The Weeping Women Hotel (27 page)

‘Well,
the highest priced kind of whore anyway,’ Rose added.

A little while later after
they had dressed her, smoked a joint together and had fallen into that uneasy
period when the minicab’s been ordered to take you home from the dinner party
but hasn’t arrived yet, the entryphone buzzed. Descending the stairs with
unsteady steps, feeling like she was walking on a pair of stepladders rather
than high heels, Harriet opened the door to one of the young men dressed in a
shiny dark grey suit, while behind her, peeking out from the bend in the
stairs, Rose and Lulu sniggered and whispered like mice behind the skirting
board.

‘The
boss sent me to come and get you,’ he said, and taking her arm led her next
door.

In
their hallway, seeing the chairlift, she said with a giggle, ‘I think it’s my
turn,’ and with some difficulty because of the tightness of her dress sat down
on the pink padded plastic seat, strapped herself in and with a beep set off
for the party.

As the
chair slowly turned the corner up to the first-floor landing, it momentarily
jammed with a shaking and a grinding of cogs so that Harriet found herself
suspended high above the entranceway facing straight back down the dirty
stairs, her legs dangling helplessly in mid-air, and the young man scowling
upwards impatiently waiting for her to complete her ascent.

For a
second Harriet felt a distant panic but the chair began again and Mr Iqubal
Fitzherbert De Castro was waiting for her in the doorway of the big room.

‘Harriet,
welcome.’ Taking her hand and helping her out of the chair he asked, ‘I hope
you didn’t have any difficulty getting here?’

‘No,’
she replied, ‘it’s not too far to come.’

Leading
Harriet by the fingertips into the big room, he said wistfully, ‘Ah well …
you know, it would have been nice for me to take you to some smart place on the
river perhaps or a fashionable restaurant in the West End but it is unfortunately
not possible at the moment for us to travel very far. This city we live in, it
is all overlapping territories. Areas we mark out, over which we try to exert
influence. A male cat, an unneutered one of course, has a territory sometimes
miles across that he must patrol every night before he can rest. For me there
are certain streets in our neighbourhood where I am welcomed with gifts, while
there are others especially in areas of Tooting and Streatham where I could not
walk without serious risk of being killed. You, on the other hand, would be
free to parade up and down those same streets all day and nobody would bother
you. So for the moment we have to hold our parties in this house.’

In the
room, the lights were turned down low; seated on the low couches were various
stocky men in tight suits. Harriet felt with a shiver their eyes run up and
down her body like an MRI scan. She didn’t know what food she expected these
people to eat but on a couple of side tables were the same cheap supermarket
quiches and wrinkled cocktail sausages that the poor serve at funerals. The
drink was those stubby bottles of beer smuggled in from
France
and the litre bottles of whisky,
vodka and gin from the same
Pas de Calais
drinks warehouse.

On the
council-supplied couches the older men in suits sat nursing drinks, while in
the centre of the room younger men, some in suits, others in expensive
round-necked jumpers and cotton combat pants, danced with young women who were naked
except that they wore gold shorts or black thongs and on their feet cheap
high-heeled shoes. Though she kept her face blank, inside Harriet was feeling
the same dark excitement as she’d experienced in the days after Patrick first
made her jump from the tree. She’d heard that crack addicts were always chasing
that first irretrievable high but here she was and she’d managed to get the
exact same feeling back, except this time it was better because now she was the
one in control. Harriet wondered whether she was right to be so thrilled by
this decadence; maybe identical parties were going on all around the
neighbourhood where young women detached themselves from those they danced with
to be fondled by men old enough to be their accountants then led off to the
bedrooms in ones and twos.

Though
they all wolfishly looked her over, nobody tried anything with Harriet. She
assumed they thought that she belonged to Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro. Yet
after a little while it was clear to her why her presence would bring him
status. Sure, she thought, looking them over, some of the girls, especially the
younger ones, were extremely pretty, springy unmarked bodies, lush hair and so
on but when you looked closely there was some corruption that spoilt all of
them: partly it was a hardness, she guessed — the imprint of the dreadful
things they had done in their short lives — partly it was their brittle
insincerity and partly it was simple fear. The girls covered up their fear with
spiky bravado or a brittle sexiness but there was still the whisper of the
knowledge of what these frightening men might do to them on every one of their
pretty faces. All these things, Harriet told herself, were missing from her own
features, making her easily the most beautiful woman there.

She
knew at last why she had learnt to fight and why she had put up with the
rigours of training though it went against so much of her nature. Sure, it had
made her cool to look at but if she ever tried to use the blows and strikes of
Li Kuan Yu outside the dojo she’d most likely end up in prison. That wasn’t it,
here she was amongst these terrifying men unafraid — that was what her fighting
skills were for: to give her the confidence to do exactly as she wanted. She’d
tell Lulu and Rose tomorrow that she’d been accepted as an equal by a group of
men who didn’t care what anybody thought about them, who lived a life of danger
and debauchery. She was free and she loved it. As the voice of Dr King often
shouted at her over the hidden speakers in the lavatories of the Admiral
Codrington, ‘In the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at last, God awmighty,
free at last!”’

Mind
you, there were other people to whom Harriet would not mention this night at
all: Helen for one, Toby as well and, though she would be seeing him for
practice in about six hours’ time, Patrick.

Toby and Helen had been
watching the television, a gardening show which they were both keen on: over
the years they’d got a lot of interesting ideas for features in their own
garden from it. About halfway through the show, though, Toby suddenly began
shouting at the television, ‘Tree surgeons! Tree surgeons! Tree surgeons!
They’re not fucking surgeons! How can they call themselves surgeons? They’re
just gardeners! Not even proper overall gardeners, they’re just tree gardeners!
A pack of jumped-up pretentious twats. I mean a mechanic’s not a car
consultant, is he? A plumber’s not a drainage doctor! A window cleaner’s not a …
a … a window surgeon!’

Then
suddenly he began crying.

‘Toby,
what’s the matter?’ Helen asked, touching his hand.

‘Can’t
you see?’ be said, glaring at her furiously. ‘It’s the tree surgeons, they make
me so angry …’

‘But I
couldn’t help feeling that it had to be more than that,’ she told Julio,
‘though God knows what.’

‘It’s
another woman,’ Julio stated bluntly.

She
felt herself blushing bright red. ‘Another woman! Toby? You don’t know my
husband if you think it’s another woman.’

‘Well,’
he said, ‘I don’t know of any other thing that would make a man so crazy.’

‘No!
No! No!. Maybe in
Argentina
,
with all that tango dancing and machismo and the cars with no numverplates,’
she told him, ‘but not here in north
London
. He has a very stressful job — it’s probably something to do with
that.’

Then it
suddenly struck her that the Julio she was talking to inside her head was the
old grumpy fellow she’d just met rather than the optimistic younger version.
With an effort she conjured the younger man out of the shadows at the back of
her brain.

‘Of
course it’s not another woman,’ young Julio told her, ‘after all he is your
husband as you say and you are such a beautiful woman, how could anybody ever
tire of you?’

‘Exactly,’
Helen replied, finally satisfied with the conversation.

Yet the
picture of the Argentinian that she held in her mind, an image of a handsome,
long-haired, athletic youth, was constantly being overlaid like a faulty,
juddering, antique videotape with the likeness of a mournful, bad-tempered,
crippled old man.

The back of the mournful,
bad-tempered, crippled old man was towards her as she sidled between the tables
in the park café. It wasn’t true, despite what he’d told her, that he was in
there all the time. She knew this because she’d called in on several occasions
at different times of the day and there’d always been somebody else sitting in
the seat he’d said was Julio’s seat. She knew in her heart that she should
leave him be but there was a terrible compulsion within her to get him to
conform more closely to the image of Julio she held in her mind.

She
nearly missed him this time as he was at a completely different table by a
window staring out into the busy, sunlit park.

‘Oh.
Hello, the lady from the puppet show,’ he said, rising formally from his seat
to greet her, at least remembering who she was but not smiling fondly as she’d
imagined he might. ‘Please sit down,’ Julio said, gesturing to a red plastic
bucket seat opposite. ‘You seem tired, it makes you look old.’

‘Oh
well, you know,’ Helen replied, sinking down into the unyielding sweaty chair,
‘it’s my work. I work for a charity that looks after talking birds and there’s
been sudden tribal uprisings in
Papua New Guinea
. The mudmen, after like fifty years of being peaceable, have
suddenly taken to raiding Western targets. They attacked the British Consul’s
summer residence in the
Southern Highlands
two weeks ago and they’ve taken his daughter’s parrot, Polly
Williams, hostage. They’ve already released a video of Polly pleading for his
life and saying he’ll be killed if the British government doesn’t, meet a
number of insane conditions. We’re trying to put together a team of negotiators
to go out there but it’s hard finding the right people, it’s wearing me out …
worrying about that poor bird, poor Polly. I guess that’s me, I worry too
much.’

‘It
occurs to me you all worry too much, all you women,’ Julio said. ‘You know when
I am in the newsagent’s I look at the men’s magazines and there’s hundreds of
them about their many hobbies — trains, guns, cars, sailing, Asian women with
enormous breasts. But then I look at the women’s magazines and I see every one
of them is to do with self-improvement, a constant stribing to make yourselbes
one hundred per cent perfect. Lose weight, get fitter, speak Chinese, knit
this, weave that. The men they are completely happy with themselves the way
they are, the women all hate themselbes.’

‘Yes,
you’re right,’ Helen said, smiling — she loved it when he said wise things —
‘we make it such hard work being a woman.’

Julio
said, ‘When I was a child we were quite rich, so my mother didn’t need to work
but still she couldn’t enjoy herself. Instead she was always going to night
school, taking classes and half learning languages but then becoming dispirited
and giving them up because she hadn’t become fluent in two weeks.’ Here he
paused. ‘Then one day without warning she disappeared.’

‘Oh,
Christ!’ Helen gasped. ‘The Triple A!’

‘No,
nothing like that,’ he replied, annoyingly smiling a tiny bit in a pitying way
at her melodramatic interruption. ‘It was long before the Triple A; even so the
family were out of our minds with worry because she was gone for a month vefore
we found out where she was. When we discovered her do you know what my mother
was doing?’

‘No.’

‘Working
as a chamvermaid in a hotel.’

‘A
chambermaid?’

‘Yes,
this woman who had servants to do any little thing she wanted was cleaning toilets
and was happier than she bad been for a long time. My mother told me afterwards
when we got her home that it is many women’s plan if things become too much for
them, they think they’ll run away and work in a hotel.’

‘Why a
hotel?’

‘She
said you are part of a community but have no responsibility. You get told what
to do, a vit of a wage and somewhere to sleep. Working in a hotel lets you off
all the endless effort of being a woman, all this responsibility to improve
yourself.

‘Yes,
you are still caring for other people but at a distance, not too involved.
Because that is the women’s other thing: that they think secretly that they all
are in charge of everything and have to work every hour of the day to make everyvody
happy.’

10

The pond in the park, once
dead and stagnant, now fumed with life, starlings, sparrows and blackbirds came
to drink from its soupy waters, house martins and swifts looped low over the
black surface to scoop up the dragonflies and water boatmen that skimmed across
the surface. Wood pigeons cooed in the trees, dandelions, daisies and native
poppies spotted the emerald grass. Harriet said to her sister, ‘The hardware
store’s closed down, I hear it’s going to be a fucking Starbucks or one of
those places that sells sandwiches made in India the day before and then packed
into triangular little packs by people suffering from cholera.’