The Weeping Women Hotel (11 page)

‘I
still don’t see what that’s got to do with carrying on because you didn’t quite
get what you ordered. You knew that Cosmo was upset about what Michael said
about Sasha’s show and it’s probably the last time that that woman’s ever going
to have dinner with her daughter.’

‘I didn’t
get anything that I ordered from that idiot and I don’t see why I should put up
with it.’

‘Well,
where would we be if everybody behaved like that?’ asked Lulu.

‘
France
,’ said Harriet.

Helen stood on the steps
of the law courts and shook hands with Warbird’s legal team, the nicely spoken,
smooth-faced solicitors and the expensive, pointy-nosed barrister that they’d
hired. The case these men had fought for them had been against the bereaved
sons and daughters of an old woman who’d left her entire fortune in her will to
Warbird; the sons and daughters had tried unsuccessfully to get the bequest
reversed, telling the court that their mother was insane, wheeling a sick grandchild
in from Great Ormond Street Hospital on a gurney and staging a rooftop protest
dressed in bird costumes.

Refusing
the offer of a celebratory drink at the stylish hotel across the
Strand
, Helen decided to walk along the
Embankment then catch a train at Blackfriars to King’s Cross where she’d be
able to change on to another that would take her to the little station on the
edge of the park.

The
motion to dismiss the will was always bound to fail because those who had
decided to give their money to her charity, especially the ones who were
cutting out their families, were extremely systematic about making sure their
bequests were legally waterproof.

Though
she never met most of them she still felt great affection for the people who
made donations to her organisation. To Helen they weren’t like the morons who
gave money to charities like the Penrith Disaster Fund — simple-minded idiots
who made an impulsive on-the-spot donation because they’d just seen something
sad on the telly or who bought a charity record and then wallowed in
self-congratulation as if they’d done something noble, while in fact the only
true beneficiary was themselves since they now felt free to carry on living
their self-indulgent, unreflective lives.

She
said to Julio Spuciek, ‘Is it wrong if those of us who work at Warbird treat ourselves
well? Is it bad if we eat nice lunches and sometimes travel about in
limousines?’

‘Of
course it isn’t,’ he replied. ‘Why shouldn’t you? After all, you’ve dedicated
your lives to doing good in the world, you are entitled to treat yourselves
occasionally. You are behaving in exactly the right way.’

‘But
some of those animal rights activists despise organisations like mine, they
see us as soft and corrupt.’

‘No,
those people have allowed themselves to be driven mad by the terrible cruelty
they see all around. You do not allow yourself that luxury. You keep yourself a
little detached and are more effective because of it.’

‘Muchas
gracias,’
she said.

‘De
nada,’
he replied.

The fury that swept over
Patrick when he’d looked in the window of the shop and found out Harriet had
lied to him had taken him completely by surprise. He really didn’t know why he
was walking past her shop right there and then anyway, but she appeared to be
mocking him by sitting there under her yellow light, like she was saying he
wasn’t worth her lousy time, that he’d been wrong to like her even after all
he’d done to try and help her get fit and after all the great chats they’d had
together.

Oh
well, there’s no point in worrying about it now, Patrick thought, heading
towards Harriet’s shop for their next training session. As. always he tried to
walk as Martin Po had told him to: ‘like water flowing downhill’.

When he
saw her standing waiting for him’ in front of the counter a blush of agitation
spreading upwards from her breasts, he was surprised to feel another rush of
anger towards her so he simply said in a tight voice, ‘Shall we go to the park
then?’

‘Yes,’
Harriet replied, looking at the floor.

They
skirted a drinking club of tattooed men and women hungrily guzzling cider from
a big green plastic bottle and soon came to the bowl of earth with the oak tree
at its centre.

‘OK,’
he said. ‘You know what to do.’

‘Aren’t
you going to help me?’

‘No.’

With
difficulty and a sulky look Harriet tried to scramble up to the second branch.
She reminded Patrick of some sort of bulky animal that wasn’t meant to climb
trees, a kangaroo perhaps or an elderly overweight
Labrador
dog. He saw that she was opening some of the recently healed cuts
on her palms as she climbed. Eventually Harriet reached the second branch and
once there raised herself and stood gingerly balanced on the shaky limb looking
at the ground, tears rolling down her nose. Patrick said nothing and after half
a minute she simply stepped off. He remembered they’d told them at school about
Galileo dropping stuff off the leaning tower of Pisa and how a feather and a
cannonball would travel at the same speed, but, really, looking at how Harriet
fell you had to believe that there was a different kind of gravity for fat
people: she travelled at an extraordinary pace, smashing into the ground with a
terrible thump that threw up soil like an artillery shell.

Harriet
lay for a little while on the ground with her fat arse up in the air. He was
almost tempted to tell her to forget it, her breath was laboured and she seemed
to be crying properly now, certainly great snuffly sobs escaped from her face
buried in the earth. Yet after lying there for a few seconds she slowly got up
and, without a word, again climbed into the tree. As before she paused on the
groaning branch, her face streaked with mud and tears running down her cheeks,
before throwing herself once more into the air.

Eight
more times she repeated the jump as she had been told, managing the last couple
of times to land without smashing herself into the ground.

‘I can
do it more times. Should I do it more times? I can do it more times,’ she said
to Patrick, grinning madly with blood showing through the knees of her torn
dungarees and snot running out of her nose.

‘No,
nine times,’ he said, ‘you always have to do a thing like this nine times or
ninety times or nine hundred times, no more and no less.’ He stared at her
standing in front of him, fat and sweaty, panting and gulping with exertion. If
he wanted to he knew it would be possible to leave her now, having done what
was promised; Harriet had done the jump from the second branch of the tree nine
times and that should have been enough but instead he stayed.

‘For
the rest of the hour we’re going to do stone throwing,’ he told the quivering
mud-streaked woman in front of him. ‘Stand with your back to the tree.’ Walking
nine yards away, Patrick picked up a small stone from the ground while she
reeled towards the tree. Then he turned and threw it at Harriet not quite with
full force but still causing her to yelp in pain and jump in the air as the
stone snapped into her lower leg.

After
half an hour and nine times nine stones bouncing off different fleshy parts of
her body and her eventually managing not to flinch at each blow, he instructed
Harriet to throw some stones at him.

‘Throw
stones at you?’

‘Yeah.
Here,’ he said, bending down and handing her the small pebble he’d picked up.

She
threw like a girl but worse, not even succeeding in hitting him from nine feet
away.

‘Throw
harder and better!’ he yelled, but she still didn’t manage to get any shots on
target until the hour was nearly up when with her last shot she caught the
young man on the face, cutting his lip open.

‘Yes!’
she shouted with furious glee, jumping in the air with her fists clenched, arms
aloft, before seeing the blood on his face. and collapsing. ‘Oh Christ, I’m so
sorry,’ she wailed.

‘Stay
where you are!’ Patrick shouted. Then, ‘You know what to do during the week?’

‘What?’
she asked, too distressed to understand the question. ‘You know what to do
during the week?’ he asked once more. ‘Er … Jump nine times a day from the
second branch?’ ‘That’s right.’ Then he paused. ‘By the way I forgot to get my
forty pounds, you know with all that went on last week, so that’ll be eighty
with this week as well.’

Harriet
pushed her glasses back up her nose and reaching into the tight back pocket of
her dungarees with shaking hands brought out a clammy wad of notes; she peeled
off four twenties and handed them to Patrick.

‘Thanks.’
Then he said to her, ‘By the way you might want to get contact lenses, or have
laser surgery instead of those glasses.’

Honestly! Harriet thought
to herself that throwing the stones was nearly the most embarrassing thing
she’d ever done, an untidy unravelling of her limbs that caused the pebble to
travel about four feet before plipping to the ground. Then when she did hit him
she was amazed to feel such wild exultation … well, that didn’t even go
halfway to describing it, it was like every blood cell in her body was doing a
wild victory dance, then when she saw the cut on his lip she felt as terrible
as she’d felt ecstatic a second before, so terrible that she wanted to fall to
the ground to grovel all day at his feet and repair all his clothes and send
him a whole smoked salmon from Canada but he wouldn’t let her do anything.

She’d
been feeling pretty good up to that point. Standing on the second branch she
was at a negligible height, a height that was less than halfway up her stairs,
an amount of feet and inches she disregarded twenty times a day but that was
suddenly significant since she was going to jump it. Harriet thought to
herself that this must be how an agoraphobic feels: where once perhaps they had
taken underground trains without a thought, sailed on ferries and danced
amongst seething crowds in clubs with inadequate fire escapes, now the trip
down the hall to the front door contained too much terror for them.

The
solution was the same, she thought: to face your fears. Harriet stepped from
the branch and into the void and experienced something for which she’d yearned
all her adult life — weightlessness. Abruptly with that single step she had no
body, no flailing limbs, no fleshy, demanding, restricting, smelly packaging —
there was simply her and her mind in freefall through the singing air.

Like he told everybody, he
was only trying to help. Toby had been sitting in a branch of the Pretzel Shed
on the concourse of Euston Station because they have free newspapers in there
when another customer, a young man of around thirty, suddenly started acting
all odd, slurring his words, waving his arms about in an uncoordinated fashion
before slumping in a faint on to the counter. Now because he was a keen watcher
of medical shows on the television —
ER, Holby
City and
Casualty
—
Toby had sort of got the idea that he had a basic grasp of medicine, so he said
to the staff who were flapping about ineffectually in a variety of foreign
languages over this passed-out man, ‘It’s all right, this chap’s clearly a
diabetic and he’s become hypoglycaemic, we just need to give him something
sweet to eat then he’ll be fine.’ So the boys and girls forced down the man’s
throat some of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s Death By Chocolate, which it nearly turned
out to be because the paramedics said that was exactly the wrong thing to give
him in what Toby thought was an unnecessarily unpleasant manner.

Wandering
north along Camden High Street he wondered whether Harriet had asked that guy
about his football lessons. He’d gone into her shop to ask about it earlier in
the week but she’d acted very odd when he’d mentioned him.

‘What
are those marks on your face?’ Toby had asked. ‘And on your hands?’

‘Rough
housing,’ Harriet replied.

‘Rough
housing?’

‘Rough
housing.’

‘Rough
housing with who?’

‘With
Patrick; my personal training can be a little more physical than you might
imagine.’

‘Obviously.’
He felt like a cop in a movie where he’s’ standing on the doorstep talking to a
woman and there’s a gunman hiding behind the door with a gun to the woman’s
head so she can’t ask for help but the cop’s too thick to notice there’s
anything wrong so he goes away and the woman gets murdered or sorts out the
situation by herself. Come to think of it, she had a sort of pleading
expression on her face as well, a kind of mad, direct stare. Except there was
no gunman; well, he supposed there might have been one hiding amongst the racks
of clothing but he’d seen her since and if there was she hadn’t mentioned it.

Toby
wondered as he walked along whether somebody living alone could suffer from
domestic violence.

All the next week Harriet
practised jumping from the second branch and when Patrick came she was OK about
throwing herself from the third branch even though it was really quite high.
After the jumping they went back to her place and did the standing about like a
horse thing again. Patrick didn’t stay afterwards to chat any more like she’d
hoped; she supposed he was still quite angry with her, but he did say as he was
leaving, ‘Do you know the community centre in the park?’