The Weeping Women Hotel (8 page)

‘Now,
we better get going,’ Helen said in her busy fashion. ‘Harriet, you got
everything you need?’

‘Sure.’

‘Remember
Timon’s not allowed his fish fingers until he’s eaten two plums and he can only
watch half of his
Thunderbirds
tape.’

‘Two
plums, half
Thunderbirds
tape.’

‘See
you later, we’ll be back about twelve.’

‘You
just have a good time.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

‘Have
they gone?’ Timon asked, coming out of his room where he’d been playing games
on his computer. He was a stocky and composed six-year-old who to his aunt
appeared to have very little to do with either Helen or Toby in looks or
temperament. One of the many things she loved about him was that though both
his parents strove energetically to transfer all of their many neuroses,
vanities and anxieties to their son he seemed to remain entirely inured to
their efforts.

‘Yeah,’
Harriet said, ‘now what do you want for your tea?’

‘Fried
eggs and whipped cream from a can?’

‘Sure,’
she replied, taking out her tobacco tin.

Helen and Toby were making
their way to the jubilee gala dinner of the Percussionists Licensing Society.
Before Toby had taken the post at the Penrith Disaster Fund, straight out of
college he had been offered a very good position at the PLS. This event tonight
commemorated the founding of the organisation fifty years ago, to collect fees
from concert venues, radio stations and record companies for the work done by
drummers, timpanists and bongo players.

Every
year the Percussionists Licensing Society threw themselves a big dinner at
which various members of the office staff presented crystal goblets to each
other and a list was read out of criminal prosecutions they’d brought against
their own members who’d submitted false claims for royalties: no percussionists
were asked to this event.

The
regular dinner was held in a marble-lined room at the new I.M. Pei-designed
Percussionists Licensing Society headquarters building in Mayfair but for this
special event they had taken the big ballroom in a Park Lane hotel and as a
valued ex-employee Toby had been offered four tickets.

In the
taxi as they drove south into the city below them Toby sang, ‘Whoo, whaa, whooo,’
and Helen thought about her sister. Her hope was that in time maybe Harriet
would start dressing a bit better for this Patrick fellow; she knew of course
that there was nothing going on between them, but still at least there was a
man coming to her flat regularly which was something. Before, in the house,
she’d had to stop herself attacking her sister’s clothes with a bread knife
they annoyed her so much; force herself not to slash Harriet’s hairy jumpers
and her fat girl stretch pants, especially as she’d teamed them tonight with
thick ribbed wool socks and walking boots, but Helen knew of course if she said
anything out loud about the way her sister looked, even though she was just
trying to be helpful, Harriet would go all silent and sulky. She had had to
hold down one arm with the other to stop it snatching her sister’s greasy
spectacles off her nose and giving them a good polish.

As they’d been leaving the
house, out of the corner of her eye Helen saw the businessman who hung around
the area hurry past talking rapidly into his mobile phone, unable to decipher
precisely who he was referring to; she only heard something about….
frizzy-haired midget thinks if a man doesn’t fancy them he’s gay’. Then,’…
told you about him, he looks like one of those big Irish farmers, huge hands,
failed suicide …‘

To
Helen it seemed nice that he had somebody with whom he could share these
thoughts. The Easter when she was thirteen the family had gone on holiday to a
rented villa in ‘Lanzarote, a shabby breezeblock cube but with a swimming pool
and everything. She’d found an old diving mask in a cupboard and had spent
hours each day floating on the warm surface gazing down into the spangly
turquoise-tiled depths, languorously twisting and turning for the eyes of her
ever-present dad.

One
day, as she drifted through the quicksilver chlorine-scented water, the
shrivelled rubber of the mask’s strap suddenly snapped, making her feel as if
she’d been shot in the head, like the rooftop swimmer in
Dirty Harry,
and
as she watched the mask beneath her dangling, pale feet tumbling down into the
dangerous blue depths Helen lifted her head to look around and saw that her dad
had left the poolside. She wasn’t afraid, there was no risk of her drowning,
but it just seemed there was no certainty any more and the loneliest thing in
the world was to be by yourself in a swimming pool.

That
sense of dislocation stayed with her until the last week of school before the
summer holidays. She was in the school library, hanging around in there because
this group of girls who the day before had been her best friends said they
hated her and suddenly wouldn’t talk to her any more. Seated at one of the long
shiny mahogany worktables, sunlight streaming in thick tubes through the
windows, she was pretending to work on a poem for the school magazine but
instead was flicking through one of the old
Sunday Times
magazines that
the librarian kept in Perspex binders. In an edition from September 1978
opposite a full-page advert for Ecko Hostess Trolleys there was a photograph,
the black and white image so grainy that it seemed at first to be of bacteria
or something; only slowly did it resolve itself into the sad face of a young
man, a young man with long black ‘hair parted in the centre. As Helen stared
into his soulful eyes she felt an unfamiliar, warm sensation at the base of her
stomach.

Flipping
over the page she greedily dived into the story. His name was Julio Spuciek,
the son of a Ukrainian father and an Argentinian mother; in the 1970s in his
native
Argentina
he had been
the country’s fifth most celebrated poet, the reserve international goalkeeper
and its most renowned puppeteer. For several years he had made fun of the
authorities on his enormously popular TV and radio shows assisted by his
puppets —Margarita, Tio Pajero, Abuela, El Gordo and Señor Chuckles. When, in a
bloody coup and a wave of terror, the Fascist military junta came to power,
his popularity and his socialism condemned him and he was swept up amongst the
first wave of the disappeared into the notorious prison of El Casero. Yet even
the terrible generals were reluctant to murder a man as popular as Julio
Spuciek and in time they lit on another plan. One cold winter’s day in the grey
yard of the prison of El Casero Julio Spuciek’s puppets were brought out, lined
up. one by one against the exercise yard wall and shot by firing squad.

In the
magazine there were more blurred photos: of the splintered corpses of the
puppets and further colour pictures of the mournful, sensitive bearded face of
their puppeteer. Since that moment Julio had been inside her head, her constant
companion, her special friend. Helen stood at the top of the stairs and, like a
TV reporter, relayed the scene at the gala dinner of the Percussionists
Licensing Society to him now.

She had
carried this man around with her for over twenty years. Helen pointed out new
things to him’ all the time and when she saw something wrong — the ugliness of
a modern building, say, or some drunken boys behaving badly in the street — she
would apologise to Julio on behalf of her country. He was with her for her
first period, he sat alongside her during her A levels and he was watching
benevolently the first time she sucked a boy’s cock. Helen consulted Julio
Spuciek on every major decision in her life and he always told her she was
doing the right thing.

4

Harriet was trying to
remember how much water she’d drunk — she knew she was supposed to walk ten
thousand steps a day, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, drink two
litres of water and consume a minimum of three portions of oily fish during the
week; the authorities seemed to have turned the simple business of staying
alive into a full-time job. Also, if you drank the two litres of water then set
out to walk the ten thousand steps as she had just done, then pretty soon the
frantic hunt for the lavvy would begin. In the brief period when she tried to
stick to the government’s instructions Harriet was constantly being chased out
of hotels by security men or in burger bars staff would bang on the door of the
stall she was using shouting, ‘You no buy nothing, you gotta buy something to
pee!’ So she would have to purchase a giant flame-grilled bacon burger to pay
for her use of the toilet, thus undoing all the walking and water drinking. In
the end Harriet decided it was best if she stayed near her house and only drank
tea, coffee and alcohol.

Since
she’d become the sort of woman who had a personal trainer Harriet’s visits to
Muscle Bitch had ceased, though she hadn’t of course stopped the direct debit
that paid for her membership. During their weekly workouts in her upstairs
room, with Patrick watching over her and urging her on, she put a lot of
conscious effort into her exercises to show him she was sincerely trying to get
fit, but when he wasn’t there she couldn’t find the motivation to do them at
all. Lying on the floor with her toes hooked under the radiator fully intending
to do twenty half sit-ups she would come to fifteen minutes later still lying
on the floor having spent the time daydreaming about wallpaper with the smell
of burning trainer toe in the air.

So this
act of taking on a personal trainer had resulted in Harriet losing what muscle
tone she’d had, thus giving her sagging flesh the appearance of having gained
even more weight. She also seemed to be spending a lot more of her time lying
on the floor daydreaming about wallpaper, so some of her customers had begun to
complain about repairs being delivered late. Harriet told herself that she
couldn’t afford to begin losing any business because of Patrick. The financial
cost of employing him, forty pounds a week spent on nothing, was something she
could just about afford but it was really starting to annoy her: she had plenty
of nothing already. Sulkily she said to herself it wasn’t as if Patrick seemed
bothered whether he taught her or not; he took the money every week curtly
without acknowledgement, then sat around her flat for hours expounding his
bizarre theories, killing any shred of the mild excitement she’d first felt in
knowing him. One day in the upstairs room as a gentle misty rain fell outside
he said, ‘Y’know, Harriet, what I wonder?’

‘No,’
she mumbled petulantly.

‘I
wonder what the Australians were doing fightin’ in
Vietnam
. I mean you can sort of understand why the States was there and the
Vietnamese of course … though they didn’t really have a choice in the matter.
But the Australians? They sent a boat to the
Falklands
as well and they’re in
Iraq
of course.’

‘Maybe
they believe in freedom and democracy,’ Harriet said in a sarcastic tone.

‘I
suppose they could,’ he replied, taking what she’d said seriously, ‘but I
think they were just bored.
Australia
’s a long way from anywhere else and they fancied getting out for a
bit.’

‘But
don’t you think that’s a terrible thing: to fight a war in somebody else’s
country just to get away from home?’

‘It’s
what men do,’ was his answer. ‘We must fight.’

‘Really?
How awful for you.’

‘Yes,
it can be.’

Another
thing, it was starting to creep her out a little having him in her place every
week, sitting there like a strange, unwelcome cousin from
New Zealand
.

The
Booing Corporation was telling her that she might as well realise that she was
never, ever going to lose any weight. All the little men at their morning
conference told her to face it: if taking on a personal trainer didn’t do it
then nothing was going to, the nasty little men around the conference table all
said. Harriet simply didn’t have the moral character to stick to an exercise
regime, she should get used to the fact that this was her now. A fat, useless,
thirty-eight-year-old woman that nobody was ever going to love.

In mid-October, as the
leaves on the trees in the park across the way began to turn red and in a few
cases light blue, at the end of their fifth training session she said to him,
‘Wow! Patrick, that was great.’

‘So
same time next week, is it?’ he asked, opening the silver plastic case of the
cheap personal organiser he used to record their appointments in.

‘No,
now here’s the thing,’ Harriet said quickly, ‘I’ve just got a big contract to
repair the costumes for the Welsh National Opera, apparently a tiger from a
production of
Carmen
set-in colonial India got loose and slashed all
their costumes, so I’ve got to go and work … in Cardiff. I definitely won’t
be here next week at all so why don’t I give you a ring on your mobile when the
contract’s over?’

‘What,
not the week after either?’ he asked.