The Weeping Women Hotel (6 page)

All of
this made Harriet furious, she hated the injustice and the cruelty of it and
she missed the little old ladies. Most of all though, she objected to the way
the boys who lived rent-free in the adjoining house constantly piled rubbish
bags and mounds of rotting food against her front step. As she stepped over the
garbage she’d felt herself seethe with rage, a rage that was swiftly followed
by a crushing sense of powerlessness. Harriet fantasised often about
confronting these rough-looking boys with one of those electric gatling guns
you saw in
Hollywood
movies,
laughing insanely as the bullets ripped into them and feathers flew from their
big puffed-up jackets. Outside her head she scuttled out of their way and said
nothing and kept her head down, since they seemed to be so many and she was
frightened of enraging them. Harriet suspected some of the boys had pushed
their own grandmothers down the stairs, so there was no knowing what they’d do
to her.

A few
months before, she had been burgled and the police said that it was most likely
the Namibian boys who’d done it, since there were CCTV cameras that covered
most of the pavement, though not the adjacent front doors, and nobody suspicious
had been spotted approaching her place. She felt another huge rush of hate for
the young men as she thought about the brooch, her only memento of her mother,
which they had stolen. Harriet’s fury wasn’t cut off until she stepped through
the doors of the pub on the corner.

Until the year 2000 the
pub had been a typical north
London
boozer called the Admiral Codrington, then it was gutted like an
organic salmon and began serving a different kind of food and drink to the new
people moving into the area. A few old-time drinkers hung on still, never
moving out of an area of stripped wooden floor that had once been the public
bar, though now they had to nurse pints of Czech Staropramen Pilsner or a stout
from the
Aleutian Islands
called Gleck in place of their fizzy keg
London
bitter.

‘Hello,
Jago … Hello, Alaric,’ Harriet said to the barmen, ‘pint of Gleck please.’

Her two
friends were already there, seated at a pine table, a half-drunk bottle of
white wine between them. She picked up the beer — it was cloudy and the greasy
glass was only three-quarters full but she still paid the price of a budget
flight to
Corsica
for it — and
went to sit down. Rose had been on the same fashion course as Harriet at the
college in Middlesex that they had all attended. Now she was a successful
costume designer working on TV programmes and films. Though she lived alone,
while she was away on location she often had affairs with married men on the
crew, usually a senior electrician or the cameraman. Once Harriet had asked
her, ‘Don’t you feel guilty about having sex with all these married men?’

‘D.C.O.L,
darling,’ Rose replied.

‘What
does that mean?’ she asked.

‘D.C.O.L.,
— Doesn’t Count On Location.’

‘Right …‘
she said. ‘Y.H.A.G.B.A.’

‘Eh?’

‘Y.H.A.G.B.A.
— Your Heart Always Gets Broken Anyway.’

Lulu
had been a star at college, a student on the popular drama course that the
school ran, tipped for success, but somehow she had not done very well in the
outside world as an actress, so in her mid-twenties Lulu had retrained as a
psychologist. Now she was very much in demand, she had her own busy private
practice and was often called on to testify in the law courts, where her hammy
acting skills were perfect in that arena of bad theatre. From what Harriet
could see Lulu’s job was to attest that clearly deranged killers were no danger
to society and should be released immediately, or to ‘affirm that obviously
kind, loving parents must have their children taken off them by social services
without delay. Like most psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists and
counsellors that she’d met — and Harriet had met a good number, having been
paying for various forms of therapy all her adult life — Lulu possessed no clue
as to the reasons behind her own actions so she continually behaved in a manner
well over the borders of sanity. Harriet reflected that Lulu was fortunate in
respect of her career choice, since out of simple professional courtesy no
other mental health care professional would ever agree to have her sectioned.

Then of
course inevitably she felt guilty .over thinking bad things about Lulu so
decided to extravagantly praise the other woman’s jacket (which was horrible).
There was a chain of shops with branches in all the therapist-infested areas of
north
London
— Hampstead,
Muswell Hill, Crouch End — called Medina De Muswell Hill that seemed to sell
clothes only to women psychologists — huge tent-like dresses, jackets made out
of sacking and long scarves seemingly decorated with trails of acidic vomit.

As it
turned out Harriet didn’t get a chance to say anything to Lulu since as she sat
down Lulu was staring with a furious expression on her face at a blurred woman
right across the other side of the pub. ‘That woman over there’s talking about
me, ‘she hissed, ‘she’s saying I’m a bastard.’

‘Oh
yeah?’ Harriet said, having grown so used by now to Lulu’s outbursts that she
hardly noticed them. She took a tobacco tin out of the pocket of her dungarees
and began to roll a cigarette, before remembering with annoyance that she was
no longer allowed to smoke in the pub.

She
hoped they wouldn’t talk about their personal lives tonight: Lulu was obsessed
with a married Greek Orthodox priest whom she’d seen once in a shop and Rose
was conducting a romance with somebody she wasn’t quite sure was a man over the
internet.

For a
while she’d been planning not to turn up at the pub, to leave her friends
wondering where she was and when they phoned to ask why she wasn’t there to
pretend to have forgotten about the whole thing.

If
Harriet was mad at the neighbours for stealing her mother’s brooch, she was
also overcome with relief that they hadn’t found her most secret shameful thing
hidden in a secret compartment in the bottom of the sewing machine. It wasn’t
spiked nipple clamps or a signed Phil Collins CD but a small notebook. On one
half of each page in neat, precise handwriting was a column headed ‘I’ for
incoming calls and a column headed ‘0’ for outgoing. Beneath each column was a
list of the same initials. ‘R’, ‘L’, ‘P’ and ‘K’ and next to each initial was
written something like ‘1 txt, 2 pc or 4 ems’. This simple code was a list of
her friends and a record of the incoming phone calls, text messages and e-mails
they had sent to her and the number of the same she had sent to them. When the
entries in the ‘0’ column vastly outweighed those for the ‘I’ column Harriet
broke off contact until they more or less balanced out. (She was prepared to
accept a twenty-five per cent imbalance in outgoing over incoming as being more
or less an equality.)

The
entry for ‘K’ was a man called Kevin Macardle who’d come into the shop two
months ago to pick up a repair and had asked if she wanted to go out for a
drink, maybe, sometime, whenever. The ‘Outgoing’ column read: “‘K” 27 txts, 19 pcs,
46 ems’; the ‘Incoming’ tally read: “‘K” 0 txts, 0 pcs 0 ems.’

Harriet
thought there were so many ways now in which people were able not to get in
touch with you. When she’d been a student there’d only been a payphone on the
hall landing and it was easy to tell yourself that friends had rung and left a
mess age with some drug-addled engineering student or confused African who’d
forgotten it in the very moment of being told. Now, though, there was your
mobile phone with message icons for both verbal and SMS Text to remain unlit,
e-mail in-box that stayed empty and even the dear old fax that vomited out
missive after missive about how you could buy a cheap panel van or go on the
lemonade diet but never a kind word from a friend. And to make sure that
absolutely nobody had called you at home while you were out there was always
1471 to dial up simply to check that you were surely-alone in a collapsing
universe.

Up
until the night before there had been an imbalance of over thirty-six per cent
in outgoing communications between Harriet and both Lulu and Rose but an hour
and a half phone call from Lulu the night before during which the battery on
her cordless phone went dead, she descended two floors to the shop in order to
pick up the other handset, switched it on and found Lulu still talking, evened
things out.

‘So, you looking forward
to the big workout?’ Harriet asked.

‘What?’
queried Rose.

‘The
personal training with the guy?’ she replied.

‘What
guy?’

‘Oh
shit, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.’

‘Forgotten
what?’ enquired Lulu.

‘The
guy from the gym, you remember? You two were saying you really wanted to get
fit, you were determined to do it this time and nothing was going to stop you.
So I said I would book this kid from my gym to come round and give us some
personal training next Wednesday afternoon.’

‘I
don’t remember anything about this,’ said Rose. ‘Anyway I can’t come, I’m going
to
Wales
to work on a film
about Methodists.’

‘And I
can’t go,’ added Lulu, ‘because it’s the Greek Orthodox festival of Santa
Kyriou and Constantine might need me to erm … to do something for him.’

Harriet
knew better than to mention that
Constantine
was unlikely to need her to do anything, since he wasn’t aware of
her existence and mentioning that inconvenient-fact would only provoke one of
Lulu’s rages. She was less certain whether Rose’s excuse was true or not but
again it would be difficult to challenge her on it since she would go to
extraordinary lengths to back up the most outrageous lies, even producing
forged documents and dragging out obviously bribed witnesses to back up some
minor lie she’d been challenged on.

‘Well,
it’s going to be bloody uncomfortable,’ she sighed, ‘with just me and him there
in my big upstairs room. I’m just going to have to cancel the whole bloody
thing.’

Except that somehow she
never did cancel the whole bloody thing, so on the following Wednesday at
exactly one minute to three, from her worktable, dressed already in her
tracksuit, she saw Patrick walking rapidly alongside the park. Without seeming
to look whether there was any traffic coming, he abruptly changed direction and
swerved across the road towards the shop. Suddenly, seeing him outside the
confines of the gym, she took in how slightly odd-looking he was, too pale and
shiny, like a waxwork. Harriet got a touch of the Fear: she had thought she
knew him a bit, that he was a sort of friend, but she realised that was only
within the peculiar interior of Muscle Bitch; outside it he was just another
odd-looking young man in sports clothes whom she had invited to come to her
upstairs room to do things to her.

Observing
him approach, Harriet thought to herself that he walked rather like a fly
flies: with short little steps, his arms stiff by his side, he crossed the
pavement in a dead straight line then, encountering her doorway, veered through
it, disappearing from sight for a micro-second until, without slowing down,
Patrick was in the shop taking another direct trajectory to her worktable.

‘Where
are your friends?’ he asked, coming to a halt so suddenly that he swayed
backwards and forwards on the spot until the force of his forward motion had
dissipated.

Discomforted
by the abruptness of his question and having no time to summon up one of the
lies she’d prepared, Harriet said truthfully, ‘They let me down, they said they
wanted to do it then they pretended they didn’t.’

Patrick
stood at the counter not speaking, his face immobile, inscrutable, so she felt
forced to babble on.

‘Do you
want to cancel? I feel like I’ve let you down, I have let you down, I’ll pay
for the session anyway, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll pay for the session anyway.’

After a
second’s thought he said, ‘No, I’m here and if I’m getting paid we should do
it.’

‘Right,
OK,’ Harriet said, unsure of whether this was the outcome she’d wished for or
not; she wouldn’t have minded a nice nap round about now and some pancakes.
‘You’d better come upstairs then.’

Harriet’s
shop occupied the ground floor of the building: there was a space for the
customers, then the L-shaped counter with the till on it, behind which were
rails of repaired clothing on hangers shrouded in plastic and her worktable
which she’d placed in the window with a strong bright industrial lamp on it
made out of grey crackled metal. Harriet had thought when moving in that she
would be able to look up from the scraps of cotton and shards of material and
from time to time smilingly observe the activity of her neighbourhood, but in
reality half the time when she did this there was something not very nice going
on: a man shaking a crying girl, two uniformed security guards smoking crack in
a parked car through a trumpet of silver paper or a one-legged pigeon stumbling
about, constantly falling over and getting up again only to fall down once
more. A door at the side of the shop set in the ancient tongue and grooved
walls opened into a corridor with its own front door to the street and stairs
that led up to her flat on the second and third floors, so that in the evenings
and on Sundays she could come and go without having to pass through the
workspace.