by Alexei Sayle
The regular dinner was held in a marble-lined room at the new I.M. Pei-designed Percussionists Licensing Society headquarters building in Mayfair but for this special event they had taken the big ballroom in a Park Lane hotel and as a valued ex-employee Toby had been offered four tickets.
In the taxi as they drove south into the city below them Toby sang, ‘Whoo, whaa, whooo,’ and Helen thought about her sister. Her hope was that in time maybe Harriet would start dressing a bit better for this Patrick fellow; she knew of course that there was nothing going on between them, but still at least there was a man coming to her flat regularly which was something. Before, in the house, she’d had to stop herself attacking her sister’s clothes with a bread knife they annoyed her so much; force herself not to slash Harriet’s hairy jumpers and her fat girl stretch pants, especially as she’d teamed them tonight with thick ribbed wool socks and walking boots, but Helen knew of course if she said anything out loud about the way her sister looked, even though she was just trying to be helpful, Harriet would go all silent and sulky. She had had to hold down one arm with the other to stop it snatching her sister’s greasy spectacles off her nose and giving them a good polish.
As they’d been leaving the house, out of the corner of her eye Helen saw the businessman who hung around the area hurry past talking rapidly into his mobile phone, unable to decipher precisely who he was referring to; she only heard something about…. frizzy-haired midget thinks if a man doesn’t fancy them he’s gay’. Then,’… told you about him, he looks like one of those big Irish farmers, huge hands, failed suicide …‘
To Helen it seemed nice that he had somebody with whom he could share these thoughts. The Easter when she was thirteen the family had gone on holiday to a rented villa in ‘Lanzarote, a shabby breezeblock cube but with a swimming pool and everything. She’d found an old diving mask in a cupboard and had spent hours each day floating on the warm surface gazing down into the spangly turquoise-tiled depths, languorously twisting and turning for the eyes of her ever-present dad.
One day, as she drifted through the quicksilver chlorine-scented water, the shrivelled rubber of the mask’s strap suddenly snapped, making her feel as if she’d been shot in the head, like the rooftop swimmer in Dirty Harry, and as she watched the mask beneath her dangling, pale feet tumbling down into the dangerous blue depths Helen lifted her head to look around and saw that her dad had left the poolside. She wasn’t afraid, there was no risk of her drowning, but it just seemed there was no certainty any more and the loneliest thing in the world was to be by yourself in a swimming pool.
That sense of dislocation stayed with her until the last week of school before the summer holidays. She was in the school library, hanging around in there because this group of girls who the day before had been her best friends said they hated her and suddenly wouldn’t talk to her any more. Seated at one of the long shiny mahogany worktables, sunlight streaming in thick tubes through the windows, she was pretending to work on a poem for the school magazine but instead was flicking through one of the old Sunday Times magazines that the librarian kept in Perspex binders. In an edition from September 1978 opposite a full-page advert for Ecko Hostess Trolleys there was a photograph, the black and white image so grainy that it seemed at first to be of bacteria or something; only slowly did it resolve itself into the sad face of a young man, a young man with long black ‘hair parted in the centre. As Helen stared into his soulful eyes she felt an unfamiliar, warm sensation at the base of her stomach.
Flipping over the page she greedily dived into the story. His name was Julio Spuciek, the son of a Ukrainian father and an Argentinian mother; in the 1970s in his native Argentina he had been the country’s fifth most celebrated poet, the reserve international goalkeeper and its most renowned puppeteer. For several years he had made fun of the authorities on his enormously popular TV and radio shows assisted by his puppets —Margarita, Tio Pajero, Abuela, El Gordo and Señor Chuckles. When, in a bloody coup and a wave of terror, the Fascist military junta came to power, his popularity and his socialism condemned him and he was swept up amongst the first wave of the disappeared into the notorious prison of El Casero. Yet even the terrible generals were reluctant to murder a man as popular as Julio Spuciek and in time they lit on another plan. One cold winter’s day in the grey yard of the prison of El Casero Julio Spuciek’s puppets were brought out, lined up. one by one against the exercise yard wall and shot by firing squad.
In the magazine there were more blurred photos: of the splintered corpses of the puppets and further colour pictures of the mournful, sensitive bearded face of their puppeteer. Since that moment Julio had been inside her head, her constant companion, her special friend. Helen stood at the top of the stairs and, like a TV reporter, relayed the scene at the gala dinner of the Percussionists Licensing Society to him now.
She had carried this man around with her for over twenty years. Helen pointed out new things to him’ all the time and when she saw something wrong — the ugliness of a modern building, say, or some drunken boys behaving badly in the street — she would apologise to Julio on behalf of her country. He was with her for her first period, he sat alongside her during her A levels and he was watching benevolently the first time she sucked a boy’s cock. Helen consulted Julio Spuciek on every major decision in her life and he always told her she was doing the right thing.
4
Harriet was trying to remember how much water she’d drunk — she knew she was supposed to walk ten thousand steps a day, eat five portions of fruit and vegetables, drink two litres of water and consume a minimum of three portions of oily fish during the week; the authorities seemed to have turned the simple business of staying alive into a full-time job. Also, if you drank the two litres of water then set out to walk the ten thousand steps as she had just done, then pretty soon the frantic hunt for the lavvy would begin. In the brief period when she tried to stick to the government’s instructions Harriet was constantly being chased out of hotels by security men or in burger bars staff would bang on the door of the stall she was using shouting, ‘You no buy nothing, you gotta buy something to pee!’ So she would have to purchase a giant flame-grilled bacon burger to pay for her use of the toilet, thus undoing all the walking and water drinking. In the end Harriet decided it was best if she stayed near her house and only drank tea, coffee and alcohol.
Since she’d become the sort of woman who had a personal trainer Harriet’s visits to Muscle Bitch had ceased, though she hadn’t of course stopped the direct debit that paid for her membership. During their weekly workouts in her upstairs room, with Patrick watching over her and urging her on, she put a lot of conscious effort into her exercises to show him she was sincerely trying to get fit, but when he wasn’t there she couldn’t find the motivation to do them at all. Lying on the floor with her toes hooked under the radiator fully intending to do twenty half sit-ups she would come to fifteen minutes later still lying on the floor having spent the time daydreaming about wallpaper with the smell of burning trainer toe in the air.
So this act of taking on a personal trainer had resulted in Harriet losing what muscle tone she’d had, thus giving her sagging flesh the appearance of having gained even more weight. She also seemed to be spending a lot more of her time lying on the floor daydreaming about wallpaper, so some of her customers had begun to complain about repairs being delivered late. Harriet told herself that she couldn’t afford to begin losing any business because of Patrick. The financial cost of employing him, forty pounds a week spent on nothing, was something she could just about afford but it was really starting to annoy her: she had plenty of nothing already. Sulkily she said to herself it wasn’t as if Patrick seemed bothered whether he taught her or not; he took the money every week curtly without acknowledgement, then sat around her flat for hours expounding his bizarre theories, killing any shred of the mild excitement she’d first felt in knowing him. One day in the upstairs room as a gentle misty rain fell outside he said, ‘Y’know, Harriet
, what I wonder?’
‘No,’ she mumbled petulantly.
‘I wonder what the Australians were doing fightin’ in Vietnam. I mean you can sort of understand why the States was there and the Vietnamese of course … though they didn’t really have a choice in the matter. But the Australians? They sent a boat to the Falklands as well and they’re in Iraq of course.’
‘Maybe they believe in freedom and democracy,’ Harriet said in a sarcastic tone.
‘I suppose they could,’ he replied, taking what she’d said seriously, ‘but I think they were just bored. Australia’s a long way from anywhere else and they fancied getting out for a bit.’
‘But don’t you think that’s a terrible thing: to fight a war in somebody else’s country just to get away from home?’
‘It’s what men do,’ was his answer. ‘We must fight.’
‘Really? How awful for you.’
‘Yes, it can be.’
Another thing, it was starting to creep her out a little having him in her place every week, sitting there like a strange, unwelcome cousin from New Zealand.
The Booing Corporation was telling her that she might as well realise that she was never, ever going to lose any weight. All the little men at their morning conference told her to face it: if taking on a personal trainer didn’t do it then nothing was going to, the nasty little men around the conference table all said. Harriet simply didn’t have the moral character to stick to an exercise regime, she should get used to the fact that this was her now. A fat, useless, thirty-eight-year-old woman that nobody was ever going to love.
In mid-October, as the leaves on the trees in the park across the way began to turn red and in a few cases light blue, at the end of their fifth training session she said to him, ‘Wow! Patrick, that was great.’
‘So same time next week, is it?’ he asked, opening the silver plastic case of the cheap personal organiser he used to record their appointments in.
‘No, now here’s the thing,’ Harriet said quickly, ‘I’ve just got a big contract to repair the costumes for the Welsh National Opera, apparently a tiger from a production of Carmen set-in colonial India got loose and slashed all their costumes, so I’ve got to go and work … in Cardiff. I definitely won’t be here next week at all so why don’t I give you a ring on your mobile when the contract’s over?’
‘What, not the week after either?’ he asked.
‘Well, no …‘ His probing made her even more determined to end it now. ‘It’s such a big job. I have no idea when it’ll end but I’ll certainly call the minute I’ve got further information and we’ll start training again like before.’
‘Well, I suppose so,’ Patrick said, ‘but you need to do your exercises every day on your own, or you’ll lose all the progress we’ve made, you understand that, doncha?’
‘Oh,. I’ll do it, don’t you worry.’
There was one of the biggest film premieres of the year being held in Leicester Square: searchlights lit up clouds of starlings that circled in the orange night air and stretch limousines slid sinuously along the narrow side streets clipping pedestrians on the elbows with their wing mirrors. The movie The Laughter of Eggs was the first of Brazilian writer Paulho Puoncho’s many successful novels to be filmed. Like a lot of Latin American fiction it heavily featured a talking bird that uttered all manner of wise and deep statements. Warbird had supervised the humane treatment of the talking bird while it was on set and during the promotional tour (during location filming the rumour was the bird had had a bigger trailer than Jeremy Irons), and now the European premiere was being held in aid of Helen’s charity.
Toby and Helen had given their taxi driver a pass which allowed him to drive into Leicester Square right up to the entrance of the cinema down a high lane that had been carved out of yelling people. The cameras did not explode for them in a waterfall of light as they stepped from the cab, though a couple of freelancers penned outside behind barriers took a few shots of Helen since she was very pretty and might have an affair with somebody famous one day.
In front of the couple, capering in the entrance to the cinema, was someone they knew, an actor called Roland Malone who had co-starred in the early nineties with Lulu in her one hit, a TV detective series called Bold As Bacon about a father and son team who ran a bacon stall round the markets of the northwest and also solved crimes. The photographers called out to him, ‘Roland! Roland! This way, Roland!’ and he pranced and cavorted for them.
Toby and Helen, skirting Roland’s flailing arms, mounted the stairs and entering the auditorium were shown to their seats; in the arm of each there was a free bag of popcorn and a bottle of flavoured mineral water of a new kind — carrot or something. The Odeon was separated into two halves by a long curving aisle that ran the width of the cinema. In front of this aisle towards the screen was the place where local radio competition winners and office staff from the companies who supplied bottled water and sticky labels to the film’s producers were seated, overdressed in their ballgowns and rented tuxedos with red bow ties; a cloud of excitement and anticipation hung over this southern hemisphere of the cinema.
In the uphill part where Helen and Toby sat were the film’s producers themselves, its distributors, various low-grade stars of television and radio and the senior executives of Warbird: there was no excitement here. Inside her head Helen explained all this to Julio Spuciek.
The couple had invited their friends Oscar and Katya to the premiere and they were waiting for them in the four-seater box that fronted the aisle. Oscar had once worked with Toby at the Percussionists Licensing Society, while Katya was a food writer and critic: at the moment she was working on a book of recipes for meals that were mentioned in the Bible; she reckoned this would be a huge hit with fundamentalist Christians who wished to eat only holy food.
Roland Malone, having been told by the photographers that they had enough shots of him now, thank you very much, had wandered into the auditorium; spying Toby and Helen he waved energetically and came over to stand in front of their seats in the aisle.
‘Hi, Roland,’ said Toby. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Great,’ the actor replied. ‘I’ve just been speaking to my agent, he’s got something really exciting for me.’
‘What, the National job?’
‘No, it’s a memorial service at the actors’ church for Tony Walker, big-time drama producer. Rumour is he died of a heart attack in the arms of a very good-looking Labrador.’
‘I didn’t know he was a big mate of yours,’ Helen said.
‘Me? I hated the bastard.’
‘So why are you doing it?’
He looked at her like she was retarded. ‘I’m top of the bill! If you do a telly or a play only the public see-it, but if you give a good performance at a memorial service for somebody really important then every bastard in the business is there to watch you breaking down in tears at the power of your own acting; can’t fail.’
Helen said to Julio Spuciek in her mind, ‘Roland! What a self-involved arse. Of course, Julio, you remember he was exactly the type I would have once fallen for, before I married Toby — handsome, creative, highly strung and a complete prick.’
‘Pajero is the Argentinian slang for prick,’ Julio said.
‘Really, and isn’t a Pajero a type of four-wheel-drive car?’
‘Exactly, all these pricks are driving around with “prick” written on their car.’
‘Oh, Julio,’ she said, ‘you’re so funny.’
‘And you are looking particularly beautiful tonight.’
Just about completing the fashion course, Harriet left college with an indifferent degree and none of her tutors, unsurprisingly, seemed willing to recommend an overweight girl who didn’t look after herself as an intern at any fashion house. So, more or less at random, she took a job as a dresser on Miss Saigon at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. With her meagre wages she was able to move to a bedsit in the place that nobody calls Pointless Park.
When He
len left college she liked to think it was a complete coincidence that she moved there too, except she lived in a big house with the family of a lecturer from the college whom she was having an affair with. Helen gave dinner parties, she went to plays and the cinema and had lots and lots of boyfriends. If she fell out with one boyfriend there was always another waiting: one took an overdose because she chucked him, another became gay; one tried to join the French Foreign Legion but was turned down and settled for a fast-track management career at Waterstones. Sex was everywhere: in the same week as Cindy Crawford and k.d. lang were pictured kissing on the front cover of Vogue Lulu and Rose put their hands down each other’s-pants at a party and rummaged around as if they were looking for something. Even Harriet had a married man who slunk up to her little bedsit in the late afternoon.
Always in the background, almost unnoticed, there was Toby, hanging around without making any great impression except that he was generally drunk and there was often a crowd grouped around him looking down and asking, ‘Are you all right, Toby?’
In 1998 the sisters’ mother, who had suffered from ill health for years, suddenly became very sick. Helen was twenty-seven when this happened, Harriet thirty. Later on when they were in their mid-forties and they’d all begun to look like their own deranged elderly relatives, there would always seem to be somebody who was having to fly up to Scotland every weekend to comfort their father in a hospice or who was forced into making eight-hour train journeys to obscure mental institutions in Cumbria in order to visit their suicidal sister, but back then they seemed to be the only ones who had to endure this kind of crisis. When Helen told all her exciting lovers that she needed their help and support at a difficult time in her and her sister’s life they all acted as if it was they who were having some huge crisis.