The Weeping Women Hotel (31 page)

‘But,’
Helen stammered’… I thought you said only young girls of fourteen were
beautiful?’

‘When?
When did I say that?’

‘You
said you and all your lecherous South American mates agreed that women are only
truly beautiful when they are young — fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.
You and Paulho Puoncho went to a brothel off the Avenida Florida where the
girls were maybe fourteen, fifteen.’

‘Oh,
that was some nonsense that we used to say when we were young. I went along
with it but never really believed. No, your sister up there on the stage, a
body of such grace, such power and, I think the most attractive of all, capable
of great cruelty.’

‘My
sister capable of great cruelty! Hat? You must be joking.’

‘No,
she is magnificent.’

She
couldn’t stop herself asking, ‘What about me?’

‘What
about you?’

‘Don’t I
have grace, power, cruelty?’

‘You?’
He looked at Helen and laughed. ‘You are a girl. A pretty girl, sure, but one
whose looks mean too much to her. Everyone must love you. or you feel you are
nothing. Perhaps you will introduce me to your sister Harriet?’

She was
saved from figuring out what her response to this would be by a young community
worker rounding the corner. ‘Oi, ‘Oolio!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve been warned about
chatting to the girls. Do you want another two hundred hours?’

So he
scuttled off, leaving her feeling even more uncomfortable and confused.

Martin and Patrick had once
discussed the idea of whether it might be possible to form a squad of trained
killers, of ninjas, from those who are suffering or who had suffered from panic
attacks and related acute anxiety disorders — phobias, obsessive
compulsive-behaviour, intrusive fearful thoughts and so on. Sifu Po had a
notion that if getting out of the house in the morning was the most frightening
thing in the world then a
midnight
parachute drop into the
Yemen
would be no more frightening. He reasoned that if you are
frightened of everything you are therefore frightened of nothing. If you are
phobic, he said, it takes as much courage to touch a frozen chicken as it does
to murder a Russian gangster in his sleep, if you are scared nearly to death of
the voices in your head telling you to take your pants down in public then
going up against the Colombian drug cartels might be a cakewalk by comparison.
As he said to his young disciple, ‘Let’s face it, Patrick you can run away or
kill the Colombian drug cartel but the voices in your head, you’re stuck with
them.’ For a while the two of them had hung around outside the Nightingale
Clinic which Martin said was a famous mental place and eventually they found a
number of people who were suffering from anxiety disorders, but when the two men
tried to take these people somewhere to explain their ideas they kept crying,
fainting on the pavement and begging the martial arts adepts to let them go.
Still, it had been a happy time for Martin and Patrick travelling around
together, stalking the mentally ill.

Patrick
had thought that maybe with Harriet he would become Martin — the wise sifu —
and she would become him, sort of — the disciple, the one who learnt and
admired. But she seemed more interested in the gangsters next door.

Harriet sat in front of
her computer, accessed Google and started looking for information on Li Kuan
Yu. She didn’t know why she hadn’t done it before; perhaps it was because when
she had been in love with it, she’d wanted to think that Li Kuan Yu was unique,
a private magical thing that existed in a world outside the tawdry goings-on
that you found on the internet.

The
first few searches produced bewildering references to impossible Chinese
classical books, myths and legends, but no martial arts, apart from a reference
to Kuan Yu, apparently the god of choice of the Triads, the police and kung fu
masters. Changing the spelling to Lee Kuan Yew brought reams of entries
referring to the semi-retired dictator of
Singapore
but this wasn’t what she was after.

Altering
the spelling several times, ‘LKY:
Kettering
: Martial Arts’. finally produced a number of entries. In a Forum on
the site ‘www.Obscurexternalmartialarts.com’ she read: ‘Web-forum: The Master
of Northampton. Does anyone know what happened to Martin Po?’ Somebody calling
themselves ‘Tim from
Vancouver
’
asked this question.

There
were a number of replies.

ENTRY: From William Tang, PhD, Dept of Sino Tibetan Studies, University
of
Durham
. Posted
16/10/99
.

Martin Po was reputedly master of the Legend of Li Xian Ieou (Silver
Fin Fish Fist), an allegedly deadly martial arts form. There are no published
photographs either of the art or its founder.

Origin: Some trace the roots of Silver Fin Fish Fist to Tönpa Shenrab,
the founder of Bon, a shamanistic folk religion which pre-dated Buddhism. He is
said to have been born in the mythical
land
of
Olmo Lung Ring
, whose location remains something of a
mystery. The land is traditionally described as dominated by
Mount
Yung-drung
Gu-tzeg (Edifice of Nine Swastikas), which
many identify as
Mount
Kailash
in western
Tibet
. Due to the sacredness of Olmo Lung Ring and the mountain,
both the counter-clockwise swastika and the number nine are of great
significance. (See Snellgrove:
The Nine Ways of Bon,
1957.)

Certainly the swastika featured large in the sect which surrounded the
cult of Li Xian Yeow. The
Happy
Garden
, headquarters
and temple, was situated at number
9 Boncastle Road
,
Kettering
. See
Leicester Mercury,
Jan. 1982, pp. 2—3, ‘Chinese
Nazis in
Northampton
?’.

Though never numerous there have been no known references to Martin Po
since 1997.

There
were several other entries, one from somebody calling themselves ‘Iron Fist
Tony Roberts’ which read: ‘Sure. I studied his so-called LKY some time back.
He’s a fraud. It doesn’t work. I hurt my back quite severely from falling off a
ladder practising one of the forms. Don’t go there.’

This
had led to two responses:

From
Anna Conda,
Leipzig
,
Germany
: ‘Fraud yourself. Liar! LKY is
best world martial art. I will defend my master to the death against all
detractors, you crippled pimp. Martin Po is in the
Far
East
, by the way, learning at the feet of his Master.
He will return and crush his enemies, probably soon.’

And
lastly from somebody called ‘John in Daventry’, who wrote: ‘I went to school
with a Chinese kid called Martin Po. I seem to remember he got done by the
police for jumping out of trees and wrapping his legs round schoolgirls, after
that he went away. I don’t know anything about LKY but students should try
Drunken Monkey Fist. Much more effective and no trees.’

Not a
unique, private, magical thing that exists in a world outside the tawdry
goings-on found on the internet then.

It was a particularly busy
time at work for Helen since the following week would be National Talking Bird
Awareness Week. However, since the same seven days were also European Leprosy
Awareness Week and had within it UK Banana Day and National Ride to Work Day
not to mention the entire year being United Nations International Year of the
Environmentally Aware they struggled to get media attention. Sometimes she
thought that perhaps the authorities could extend the year, say, to six hundred
days then every cause could have its day. Yet she knew that inevitably even
this unlikely solution would lead to problems; the football season would be too
long for a start and the worthwhile days, weeks and months would simply expand
to fill the extra time. Maybe, Helen thought, some of these special days could
be combined so that you’d get something like National Ride to Work on a Leper
Day. It might be nice for people to chat to a leper while they were carried
into work, they might learn something about the disease that they wouldn’t get
from reading an article in the paper.

It
occurred to her that she might be able to conserve two birds with one stone.
The rescue of the British Consul’s daughter’s parrot from rebel mudmen in
Papua New Guinea
was just the kind of
heart-warming story Warbird needed to put it in front of other charities.
Secondly, if the rescue mission was led by the husband of one of the charity’s
senior administrators that would certainly help her standing within the organisation;
after all it had been a while now since the
Rwanda
triumph. Or it might all be a complete disaster.

11

The summer was hot with
periods of humidity (‘humadidity’ as Toby called it) mixed with warm rain that
in previous years would have sent plant diseases racing round the park.
However, because of their wild mongrel nature the plants were strong this year
and fought off illness with ease. The store that had once belonged to Mr
Sargassian finally reopened but not as predicted as a corporate coffee shop or
a place that sold sandwiches packed in India, rather as a charity shop
supposedly for the Namibian Disaster Relief Fund.

‘They’ve
opened a shop now,’ Harriet heard the Can Man say, ‘yes,
them.’

As she
browsed the store, it seemed to her that many of the products on show appeared
to be at remarkably low prices and were suspiciously new compared with the
cast-offs in other charity shops she’d visited. Stacked up were the latest DVD
recorders, top-of-the-line computers and iPods that she thought were only on
sale in the United States alongside huge piles of round tins of mackerel from
Turkey and big fat rolls of shiny black rubbish bags for a pound.

Since
the party at the flat next door there had been several excursions and on each
occasion there had been a new outfit for Harriet. Often these were waiting for
her in the next-door flat but at other times Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro
took Harriet to smart clothes and jewellery places in Crouch End and Muswell
Hill where the women serving in the shops would give her funny looks. Sometimes
they went to nightclubs, once to the dog racing at Walthamstow and once to a
party in a flat on the
Greenwich
Peninsula
overlooking
the Dome.

Sometimes
when they went out they’d travel around in one of those stretch limousines;
with its dimly lit interior yawning off into the distance, it felt to Harriet
like they were travelling around outer London in a carpeted coal mine. The gang
of young men dressed in smart suits would perch sideways on foldout chairs and
drink whisky from a line of cut-glass decanters arrayed on a drinks cabinet to
the side of the limousine, their contents described on a little brass dog tag
worn round the neck.

One
night as she came out of her shop towards the limousine the Tin Can Man was on
the opposite pavement standing just inside the park, knee-deep in the long
grass; unusually she could see the silver glint of his phone as it hung silent
in his hand.

Clambering
into the back seat of the limousine, Harriet cast another quick look at the
silent watcher. Following the direction of her gaze Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De
Castro asked, indicating the Tin Can Man, ‘Friend of yours?’

‘No,
not really, I just see him around, you know, and he says things about me or he
used to …‘

‘I see.
Well, actually, we used to be quite close to him.’

‘Him?’

‘Yes,
before his troubles he was something of a wealthy man.’

‘Really?
He doesn’t seem like it now.’

‘Nevertheless
it is true; you know, he owned that building where the gym that is only for
women is now. Used to manufacture women’s clothes there. When he had his
troubles we were luckily able to help him out a little by buying the building
off him. Unfortunately he was not grateful because by then his mind had turned;
still we tried to be his friend and that is the main thing.’

When Harriet had first
become involved with Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro and the Namibians and had
gone to that first party she’d wondered whether she’d finally found her gang of
travellers, her posse, her tribe, her crew. Certainly being in their company
gave her a delirious sense of being unrestrained. To Harriet Mr Iqubal
Fitzherbert De Castro and all the others whom he mixed with were not bound by
parking tickets, planning regulations and refraining from putting your rubbish
out until after 8.30 on bin night. They did not submit to the petty rules of
society. Of course there was a price to pay for this freedom — the price they
paid was that they didn’t have the protection of society and other people
sometimes tried to kill them but they seemed OK with that.