The Weeping Women Hotel (3 page)

Harriet’s
younger sister Helen — Toby’s wife — also worked full time for a charity, this
one going by the name of Warbird. Warbird wasn’t always called Warbird: when it
was founded by a group of philanthropically inclined citizens in the early
Victorian era to look out for the interests of canaries being sent down coal
mines it was known as the Society for the Protection of Our Feathered Chums. In
the modern age Helen’s charity primarily concerned itself with the treatment
and welfare of parrots, macaws and budgerigars that were trapped or needed to
be rescued from dangerous war zones. A few years before, the family including
Harriet had been on holiday in Cornwall when Helen had got a call saying there was
a famous parakeet trapped in the middle of the tribal massacres in Rwanda; the
parakeet belonged to a British millionaire who had a wildlife sanctuary in the
rainforest, all the human staff had fled or been hacked to bits and the word
was that the blood-crazed Hutus would soon start on. the wildlife. Helen right
away drove back to
London
and
organised a private plane to fly into the middle of the fighting. Harriet
tried to be proud when she saw her sister being interviewed on Sky News with
Montmorency sitting on her shoulder. Though really, she’d thought to herself,
you’d think the bird could have flown out of there by itself if they’d simply
told it where to go.

Then
immediately Harriet felt guilty about having mutinous, unsupportive ideas such
as these. They came often to her and her response always was instantly to try
and squash them flat and replace them with nicer, more kindly thoughts.
Unfortunately, however quickly Harriet caught and squashed them, she was still
left with feelings of shame over being the sort of person who had such
malevolent ideas in the first place, so she would then have to perform some
penance to make amends, maybe buy a little present for the person she’d had the
bad thought about, resolve to be super-nice to them forever in thought and
deed, praise their shoes extravagantly when she next saw them or do tedious
little jobs for them even though she really had better things to be getting on
with.

‘There
you go, Toby,’ Harriet said, ‘your jacket’s done.’

‘Ta, thonks
a lot,’ her brother-in-law replied, taking it and staring at where the acid
burn hole had been — there was now no trace at all.

‘Golly,
Hat Hat,’ Toby said, ‘you’re a magician.’ Then he stood in the centre of the
shop dearly wondering what to do next. Though he didn’t necessarily do that
much work Toby was scrupulous about not going home until the end of the working
day. Harriet imagined that he knew if he started staying at home during the
week he might eventually never leave the house. Toby looked at his watch, then
he did a bit of tuneless singing to himself. ‘Yeehoo, yahh, yeegata yam yam,’
he sang. Then finally he said, ‘I think I’ll go and visit that exhibition of
new ceramics in that gallery at the furthest end of the parade.’

He
really could be so sweet, Harriet thought as Toby left the shop, forgetting to
close the door behind him. She could hear him singing ‘Yach a yang a yach a yoo…‘
the sound trailing off down the pavement. Now she felt a bit despicable about
wishing he would leave, picturing with a stab of guilt how whenever they were
out and they met any of his mates that she didn’t know, like the gang he played
football with on a Thursday, he would always put his arm around her and say
right away, ‘Guys, this is my sister-in-law Harriet,’ like he was claiming her,
pointing out to them that she was somebody special in his life.

Toby thought the woman
behind the counter in the gallery was having some kind of fit hissing and
tutting and sighing like that; it was only when she strode out from her desk
and slammed the door that he realised he hadn’t shut it behind him. Staring at
the tortured lumps of glazed clay, he’d become engrossed in thinking of his
sister-in-law. Toby’s personal theory, for what it was worth, was that Harriet
had been attracted to invisible mending because she herself was so visible.
Harriet reminded him of one of the misshapen, hand-thrown milk jugs he was
standing in front of: huge, pot-bellied and lumpy. Whenever he was out with her
and they bumped into somebody he knew who wasn’t from their social circle, some
of the fellows from the footy club for example, he would point out immediately
that this big fat thing he was with was his sister-in-law just in case they
thought she was some girl he was having sex with. Toby felt guilty about doing
that because Hat was his best friend, but still and all a fellow had his
reputation to think of.

To this
day he still found it hard to believe it that the slim, vivacious, petite
Helen, the woman he was married to, was the sister of such a hippo.

Even
after eight years of marriage, every day Toby still considered it his greatest
achievement in life to have managed to snag a woman as beautiful as Helen. That
and of course his ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ triumph with Tori and Paul, but
the soup thing was years ago now.

Toby also wasn’t sure
whether he should really be proud of the ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ thing. He
seemed to remember that before he’d made the decision to stop drinking (well,
Helen suggested it pretty forcefully and the stipendiary magistrate had implied
it might make sense too) he hadn’t said or done all these weird things. Still,
most of the time he didn’t regret his choice — there had been a demented, sprayhose
quality to his drinking that had frightened him in the few brief hours when
he’d been sober. If it took a tremendous effort of will to steer clear of
alcohol and if he still thought about having a drink an awful lot of the time
and if as it turned out the poison in the liquor had somehow been deadening or
killing off the runaway thoughts that now carommed day and night around his
head and he monthly seemed to acquire some new strange idiosyncrasy, quirk or
tic, well, that was all a price worth paying.

Stubbornness
was something Toby noticed and admired in Harriet; you had to give her credit
for the dogged way she kept trying to lose weight despite a total lack of
success and so many obstacles being put in her way. He’d asked her earlier in
the shop, ‘Can you babysit Timon tonight? Me and Helen are going to a charity
dinner attended by Bono out of U2.’

‘Yeah
of course,’ she’d replied. ‘Helen’s already asked me. But you’ll have to wait
till after seven, when I get back from the gym.’

Toby
was surprised to hear her say this. ‘I didn’t know you were going to the gym
again, Harriet, after… you know that thing that happened, the incident…’

‘Yes,
well …‘ Harriet said, poking her jaw out so she looked like a fighting dog,
‘the boss of the gym agreed that that woman had no right to say those things to
me. Apparently she was suffering from postnatal depression over not getting her
figure back two weeks after giving birth; but still, shouting all that stuff
about how I looked and the smell of my sweat… They’ve told her she has to
attend another branch and they’ve offered me six months free membership
extension to sort of say sorry. So I have to go back really.’

Stubborn,
see?

As Harriet huffed along
the pavement she once more castigated herself for not being able to say out
loud Toby’s name for the patch of land she was skirting; she really should have
been able to use it, especially since it did so perfectly capture the flavour
of the place: it truly was a pointless park. The fitness centre Harriet was
heading for was on the boundary road at its southern tip, but though tarmac
paths snaked through the black trees and one streetlight in five was working
she would not, certainly after nightfall, enter its pitch-dark interior.
Harriet recalled when she’d been a child in the early 1970s in
Southport
that a park had been a very
different thing. There were big wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance that
were firmly locked at sunset every night, there were substantial black-painted
spiked railings all around the perimeter, inside there was a bandstand and a
boating lake, clipped grass as neat as a Guardsman’s haircut, a crystal palm
house, flowers and stout native trees and a head gardener who lived in a little
house by the gates and kept an eye out. Not in this part of north London where
she lived now; those into whose charge fell the open spaces during the 1960s
were having none of that old malarky — they couldn’t quite explain to you bow a
bandstand could be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting
down women, they just knew it somehow did.

The
authorities at that time had high hopes of building a grand eight-lane highway
linking Walthamstow in the east with Fulham in the west, demolishing large
parts of antediluvian London on the way and vaulting St Paul’s Cathedral on a
long-legged concrete flyover. Any building on the route might be pulled down at
any moment, so while they waited for it all to happen they thought they might
as well stick modern non-hierarchical urban utility spaces b along its entire
length.

Composed
of interlinked Second World War bomb sites, an abandoned asbestos factory and
the grounds of a long-vanished stately home,
Pointless
Park
was laid out
by graduates of the new town planning courses from the best polytechnics in
Britain
, disregarding all the laws of both
Eastern and Western aesthetics. The disruptive, unbalanced random distribution
of weedy, ill-looking trees, ugly, common plants, concrete, tarmac, dead-end
paths leading to blank walls, sinister hollows, unsightly brown hummocks,
stretches of grey metal fencing only suitable for a poison gas research
facility and scrubby dead grass emitted such a strong sense of malevolence that
anybody entering the park immediately suffered acute feelings of anxiety, fear
and depression. The only ones able to endure its aura of malignancy were those
whose brains had been numbed by drinking cider or floor polish, or those who
were taking powerful anti-epilepsy medication.

Only in
the very middle of the park in a shallow bowl perhaps two hundred yards across
was there a sort of calm. Over the years pollution had killed off all the
native woodland trees that had surrounded the bygone stately home, apart from a
single ancient oak right in the centre of the grassy depression. Four hundred
years old with many long-dead branches not cleared by any tree surgeon and
stumpier than a healthy oak should be, growing only about fifty feet high, it
had a cave-like hollow in its trunk where somebody in the late eighteenth
century had lit a fire at its base and the tree had grown around the damage.

Fringing
the edge of the bowl a tangle of living and dead trees — beech, horse chestnut,
hawthorn and sycamore, curled about with damp undergrowth, thorny berberis,
rhododendron and strange creepers of unknown origin — was neglected by the
contractors who visited the rest of the park a few times. a year to flail the
grass, pick up a few of the discarded syringes and trample the flowers round
the edge but who never penetrated further to its heart of darkness.

In Harriet’s mind the park
was roughly the shape of an upside-down pork chop, fatter at its base, a
quarter of a mile wide and approximately a third of a mile along both sides,
the eastern margin formed by a high brick wall beyond which ran a railway line
buried in a deep cutting. The steep sides of the cutting were almost an
extension of the park, untrodden by humans from one year to the next; rare
species of rodents and reptiles flourished beneath its long grass and often
above the track birds of prey — kestrels and hawks — hovered and swooped.

Her
invisible mending business was in a small terrace of shops on the road at the
northern end of the park. In some ways Harriet didn’t need a shop as most of
her trade came from repair contracts with many theatres in the West End, but as
she lived alone and worked alone, the few walk-in customers she got during the
day at least meant that she talked to some human beings just to reassure herself
that she was real. Harriet’s brain, free to fret itself into increasingly
baroque circles, worried that all those people you read about who went missing
every year had simply faded away, their molecules giving up the effort of
holding together simply because nobody had taken any notice of them for so
long.

The
work was never-ending — performers were always tearing their clothes, either in
accidents or fits of actorish passion —and secure, since once managements found
somebody they got on with to do their repairs they tended to stick with them.
And despite the big sign above her window stating ‘Harriet Tingle, Invisible
Mending Services’ she was constantly turning away people who entered the shop
clutching bundles of dirty clothing who wished to have their dry-cleaning done.
‘I don’t do cleaning,’ she would tell them in a clear, slow voice, ‘I do
invisible mending; it’s a highly specialised craft, I don’t stick on patches to
repair a hole like they do in the dry-cleaners.’ If they hadn’t already turned
round and walked out without a ‘thank you’ or a ‘sorry’ she would continue to
explain to them: ‘I take a tiny strand of fabric from some place on the garment
that you can’t see and I weave it around the damage so that once it’s done
you’d never know where the repair was. I charge forty pounds a hole.’

‘About
the same as a high-class prostitute,’ Harriet had once remarked to her friend
Rose.