by Alexei Sayle
‘I still don’t see what that’s got to do with carrying on because you didn’t quite get what you ordered. You knew that Cosmo was upset about what Michael said about Sasha’s show and it’s probably the last time that that woman’s ever going to have dinner with her daughter.’
‘I didn’t get anything that I ordered from that idiot and I don’t see why I should put up with it.’
‘Well, where would we be if everybody behaved like that?’ asked Lulu.
‘France,’ said Harriet.
Helen stood on the steps of the law courts and shook hands with Warbird’s legal team, the nicely spoken, smooth-faced solicitors and the expensive, pointy-nosed barrister that they’d hired. The case these men had fought for them had been against the bereaved sons and daughters of an old woman who’d left her entire fortune in her will to Warbird; the sons and daughters had tried unsuccessfully to get the bequest reversed, telling the court that their mother was insane, wheeling a sick grandchild in from Great Ormond Street Hospital on a gurney and staging a rooftop protest dressed in bird costumes.
Refusing the offer of a celebratory drink at the stylish hotel across the Strand, Helen decided to walk along the Embankment then catch a train at Blackfriars to King’s Cross where she’d be able to change on to another that would take her to the little station on the edge of the park.
The motion to dismiss the will was always bound to fail because those who had decided to give their money to her charity, especially the ones who were cutting out their families, were extremely systematic about making sure their bequests were legally waterproof.
Though she never met most of them she still felt great affection for the people who made donations to her organisation. To Helen they weren’t like the morons who gave money to charities like the Penrith Disaster Fund — simple-minded idiots who made an impulsive on-the-spot donation because they’d just seen something sad on the telly or who bought a charity record and then wallowed in self-congratulation as if they’d done something noble, while in fact the only true beneficiary was themselves since they now felt free to carry on living their self-indulgent, unreflective lives.
She said to Julio Spuciek, ‘Is it wrong if those of us who work at Warbird treat ourselves well? Is it bad if we eat nice lunches and sometimes travel about in limousines?’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ he replied. ‘Why shouldn’t you? After all, you’ve dedicated your lives to doing good in the world, you are entitled to treat yourselves occasionally. You are behaving in exactly the right way.’
‘But some of those animal rights activists despise organisations like mine, they see us as soft and corrupt.’
‘No, those people have allowed themselves to be driven mad by the terrible cruelty they see all around. You do not allow yourself that luxury. You keep yourself a little detached and are more effective because of it.’
‘Muchas gracias,’ she said.
‘De nada,’ he replied.
The fury that swept over Patrick when he’d looked in the window of the shop and found out Harriet had lied to him had taken him completely by surprise. He really didn’t know why he was walking past her shop right there and then anyway, but she appeared to be mocking him by sitting there under her yellow light, like she was saying he wasn’t worth her lousy time, that he’d been wrong to like her even after all he’d done to try and help her get fit and after all the great chats they’d had together.
Oh well, there’s no point in worrying about it now, Patrick thought, heading towards Harriet’s shop for their next training session. As. always he tried to walk as Martin Po had told him to: ‘like water flowing downhill’.
When he saw her standing waiting for him’ in front of the counter a blush of agitation spreading upwards from her breasts, he was surprised to feel another rush of anger towards her so he simply said in a tight voice, ‘Shall we go to the park then?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet replied, looking at the floor.
They skirted a drinking club of tattooed men and women hungrily guzzling cider from a big green plastic bottle and soon came to the bowl of earth with the oak tree at its centre.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘You know what to do.’
‘Aren’t you going to help me?’
‘No.’
With difficulty and a sulky look Harriet tried to scramble up to the second branch. She reminded Patrick of some sort of bulky animal that wasn’t meant to climb trees, a kangaroo perhaps or an elderly overweight Labrador dog. He saw that she was opening some of the recently healed cuts on her palms as she climbed. Eventually Harriet reached the second branch and once there raised herself and stood gingerly balanced on the shaky limb looking at the ground, tears rolling down her nose. Patrick said nothing and after half a minute she simply stepped off. He remembered they’d told them at school about Galileo dropping stuff off the leaning tower of Pisa and how a feather and a cannonball would travel at the same speed, but, really, looking at how Harriet fell you had to believe that there was a different kind of gravity for fat people: she travelled at an extraordinary pace, smashing into the ground with a terrible thump that threw up soil like an artillery shell.
Harriet lay for a little while on the ground with her fat arse up in the air. He was almost tempted to tell her to forget it, her breath was laboured and she seemed to be crying properly now, certainly great snuffly sobs escaped from her face buried in the earth. Yet after lying there for a few seconds she slowly got up and, without a word, again climbed into the tree. As before she paused on the groaning branch, her face streaked with mud and tears running down her cheeks, before throwing herself once more into the air.
Eight more times she repeated the jump as she had been told, managing the last couple of times to land without smashing herself into the ground.
‘I can do it more times. Should I do it more times? I can do it more times,’ she said to Patrick, grinning madly with blood showing through the knees of her torn dungarees and snot running out of her nose.
‘No, nine times,’ he said, ‘you always have to do a thing like this nine times or ninety times or nine hundred times, no more and no less.’ He stared at her standing in front of him, fat and sweaty, panting and gulping with exertion. If he wanted to he knew it would be possible to leave her now, having done what was promised; Harriet had done the jump from the second branch of the tree nine times and that should have been enough but instead he stayed.
‘For the rest of the hour we’re going to do stone throwing,’ he told the quivering mud-streaked woman in front of him. ‘Stand with your back to the tree.’ Walking nine yards away, Patrick picked up a small stone from the ground while she reeled towards the tree. Then he turned and threw it at Harriet not quite with full force but still causing her to yelp in pain and jump in the air as the stone snapped into her lower leg.
After half an hour and nine times nine stones bouncing off different fleshy parts of her body and her eventually managing not to flinch at each blow, he instructed Harriet to throw some stones at him.
‘Throw stones at you?’
‘Yeah. Here,’ he said, bending down and handing her the small pebble he’d picked up.
She threw like a girl but worse, not even succeeding in hitting him from nine feet away.
‘Throw harder and better!’ he yelled, but she still didn’t manage to get any shots on target until the hour was nearly up when with her last shot she caught the young man on the face, cutting his lip open.
‘Yes!’ she shouted with furious glee, jumping in the air with her fists clenched, arms aloft, before seeing the blood on his face. and collapsing. ‘Oh Christ, I’m so sorry,’ she wailed.
‘Stay where you are!’ Patrick shouted. Then, ‘You know what to do during the week?’
‘What?’ she asked, too distressed to understand the question. ‘You know what to do during the week?’ he asked once more. ‘Er … Jump nine times a day from the second branch?’ ‘That’s right.’ Then he paused. ‘By the way I forgot to get my forty po
unds, you know with all that went on last week, so that’ll be eighty with this week as well.’
Harriet pushed her glasses back up her nose and reaching into the tight back pocket of her dungarees with shaking hands brought out a clammy wad of notes; she peeled off four twenties and handed them to Patrick.
‘Thanks.’ Then he said to her, ‘By the way you might want to get contact lenses, or have laser surgery instead of those glasses.’
Honestly! Harriet thought to herself that throwing the stones was nearly the most embarrassing thing she’d ever done, an untidy unravelling of her limbs that caused the pebble to travel about four feet before plipping to the ground. Then when she did hit him she was amazed to feel such wild exultation … well, that didn’t even go halfway to describing it, it was like every blood cell in her body was doing a wild victory dance, then when she saw the cut on his lip she felt as terrible as she’d felt ecstatic a second before, so terrible that she wanted to fall to the ground to grovel all day at his feet and repair all his clothes and send him a whole smoked salmon from Canada but he wouldn’t let her do anything.
She’d been feeling pretty good up to that point. Standing on the second branch she was at a negligible height, a height that was less than halfway up her stairs, an amount of feet and inches she disregarded twenty times a day but that was suddenly significant since she was going to jump it. Harriet thought to herself that this must be how an agoraphobic feels: where once perhaps they had taken underground trains without a thought, sailed on ferries and danced amongst seething crowds in clubs with inadequate fire escapes, now the trip down the hall to the front door contained too much terror for them.
The solution was the same, she thought: to face your fears. Harriet stepped from the branch and into the void and experienced something for which she’d yearned all her adult life — weightlessness. Abruptly with that single step she had no body, no flailing limbs, no fleshy, demanding, restricting, smelly packaging — there was simply her and her mind in freefall through the singing air.
Like he told everybody, he was only trying to help. Toby had been sitting in a branch of the Pretzel Shed on the concourse of Euston Station because they have free newspapers in there when another customer, a young man of around thirty, suddenly started acting all odd, slurring his words, waving his arms about in an uncoordinated fashion before slumping in a faint on to the counter. Now because he was a keen watcher of medical shows on the television — ER, Holby City and Casualty — Toby had sort of got the idea that he had a basic grasp of medicine, so he said to the staff who were flapping about ineffectually in a variety of foreign languages over this passed-out man, ‘It’s all right, this chap’s clearly a diabetic and he’s become hypoglycaemic, we just need to give him something sweet to eat then he’ll be fine.’ So the boys and girls forced down the man’s throat some of Rabbi Rabinowitz’s Death By Chocolate, which it nearly turned out to be because the paramedics said that was exactly the wrong thing to give him in what Toby thought was an unnecessarily unpleasant manner.
Wandering north along Camden High Street he wondered whether Harriet had asked that guy about his football lessons. He’d gone into her shop to ask about it earlier in the week but she’d acted very odd when he’d mentioned him.
‘What are those marks on your face?’ Toby had asked. ‘And on your hands?’
‘Rough housing,’ Harriet replied.
‘Rough housing?’
‘Rough housing.’
‘Rough housing with who?’
‘With Patrick; my personal training can be a little more physical than you might imagine.’
‘Obviously.’ He felt like a cop in a movie where he’s’ standing on the doorstep talking to a woman and there’s a gunman hiding behind the door with a gun to the woman’s head so she can’t ask for help but the cop’s too thick to notice there’s anything wrong so he goes away and the woman gets murdered or sorts out the situation by herself. Come to think of it, she had a sort of pleading expression on her face as well, a kind of mad, direct stare. Except there was no gunman; well, he supposed there might have been one hiding amongst the racks of clothing but he’d seen her since and if there was she hadn’t mentioned it.
Toby wondered as he walked along whether somebody living alone could suffer from domestic violence.
All the next week Harriet practised jumping from the second branch and when Patrick came she was OK about throwing herself from the third branch even though it was really quite high. After the jumping they went back to her place and did the standing about like a horse thing again. Patrick didn’t stay afterwards to chat any more like she’d hoped; she supposed he was still quite angry with her, but he did say as he was leaving, ‘Do you know the community centre in the park?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I want you to meet me at the community centre café in the park at ten on Saturday.’
‘OK. Yeah, I suppose … sure.’
‘Good.’
Without another word he turned and stalked off leaving Harriet, the Mudwoman of north London. ‘What was this — a date?’ she asked herself. If so it was an odd place to go on a date. The community centre was little more than a large one-roomed wooden shed situated on the edge of the park directly over the road from Toby and Helen’s house. Like the rest of the area the community centre was a battleground, part of the constant struggle for land going on in Pointless Park, a battle fought between on the one side the new arrivals — the families of the TV producers, bankers, lawyers and graphic designers who had bought houses in the last few years — and on the other the older community — a shaky alliance of the white unworking classes of the Watney Flats and the overseas immigrants. Recently the middle classes had seized control of the children’s playground attached to the community centre; they had managed this coup because like General Zhukov’s Soviet forces confronting Paulus’s doomed 6th Army before the gates of Stalingrad their troops and their equipment were much better adapted to winter warfare. The flabby, exposed, .tattooed, pierced, white flesh of the proletarian women was no match for the Berghaus anoraks and Timberland boots of the mothers and fathers of the new families. In six months’ time the army of the poor, like the Germans at Kursk, would try and stage a summer counter-offensive but by then the situation would be irreversible.
The swings and the sandpit in the children’s playground behind their low wooden picket fence resembled some playground of the Village of the Damned because silently playing inside it were so many pairs of spooky twins, laboriously produced by IVF and private medicine from the fragile sperm and damaged eggs of their over-achieving parents.
It was cold on the wooden bench in the children’s playground. Helen was shivering with the cold despite her nose being buried deep in the collar of her North Pole jacket. To keep a watch on Timon she had to squinch her eyes up to see him through the fog that swirled over the park. Even so, from time to time he would disappear into the grey mist; fortunately it was easy to identify the identical blond triplets of indeterminate sex whom he was playing with, since from time to time their eyes would light up with a sudden eerie glow, like the brake lights on a truck. Helen liked to take her son to the playground on a Saturday: it was a treat for both of them to get out of the house; he could play with his mute replicant friends and she was able to smoke an illicit cigarette and, with a delicious squirm of guilt, read a particular magazine which she bought every week from a different newsagent to the one she purchased her Independent and Guardian from. The magazine was called Have A Rest. Often written as if translated from another language that didn’t possess many verbs, the magazine detailed the lives of people who Helen knew must dwell around her, yet whose existence she would have been entirely unaware of if it wasn’t for the stories in Have A Rest. Helen thought of the periodical as a sort of stargate which allowed her to gaze at a strange parallel universe that occupied the same time-space continuum as her but with which it would be impossible for her to intersect. In this universe people, nearly all of them
fat and ugly, led the most extraordinarily complicated lives. They had sex with their drug-addicted ex-husband’s sisters, they married Filipino grandmothers twice their age whom they’d met on holiday and took them to live on Sheffield housing estates naïvely expecting that things would turn out well; their mothers turned out to be their sisters, their uncles turned out to be their fathers and their fathers sometimes turned out to be their mothers. Judging by the photographs that accompanied the stories these people were of every shade of pink, yellow, brown and black, usually within the same family.
It was all such a contrast with Helen’s own circle who were universally white (apart from Swei Chiang and even she’d been educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College), they married and stayed married, were good-looking and healthy, had only their own children and generally didn’t commit suicide by hanging themselves in the garden shed. Sometimes she almost envied the people in Have A Rest: compared to the calm trajectory of the lives of her and her circle there seemed to be a mad vitality about what they got up to; she wondered what it would be like to be one of them, to live in such chaos.
As the fog closed in Helen became absorbed in a story about a woman who kept finding her underwear drawer disturbed so she installed a hidden video camera in the bedroom. Watching the tape back gave the woman a perfect full-colour Dolby stereo record of her husband having sex in her bra and panties with her own brother-in-law. The, magazine had printed crystal-clear excerpts from the tape.
Suddenly with a start she looked up, remembering where she was; like all the mothers Helen was perpetually on the lookout for one of the five hundred different kinds of predator the local paper insisted were after their children. After a few worried seconds she saw with relief that her son was arm wrestling with one of the triplets who appeared to be hovering a few inches off the ground.