The Weeping Women Hotel (17 page)

‘Really?
Have you seen it? Is he, like, a friend of yours?’

‘Naww,’
Patrick replied, ‘the guy’s a loser otherwise he wouldn’t be living in a hole
in the ground in the park, would he? No, I know all about him because I stalk
him. See, the martial artist is a hunter as well as a warrior, Harriet, and man
is the most dangerous animal of all and the most exciting to hunt.

‘When I
find his hiding place what I do is I trash it. He had a couch in the last one
and photos of’ his kids — I pissed on them to show I was marking his territory,
like a male lion would. He’s moved again since and I’ll give him that — he
learns. His place must be really well camouflaged ‘cos I’ve looked all over and
still don’t know where it is but I’ll find it one day.’

‘That
must be a lot of effort for him digging it out time after time,’ Harriet said.

‘Oh,
I’m sure he enjoys the hunt as much as I do,’ Patrick asserted blithely.
‘Another time,’ he continued, lost in happy memories, ‘I stole his sardine tin,
his phone, reckon I did him a favour, at least it shut him up for a few days.
You know, Harriet, what I wish more than anything else?’ he asked wistfully.
‘I wish that I’d been sent to an English public school. They really break a
kid’s spirit there, you’re pretty much impervious to torture if you’ve been to
an English public school and you have lovely manners.’

It had been a hard winter
and February was the coldest month that year; afternoon temperatures often
didn’t rise above freezing point. Though the sun tried to shine, its watery
light failed to reach the ground. In March the rays began to grow stronger and
out of the wind it could be quite warm. Men who exposed themselves to
schoolgirls and young mothers began to return in growing numbers to the park.

During
this same time Harriet’s appearance underwent a slow and subtle change. It was
as if a lazy but talented sculptor, trained in the classical style, was carving
the statue of a striking woman from the misshapen, pink, wobbly block of
Hattie. He didn’t do much each day, in fact sometimes the sculptor didn’t turn
up for work at all, but when he did his craftsmanship, though minute and
leisurely, was assured and confident. In the morning now to get to the shop she
would jump down the stairs: she’d started with three steps and had now worked
up to the full flight. Falling through the air she imagined, as Patrick had
told her to, that she was flying like a cormorant with a fish in its mouth away
from the surface of a placid lake disturbed by a single ripple; this led to a
lightness of spirit and body and a great deal of plaster falling off the walls
and ceiling.

Her
attitude to the world around her also began to change. After all, she thought,
the purpose of all the work on general fitness, the stalking, the breathing
techniques, the philosophical discussions, the history lessons on Tönpa
Shenrab, the founder of Bon, which pre-dated Buddhism in the mythical land of
Olmo Lung Ring, was to teach her how to cripple or kill another human being
effectively. No — not another human being —
a man.
The people who did
the crimes that filled the local paper, the torn clippings that Patrick showed
them, were always men; no women lurked in the bushes of the park with knives,
wire and silver duct tape in a sports bag. It occurred to her that as a woman
she had always acted in a certain way, constantly, subconsciously on alert
since she was a child. And who or what had she been on the alert for? Men, men
and boys. Endlessly vigilant for single men walking the streets at night,
constantly listening for their footsteps behind her on the pavement, crossing
the road to avoid groups of boys and ceaselessly having to deflect their
drunken attentions in the pub without enraging them.

This
was the way it had been. These days she no longer worried about the danger
before walking down a dark street or entering a rough bar, going exactly where
she wanted to go, down alleys, across trading estates; she drank alone in the
saloon bars of the few remaining old man pubs and even travelled the broken
paths of the park at the dark of night. Because now Harriet had no reason to
fear anyone, her new-found strength, her knowledge of the secret killing points
on the body, her ability to drop silently out of trees on to anybody who
annoyed her, meant she was a woman who to all intents and purposes lived as a
man.

On
becoming a part-time male Harriet began to feel a degree of sympathy and
understanding for her fellow men, dispensing with the default anti-man disdain
she’d previously hidden behind. Most of them weren’t so bad really, she thought
to herself, at least in the Western countries. Considering they had this
physical power over women, most of them struggled really hard against their
natures, they strove literally manfully not to use their force on women, they
allowed women to boss them around, to stop them seeing their kids, to take
their money and their houses off them and a lot of men took it. Of course, she
said to herself, a good few of them didn’t take it, they used their fists and
their feet all the time or they got the address of the battered women’s shelter
from friendly police officers and went round and killed everybody with a
shotgun, or they said they were taking the kids to Alton Towers for .the day
then drove the family car into a canal thinking, Ha, ha, that’ll show her …
But still and all when she considered it she was surprised by the number of
males that did put up with not getting their own way. Now that she knew how to
punch and kick better than most of them she wasn’t sure that she’d put up with
a lot of what a lot of men put up with.

As the
weight dropped away Harriet also began to think again about sex: for years she
had suppressed her desire but as her new body tingled with sensual life it was
impossible to prevent a desperate yearning for another’s touch seeping back
into her mind. Each day at some point, often in the afternoon, she would go up
to the bedroom, take all her clothes off then look at herself in the
full-length mirror. She would run her hands down her torso and over her hips,
staring at this woman who was slowly being revealed like a complicated picture
being sent over the internet.

Helen and Toby were
attending a supper party in the ruins of Oscar and Katya’s home. Nine months
before, the couple had got a builder in to do some minor redecorating of their
dining room, and this small project had somehow turned into a massive
remodelling of their entire house. In a sort of builders’ Stockholm syndrome,
rather than get angry Oscar and Katya had fallen completely under the spell of
this man. They appeared to find him wise, exciting and hilarious while to
everybody else he was the exact reverse of these things. If Oscar and Katya
invited their friends round for a meal you could never be quite sure whether
the builder would be there or not and consequently whether the evening would be
completely ruined or not.

He was
there tonight, a thin sallow-skinned man with a voice as flat and dull as
Luxembourg
. And it was worse: the
builder’s one interest, outside wrecking people’s homes, was the Rio Carnival
with which he was totally obsessed. He saved all his money so that he could go
every other year to
Brazil
for
a whole month and a half, to take part in the preparations and even to serve as
a judge in some of the local competitions for junior samba bands. Tonight he
had brought his slides of the carnival along to show everybody. Kerclick.
‘That’s a fellow called Paulho Harvihad,’ he said in his nasal drone, ‘and’ —
kerclick — ‘that’s a fellow, a friend of mine, called Paulho Herviho.’ Kerclick.
‘That’s a fellow called Paulho Hohahivo. He’s a funny fellow, Paulho Hohahivo
is.’ Kerclick. ‘That’s the stadium, the Sambodromo, where the parade ends and
the judging of the …‘

The
flickering lamp and the builder’s droning voice sent Toby into a light trance.
He found himself drifting off and thinking for some reason about Harriet, his
sister-in-law. He reflected that she certainly wouldn’t be sitting there
pretending to be all interested in these awful slides. With half his mind he
heard Helen asking the builder, ‘So does each favela have its own samba band or
is there more than one?’

Toby
smiled to himself; he knew that if she’d been there Harriet would be shooting
him secret looks under her eyelids, that they’d both be struggling to repress
muffled laughter at the crappiness of the situation, especially as … ‘Dear
God!’ Kerclick. A slide came on the screen of the builder standing with his
hands on his hips at night on some steep cobbled street, wearing high heels, a
sparkling green high-cut thong, jewelled emerald-studded bra and feathered
green and gold headdress. ‘That’s me in the …‘

As
rapidly as possible Toby sailed away again in his mind but the happy place had
gone. Instead, with a shiver of nausea, he recalled the strange pale psycho
Harriet had brought along to Christmas dinner. What was she doing with him?
Well, she’d said he was her personal trainer but Lulu had told him they went to
the park in the middle of the night and did some strange kind of martial art
together. What was that all about? Was something more going on there, some
electricity between them and why did he, all of a sudden, care what she did?
Toby abruptly wondered if Patrick was having sex with his sister-in-law. No, it
wasn’t possible, he thought to himself, that Patrick was really good-looking.
Then he understood why he’d been thinking about Harriet in this new way —
somehow now she was becoming really good-looking too.

‘Crikey, Hat,’ said Toby,
opening the door when she called round one evening to babysit, ‘you look … I
dunno, different.’

‘Well,
you know, it’s doing my training with Patrick, all that exercise is really
starting to pay off.’

‘Right,’
he said.

‘D’you
like my new body?’ she asked, stretching her arms above her head and turning
slowly so he could inspect her.

‘Yes, I
do,’ he said. ‘I do like your new body. Yes, I do.’

In
Harriet’s first year after college., though beginning to put on proper weight,
she’d still been sort of pretty, in the way that nearly any young woman is
pretty but even then she had a sense that she was nothing special. Yet somehow
underneath the rippling flesh there seemed to have been incubating all through
her fat years a woman of truly startling appearance. Maybe keeping her out of
the light all this time had allowed the woman to ripen unblemished. Her hair
that had once been limp and an unvarying sweaty flat black was now, due partly
to all the time spent in the open air, shot through with iridescent coppery
highlights. Harriet’s skin, formerly pasty and white, was these days lightly
tanned and had acquired a healthy blush beneath the surface thanks to all the
blood that was now pumping madly round her system. Her breasts had reduced and
taken on a pleasant springy shape, so much so that she was constantly genuinely
surprised that they belonged to her and was able to contemplate them for a long
time in the mirror, marvelling at them as if they belonged to some other woman.
She wondered in a languid sort of way whether it was a sign of lesbianism if
you were getting aroused at the sight of your own tits.

When
customers came into the shop she also noticed a change in their attitude
towards her: saying something perfectly ordinary that she’d said a thousand
times before caused them to laugh or smile as they’d never done before;
customers would tell her to forget the change or say that it didn’t matter that
she hadn’t got their repair ready even though she’d said it would be done a
week ago. Harriet would think to herself, Why are they suddenly being nice to
me and why are many more men coming to me with repairs? and it would come back
to her that she had accidentally become beautiful.

Having
never looked exceptional before, she was completely unprepared for how other
people’s attitude to her would shift, simply because of a change in her
appearance.

This
must be what it’s like to be my sister, Harriet thought wonderingly to herself.

All
kinds of visions, images and memories that had formerly been suppressed began
to force their way to the surface of her mind. She recalled that due to Helen’s
overall loveliness and soppy, gentle manner people constantly assumed that
naturally she would be a vegetarian and even those friends who knew her well
were repeatedly shocked when she ordered a rare steak or some raw smelly
kidneys in a restaurant. By contrast, with Harriet, in the past, people would
phone when they were taking a trip to the freezer centre to enquire whether she
wanted them to pick up a couple of ten-kilo bags of liver while they were down
there.

Toby and Helen’s gala
benefit that night was for a charity organisation called Plumbio; it had
formerly been the Lead Miners Benevolent Society but lead mining and lead
miners had died out many years ago, yet the society continued with its name
changed to collect funds, hold benefits and mount celebrity polo matches.
Plumbio served a very useful function in that it enabled people to hold
decadent champagne parties in marquees in Mayfair squares in the name of
charity without the money actually going to anyone unpleasant such as the poor
or Africans.

‘Now Timon’s
got to read the front page of
El País
to practise his Spanish before he
can have any of the aubergine dip and he’s not allowed to play with his light
sabre until he’s taken all of his echinacea,’ Helen said to her sister.