by Alexei Sayle
‘So what’s changed?’
There was a pause in which her new self caught up with the small alterations that had already happened with her body. She said, ‘Li Kuan Yu?’
‘Li Kuan Yu,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a sign that we need to work harder than ever then you will be ready to move to a whole higher level of understanding. You have this anger which could turn you into a really good fighter, Harriet.’
6
In the park for most of the month of January the strong winds switched direction and now blew from the east, though just as intensely as before. Snow fell heavily and froze over the ground for nearly two weeks. When the park had been first laid out there had been a municipal paddling pool built for local children to wade in. It lay about twenty yards across the grass from Harriet’s front door, in the north-western corner and within sight of her upstairs room. The pond was constructed as a concrete oval (corners being considered hierarchical at the time) and was half a metre deep. Of course she wasn’t there at the time since this happened in the sixties but she knew what would have happened next: within a week of its installation the shoddy concrete begins slowly to leak. Though employees of the parks and gardens department are supposed to attend to it the water is never changed or filtered or topped up so that after a month no children will venture near its foetid surface and when in late autumn the water finally all drains away into the surrounding soil the pool is not refilled. This is not the end though — over the next two winters leaves from the trees blow into the empty stained bowl and lie there, rainwater falls on them and they rot down until a thick mould effectively seals the cracks in the concrete. Further rainwater falls and refills the pool and thanks to the base of leaf mould it is constantly oxygenated making it a much purer liquid than the chlorinated acid with which the paddling pool had originally been filled. Nevertheless, while the water is pure and clear the rotted vegetation lining the bottom makes it appear black and sinister, especially since clutching tendrils of floating sweet grass curl beneath the surface: the result is that it is still shunned by the human population.
The silt had built up over the years so that now around the edges of the pool couch grass and ferns had seeded themselves, fringing the margins; beyond that cracked willow formed a further barrier to the curious human. Some days while on her way to the oak tree Harriet would force her way through the willow and jump over the pond at its narrowest point before climbing to the oak’s highest branches and throwing herself to the ground nine times.
Two mornings a week at 6 a.m. Patrick would come to her place to train and — especially if the weather was bad — he would insist they went to the park. Sometimes as they tramped through a hollow or along a grey tarmac path they would come upon prone figures lying on a bench or sprawled across the dank earth inadequately wrapped in cardboard and newspaper; usually these homeless were asleep, though from time to time they were dead. These corpses were part of the ever-changing population of drinkers and drug addicts in the park whose poisoned systems had given out on them, yet despite this there always seemed to be new recruits whose intended career path was that they planned to die alone during the night under cold and unfriendly trees.
One morning Patrick said to her, ‘Harriet, you know that guy who talks all the time about people into his sardine tin?’
‘The Tin Can Man, yeah.’
‘Did you know he lives right here in the park, in a secret burrow in the ground? It’s quite clever really, seeing as he’s nuts. He digs air shafts, storage rooms, sleeping ledge, a system of channels to drain away rainwater, all kinds of stuff like that.’
‘Really? Have you seen it? Is he, like, a friend of yours?’
‘Naww,’ Patrick replied, ‘the guy’s a loser otherwise he wouldn’t be living in a hole in the ground in the park, would he? No, I know all about him because I stalk him. See, the martial artist is a hunter as well as a warrior, Harriet, and man is the most dangerous animal of all and the most exciting to hunt.
‘When I find his hiding place what I do is I trash it. He had a couch in the last one and photos of’ his kids — I pissed on them to show I was marking his territory, like a male lion would. He’s moved again since and I’ll give him that — he learns. His place must be really well camouflaged ‘cos I’ve looked all over and still don’t know where it is but I’ll find it one day.’
‘That must be a lot of effort for him digging it out time after time,’ Harriet said.
‘Oh, I’m sure he enjoys the hunt as much as I do,’ Patrick asserted blithely. ‘Another time,’ he continued, lost in happy memories, ‘I stole his sardine tin, his phone, reckon I did him a favour, at least it shut him up for a few days. You know, Harriet, what I wish more than anything else?’ he asked wistfully. ‘I wish that I’d been sent to an English public school. They really break a kid’s spirit there, you’re pretty much impervious to torture if you’ve been to an English public school and you have lovely manners.’
It had been a hard winter and February was the coldest month that year; afternoon temperatures often didn’t rise above freezing point. Though the sun tried to shine, its watery light failed to reach the ground. In March the rays began to grow stronger and out of the wind it could be quite warm. Men who exposed themselves to schoolgirls and young mothers began to return in growing numbers to the park.
During this same time Harriet’s appearance underwent a slow and subtle change. It was as if a lazy but talented sculptor, trained in the classical style, was carving the statue of a striking woman from the misshapen, pink, wobbly block of Hattie. He didn’t do much each day, in fact sometimes the sculptor didn’t turn up for work at all, but when he did his craftsmanship, though minute and leisurely, was assured and confident. In the morning now to get to the shop she would jump down the stairs: she’d started with three steps and had now worked up to the full flight. Falling through the air she imagined, as Patrick had told her to, that she was flying like a cormorant with a fish in its mouth away from the surface of a placid lake disturbed by a single ripple; this led to a lightness of spirit and body and a great deal of plaster falling off the walls and ceiling.
Her attitude to the world around her also began to change. After all, she thought, the purpose of all the work on general fitness, the stalking, the breathing techniques, the philosophical discussions, the history lessons on Tönpa Shenrab, the founder of Bon, which pre-dated Buddhism in the mythical land of Olmo Lung Ring, was to teach her how to cripple or kill another human being effectively. No — not another human being — a man. The people who did the crimes that filled the local paper, the torn clippings that Patrick showed them, were always men; no women lurked in the bushes of the park with knives, wire and silver duct tape in a sports bag. It occurred to her that as a woman she had always acted in a certain way, constantly, subconsciously on alert since she was a child. And who or what had she been on the alert for? Men, men and boys. Endlessly vigilant for single men walking the streets at night, constantly listening for their footsteps behind her on the pavement, crossing the road to avoid groups of boys and ceaselessly having to deflect their drunken attentions in the pub without enraging them.
This was the way it had been. These days she no longer worried about the danger before walking down a dark street or entering a rough bar, going exactly where she wanted to go, down alleys, across trading estates; she drank alone in the saloon bars of the few remaining old man pubs and even travelled the broken paths of the park at the dark of night. Because now Harriet had no reason to fear anyone, her new-found strength, her knowledge of the secret killing points on the body, her ability to drop silently out of trees on to anybody who annoyed her, meant she was a woman who to all intents and purposes lived as a man.
On becoming a part-time male Harriet began to feel a degree of sympathy and understanding for her fellow men, dispensing with the default anti-man disdain she’d previously hidden behind. Most of them weren’t so bad really, she thought to herself, at least in the Western countries. Cons
idering they had this physical power over women, most of them struggled really hard against their natures, they strove literally manfully not to use their force on women, they allowed women to boss them around, to stop them seeing their kids, to take their money and their houses off them and a lot of men took it. Of course, she said to herself, a good few of them didn’t take it, they used their fists and their feet all the time or they got the address of the battered women’s shelter from friendly police officers and went round and killed everybody with a shotgun, or they said they were taking the kids to Alton Towers for .the day then drove the family car into a canal thinking, Ha, ha, that’ll show her … But still and all when she considered it she was surprised by the number of males that did put up with not getting their own way. Now that she knew how to punch and kick better than most of them she wasn’t sure that she’d put up with a lot of what a lot of men put up with.
As the weight dropped away Harriet also began to think again about sex: for years she had suppressed her desire but as her new body tingled with sensual life it was impossible to prevent a desperate yearning for another’s touch seeping back into her mind. Each day at some point, often in the afternoon, she would go up to the bedroom, take all her clothes off then look at herself in the full-length mirror. She would run her hands down her torso and over her hips, staring at this woman who was slowly being revealed like a complicated picture being sent over the internet.
Helen and Toby were attending a supper party in the ruins of Oscar and Katya’s home. Nine months before, the couple had got a builder in to do some minor redecorating of their dining room, and this small project had somehow turned into a massive remodelling of their entire house. In a sort of builders’ Stockholm syndrome, rather than get angry Oscar and Katya had fallen completely under the spell of this man. They appeared to find him wise, exciting and hilarious while to everybody else he was the exact reverse of these things. If Oscar and Katya invited their friends round for a meal you could never be quite sure whether the builder would be there or not and consequently whether the evening would be completely ruined or not.
He was there tonight, a thin sallow-skinned man with a voice as flat and dull as Luxembourg. And it was worse: the builder’s one interest, outside wrecking people’s homes, was the Rio Carnival with which he was totally obsessed. He saved all his money so that he could go every other year to Brazil for a whole month and a half, to take part in the preparations and even to serve as a judge in some of the local competitions for junior samba bands. Tonight he had brought his slides of the carnival along to show everybody. Kerclick. ‘That’s a fellow called Paulho Harvihad,’ he said in his nasal drone, ‘and’ — kerclick — ‘that’s a fellow, a friend of mine, called Paulho Herviho.’ Kerclick. ‘That’s a fellow called Paulho Hohahivo. He’s a funny fellow, Paulho Hohahivo is.’ Kerclick. ‘That’s the stadium, the Sambodromo, where the parade ends and the judging of the …‘
The flickering lamp and the builder’s droning voice sent Toby into a light trance. He found himself drifting off and thinking for some reason about Harriet, his sister-in-law. He reflected that she certainly wouldn’t be sitting there pretending to be all interested in these awful slides. With half his mind he heard Helen asking the builder, ‘So does each favela have its own samba band or is there more than one?’
Toby smiled to himself; he knew that if she’d been there Harriet would be shooting him secret looks under her eyelids, that they’d both be struggling to repress muffled laughter at the crappiness of the situation, especially as … ‘Dear God!’ Kerclick. A slide came on the screen of the builder standing with his hands on his hips at night on some steep cobbled street, wearing high heels, a sparkling green high-cut thong, jewelled emerald-studded bra and feathered green and gold headdress. ‘That’s me in the …‘
As rapidly as possible Toby sailed away again in his mind but the happy place had gone. Instead, with a shiver of nausea, he recalled the strange pale psycho Harriet had brought along to Christmas dinner. What was she doing with him? Well, she’d said he was her personal trainer but Lulu had told him they went to the park in the middle of the night and did some strange kind of martial art together. What was that all about? Was something more going on there, some electricity between them and why did he, all of a sudden, care what she did? Toby abruptly wondered if Patrick was having sex with his sister-in-law. No, it wasn’t possible, he thought to himself, that Patrick was really good-looking. Then he understood why he’d been thinking about Harriet in this new way — somehow now she was becoming really good-looking too.
‘Crikey, Hat,’ said Toby, opening the door when she called round one evening to babysit, ‘you look … I dunno, different.’
‘Well, you know, it’s doing my training with Patrick, all that exercise is really starting to pay off.’
‘Right,’ he said.
‘D’you like my new body?’ she asked, stretching her arms above her head and turning slowly so he could inspect her.
‘Yes, I do,’ he said. ‘I do like your new body. Yes, I do.’
In Harriet’s first year after college., though beginning to put on proper weight, she’d still been sort of pretty, in the way that nearly any young woman is pretty but even then she had a sense that she was nothing special. Yet somehow underneath the rippling flesh there seemed to have been incubating all through her fat years a woman of truly startling appearance. Maybe keeping her out of the light all this time had allowed the woman to ripen unblemished. Her hair that had once been limp and an unvarying sweaty flat black was now, due partly to all the time spent in the open air, shot through with iridescent coppery highlights. Harriet’s skin, formerly pasty and white, was these days lightly tanned and had acquired a healthy blush beneath the surface thanks to all the blood that was now pumping madly round her system. Her breasts had reduced and taken on a pleasant springy shape, so much so that she was constantly genuinely surprised that they belonged to her and was able to contemplate them for a long time in the mirror, marvelling at them as if they belonged to some other woman. She wondered in a languid sort of way whether it was a sign of lesbianism if you were getting aroused at the sight of your own tits.
When customers came into the shop she also noticed a change in their attitude towards her: saying something perfectly ordinary that she’d said a thousand times before caused them to laugh or smile as they’d never done before; customers would tell her to forget the change or say that it didn’t matter that she hadn’t got their repair ready even though she’d said it would be done a week ago. Harriet would think to herself, Why are they suddenly being nice to me and why are many more men coming to me with repairs? and it would come back to her that she had accidentally become beautiful.
Having never looked exceptional before, she was completely unprepared for how other people’s attitude to her would shift, simply because of a change in her appearance.
This must be what it’s like to be my sister, Harriet thought wonderingly to herself.
All kinds of visions, images and memories that had formerly been suppressed began to force their way to the surface of her mind. She recalled that due to Helen’s overall loveliness and soppy, gentle manner people constantly assumed that naturally she would be a vegetarian and even those friends who knew her well were repeatedly shocked when she ordered a rare steak or some raw smelly kidneys in a restaurant. By contrast, with Harriet, in the past, people would phone when they were taking a trip to the freezer centre to enquire whether she wanted them to pick up a couple of ten-kilo bags of liver while they were down there.
Toby and Helen’s gala benefit that night was for a charity organisation called Plumbio; it had formerly been the Lead Miners Benevolent Society but lead mining and lead miners had died out many years ago, yet the society continued with its name changed to collect funds, hold benefits and mount celebrity polo matches. Plumbio served a very useful function in that it enabled people to hold decadent champagne parties in marquees in Mayfair squares in the name of charity
without the money actually going to anyone unpleasant such as the poor or Africans.
‘Now Timon’s got to read the front page of El País to practise his Spanish before he can have any of the aubergine dip and he’s not allowed to play with his light sabre until he’s taken all of his echinacea,’ Helen said to her sister.
‘Sure, don’t worry.’
‘Hey, Timon,’ Harriet said, once the boy’s parents had gone, ‘how would you like to see what the inside of a pub looks like?’
When the two of them got to the Admiral Codrington, .the little boy’s hand in that of his auntie’s, Lulu and Rose were, as usual, already there seated at a table with Roland Malone between them. Two empty wine bottles were on the table and the trio were halfway through their third. Roland was in the middle of telling the two women all about his latest acting role. He’d recently become involved with Fathers 4 Fathers 4 Kidz, a group that militantly campaigned for disgruntled divorced and separated fathers. The day before he’d dressed up as the Norse god Wotan and climbed a crane on the new Terminal Five construction site at Heathrow.
‘Some planes coming in from the Middle East had to be diverted to Frankfurt,’ he was telling them proudly, ‘and the Duke of Westminster’s private jet had to circle for three hours till it was nearly out of fuel and had to land on the M4. I was on all the UK news channels and AI-Jazeera because of the planes from the Middle East.’
‘But, Roland,’ Rose said, ‘you’re not actually divorced or separated, you and Inga are perfectly happy together though God knows why, and you can visit your kids whenever you want seeing as they’re at home with you.’
‘Yeah, but if we did split up she’d probably stop me seeing them.’
‘No, she wouldn’t.’
Lulu said, ‘The men in those groups, the genuine ones, not you, Roland, are a pack of self-justifying creeps who can’t believe anything’s their fault.’.