The Weeping Women Hotel (4 page)

‘Darling,
how naïve you are,’ Rose had replied. ‘You’ve no idea how much some men would
pay for the right hole. Especially if it’s telling them things they want to
hear.’

Looking
over her shoulder she smiled at her building and thought, I own that. Harriet’s
shop was in the middle of the parade and sat alongside a number of ethnic
businesses such as Halal Meat And Videos and a Turkish social club, some businesses
that catered to the newer, more wealthy inhabitants of the area like a
fromagerie and a gift shop and gallery called Galerie Giscard d’Estaing of
which she was the best customer. There was an old-style hardware store that was
very useful and a Valueslasher Mini Market for the white working classes. On
the corner there was a pub and over the road in the other direction a sweet
little railway station with cream-painted filigree fretwork edging the platform
canopy and a slate roof, from which trains ran into the Lagos-like madness of
Finsbury Park and past whose silent platform late at night slid sinister grey
trains carrying nuclear waste from the power plants on the Suffolk coast to the
north near Penrith, where the people didn’t matter as much, where it was stored
in leaky concrete holes in the ground.

It was
a guilty pleasure for Harriet that she held the freehold of the whole building;
she thought she shouldn’t be the sort of person who took pleasure in property,
that she should be wild and free and ready to move to New Zealand at a moment’s
notice, nevertheless it was the thing Harriet secretly felt proudest of that
she’d had the sense to buy, even though some months the mortgage repayments
could still be a problem, before prices in the area went completely mad.

The
road curved east, giving her the first view of the gym towards which she was
heading. Housed in a former five-storey garment factory, a stocky cube of a
building faced with yellow brick, the ground floor was now occupied by her gym
which was called Muscle Bitch — it was one branch of a middle-market chain with
an all-female clientele. Harriet had joined three months ago on her
thirty-eighth birthday. The three-month introductory, membership had been an
unsubtle birthday present from her sister Helen. Harriet liked to think there
was-nobody better at buying presents than her: she possessed a comprehensive
collection of jewellery brochures, a definitive list of florists, extensive
contacts amongst muffin basket vendors and each gift she gave to someone was
crafted for their particular personality and was a joy to own. Whereas the
presents her sister gave, at least to Harriet, were invariably an imposition:
they always required her to go somewhere and do something, a voucher for
beginners’ violin lessons, a three-week walking tour in the Alpujarras or a
course of introductory Arabic in
a.
six CD boxed set.

When
Harriet had reluctantly gone to join the gym the man in the suit who filled in
the membership forms and took her voucher as if it was contaminated went off to
find a teacher to devise her exercise programme and was gone for a very long
time. Occasionally people who looked like instructors would stick their heads
round the door then withdraw them quickly when they saw her.

Nearly
half an hour passed before the manager came back trailed by a tall, slim but
muscular, pale-skinned young man with close-cropped blond hair, who had the
name Patrick stitched on the breast of his light green instructor’s polo shirt.

‘This
is Patrick,’ the manager said redundantly, ‘he’s said he’ll show you what to
do.’

‘Great,
thanks, great,’ Harriet babbled, grateful that at last somebody was prepared to
take her on. Without a word the young man turned into the body of the gym with
its sweet smell of air freshener mingling with the clang of weights rising and
falling. As she dragged around behind him Patrick would brusquely order Harriet
to climb into a machine, he would strap her in,’ belt her up and then tilt her
heavy body backwards so that her legs were spread wide apart and all her fat
tipped towards the floor; after that he would lean across her prone body to
minutely adjust something, with her thinking that this was much closer than she
would ever normally get to a stranger. Harriet held herself stiff as her nose
brushed his sinewy white skin and her breath riffled his translucent, pale
eyelashes.

After a
few strained pushes on each machine at weights with the combined heaviness of a
couple of mice, Patrick marked out on a pale yellow card what she should do
during subsequent visits then abruptly left her, still pinioned inside a
machine, without a word.

Harriet
had not wanted to get changed at the gym, exposing her hectares of dimpled
flabby skin to the other women, so she walked home in the clothes she’d worked
out in, the icy wind drying her sweat in salty rings on the towelling fabric of
her tracksuit.

After the trauma of the
induction she almost didn’t return to Muscle Bitch but in the end found herself
unwilling to add the gym to the long list of things she had given up on after
one visit or lesson, things such as archery, dry-stone wall building or
introductory Arabic. Harriet was determined that ‘going to the gym’ would at
least be on the slightly shorter list of things she’d abandoned after a few
months, along with learning to play the violin and Marxism.

So over
the next couple of months once or twice a week, experiencing an inner sense of
dread as if going in for painful and embarrassing minor surgery, she would drag
herself there along the pavement.

It was
only the thought of Patrick being there to help her through it that persuaded
her to make the trip. He always seemed to be the one nearby when she needed
somebody to hit the emergency stop button on the treadmill, to lift some
weights off her or to whisper that she was trying to do leg presses on an arm
curl machine and when, as often happened, she became confused at the settings
on the machines, unsure whether ‘15’ was the weight or the seat height it was
always him she would seek out for advice.

Harriet
would rather have gone to the gym during the day when the place was presumably
emptier but a sense of guilt kept her constantly in the shop from nine to five
so she was forced to attend in the evenings when the place was always packed
with demented women, running on the treadmills, crazed expressions on their
faces, dancing madly as if auditioning for
A Chorus Line
or pedalling
static bikes as though pursued by hordes of mounted cossacks with rapine on
their minds. Yet amongst the frantic female crowd Patrick seemed to glide with
solemn composure. Finding herself oddly comfortable with his looming, sallow
presence, Harriet assumed, although he gave no sign of it, that he felt some
sort of fondness for her. All the same, she realised, the main reason their
relationship grew was because he was the only instructor that she ever saw
twice. The entire staff of the gym, including the receptionists, the office
staff and the cleaners — all the small
Mediterranean
muscled men and the slender blonde South African girls — seemed to
change entirely between each of her visits.

At
first Patrick struggled conscientiously to perform his job with Harriet, to
encourage her to push herself, to strain after progress, to work her body. ‘Cccc’mon!’
he would growl, or ‘Yes, yes, that’s good!’ but throughout all the damp hours
she spent at Muscle Bitch none of her weights or reps went up at all. Harriet
could just about chest press five kilos — the lowest weight — on her first
visit and she was still just about chest pressing five kilos now, three months
later. After a while Patrick had given up trying to be a motivator and simply
sat down next to her staring into space or chatting in a disjointed fashion.

He
seemed to be able to talk at length without Harriet actually getting much
information about his life. He possessed a strange elliptical way of speaking
about himself, mentioning the names of people without any context so that she
thought she’d found out things about him but was never entirely sure. There
seemed to be a child and possibly a mother, though whether they lived with him
or not remained obscure, and there definitely seemed to be a best friend called
Martin who had a great deal of sage advice though Martin might have been a cat,
and there’d possibly been an important trip to Belgium but perhaps not. It was
hard to know even what age he was; given the number of things he’d done he had
to be at least in his late twenties though sometimes to her he seemed little
older than a child.

Indeed
Patrick never seemed younger to Harriet than when one day, more direct than
usual, he told her that he would really like to be a stunt man in the movies.
She grabbed on to this solid piece of biography and pressed him to expand. ‘You
have to be at Olympic level in two sports, though, and you have to, like, know
people in the business,’ he told her. She shyly said that she often repaired
costumes for theatre and film productions and knew a few people in the business
but he didn’t seem interested in any practical help she could offer. Patrick’s
speech, usually flat, became more animated as he went on. ‘They have this
annual stuntman’s ball every year, right? And when the bloke announces who you
are at the entrance to the ballroom, you have to come in and throw yourself
down the stairs, to get to like where the tables are and the dance floor and
that …‘ He paused, then said, ‘I don’t know whether the wives and girlfriends
have to throw themselves down the stairs too. I suppose if they were stuntwomen
themselves they could but walking down the stairs would be optional…‘ Harriet
got the feeling from his tone that he thought the wives and girlfriends really
should throw themselves down the stairs too, even if they weren’t stuntwomen,
out of loyalty.

When she checked in to the
gym with her personalised swipe card, the entrance way, as it-often was, was
filled almost entirely with red and purple balloons, making her feel as if
she’d walked into a giant berry pie.

‘Hi, er…’
said the female receptionist brightly, reading her name off the computer
screen,’… Harriet, you coming to the party then?’

There
was frequently a party at the gym that went with the balloons though sometimes
there were just balloons for their own sake. ‘No, I don’t think so. What’s this
one in aid of?’

‘It’s
going to be great,’ the receptionist explained breathlessly. ‘Relay run on the
treadmills from
London
to
Penrith for the Fairground Disaster Fund — one of the girl’s brothers ran a
hoopla stall in the path of the Ferris wheel — and, well, you know… the
party’s compulsory for the staff so I won’t get home until after
midnight
but hey! ‘That’s great too.’

Feeling
as if she was already carrying heavy weights, Harriet passed into the interior
of Muscle Bitch and moved amongst its crowd of grunting women. Her exercise
programme was the usual mixture of light weight-lifting and aerobic exercises.
After some half-hearted stretching that usually gave her backache, she climbed
into a sort of bathtub-cum-recumbent bicycle with a TV screen clamped on the
front of it. She was supposed to pedal the bathtub for twenty minutes round a
badly computer-rendered tropical island shown on the TV screen. After only a
quarter of her allotted time she would usually steer the bathtub over the edge
of Pirates Cliff or pedal out to sea from Mermaid Beach, hoping to drown or be
smashed to bits on the rocks of Coconut Inlet, but the implacable computer
inside the machine simply steered her back to dry land, generally after a stern
fish told her not to be so silly.

Sweatily
pedalling around the imaginary island, Harriet’s thoughts were on a journey of
their own to an equally uncomfortable destination. She realised that she had
for some time been approaching the point invariably reached in her efforts at
self-improvement — Giving Up Cove.

A few
years before, she had been introduced to an Iraqi man at a party by her friend
Lulu. Lulu said this man was a healer who had completely cured her mother’s
arthritis and she was sure he could do the same for Harriet’s obesity. Filled
with optimism at a cure for fatness that required her to do nothing, she
visited him at his shabby rented rooms in Harley Street and for ninety pounds a
session he wrapped her in hot towels and prodded and pinched her body seemingly
at random. At the end of six hours’ ‘treatment’ she had gained nearly half a
stone, so Harriet told him she was emigrating to Argentina and stopped the
visits. A few weeks later she bumped into Lulu’s mum who told Harriet that her
b arthritis was worse than ever and she wished she was dead.

One
thing, however, that had stayed with her from her six sessions with the grave
Iraqi, apart from the half a stone, was a phrase he’d used. In attempting to
describe the complexity of her mind, he had endeavoured to liken the inside of
Harriet’s head to the Boeing Corporation. The healer had wanted to conjure up a
vision of rows and rows of desks, mile upon mile of tiny office workers
dedicated to the elaborate business of managing Harriet’s thought processes and
actions. Except he ruined the profundity of it by pronouncing the Boeing
Corporation as ‘the Booing Corporation’. To her this seemed a much more apt
metaphor for her thinking — not a huge, efficient global planemaker but
instead the Booing Corporation: a gigantic organisation installed inside her
head dedicated to the business of booing, heckling and general discouragement
of any kind of positive behaviour. The only time the Booing Corporation ever
became encouraging was when they were suggesting it might be a really good idea
to eat a whole frozen tuna pie at
six thirty
in the morning. Except, as her wobbling legs strained against the
pedals and perspiration rolled down her face, she resolved that this time
things were going to be different, this time she had a foolproof plan to get
fit and lose weight.