The Weeping Women Hotel (22 page)

Holding its jade in special
esteem

If you do not expect the
unexpected you will not discover it

Cold things grow hot, the
hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens

Souls are exhaled from the
moist things

For souls it is death to
become water

For water death to become
earth

But from earth water comes
into being

From water soul

Keep close to yourself the
moisture of your body

Neither depleted nor injured

In your fastness shall come life

The cure is within you

In a nine-year spirit shall
fly.

Then Patrick opened his
eyes and, his voice returning to normal, he said, ‘Do you see what it’s saying,
Harriet?’

It didn’t
seem to be saying anything as far as she could tell but then many Oriental
things were a mystery to her, she was never sure whether their poetry was
deeply profound or just stupid stuff broken into short lines. ‘I think so a
bit,’ Harriet said, ‘but just explain it to me a little better.’

‘Martin
told me that basically this poem means that if a man doesn’t spill his fluids
for nine years — you understand what fluids I am talking about here? The Ching
fluids — and does the breathing exercises and all other exercises and becomes
wise in the fighting arts then it will lead to a reversal of the ageing process
and to immortality.

‘He
said that Taoists believe that when a human is born they acquire a hun spirit
and a p’o spirit. Hun is yang which is heaven, immortality, and p’o is yin,
which means earth and mortality. If we have lived within the nine emotions of
the desire realm —that’s all the stuff I was talking about — then at death when
hun and p’o separate our spirit will leave through the top of our head and we
will return as one type of ghost which is called kuei. That’s the hun type
which is immortal. If we have spilt our seed and not lived within the nine
emotions of the desire realm we will become a p’o spirit. This type doesn’t
survive very long and soon becomes a dead ghost which is no good at all. If you
are a hun spirit after some time you can locate a p’o spirit which has just
died to unite with to return to earth and try again.

‘You
can’t believe the effect this had on me, Harriet — at that instant all my fear
of death disappeared because I was being told of a way not just to live a
longer time in this realm but a way to be immortal. It was eight years and
seven months ago that Martin Po told me this. If I can hold on to my fluids for
five months more then I will never die. I will live a long, long, long time and
even if I’m killed by somebody my spirit will be hun. At the moment of death it
will leave through the top of my head, I’ll hang around for a while then return
to earth.’ He paused for a few seconds, his brow rippled with thought. ‘Of
course what Martin Po told me means I can’t have sex ever a gain or you know …
do anything else along those lines because I can’t spill my seed. Still, on
balance I’d say it’s definitely worth it.’

Harriet
asked herself what was that familiar sensation she felt? It was the plummeting
feeling experienced the first time she’d launched herself from the branch of
the oak tree, except this time there was no excitement, only the sick sensation
of falling. She said to him, ‘But you won’t be able to have children or
anything.’

‘Oh,’
he replied nonchalantly, ‘that’s not a problem. See, I’ve got a kid. By a girl
in the flats, we were married and everything but Martin told me I had to leave
her as she was getting in the way of my Li Kuan Yu.’

‘So,’
she enquired, ‘erm … if I keep doing my Li Kuan Yu and stuff, after nine
years will I achieve immortality then?’

‘Oh
no,’ he stated, smiling in a patronising way she’d never noticed in him before,
‘you women don’t have fluids, do you? Fluids like men? All the adepts agree the
only way women can live forever is through having children. That’s why they’re
always trying to steal men’s vital fluids so they can make babies and become
immortal themselves.’

‘Oh,
right …‘ Harriet said, nodding. It figured. Apparently immortality, at least
according to the laws of Li Kuan Yu, was one of those things, like being an
ayatollah, a chief constable or a football commentator, that men had reserved
solely for themselves.

Before she had known anything
about martial arts she’d sort of vaguely assumed that if you became an adept
then there was naturally a calm serenity that came with it, like that guy on
the TV show
Kung Fu
or Jackie Chan who seemed like a happy sort of bloke
despite all the injuries he’d picked up in his career, but her experience had
shown her that that wasn’t the case — if anything it seemed to make people more
angry to know that they could pulverise most others in the world.

In
Harriet’s case her feelings of calmness towards her neighbours had not
continued; as promised they had carried on leaving their rubbish on her step
and instead of learning to live with it in a state of serene acceptance as
she’d hoped she might, she’d taken to stuffing it back through their letterbox,
sometimes dousing it in petrol and setting fire to it first. The Namibians
next door didn’t match her escalation but they didn’t stop leaving their
garbage piled against her front door either.

During
all the things she had been through, all the wasted, sorry, bitter years of her
fatness, it had always been a massive consolation to Harriet that at no point
had she been dumb or desperate enough to turn to religion. No matter what
comfort other people took from their idiotic illusions at no time had she sought
to believe angels were looking after Mum and Dad, not for one second had she
trusted that everything happens, for a reason and God was smiling down on his
creations. Harriet swallowed none of that shit. Nuns with their silly smiles,
Christian politicians with their simpering certainty, mullahs with their stupid
hats and their absurd conviction that they were going to some sort of theme
park in the sky because they avoided eating pork sausages and got up and down
five times a day pointing east (‘Excellent aerobic exercise, being a Muslim,’
Patrick had said), to her these and any other religious believers were simply
cowards, trembling curs terrified to look into the black void that awaited all
of us.

She’d
found it really moving when Patrick had told her about his despair, she’d
thought, Here’s a person like me. Now to discover that he believed this crap
about his spirit leaving through the top of his head and not spilling his
fluids made her feel furious towards him. Harriet had trusted him, let him make
her jump out of a tree, turned to him for advice and all the time he’d been
someone who’d put his faith in the existence of ghosts.

She
told herself to calm down, that whatever nonsense Patrick had in his head at
least Li Kuan Yu had wrought a huge change in her and she should be grateful
for that. In turn this idea cast her down again as the thought struck her that
she was stuck doing it now forever, knowing for certain that without her
constant training the fat and the fear would be back within hours.

‘So, slut, you were going
to dump us, were you?’ Rose said.

‘I
might not have done it.’

‘Throw
us out like a used dishcloth,’ Lulu said.

‘Well,
I didn’t do it, did I? So everything’s fine. Except I’m stuck with a loony for
the rest of my life.’

Lulu
said, ‘It’s not just the religion shit though, is it, darling?’

‘How do
you mean?’

‘Well,
nobody gets as angry and hurt as you’re getting over somebody turning out to be
not quite what they thought or believing something they don’t agree with. The
truth is you’re all bent out of shape because Patrick was telling you that he
was definitely unavailable.’

‘Don’t
be stupid. I’ve never fancied him.’

‘I
don’t know how much fancying has to do with why we fuck anybody. We’ve all done
it out of politeness, loneliness, power, because he told you he had a KitKat in
his pocket that he said he’d let you have half of. It had been one thing for
you to choose not to do anything with him but for him to say he can’t have sex
with you or he’ll lose his magical powers — well, I’m thinking that might have
been all right for some big fat bird but that isn’t you any more, is it,
darling? You’re beautiful, Harriet, now and nobody tells you they can’t fuck
you or they’ll die.’

Harriet
wasn’t prepared to grapple right now with the truth or not of what she was
being told so instead asked, ‘Do you think it’s easy for him?’

‘Not
doing it?’

‘Yeah.
I mean we spend a huge amount of time at the dojo grappling with each other and
I have to admit that’s making me horny such a lot, all the healthiness and the
constant touching and that.

‘I mean
that’s another difference between the average civilian and the martial artist,
as if they weren’t weird enough already: your ordinary person gets touched
maybe by their partner in just a few places a couple of times a week but at the
dojo we spend such a lot of the time with our noses in each other’s armpits and
our legs wrapped round each other’s heads.’

‘And
don’t forget the danger,’ Lulu said, ‘that always makes people want to fuck, to
reproduce before they die.’

. When
Patrick told her about not spilling his fluids she had actually asked him,
‘Don’t you find it a strain? You know, being certain that you’ll never—’

‘No,
no, no,’ he replied a bit too quickly, ‘after all, when the prize is
immortality it’s easy to bear.’

But she
didn’t care what Patrick said, she was certain he found it a strain. She knew
she did and at least she was able to attend to her own needs when the pressure
became too much. He couldn’t even do that.

8

Though it was early April
north-westerly winds blew and they generally brought sleet with them. The skies
remained cold and grey and Azerbaijan Fried Chicken became Kennedy Fried
Chicken. When Harriet practised in the park the air above her remained as
featureless and mute as a switched-off television screen.

This
was when Toby’s behaviour usually began to calm down a bit because they had
come to the end of the time of year he hated most, what he referred to as
‘Static Season’. None of his friends and family had ever gone into the
meteorological reasons for it, only that from late December to the end of March
people would hear him yelling, ‘Christ! Shit! Cripes! Bugger!’ as he touched
virtually any object and got a vicious belt of static electricity from it:
balls of blue sparks would leap across the gap between the lock and Toby’s key
as he tried to get into his house; stroking a cat could result in him being
jolted like a suspect in a South American prison and he told Harriet that he’d
once managed to get a very nasty electrical shock from a loaf of bread. From
Christmas until Easter Toby approached handshakes with a strange limp-wristed,
mincing skip and a hop which convinced those who didn’t already think it that
he was gay. In the many restaurants and bars of the new chromed metallic sort
that he and Helen frequented he always tried to open the doors using only his
shoulders, causing many angry exclamations, buffeting aside creative directors,
publishers and commissioning editors. Luckily these were not the sort of people
who started fights simply because they were hit in the face and quite badly
injured by a swinging door barged by a big mad-looking man’s shoulder. Large
department stores, with their nylon carpets and central heating, were Toby’s
particular Abu Ghraib prison; shop assistants were constantly jarred from their
daydreams by his yelps of pain as the metal racks and the nylon clothes threw
jagged shards of lightning at him. Harriet had once heard him plead with Helen
not to force him to accompany her when she was buying clothes during the early
months of the year but she couldn’t understand what he was going on about. ‘I
get shocks too, Toby,’ she said, ‘I just don’t make a fuss about it.’

This
year although the balls of blue lightning had gone away there still seemed to
be some other thing deranging him. Harriet wondered what it was. She thought
that she’d read somewhere that when medieval peasants got static electric
shocks they thought that they were being stung by invisible bees, but she
didn’t think that was what was bothering Toby.

The green plastic pitch
next to the community centre in
Pointless
Park
on which Toby
was playing football could at the wrong time of the year be particularly bad
for static. Under the hot white floodlights, every time he made a tackle in the
winter months there would be a flash of electricity between him and the other
player and he would feel the familiar sharp stab of acidic pain. Fortunately
that period was now over and he was able to play with his usual giraffe-like
abandon. Over the years his team mates had come to realise that Toby’s form
improved dramatically in the later part of the football season though they
didn’t know the reason why. Suddenly as the game went up to the other end of
the field he noticed Harriet watching him play. Her fingers were laced through
the chain link fence that surrounded the pitch and her body pressed against the
sagging barrier so that the plastic-coated wire cut a diamond pattern into her
breasts and stomach.