The Weeping Women Hotel (5 page)

Two
weeks before, sitting in the place where she went to be ritually abused about
the state of her hair, she’d read an article in an old copy of
Marie Claire
concerning
an incredibly fat woman, much fatter than her, who’d got fit and slim simply by
hiring a personal trainer. There were snaps of the woman when she’d been fat,
at family> parties and at long tables in restaurants, smiling dazedly into
the lens like a barnyard animal that somebody had put a wig and big glasses on.
Funnily enough Harriet thought to herself all these ‘before’ photos were fuzzy
as if the camera itself was angry at the woman for being such a gigantic pig.
Then there were pin-sharp, acid-bright pictures of the way the woman was now,
youthful, thin and confident, her face full of happy intelligence. That was
what Harriet was going to do, that was her plan: she was going to ask Patrick
if he’d be her personal trainer.

Harriet was pedalling the
bathtub through what was either a tropical forest or some animal heads stuck on
spikes when Patrick came over.

‘Hiya,’
he said, picking up her chart. ‘How’s it going?’

‘It’s
going at exactly the same speed as it was three months ago.’

‘Yeah…‘
he replied, studying the exercise machine’s digital readout, ‘your laptime’s identical
to the second; it’s a remarkable achievement in its way.’

‘What
way’s that exactly?’

Patrick
shrugged. ‘Well, you know it isn’t really any sort of achievement but they like
us to be positive.’

‘I’m
getting sick of this place,’ she said.

‘Well,
you need to stick with it, not get discouraged…‘ He struggled to find
something more inspirational to say, ‘or… something.’

‘No,
no,’ she persisted. ‘Patrick, I do sincerely want to get fitter but this gym
isn’t working. So I was thinking… do you do personal training?’

‘Personal
training?’ he asked.

‘Yeah,
yeah.’ Harriet realised she was talking fast now but couldn’t stop. ‘I’ve got
this big empty room above my shop, nice springy wood floor, and I was talking
to a couple of girlfriends Lulu and Rose and we … they thought we could sort
of hire you to come round and give us a workout, a personalised programme,
personal training. What do you think, what do you think?’

He’
paused for several seconds then said, looking around, ‘We’re not supposed to
make side deals with the clients.’

‘Oh
come on,’ she wheedled, ‘please … I’m never going to get into shape here. We
both know that. I assume you’ve done personal training before, most of the
instructors here have, it must have been part of your own training.’

‘Yeah,
sure, obviously …‘ He was silent for a further moment then asked, ‘You’d pay
me?’

‘Yes of
course, whatever the going rate is … I dunno, forty pounds an hour?’

He
considered a little longer then said, ‘Well, I suppose the gym don’t need to
know about it. I guess I could come round one afternoon next week to meet your
friends and work out … you know, a personalised programme and that.’

One of the muscular dykey
weight-lifting women had asked Patrick to ‘spot’ for her, that is to stand
above her while she bench-pressed the weight of a small car, to make sure that
she wouldn’t be crushed by the chromed bar if her strength suddenly went. In
fact he wasn’t giving her any attention at all but was thinking about what it
might be like to be a personal trainer. It was kind of stupid that Harriet
thought anybody at Muscle Bitch, least of all him, held any qualifications,
unless you thought looking nice in a tight. polo shirt counted as a qualification.

Not
that it was a particular shock for him to be asked to do something he didn’t
know anything about. He didn’t have any memory of it happening when he was a
kid but sometime around the time he became a teenager Patrick began to notice
people would always be asking his opinion on stuff when he only had the vaguest
idea what they were talking about. At school the teachers would often turn to
him to answer questions on all kinds of subjects and even when his replies were
stumbling or just plain wrong many times they acted as if he’d said something
dead intelligent and when they marked his essays he got grades that were much
better than he reckoned his confused ramblings on ox-bow lakes or the rise of
the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany really deserved. For the longest time
Patrick couldn’t explain it, beginning to think that perhaps he was brighter
than he thought he was: until he failed every single one of his GCSEs.

Very
confused, he took ages to figure it out. Slowly the fact dawned that those
people who marked the exam papers from the exams
didn’t know him.
Or rather
they couldn’t see him. Staring at his face in the mirror and trying to imagine
how he appeared to others he saw that the stillness, the blankness with which
he held his features, added to the way the planes of his face fell, the bright
clear blue of his eyes, the sharp, straight line of his nose, the firm cut of
his mouth, made him look really, really, really intelligent. Patrick thought,
turning his head from side to side in the pitiless light of the shaving mirror,
that if he didn’t know the true ordinariness of his own mind he’d ask himself
for advice on all sorts of difficult and baffling matters.

Beneath
Patrick’s spread legs, on her eighteenth lift the woman’s strength did suddenly
leave her and she found herself unable to straighten her arms, and the silvery
bar barely held by shaking limbs began slowly to descend on to her windpipe.
While the customer gurgled and gagged, her legs waving in the air, Patrick
mulled over what might happen if he became a successful personal trainer. He
assumed that if he did a good job for Harriet she might recommend him to her
friends, then to her whole social circle and if he did a good job for them too
then they might want him to be their friend. He knew this because sometimes he
liked to eavesdrop on the customers at the gym and from time to time he’d hear
the women discuss the valued people who came to their houses. ‘You really must
use our painter and decorator Vaclav, he’s more of a friend than anything
else,’ he’d heard them say more than once, or ‘We’re spending our summer
holidays with the, nanny’s family on their farm just outside Kraków,’ or ‘We’re
taking our Colombian cleaner to a comedy club on Saturday night, she doesn’t
speak any English so we’re not sure how much she’ll take in, but still …‘

Only if
they were good though, they didn’t seem to recommend those who were bad; he
imagined people didn’t say to their friends, ‘I’ve found this really
unreliable, incompetent and expensive plumber, you really must use him as soon
as he’s finished wrecking my central heating.’ Mind you, from what he heard at
the gym most plumbers still seemed to be unreliable, incompetent and expensive
anyway so how did that happen? It was another mystery.

Not for
the first time he wished Martin was there so he could discuss these things as
they had done so many times in the past. He’d tried again to e-mail Martin last
night but the satellite uplink wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t been for the
last month and a half.

From
beneath him Patrick heard a strange gurgling sound, a final death rattle from
the female weight-lifter; he looked down and easily lifted the chromed bar from
the woman’s throat just as she was heading towards the white light and the
welcoming outstretched arms of her mother.

3

Three years before, on her
second day of property ownership, still settling into the shop and the flat
above it, slowly sorting through boxes of books and wondering where to hang
pictures and just about deciding to set fire to the whole lot and start again,
Harriet had noticed through the big shop window a smartly dressed man of about
thirty-five standing at the bus stop a little way along the parade talking
animatedly into a mobile phone. As she got to work on her very first job,
repairing several knife slashes in the ballgown of a transsexual, she saw a
number of the little red buses that served the stop race up and rock to a halt,
she saw their doors hiss open and the man shake his head, refusing to board;
the driver would shout some insult or exhortation then, getting no response, would
drive off in a fury, the bus often becoming airborne as it crested a nearby
speed hump. Throughout all this the man continued to talk rapidly into his
phone.

At
lunchtime, guiltily skipping next door to console herself with a large shawarma
and chips at what had then been a place called Shashlik Happens and was now Mon
Fromagerie, Harriet passed near to the man and heard him describing somebody to
whoever it was he was speaking to on the other end of the phone. ‘Yeah, he
looks like one of those big Irish farmers,’ the man said, ‘that never marries
then fails to commit suicide with a shotgun in the mouth, huge hands, probably
a repressed homosexual …‘ Following the man’s electric gaze up the road she
saw that the big repressed homosexual, failed suicide Irish farmer person he
was referring to was Toby lolloping towards her along the pavement, making the
first of his many visits to the shop and now beginning to wave a cheery hello
at her with his huge hands. In turn the businessman shifted his gaze to see who
Toby was greeting, moving his head in a stiff arc like one of those
silver-painted street performers she’d seen that terrible time she went to
Barcelona
for the weekend on her own, who
made money by impersonating robots. The man with the phone stared directly,
disturbingly, into her eyes. Unable to take the intensity of his gaze, she
looked away slightly and saw that what she had taken to be the smart
metal-effect mobile phone which he had been holding to the side of his face was
in fact an unopened tin of sardines.

‘Gotta
go …‘ the man said, before slipping his tin can phone into an inside pocket
of his jacket, then, crossing the road with stiff movements, walked straight
into the park where he was soon swallowed up by the moist grey-green vegetation.

Now three years later the
Tin Can Man was still at the bus stop most days or walking up and down the
parade or striding along the perimeter roads of the park; though his smart
business suit was now filthy and torn, he still clutched his sardine can to his
mouth and would still generally be describing those around him. ‘Big, enormous,
porky girl, can hardly breathe she’s so fat, greasy black hair, gigantic gig
lamps, obviously not been fucked for years …‘ was what Harriet heard him say
about her one afternoon, forcing her to laugh out loud when he said it, since
there was really nothing she could find to argue about in this portrait.

Though
she was inclined on occasion to get extremely upset with those she thought had
insulted her, much to her own surprise Harriet never felt any fury towards the
Tin Ca-n
Man.
When thinking of
him she recalled the look briefly observed in his eyes on that first day when
she had seen his ‘phone’. A look of sadness and panic as if the words were
saying him rather than the other way around.

Also
sometimes, usually if returning to her flat late at night, when she heard him
talking he appeared to be involved in a different kind of conversation over his
imaginary phone, where he listened more to the other person and his tone was
unlike the bombastic, crazed voice of daylight hours.

The Tin
Can Man was caught up in one of these calls as she shut the side door of the
building on her way out to meet her two best friends Lulu and Rose at the pub
on the corner.

‘No,
Lynn …‘ the Tin Can Man was saying,…. yes, I understand that, darling, it’s
just that I’ve got to do the … yes, Lynn … yes,
Lynn
… please I wish you wouldn’t … yes, Lynn … but please,
darling, if you’d just listen for a second I can …’

His
pleading tone carried with Harriet up the road for once almost unheard and
unnoticed; instead there was a rushing sound of fury in her ears. About ten
months after she’d moved into her shop the building next door had been acquired
by a housing association dedicated to the interests of elderly Namibian women.
At first things had gone terribly well, the elderly ladies were an interesting
mixture, the majority African of varying shades of blackness but a few of
Indian or Pakistani extraction and one or two stiff old white women in
cardigans and pearls. In their brightly coloured robes, their saris and salwar
kameez, they had regularly visited her in the shop, bringing baked yams, onion
pakora and sponge cake with them. They would often tidy up the chaotic workroom
while Harriet devoured the food they’d made and sometimes the women might do
little pieces of intricate embroidery for her to cover a particularly
difficult hole.

However
within half a year the young grandsons and the great-nephews of the Namibian
ladies found out that Granma was living in a spacious, freshly decorated,
rent-subsidised, architect-designed flat and moved in whether they wanted them
to or not. Rapidly the old ladies died from the upset or moved back to
Whitechapel or Totteridge or Africa so that soon the entire building became
occupied by rough young men who played loud music and held mysterious parties
late into the night and didn’t appear to have regular jobs. Despite the absence
of the grannies the meals on wheels still came every day delivering stacks of
dinners in foil containers and the pavement outside was blocked by BMW 3 series
coupés and Subaru Impreza Turbos allowed to park freely on the yellow lines
because of the disabled parking badges the young men had coerced out of their
grandmothers’ doctors, insisting that they regularly took Granny down the
hospital, though if they went anywhere the cars seemed most regularly to be
parked outside nightclubs in Wood Green and Crouch End.