by Alexei Sayle
The men said, ‘But I’ve got this meeting with a guy who might buy one of my pastry sculptures,’ or ‘My allergies don’t allow me to go into or through the countryside,’ or ‘If I’m away who’ll feed my iguana?’ One particular boyfriend actually managed to develop all the symptoms of her mother’s throat cancer including rapid weight loss, muscle weakness and coughing up blood whenever she saw him.
Only Toby emerged from the mist and would drive them up and down the motorway in the middle of the night, then wait patiently outside the hospital, would shop for them and cook their meals when they were too tired and upset to do anything for themselves.
All of the next week Harriet kept the lights turned off in the shop just in case Patrick was passing and happened to glance inside and see she wasn’t in Cardiff. Unfortunately the door had to remain unlocked since she couldn’t afford to be turning away customers. Just to be on the safe side though, her worktable was dragged out of the shop window and into the space behind the counter where it was mostly hidden from the street; the disadvantage of this was that there was less light back there so she needed to keep her work lamp burning simply to be able to do the repairs. On the day, at the hour when Harriet should have been having her sixth lesson with Patrick the sky was grey and clouded. Every few minutes, while working at her table in a pool of yellow light repairing moth holes in a tweed jacket, she would glance up at the window just in case he was there; in as much as she had a plan her thinking was that before Patrick saw her she could quickly turn the lamp off and hide motionless behind the hanging ranks of clothes. Though she told herself really she was being ridiculous even worrying about it.
When she looked up and he was standing right in front of her she didn’t for a second take it in; Harriet thought a grey cloud had somehow come into the shop and was blocking her view. Once she realised it was him her heart gave such a lurch of fear it was as if a buffalo was loose inside her, careening around madly trying to smash its way out of her skin.
‘You told me you were in Cardiff,’ Patrick said.
She saw that his skin was completely white, even paler than it usually was. Harriet seemed to remember a medical student saying you shouldn’t fear an aggressive person who was red in the face because they weren’t going to harm you, all their blood was in their head thinking angry thoughts. You should really fear the white-faced since all their blood had gone to the extremities, their hands and feet, ready to do terrible damage.
‘Oh well, yes but … they told me it …‘ she trailed off unable to think of a lie.
‘But you’re here.’, ‘Yes.’
‘So as it turns out we can do our lesson.’
‘Yes.’
‘Lock the door and get up the stairs then.’
With uncertain legs Harriet rose, put the shop sign to ‘Closed’ and turned the lock on the door. She thought fleetingly of fleeing into the street but what would-she say to people? ‘There’s a man in my shop and I’m afraid that he wants to give me a fitness lesson.’ So instead she turned off the lights and walked into the hall. He followed close behind as they mounted the stairs up to the empty room.
Outside the big windows the sky was now a single shade of grey the colour of the sugarpaper that Harriet remembered they used to draw on in art class at school. Somewhere over Hackney lightning crackled.
Standing in the centre of the room she waited to be told what to do.
Patrick walked in tight circles around her and she tried to follow him with her eyes until he hissed, ‘Look straight ahead.’
After some more pacing, out of her vision, he spoke again. ‘We’re going to try something different today. You’re to stand as if you’re riding a horse, do you know how to do that? Legs apart, knees bent.’
‘Like I’m riding a horse?’
Suddenly he was right in front of her face. ‘Yes, like you’re riding a fucking horse, playing fucking horsey, do you know how to fucking do that?’
She thought to herself that she’d never seen her plumber angry, the postman had never sworn at her, Mr Sargassian, the old man from next door who came in to water her plants while she was away, had never stood in front of her, his spit flying into her eyes, telling her to play fucking horsey, so how had she got into this situation? This man who’d come to her house six times was now yelling at her to do weird stuff and she couldn’t think of anything to do but to obey.
Slowly Harriet settled into the shape remembered from childhood, her legs apart, her bottom sticking out at a stupid angle. She felt the fat of her stomach creasing over itself and a single rivulet of sweat trickled down her back, suddenly making her want to giggle..
‘Arms by your side, fists clenched …‘ He was directly behind her now as he spoke and though she desperately wanted to she was afraid to turn her head.
Then, more frightening than any angry words, there was nothing; for what must have been ten minutes Harriet stood in this posture; occasionally she thought she heard him, move behind her, sometimes sensing he was somewhere at the back of the room, at other times feeling that he was right behind her, feeling his breath only a few inches from her spine. Soon her legs began to shake and she was considering asking if she might move when suddenly from somewhere out of the darkness he walked up and kicked her hard in the shins. Over the next few months Harriet would learn that each part of the body has its own kind of pain: head pain is like a bad fog, arm pain is like a stale sandwich, but she would always say that shin pain is one of the worst.
‘Ow,’ she yelped.
Immediately Patrick’s face was centimetres from her own. ‘Get back into your fucking stance, get back into your fucking stance.‘
The agony was just beginning to subside when he suddenly flew from the opposite direction and kicked the shaking fat woman in the other shin.
‘Ow, Christ!’ she yelped again, but quickly stepped back into her stance without being told.
After he had kicked Harriet’s shins three more times Patrick said, ‘Right, follow me.’
In turning to try and follow she fell heavily and awkwardly to the ground, pain shooting into her palms. He did not wait, however, and as she lay twisted on the floor she heard his steps descending the stairs. Harriet could have let Patrick leave then and might have been free of him, but propelled by an indistinct fear she thrust herself upright and followed in a rush, bashing her shoulder on the doorway as she raced breathlessly down the stairs after him.
The front door was open and she could just see his feet disappearing over the road as she slalomed down the corridor and into the street.
Glimpsing Patrick disappearing into the park, Harriet was forced into a waddling, ungainly run in order to catch him up as he steadily pressed across the muddy grass and through the dripping undergrowth towards the centre of the greenery. Stepping straight into a laurel bush that wetly slapped her in the face she realised they had come to the very heart of the park, a place where she had not ventured for years.
It was strangely silent in this shallow bowl, the sides sloping gently down to the ancient oak tree right at the core soaking up all noise from the outside world, the only sound the delicate patter of rain on leaves. The edge of the bowl was ringed in an almost impenetrable tangle of bramble, dog rose, laurel, beech tree and scraggly pine. Looking down she saw that her stretch pants were torn and her legs were bleeding from forcing her way unwittingly through the thorns.
Patrick stopped by the oak tree and waited while Harriet staggered up to him. The first fork of the oak tree was about five feet above the ground. Patrick pointed to it and said to her, ‘Climb up there.’
‘What, where?’
‘Climb up to that first branch of the tree.’
‘I can’t climb.’ Despite what had just gone on between them she thought it still seemed particularly cruel of him to expect somebody as fat as her to climb a tree.
‘I’ll give you a boost.’
‘No, no, no. I’ll be too heavy.’
‘No, you won’t.’
> He cupped his hands, Harriet tried to bend her leg to fit into them but couldn’t get her foot high enough. With a sigh Patrick bent a little lower, she put her foot into his fingers and realised how strong he was as he more or less threw her into the tree. Harriet clung on desperately to the flaking grey wood as it dug into her stomach, knocking the air out of her as she hung over the branch.
‘Stand up,’ Patrick ordered.
With great difficulty she managed to lever herself upright so that she stood swaying unsteadily on the branch, forced to embrace the trunk of the oak tree like a lover just to steady herself.
Patrick’s chest was now level with the woman’s feet as he said quietly, ‘Now jump.’
‘Jump?’ she squeaked.
‘Jump,’ he repeated quietly.
In Harriet’s mind there suddenly appeared an image of the shelf for tinned fish at the supermarket: there were so many different kinds of tuna that sometimes she stood for fifteen minutes trying to choose between tuna chunks in brine or tuna steaks in sunflower oil or tuna chunks in olive oil. She understood there was a sort of freedom in having no choice at all, so with her mind temporarily at peace and without further argument she stepped off-the brittle branch and into the empty air.
Nothing happened then a lot happened. She struck the ground and her legs twisted beneath her as her body pitched forward, her glasses fell off and, stretching out her hands to protect herself tumbling forward, her soft pink palms scraped along the stony soil beneath the tree tearing the skin wide open, her chin hit the ground jarring the neck and her teeth dug into her lip splitting it open, blood spurting in an arc to land at Patrick’s feet.
‘OK,’ he said, ‘training’s over for today.’ Then he squatted down next to her fat exhausted body.
‘Now here’s your homework. Tomorrow I want you to get up at six in the morning and come here and climb to that branch and jump from there nine times. Nine times, do you get it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yeah? I want you to do that every day. Now if you want, of course, you can not do that, you can not do that just like you’ve not been doing your exercises even though you promised you would, but next week, next week, I’m goin’ to come to your shop and get you and we’ll come here and you’re going to jump from that second branch.’ He pointed upwards to a cleft in the tree that was much, much higher than the limb from which she had so recently launched herself at such great cost. ‘And if you haven’t jumped nine times a day from the first branch then there’s a possibility you’ll die when you jump from that second branch, certainly you’ll break somethin’, leg or arm, nose or jaw, suffer terrible pain. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Then he left.
Some psycho-dynamic therapist that Harriet had seen for a few increasingly unhappy and insane months in the late 1990s had suggested as part of her treatment that grown-up Harriet wrote a letter to ‘Little Harriet’, as she was encouraged to refer to her troubled teenage self back in 1982. when she had been fourteen years old. She wrote:
Dear Little Harriet,
I think you’ve got it into your head that you are unattractive to boys but you are actually a strong confident young girl, they are just morons who are frightened by your interesting ideas and your massive intelligence. You should just ask them out and see what happens and not be afraid of rejection.
You should be kinder to your mum when she gets sick because you’ll feel bad about it later and your mum really does love you even though you are always being criticised and nagged and having your choice of clothes denigrated by somebody who dresses like a nineteenth-century gypsy herself.
Lots of love,
Your grown-up self Big Harriet.
But then at the end of the letter she couldn’t stop herself adding:
PS In 1985 Everton will win the Cup Final 1—0 against Aston Villa, ‘Big’ Dave Watson scoring in the ninetieth minute.
As Harriet lay on the moist ground peeling damp leaves off her face she reflected that maybe it was this sort of smart-arse behaviour, this inability to commit herself fully to anything, to turn everything into a joke, that had always sunk her attempts to climb out of the holes that her personality had dug for itself. But it occurred to her now that she had always refused to take anything seriously in the hope that if she didn’t take things seriously then they couldn’t become serious. Now, though, they had become serious anyway; this time there was never any chance that she wouldn’t go to the park early every morning, climb the oak tree and throw herself from its lowest branch nine times.
All through the week the October weather remained stormy: gales swept in from the south-west stripping leaves from the trees, while the rain saturated the ground so that water lay in boggy pools all over the park sucking her trainers down into their clammy depths as Harriet walked each dark early morning to the oak tree, treading through the muddy, decaying flowerbeds and stepping around pyramids of damp cardboard that covered lumpy sleeping bags.
It was hard for her to describe her feelings even to herself during those next seven days; she thought the Germans probably had a mile-long word for it that translated as ‘deathfearsexiness’. That was the closest she could come; she had given herself over to someone whom she was paying forty pounds an hour to kick her in the shins and make her jump out of a tree.
She was impatient for what was going to happen next and at the same time terrified of it (how far would things go before she tried to refuse and what would happen then?). One minute Harriet would be giddy with exhilaration then the following one waves of humiliation and shame would sweep through her body. Yet, taking stock, she felt that over all these contradictory sensations was a feeling that she was more alive than she’d been for years. Somehow out of her lying and cowardice a special, secret thing had happened to Harriet: looking at her friends and her sister she thought to herself that whatever love, success or happiness they had managed to attain there’d never been anybody she knew who’d been caught up in anything like this, a matter both so dark and so dangerous.
The first day on her own she had to bring a small set of kitchen steps with her in order to get to the first branch; clumsily Harriet scrambled up into the arms of the oak tree, hesitated, felt sixteen different things at the same time and then flung herself from the branch nine times. First of all she fell very badly, scraping her knees and swallowing great clumps of damp earth, but by the middle of the week Harriet had dispensed with the steps and was managing to remain upright when landing, soaking up the impact with bent legs, until it dawned on her that she was landing in the horse stance that Patrick had shown her upstairs in the shop.
‘Don’t you want some more wine?’ Lulu asked her as she sat in the pub on the Saturday night.
‘No thanks, Lu, I’m happy with my water. ‘‘Nobody’s happy with water.’
‘I seem to be.’
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Why have you stopped smoking?’ ‘Dunno.’
‘Why have you only ordered a starter?’
‘S’all I want.’
Her interrogation was cut short by the arrival of their dinner. Like many of the new-style food pubs the Admiral Codrington served sloppily prepared ingredients on cheap white plates plonked down on paper tablecloths, to be eaten with shoddy cutlery and brought to the table by an insufficient number of woolly-minded unemployed conceptual artists, while still charging prices that would have seemed quite steep at the swankiest hotel in Monte Carlo. In the toilets, instead of music they played the speeches of Martin Luther King.
‘I didn’t order the butternut squash,’ Harriet said.
‘My sea bass is cold,’ said Rose.
‘Don’t make a fuss, it’ll be fine, just eat it! Just eat it!’ hissed Lulu.
‘No!’ Harriet suddenly said, slamming down her puny tin fork with so much force that it bent. She called out to the waiter, ‘Cosmo, excuse me, excuse me but our food’s not r
ight!’ Unfortunately the waiter wasn’t able to hear her as he was doing a little dance for the barman and the other waitress.
However when the bill came she said to him, ‘What’s this?’ The waiter looked all confused. ‘It’s the optional fourteen and a half per cent service charge.’
‘Well, take it off,’ Harriet said. ‘The service was poor, so I don’t want to leave an optional tip.’
‘What’s got into you?’ Rose hissed.
‘I’ve been trying my best,’ the waiter said with a quiver in his voice, ‘it just, it just, you know, gets really busy in here.’
‘Well, that’s not my problem, is it? The service wasn’t good enough.’
A woman who’d been eating silently with a young girl who had no eyebrows and a colourful bandanna on her head leant across from an adjacent table. ‘Please, please,’ she exclaimed plaintively, staring at Harriet, ‘it’s my daughter’s birthday tomorrow and she’s going into hospital for a cancer operation and you’re ruining our night out making a fuss like this.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ cried the waiter, turning to the woman. ‘I forgot to bring your cake, I’m so, so, sooo, sorry …’
‘Please, please don’t give it another thought,’ said the woman. ‘You haven’t destroyed our evening.’
‘So tell me again why you wanted to make Cosmo cry?’ Lulu asked as they walked to her house.
‘I cancelled my television,’ Harriet replied. ‘I cancelled my television. Rang them up and said, “I don’t want this crappy TV and video any more.” They said I had a binding contract and they’d take me to court if I didn’t keep it up. I said they could stuff their contract so then they said OK but actually they couldn’t be bothered coming and picking their equipment up because it would cost them too much and so the guy on the phone sold me both the TV and the video for twenty-five pounds. I’ve been renting off them for ten years: in that time I’ve spent over four thousand pounds and they sold me both for twenty-five quid!’