The Weeping Women Hotel (14 page)

When he
spoke they all stopped stretching and turned towards Patrick. She noted that
even though several of them were much older they listened to him in reverential
silence as if he was reciting interesting poetry rather than simply introducing
them to a fat woman.

‘Now,
Harriet,’ he said, once he’d given everybody her name and told them she was
joining the group, ‘I’m going to get changed and you need to talk to Ali’ — he
gestured towards an Asian man in his thirties — ‘about what your outfit’s going
to look like.’

‘I’d
have thought you martial artists wouldn’t care what clothes you were wearing,’
she said to Ali once they were together.

‘Why
would you think that?’ Ali replied. ‘Harriet, have you ever heard of the novels
of Paulho Puoncho? You know
The Pharmacist?
Marion
Decides to Buy a Hat? Forty-eight and a Half Seconds?’

‘I
think my friend Lulu read one once, she said it was sh—’

‘You
shouldn’t listen to what other people think,’ Ali said, telling her what he
thought. ‘He’s sold over twenty million books worldwide, Paulho Puoncho has,
and many people say his novels have saved their lives, think about that. These
books they’re all about the choices we make in life, about listening to our
hearts and most of all about following our dreams. So, yes, it is important
what outfit you choose.’

‘Right…‘

He
produced a number of catalogues from different outfitters and, pretending to
care, she finally selected a grey outfit with two black stripes down the leg and
shamefacedly gave her measurements.

‘There’s
a fifteen pound supplement for Super XXL,’ Ali said, reading from the
catalogue.

‘Right,
that’s OK,’ Harriet replied, her blushing unseen by Ali.

These
measurements were to be sent off to a place in
Leeds
and the suit would be ready for her to pick up on the next
Saturday.

While
she had been consulting with Ali, Patrick returned wearing a fighting suit of
extraordinary whiteness and called them all together. He announced that because
there was a new student they were going to practise Anaconda Tree Jump Vine
Strike, the centrepiece of Li Kuan Yu.

He said
to a tall women in black pyjamas, ‘Helga, can you get the ladder?’

She
returned a few moments later with a dented aluminium stepladder, then one
student stood on it while another held the legs. Patrick in his bright white
outfit explained to the group that the student on the ladder should wait with
what he said was ‘full tension and intention focused in thighs’ while the rest
of them ran in a line past the ladder. With full kiai, which was apparently a
sort of shout, and focused chi, which was a sort of energy, the person on the
ladder was supposed to choose their victim then jump feet first and wrap their
legs around the opponent’s neck, making sure their groin pressed into the back
of the opponent’s neck so that they couldn’t turn and bite what Patrick called
‘the secret place’. When Harriet watched a football match on the TV and she
saw the footballers tackling each other or embracing after scoring a goal she was
often distracted by the thought of their ‘secret places’ rubbing and banging
against each other and when she went to the hairdresser she always kept her
arms squeezed tightly into the sides of the chair so the hairdresser’s ‘secret
place’ Wouldn’t inadvertently touch her, yet now she was going to have one of
them tucked into the back of her neck. Harriet thought to herself that in a
short time she’d come a long way, though in what direction she wasn’t sure.

As it
turned out it was considered too dangerous for Harriet and a couple of the
newer students to jump off the stepladder so they were told to practise
Anaconda Tree Jump Vine Strike by sitting on a partner’s shoulders and walking
around. Patrick handed out grubby foam neck braces to be worn by the training
partners but it was clear that even with them on nobody was willing to carry
Harriet about, so in the end she found herself on Patrick’s shoulders with her
secret place tucked into the back of his neck.

After two hours’ training
the group went back next door to the community centre café. Apart from Harriet
there were seven other members. Seated next to her at the Formica table was Mi,
an accountant; next to him was Helga, a large German woman in her forties, an
aromatherapist. There was Paul, a BT engineer; squeezed next to Paul was
Langley
, a Jamaican cabbie; opposite him
Gill, a housewife; and next to her there was Jason, a teenager who’d been sent
along by social services. Lastly there was Jack, a small compact man who,
though extremely fit-looking, Harriet guessed to be in his early sixties, a
retired engineer. She found it odd to see a man of that age dressed in short
leather jacket and light blue faded jeans; like Patrick he too was Old London
from the Watney Flats and was also the only person apart from Patrick who had
actually been taught by the Founder — Martin Po. Jack was a devotee of
everything Chinese: he spoke Cantonese, spent his holidays over there in
strange industrial cities nobody had ever heard of that possessed two million
inhabitants and had even gone so far in his Sinophilia as to join an extreme
Maoist group in the 1970s.

There
was also something of the Politburo apparatchik about Jack in that he played
the wise old adviser to Patrick’s more impetuous temperament, advising caution
and offering sage interpretations of some of Sifu Po’s more confusing and
contradictory statements.

It
wasn’t until later in the afternoon when she was back in her shop, dizzy from
the strange day she’d just had, that it dawned on Harriet that she hadn’t just
been told some ancient tale of monks or Samurai: Patrick had given her explicit
details of a thirty-six-year-old unsolved triple homicide. She decided that
maybe Martin hadn’t really split Scots Billy’s skull or killed Big Barry by
twisting his testicles or tangoed the other one on to the railings: it was just
some sort of parable.

5

Nearly two months went by.
Northerly winds blew the remaining leaves off the trees in the park. The
contractors should have come by to collect them for compost while burning those
that were diseased, but they never arrived, as if they had a plan that in the
summer there should be virulent outbreaks of many different and varied plant
contagions. Halal Meat and Videos became Azerbaijan Fried Chicken. The Tin Can
Man appeared for a time without his sardine tin looking mute and distressed
until he managed to steal a new one from the Valueslasher Mini Market. He then
had to catch up on his calls, talking for hours, up and down the shopping
parade, mad insults, comments on people’s clothes, deranged observations on
their lives pouring from his mouth.

Late
one still, windless night, practising on the unmarked punchbag she’d recently
bought, Harriet heard him begging from beneath her window, ‘Please, Lynn,’ he
cried, ‘no, darling, you know there’s no one but you. I just lost my phone for
a while … baby, no … please don’t … please don’t …’ To drown out his
sobbing she punched harder and harder until she made her first dent in the
shiny plastic of the swinging bag.

Harriet’s life until
meeting Patrick had resembled owning a rare kind of horse: it needed constant
tending, feeding and maintenance in order to try and prevent it from dying
limply in a field. Phone calls had to be made, people needed to be tracked down
and forced into meeting for drinks or reluctant visits to see things. They
couldn’t be ordinary things either. You couldn’t bribe people to go to
something simple like the theatre or the cinema these days, so she had
constantly to be finding new and exciting events to visit — physical theatre
performed in disused ammunition factories, low-flying balloon trips across
safari parks, walking tours led by a comedian off the TV around Brent Cross
Shopping Centre. Birthdays had to be remembered for which presents needed to be
bought so offence wasn’t caused and feuds had to be taken into account so two
or more people who weren’t speaking didn’t end up spending an evening together.

Now,
though, with Li Kuan Yu her life had taken on a life of its own, needing no
attention Whatsoever. Patrick told her firmly that if she wanted to make
progress then attendance at the dojo two nights a week and all of Saturday
morning was the bare minimum; he added that as a special favour he was also
prepared to give her private lessons three times a week in the room on the
first floor, so there was suddenly very little time for Harriet to do anything
else except work, sleep and exercise. When she wasn’t at the dojo or in her
shop she went on long, huffing half-walk half-runs, wearing out the crotches of
two pairs of dungarees in a fortnight with the unaccustomed friction below her
secret place. As she walked and as she exercised her body twisted and creaked
and protested like a suspension bridge in a high wind but there was the
definite feeling that there was a tiny bit less of her every day and what
remained was a tiny bit firmer.

She said to Lulu and Rose
in the pub, ‘I dunno, I was so disappointed at first when he told me what it
was, this ridiculous nonsense. But y’know something’s made me stick with it and
the odd thing is I am losing weight so I’m sort of beginning to think there
might be something to it.’

The day
before Lulu had phoned her. ‘Didn’t you notice we haven’t been talking to you
for nearly a month?’ she asked in a querulous voice.

‘How do
you mean?’ Harriet replied, confused. ‘I’ve talked to you both loads of times
on the phone.’

‘Yeah,’
said Rose, jumping in, ‘but we’ve been sniffy and distant.’

‘Is
this on speakerphone?’

‘Cutting
and abrupt,’ added Lulu.

‘Churlish
and unpleasant.’

‘Why?’
she asked, trying to sound like she’d noticed.

‘Don’t
you remember? That terrible scene you made last time we were in the Admiral
Cod, making Cosmo cry and acting all crazy.’

‘You
reminded us of Hitler, but not in a good way.’

‘Oh
that, well, you know it’s …‘ Harriet mumbled.

‘Apology
accepted,’ Lulu said.

That
night they all went to the pub to make up. Right away it was clear that Cosmo
the waiter was completely transformed; he shivered with an almost sexual
delight when she came in, he whispered to Harriet that he was so glad she’d
decided to return after ‘our upset’ as he referred to it, and that evening he
was attentive and kept slipping them dishes from the kitchen free of charge so
that if that had been the pub’s general policy it might almost have been good
value.

Harriet’s attitude to the
other people at the dojo also underwent a slow change. When sitting amongst
this odd assortment of people she realised something about her old group of
friends, the ones she had had all her adult life. It dawned on her that they
were more or less the same: they were more or less white, they were more or
less educated and what held them together was a weak thing. A vague hatred of
Tony Blair, burnt-out love affairs, the thought they might need each other one
day when they were old and incontinent, the fact that they didn’t know anybody
else: that was pretty much it. Now it seemed to her that at the dojo she was
sitting amongst a group of people who were bound to each other by something
much stronger than the coincidence that they’d all discovered couscous and
New Zealand
wine at more or less the same
time.

One big
thing that she started to think about was what it would be like to be able to
fight. Up until then like most women she’d thought of physical violence as an
almost exclusively male pursuit, like yachting or exposing yourself to
schoolgirls, but now sometimes she found herself fantasising about what it
would be like to get people to do what you wanted because they were frightened
of you or respected you rather than because they felt sorry for you or because
you’d gone on and on at them.

Patrick
said to Harriet in the upstairs room one afternoon as light snowflakes drifted
like parachutists to the cold pavement, ‘An important part of learning to be a
fighter is getting used to being hurt, that’s the point of all that stone
throwing and the shin kicking. What confuses the average civilian,’ he went on,
‘is just the act of gettin’ punched, they’re standing there thinking, My God,
I’ve been punched! Being punched is the worst thing in the world! Then you
punch them again and bingo! They’re down and out. But if you get used to being
punched, it’s no big deal, no shock, so you’re ready to shrug it off and take
action back.’

She
nodded vigorously at this, knowing for once exactly what he meant because she’d
discovered that she didn’t much mind being hurt in this way; maybe her nerve
endings weren’t as sensitive as most people’s or something. While it wasn’t
pleasant being hit or punched, in a way she sort of welcomed the sting of the
stones against her skin; sometimes she wondered to herself if because of her
tolerance for pain she was maybe already halfway to being a really good
fighter.