered whether demons were coming to get her and after
all there was a heaven and a hell, wouldn’t she be embarrassed if that was the
case? As the screaming reached a pitch the earth beside the flailing couple
exploded, clods of turf, soil, branches and leaves flew upward from the ground
to rain down on to her face, gritty soil filling her open gasping mouth as the
upper part of the Tin Can Man’s torso appeared abruptly beside her.

‘I’m
here now,
Lynn
,’ he said
quietly, staring into the woman’s eyes. Then, face smeared with dirt, the older
man climbed from his muddy hole in the ground.

Patrick,
relaxing his grip on Harriet, rose to face him. ‘Look, mate,’ he said, ‘this
don’t have nothing to do with you.’

The Tin
Can Man opened his mouth and laughed, revealing two neat rows of little yellow
teeth, then without any change of attitude struck. When Harriet had seen people
fight at the dojo it was always a choreographed dance, while the way the Tin
Can Man came at Patrick reminded her more than anything else of an enraged
baboon. There was no precision, no elegance, no move you could put a nice name
to: simply there was the flailing fury of a man who’s lost his family and lived
in a hole in the ground for three years, who’s had his belongings pissed on,
who didn’t care about, indeed welcomed, pain.