The Weeping Women Hotel (28 page)

‘Well,
you know times change, if people can’t pay the going rate for a property …’

‘It
doesn’t seem fair.’

‘I’d
have thought you’d be all for change,’ Helen said.

‘You’re
confusing my personal growth with a guy being thrown out of his shop after
thirty years: they’re not the same thing.’

‘What
about Starbucks’ personal growth?’

‘What
the hell are you talking about?’

When
Harriet and her sister argued they never argued about what the argument was
about. Like the superpowers in the last century fighting their surrogate wars
over the territories of smaller nations, so Harriet and Helen would conduct
furious rows over Vatican foreign policy or the correct way to make couscous
with roasted Mediterranean vegetables, each of them adopting more and more
extreme positions they didn’t believe in, while the real disagreement was over
Harriet being expected to babysit at a moment’s notice or her dropping out of night
school yet again. Sometimes it was unclear to both of them what the buried
subject of the argument was: Harriet could remember one furious row over the
ecological effects of tourism on the
Great Barrier Reef
where they both forgot what rabid views they’d started out with and
had to end it with weak and confused agreement.

She
supposed really it was always ultimately about the same thing — the upper hand.

‘Anyway,’
Helen said, ‘I’ve always found when a shop closes, a few weeks later I can’t
remember what it used to sell. It’s only sometimes when you need some nails or
a copy of the Koran you recall there used to be a shop that sold what. you
wanted round the corner but then you go and get it somewhere else. And
restaurants … think of the number of restaurants that have come and gone, you
always know they’re in trouble when there’s a waiter standing in the doorway
staring miserably up and down the street. That’s not going to encourage you to
eat there, is it? Like that old-fashioned Italian place up the hill, do you
remember it? That closed down last week because it was useless.’

Toby spent most of that
sunny Saturday buying a light bulb. In their house there seemed to be an almost
infinite number of different light fittings: there were lamps that required
small continental screw fittings, lamps that required large continental screw
fittings, some that took small bayonet bulbs and some that took large bayonet
bulbs, not to mention all the halogen lights that were almost impossible to fit
with their fiddly little prongy things.

In the
past he could have got what he wanted from Mr Sargassian’s hardware store which
apparently now was 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. Now he had to drive into Wood Green, find a parking
place, find a lighting shop, then had to phone Helen. ‘What am I looking for
again?’

‘Large
continental screw-fitting energy-saving pearl candle.’

‘Right.’

‘That’s
a small continental screw-fitting clear candle non-energy saving,’ Helen said
when he got it home.

‘Oh.’

When
Toby returned to Wood Green the lighting store was closed so he had to drive to
a DIY warehouse off the
North Circular Road
. “What was it again?’ he asked his wife on the phone.

‘Large
continental screw-fitting energy-saving pearl candle.’

‘Right,’
Toby said but the DIY warehouse didn’t have any of those so he had to drive
back into Muswell Hill where he finally got the bulb in a shop identical to Mr
Sargassian’s hardware store. The store was two shops down from the boarded-up
Italian restaurant; a temporary sign on the hardboard window said it was soon
to be a fitness place called Pontius Pilates.

‘Are you still looking for
people to go to
Papua New Guinea
?’ Toby asked Helen as she wobbled on their dangerous stepladder
trying to fit the bulb.

‘Yeah,
why?’

‘I’d
like to go.’ ‘You?’

‘Yes.’

‘You?’

‘Yes,
why not me?’

‘What
is wrong with you, Toby?’ she asked, descending the stepladder and facing him.

‘My
life’s too comfortable.’

‘Well,
you could buy some shoes that don’t fit, then, instead of going to
Papua New Guinea
. You’ll have to camp, you
know, in the jungle. I mean you don’t like staying in any hotel that doesn’t
have at least three AA stars.’

‘That’s
the point, I want to rough it, while doing something worthwhile, for talking
birds in danger of course.’

‘I know
they’re not up to strength yet,’ Helen said doubtfully.

‘I
suppose I can have a word with the PNG group coordinator,’ but Toby knew from
her tone of voice that she wasn’t convinced and almost certainly nothing would
happen. On the other hand, he told himself, at least he’d tried.

Unlike ‘her Julio’ — the
one inside her head who was nearly always courteous, polite and kind — the
‘real’ Julio could sometimes be rather too crude for Helen’s taste. He said to
her as she waited for them to leave his flat, ‘You know what my theory of human
evolution is?’

‘No,
natural selection maybe or the intervention of some all-knowing, all-seeing,
essentially kindly spiritual entity like in the books of Paulho Puoncho?’

‘That
pinche
cabron!
No. My theory of human evolution is shit.’

‘Shit.’

‘Yes,
shit. You look at other animals — their arseholes are right on the outside of
their vodies so their waste comes out nice and easy but we have these vig fat vuttocks
that trap our shit. I think maybe we evolved so we could wipe our asses and get
away from the stink of our own vacksides.’

Not
very nice and terribly negative; she knew he’d been tortured and everything,
but still. This conversation took place in Julio’s ‘apartment’, as he called
it, actually a one-bedroomed flat on the Watney Estate. There were
Spanish-style wrought-iron grilles over the windows and an ornate black
security gate covering the front door which looked both vaguely exotic and sad
at the same time and also looked stout enough to keep the emergency services
out if there was a fire. Inside, the walls were painted in ochre reds and
yellows, there were colourful posters with words in Spanish on them and on his
desk piled with papers and magazines sat the corpses of his inexpertly mended
marionettes Margarita, Tio Pajero, Abuela, El Gordo and Señor Chuckles.

As
Julio moved about the flat preparing to go out, forgetting where he’d left his
keys, patting each one of the many pockets of his trousers to ensure he’d got
his reading glasses and his heart pills, the slow, jerky movements of his body
reminded Helen of those badly repaired puppets. Surreptitiously she looked at
his body but was disappointed that there were no apparent signs of torture on
his stick-like arms projecting from the flappy short sleeves of his faded white
shirt. Certainly he didn’t seem to be quite able to stand up straight, his body
etching a slender, shallow ‘5’ in the overheated air of the room; this she took
as evidence of abuse at the hands of Fascists. Of course you saw lots of
elderly people just like that down the post office and nearly all of them
hadn’t been tortured by a right-wing military junta so perhaps she was wrong.

A
familiar but distant sensation had been dogging Helen since entering his flat
and it was only now that she realised what it was: the feeling of being on a
date. Trying to recall, Helen wasn’t sure she’d been alone in a room with a man
for more than a few minutes since marrying Toby. All the people they saw
socially were couples like themselves so the men came with the women, the women
with the men. Before that the only males she’d been alone with she’d been
having sex with. It seemed odd to be by herself with a man who had shown no
interest in her. Helen wasn’t completely sure how to behave; in the end she
thought she’d try for flirtatious indifference.

The
experience of being in some guy’s flat, of looking for clues to his personality
like a detective, of simple objects taking on the qualities of heroism or
cuteness or repulsion, flooded back to her, almost like a memory of childhood.
Helen cruised his books and his walls for revealing insights. Coming upon a
group photo in black and white she picked it up to study more closely. The
photograph showed a group of youngish men and women dressed in the style of the
1960s under a banner that read ‘Congreso des Marionetas.
Buenos Aires
1970.’ With a jolt Helen
recognised the young Julio Spuciek, the one who had lived in her mind for the
last twenty years, standing in the centre of a group amongst whom to her kind
of person were a selection of living gods. There was Borges, Mario Vargas
Llosa, Marquez and even the elusive Paulho Puoncho.

‘Quite
a photo,’ she said to Julio, indicating the picture.

‘Oh
yes,’ he agreed, short-sightedly peering at it. ‘At that time there was a great
deal of Norwegian money abailable for those interested in writing for puppets,
so many came. Though from what I remember we spent most of our time in and out
of the brothels.’

‘The
brothels?’ Helen repeated, though there isn’t really another word that
‘brothel’ can be confused with.

‘Yes,
brothels, whorehouses, vordellos. Everyone in that group thought women were
only truly beautiful when they were very young girls. There was a particular
house in Vuenos Aires off the Abenida Florida, I think it was, Paulho Puoncho
used to go there all the time. The girls were perhaps fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,
at least that’s what the madam said and we chose to velieve her.’

Then
Julio said, ‘At least I am no longer interested in any of that, thank God! At
my age I will never fall for another woman. Now, shall we go and eat Chinese
food?’

A few days before, Helen
had gone to the café at the time of day when she thought he might be there. At
first she couldn’t see him but sat at a slimy table anyway and ate a stale Mars
Bar with a sell-by date in the last century. Through the dirty windows looking
out over the playground it seemed to her that all the middle-class mums looked
so terribly worried, while the few working-class mothers happily chatted and
smoked as their kids fell off the swings and cracked their heads on the
concrete.

“Ello,
‘Oolio!’ she heard behind her and he was there.

‘Listen,’
Helen said after he was seated opposite her and she’d paid for his coffee, ‘I’d
really like to take you out to dinner one night this week. I can get us a table
at the Ivy with a couple of days’ notice if you’d like to go somewhere like
that.’

‘No, I
don’t think so …’

‘Please,
maybe not necessarily anywhere fancy.’

‘Well,’
Julio said, a distant look coming into his eyes, ‘I have heard that there is a
place in
Wood
Green
Shopping
City
. I read about
it in the local paper, they say it is called Wow Tse Tung and you can eat all
the Chinese food you wish to for nine pounds and ninety-five pence. Their
advert in the local paper declares that a person can choose from over one
hundred and twenty dishes — there’s sushi and roast Peking duck with pancakes
on the weekends. Can you imagine that? So much food for so little money.’

This must be what they
mean by ‘the Fat of the Land’, Helen thought to herself, surveying the
customers of Wow Tse Tung. Or rather, she amended, ‘the Fat of the
British Commonwealth
’.

On this
Friday night the place was full of the overweight of the
United Kingdom
’s former empire. There were
fat Cypriots, fat Sikhs, fat Bangladeshis, fat Nigerians, fat Maltese, fat
Chinese, fat Australians, fat Papuan Pygmies. Morbidly obese Guyanese
overflowed their groaning plywood and chrome chairs, while enormous-bottomed
Jamaican women creaked over the protesting blond laminate floor and corpulent
Malays queued impatiently beside clinically overweight South Africans for their
turn at the chicken wings. All of them made her feel sick. Helen was certain
she had never revealed her revulsion — her extreme dislike of fatness — to
Harriet but secretly she had always thought that to be overweight was simply a
failure of personality, an inability to exert sufficient control over your
body. She admitted to herself at that instant why she’d married Toby: it was
because he had been so in love with her that she would always hold the power
and he would never be able to hurt her, she would always be the one in control.

She and
Julio had taken a minicab the mile and a half to
Wood
Green
Shopping
City
, a red-brick ziggurat of shops, restaurants and walkways that had
furious winds blowing down them on even the calmest of summer days.

Wow Tse
Tung was on the second level and an elephantine pair of Hindus were just about
to snag the last good table opposite the large plate-glass window overlooking
the treacly traffic outside, but the Argentinian who up till then had been
shuffling like an old man developed a sudden turn of speed and grabbed it for
him and Helen. Outside, the buses, the dented vans and the Asian kids in their
tricked-out Hondas and Subarus ground up and down the High Street as once their
table was secured they ordered two Singapore Tiger beers and were free to start
on the hunt for food.