The Weeping Women Hotel (13 page)

‘Afterwards
he brought me here to the community centre café. When we were sat down at a
table the Chinese man introduced himself. He told me his name was Martin Po. 1
told him mine was Patrick O’Reilly.

‘Then
just like I told you my story he told me his. He said he was born in 1949, in
Hong Kong
. His family lived in a place
known as the
Walled
City
, it sounded like a strange place.
When
Britain
beat
China
in the Opium Wars they leased the
New
Territories
for ninety-nine years. Somehow in the agreement the
Old
Kowloon
Walled
City
got left out, so that afterwards it
was claimed by both the Chinese and the British as their territory.

‘It was
like a big council estate on a rocky hill where everybody had built their own
apartments without any kind of regulation you might get a bit of the idea.
Everyone’s flat was on top of everyone else’s flat, their living room jutting
into your kitchen, your bedroom on top of their toilet. The buildings were
connected at all different levels: there might be a door in the floor of your
bedroom that dropped you into a narrow passageway, or a panel at the back of
the living room behind the TV giving into a dark alley with water dripping down
the walls and piles of garbage everywhere. Electricity was tapped from outside mains,
wells were drilled to get water. Mixed in with the apartments were sweatshops
and factories. The place was lawless, the
Hong Kong
police rarely entered and the Triads controlled a lot of the
day-to-day life.

‘Nevertheless
Martin’s family though poor were honest and, for the
Walled
City
, well
educated. His father was a clerk in the colonial customs house; his mother a
teacher. They wanted the best for their only son but couldn’t afford an
academy, so they sent him away, aged seven, to Blue Cloud Monastery, on a high
mountain in the
New
Territories
, run by Taoist monks. There he
learnt mathematics, the Chinese classics, calligraphy, acrobatics, meditation,
herbal medicine and a style of Wu Shu boxing known as White Crane kung fu.

‘He
missed his family but studied hard and became one of the most promising
students the monks had ever seen. At the annual rice pounding festival it is
said that he ground more rice than any boy of his age. Yet Blue Cloud Monastery
was a cruel place. The monks earned money for its upkeep and recruited new
converts by touring their students in a troupe around villages and towns and
sometimes to
Hong Kong
itself.
The youngsters demonstrated their hard Ch’i Kung skills by being beaten by iron
bars, jumping through burning hoops and making six-layer human pyramids. Many
children were injured, but there was no hospital or sympathy from their Taoist
masters, only bitter herbs.

‘Aged
thirteen Martin became disillusioned with this hard life and deserted the
circus on a trip to
Hong Kong
.
Shorn of discipline, he said he entered a dark period. Under the influence of
one of the many Triad gangs in the
Walled
City
, the Black
Singlet Cobra 13, he smoked opium, listened to jive music and almost ruined his
internal chi. He also developed a fondness for ballroom dancing.

‘Martin
Po’s family were worried that their only son would ruin his life hanging round
Locarnos and chasing the dragon, so for his sake they gave up everything and
together emigrated to England in search of a better life. Unfortunately, they
were misled by relatives and his educated parents found themselves owners of
the Happy Garden Chinese Takeaway in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

‘In
1965
at the age of fifteen, he was in a foreign land, with no friends. Ballrooms
were unknown in
Kettering
.
Though he heard there was a
Mecca
in
Northampton
,
adolescent Chinese were not welcome there. He refused to help his father,
instead spending his time in the flat above the
Happy
Garden
watching
the television, all-in wrestling on Saturday afternoon and his favourite shows,
Robin Hood
and Come
Dancing.

‘The
new towns of
Kettering
and
Corby
were not the best places in
Britain
to open a Chinese chip shop. The
area around
Kettering
was known
as Little Scotland in the 1960s. There was no work in
Scotland
so men and their families came down to work in the steel mills, the
Aquascutum factory and the famous
Corby
trouser press factory.

‘Most
of the Scots were Glasgow Rangers fans, fanatical Protestant Christians. Many
nights he watched his father taking terrible abuse from these huge drunken men.
One summer night in 1967, when Glasgow Celtic won the European Cup, a gang of
drunken Scots got the idea that his father was a Catholic Christian, a rival
sect. They jumped the counter and held his hand in the fat fryer whilst urging
him to say, “Queen good, Pope a bastard.” Hearing his father’s screams, Martin
rushed downstairs. He tried to save his dad but he had neglected his training.
Martin’s rusty kung fu had no effect on these giants; their pain receptors had
been dulled by huge amounts of drink and they merely laughed at the boy before
them, battering him to the ground and kicking him unconscious. His father’s
hand was completely crippled, and they had to sell the
Happy
Garden
. Social
services provided the family with a council flat on an estate in
Corby
but his father now had a total
breakdown and wouldn’t leave the house.

‘Martin
swore revenge on those who had mutilated his father, but how to do it? He
calculated that while the methods of Chinese boxing taught by his old academy
had many valuable elements, dealing with enormous alcoholic Scotsmen was
outside the experience of the Shaolin monks and required something more suited
to the modern world of the 1960s. But how to devise it and what to call it? It
was almost unknown to see Asians on the TV but one night his mother called him
to say there was something on about a mighty Chinese warrior. It was a piece on
the BBC programme
Panorama
about Lee Kuan Yew, the first leader of
independent
Singapore
. The
programme was not favourable because in Singapore long hair was banned, chewing
gum was outlawed and people were sent to prison for crossing the road at the
wrong time. But Martin thought any man who could corral and unite the
disputatious Malays, Han Chinese, Indians and the Straits Muslims must be a
mighty warrior indeed, so he named his fighting method Li Kuan Yu in tribute to
him.

‘Now it
had a modern name what would be its foundation? Of course Li Kuan Yu is rooted
in his training at the monastery, but where would its modern influences come
from that would help him defeat the giant alcoholic Scotsmen?

‘He
thought of Richard Green’s
Robin Hood,
which he had watched so avidly,
recalling the scenes where the merry men regularly jumped out of trees on to
their enemies. This gave him the inspiration for the Li Kuan Yu signature form,
Anaconda Tree Jump Vine Strike. He spent hours hiding in trees and jumping out
of them in order to perfect this art. Another move in Li Kuan Yu is called
Broom Staff Pike Stance which, while it may resemble an Aiki Jujitsu Jo weapons
form, is also influenced by Little John out of
Robin Hood.
From his
other favourite show
Come Dancing
he took many examples of fancy
footwork and complicated turns.

‘Out in
the wider world to make money Martin took work as a waiter in local Chinese
restaurants, but even here he got more inspiration: the drunken customers of
these places led to him inventing Roll Eyes Fall on Enemy which involved
deceiving your opponent by staggering around pretending to be drunk then
falling on top of him; some of the inspiration for Roll Eyes Fall on Enemy,
also came to Martin from a Big Daddy/Giant Haystacks body slam.

‘It
took four years before Martin felt he was ready to take revenge on those who’d
attacked his father. The leader of. the gang was a steel worker called Scots
Billy, who lived on the Glenfiddich council estate. Martin silently watched from
the shadows as Scots Billy and his fellow gang members spent many evenings
drinking in the local pubs. On the night chosen for revenge he raced ahead of
them to the estate and arrived in time to see the three cackling drunks heading
for one of the entrances. Martin ran silently up the opposite stairwell. The
estate was built on eight deck levels. He went up three flights then leant over
the balcony; he could hear Scots Billy singing and chanting below. Martin hung
from the railings in Anaconda Tree Strike preparation form, suspended in the
blackness. As Scots Billy rounded the corner on to the landing below, he
launched himself down, wrapping his legs round the head of the startled steel
worker.

‘Scots
Billy fell forward with the young Chinese man on his back like a rodeo rider.
He dug his fingers into Billy’s ears and wrapped his thumbs round the big man’s
temples, digging into his eye sockets. Expanding his chi from the chest, he
pulled the skull apart, exposing for a second the fontanelles which had closed
six months after Billy was born. He twisted the head for good measure and
completed with Knuckles to Temples Big Headache, a deadly pressure-point blow.

‘Scots
Billy fell forward like a
Sherwood Forest
oak. The second man was next, another Scot called Big Barry.
Swooping upward from Snake Creeps Down into Golden Cock Stands on One Leg,
Martin hammered his fingers firmly into the big man’s groin, twisted and
pulled; that did for him. The third made to run, but Martin sidled alongside
and tangoed him down the corridor before dipping like Victor Sylvester.
Scooping up, he flipped the man over the balcony where he was impaled on the
railings below. Then,’ Patrick finished, ‘he ran to
London
.’

‘You
mean he ran away to
London
?’
Harriet asked.

‘No, he
ran to
London
. Down the A43,
A15 and the
A5.
Running all the way using his Tibetan Lung Pa stride, he
arrived in Stanmore eight hours later, feeling only slightly breathless.’

As Patrick finished
talking Harriet had been thinking of Roland Malone, recalling the time when
he’d been on tour and had found a book in some provincial dressing room called
something like
Mysteries of the Universe Revealed.
The actor had gone
through a phase where after reading this book he could provide banal and
tedious explanations for every mystery or enigma that anyone ever mentioned.
He’d say, ‘You know Cézanne painted like that after he was kicked in the head
by a horse in
Pamplona
and
started seeing everything in funny shapes.’ That was his explanation of
post-Impressionism.

Harriet
had never thought for one second that the things she’d been doing these last
couple of weeks had any kind of explanation; if she had considered it at all
she’d sort of assumed that Patrick had invented the tree jumping and the stone
throwing right there and then because her lying had annoyed him so much, that
it had all come out of his feelings for her even if those feelings were mostly
extreme annoyance. That it had been something unique to the two of them.

She felt
desperately sad that it wasn’t special after all. She tried to hang on to the
fact that whatever they’d been doing the past couple of weeks at least it had
made her feel better and, for the first time in her adult life, she’d lost a
bit of weight.

‘So
what do you think?’ he asked.

‘About
what?’

‘About
becoming a student of Li Kuan Yu. My dojo, the place where I teach, is in the
community centre, from eleven to one. I thought you’d like to join us.’

‘I
dunno …’

‘Li
Kuan Yu is more than martial arts, Harriet; many refer to it as “the Grand Ultimate”.’

When
she looked at Patrick he reminded her of a kid showing off his paltry
collection of toys to another richer more spoilt kid.

He
said, ‘Martin told me everybody had to find their own way to Li Kuan Yu, that’s
why we don’t advertise or anything. I think you lying to me was your way to
it.’

It
seemed to Harriet that in fact the whole thing had been more about him than her
and she really didn’t want to get caught up in this new entanglement, but the
look of puppyish desperation in his eyes made her say, ‘Yeah, fuck it, why
not?’

‘Great,’
Patrick replied, with a little moue of irritation at her swearing.

Brilliant,
she thought to herself, I’m being taught kung fu by my mother.

They
left the café and walked on the foggy, frost-crunching path round to the
entrance of the community centre. He led her across the small foyer, seemingly
papered with fluttering notices and messages, then through cheap wooden double
doors into the large main space; this was a low-ceilinged, all-purpose hall,
stacking chairs pushed back against the walls and a jumble of stage lights
dangling from the roof joists. Though it wasn’t yet eleven there were a group
of people wearing kung fu-style outfits stretching and limbering up in the
centre of the wooden floor. With his hand on her shoulder he presented Harriet
to the others.