by Alexei Sayle
Nevertheless, feeling guilty, she swept the perimeter of the fenced-off area for suspicious men; looking in the direction of the park’s interior Helen thought she saw through the fog her sister heading towards the café. This woman, if it was her sister, passed behind a man who was staring at the children — he was perhaps sixty with thinning black hair swept back from his forehead, a greying beard and a sad soulful expression on his face, he wore a dark suit and over his shoulders was draped an expensive-looking but clearly very old fawn overcoat. Her first reaction was that somebody with such a benevolent countenance could never be a threat to the kids; it was only on giving him a second glance that Helen realised with a thump in her chest that she was gazing into the face, now lined and grey, but still recognisable, of Julio Spuciek. She felt like a Mexican peasant girl who sees the face of Jesus in a potato.
On Saturday morning as Harriet headed towards the park cafe, even though an icy fog lay over the ground and the smell of sleet was in the air, there were some kids including a pair of twins and a set of triplets playing in the sandpit. It seemed cruel to her to expose your children to such rigours, though in all fairness they seemed happy enough. The twins sat upright and motionless in the sand communicating with each other in their own secret languages.
‘Harriet immlich neem,’ said one three-year-old redhead.
‘Harriet treemput treek,’ replied an identical three-year-old redhead.
‘Seems to be losing weight and she’s smiling to herself in a gormless fashion,’ said the Tin Can Man as he stalked along the path shouting into his phone. ‘… no, no, she’s not getting fucked, it’s something else.’
The café attached to the community centre, being steamily heated, was still firmly in the hands of the old community of Pointless Park and since many of its clientele had served .time in prison the food would have been familiar to anyone who’d done a ten-year bit in Parkhurst: the ciabatta and cappuccino revolution had not yet been able to reach this place. Until the new people could force themselves to find the terrible food or the unhygienic owners ‘amusing’ or ‘charming’ the locals were safe. The coffee came from a giant catering tin of Nescafé and the tea from a big, battered tin kettle. Trying to focus on the greasy chalked menu through her new contact lenses, Harriet realised there was almost nothing on there that she wanted to eat or drink, partly because it all sounded horrible but also due to the fact that her appetite seemed to have declined; in the past if she wasn’t eating she was thinking about eating but now whole hours would go past before Harriet thought about food, so in the end she asked for a glass of tap water and some toast. When fat people like her ate in public they were used to getting angry glares from other diners; you could often see the people thinking, Look at the state of her! No wonder she’s so fat eating all the time! even if all the fat person had in front of them was a small salad.
“Ello, Patrick!’ she heard the woman call from behind the counter as the door opened and a shiver of cold air passed up her spine. The red plastic bucket seats in the café were bolted to the floor so they couldn’t be moved and the edge of the sticky table was bisecting her stomach so she was in some discomfort and it took her a second to absorb his appearance.
He sat down opposite Harriet in his economical fashion like somebody folding a blind man’s cane and immediately began talking.
Seeing him once more she was struck by how young he looked; in her mind, she supposed because he had power over her, he always appeared to be much older. The fat woman wondered to herself, not for the first time, how she had fallen under the control of this pale child.
‘Your parents alive?’ he asked.
And a bright good morning to you, Harriet thought to herself but said instead, ‘No, no, they’re both dead.’
‘Me too. You know I sometimes wondered if God had invented sleep so people would know what being dead was like.’
‘Except you wake up from sleep.’
Patrick’s brow corrugated with annoyance. ‘Yeah … still, without knowing what death was like people might not be afraid of it, they’d say, “So what’s that like then?” And step in front of buses and stuff. Well., people who’d been knocked out by a punch or something might have some idea of what death was like but not the others. But there is no God so it was a stupid question to ask myself.’ Patrick paused, confused as to what he’d been talking about. ‘You know I’d always sort of vaguely assumed that I wouldn’t be that upset when me parents died, so when they passed away so close to each other I was … I was really surprised to feel … well, I dunno what you call it … depression I suppose. Only nineteen years old but suddenly I knew there was no purpose to life, that everything was pointless and when I died there was only … nothing, nothing forever.’ He stopped then after a second resumed. ‘I dunno, the nothingness thing might have occurred to me at some point in me life but if Mum and Dad hadn’t gone so suddenly it might not have hurt me as much. I left me job at the shoe shop and used to go looking for busy crowds, I’d wander through them straight ahead without moving me shoulders and do you know? Other people just sort of bounced off me.
‘One day I was in the West End and turned off the Charing Cross Road into Chinatown. I went into this big Chinese restaurant, I think my mind was sort of searching out humiliation so it could feel even more miserable, I think now that misery needs more misery to feed itself. As soon as I was through the door a Chinese waiter saw me and though there were loads of empty tables on the ground floor he shouted at me, ‘Upstair plee!’ I did what he said and trudged up a narrow greasy staircase to the first floor where this other Chinese waiter yelled at me, ‘Upstair plee!’ On the second floor again I was ordered to go ‘Upstair plee!’ even though up there there were more vacant tables on that floor than full ones. At last I reached the almost totally empty roofspace of the building where there were just a couple of diners and as soon as I came into the room another Chinese waiter saw me and shouted, ‘Downstair plee!’ and because I didn’t move fast enough, he bellowed again right in me face, ‘Downstair plee!’ On the second floor again it was, ‘Downstair plee!’ ‘Downstair plee!’ until finally I was in the basement that really was full and another waiter shouted at me, ‘Upstair plee!’ ‘Upstair plee!’ and I just froze. You’d think they’d feel sorry for me but I know now that’s not the Chinese way; rather than having any sympathy I was suddenly surrounded by a crowd of the restaurant’s managers in their black jackets screaming abuse at me in Cantonese. Until suddenly they all went quiet, a small middle-aged waiter with shiny, dyed black hair, wearing one of those plum-coloured waistcoats, pushed his way through the crowd. The funny thing was that although he was clearly an underling the managers fell back as he took my hand and led me back upstairs to a big table in the window where he brought me that stuff they call congee-rice porridge and barbecued meats free of charge.’
Patrick paused for a few seconds then continued.
‘Not that I felt any better after that, in fact I stopped going on those long walks. They say exercise can help with depression but you need energy to get yourself up to take the exercise and I didn’t have it, I was slipping down. A lot of the time I came here to the park and sat on a bench; it was here one day I saw that same waiter in a T-shirt and shorts standing motionless and barefoot in a patch of brambles starin’ at me. The waiter made a gesture for me to come to him.
‘“Why don’t you take your shoes off,” he said to me. Somehow, Harriet, it seemed natural to do as he said, so that I took off me shoes and wandered into the briar patch as if I was stepping on to the beach at Brighton and stood next to this small Chinese man. The thorns hurt like hell, puncturing my flesh like little curved knives. “It hurts,” I said to him. “Yes,” he said, “it hurts,” and I realised this pain was the first real thing I’d felt in months.
‘Afterwards he brought me here to the community centre café. When we were sat down at a table the Chinese man introduced himself. He told me his name was Martin Po. 1 told him mine was Patrick O’Reilly.
> ‘Then just like I told you my story he told me his. He said he was born in 1949, in Hong Kong. His family lived in a place known as the Walled City, it sounded like a strange place. When Britain beat China in the Opium Wars they leased the New Territories for ninety-nine years. Somehow in the agreement the Old Kowloon Walled City got left out, so that afterwards it was claimed by both the Chinese and the British as their territory.
‘It was like a big council estate on a rocky hill where everybody had built their own apartments without any kind of regulation you might get a bit of the idea. Everyone’s flat was on top of everyone else’s flat, their living room jutting into your kitchen, your bedroom on top of their toilet. The buildings were connected at all different levels: there might be a door in the floor of your bedroom that dropped you into a narrow passageway, or a panel at the back of the living room behind the TV giving into a dark alley with water dripping down the walls and piles of garbage everywhere. Electricity was tapped from outside mains, wells were drilled to get water. Mixed in with the apartments were sweatshops and factories. The place was lawless, the Hong Kong police rarely entered and the Triads controlled a lot of the day-to-day life.
‘Nevertheless Martin’s family though poor were honest and, for the Walled City, well educated. His father was a clerk in the colonial customs house; his mother a teacher. They wanted the best for their only son but couldn’t afford an academy, so they sent him away, aged seven, to Blue Cloud Monastery, on a high mountain in the New Territories, run by Taoist monks. There he learnt mathematics, the Chinese classics, calligraphy, acrobatics, meditation, herbal medicine and a style of Wu Shu boxing known as White Crane kung fu.
‘He missed his family but studied hard and became one of the most promising students the monks had ever seen. At the annual rice pounding festival it is said that he ground more rice than any boy of his age. Yet Blue Cloud Monastery was a cruel place. The monks earned money for its upkeep and recruited new converts by touring their students in a troupe around villages and towns and sometimes to Hong Kong itself. The youngsters demonstrated their hard Ch’i Kung skills by being beaten by iron bars, jumping through burning hoops and making six-layer human pyramids. Many children were injured, but there was no hospital or sympathy from their Taoist masters, only bitter herbs.
‘Aged thirteen Martin became disillusioned with this hard life and deserted the circus on a trip to Hong Kong. Shorn of discipline, he said he entered a dark period. Under the influence of one of the many Triad gangs in the Walled City, the Black Singlet Cobra 13, he smoked opium, listened to jive music and almost ruined his internal chi. He also developed a fondness for ballroom dancing.
‘Martin Po’s family were worried that their only son would ruin his life hanging round Locarnos and chasing the dragon, so for his sake they gave up everything and together emigrated to England in search of a better life. Unfortunately, they were misled by relatives and his educated parents found themselves owners of the Happy Garden Chinese Takeaway in Kettering, Northamptonshire.
‘In 1965 at the age of fifteen, he was in a foreign land, with no friends. Ballrooms were unknown in Kettering. Though he heard there was a Mecca in Northampton, adolescent Chinese were not welcome there. He refused to help his father, instead spending his time in the flat above the Happy Garden watching the television, all-in wrestling on Saturday afternoon and his favourite shows, Robin Hood and Come Dancing.
‘The new towns of Kettering and Corby were not the best places in Britain to open a Chinese chip shop. The area around Kettering was known as Little Scotland in the 1960s. There was no work in Scotland so men and their families came down to work in the steel mills, the Aquascutum factory and the famous Corby trouser press factory.
‘Most of the Scots were Glasgow Rangers fans, fanatical Protestant Christians. Many nights he watched his father taking terrible abuse from these huge drunken men. One summer night in 1967, when Glasgow Celtic won the European Cup, a gang of drunken Scots got the idea that his father was a Catholic Christian, a rival sect. They jumped the counter and held his hand in the fat fryer whilst urging him to say, “Queen good, Pope a bastard.” Hearing his father’s screams, Martin rushed downstairs. He tried to save his dad but he had neglected his training. Martin’s rusty kung fu had no effect on these giants; their pain receptors had been dulled by huge amounts of drink and they merely laughed at the boy before them, battering him to the ground and kicking him unconscious. His father’s hand was completely crippled, and they had to sell the Happy Garden. Social services provided the family with a council flat on an estate in Corby but his father now had a total breakdown and wouldn’t leave the house.
‘Martin swore revenge on those who had mutilated his father, but how to do it? He calculated that while the methods of Chinese boxing taught by his old academy had many valuable elements, dealing with enormous alcoholic Scotsmen was outside the experience of the Shaolin monks and required something more suited to the modern world of the 1960s. But how to devise it and what to call it? It was almost unknown to see Asians on the TV but one night his mother called him to say there was something on about a mighty Chinese warrior. It was a piece on the BBC programme Panorama about Lee Kuan Yew, the first leader of independent Singapore. The programme was not favourable because in Singapore long hair was banned, chewing gum was outlawed and people were sent to prison for crossing the road at the wrong time. But Martin thought any man who could corral and unite the disputatious Malays, Han Chinese, Indians and the Straits Muslims must be a mighty warrior indeed, so he named his fighting method Li Kuan Yu in tribute to him.
‘Now it had a modern name what would be its foundation? Of course Li Kuan Yu is rooted in his training at the monastery, but where would its modern influences come from that would help him defeat the giant alcoholic Scotsmen?
‘He thought of Richard Green’s Robin Hood, which he had watched so avidly, recalling the scenes where the merry men regularly jumped out of trees on to their enemies. This gave him the inspiration for the Li Kuan Yu signature form, Anaconda Tree Jump Vine Strike. He spent hours hiding in trees and jumping out of them in order to perfect this art. Another move in Li Kuan Yu is called Broom Staff Pike Stance which, while it may resemble an Aiki Jujitsu Jo weapons form, is also influenced by Little John out of Robin Hood. From his other favourite show Come Dancing he took many examples of fancy footwork and complicated turns.
‘Out in the wider world to make money Martin took work as a waiter in local Chinese restaurants, but even here he got more inspiration: the drunken customers of these places led to him inventing Roll Eyes Fall on Enemy which involved deceiving your opponent by staggering around pretending to be drunk then falling on top of him; some of the inspiration for Roll Eyes Fall on Enemy, also came to Martin from a Big Daddy/Giant Haystacks body slam.
‘It took four years before Martin felt he was ready to take revenge on those who’d attacked his father. The leader of. the gang was a steel worker called Scots Billy, who lived on the Glenfiddich council estate. Martin silently watched from the shadows as Scots Billy and his fellow gang members spent many evenings drinking in the local pubs. On the night chosen for revenge he raced ahead of them to the estate and arrived in time to see the three cackling drunks heading for one of the entrances. Martin ran silently up the opposite stairwell. The estate was built on eight deck levels. He went up three flights then leant over the balcony; he could hear Scots Billy singing and chanting below. Martin hung from the railings in Anaconda Tree Strike preparation form, suspended in the blackness. As Scots Billy rounded the corner on to the landing below, he launched himself down, wrapping his legs round the head of the startled steel worker.
‘Scots Billy fell forward with the young Chinese man on his back like a rodeo rider. He dug his fingers into Billy’s ears and wrapped his thumbs round the big man’s temples, digging into his eye sockets. Expanding his chi from the chest, he pulled the skull apart, exposing for a second the fontanelles which had closed six months after Billy was born. He tw
isted the head for good measure and completed with Knuckles to Temples Big Headache, a deadly pressure-point blow.
‘Scots Billy fell forward like a Sherwood Forest oak. The second man was next, another Scot called Big Barry. Swooping upward from Snake Creeps Down into Golden Cock Stands on One Leg, Martin hammered his fingers firmly into the big man’s groin, twisted and pulled; that did for him. The third made to run, but Martin sidled alongside and tangoed him down the corridor before dipping like Victor Sylvester. Scooping up, he flipped the man over the balcony where he was impaled on the railings below. Then,’ Patrick finished, ‘he ran to London.’
‘You mean he ran away to London?’ Harriet asked.
‘No, he ran to London. Down the A43, A15 and the A5. Running all the way using his Tibetan Lung Pa stride, he arrived in Stanmore eight hours later, feeling only slightly breathless.’
As Patrick finished talking Harriet had been thinking of Roland Malone, recalling the time when he’d been on tour and had found a book in some provincial dressing room called something like Mysteries of the Universe Revealed. The actor had gone through a phase where after reading this book he could provide banal and tedious explanations for every mystery or enigma that anyone ever mentioned. He’d say, ‘You know Cézanne painted like that after he was kicked in the head by a horse in Pamplona and started seeing everything in funny shapes.’ That was his explanation of post-Impressionism.
Harriet had never thought for one second that the things she’d been doing these last couple of weeks had any kind of explanation; if she had considered it at all she’d sort of assumed that Patrick had invented the tree jumping and the stone throwing right there and then because her lying had annoyed him so much, that it had all come out of his feelings for her even if those feelings were mostly extreme annoyance. That it had been something unique to the two of them.
She felt desperately sad that it wasn’t special after all. She tried to hang on to the fact that whatever they’d been doing the past couple of weeks at least it had made her feel better and, for the first time in her adult life, she’d lost a bit of weight.