The Weeping Women Hotel (18 page)

‘Sure,
don’t worry.’

‘Hey,
Timon,’ Harriet said, once the boy’s parents had gone, ‘how would you like to
see what the inside of a pub looks like?’

When the two of them got
to the Admiral Codrington, .the little boy’s hand in that of his auntie’s, Lulu
and Rose were, as usual, already there seated at a table with Roland Malone
between them. Two empty wine bottles were on the table and the trio were
halfway through their third. Roland was in the middle of telling the two women
all about his latest acting role. He’d recently become involved with Fathers 4
Fathers 4 Kidz, a group that militantly campaigned for disgruntled divorced and
separated fathers. The day before he’d dressed up as the Norse god Wotan and
climbed a crane on the new Terminal Five construction site at Heathrow.

‘Some
planes coming in from the Middle East had to be diverted to Frankfurt,’ he was
telling them proudly, ‘and the Duke of Westminster’s private jet had to circle
for three hours till it was nearly out of fuel and had to land on the M4. I was
on all the
UK
news channels and
AI-Jazeera because of the planes from the
Middle East
.’

‘But,
Roland,’ Rose said, ‘you’re not actually divorced or separated, you and Inga
are perfectly happy together though God knows why, and you can visit your kids
whenever you want seeing as they’re at home with you.’

‘Yeah,
but if we did split up she’d probably stop me seeing them.’

‘No,
she wouldn’t.’

Lulu
said, ‘The men in those groups, the genuine ones, not you, Roland, are a pack
of self-justifying creeps who can’t believe anything’s their fault.’.

‘Yikes,
Hattie,’ said Roland, who hadn’t seen her for a while, ‘you’ve lost a lot of
weight.’ Then a theatrical look of concern crossed his face. ‘Do you have
cancer?’ he asked, tilting his head sideways like a confused dog. ‘Because I reckon
I’ve got cancer of the—’

‘No,
Roland, you idiot,’ Rose interjected, ‘she hasn’t got cancer any more than you
have. Haven’t you heard? Harriet’s become a Mutant Ninja invisible mender.’

‘What?’

‘Our
Hat could pull your spine out of your body and you wouldn’t notice,’ Lulu
added.

‘Poke yer
eyes out,’ said Rose.

‘You bitches!
I told you about that in confidence.’

‘We
wormed it out of you really.’

‘Well,
I still said I didn’t want to talk about it,’ then, turning to Roland, ‘I’ve
been doing a lot of fitness training but I’ve also been learning a martial art
called Li Kuan Yu. That’s why I’ve lost so much weight.’

‘Oh
yeah? And you’re good at it?’ Roland asked.

‘Don’t
sound so surprised.’

‘No,
it’s just you’ve never seemed … I dunno … sporty.’

‘I
guess I just never found the sport. But, yeah, my sifu says— ‘Your what?’ ‘My
sifu, my teacher.’ ‘Oh, is he that weird pale kid,’ Roland asked, ‘who was at
Christmas dinner?’

‘Patrick,
yeah.’

‘What’s
his surname, by the way?’

She
blushed. ‘It’s O’Reilly Po.’

‘O’Reilly
Po
?’

‘What
kind of a name’s O’Reilly Po?’

‘It’s
part Chinese. In martial arts circles it’s a common thing, apparently, he took
the surname of his sifu. Who was called Martin Po.’

‘You
certainly look good on it,’ Roland said, then asked, ‘Do you think learning a
martial art would help with my depression?’

Harriet
was silent. She had discovered with Li Kuan Yu that she wasn’t a proselytiser:
in the past she’d been eager to recruit others to her many short-lived
enthusiasms, signing them up to subscriptions for magazines ‘on literary
theory, dragging them along to performances of obscure puppeteers, but with her
fighting art there was no urge to share it at all.

Harriet
was spared making any reply by Lulu saying with professional disdain, ‘You’re
not depressed, Roland, at the most you’re just a bit fed up. If you want to see
depressed you should come with me round the wards. Those people are much worse
off than you.’

‘No,
they’re not,’ the actor replied.

‘How do
you figure that out?’

‘Well,
it’s easy, you see, their depression is happening to them but my depression is
happening to me so it’s clearly much worse.’

Rose
said, ‘Christ, Roland, you’re an arse.’

Whenever Harriet watched a
movie in which the hero was a wild, authority-defying free spirit who lived
life by their own rules, her enjoyment was always spoilt by her inevitably
wondering what they’d be like to have as a neighbour. She’d be happily
submerged in the film then suddenly find herself thinking, Well, that’s all
well and good you having wild sex in the jacuzzi to the sound of rock music in
the middle of the night, but what about the people next door? They’ve probably
got to get up for work in the morning. You could bet Billy Bob Thornton’s
character in
Bad Santa
might ultimately be a life-enhancing force for
good but he still wouldn’t turn down the music if you asked him to or be
conscientious about only putting his rubbish bags out on the correct night, and
if you lived downstairs from him he’d never be there to water your plants (not
with water anyway) or feed the cat when you went on holiday. And she doubted
whether the folks in the next apartment to Keanu Reeves’s character Neo in
The
Matrix
would appreciate him smashing through their wall pursued by
computer-generated replicants, or indeed be grateful to him for showing them
that their entire world was an evil illusion — they might have been happier
living in ignorance hooked up to a feeding tube full of nutritious mush.

When
Harriet got back to the shop at
1 a.m.
after Toby and Helen had finally returned from their Plumbio
function, a pyramid of black rubbish bags and the frame of a bicycle had been
piled against the street door to her flat.

‘Why
does Timon smell of beer?’ her sister had asked in a nasty voice as soon as
she’d come into the living room, while Toby had seemed to be acting even odder
than usual and now there was this crap all over her front door.

‘Enough
of this,’ Harriet muttered to herself and stepping over the garbage hammered on
the door of her neighbours’ house, the Elderly Namibian Women’s Housing
Association Home. She felt the flimsy wood beginning to shift and splinter
under the force of her blows. Soon there was shouting from inside and heavy
steps descending the stairs before the door was yanked open by a dark-skinned
Namibian youth with bulging eyes, sharp features and zigzags carved into his
haircut. He was dressed in a shiny turquoise and pink tracksuit, a cigarette
hung from his lips and as the woman watched embers from it dropped on to the
oily material where they caught fire and burnt little black circles.

‘What
you want?’ he queried in a thick accent.

Struggling
to control her runaway breathing, Harriet said in a rush, ‘You might recognise
me — I’m your neighbour. I live next door and you keep piling your bloody rubbish
against my step.’

‘It’s
not our rubbish, mate,’ he replied, making to close the door.

She
blocked it open, locking her arm in such a way that it was impossible to close
and at the same time bent down and tore open one of the rubbish bags: inside on
top of other garbage was a lustrous blue and gold tracksuit, the jacket half of
which was burnt into black cindery tatters. Harriet picked it up in her free
hand and held it in front of the youth.

Looking
at the tracksuit jacket the young man said, ‘You better come up.’ Suddenly
uncertain but committed now, she followed him into a greasy mirror image of her
own home. Standing uncomfortably close to the youth in the hall, Harriet
expected to be led up the stairs but instead, keeping his eyes locked on hers,
he sat down on a top-of-the-range-looking pink-padded chairlift that took up
most of the hallway. The Namibian pulled back on a joystick built into the arm
of the chair, there was a loud beeping noise and after a second the young man
slowly began to grind upwards. His ascent was so slow that she waited until he
was halfway up before climbing a couple of steps and it was only when he turned
the corner and disappeared out of sight that the woman followed him up to the
landing.

Like her big upstairs room
this matching floor had been retained as one big space. Presumably it had been
intended as some sort of meeting room for the Namibian grannies since there
were grab bars at waist height screwed into the walls for them to hang on to,
light switches had been placed at the level of a wheelchair and panic button
alarms had been fitted beside the doors; the only thing that was missing from
this picture was the grannies themselves. In their place various young men,
their features ranging like their grandmothers’ from white to deepest black,
dressed in the uniform cheap tracksuits, lounged about on council-supplied
velour sofas. In one corner there was a huge flat-screen TV on which was
playing a shaky DVD of a fat woman yelling out a hysterical song against a
rapidly changing background of forests, rivers and mountains with writing in
Arabic running backwards on a crawl along the bottom of the screen.

In the
centre of the room on one of those brown leather reclining armchairs that
extend like a club-class seat on an aeroplane sat an older bearded man.

Unlike
the youngsters this man was not wearing a tracksuit but instead was dressed in
well-cut dark brown Italian moleskin trousers, a white poplin cotton shirt and
a beautiful knitted cardigan that looked Spanish to Harriet’s experienced eyes,
and on his small feet were embroidered leather Moroccan slippers. Though his
skin was dark mahogany his features seemed Arabic rather than African, the
smart clothes combined with a small pepper and salt beard and the reading glasses
worn on a chain round his neck gave him the air of a successful American jazz
pianist popular in Sweden and France but ignored in his own country due to his
radical political views on class and race and his controversial marriage to a
beautiful blonde woman. Though smaller and more slender than the muscular young
men around him it was clear they deferred totally to the older man. Since
obtaining a little of it, Harriet had become interested in the exercise of
power, reflecting that maybe you didn’t need to learn how to punch and kick and
jump on your enemies from trees if you could get others to do it for you.

She had
always had the feeling that only creepy people such as Oscar and Katya’s weird
builder got on well with foreigners, not all foreigners of course, not
sophisticated architects from Madrid or painters from Los Angeles but rather
primitive foreigners, goatherds, tribal foreigners, foreigners like this lot.
Toby had told her once that he reckoned the people in the slums of
Rio
— the favelas — whom the weird builder
stayed with, were just nice to him because they were after his money, but she
wasn’t so sure, feeling that they really, really, truly liked him for who he
was. Though of course they still took as much money off him as they could. In
her experience foreigners often responded to the bogus, the fake, the untrue in
other nationalities.

But
then it occurred to her that Martin Po was a foreigner and Patrick had got on
with him so well that he’d saved his life and become Patrick’s sifu. Well, Harriet
reasoned to herself, Martin was Chinese and somehow they didn’t count as
foreigners: Chinese people managed to be both really alien and familiar at the
same time.

The
young man who had answered the door crossed to the older one and spoke in a low
voice. He listened then bade the woman come and sit facing him on a leather
footstool. She considered remaining standing but in the end sat down.

‘You
wish to speak to us?’ the older man enquired in a treacly accented voice.

‘Yeah,’
she said. ‘I live-next door to you and I’m getting really sick of you people
leaving your crap outside my door.’

The
head man didn’t appear to be listening. ‘So,’ he said, acting all cunning and
vague like a wily’ wolf in a cartoon, ‘you say you are the woman who lives next
door.’

‘Yes,
that’s right I do, I am.’

‘Then
explain me this if you can, the woman who lives next door is a big fat woman.
How can that be you? You are not a big fat woman.’

‘I’ve
lost weight,’ she replied.

This
seemed to throw him for a second but then he came over all wily again. ‘I see,
then explain me this. She seemed also to be a frightened woman, the woman who
lived next door. We used ‘to see her from our window, pulling angry little
faces at our front door then running inside her house as if angry parrots were
pursuing her.’

‘Well,’
she said, lapsing into his portentous way of speaking, ‘it seems that I have
lost my fear along with my fat.’

‘That
is unusual …’ There was silence as he mused on this for half a minute then he
began again. ‘So now tell me this, when you were fat and fearful and you saw
rubbish on your step what did you feel?’