The Weeping Women Hotel (21 page)

‘Isn’t
Southport
all posh people and
multi-millionaire footballers playing golf?’ Toby asked Helen the first time he
drove the two sisters to their parents’ shabby little terraced house in the
dull flatlands behind the railway station.

‘Not
all of it obviously,’ Harriet mumbled from the back seat where she was lying
sprawled out, her legs twisted into the backs of the front seats.

‘But
this is just like
Swindon
where
I come from.’

The
Percussionists Licensing Society had given Toby a very smart black diesel Saab
as part of his job package. The front wheels sizzled over the sand in the
gutter as he parked in the frosty, salty, seaside night air amongst the papery,
dented Hyundais and Protons lined up along the narrow pavement.

The
three of them had met four and a half hours before, at dosing time, outside the
Admiral Codrington. Harriet had spent the three and a half hours before that
inside the pub with her two horrible cronies but Helen had been at home reading
so just needed to walk round the corner from her flat. Together they’d driven
north.

The
phone call from the next-door neighbour telling Helen that Mum had been taken
to hospital had come a little while before. In the shiny grey leather front
seat of the car, as blacked-out
England
slithered past, Helen was so upset that everything felt sort of
weirdly disconnected and floaty, but oddly there was still the air of an outing
hanging over their trip. At a twenty-four-hour petrol station, after he’d
filled up the car, Toby bought two big bottles of Tango, a supersize bag of
Skittles and a CD of the number one hits from the eighties. As they hissed up
the dark motorways the two of them sang along to T’Pau, Culture Club and Duran Duran
while Harriet slept sprawled out, snoring, in the back.

Somewhere
near Stafford in a comfortable period of silence Julio Spuciek said to her,
‘You know, fifty years ago you would not have had to make these terrible
journeys — a girl of your class would have lived round the corner from her
mother, married a man from the neighbourhood, cooked a roast dinner for her
aunties every Sunday, had few decisions to make and been nearby when a crisis
arose. Or, on the other hand, you might have lived in India or somewhere else
colonial with your husband who was a sergeant in the sappers’ (Julio got some
of his ideas about England from the works of Rudyard Kipling) ‘and the trip
home would have taken six weeks by steamship so the whole emergency would have
been resolved by the time you got there.’

Either
way she wouldn’t have had to endure these trips. There were times when Toby
couldn’t drive them and then they had to submit to the human rights violation
that was inter-city train travel. The railways had been privatised a few years
before and at the same time as the carriages of the many companies were being
painted in gorgeous colours they began to rot from inside like the tropical
flowers they had come to resemble. Helen remembered one train they were on, its
heating going full pelt though it was a sweltering summer’s day so that Harriet
was cascading with sweat, locked wheels outside Crewe Station and stayed there
for three hours. Out of the window Helen and her sister were able to examine in
detail the Co-op supermarket car park, the weird train-spotters looking at them
looking at them and the hulking red-brick hotel like a pirate ship with jolly
flags flapping and cracking from its round medieval towers.

Whenever
Helen saw a movie in which the happy ending was that the super-intelligent
working-class girl received the letter telling her she’d been accepted for the
swanky academy, she always wondered whether that really was a happy ending. The
likely outcome of the girl getting her education would be that in the future
even if she loved her parents dearly she wouldn’t be able to stop herself being
bored and petulant with them and though she struggled against it she wouldn’t be
able to resist finding her home town tedious, tiny and peculiar.

She and
her sister had hardly returned home at all until their mother got sick so that
now, aft-er
London
,
Southport
reminded Helen of a model village
in the window of a toy shop, with its neat flowerbeds and fountains that
actually worked and the little electric trains that ran to and from the
not-at-all toytown of
Liverpool
.

When they weren’t visiting
the hospital she would take Toby into town or to the beach or the pine woods;
she showed him the Art School which Marc Almond had attended and Lord Street
where, standing by the war memorial, she told him how the Protestant Fanatics —
the Orange Lodges — from Liverpool, Londonderry, Belfast and Glasgow would
parade every July 12th, marching pipe bands and pallid slum boys dressed up as
King William precariously balanced on white cart-horses.

As they
wandered the wrought-iron-canopied streets of the northern seaside town and
looked out over its grey sands Helen wasn’t sure then what she felt about Toby;
certainly intensely grateful to him for all his help, but unsure whether there
could be anything more between them. She’d had men crazy about her before, but
his level of looming devotion could sometimes verge on the disturbing.

Mostly
she took Toby out in order to get away from her parents’ uncomfortable
furniture. Every time she sat down on Mum’s couch immediately there would be a
terrible and familiar pain running across her shoulders. It became automatic
for Helen to wonder at this point where working-class people like her parents
managed to buy their furniture. In the homes of her friends in the big city
there were big comfy couches that you sank into as if falling into a delicious
sleep, whereas all the sofas and chairs in their parents’ and their aunties’
homes seemed to contain hidden pointy bits, like mantraps devised by the Viet
Cong, that forced the sitter’s spine into all kinds of uncomfortable, sometimes
permanently damaging, contortions. The couch in the living room of their
childhood home had an upholstered ridge that ran along the back of it that
forced anyone sitting on it into a hunched simian posture. Maybe, Helen thought,
that was some marker of the difference between her generation and her parents’.
For Helen and her friends, their furniture was like their lives: it was there
to look good and be lounged on, to be enjoyed in a sensual fashion, while for
Mum and Dad and everyone they knew their couches and armchairs were
uncomfortable and full of hidden pain and would eventually leave you bent,
broken and in great physical distress.

In the big upstairs room
above the shop, as hail battered on the windows, eager to begin her new life as
a devoted disciple and thirsting to know more, Harriet said to Patrick after
practice, ‘We never really talked about it but you said you came to Li Kuan Yu
because of your fear of death.’

‘That’s
right,’ he replied, only half concentrating as he had been balancing in Golden
Cock Stands on One Leg for the last twenty minutes.

‘So I
assume meeting Sifu Martin Po and learning Li Kuan Yu helped you conquer your
fear of death, did it?’

Her
expectation had him replying that he had learnt some great, marvellous calming
wisdom from Sifu Po but instead he said, ‘In a way, yeah, you could say that.’

‘So can
you tell me how?’

‘Sure,
because quite soon I’m not going to die.’

‘No,
well, hopefully you’re not, especially with all this exercise and healthy
living, you’ll live a long life, so no, you won’t die quite soon, no.’

He look
directly at her for once, before putting both feet on the ground and stating,
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, Harriet. What I’m saying is that in five
months’ time I will be immortal.’

‘Really,
immortal you say?’

‘Let’s
stretch our tendons,’ he suggested. So they squatted down facing each other
(rather like a traveller child crapping in a car) while he went on, ‘Yes,
there’s nobody at the dojo knows this, not even Jack.’

‘No,
well, I can see why you wouldn’t want to tell them.’

‘At
first in the early days as I worked with the Founder my depression felt a
little better but I was still haunted with thoughts of death. The idea that
when I died all my memories, all my thoughts would be gone, I still couldn’t
take it. That Patrick would be gone as if he’d never existed and if Patrick was
gone and nothing remained of him then what’s the point of doing anything
because it would all evaporate. Everybody dies and nothing remains. Death was
coming to get me.

‘Even
with the help of Sifu Ma Po for three months some days I thought of nothing
else and it was all I could do to lift me head off me chest. Finally, as I say,
I began to feel a tiny bit better with all the exercise, better chemicals
getting into my system and so on. Yet the Founder could see without being told
‘cos he was that wise that there was still a great fear of dying at the heart
of me. So one day he brought me to the oak tree in the park and told me more of
his story.

‘After
Martin Po killed Scots Billy and ran to London he took many jobs, working in
the laundries of lots of smart hotels, a waiter in the Won Kei restaurant in
Wardour Street known to have the rudest waiters in Chinatown, runner for the
illegal bookmakers controlled by the 44K Triad. In the free time he had he
worked solely on perfecting the form of Li Kuan Yu. When two years had gone by
Martin had saved a little money, not wasted it on drink and gambling like so
many other Chinese. For some time the Founder had, he told me, been thinking
about his time when he had been a child growing up in the
Walled
City
.

‘Sifu
said he was thinking about a place all the kids knew —and avoided — a red door
with a curved yellow portal, temple style, at the bottom of a dead-end corridor
on the fifth level at the very epicentre of the Walled Citadel. Even the
Snakeheads left its inhabitant alone. There were a pair of porcelain guardian
dragons on either side of the studded metal door and a pot burning incense.
Behind this door was supposed to live a Master. Some said the Master was an
Immortal — over one thousand years old — who lived on the blood of young
virgins and graveyard herbs, both of which he picked up at night by adopting
the shape of a Flying Fox. Others stated he was a much younger Taoist priest —
only a hundred and twenty years old — who owed his longevity to a yin/yang
alchemy of breathing techniques and T’ai Chi Ch’uan which also gave him
limitless fighting powers. Yet others claimed he was himself the leader of the
most powerful Triad group in
Hong Kong
, the Tyan T’ai Pitchfork Clan. Some swore the Red Door became
invisible during police raids. Others told the tale of five youths from the
notorious Jonny Swords Triad gang who tried to rob the Master and were found
blinded, with massive internal bleeding and insane with terror.

‘In
1976 Martin Po, the Founder, returned to the Walled City, found his way to that
door, knocked and asked the Master to teach him how to fight.

‘The
Master had heard of Martin from his time as the best student ever at Blue Cloud
Mountain but he still had to take a test; he was forced to hang upside down,
bat-style, suspended by his insteps from a beam inside the Master’s temple for
twenty-four hours, and only then would the Master agree to take him on.

‘For
the following three years Martin spent most of his waking hours at the feet of
the Master or standing on one leg in a corner. He learnt Taoist breathing, the
reverse of the normal inhale-exhale cycle, cat-walking on burning coals, a
hundred and twenty-two deadly and semi-deadly pressure points, the ancient five
animal exercises, hurling anathemas and a lethal cookbook of poisons made with
readily available herbs and spices. These were things Martin had expected to
learn but one November morning the Master showed him a copy of a book called
The
Jade Monk’s Doorway of Light.
The book was written in Mandarin and contained
many odd diagrams, but the main text was concise and talked of Ching which is
essence or sexual fluid, Chi which is breath and Shen which is spirit. At its
core was a poem which the Master told Ma Po to “memorise and recite nine times
a day”.’

Then
closing his eyes Patrick recited:

Listening not to me but to
the account

It is wise to agree all
things are one

They do not comprehend how
in differing it agrees with itself

A backward-turning
connection like that of a bow and a lyre

Unapparent connection is
better than apparent

But of this account which
holds forever men prove uncomprehending

Both before hearing it and
when they hear it.

But nine hundred times nine
the morning recitation shall rise

Nine years shall see the
release of the spirit

Rising above the accounts of
men

The immortal shall be mortal

The mortal immortal

Living their death

Dying their life

Soul has a self-increasing
account