The Weeping Women Hotel (2 page)

Of the three weeping women
who had been in the breakfast room on my first day, one was not there the next,
one stayed a week then was gone and the third, the woman dressed in the
accessorised Nicole Farhi, I saw one morning in the corridor on the first
floor, pushing a cleaning cart, going from room to room singing a tuneless song
to herself, wearing a blue nylon overall, her face free from make-up and her
arms unadorned by bracelets.

After
breakfast on my eighth day at the hotel I went to the reception desk and spoke
to the young girl working at the computer.

‘Hi,’ I
said.

‘Hi
there,’ the girl replied.

‘Look,
I think there might be a bit of a… erm, problem with my bill. I can pay up to
today but after that my funds are going to get a little low. I need, I guess,
to speak to the manager, maybe about some sort of a job?’

Rather
than treating this as a problem the girl smiled sweetly, then with a couple of
sweeps of her slender fingers put her computer to sleep and said, ‘OK, we need
to find solace.’

‘Yes, I
suppose we all do,’ I said. ‘That’d be nice.’

The
girl lifted the flap of the counter and beckoned me through, led me across the
little reception and through another door at the rear, down a narrow
wood-panelled corridor past the hotel’s clattering kitchens to another small
office with a battered cream-painted door.

She
knocked and a woman’s voice called for us to enter.

We both
squeezed into a tiny space lined with shelves on which box files, stacks of
papers and accountancy books were precariously balanced. On the wall was a year
planner covered in stickers and a calendar from an organic farm.

Seated
at a cheap office desk was a black woman in her mid-forties; her skin was that
black that is almost blue, her head and body might have been taken from a
Benin
sculpture, while her clothes had
come from B&Q. The woman was dressed in a grimy overall dress of murky
shades of orange as worn by employees of the DIY store and in a space above her
left breast was written in Biro the name ‘Solace’.

‘Solace…’
the young girl said to the African woman, indicating me with a wave of her
hand,’… Room 3.’

‘Room
3,’ said Solace, looking up at me, ‘sit down, dear.’

Once I
was seated on a wobbly, cracked plastic stacking chair the older woman leant
forward and asked, ‘Did you hear the voices, dear? Did they tell you to come
here, the voices?’

‘Eh?’ I
asked, primed as I was for some kind of quizzing about my financial resources.

The
young girl said, ‘Some hear voices, some see pictures in their minds like a
film.’

Getting
no response from me, Solace added, ‘Or drawings; other women get letters
through the post addressed to them in their own handwriting and inside are maps
on how to get here and a bus timetable. One said a statue of Florence
Nightingale told her to cycle all the way to
Crewe
from
Lincoln
but
she was a bit…’

Finally
I said, ‘I took a train, I took a night train and I don’t know why but it
seemed like a good idea if I got off here.’

They moved me out of my
room in the kindliest way as if it was my idea; instead I was given a bed in a
cramped, wooden-walled little cubicle slotted into the hot roof space of the
hotel. In addition to the narrow metal-framed bed, the cubicle contained a
small hardboard wardrobe, a desk and a bedside table; it felt like that was
enough.

To pay
my way they assigned me a job in
Guantanamo
Bay
serving behind
the bar, something I found I was unexpectedly bad at. Yet Solace never even
hinted that they would move me, and because the drink was cheap and the
atmosphere unthreatening none of the customers seemed to mind the occasional
wrong order, incorrect change or cranberry juice knocked down the front of
their white T-shirt. For my part the brainless work was a balm for my
overheated nerves and I felt safe and looked after. The big beefy women who
manned the door of the club looked like they would be a match for most men in a
fight, though somehow it rarely came down to violence, they always seemed to be
able to defuse a situation before it climbed out of control and became
irreversible; unlike a lot of male security staff they never acted like they
had anything to prove.

In the
early hours of the morning once all the customers had reeled off into the
night, those who had worked late would sometimes sit around in the staff
canteen: a large, bare, functional room at the rear of the building,
white-painted, lined with simple wooden tables and benches, where they would
recount how they had come to the Station Hotel Crewe. I sat and listened but
never joined in, to tell the truth I’d hardly had time to digest it myself.
Important, crucial bits I’d forgotten would suddenly slip back into my mind,
often with a jolt of shame, fear or sadness.

When
you came down to it many of the women’s tales amounted to extended nervous
breakdowns, all sort of the same in the end though the details could be
unbelievably shocking. A lot had had terrible things done to them, a few had
done terrible things to others; some were clear on their motives, others told
their tale still wrapped around with self-justification and evasion that only
they couldn’t see. I found all the stories I listened to during these early
morning sessions absolutely riveting, apart from one. There was a woman there
named Mrs Costello whose duties around the hotel seemed to consist of occasionally
putting a spoon out at breakfast and whose crisis seemed to consist solely of
her husband once slightly burning a corner of their living room curtains. This
paucity of incident did not prevent her relating this yarn over and over again
on nights such as this.

We’d
had a particularly busy evening with a spirited performance by The Jim, a Paul
Weller tribute act fronted by a lead singer whose real name was Jim, so it
wasn’t until after 2 a.m. that the empties had been cleared away and the
mistakes I’d made in giving change had been accounted for so the cash could be
counted and locked in the safe. It was a warm night and the windows were
propped open; nobody from the club staff wished to go to bed yet and before
anyone could stop her Mrs Costello was off again. Drifting away, I wondered to
myself whether I would ever tell my own story like this, during one of these
early mornings. I was certain if I ever did, even though I say so myself, the
story would have a lot more to it than somebody setting fire to the curtains.

2

Toby stood in the doorway
of Harriet’s shop, letting the September wind rush in to riffle the clothes
hanging on racks behind the counter; he was straining to see the police
helicopter that was slowly and noisily circling the neighbourhood. The machine
itself was so low in the sky that it was hidden by the tall trees in the park
opposite but its searchlight backlit them in black, angular silhouette, giving
the appearance of a sinister wood in a Balinese shadow play.

‘The
Pointless
Park
airshow beginneth early tonight,’ Toby said, coming back into the
warmth and closing the door so that the clothes abruptly stopped their frantic
dance.

Harriet
looked down and smiled to herself — her brother-in-law was the only person in
the world who called the neighbourhood that they lived in ‘
Pointless
Park
’. Even she didn’t, though from time to time she tried really,
really hard to do it, to say the words ‘
Pointless
Park
’. Mentally
Harriet would rehearse little scenarios in which she used the name in a
conversation with Toby, saying in her mind, ‘The Japanese Strangleweed is
flower-ing this week in Pointless Park,’ or ‘I hear they found another dead
body in Pointless Park today,’ knowing how happy it would make him if she did.
She’d set out to say it and he would stare optimistically at her, like a little
kitten crouched waiting for a ball of silver paper to be thrown to it but then
some other words would emerge from his sister-in-law’s mouth and Toby would
deflate like a punctured weather balloon. One of the hazards of having a
conversation with Toby was that he gave his own names to lots of people and
lots of things but would never explain what they were or admit there was
anything odd about what he was saying: for instance he called the Prime
Minister ‘Mrs Mitchum’ and the European Community was ‘The Banana Club’. It
could be quite difficult for people who didn’t know him or weren’t familiar with
his personal glossary to understand what he was talking about a lot of the time
when he said things like, ‘I see Mrs Mitchum gave a big speech to the Banana
Club last night.’ He would also always sing a few bars of the
Marseillaise
whenever
he saw a black person reading the news.

It was
just a guess of Harriet’s that he’d like her to use the same phrases as him,
she didn’t know for certain, nothing had ever been said out loud. Maybe, she
thought, he was happy being misunderstood, yet she did remember how briefly
delirious Toby had seemed to be when he discovered that he’d persuaded a
married couple to use the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ every time that
they drank soup. The couple were called Tori and Paul and they had been friends
at college with Harriet’s younger sister Helen. Toby too had been at this
college but at that time not part of the same circle. He’d belonged to a crowd
of rugby-playing business studies students who Helen and her friends only
encountered puking drunkenly into wastepaper bins on the campus as they left a
play or a madrigal concert.

In the
early years after Helen and Toby married they gave many dinner parties for
Helen’s old college friends, while not returning the phone calls of Toby’s
mates. He would cook the first course which was always soup and when serving it
he would invariably say, ‘There we are, soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ then he’d
smile at everyone as if he’d just done a magic trick.

What
Toby wasn’t aware of was the process by which the married couple Tori and Paul
had come to use the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’. After the dinner party
they would start drunkenly talking about what an arse Toby was as soon as they
were in the minicab going home; they would say to each other in a high-pitched,
mocking imitation of Toby’s voice, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ and ‘Please do
have some more of this delicious soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ then they would
collapse against each other laughing, convincing the Algerian or Bengali taxi
driver once again of the impenetrability and corruption of Western society.
Tori and Paul would also repeat after Toby, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ when
he served the soup and give each other secret looks. Pretty soon when they had
soup at home Tori and Paul would say to each other, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de
loop,’ at first still ridiculing Toby but eventually they forgot why they were
saying it and it became part of the private language every couple develops,
employed long after they’d gratefully ceased having soupy dinners with Toby and
Helen.

When
Tori and Paul had children one of their au pairs was a Maori girl from the
Southern Pacific Cook Islands who, when she returned home after a couple of
years, took the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ with her and spread it
amongst her extended family until finally the phrase appeared in an anthropological
dissertation: ‘“Soup, swoop, loop de loop”: Shamanistic Incantations in
Raratongan Food Preparation Rituals’,
University
of
Topeka
, 1998.

Toby was a great many
things to Harriet: he was her brother-in-law, he was married to her little
sister, he was father of her beloved nephew and he was her best male friend,
but sometimes she still wished that he didn’t have quite so much free time to
hang around her shop. Harriet thought to herself that it wasn’t as if he didn’t
have a job, a good job and a job he was good at. When she sporadically visited
her brother-in-law at his work it always amazed her to see how all his quirks
and idiosyncrasies disappeared and that around the office he was focused and
businesslike like a normal person; those who only knew Toby from the office
were astonished to witness his eccentric behaviour in social situations and
those who only met him socially were startled to learn that he held down any
kind of job at all and didn’t live in some sort of sheltered accommodation.

But
Harriet knew it was part of his cleverness that he’d always looked for
employment in administrative posts that didn’t stretch him. Until quite
recently Toby had been deputy chairman of the Penrith Fairground Disaster Fund,
a charity whose main purpose as far as she could tell was to avoid giving any
money to anybody involved in any way in the great Penrith Fairground Disaster —
either those actually on the Ferris wheel or the ones crushed by it as it
travelled down the A66.

A few
months ago he’d left that position and now administered the estate of a famous
playwright who’d died in the late 19803. From what Harriet knew the playwright
had been an easy-going, genial sort but his estate was now controlled by several
distant relatives whom he’d never met. Toby’s job was to stop anybody ever
putting on any of the work of the playwright ever again unless they agreed not
to change a single syllable of the sacred text. As far as possible, following
orders from the estate, Toby did his best to prevent students from studying the
sacred text and to forbid the transmission of any clips of the plays on radio
or television unless a gigantic fee was paid to the distant relatives.