by Alexei Sayle
‘Hi, how’s it going out there?’ Helen asked, reaching for more nuts.
‘The usual: Swei Chiang’s explaining that although she’s still a rampant socialist they’ve just got to send their three-year-old to military academy because there’s regular outbreaks of cannibalism at the local comprehensive. Oscar and Katya are practising for the European bickering championships and Roland …well…’
‘It’s better than the time he was playing an SS officer in that mini-series with Cybill Shepherd.’
‘Yeah,’ the older sister agreed. ‘He said if we didn’t finish the chocolate mousse he’d made then he’d force us to dig our own graves and shoot us. Honestly, though, it’s the same every time we meet, we could put our conversation on a fucking tape loop then we could just eat our dinner and flip through magazines while the tape played.’
‘I thought you liked our Christmas dinners?’
‘Oh, I suppose I do but, you know, Christmas is always a bit of a pain.’
‘I don’t, know where you’re getting this sudden bad temper from, you’ve always said you had a good time on all the other Christmases. I burnt my finger on the carp, you know.’
At college those on Harriet’s fashion course interested in designing costume for the theatre were required to take a subsidiary drama course. Though unwilling and shy at first she had found herself rather enjoying the workshops she took part in.
One of the exercises the teacher set their group was to take a page from a foreign language phrase book and for them to try and dramatise it, to attempt to make logical sense of the unrelated phrases. ‘Estoy enfermo, I’m sick,’ one would say.
Another student would reply, ‘Estoy bien, I’m well.’
‘Where is the hospital/ambulance/doctor’s surgery?’ a third would ask.
‘I’m going to be sick/faint/give birth.’
‘Where is the bus station?’
‘Nos divertimos mucho, we had a lot of fun!’
‘Voy a verle otra vez? Am I going to see you. again?’
‘I have been bitten by a dog!’
‘My car has a flat battery/engine fire.’
With their abrupt switches of topic and sudden dives into self-pity, conversations with her sister reminded Harriet of these workshops fifteen years ago. Helen had drummed into her older sister since they were kids that the idea of anybody having a bad time at an event that she’d organised made her deeply uneasy.. She knew Helen hated the very idea that she wasn’t enjoying herself now and hadn’t enjoyed other Christmases —that’s why she’d let it slip; siblings know how to push each other’s buttons, because they installed them. Or rather Helen didn’t care whether Harriet was having a good time or not but she couldn’t stand her showing that she was miserable. In the past Harriet would have been too intimidated by the scene Helen might make to let her boredom show but she suddenly didn’t want to put up with it any more; after all, this insistence on everybody acting hysterically merry was simply another facet of her sister’s egotism. Helen felt that her very presence in a room made it sparkle, so she assumed if somebody was having a bad time it implied that there was some flaw in her loveliness. Harriet decided it would probably be good for both of them if in the future she didn’t try so hard to placate her sister.
It was all right for her, Helen thought, Harriet didn’t have her responsibilities: Helen was a wife, she was a mother, Harriet didn’t even look after her own appearance, never mind a husband and son and all the distressed talking birds in the world. Plus looking as good as Helen didn’t happen without her doing a huge amount of work while her sister went out looking like a bag of potatoes. She knew now that Harriet would never stick to this latest fitness regime any more than she’d stuck to any of the others over the last fifteen years despite all the support and the expensive equipment she’d given her. Helen had been glad when Harriet had become friendly with this Patrick but she still didn’t understand why she had invited her personal trainer weirdo to Christmas dinner.
Helen would sometimes think after a particularly good night out or a pleasant weekend that time should really stop now, since everything was perfectly balanced, through her efforts all her friends were getting on, because of her constant vigilance everybody was in good health. She would say to the universe while dropping off to sleep, ‘OK that’ll do now, let’s stop it all, everything’s perfect,’ and would be genuinely surprised to wake the next morning and find that time was still grinding onwards. ‘I thought I told you to stop,’ she would say grumpily to the universe, aware that her memories of the perfect night out were already fading.
She asked Harriet, ‘What time’s your friend coming?’
‘Two forty-four.’
‘Two forty-four? Not two forty-three or two forty-five?’
‘No, he said two forty-four.’
She glanced at the clock on the wall. ‘Well, it’s two forty-four now and—’
The doorbell rang.
‘I’ll get it!’ Toby shouted from the bedroom.
They heard the cannonade of his feet running down the stairs then the door opening, muffled conversation and the door closing.
‘Harriet, your friend’s here!’ Toby shouted.
‘Two forty-four,’ said Harriet as she left the kitchen.
In the hallway Helen heard Toby ask, ‘So what can I get you to drink then, Patrick?’
‘Just tap water, please,’ Patrick said.
‘Ah, “Pointless Park Pop”.’
‘No, tap water, please.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Oh, ah, I …‘ Normally Toby would stubbornly stick to his name for something in the face of everybody’s confusion but there must have been some quality about this Patrick that sapped his confidence so he said, ‘Tap water, yes …’
‘No, didn’t you call it something else?’
God, Toby! Helen thought. Stop being so pathetic.
‘Hi, Patrick,’ Harriet called out.
‘I’ll get your water,’ Toby said, scuttling into the kitchen. ‘Harriet’s friend’s here,’ he said to his wife.
‘Come and sit down next to me and meet everyone,’ Harriet said to Patrick, considering taking him by the hand or arm but not daring to do so. Eventually she just sort of poked him with her finger in the direction of the big living room where everybody was sitting around the dining table. Patrick sat down in Toby’s chair: to Harriet his straight-backed posture made a powerful contrast with the slumped, weak, caved-in bodies of all the rest of them.
‘Everybody, this is my friend Patrick.’
Patrick stood up again and shook hands rather formally with them all. She could see they were all confused by having somebody who wasn’t exactly the same as them in their midst. So, trying the most obvious way to work out his place in the hierarchy, Martin asked, ‘Hi, Patrick, and what do you do?’
‘Well,’ he replied, looking all serious, ‘I met Harriet at the gym. I’m an instructor there but now we’ve been doing personal training together and I hope become friends,’ and he gave a shy little smile.
They’d never actually had a discussion about whether Li Kuan Yu was to be mentioned to outsiders; clearly it wasn’t.
‘And what do you all do?’ Patrick asked in turn.
‘Percussionists Licensing Society.’
‘I’m writing a book of recipes of food mentioned in the Bible — I made the unleavened bread flavoured with bitter herbs that we’re having later.’
‘I plan conferences for dentists,’ Katya said, ‘and Martin’s at Birkbeck College University of London, professor of modern languages.’
‘What, all of them?’ Patrick asked.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘All of the modern languages does he teach?’
‘No, just French and German obviously.’
‘Right, so he’s a French teacher.’
‘Well, no, well, sort of …‘ Katya decided not to pursue it. ‘Of course you know Roland,
he’s a—’
Roland Malone spoke up for himself. ‘Neck monkey!’ he shouted.
There was an embarrassed silence during which Patrick stared levelly at him for several seconds. ‘No you’re not, you’re an actor,’ he finally said. ‘I know that because I’ve seen your picture a lot of times in the local paper.’
Though Patrick seemed as far as anybody at the dojo could tell completely uninterested in watching television, never went to the movies and didn’t read books, he faithfully read the local paper every week. From it he would extract stories of knifings, rapes and robberies (of which there seemed to be many), cut them from the paper and read them out to Harriet in her room or to the dojo as they practised. Then Patrick would ruefully explain exactly how the victims of these assaults would have been able to beat their assailants if only they’d been adepts of Li Kuan Yu.
‘That woman whose bag was snatched, she could have used Shin Strike and Elbow Strike to the Side of Head on the bloke who did it. That bus driver could have used Split Fingers Cobra Eyeball Strike on the man who showed him his penis on the N19 night bus, and if that other man had known Li Kuan Yu he wouldn’t have driven into that elm tree in the park because he wouldn’t have been drunk.’
Patrick said, ‘What interesting jobs you all have.’
There was a self-satisfied murmur of assent at this.
‘I bet you all went to university as well and got firsts or something.’
Another hum of happy assent.
‘Well, a good 2:1,’ said Katya.
Toby came back in and handed a glass to Patrick. ‘There you go, Patrick, there’s your … water.’
Patrick took one sip of the clear liquid and immediately gagged. ‘Dear God!’ he said, looking at his drink in an appalled fashion. ‘What’s that?’
Everybody else stiffened with embarrassment; everyone in their social circle knew better than to ever ask Toby for a soft drink at home. One of his most prized possessions was a machine called a Colajet: this contraption of pipes, gas cylinders and nozzles was advertised as making carbonated drinks, supposedly ‘as good as the real thing’ from a mixture of tap water and a selection of disgusting syrups Toby kept in labelled bottles. Guests at Toby and Helen’s were always being offered ‘tonic water’ that tasted like sump oil or unpleasant-looking brown Cola the consistency of glue. They learned rapidly to take their drinks straight or to bring their own mixers with them, but if he did somehow slip them a drink from his machine the last thing they would do would be to complain about it, since another rule of dinner at Harriet’s sister’s house was that you didn’t upset Toby by confronting any aspect of his alternate reality. There was an unspoken agreement that you didn’t do it since there was a generalised fear that his fragile world might crumble like a computer-generated parallel universe in a dystopian science fiction movie.
‘It’s fizzy mineral water,’ Toby said.
‘Well, it tastes disgusting,’ Patrick replied. ‘I asked you for tap water which is perfectly fine to drink as it is. So could you get me that?’ Then he continued with what he’d been saying, ignoring Toby who drifted back to the kitchen looking as if he’d been punched in the face. ‘I left school when I was very young me but it amazes me all the different sorts of things educated people like you do. I look around and see all these incredible things — did you know there’s a new kind of salmon-flavoured waffle coming on the market? Somebody who went to college must have thought of that.’ Harriet knew Patrick and the ways of Li Kuan Yu well enough by now to discern that the smiling, slightly confused dinner guests were being led blindly into a trap just as the great Samurai Musashi ensnared the three brothers of the Yoshioka Shogun at the Sanjusangendo Temple, home to the thousand statues of Kannon. He pressed on, ‘But when you think about it all these people are wasting their time because there is only one thing in the world they should be working on.’
‘How do you mean?’ asked Martin.
‘Well,’ Patrick replied, ‘let me ask you, what’s the greatest crime you can commit?’
Swei Chiang spat, ‘Parking in a bloody bus lane according to Islington bloody Council, though how else are you supposed to get your child to its piano lessons on time? Tell me that.’
‘Murder,’ Oscar said.
‘Murder, exactly, that’s right, Oscar. So we believe the worst thing you can do is to kill somebody, because we think death is the worst thing that can happen to a person. Yet at the same time we’re all going to die, aren’t we?’
‘S’pose so …‘ mumbled Oscar.
‘But not for a while,’ said Katya.
Patrick ignored her. ‘And yet we meekly accept it. This terrible thing is going to happen to you all.’ He pointed at them as he spoke. ‘And to all your children and to all your pets and to everybody you’ve ever met and still you people with all your talent and your brilliant minds you just shrug your shoulders and you spend your time administering estates or sending dentists to the Great Barrier Reef or teaching French or being in films when if you think about it you should all be working on a cure for death twenty-four hours a day! Or at the very least trying to make life longer for people until somebody else comes up with a cure for death! So really, looking at the situation in the cold light of day anything else you do is a complete and utter waste of time.’
‘I say! Everybody’s very quiet in here!’ shouted Toby, as he entered carrying a big soup tureen he’d had specially made for him by Spode of Derby.
During Patrick’s speech Harriet had felt herself glowing inside like a toaster. Usually her sister was the star of these Christmas dinners, everybody cooing over her fantastic food and how lovely she looked and the funny things Timon said, but here this year was her guest and he was saying all this brilliant, fascinating stuff that had completely derailed the usual boring stream of tediousness.
Added to that there was the way he looked! Though it was winter he wore a simple white T-shirt, its semi-see-through material stretched tight over the swelling muscles of his arms and outlining the sturdy rippling contours of his body. Patrick’s hair was cut close to his skull and his pallid blue eyes under long pale eyelashes glittered with ferocious life so that he made everybody else seated round the table seem waxy and inert by contrast.
Harriet caught Katya running her eyes hungrily up and down Patrick’s torso, as well she might, she thought, given the crumpled, stove-in posture of her own man; in fact come to think of it there was a certain wolfish longing in Oscar’s own gaze towards Patrick.
Toby placed a steaming bowl in front of Patrick and said, ‘There you go, Patrick, lovely soup, swoop, loop de loop.’
‘What did you say?’ Patrick asked.
Later that evening she walked with Patrick along the edge of the park, back towards the Watney Flats where he lived.
‘Thanks very much for that, Harriet,’ he said.
‘Yeah, Christmas dinners like that remind you of what you haven’t missed.’
‘No, no,’ he replied, ‘it’s good to mix from time to time with people. There’s always something you can learn from them and it was nice to have home-cooked food.’
Over the road the Tin Can Man passed them rapidly walking south. Perhaps because it was Christmas Day, rather than commenting on other people he was having one of his anguished conversations. ‘Please, Lynn,’ he was saying, ‘you might at least allow me to see the kids today. I’ve got everyone these really great presents … a rocking horse … a Nintendo … a Ninja Turtle game …’
Even Harriet knew the Ninja Turtles hadn’t been popular with kids for years.
‘I told you I lost my phone for a few days … yes I know, Lynn, but if I could just come and … no, Lynn … yes, Lynn … but please, darling, if I could just …‘ His desperate entreaties faded as they stopped at the flinty gateway to the Watney Trust Flats.
‘Harriet, I wanted to say …’
Suddenly she wasn’t paying attention but was staring beadily over her friend’s shoulder. ‘Excuse me a minute, Patr
ick,’ she said.
A number of seconds before, a battered whitish van with ladders on the roof had pulled into a parking bay a few yards further along the pavement. The driver, a large burly man, was locking the rust-streaked door as she reached him. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘in the cold my fingers go white and then blue, do you think I’ve got thromboangitis obliterans?’
‘Eh what, love?’ he asked, staring at this. wired-up bulky woman in confusion.
‘See, I’m asking you this question because you’re a doctor, aren’t you?’
‘No, I ain’t a doctor.’
‘Well,’ she said in a quiet voice, pointing to the white-painted space in which the van was parked, ‘you’re parked in a doctor’s space.
The builder stared back. ‘It’s Christmas Day, love,’ he said with a smirk, ‘the doctor won’t be needing it.’
‘How do you know?’ she spat. ‘They might be called out on an emergency to help a seriously ill asthmatic refugee child and when they get to the surgery they’d like to park, all tired and weary as they are since they’ve been on call for the last thirty-six hours, in their own damned space.’
The big man seemed inclined to argue but something in her manner made him reconsider. ‘I’ll move it,’ said the builder, climbing back into his vehicle.
Harriet skipped back to Patrick who’d been watching motionless and tense.
‘I hate people who park selfishly like that in disabled spaces and such, I’ve always wanted to tell one of them off. And now I have … a little Christmas present to myself. Now, what were you saying?’
Patrick smiled and uncoiled his fists. ‘Would you have done that a month ago?’
‘What?’
‘Spoken to that guy like that.’
She had acted without thinking; now forced to reflect on her actions, Harriet said uncertainly, ‘Well, I’ve thought about it loads of times but I’ve never …’
‘Acted?’
‘Yes, you’re right.’