by Alexei Sayle
‘So what do you think?’ he asked.
‘About what?’
‘About becoming a student of Li Kuan Yu. My dojo, the place where I teach, is in the community centre, from eleven to one. I thought you’d like to join us.’
‘I dunno …’
‘Li Kuan Yu is more than martial arts, Harriet; many refer to it as “the Grand Ultimate”.’
When she looked at Patrick he reminded her of a kid showing off his paltry collection of toys to another richer more spoilt kid.
He said, ‘Martin told me everybody had to find their own way to Li Kuan Yu, that’s why we don’t advertise or anything. I think you lying to me was your way to it.’
It seemed to Harriet that in fact the whole thing had been more about him than her and she really didn’t want to get caught up in this new entanglement, but the look of puppyish desperation in his eyes made her say, ‘Yeah, fuck it, why not?’
‘Great,’ Patrick replied, with a little moue of irritation at her swearing.
Brilliant, she thought to herself, I’m being taught kung fu by my mother.
They left the café and walked on the foggy, frost-crunching path round to the entrance of the community centre. He led her across the small foyer, seemingly papered with fluttering notices and messages, then through cheap wooden double doors into the large main space; this was a low-ceilinged, all-purpose hall, stacking chairs pushed back against the walls and a jumble of stage lights dangling from the roof joists. Though it wasn’t yet eleven there were a group of people wearing kung fu-style outfits stretching and limbering up in the centre of the wooden floor. With his hand on her shoulder he presented Harriet to the others.
When he spoke they all stopped stretching and turned towards Patrick. She noted that even though several of them were much older they listened to him in reverential silence as if he was reciting interesting poetry rather than simply introducing them to a fat woman.
‘Now, Harriet,’ he said, once he’d given everybody her name and told them she was joining the group, ‘I’m going to get changed and you need to talk to Ali’ — he gestured towards an Asian man in his thirties — ‘about what your outfit’s going to look like.’
‘I’d have thought you martial artists wouldn’t care what clothes you were wearing,’ she said to Ali once they were together.
‘Why would you think that?’ Ali replied. ‘Harriet, have you ever heard of the novels of Paulho Puoncho? You know The Pharmacist? Marion Decides to Buy a Hat? Forty-eight and a Half Seconds?’
‘I think my friend Lulu read one once, she said it was sh—’
‘You shouldn’t listen to what other people think,’ Ali said, telling her what he thought. ‘He’s sold over twenty million books worldwide, Paulho Puoncho has, and many people say his novels have saved their lives, think about that. These books they’re all about the choices we make in life, about listening to our hearts and most of all about following our dreams. So, yes, it is important what outfit you choose.’
‘Right…‘
He produced a number of catalogues from different outfitters and, pretending to care, she finally selected a grey outfit with two black stripes down the leg and shamefacedly gave her measurements.
‘There’s a fifteen pound supplement for Super XXL,’ Ali said, reading from the catalogue.
‘Right, that’s OK,’ Harriet replied, her blushing unseen by Ali.
These measurements were to be sent off to a place in Leeds and the suit would be ready for her to pick up on the next Saturday.
While she had been consulting with Ali, Patrick returned wearing a fighting suit of extraordinary whiteness and called them all together. He announced that because there was a new student they were going to practise Anaconda Tree Jump Vine Strike, the centrepiece of Li Kuan Yu.
He said to a tall women in black pyjamas, ‘Helga, can you get the ladder?’
She returned a few moments later with a dented aluminium stepladder, then one student stood on it while another held the legs. Patrick in his bright white outfit explained to the group that the student on the ladder should wait with what he said was ‘full tension and intention focused in thighs’ while the rest of them ran in a line past the ladder. With full kiai, which was apparently a sort of shout, and focused chi, which was a sort of energy, the person on the ladder was supposed to choose their victim then jump feet first and wrap their legs around the opponent’s neck, making sure their groin pressed into the back of the opponent’s neck so that they couldn’t turn and bite what Patrick called ‘the secret place’. When Harriet watched a football match on the TV and she saw the footballers tackling each other or embracing after scoring a goal she was often distracted by the thought of their ‘secret places’ rubbing and banging against each other and when she went to the hairdresser she always kept her arms squeezed tightly into the sides of the chair so the hairdresser’s ‘secret place’ Wouldn’t inadvertently touch her, yet now she was going to have one of them tucked into the back of her neck. Harriet thought to herself that in a short time she’d come a long way, though in what direction she wasn’t sure.
As it turned out it was considered too dangerous for Harriet and a couple of the newer students to jump off the stepladder so they were told to practise Anaconda Tree Jump Vine Strike by sitting on a partner’s shoulders and walking around. Patrick handed out grubby foam neck braces to be worn by the training partners but it was clear that even with them on nobody was willing to carry Harriet about, so in the end she found herself on Patrick’s shoulders with her secret place tucked into the back of his neck.
After two hours’ training the group went back next door to the community centre café. Apart from Harriet there were seven other members. Seated next to her at the Formica table was Mi, an accountant; next to him was Helga, a large German woman in her forties, an aromatherapist. There was Paul, a BT engineer; squeezed next to Paul was Langley, a Jamaican cabbie; opposite him Gill, a housewife; and next to her there was Jason, a teenager who’d been sent along by social services. Lastly there was Jack, a small compact man who, though extremely fit-looking, Harriet guessed to be in his early sixties, a retired engineer. She found it odd to see a man of that age dressed in short leather jacket and light blue faded jeans; like Patrick he too was Old London from the Watney Flats and was also the only person apart from Patrick who had actually been taught by the Founder — Martin Po. Jack was a devotee of everything Chinese: he spoke Cantonese, spent his holidays over there in strange industrial cities nobody had ever heard of that possessed two million inhabitants and had even gone so far in his Sinophilia as to join an extreme Maoist group in the 1970s.
There was also something of the Politburo apparatchik about Jack in that he played the wise old adviser to Patrick’s more impetuous temperament, advising caution and offering sage interpretations of some of Sifu Po’s more confusing and contradictory statements.
It wasn’t until later in the afternoon when she was back in her shop, dizzy from the strange day she’d just had, that it dawned on Harriet that she hadn’t just been told some ancient tale of monks or Samurai: Patrick had given her explicit details of a thirty-six-year-old unsolved triple homicide. She decided that maybe Martin hadn’t really split Scots Billy’s skull or killed Big Barry by twisting his testicles or tangoed the other one on to the railings: it was just some sort of parable.
5
Nearly two months went by. Northerly winds blew the remaining leaves off the trees in the park. The contractors should have come by to collect them for compost while burning those that were diseased, but they never arrived, as if they had a plan that in the summer there should be virulent outbreaks of many different and varied plant contagions. Halal Meat and Videos became Azerbaijan Fried Chicken. The Tin Can Man appeared for a time without his sardine tin looking mute and distressed until he managed to steal a new one from the Valueslasher Mini Market. He then had to catch up on his calls, talking for hours, up and down the shopping parade, mad insults, comments on peop
le’s clothes, deranged observations on their lives pouring from his mouth.
Late one still, windless night, practising on the unmarked punchbag she’d recently bought, Harriet heard him begging from beneath her window, ‘Please, Lynn,’ he cried, ‘no, darling, you know there’s no one but you. I just lost my phone for a while … baby, no … please don’t … please don’t …’ To drown out his sobbing she punched harder and harder until she made her first dent in the shiny plastic of the swinging bag.
Harriet’s life until meeting Patrick had resembled owning a rare kind of horse: it needed constant tending, feeding and maintenance in order to try and prevent it from dying limply in a field. Phone calls had to be made, people needed to be tracked down and forced into meeting for drinks or reluctant visits to see things. They couldn’t be ordinary things either. You couldn’t bribe people to go to something simple like the theatre or the cinema these days, so she had constantly to be finding new and exciting events to visit — physical theatre performed in disused ammunition factories, low-flying balloon trips across safari parks, walking tours led by a comedian off the TV around Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Birthdays had to be remembered for which presents needed to be bought so offence wasn’t caused and feuds had to be taken into account so two or more people who weren’t speaking didn’t end up spending an evening together.
Now, though, with Li Kuan Yu her life had taken on a life of its own, needing no attention Whatsoever. Patrick told her firmly that if she wanted to make progress then attendance at the dojo two nights a week and all of Saturday morning was the bare minimum; he added that as a special favour he was also prepared to give her private lessons three times a week in the room on the first floor, so there was suddenly very little time for Harriet to do anything else except work, sleep and exercise. When she wasn’t at the dojo or in her shop she went on long, huffing half-walk half-runs, wearing out the crotches of two pairs of dungarees in a fortnight with the unaccustomed friction below her secret place. As she walked and as she exercised her body twisted and creaked and protested like a suspension bridge in a high wind but there was the definite feeling that there was a tiny bit less of her every day and what remained was a tiny bit firmer.
She said to Lulu and Rose in the pub, ‘I dunno, I was so disappointed at first when he told me what it was, this ridiculous nonsense. But y’know something’s made me stick with it and the odd thing is I am losing weight so I’m sort of beginning to think there might be something to it.’
The day before Lulu had phoned her. ‘Didn’t you notice we haven’t been talking to you for nearly a month?’ she asked in a querulous voice.
‘How do you mean?’ Harriet replied, confused. ‘I’ve talked to you both loads of times on the phone.’
‘Yeah,’ said Rose, jumping in, ‘but we’ve been sniffy and distant.’
‘Is this on speakerphone?’
‘Cutting and abrupt,’ added Lulu.
‘Churlish and unpleasant.’
‘Why?’ she asked, trying to sound like she’d noticed.
‘Don’t you remember? That terrible scene you made last time we were in the Admiral Cod, making Cosmo cry and acting all crazy.’
‘You reminded us of Hitler, but not in a good way.’
‘Oh that, well, you know it’s …‘ Harriet mumbled.
‘Apology accepted,’ Lulu said.
That night they all went to the pub to make up. Right away it was clear that Cosmo the waiter was completely transformed; he shivered with an almost sexual delight when she came in, he whispered to Harriet that he was so glad she’d decided to return after ‘our upset’ as he referred to it, and that evening he was attentive and kept slipping them dishes from the kitchen free of charge so that if that had been the pub’s general policy it might almost have been good value.
Harriet’s attitude to the other people at the dojo also underwent a slow change. When sitting amongst this odd assortment of people she realised something about her old group of friends, the ones she had had all her adult life. It dawned on her that they were more or less the same: they were more or less white, they were more or less educated and what held them together was a weak thing. A vague hatred of Tony Blair, burnt-out love affairs, the thought they might need each other one day when they were old and incontinent, the fact that they didn’t know anybody else: that was pretty much it. Now it seemed to her that at the dojo she was sitting amongst a group of people who were bound to each other by something much stronger than the coincidence that they’d all discovered couscous and New Zealand wine at more or less the same time.
One big thing that she started to think about was what it would be like to be able to fight. Up until then like most women she’d thought of physical violence as an almost exclusively male pursuit, like yachting or exposing yourself to schoolgirls, but now sometimes she found herself fantasising about what it would be like to get people to do what you wanted because they were frightened of you or respected you rather than because they felt sorry for you or because you’d gone on and on at them.
Patrick said to Harriet in the upstairs room one afternoon as light snowflakes drifted like parachutists to the cold pavement, ‘An important part of learning to be a fighter is getting used to being hurt, that’s the point of all that stone throwing and the shin kicking. What confuses the average civilian,’ he went on, ‘is just the act of gettin’ punched, they’re standing there thinking, My God, I’ve been punched! Being punched is the worst thing in the world! Then you punch them again and bingo! They’re down and out. But if you get used to being punched, it’s no big deal, no shock, so you’re ready to shrug it off and take action back.’
She nodded vigorously at this, knowing for once exactly what he meant because she’d discovered that she didn’t much mind being hurt in this way; maybe her nerve endings weren’t as sensitive as most people’s or something. While it wasn’t pleasant being hit or punched, in a way she sort of welcomed the sting of the stones against her skin; sometimes she wondered to herself if because of her tolerance for pain she was maybe already halfway to being a really good fighter.
When she told Lulu and Rose about the punching and the hitting thing Lulu asked, ‘So in this barmy new upside-down world of yours are battered housewives really good fighters because they get punched all the time?’
‘Is this you still being cutting and unpleasant?’
‘No, it just sounds a bit odd is all.’
‘We worry about you, darling.’
‘Is this some sort of cult you’re getting yourself involved in?’
Harriet had told them emphatically, ‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’
Last time she’d seen Patrick, she’d asked, ‘What are you going to be doing next Monday?’
‘Monday?’ he replied thoughtfully. ‘Well, Mondays I usually start with Frog Jumps into Lily Pond. I wake at dawn and start my exercises while still in bed with the frog stretch exercise. I touch the soles of the feet together and flatten the knees to the horizontal position; assuming this triangular shape I attempt to bring the heels, keeping the soles of the feet together, up to the base of the mei lo chakra point, situated midway in the perineum. I repeat this at least ninety times. Then moving to standing position, I stretch skywards, extending fingertips and moving on to tiptoes, again at least ninety times. Next I bring arms to shoulder height extended horizontally and commence to make small circles, moving to wider circles then full windmills, counter-clockwise then clockwise. I perform nine hundred revolutions “until your arms rotate like roundabouts at ‘Wicksteed Park” as Sifu Po says. Then I go for my nine-mile run. Why? Why do you ask?’
‘It’s Christmas Day.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s just my sister and her husband always make Christmas dinner for anybody who’s still around in London; they’re always going on at me to bring someone, I never did up to now but I thought, I dunno … I thought you might like to come.’
Underneath the flashing red chilli .peppers lights, which wer
e Harriet’s sole contribution to the day, Martin and Swei Chiang were talking about their children’s education. Swei Chiang said, ‘Of course we’d love to send the kids to the local state school but it’s a jungle down there, there’s a shooting most days …‘
‘Well, actually, somebody was squirted with a water pistol,’ Martin corrected.
‘But it had acid in it.’
‘Diet Doctor Pepper.’
‘Stop correcting me, Martin!’
Facing them across the table Oscar and Katya weren’t listening but instead were arguing in hissy whispers.
‘I can’t drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’
‘Well, I can’t drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’
‘Well, I can’t drive home, I’ve had too much to drink.’
At the far end of the table was Roland Malone, his hair sticking up in clumps, wrapped inside a ratty torn anorak with a fur-lined hood that he wore up so it covered his head completely. He had just been offered a part .in a gritty new British film and was refusing to come out of character, so his family had gone on holiday to North Africa without him. He was speaking to nobody in particular at high speed in a strange nasal ‘northern’ accent.
‘The trees are full of spiders, right? Waiting, hiding from the light, the fist-in-the-face Nazis that vomit up car jack neutral spinsters — it’s all in the Bible, man — St Paul’s letter to the National Car Parking company complaining about a scratch on his Nissan Micra that some clown … Coco? I’d rather have Horlicks if it’s all the same to you …’
Bored, Harriet got up from the table unnoticed and went into the kitchen where her sister was preparing the meal. Helen had decided to have a Slovakian Christmas this year and her arm was halfway up a large carp, stuffing it with walnuts that she’d already cooked separately.