The Weeping Women Hotel (24 page)

Hauling
Timon in her wake, as Helen passed the boarded-up shop and the tattered remains
of a defiant banner Mr Sargassian had made, she heard that funny businessman
who walked around the neighbourhood shouting into his mobile phone.

‘The
bastard landlord’s turfed the old tenant out even though he’s been there thirty
years. They say it’s going to be a Starbucks,’ he yelled, ‘or one of those
places that sells sandwiches made in India the day before and then packed into
triangular little packs by people with cholera.’

‘I have
a responsibility to raise as much money for the charity as I can,’ she told
Julio Spuciek in her head. ‘If Starbucks pays us more than Mr Sargassian I have
a duty to the talking birds to evict him.’

‘Of
course you do,’ Julio replied.

She
then continued just so he understood, ‘But sometimes do you think people who
campaign for things can have too narrow a view? That while we might set out
with good intentions our vanity and competitiveness might occasionally take
over?’

‘No,
no, you mustn’t think like that, Helen. There may be others in your field who
act like that but your motives are pure, you are a good person doing good
work.’

‘You’re
right of course, Julio, you are such a comfort to me.’

The
reason Helen was dragging her son towards the community centre was because it
was half term and the local mothers — well, the middle-class ones who cared
about such things — had demanded that the council pay for a puppet show to be
put on in the playground. They paid their taxes so the least the council could
do was to occupy their children for a couple of hours.

At one
end of the playground a tall thin stage made from faded fabric had been set up.
It was a bit like the Punch and Judy tent she remembered from the seafront at
Southport
but wider and with a very
un-Southport painted backdrop of sinister forests and mountains. There was
already a fair-sized audience of expectant kids gathered there, wriggling about
on folding chairs, eager to see the show. Helen heard one pale, six-year-old
triplet in perfect imitation of overheard adults say to the child next to him,
‘How post-ironic, a puppet show.’

The
other replied, ‘I was thinking if I like it I might option the film rights. My
godfather’s chairman of British Screen and …‘ The child never finished the
sentence as its tentative attempt at adulthood fell away and childish terror
returned, its silent mouth hanging open, because to the accompaniment of
strange discordant accordion music the first of the puppets shambled on stage.
Helen thought she had not seen a more malevolent wooden figure since the time
she’d asked a market stall owner in Port au
Prince
,
Haiti
, to show
her her best, most authentic voodoo dolls, the ones that the tourists didn’t
usually get to see.

‘This
might not be so bad after all,’ Timon said, smiling.

The
wooden figure turned in a jangly way to the front of the stage and began
screaming at the audience in a high-pitched voice about the environment and the
end of the world. By the time it finished its first speech several of the
formerly sophisticated little ones were weeping in terror. Helen too was
staring, suddenly realising where she had seen the puppet before. Though one of
its glass eyes was splintered and milky, its mouth torn back to the jaw and one
of its legs was little more than a splintery stump, it came to her that she was
looking at the wooden face of Señor Chuckles, beloved marionette of Julio
Spuciek.

At one point in her
twenties Harriet had gone to see a proper old-style Freudian psychoanalyst with
a place in Hampstead, a couch, substantial wallpaper, African sculptures on the
shelves and everything — she thought there was probably a place like a pub
outfitters where they bought this stuff, so identical did their consulting
rooms seem. Following her first consultation the fee he’d asked for, written
out with a fountain pen on thick creamy paper, was breathtakingly high. He also
told her she was supposed to visit him three or four times a week. When Harriet
asked this man why it cost so much ‘to sit and talk to him he said it was part
of her therapy, that in order for her to take her treatment seriously the fee
‘should sting a bit’.

It
seemed very convenient that these medical men had actually managed to work it
into their ideology that they not only got to charge her a huge amount of money
but they could pretend it was part of her treatment. She imagined if it was
proved conclusively that her mental healing would be helped by them giving away
treatment for nothing they wouldn’t be so keen to promote that theory.

A
little while later the psychoanalyst, accurately spotting Harriet’s dogged
reluctance to commit herself unquestioningly to anything, suggested that the
best way for them to overcome this crucial, crippling inhibition might be for
her to dress up as a jockey and ride him around the consulting room.

Patrick
didn’t charge as much per session as the Freudian but it still stung a lot. He
continued to charge one hundred and twenty pounds a week for her three private
lessons, plus another ‘general fee’ of sixty pounds as he called it for all the
other work they did together. She’d hinted at a possible reduction but with
echoes of the analyst he had said that an important part of being a disciple
was making a financial contribution to what he called ‘the cause’. Harriet felt
a twinge of suspicion but had to admit he didn’t seem to be spending the money
on himself: apart from his little red hatchback car he appeared to own
virtually nothing. The few clothes Patrick possessed were worn in strict
rotation and a number of these items had visited her shop for mending on
several occasions, for free of course. The one time she had seen inside his
fiat, though it was incredibly clean, it appeared to contain only a solitary
office chair, a television, a computer balanced on a milk crate and a single
mattress on the floor serving as his bed and it smelt rather horribly of what
seemed like sour milk and turpentine.

Harriet
felt spending so much money wouldn’t have seemed as bad if her business had
been going well. Certainly more men and a few women seemed to be coming through
the door with holes in their clothes but this was balanced by her losing
several big contracts with West End theatres due to late delivery. The truth
was she just found it harder and harder’ to repair holes: whatever therapeutic
purpose it had served seemed to have gone. Harriet hadn’t realised how
important her work had been in keeping her sane. Once invisible mending had
been a refuge for her; when the world had been full of fear she had been able
to submerge herself into her work like a diver sinking down to the ocean floor
so that as she drifted deeper the anxiety floated away.

Now she
no longer felt fear, the urge to invisibly seal up holes had evaporated. Not
that fear had been replaced by serenity as she’d hoped. When she had been Fat
and Ugly Harriet she had found consolation through telling herself that there
were many things in the world that clearly weren’t for her. Now, however, there
was a terrible hunger for nearly everything.

Helen stood fidgeting in
the playground as a stream of nannies and au pairs collected the weeping
children and Julio Spuciek was shouted at by the unnaturally thin woman who
organised children’s events in the borough. In the weeks since seeing his face
Helen had more or less convinced herself that she’d been mistaken. But now the
thin, bearded man, at least thirty years older than the person yelling at him,
who turned his unhappy brown eyes to the ground as the angry woman’s words
ripped through his ancient overcoat, could be none other than the person who’d
lived inside her head since she was a young girl.

‘I’ve
never seen the children so frightened!’ the council’s children’s entertainment
officer bellowed. ‘And some of them have been to
Shockheaded Peter
four
times.’

‘I’m
sorry,’ Helen heard Julio whisper in accented English, his voice sounding
almost exactly as she’d imagined it would — sort of sad and smoky. ‘It’s not
me, it’s the puppets, they have their own, minds. Señor Chuckles is angry
because of the destruction of the forests and …‘

Feeling
breathless, on unsteady legs, she approached the council woman and touched her
lightly on the arm. ‘Melanie,’ she said, ‘would it be possible to have a word
with you?’

‘Oh,
hi, Helen, yes I suppose so …‘ Then she turned back to the puppeteer. ‘I
haven’t finished with you. Honestly, some of those kids have never heard such
swear words even though a number of their parents are stand-up comedians …’

The two
of them walked a few paces off. They had met a number of times at functions and
for a while Melanie had worked for another talking bird charity. They knew each
other to be professionals in the world of public service and as such were
always happy to perform little favours for each other —speed up planning
applications or jump waiting lists for serious operations, that kind of thing.

Melanie
asked, ‘What can I do for you, Helen?’

‘The
puppeteer,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t be so hard on him, Melanie; he was
tortured.’

‘Not by
the children he wasn’t,’ Melanie replied unforgivingly. ‘Well, maybe those
Yentob twins, they’re capable of anything but really it’s not the little ones’
fault.’

‘Still,
he was a political prisoner.’

‘Oh,
they all say that when they get into trouble …‘ ‘No, I know he was genuinely,
it’s Julio Spuciek. The Edge wrote a song about him, don’t you remember?’

‘Not
Sting or Bono?’

‘No,
the Edge. But please give him a break.’

‘Oh all
right … I suppose so.’ She gave a testy glance towards the old man still
standing head bent. ‘I’m only doing this for you though.’ The two of them
returned to the old puppeteer.

‘Mr
Spuciek, Helen here has asked me to go easy on you because of your … past but
I have to tell you that if I have anything to do with it you will never be
employed by this council again.

There
was a pause while the man nodded, then raising his eyes he asked, ‘Do I still
get paid?’

‘What?’

‘Do I
still get paid?’ he asked again from under his grey-flecked eyebrows.

‘Get
paid? I was given to understand you were doing this performance as part of your
two hundred hours’ community service order.’

‘No,
madam,’ he said, straightening and looking her in the eye for the first time.
‘I am a professional performer and a professional performer needs to get paid.’

‘Oh, I …‘
Melanie paused and then seeing no point in making a fight of it said,’…
suppose so, though I can’t for the life of me really see why. I’ll put a cheque
in the post.’

Julio
Spuciek and Helen watched the council woman’s angry, bony bottom depart. ‘Could
I possibly buy you a cup of coffee?’

For the
first time he looked directly at her and smiled a sad rueful smile. ‘Madam,
that would be most kind but really I have to pack up my puppets and then there
are other things that …’

‘Oh, I
can wait,’ she said.

‘No,
really, you don’t need to …‘

‘Yes,
really, I can wait. It’s not a problem for me.’

‘Shall we go there?’ Helen
asked, pointing to the pub, certain that he would enjoy some nice risotto or a
Barnsley chop on a bed of wilted greens, to fill him out a bit.

Before
leaving the playground Julio had dumped his puppets into a big leather suitcase
roughly in a tangle of strings and limbs on top of each other (Helen would
really have liked to sort them out so they were lying more comfortably but kept
quiet); they were with him now. His stage he’d folded with furious movements
and thrown carelessly into a storeroom at the community centre.

‘No, we
should go there,’ Julio replied, pointing instead towards the community centre
café. ‘The place here is where I like to go.

Helen
had to suppress a shiver of distaste as they sat down at a greasy Formica
table.

‘Are
you sure?’

‘Yes,
absolutely.’

“Ello
‘Oolio,’ the woman behind the counter shouted. ‘Coffee, is it?’

Helen
ordered a KitKat bar for herself.

He said
to her, ‘I suppose I have to thank you for interceding for me with that ugly
woman.

‘Well,
she was being a bit unfair; in a way it was her fault for booking you, it’s
idiotic to assume a puppet show is going to be suitable for children.’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s
like always assuming …‘ But she couldn’t think of anything else so said,
‘Señor Spuciek, I have always been a great admirer of yours since … since I
was a young girl.’

She’d
thought he would be pleased as she said this but he sighed, seeming to shrink a
little. ‘Ah yes, since you were a young girl, of course …‘ He paused. ‘In the
1960s when I was a big star of the left in Argentina, an invitation came one
day via the Communist Party for me to go to China to give talks and to do my
puppet shows.’ Again he stopped for a second, staring off into space. ‘Nobody
went to
China
then, it was
easier to go to the moon than to
China
, what an opportunity! Also amongst my circle there was great
sympathy with the ideas of the Cultural Revolution, you know. That you could
turn vack the clock to a simpler life untainted by the corruption of egotism.
Writers, performers, painters — individualists every single one of us — dreamt
of creating a world free of egotism, I don’t know why.