The Weeping Women Hotel (25 page)

‘Maybe
because I was
simpatico
the authorities allowed me to travel around a
little bit, with a minder of course but still … One day we were going to see
a place where they made steam engines whether anybody wanted them or not and we
passed a group of schoolgirls leaving their college when they all suddenly
started screaming. For a second I was excited, thinking maybe it was for me,
the famous revolutionary puppeteer; in that country at that time anything
seemed possible. It wasn’t for me though, the screaming, but vecause the young
girls had seen this particularly huge poster of Chairman Mao Tse-tung
travelling around on its own truck — the only behicle on the road. It was like
film on the television about Elbis.’

For a
second Helen was confused about who or what ‘Elbis’ was until she realised that
like a lot of Spanish speakers he would sometimes conflate his ‘V’s and his
‘B’s.

‘They
were becoming hysterical over Chairman Mao — a fat old Chinaman with a vig wart
on his face. I understood then that while situations may change the nature of
people is fixed. Young girls they always need somevody at a particular point in
their lives when they are developing … you know … in certain ways. In China
during the Cultural Revolution because there was nobody else around they would
get hysterical love and I guess touch themselves when they were alone to
pictures in their mind of Chairman Mao, the vig fat old Chinaman who was
putting their parents in prison.

‘When I
was picked up by the junta in ‘75 I got what I had always wanted: to become
sort of an international political star featured in all the magazines around
the free world, except of course to vecome that famous I had to be in a cell a
foot deep in water veing veaten with a stick, so I didn’t know about me being
famous.

‘Since
they let me out in ‘83 following the war of the Malvinas, I have met a few of
the ones who fell for me and they were all the same. Clever girls who thought
they were a bit more intelligent than their schoolfriends. Clever pretty girls
who didn’t want to fall for Little Donny Osmond, so chose me instead — the poor
tortured political prisoner with the soulful, brown eyes.’ And here he did look
at her, head lowered, with his big brown eyes and they were soulful still.

Helen
felt like when she’d walked into a wall, numb at that moment but knowing that
severe pain was on the way. The face of Jesus in the potato had just told the
Mexican peasant girl that he didn’t exist but was instead just random marks in
a vegetable. To fill the space she asked, ‘What was that about a community
service order?’

‘Ah, I
have certain problems with anger,’ Julio replied. ‘Because of … you know, the
things that happened to me. The prisons, the secret ones where I was taken were
called Chupaderos.
Chupo
means to …‘ He made a face like a vacuum cleaner
sucking up air.

‘Oh
yeah,’ she said, ‘like Chupa Chups.’

“What?’

‘Chupa
Chups, they’re a Spanish sweet I buy for my son, a sort of round ball on a
little stick, you suck them.’

‘I
can’t have sweets I am diavetic, also have pleurisy from my time in the
prison.’ Julio was again silent for a while then said, ‘There used to be this
car that was only made in
Argentina
called a Ford Falcon. It looked sort of like an American car but
also like a European car, voth of them from years vefore … old-fashioned, you
understand? Just like
Argentina
.
So when they came for you — the Triple A they were
called: “
Alliance
,
Argentina
…“ I forget the other thing —
when they came for you it was always in these Ford Falcons and the cars always
they had no numverplates. Everybody knew when they see this car outside your
house that you are in vig trouble. I spent nine years in prison, until the
junta collapsed after the war in the Malbinas. In a cell knee-deep in water. It
was bery vad and worse — vy the time I got out I had gone out of fashion,
yesterday’s news, you know.’

He gave
her a sad smile, while she suddenly remembered she’d left Timon outside playing
with the Yentob twins.

‘I’ve
got to go,’ Helen said, rising.

‘Yes,
well, goodvye,’ Julio said.

‘Perhaps
we could meet again for coffee, at some time?’ she said. ‘For another chat.’

He
replied with a shrug. ‘Well, I am always at this place in the afternoons, this
is my seat — Julio’s seat, everyone knows it. If I am here I cannot stop you
being here also.’

‘Right,
great. Afternoon coffee it is then.’

Unwrapping
the silver duct tape that bound her son to the tree she heard the funny
businessman saying into his phone, ‘The Little One’s got a funny look about her
now …’

In bed in the early
morning light Toby stared down at Helen sleeping next to him and wondered how
well he really knew her. More and more he was having these feelings. Before
they got together, whenever he’d seen Helen it had always been in a public
place — down the pub, driving to her mother’s house or at a party. When they
first slept together, afterwards he had fallen asleep and on waking in the
morning at first he thought that Helen had been replaced during the night by an
exhausted child that had crawled into his bed for a nap. It was only when he
looked down her naked body, when he saw with a start of guilt that the child
had a splendid pair of breasts and a triangle of pubic hair, that he realised
that it was Helen lying next to him but that their thrashing during the night
or perhaps a wash had removed all her make-up.

Since
then it had always disturbed him the way Helen would wake as one woman every
morning then would paint on herself the face of an entirely different woman,
like a police artist composing the image of a beautiful but hard-faced woman wanted
for some crime of fraud or people-trafficking.

Harriet,
on the other hand, had never thought it worth painting herself during her fat
days and so didn’t bother now and so to him there was only one Harriet and that
Harriet, that true Harriet, was staggering-looking without the addition of
paint. She had told Toby that for a while when going out she would apply a
slash of lipstick, but her efforts had been so incompetent that she looked like
she was applying for work as a clown or was somebody whose facial features for
some reason needed to be seen clearly from a couple of miles away. Harriet said
that men in the most ridiculous places such as the nave of Westminster Abbey or
a hospital casualty department were constantly asking her how much she charged for
a blowjob until finally she got the message and went out without putting on any
make-up.

Toby
knew that he had to change his life soon or go completely mad; he needed to
make a plan right away but thinking about Harriet got him to surreptitiously
stroking himself and fantasising about what it would be like having sex with
his wife and her sister at the same time. At first he got really excited but
pretty soon in his fantasy Helen started ordering everybody about, ‘Harriet,
you stick your head down there. Now, Toby, you put that in there …‘ So the
whole thing dissolved as he returned to a troubled sleep.

9

Patrick had finally got an
e-mail back from Martin Po but it hadn’t in any way set his mind at rest. His
sifu told him next to nothing about the situation over there and what little
there was was written in a very confusing way, rambling and repetitious, with
many outrageous claims and paranoid denunciations of those around him. Worse,
at the end of the e-mail was a long list of things Martin said Patrick
absolutely had to send out to him immediately. A few of them he thought he
could buy in the shops: the two-way radios, canned food, medicines and the
bandages, but others he had no idea what they were. Some of them like the night
vision equipment and the poisons he thought might be illegal and one — a
Dragunov 7.62mm sniper’s rifle with infrared telescopic sights — he was certain
was. Even if he knew where to get these things he was far from positive that he
had enough cash to buy them. After all, he had handed over to Martin a great
deal of money when he’d bought the dojo off him but he didn’t seem to remember
or care about that and always demanded more.

The
tone of the e-mail only added to Patrick’s worries.

Driving
around in his little red hatchback he purchased a couple of the easier items
from a supermarket, a chemist and a pet superstore. He wrapped them up and took
them to the post office. The cost of the postage even for these few objects was
horrendous and the clerk told him that the package would probably take over two
months to arrive at its destination.

Once Harriet had gone on a
school trip to Paris; they must have visited all the museums and the
cobblestone-circled palaces yet the only thing she remembered seeing was a
slogan painted by anarchists on a wall near the Sorbonne to express their superior
disdain for the tedious life of the wage slave:
‘Métro Boulot Resto Dodo’
it
read — ‘Tube Work Eat Sleep’. Now it seemed to Harriet if you substituted dojo
for
Métro
that was pretty much her life too. The need to keep up the
exercise seemed constant: one missed training session and she immediately imagined
she could sense her muscles slackening and losing definition. Since invisible
mending failed to satisfy any need in her, repairs that would have previously
taken a few minutes now required hours of work so that she was forced to be at
her worktable on a bright Saturday afternoon. Apart from dojo and Dodo all
other tasks never got done, she couldn’t seem to find the time to buy herself any
new clothes, for instance, but even if she did she wasn’t sure Patrick would
approve; it had been made pretty clear at the dojo that taking too much of an
interest in your appearance was considered a distraction from the serious
business of learning how to whack people more effectively. Unfortunately all
Harriet had in her wardrobe that fitted her now was the stuff she’d worn when
she’d last been thin, back at college in the late eighties and only just out of
her teens. Catching sight of herself in a full-length mirror she thought she
looked like some sort of female nonce just released from prison after a
fifteen-year stretch.

From
her shop window Harriet gazed gloomily at the park. The sun was shining
brightly and the park bustled with people, entwined couples lay in the grass
furtively feeling each other up. For the last few years the grass, trees and
plants had been more or less ignored by the contractors who were supposed to
come and regularly mutilate it, so while the place remained glum and sinister
in winter during the spring and summer months it had grown to be almost
pleasant.

This
year nature having secretly gathered its forces staged a summer breakout,
silver birch saplings that in the two or three years previously had lain in
small cracks in the park’s paths suddenly burst upwards splintering the
concrete into powdery dust. Goat willow, bird cherry over a metre high and
hawthorn trees hung heavy with white blossom, oak saplings sent out by the big
tree in the centre suddenly stretched upwards. In the long grass native wild
flowers ran unrestrained by pesticide, yellow cowslips and primrose burgeoned,
while peacock butterflies flittered crazily between them.

Through
the plate glass Harriet spotted Lulu and Rose rolling about on the grass,
play-fighting with each other and drinking white wine.

Abandoning
her work she got up and went to join them.

‘You’ve
stopped losing weight,’ Lulu said to her as they lay on the grass, the sun
warming their stomachs.

‘Yeah,
this is me now,’ she replied.

‘Christ,
I wish it was me,’ Lulu replied, running her eyes up and down her body, rather
hungrily Harriet thought.

‘We’d
sort of hoped you’d go all stringy like Madonna,’ Rose said, ‘but you’re hard
yet still curvy where you need to be.’

‘Fit,
beautiful and able to fight more or less anybody in the world,’ Lulu said. ‘Not
bad.’

‘Still
can’t get a bloke to shag me though. I bet if I’d eaten even more and got
really, really fat weighing thirty or forty stone then I’d have had my pick of
all kinds of perverts.’

‘I
think the reason nobody’ll shag you is because your clothes are an absolute
bloody fright,’ Rose said.

Leaving her two friends laid
out on the warm grass starting on another bottle of white wine, she returned to
the shop. As Harriet rose to leave, Lulu, looking around the park at the
encompassing trees, the rippling grass and the nodding flowers, said, ‘Funny,
this place used to creep me out but now it seems sort of nice …’

Back at
the worktable under the hot light she sat staring gloomily at a John Smedley sweater,
one arm eaten by termites. The night before at the dojo for the first time
she’d managed to land a couple of kicks on the side of Patrick’s head. At first
Harriet had felt wildly elated by this but catching a look at Patrick’s wounded
expression made her suddenly overcome with’ contrition, having to resist the
urge to hug him and to kiss the livid marks that she’d just planted on his
cheek.