by Alexei Sayle
Harriet looked down and smiled to herself — her brother-in-law was the only person in the world who called the neighbourhood that they lived in ‘Pointless Park’. Even she didn’t, though from time to time she tried really, really hard to do it, to say the words ‘Pointless Park’. Mentally Harriet would rehearse little scenarios in which she used the name in a conversation with Toby, saying in her mind, ‘The Japanese Strangleweed is flower-ing this week in Pointless Park,’ or ‘I hear they found another dead body in Pointless Park today,’ knowing how happy it would make him if she did. She’d set out to say it and he would stare optimistically at her, like a little kitten crouched waiting for a ball of silver paper to be thrown to it but then some other words would emerge from his sister-in-law’s mouth and Toby would deflate like a punctured weather balloon. One of the hazards of having a conversation with Toby was that he gave his own names to lots of people and lots of things but would never explain what they were or admit there was anything odd about what he was saying: for instance he called the Prime Minister ‘Mrs Mitchum’ and the European Community was ‘The Banana Club’. It could be quite difficult for people who didn’t know him or weren’t familiar with his personal glossary to understand what he was talking about a lot of the time when he said things like, ‘I see Mrs Mitchum gave a big speech to the Banana Club last night.’ He would also always sing a few bars of the Marseillaise whenever he saw a black person reading the news.
It was just a guess of Harriet’s that he’d like her to use the same phrases as him, she didn’t know for certain, nothing had ever been said out loud. Maybe, she thought, he was happy being misunderstood, yet she did remember how briefly delirious Toby had seemed to be when he discovered that he’d persuaded a married couple to use the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ every time that they drank soup. The couple were called Tori and Paul and they had been friends at college with Harriet’s younger sister Helen. Toby too had been at this college but at that time not part of the same circle. He’d belonged to a crowd of rugby-playing business studies students who Helen and her friends only encountered puking drunkenly into wastepaper bins on the campus as they left a play or a madrigal concert.
In the early years after Helen and Toby married they gave many dinner parties for Helen’s old college friends, while not returning the phone calls of Toby’s mates. He would cook the first course which was always soup and when serving it he would invariably say, ‘There we are, soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ then he’d smile at everyone as if he’d just done a magic trick.
What Toby wasn’t aware of was the process by which the married couple Tori and Paul had come to use the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’. After the dinner party they would start drunkenly talking about what an arse Toby was as soon as they were in the minicab going home; they would say to each other in a high-pitched, mocking imitation of Toby’s voice, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ and ‘Please do have some more of this delicious soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ then they would collapse against each other laughing, convincing the Algerian or Bengali taxi driver once again of the impenetrability and corruption of Western society. Tori and Paul would also repeat after Toby, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ when he served the soup and give each other secret looks. Pretty soon when they had soup at home Tori and Paul would say to each other, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ at first still ridiculing Toby but eventually they forgot why they were saying it and it became part of the private language every couple develops, employed long after they’d gratefully ceased having soupy dinners with Toby and Helen.
When Tori and Paul had children one of their au pairs was a Maori girl from the Southern Pacific Cook Islands who, when she returned home after a couple of years, took the phrase ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ with her and spread it amongst her extended family until finally the phrase appeared in an anthropological dissertation: ‘“Soup, swoop, loop de loop”: Shamanistic Incantations in Raratongan Food Preparation Rituals’, University of Topeka, 1998.
Toby was a great many things to Harriet: he was her brother-in-law, he was married to her little sister, he was father of her beloved nephew and he was her best male friend, but sometimes she still wished that he didn’t have quite so much free time to hang around her shop. Harriet thought to herself that it wasn’t as if he didn’t have a job, a good job and a job he was good at. When she sporadically visited her brother-in-law at his work it always amazed her to see how all his quirks and idiosyncrasies disappeared and that around the office he was focused and businesslike like a normal person; those who only knew Toby from the office were astonished to witness his eccentric behaviour in social situations and those who only met him socially were startled to learn that he held down any kind of job at all and didn’t live in some sort of sheltered accommodation.
But Harriet knew it was part of his cleverness that he’d always looked for employment in administrative posts that didn’t stretch him. Until quite recently Toby had been deputy chairman of the Penrith Fairground Disaster Fund, a charity whose main purpose as far as she could tell was to avoid giving any money to anybody involved in any way in the great Penrith Fairground Disaster — either those actually on the Ferris wheel or the ones crushed by it as it travelled down the A66.
A few months ago he’d left that position and now administered the estate of a famous playwright who’d died in the late 19803. From what Harriet knew the playwright had been an easy-going, genial sort but his estate was now controlled by several distant relatives whom he’d never met. Toby’s job was to stop anybody ever putting on any of the work of the playwright ever again unless they agreed not to change a single syllable of the sacred text. As far as possible, following orders from the estate, Toby did his best to prevent students from studying the sacred text and to forbid the transmission of any clips of the plays on radio or television unless a gigantic fee was paid to the distant relatives.
Harriet’s younger sister Helen — Toby’s wife — also worked full time for a charity, this one going by the name of Warbird. Warbird wasn’t always called Warbird: when it was founded by a group of philanthropically inclined citizens in the early Victorian era to look out for the interests of canaries being sent down coal mines it was known as the Society for the Protection of Our Feathered Chums. In the modern age Helen’s charity primarily concerned itself with the treatment and welfare of parrots, macaws and budgerigars that were trapped or needed to be rescued from dangerous war zones. A few years before, the family including Harriet had been on holiday in Cornwall when Helen had got a call saying there was a famous parakeet trapped in the middle of the tribal massacres in Rwanda; the parakeet belonged to a British millionaire who had a wildlife sanctuary in the rainforest, all the human staff had fled or been hacked to bits and the word was that the blood-crazed Hutus would soon start on. the wildlife. Helen right away drove back to London and organised a private plane to fly into the middle of the fighting. Harriet tried to be proud when she saw her sister being interviewed on Sky News with Montmorency sitting on her shoulder. Though really, she’d thought to herself, you’d think the bird could have flown out of there by itself if they’d simply told it where to go.
Then immediately Harriet felt guilty about having mutinous, unsupportive ideas such as these. They came often to her and her response always was instantly to try and squash them flat and replace them with nicer, more kindly thoughts. Unfortunately, however quickly Harriet caught and squashed them, she was still left with feelings of shame over being the sort of person who had such malevolent ideas in the first place, so she would then have to perform some penance to make amends, maybe buy a little present for the person she’d had the bad thought about, resolve to be super-nice to them forever in thought and deed, praise their shoes extravagantly when she next saw them or do tedious little jobs for them even though she really had better things to be getting on with.
‘There you go, Toby,’ Harriet said, ‘your jacket’s done.’
‘Ta, thonks a lot,’ her brother-in-law repl
ied, taking it and staring at where the acid burn hole had been — there was now no trace at all.
‘Golly, Hat Hat,’ Toby said, ‘you’re a magician.’ Then he stood in the centre of the shop dearly wondering what to do next. Though he didn’t necessarily do that much work Toby was scrupulous about not going home until the end of the working day. Harriet imagined that he knew if he started staying at home during the week he might eventually never leave the house. Toby looked at his watch, then he did a bit of tuneless singing to himself. ‘Yeehoo, yahh, yeegata yam yam,’ he sang. Then finally he said, ‘I think I’ll go and visit that exhibition of new ceramics in that gallery at the furthest end of the parade.’
He really could be so sweet, Harriet thought as Toby left the shop, forgetting to close the door behind him. She could hear him singing ‘Yach a yang a yach a yoo…‘ the sound trailing off down the pavement. Now she felt a bit despicable about wishing he would leave, picturing with a stab of guilt how whenever they were out and they met any of his mates that she didn’t know, like the gang he played football with on a Thursday, he would always put his arm around her and say right away, ‘Guys, this is my sister-in-law Harriet,’ like he was claiming her, pointing out to them that she was somebody special in his life.
Toby thought the woman behind the counter in the gallery was having some kind of fit hissing and tutting and sighing like that; it was only when she strode out from her desk and slammed the door that he realised he hadn’t shut it behind him. Staring at the tortured lumps of glazed clay, he’d become engrossed in thinking of his sister-in-law. Toby’s personal theory, for what it was worth, was that Harriet had been attracted to invisible mending because she herself was so visible. Harriet reminded him of one of the misshapen, hand-thrown milk jugs he was standing in front of: huge, pot-bellied and lumpy. Whenever he was out with her and they bumped into somebody he knew who wasn’t from their social circle, some of the fellows from the footy club for example, he would point out immediately that this big fat thing he was with was his sister-in-law just in case they thought she was some girl he was having sex with. Toby felt guilty about doing that because Hat was his best friend, but still and all a fellow had his reputation to think of.
To this day he still found it hard to believe it that the slim, vivacious, petite Helen, the woman he was married to, was the sister of such a hippo.
Even after eight years of marriage, every day Toby still considered it his greatest achievement in life to have managed to snag a woman as beautiful as Helen. That and of course his ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ triumph with Tori and Paul, but the soup thing was years ago now.
Toby also wasn’t sure whether he should really be proud of the ‘soup, swoop, loop de loop’ thing. He seemed to remember that before he’d made the decision to stop drinking (well, Helen suggested it pretty forcefully and the stipendiary magistrate had implied it might make sense too) he hadn’t said or done all these weird things. Still, most of the time he didn’t regret his choice — there had been a demented, sprayhose quality to his drinking that had frightened him in the few brief hours when he’d been sober. If it took a tremendous effort of will to steer clear of alcohol and if he still thought about having a drink an awful lot of the time and if as it turned out the poison in the liquor had somehow been deadening or killing off the runaway thoughts that now carommed day and night around his head and he monthly seemed to acquire some new strange idiosyncrasy, quirk or tic, well, that was all a price worth paying.
Stubbornness was something Toby noticed and admired in Harriet; you had to give her credit for the dogged way she kept trying to lose weight despite a total lack of success and so many obstacles being put in her way. He’d asked her earlier in the shop, ‘Can you babysit Timon tonight? Me and Helen are going to a charity dinner attended by Bono out of U2.’
‘Yeah of course,’ she’d replied. ‘Helen’s already asked me. But you’ll have to wait till after seven, when I get back from the gym.’
Toby was surprised to hear her say this. ‘I didn’t know you were going to the gym again, Harriet, after… you know that thing that happened, the incident…’
‘Yes, well …‘ Harriet said, poking her jaw out so she looked like a fighting dog, ‘the boss of the gym agreed that that woman had no right to say those things to me. Apparently she was suffering from postnatal depression over not getting her figure back two weeks after giving birth; but still, shouting all that stuff about how I looked and the smell of my sweat… They’ve told her she has to attend another branch and they’ve offered me six months free membership extension to sort of say sorry. So I have to go back really.’
Stubborn, see?
As Harriet huffed along the pavement she once more castigated herself for not being able to say out loud Toby’s name for the patch of land she was skirting; she really should have been able to use it, especially since it did so perfectly capture the flavour of the place: it truly was a pointless park. The fitness centre Harriet was heading for was on the boundary road at its southern tip, but though tarmac paths snaked through the black trees and one streetlight in five was working she would not, certainly after nightfall, enter its pitch-dark interior. Harriet recalled when she’d been a child in the early 1970s in Southport that a park had been a very different thing. There were big wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance that were firmly locked at sunset every night, there were substantial black-painted spiked railings all around the perimeter, inside there was a bandstand and a boating lake, clipped grass as neat as a Guardsman’s haircut, a crystal palm house, flowers and stout native trees and a head gardener who lived in a little house by the gates and kept an eye out. Not in this part of north London where she lived now; those into whose charge fell the open spaces during the 1960s were having none of that old malarky — they couldn’t quite explain to you bow a bandstand could be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting down women, they just knew it somehow did.
The authorities at that time had high hopes of building a grand eight-lane highway linking Walthamstow in the east with Fulham in the west, demolishing large parts of antediluvian London on the way and vaulting St Paul’s Cathedral on a long-legged concrete flyover. Any building on the route might be pulled down at any moment, so while they waited for it all to happen they thought they might as well stick modern non-hierarchical urban utility spaces b along its entire length.
Composed of interlinked Second World War bomb sites, an abandoned asbestos factory and the grounds of a long-vanished stately home, Pointless Park was laid out by graduates of the new town planning courses from the best polytechnics in Britain, disregarding all the laws of both Eastern and Western aesthetics. The disruptive, unbalanced random distribution of weedy, ill-looking trees, ugly, common plants, concrete, tarmac, dead-end paths leading to blank walls, sinister hollows, unsightly brown hummocks, stretches of grey metal fencing only suitable for a poison gas research facility and scrubby dead grass emitted such a strong sense of malevolence that anybody entering the park immediately suffered acute feelings of anxiety, fear and depression. The only ones able to endure its aura of malignancy were those whose brains had been numbed by drinking cider or floor polish, or those who were taking powerful anti-epilepsy medication.
Only in the very middle of the park in a shallow bowl perhaps two hundred yards across was there a sort of calm. Over the years pollution had killed off all the native woodland trees that had surrounded the bygone stately home, apart from a single ancient oak right in the centre of the grassy depression. Four hundred years old with many long-dead branches not cleared by any tree surgeon and stumpier than a healthy oak should be, growing only about fifty feet high, it had a cave-like hollow in its trunk where somebody in the late eighteenth century had lit a fire at its base and the tree had grown around the damage.
Fringing the edge of the bowl a tangle of living and dead trees — beech, horse chestnut, hawthorn and sycamore, curled about with damp undergrowth, thorny berberis, rhododendron and strange
creepers of unknown origin — was neglected by the contractors who visited the rest of the park a few times. a year to flail the grass, pick up a few of the discarded syringes and trample the flowers round the edge but who never penetrated further to its heart of darkness.
In Harriet’s mind the park was roughly the shape of an upside-down pork chop, fatter at its base, a quarter of a mile wide and approximately a third of a mile along both sides, the eastern margin formed by a high brick wall beyond which ran a railway line buried in a deep cutting. The steep sides of the cutting were almost an extension of the park, untrodden by humans from one year to the next; rare species of rodents and reptiles flourished beneath its long grass and often above the track birds of prey — kestrels and hawks — hovered and swooped.
Her invisible mending business was in a small terrace of shops on the road at the northern end of the park. In some ways Harriet didn’t need a shop as most of her trade came from repair contracts with many theatres in the West End, but as she lived alone and worked alone, the few walk-in customers she got during the day at least meant that she talked to some human beings just to reassure herself that she was real. Harriet’s brain, free to fret itself into increasingly baroque circles, worried that all those people you read about who went missing every year had simply faded away, their molecules giving up the effort of holding together simply because nobody had taken any notice of them for so long.
The work was never-ending — performers were always tearing their clothes, either in accidents or fits of actorish passion —and secure, since once managements found somebody they got on with to do their repairs they tended to stick with them. And despite the big sign above her window stating ‘Harriet Tingle, Invisible Mending Services’ she was constantly turning away people who entered the shop clutching bundles of dirty clothing who wished to have their dry-cleaning done. ‘I don’t do cleaning,’ she would tell them in a clear, slow voice, ‘I do invisible mending; it’s a highly specialised craft, I don’t stick on patches to repair a hole like they do in the dry-cleaners.’ If they hadn’t already turned round and walked out without a ‘thank you’ or a ‘sorry’ she would continue to explain to them: ‘I take a tiny strand of fabric from some place on the garment that you can’t see and I weave it around the damage so that once it’s done you’d never know where the repair was. I charge forty pounds a hole.’