by Alexei Sayle
‘Well, it’s going to be bloody uncomfortable,’ she sighed, ‘with just me and him there in my big upstairs room. I’m just going to have to cancel the whole bloody thing.’
Except that somehow she never did cancel the whole bloody thing, so on the following Wednesday at exactly one minute to three, from her worktable, dressed already in her tracksuit, she saw Patrick walking rapidly alongside the park. Without seeming to look whether there was any traffic coming, he abruptly changed direction and swerved across the road towards the shop. Suddenly, seeing him outside the confines of the gym, she took in how slightly odd-looking he was, too pale and shiny, like a waxwork. Harriet got a touch of the Fear: she had thought she knew him a bit, that he was a sort of friend, but she realised that was only within the peculiar interior of Muscle Bitch; outside it he was just another odd-looking young man in sports clothes whom she had invited to come to her upstairs room to do things to her.
Observing him approach, Harriet thought to herself that he walked rather like a fly flies: with short little steps, his arms stiff by his side, he crossed the pavement in a dead straight line then, encountering her doorway, veered through it, disappearing from sight for a micro-second until, without slowing down, Patrick was in the shop taking another direct trajectory to her worktable.
‘Where are your friends?’ he asked, coming to a halt so suddenly that he swayed backwards and forwards on the spot until the force of his forward motion had dissipated.
Discomforted by the abruptness of his question and having no time to summon up one of the lies she’d prepared, Harriet said truthfully, ‘They let me down, they said they wanted to do it then they pretended they didn’t.’
Patrick stood at the counter not speaking, his face immobile, inscrutable, so she felt forced to babble on.
‘Do you want to cancel? I feel like I’ve let you down, I have let you down, I’ll pay for the session anyway, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll pay for the session anyway.’
After a second’s thought he said, ‘No, I’m here and if I’m getting paid we should do it.’
‘Right, OK,’ Harriet said, unsure of whether this was the outcome she’d wished for or not; she wouldn’t have minded a nice nap round about now and some pancakes. ‘You’d better come upstairs then.’
Harriet’s shop occupied the ground floor of the building: there was a space for the customers, then the L-shaped counter with the till on it, behind which were rails of repaired clothing on hangers shrouded in plastic and her worktable which she’d placed in the window with a strong bright industrial lamp on it made out of grey crackled metal. Harriet had thought when moving in that she would be able to look up from the scraps of cotton and shards of material and from time to time smilingly observe the activity of her neighbourhood, but in reality half the time when she did this there was something not very nice going on: a man shaking a crying girl, two uniformed security guards smoking crack in a parked car through a trumpet of silver paper or a one-legged pigeon stumbling about, constantly falling over and getting up again only to fall down once more. A door at the side of the shop set in the ancient tongue and grooved walls opened into a corridor with its own front door to the street and stairs that led up to her flat on the second and third floors, so that in the evenings and on Sundays she could come and go without having to pass through the workspace.
It was up these stairs that she led Patrick to the first floor and the big empty tobacco-yellow storeroom; at the front this room retained its original windows which ran almost from floor to ceiling, the ancient beige paint of the glazing bars splintered and cracked, while the frames, off-square from subsidence, jutted into the brickwork at an angle and they hadn’t been able to be opened since the war in Korea. Through the dusty glass there, was a vista of the road and the park beyond it. At the rear, metal-framed windows installed in the 1920s gave a view of her tiny yard and the blank rears of the houses and shops that ran away from the park towards Alexandra Palace up on its hill, resembling the château of a particularly mournful Fascist dictator.
At this level the vegetation of the park filled the floor-length Georgian windows and appeared almost pleasant if you didn’t look too closely. Patrick stared around at the space deep in thought. Harriet assumed he was working out where it would be best to exercise but when he finally spoke he said, ‘Carpet shop.’’
‘Eh?’
‘Carpet shop. This used to be a carpet shop when I was a kid.’
‘Really?’ she replied, glad for a minute to put off the moment when she’d have to start exercising. ‘You’re from round here?’
‘Yeah, the Watney Trust there over the way, still live in me parents’ old flat. Y’know I actually worked in this place when I was fifteen, Saturday job. I remember one time the boss was out and a woman come in and she looked around at all the stock, took hours and she said to me, ‘Oh that’s a lovely shade of carpet that’d go great in my front room,’ so she gave me all the measurements and I was real pleased with myself thinking how glad the boss would be that I’d done this big deal for him. I cut the carpet to shape while the woman went to get the money from the bank. When the boss come in and I told him he went mad with me, he said, “You idiot, she’ll never come back …“‘ Patrick paused. ‘And she didn’t.’
‘Why did she get you to cut the carpet then?’
The young man stared straight into her eyes. ‘Because women are liars. They can’t say what they want and they can’t say what they don’t want. That woman just .wanted to have a look round but she couldn’t leave without pretending to buy something. She didn’t want to upset me by leaving the shop without buying something.’
‘But she never came back and you got in trouble with your boss,’ Harriet said.
‘Yeah, that’s right but she was out of the shop by then, she’d stopped thinking about me, she didn’t feel responsible any more.’ He paused. ‘So shall we get started then, Harriet?’
‘Yes indeed, I’ve really been looking forward to this,’ she lied.
Patrick had brought along one of the yellow programme cards from the gym and on it he listed all the things she had to do to get fit. Harriet felt an immediate sense of disappointment; she had assumed somehow because she alone was employing him that he might now show her the secret personal trainer things that you wouldn’t gain access to in the public press of the gym. The article in Marie Claire about. the formerly fat woman had hinted that there was some mystical effect simply in having your own personal trainer person, that when you had one-on-one tuition the weight more or less fell off you of its own volition. Her feelings of disillusion continued when Patrick first’ took her through a series of stretches just about identical to the ones she’d done at Muscle Bitch, then sit-ups, press-ups and finally an aerobic workout precisely the same as any number she had bought on video, CD and DVD over the years. Harriet had hoped, even if she didn’t learn secret things, that’ having Patrick doing the exercises in front of her might stir her to greater exertion but instead the disdainful ease with which he did all the movements — movements that were utterly impossible for Harriet — and the fact that he was clearly only using a twentieth of his energy, merely served to dispirit her even more, so that she felt she was actually performing even worse than she had done at the gym. On reflection, Harriet supposed she shouldn’t have really expected any more, after all the same edition of Marie Claire in which she’d read about the formerly fat woman’s weight loss had also hinted that avocados could cure Parkinson’s disease.
After a painful hour it was over. He said, ‘Now we’ll do this every week, OK? But you’ve also got to do the workouts that I’ve marked down for you on your own. You’ll never progress if you don’t.’
‘No, I understand that, I’m highly motivated,’ she replied.
Harriet had expected him to leave after the session; her track-suit was clammy and she longed to have a shower and then eat a whole packet of wholemeal chocolate biscuits, but Patrick simply stood tree-like in the empty room so
that after an uncomfortable thirty seconds she felt compelled to invite him upstairs to her flat.
‘This is lovely,’ he said, staring at the light-up Madonna in a shrine of seashells that Rose had brought her back from Guadeloupe.
‘Yeah, it’s hilarious, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘How do you mean hilarious?’
‘Er … no, you’re right, it’s lovely. Would you like tea?’
He sat himself down tentatively in her inflatable pink armchair. Harriet could hear him causing it to squeak and squeal while she made them both Chinese tea in the kitchen. Returning with the tray, she set it down on the purple Formica coffee table and sat perched on her zebra-striped couch facing Patrick. He had been staring ruminatively up at the clouds painted on the ceiling but came back to earth focusing on the tea things — the porcelain pot and the two mugs celebrating the marriage of Princess Diana to Prince Charles.
‘You have a beautiful flat,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
‘Painting clouds on the ceiling, I don’t know how anybody thinks of that.’
‘Well, you know …’
But then, like an interrogator on a cop show, he abruptly switched his gaze to her tiny black plastic television connected to an ancient VCR, both of them balanced on a small box ottoman, and stated in a sharp tone,. ‘I bet you rent that, don’t you?’
‘Er, yes, I do actually,’ Harriet responded, feeling uncomfortable at being questioned like this in her own home.
‘How much do you pay a month?’
‘Twenty-five pounds,’ she replied, automatically knocking off ten pounds.
‘It’s rubbish,’ Patrick said vehemently. ‘You could buy a nice big wide-screen plasma LCD TV, digital ready, with built-in DVD and nicam digital surround sound for what you’re paying in a year for that crap.’
‘Yes, but there’s the … the, erm, free upgrades and the maintenance contract that gives you peace of mind,’ Harriet retorted, trying feebly to stick up for herself. Even as she said all this she knew it to be a lie. Rose had been paying three hundred and eighty pounds a year for a TV that had broken down eighteen months before but she refused to call out the company’s engineers in case she upset them. Harriet knew that if her television stopped working she would react in exactly the same way.
Patrick went on boastfully, ‘A lot of the ladies at the gym are still renting their TVs as if they were students. Modern audiovisual equipment rarely breaks down. I tell them to buy new stuff and when they do they’re always satisfied.’ Less emphatically but still staring at her tiny scratched TV screen, he asked, ‘You know that show that’s on BBC 1 about movies, used to be presented by some bloke who liked cricket, now Jonathan Ross does it?’
‘Barry Norman was the other bloke,’ she said, happy to get off the subject of renting audiovisual equipment.
‘Right …‘ Then he leant forward and staring into her eyes said very rapidly, ‘Now quickly without thinking tell me what that show’s called right now!’
‘Film 1988!’ she shouted, then was silently surprised at what she’d said.
‘Exactly,’ replied Patrick, leaning back, his air of wisdom slightly spoilt by the squeaking and squealing of the chair. ‘But it’s not 1988, is it, Harriet? It’s 2006, isn’t it? That’s what the show’s actually called: Film 2006.’
‘You’re right …’ Harriet responded slowly then asked wonderingly, ‘So why would I say 1988?’
‘Because,’ he stated, ‘that’s when you were happiest, in 1988. Everybody always shouts out the year when they were happiest. Do you know what year I’d say?’
‘No,’ she replied, though she could guess.
‘Two thousand and six,’ he said smugly. ‘I’d say Film 2006 That’s what I’d say.’
‘Because you’re incredibly happy right now?’ Harriet asked sarcastically. Then, attempting a joke, ‘Because you’re here with me?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘of course not, not at all. But I live in the moment, do you see?’
‘Right.’
‘So what were you doing in 1988?’ Patrick asked the fat woman sitting in front of him, sweat still sparkling on her forehead like industrial diamonds.
She thought about it hard, screwing her face up before finally saying in a wistful voice, ‘I was twenty years old in my second year of college just outside London. You got a full grant back then, I lived on campus, in the hall of residence. There seemed so many possibilities and …‘ she trailed off.
‘And what?’ he asked.
‘And I wasn’t fat.’
‘Now remember you’re not allowed to smoke those filthy roll-ups,’ Helen said.
‘Of course not,’ Harriet replied indignantly.
It was the night after her first session with Patrick. Harriet had walked to her sister’s house, staying firmly on the pavement away from the threatening hulking gloom of the park. The route took her past rows of housing running away from the park on tree-lined streets. There was a smattering of spiky Gothic villas, Edwardian semis, artisan cottages, but mostly identical three-storey Victorian terraces built of London stock brick. Behind iron railings set in a low wall there was a huge, grey-brick, late nineteenth-century charitable housing estate called the Watney Trust Flats where Patrick lived. Then she arrived at her sister’s house, a villa with twin bay windows facing the park.
Harriet’s limbs ached horribly and she couldn’t raise her arms above her shoulders, all of which she took to be a good sign. Helen and Toby were getting ready to go out, just as they did five or six nights a week.
Helen was worried they were going to be late but she forced herself to sit on the couch and let her sister talk about this strange Patrick, one of a long line of oddities she’d found for herself over the years. He didn’t sound up to much but she always went out of her way to encourage Harriet to spend time with anybody who wasn’t Lulu and Rose whom she considered a pair of unsuitable, drunken harpies. Her opinion of these two women was coloured by the fact that Toby had lived with ‘that mad bitch Lulu’ as she described her in a big flat above a vacuum cleaner shop in Enfield for all of their first two years of college.
‘He’s actually lived all his life round here and his parents and grandparents too,’ Harriet said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Mr Sargassian’s been here since the 1970s,’ replied Toby, entering the room buttoning up his shirt.
‘Yes, Toby, but not since the 1870s or whenever like Patrick’s family,’ she stated emphatically.
‘No, I guess not …’
‘I mean,’ Harriet continued, ‘look at everybody we know round here, none of them is even from London. They’re all from the north like us, or Scotland or the States or Armenia, Toby, like Mr Sargassian is.’
‘And you do your exercises together in that upstairs room?’ Helen asked, to stop her going on at Toby.
‘Yeah, it’s brilliant, I’ve already lost pounds.’
‘He’s dead fit, is he, this bloke?’ Toby asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘And a good teacher, is he?’
‘Yeah, why?’ she asked, unsure where Toby was going. ‘Do you want personal training?’
‘No, not exactly,’ said Toby ‘I was thinking … do you think he’d do football lessons?’
‘Football lessons!?’ Harriet and Helen said at the same time. ‘Yeah,’ Toby said, blushing. ‘It’s just those guys I play five-aside with on a Thursday night are pretty competitive; if I could improve my technique they’d respect me more. And, I dunno, maybe me and this Patrick might become mates, it’d be cool to know somebody from around here who was all fit and stuff.’
‘I’ll ask him, Toby,’ his sister-in-law said, knowing as. she spoke that she didn’t want to be sharing Patrick with anyone else.
‘Great. Thonks a lot, Hat Hat.’
‘Now, we better get going,’ Helen said in her busy fashion. ‘Harriet, you got everything you need?’
‘Sure.’
‘Remember Timon’s not a
llowed his fish fingers until he’s eaten two plums and he can only watch half of his Thunderbirds tape.’
‘Two plums, half Thunderbirds tape.’
‘See you later, we’ll be back about twelve.’
‘You just have a good time.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
‘Have they gone?’ Timon asked, coming out of his room where he’d been playing games on his computer. He was a stocky and composed six-year-old who to his aunt appeared to have very little to do with either Helen or Toby in looks or temperament. One of the many things she loved about him was that though both his parents strove energetically to transfer all of their many neuroses, vanities and anxieties to their son he seemed to remain entirely inured to their efforts.
‘Yeah,’ Harriet said, ‘now what do you want for your tea?’
‘Fried eggs and whipped cream from a can?’
‘Sure,’ she replied, taking out her tobacco tin.
Helen and Toby were making their way to the jubilee gala dinner of the Percussionists Licensing Society. Before Toby had taken the post at the Penrith Disaster Fund, straight out of college he had been offered a very good position at the PLS. This event tonight commemorated the founding of the organisation fifty years ago, to collect fees from concert venues, radio stations and record companies for the work done by drummers, timpanists and bongo players.
Every year the Percussionists Licensing Society threw themselves a big dinner at which various members of the office staff presented crystal goblets to each other and a list was read out of criminal prosecutions they’d brought against their own members who’d submitted false claims for royalties: no percussionists were asked to this event.