The Weeping Women Hotel (12 page)

‘Yeah.’

‘I want
you to meet me at the community centre café in the park at ten on Saturday.’

‘OK.
Yeah, I suppose … sure.’

‘Good.’

Without
another word he turned and stalked off leaving Harriet, the Mudwoman of north
London
. ‘What was this — a date?’ she
asked herself. If so it was an odd place to go on a date. The community centre
was little more than a large one-roomed wooden shed situated on the edge of the
park directly over the road from Toby and Helen’s house. Like the rest of the
area the community centre was a battleground, part of the constant struggle for
land going on in Pointless Park, a battle fought between on the one side the
new arrivals — the families of the TV producers, bankers, lawyers and graphic
designers who had bought houses in the last few years — and on the other the
older community — a shaky alliance of the white unworking classes of the Watney
Flats and the overseas immigrants. Recently the middle classes had seized
control of the children’s playground attached to the community centre; they had
managed this coup because like General Zhukov’s Soviet forces confronting
Paulus’s doomed 6th Army before the gates of
Stalingrad
their troops and their equipment were much better adapted to winter
warfare. The flabby, exposed, .tattooed, pierced, white flesh of the proletarian
women was no match for the Berghaus anoraks and Timberland boots of the mothers
and fathers of the new families. In six months’ time the army of the poor, like
the Germans at
Kursk
, would try
and stage a summer counter-offensive but by then the situation would be
irreversible.

The
swings and the sandpit in the children’s playground behind their low wooden
picket fence resembled some playground of the Village of the Damned because
silently playing inside it were so many pairs of spooky twins, laboriously
produced by IVF and private medicine from the fragile sperm and damaged eggs of
their over-achieving parents.

It was cold on the wooden
bench in the children’s playground. Helen was shivering with the cold despite
her nose being buried deep in the collar of her North Pole jacket. To keep a
watch on Timon she had to squinch her eyes up to see him through the fog that
swirled over the park. Even so, from time to time he would disappear into the
grey mist; fortunately it was easy to identify the identical blond triplets of
indeterminate sex whom he was playing with, since from time to time their eyes
would light up with a sudden eerie glow, like the brake lights on a truck.
Helen liked to take her son to the playground on a Saturday: it was a treat for
both of them to get out of the house; he could play with his mute replicant
friends and she was able to smoke an illicit cigarette and, with a delicious
squirm of guilt, read a particular magazine which she bought every week from a
different newsagent to the one she purchased her
Independent
and
Guardian
from. The magazine was called
Have A Rest.
Often written as if
translated from another language that didn’t possess many verbs, the magazine
detailed the lives of people who Helen knew must dwell around her, yet whose
existence she would have been entirely unaware of if it wasn’t for the stories
in
Have A Rest.
Helen thought of the periodical as a sort of stargate
which allowed her to gaze at a strange parallel universe that occupied the same
time-space continuum as her but with which it would be impossible for her to
intersect. In this universe people, nearly all of them fat and ugly, led the
most extraordinarily complicated lives. They had sex with their drug-addicted
ex-husband’s sisters, they married Filipino grandmothers twice their age whom
they’d met on holiday and took them to live on Sheffield housing estates
naïvely expecting that things would turn out well; their mothers turned out to
be their sisters, their uncles turned out to be their fathers and their fathers
sometimes turned out to be their mothers. Judging by the photographs that
accompanied the stories these people were of every shade of pink, yellow, brown
and black, usually within the same family.

It was
all such a contrast with Helen’s own circle who were universally white (apart
from Swei Chiang and even she’d been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College),
they married and stayed married, were good-looking and healthy, had only their
own children and generally didn’t commit suicide by hanging themselves in the
garden shed. Sometimes she almost envied the people in
Have A Rest:
compared
to the calm trajectory of the lives of her and her circle there seemed to be a
mad vitality about what they got up to; she wondered what it would be like to be
one of them, to live in such chaos.

As the
fog closed in Helen became absorbed in a story about a woman who kept finding
her underwear drawer disturbed so she installed a hidden video camera in the
bedroom. Watching the tape back gave the woman a perfect full-colour Dolby
stereo record of her husband having sex in her bra and panties with her own
brother-in-law. The, magazine had printed crystal-clear excerpts from the tape.

Suddenly
with a start she looked up, remembering where she was; like all the mothers
Helen was perpetually on the lookout for one of the five hundred different
kinds of predator the local paper insisted were after their children. After a
few worried seconds she saw with relief that her son was arm wrestling with one
of the triplets who appeared to be hovering a few inches off the ground.

Nevertheless,
feeling guilty, she swept the perimeter of the fenced-off area for suspicious
men; looking in the direction of the park’s interior Helen thought she saw
through the fog her sister heading towards the café. This woman, if it was her
sister, passed behind a man who was staring at the children — he was perhaps
sixty with thinning black hair swept back from his forehead, a greying beard
and a sad soulful expression on his face, he wore a dark suit and over his
shoulders was draped an expensive-looking but clearly very old fawn overcoat.
Her first reaction was that somebody with such a benevolent countenance could
never be a threat to the kids; it was only on giving him a second glance that
Helen realised with a thump in her chest that she was gazing into the face, now
lined and grey, but still recognisable, of Julio Spuciek. She felt like a
Mexican peasant girl who sees the face of Jesus in a potato.

On Saturday morning as
Harriet headed towards the park cafe, even though an icy fog lay over the
ground and the smell of sleet was in the air, there were some kids including a
pair of twins and a set of triplets playing in the sandpit. It seemed cruel to
her to expose your children to such rigours, though in all fairness they
seemed happy enough. The twins sat upright and motionless in the sand
communicating with each other in their own secret languages.

‘Harriet
immlich neem,’ said one three-year-old redhead.

‘Harriet
treemput treek,’ replied an identical three-year-old redhead.

‘Seems
to be losing weight and she’s smiling to herself in a gormless fashion,’ said
the Tin Can Man as he stalked along the path shouting into his phone. ‘… no,
no, she’s not getting fucked, it’s something else.’

The café attached to the
community centre, being steamily heated, was still firmly in the hands of the
old community of Pointless Park and since many of its clientele had served
.time in prison the food would have been familiar to anyone who’d done a
ten-year bit in Parkhurst: the ciabatta and cappuccino revolution had not yet
been able to reach this place. Until the new people could force themselves to
find the terrible food or the unhygienic owners ‘amusing’ or ‘charming’ the
locals were safe. The coffee came from a giant catering tin of Nescafé and the
tea from a big, battered tin kettle. Trying to focus on the greasy chalked menu
through her new contact lenses, Harriet realised there was almost nothing on
there that she wanted to eat or drink, partly because it all sounded horrible
but also due to the fact that her appetite seemed to have declined; in the past
if she wasn’t eating she was thinking about eating but now whole hours would go
past before Harriet thought about food, so in the end she asked for a glass of
tap water and some toast. When fat people like her ate in public they were used
to getting angry glares from other diners; you could often see the people
thinking, Look at the state of her! No wonder she’s so fat eating all the time!
even if all the fat person had in front of them was a small salad.

“Ello,
Patrick!’ she heard the woman call from behind the counter as the door opened
and a shiver of cold air passed up her spine. The red plastic bucket seats in
the café were bolted to the floor so they couldn’t be moved and the edge of the
sticky table was bisecting her stomach so she was in some discomfort and it
took her a second to absorb his appearance.

He sat
down opposite Harriet in his economical fashion like somebody folding a blind
man’s cane and immediately began talking.

Seeing
him once more she was struck by how young he looked; in her mind, she supposed
because he had power over her, he always appeared to be much older. The fat
woman wondered to herself, not for the first time, how she had fallen under the
control of this pale child.

‘Your
parents alive?’ he asked.

And a
bright good morning to you, Harriet thought to herself but said instead, ‘No,
no, they’re both dead.’

‘Me
too. You know I sometimes wondered if God had invented sleep so people would
know what being dead was like.’

‘Except
you wake up from sleep.’

Patrick’s
brow corrugated with annoyance. ‘Yeah … still, without knowing what death was
like people might not be afraid of it, they’d say, “So what’s that like then?”
And step in front of buses and stuff. Well., people who’d been knocked out by a
punch or something might have some idea of what death was like but not the
others. But there is no God so it was a stupid question to ask myself.’ Patrick
paused, confused as to what he’d been talking about. ‘You know I’d always sort
of vaguely assumed that I wouldn’t be that upset when me parents died, so when
they passed away so close to each other I was … I was really surprised to
feel … well, I dunno what you call it … depression I suppose. Only nineteen
years old but suddenly I knew there was no purpose to life, that everything was
pointless and when I died there was only … nothing, nothing forever.’ He
stopped then after a second resumed. ‘I dunno, the nothingness thing might have
occurred to me at some point in me life but if Mum and Dad hadn’t gone so
suddenly it might not have hurt me as much. I left me job at the shoe shop and
used to go looking for busy crowds, I’d wander through them straight ahead
without moving me shoulders and do you know? Other people just sort of bounced
off me.

‘One
day I was in the
West End
and
turned off the
Charing Cross Road
into
Chinatown
. I
went into this big Chinese restaurant, I think my mind was sort of searching
out humiliation so it could feel even more miserable, I think now that misery
needs more misery to feed itself. As soon as I was through the door a Chinese
waiter saw me and though there were loads of empty tables on the ground floor
he shouted at me, ‘Upstair plee!’ I did what he said and trudged up a narrow
greasy staircase to the first floor where this other Chinese waiter yelled at
me, ‘Upstair plee!’ On the second floor again I was ordered to go ‘Upstair plee!’
even though up there there were more vacant tables on that floor than full
ones. At last I reached the almost totally empty roofspace of the building
where there were just a couple of diners and as soon as I came into the room
another Chinese waiter saw me and shouted, ‘Downstair plee!’ and because I
didn’t move fast enough, he bellowed again right in me face, ‘Downstair plee!’
On the second floor again it was, ‘Downstair plee!’ ‘Downstair plee!’ until
finally I was in the basement that really was full and another waiter shouted
at me, ‘Upstair plee!’ ‘Upstair plee!’ and I just froze. You’d think they’d
feel sorry for me but I know now that’s not the Chinese way; rather than having
any sympathy I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd of the restaurant’s managers
in their black jackets screaming abuse at me in Cantonese. Until suddenly they
all went quiet, a small middle-aged waiter with shiny, dyed black hair, wearing
one of those plum-coloured waistcoats, pushed his way through the crowd. The
funny thing was that although he was clearly an underling the managers fell
back as he took my hand and led me back upstairs to a big table in the window
where he brought me that stuff they call congee-rice porridge and barbecued
meats free of charge.’

Patrick
paused for a few seconds then continued.

‘Not
that I felt any better after that, in fact I stopped going on those long walks.
They say exercise can help with depression but you need energy to get yourself
up to take the exercise and I didn’t have it, I was slipping down. A lot of the
time I came here to the park and sat on a bench; it was here one day I saw that
same waiter in a T-shirt and shorts standing motionless and barefoot in a
patch of brambles starin’ at me. The waiter made a gesture for me to come to
him.

‘“Why
don’t you take your shoes off,” he said to me. Somehow, Harriet, it seemed
natural to do as he said, so that I took off me shoes and wandered into the
briar patch as if I was stepping on to the beach at Brighton and stood next to
this small Chinese man. The thorns hurt like hell, puncturing my flesh like
little curved knives. “It hurts,” I said to him. “Yes,” he said, “it hurts,”
and I realised this pain was the first real thing I’d felt in months.