The Weeping Women Hotel

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Firstly I must express my
deepest thanks to Sifu John Kelly: without his extensive and occasionally
disturbing knowledge of Oriental martial arts I would not have been able to
write this book.

Secondly
I have to thank Siobhan Redmond whose neighbourhood, flat and occasional items
of furniture form the basis of the place where Harriet lives.

And, as
ever, Linda.

Oh!
Mister Porter, what shall I do?

I want
to go to
Birmingham

And they’re
taking me on to
Crewe
,

Send me
back to
London
as quickly as
you can,

Oh!
Mister Porter, what a silly girl I am!

1

I stared at the poster
stuck inside the darkened window of the nightclub and wondered why the
President of the
Ukraine
had
chosen to have his picture taken wearing a blond nylon wig, pink tie and a
bright yellow jacket. Underneath the President there was printed in big red
letters the claim: ‘Yussuf Younos —undeniably
Cheshire
’s Premier Rod Stewart Tribute Act’. At the bottom of the poster was
a white space — an oblong inside which there was scrawled in black marker pen,
‘
Tuesday, August 29th 2007
’s
the Night.’

Even in
the darkness I could see that the window was crammed full of posters, pale
rectangles clinging to the inside like moths. Trailing my finger along the warm
glass I tried to read them all; the most frequently repeated seemed to feature
a group of allied airmen from the first Gulf War recently released from
torture. Above the prisoners of war it read: ‘Pret a Manger definitively the
UK
’s Number One Depeche Mode
Impersonators. Pret a Manger will be appearing at …‘ and written in another
white oblong: ‘
Guantanamo
Bay
September 4th 2007
’.
Guantanamo
Bay
was the name of the nightclub spelt out above my head in dead neon
lights. The club formed almost one half of the ground floor of a huge red
Gothic revival hotel that teetered on the edge of the narrow pavement like an
uncertain fat man on the rim of a swimming pool.

A
distant clanking and the squeal of metal grinding on metal caught my ears: it
was the sound of my night train leaving.

Pushing
at the carved wooden door of the hotel, above which a single light burnt, half
expecting it to be locked or to resist my touch in some way, it swung open
easily enough so, with no reason not to, I slipped through and entered. Finding
myself in a small reception area, I saw that ahead was a locked single
half-glazed door, to my right a reception desk and beyond it a view into the
silent pub that took up the opposite corner of the hotel to Guantanamo Bay; on
my left there were double doors through which could be seen some sort of dining
room, again deserted since it was the middle of the night, but already laid for
breakfast.

In the
cluttered space behind the reception a young woman was seated at a battered
wooden desk, clacking away at the keys of a computer. As I approached the
counter the receptionist looked up, smiled and said, ‘Hi, can I help you?’ in a
voice extremely bright for this time of morning. I had been worried that the
people at the hotel might send me away or ask in a sympathetic voice if I was
in trouble and call in the police or social services since it was 3 a.m., I was
a woman whose only luggage was in a carrier bag, whose face’ was patched and
roughly bandaged and whose hair still had traces of blood streaked through it;
but though the girl seemed to take all this in quickly it didn’t affect in any
way the warmth of her smile or the neutrality of her welcome.

‘Yes,
if you don’t mind I’d like a room… for a few days,’ I said.

‘Of
course,’ the girl replied, reaching behind her and taking a blue fob with two
keys on it from the board. Then she rose and came to the counter, held one key
up to me and explained, ‘This one lets you in the front door and through this
door here’ — she indicated the half-glazed door — ‘and the other’s for your
room: number three on the first floor.’ She also handed over a small piece of
paper slightly larger than a postage stamp with printing on it. I read:
‘Station Hotel.
Restaurant
Pass.
Breakfast Only. Room Number…’

‘Oh,
I’m not sure I’ll want breakfast,’ I said to the receptionist.

‘Oh,
you’ll want the breakfast,’ the girl replied confidently and turned back to her
computer.

Letting
myself through the door and mounting a hefty, dull brown varnished, carved
wooden arts and crafts staircase, I ascended to my room. It was much larger
than I had imagined, furnished with two narrow, single beds on each of which
had been placed a folded towel, a square of soap wrapped like a biscuit and
sachets of shampoo and shower gel; there was a small TV on a wooden chest of
drawers. I had planned to have a wash but instead lay down on one of the beds
and was almost instantly asleep. Drifting away I heard the high-pitched insect
sound of a two-stroke motorbike far into the countryside; it came fast down the
arrow-straight road, rattled past my window before fading off again into the
night.

My only plan was that I
would sleep till at least the middle of the morning but instead I was woken at
around
8 a.m.
by a voice that
intruded into my dreams chanting echoey things about
Glasgow
,
Preston
and
Carlisle
. I groggily deduced that the voice
was coming from Crewe Station in its trench across the road.

Now
irredeemably awake, I thought I might as well try the famous breakfast. Having
stayed in quite a few provincial hotels over the years, descending the stairs I
glumly thought I would be able to paint the ingredients from memory in all
their fried colours.

I
entered the fragrant interior of the dining room. Some time during the night,
along the back wall of the restaurant a long buffet table had been laid out;
walking its entire length twice, my sense of amazement grew as I studied the
food set upon it. First there was a row of brown ceramic jugs, elegantly handwritten
labels before them on the stiff white-linened table describing the contents of
each: ‘there was orange, mango, melon, peach and pear juice, and all of them
seemed on inspection to be freshly squeezed. Then there were platters of
cheeses, sliced ham, fresh figs. Further along were lidded dishes with a little
paraffin flame burning beneath each: these were labelled ‘bacon’, ‘sausages’,
‘scrambled eggs’, ‘wild field mushrooms’, and ‘today’s special — huevos
rancheros con chorizo’. There were piles of toast wrapped in thin creamy linen
and freshly baked baguettes, pots of thick home-made jams, slabs of farmhouse
butter.

I took
some bread, jam, Spanish manchego cheese and figs then seated myself at the
only available place, a small table with a single wooden chair in the far
corner of the room. A pretty young waitress soon came from the kitchens
carrying a coffee pot in each hand. ‘Can I get you coffee?’ she asked. ‘Our
special this month is
Kenyan
Blue
Mountain
.’

‘Er …
sure,’ I replied, more used to being served watery brown outflow to drink with
my British hotel breakfasts.

While
the waitress was pouring the coffee I slipped out into the foyer and looked at
the room tariff displayed in a glass frame by the desk: a single room
apparently cost thirty-five pounds a night; this seemed incredibly cheap for
such luxury — most hotels in
Britain
could only manage shabby, dirty indifference at that price.

As I
ate my breakfast I looked around the dining room: coming up to eight thirty
most of the guests were already finishing their meals and preparing to leave —
they were all men, sitting either singly or in groups; some wore papery thin
office-worker suits, others were more casually dressed in golfers’ shirts, neat
jeans and very clean trainers. The men in the most exuberant groups wore
synthetic overalls in blue, green or orange emblazoned on the back with company
logos: ‘GEC, Alstrom’, ‘Amec’ or ‘Bentley’.

At
exactly ten minutes to nine all the men got up and left the dining room. I
realised then that I’d been wrong, there had been women there all along, at the
edges of the room like corner flags, four solitary women. One was in her
mid-fifties, tears ran sown her cheeks and with pale fingers she nervously
shredded a freshly baked peach muffin; another was no more than a teenager, she
had her head in her hands and her whole body was racked with silent sobs; the
third was middle-aged and expensively dressed in a Nicole Farhi matching pale
jumper and trousers, gold necklace round the neck and gold bangles at her
wrists, she was eating bacon and sausages rapidly. I noted that both hands
which gripped the knife and fork were wrapped in bloodstained bandages and
tears dripped on to the bacon. The fourth was me.

In the following week my
only meal was breakfast, I found I was able to pack enough away at the buffet
table to last me until the next morning, occasionally supplemented by my
sneaking a few pieces of fresh fruit or a sausage up to my room for later. b
After the mental confusion of arriving at the hotel, my mind subsequently settled
into a b reasonably pleasant state of numbness. I knew there were things I
would have to think about but the time didn’t have to be right now. During the
day as my wounds slowly healed I took long walks into the rich
Cheshire
countryside along disused railway
tracks overhung with copper beech and Scotch pine, or I wandered through the
flat, amorphous town marvelling at the number of confident, beefy girls in
their skimpy tops striding along the greasy pavement clutching carrier bags
full of outsize clothing.

Often
older women, catching sight of the cuts and bruises on my face, the black eye
and the stitches, would give me a sad, knowing, sympathetic look. ‘No,’ I
wanted say to them, it’s not that.’ Sometimes 1 would go down to the station;
it gave me particular pleasure to watch the new modern expresses slide like fat
silver eels under its dirty, glass canopy Maliciously on occasion I would
occupy the same end of the platform as the train-spotters, their flapping
anoraks giving them the b appearance of cormorants perched on the edge of a
pier; this strange intense female standing in their midst made the men
extremely threatened and twitchy; they shielded their male children from me
with their plastic coats.

In the
evenings the women who guarded the door of
Guantanamo
Bay
were happy to
let me slip inside without paying. I would sit in a corner sipping at a glass
of tap water and watch the entertainers onstage. The main business of the club
was tribute acts who performed four or five nights a week. I soon noticed that,
strangely, the popularity of these acts was linked more to the fame of the,
people they were imitating rather than to the quality of their imitation. The
Abba tribute band Bjorn Cjrazy got a full house though they couldn’t match any
of the Swedish group’s complex harmonies and despite the fact that the singer
who I initially thought was supposed to be Benny was in fact attempting to do
Agnetha. On the other hand the Scottish Peter Gabriel impersonator Jock the
Monkey, who was an almost exact copy, both vocally and visually, of the real
former lead singer of Genesis, drew only a handful of discontented locals who
threw empty beer cans at him during his almost entirely authentic rendition of
the video for ‘Big Mouth’. I was also nearly certain that the Gene Pitney
impersonator who appeared there one Saturday night was actually the real Gene
Pitney.