The Weeping Women Hotel (20 page)

In a
fury she called the mobile phone number on the sticker, a man’s voice told her
to go to a cash machine and get the money, then to wait for somebody who would
be along to release her vehicle sometime within the next month and a half.

After
returning from the money machine, unable to contain her frustration, she phoned
Patrick. It struck her as she was punching in the numbers that she’d never
called him before except on dojo business but seeing as most of Helen and
Toby’s friends spent a huge amount of the time at dinner parties whining about
speeding tickets and traffic lane cameras and getting clamped she expected him
to do what she’d been forced to do hundreds of times — that is to half listen
to her moan on and on about the terrible iniquity of it all and throw in the
odd sympathetic comment.

Instead,
after she’d explained what had happened, he said coldly, ‘So you parked on this
private land and got clamped?’

‘Yeah,
that’s right and it’s so unfai—’

‘So
what are you complaining about? You were drawn into a trap by your enemy and
you were defeated.’

‘But
it’s not fair.’

‘Did
the Founder moan about it not being fair when Scots Billy crippled his father?’

‘No,
but …‘

‘Did
the great swordsman Sasaki Kojiro complain when the Samurai Musashi defeated
him in a duel?’

‘Well,
he had no head so he couldn’t but I suppose he wouldn’t have, no …’

‘So I
want you to go to a place called an HSS Hire Centre where they will rent you a
thing called an angle grinder; with it you can cut the clamp away.’

‘But
won’t they have a record of my car’s number plate so the police can track me
down and do me for criminal damage or they can find out my address and send the
bailiffs round or worse?’

‘True.
You could attack the man as he’s taking the clamp off, wait until he bends down
then use Panda Bear Breaks Neck on him, but then you’d be in even more trouble
with the police.

‘See, I
wouldn’t have that problem because I don’t exist.’

‘What
do you mean?’ Harriet asked, suddenly panicked. ‘You’re not my imaginary
friend, are you?’

‘No …‘
he laughed. ‘I mean I don’t exist to the authorities. My car’s reg is a clone,
I don’t have a bank account, the flat’s still in me parents’ name, I don’t
exist, so my enemies can’t find me.’

‘That’s
not much use to me, what am I supposed to do? I can’t disappear myself in the
next half-hour.’

He was
silent for a second before asking, ‘How many times did Sifu Po say we should
jump from the branch of a tree?’

‘Nine.’

‘And
how many branches are there on the tree that we jump from?’

‘Four.’

‘Four,
that’s right.’ Then he rang off.

Eventually an old white
Ford Escort van pulled into the petrol station. It parked blocking the exit and
a bulky man of about fifty-five, shaven-headed and gone to fat, climbed out.
Hitching up his sagging jeans, he crossed to where she stood, a big bunch of
keys in one beefy, scabbed hand.

‘You
got the money?’ he asked.

‘This
is a rip-off,’ Harriet said.

‘Yeah,
yeah,’ he replied in a bored voice used to hearing a thousand complaints and
excuses. ‘It’s clearly notified that you risk clamping if you park here.’ It struck
her that his voice was the same as the one she’d heard on the phone.

‘Where?’
she asked, looking around.

‘There,’
said the man, pointing to a sheet of plywood with some writing on it screwed
halfway up a brick wall some distance away and half concealed by a bush of wild
buddleia.

Harriet
walked over, stared at it hard then returned and said, ‘That sign is written in
what I think might be Tagalog, a language that is only spoken in certain remote
parts of Malaya, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea.’

‘Yeah,
well, that’s your multi-cultural
Britain
for you, innit?’ the man replied. ‘Still means you have to pay up,
love.’

She
angrily handed over the cash but as the man bent to remove the clamp she saw a
stained, streaked length of aluminium pipe lying on the ground. Harriet walked
over to it, picked it up and began, slowly at first, to practise Broom Staff
Pike Stance.

As the
pole tumbled and swished through the air inches from the head of the clamp man
kneeling by the front wheel of her truck, he began to look uncomfortable and
confused, dropping the big bundle of keys as he fumbled with the brass padlock.
Then, to her mind, he began to look a little afraid.

As the
man finally straightened to his feet, holding in both hands the separate bits
of his money-making slabs of metal she, continuing with her stabs and sweeps,
suddenly said, not looking at him, ‘I want thirty-six pounds back.’

‘What?’
he asked. The man was pinned back against the front of her truck and unable to
reach his van without walking into the orbit of her swirling metal pipe.

‘I
want, four times nine, thirty-six pounds back, to erm … buy a friend some
flowers.’

‘Eh,
what?’ he asked again, his eyes distracted by the pole hissing inches from his
face.

‘C’mon,’
the woman said, moderating her tone a little but not discontinuing the ferocity
of her movements, ‘it’s your firm, isn’t it? It was you I spoke to on the phone
so you’re getting one hundred and fifty-eight pounds for basically nothing and
you can afford to give me thirty-six pounds back.’

The man
was forced to duck as she swiped the pole through the air behind him.

‘Are
you happy with your life?’ she asked.

‘Is
that a threat?’

‘No,
no, no, I’m just asking, ‘is this the way you imagined things turning out, is
this what you thought you’d be doing and are you satisfied with it?’

‘Yes.
No, well, no, I have suffered a couple of bouts of moderate to severe clinical
depression.’

‘So
maybe you should change your life. Do you think your life might be to blame?’

‘Possibly.
I’ve done some things …‘

‘So
perhaps you should change it, not totally at first, but gradually in small
pieces, a little at a time … to show that you are in charge of events, in
charge of your life.’

‘And I
could start by like giving somebody thirty-six pounds back from their fine?’

‘Yeah,
if you felt that that was the right thing to do.’

‘To buy
flowers for a person in hospital?’

‘That’s
right.’

Harriet
did not immediately lower the pike to her side but continued lunging and poking
for thirty seconds then stopped. The man took out a wad of notes from his back
pocket and handed back to her some of her own money with a sigh. Returning, she
thought, wearily to his vehicle he threw the separate bits of clamp in the
back where they crashed on to a pile of others. As the man squeezed himself
into the driving seat of his van Harriet felt a sense of exultation sweep
through her.

The
clamper started up the Escort then drove in a big sweeping circle to exit the
petrol station. As he passed her he slowed down and said out of the window,
‘You want to be careful with that stick, love, you could hurt someone with it.’

‘I will
be,’ she called after him.

When
Harriet had left college in the early nineties and taken her first job working
backstage on
Miss Saigon,
one of the male dressers had been in a band
called the Sissy Robots. At that time, making one of her vain attempts to break
away a little, to forge new friendships outside those she was related to or had
been at college with, Harriet went along to a few of their performances. On
Sunday nights, taking unfamiliar tube lines and buses with strange numbers like
the W 564 and the K6 N, to scout huts and Oddfellows Halls in distant suburbs,
she discovered that the Sissy Robots were pretty much as bad as any band could
ever be. Really it was unlikely that a trio of drums, xylophone and vocals
singing songs inspired by the poetry of Mario Vargas Llosa were going to be any
good. Yet as she sat in three-quarters-empty basement theatres in Wood Green
and eighth-full town hall function rooms in Lewisham, an amazing fact struck
her: the band, appalling as they were, actually had a following. There was a
married couple call Rex and Marion who would drive in from Colchester to every
one of their performances, there were three girls all called something like Lucy
who followed them from place to place and were planning one day to run the
Sissy Robots fan club and there was a futures trader from the City called
Robert who went so far in his dedication as to hire the band to play at his
wedding where they were so bad that his wife left him on the honeymoon. The
intensity of the clique’s interest in the Sissy Robots, the late-night talks
on the phone discussing their preferred track off the band’s cassette, the
comparing of favourite gigs and also the sneering dismissal of competing
musicians allowed these few fans to imagine that the world outside their little
circle was almost as taken as they were with the band, instead of utterly
indifferent.

The S
Robots as the fans referred to them even had a record out with posters that the
illegal flyposters plastered over all the streets in the neighbourhood of the
record company headquarters but nowhere else. The three Lucies bought a
hundred copies each and Robert made everybody at Citibank phone in to Steve
Wright on Radio 1 to try and get their single on the playlist, but even with
all this effort the song only got to number eighty-five in the charts so the
record company dropped them and the band split up.

The
lesson Harriet took from her brief period following the Sissy Robots was that
people seemed to need something, anything, to believe in and that more or less
anybody could have a following. Any ideology no matter how mad could attract disciples,
any leader of anything could have themselves a small band of devout believers.
She thought at that time that she would never fall completely for anything
herself — all right, she might attempt all kinds of diets and miracle cures for
fatness but there was a tiny part of her that always hung back and she had been
proud of that part. What she hung on to (along with the fat and the high blood
pressure) was the idea of herself as Harriet the Sceptic, the big fat girl who
no matter what else was wrong with her you couldn’t fool.

Even
with Li Kuan Yu, even though it was transforming her appearance, she still
couldn’t quite become a true believer: unlike the others at the dojo it was
impossible for her to completely swallow all the stuff Patrick told them about
the triple-burner chi-raising techniques of Tummo Tibetan monks who would test
their powers by sitting naked in the snow, covered by freezing wet sheets,
mastery being demonstrated by the number of sheets that could be dried solely
by the internal heat the monks were able to generate. All the others seemed to
believe this story was true and that it actually happened, while Harriet just
found herself thinking if it was feasible she’d be able to cut down on her
laundry bills. To her it was just a story, a fable, an illustration of a
hoped-for sort of martial arts fairy world where such things were truly
possible.

All the
same, she was beginning to think that maybe it was time to give up this
long-held scepticism. ‘Right, Harriet,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s time, for
once in your life, to let go of all these doubts and quibbles that have been
holding you back. It’s time for you truly to let them all go.’ While going
through her Li Kuan Yu form, during freezing early mornings in the park or late
at night in her echoing upstairs room, dust exploding from the floorboards as
she stamped and turned, her dreams were of what it would be like when she
became finally a true believer. There was no knowing what wonders awaited her
on the other side of cynicism.

Unfortunately
she had to admit to herself there were going to be casualties. There had always
been one big area of disagreement that had existed from the earliest days
between her and Patrick. Though he was immensely pleased with her progress and
proud of his new student, the single grain of discord dividing them had been
her continuing friendship with Lulu and Rose: Harriet’s sifu couldn’t
understand how somebody who was proving themselves to be so adept at Li Kuan Yu
would still choose to hang round with a pair of drunken harridans like those
two. He told her time and time again that the true martial artist only mixed
with others who were totally dedicated to their training. ‘Stick with the
winners, win with the stickers,’ he told her. Patrick was also constantly
hinting that for those who went deeper into their fighting style there were all
kinds of magical things that would be revealed, so maybe now it was finally
time for her to cut Lulu and Rose off and become a true disciple.

A few
years after stopping work on
Miss Saigon
Harriet had bumped into the
dresser in Brent Cross Shopping Centre. He’d gone bald, amazingly had a wife
and son and told her he was now in a band called Metal Negro. But she hadn’t
ever seen any posters for Metal Negro anywhere.