by Alexei Sayle
‘Yikes, Hattie,’ said Roland, who hadn’t seen her for a while, ‘you’ve lost a lot of weight.’ Then a theatrical look of concern crossed his face. ‘Do you have cancer?’ he asked, tilting his head sideways like a confused dog. ‘Because I reckon I’ve got cancer of the—’
‘No, Roland, you idiot,’ Rose interjected, ‘she hasn’t got cancer any more than you have. Haven’t you heard? Harriet’s become a Mutant Ninja invisible mender.’
‘What?’
‘Our Hat could pull your spine out of your body and you wouldn’t notice,’ Lulu added.
‘Poke yer eyes out,’ said Rose.
‘You bitches! I told you about that in confidence.’
‘We wormed it out of you really.’
‘Well, I still said I didn’t want to talk about it,’ then, turning to Roland, ‘I’ve been doing a lot of fitness training but I’ve also been learning a martial art called Li Kuan Yu. That’s why I’ve lost so much weight.’
‘Oh yeah? And you’re good at it?’ Roland asked.
‘Don’t sound so surprised.’
‘No, it’s just you’ve never seemed … I dunno … sporty.’
‘I guess I just never found the sport. But, yeah, my sifu says— ‘Your what?’ ‘My sifu, my teacher.’ ‘Oh, is he that weird pale kid,’ Roland asked, ‘who was at Christmas dinner?’
‘Patrick, yeah.’
‘What’s his surname, by the way?’
She blushed. ‘It’s O’Reilly Po.’
‘O’Reilly Po?’
‘What kind of a name’s O’Reilly Po?’
‘It’s part Chinese. In martial arts circles it’s a common thing, apparently, he took the surname of his sifu. Who was called Martin Po.’
‘You certainly look good on it,’ Roland said, then asked, ‘Do you think learning a martial art would help with my depression?’
Harriet was silent. She had discovered with Li Kuan Yu that she wasn’t a proselytiser: in the past she’d been eager to recruit others to her many short-lived enthusiasms, signing them up to subscriptions for magazines ‘on literary theory, dragging them along to performances of obscure puppeteers, but with her fighting art there was no urge to share it at all.
Harriet was spared making any reply by Lulu saying with professional disdain, ‘You’re not depressed, Roland, at the most you’re just a bit fed up. If you want to see depressed you should come with me round the wards. Those people are much worse off than you.’
‘No, they’re not,’ the actor replied.
‘How do you figure that out?’
‘Well, it’s easy, you see, their depression is happening to them but my depression is happening to me so it’s clearly much worse.’
Rose said, ‘Christ, Roland, you’re an arse.’
Whenever Harriet watched a movie in which the hero was a wild, authority-defying free spirit who lived life by their own rules, her enjoyment was always spoilt by her inevitably wondering what they’d be like to have as a neighbour. She’d be happily submerged in the film then suddenly find herself thinking, Well, that’s all well and good you having wild sex in the jacuzzi to the sound of rock music in the middle of the night, but what about the people next door? They’ve probably got to get up for work in the morning. You could bet Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Bad Santa might ultimately be a life-enhancing force for good but he still wouldn’t turn down the music if you asked him to or be conscientious about only putting his rubbish bags out on the correct night, and if you lived downstairs from him he’d never be there to water your plants (not with water anyway) or feed the cat when you went on holiday. And she doubted whether the folks in the next apartment to Keanu Reeves’s character Neo in The Matrix would appreciate him smashing through their wall pursued by computer-generated replicants, or indeed be grateful to him for showing them that their entire world was an evil illusion — they might have been happier living in ignorance hooked up to a feeding tube full of nutritious mush.
When Harriet got back to the shop at 1 a.m. after Toby and Helen had finally returned from their Plumbio function, a pyramid of black rubbish bags and the frame of a bicycle had been piled against the street door to her flat.
‘Why does Timon smell of beer?’ her sister had asked in a nasty voice as soon as she’d come into the living room, while Toby had seemed to be acting even odder than usual and now there was this crap all over her front door.
‘Enough of this,’ Harriet muttered to herself and stepping over the garbage hammered on the door of her neighbours’ house, the Elderly Namibian Women’s Housing Association Home. She felt the flimsy wood beginning to shift and splinter under the force of her blows. Soon there was shouting from inside and heavy steps descending the stairs before the door was yanked open by a dark-skinned Namibian youth with bulging eyes, sharp features and zigzags carved into his haircut. He was dressed in a shiny turquoise and pink tracksuit, a cigarette hung from his lips and as the woman watched embers from it dropped on to the oily material where they caught fire and burnt little black circles.
‘What you want?’ he queried in a thick accent.
Struggling to control her runaway breathing, Harriet said in a rush, ‘You might recognise me — I’m your neighbour. I live next door and you keep piling your bloody rubbish against my step.’
‘It’s not our rubbish, mate,’ he replied, making to close the door.
She blocked it open, locking her arm in such a way that it was impossible to close and at the same time bent down and tore open one of the rubbish bags: inside on top of other garbage was a lustrous blue and gold tracksuit, the jacket half of which was burnt into black cindery tatters. Harriet picked it up in her free hand and held it in front of the youth.
Looking at the tracksuit jacket the young man said, ‘You better come up.’ Suddenly uncertain but committed now, she followed him into a greasy mirror image of her own home. Standing uncomfortably close to the youth in the hall, Harriet expected to be led up the stairs but instead, keeping his eyes locked on hers, he sat down on a top-of-the-range-looking pink-padded chairlift that took up most of the hallway. The Namibian pulled back on a joystick built into the arm of the chair, there was a loud beeping noise and after a second the young man slowly began to grind upwards. His ascent was so slow that she waited until he was halfway up before climbing a couple of steps and it was only when he turned the corner and disappeared out of sight that the woman followed him up to the landing.
Like her big upstairs room this matching floor had been retained as one big space. Presumably it had been intended as some sort of meeting room for the Namibian grannies since there were grab bars at waist height screwed into the walls for them to hang on to, light switches had been placed at the level of a wheelchair and panic button alarms had been fitted beside the doors; the only thing that was missing from this picture was the grannies themselves. In their place various young men, their features ranging like their grandmothers’ from white to deepest black, dressed in the uniform cheap tracksuits, lounged about on council-supplied velour sofas. In one corner there was a huge flat-screen TV on which was playing a shaky DVD of a fat woman yelling out a hysterical song against a rapidly changing background of forests, rivers and mountains with writing in Arabic running backwards on a crawl along the bottom of the screen.
In the centre of the room on one of those brown leather reclining armchairs that extend like a club-class seat on an aeroplane sat an older bearded man.
Unlike the youngsters this man was not wearing a tracksuit but instead was dressed in well-cut dark brown Italian moleskin trousers, a white poplin cotton shirt and a beautiful knitted cardigan that looked Spanish to Harriet’s experienced eyes, and on his small feet were embroidered leather Moroccan slippers. Though his skin was dark mahogany his features seemed Arabic rather than African, the smart clothes combined with a small pepper and salt beard and the reading glasses worn on a chain round his neck gave him the air of a successful American jazz pianist popular in Sweden and France but
ignored in his own country due to his radical political views on class and race and his controversial marriage to a beautiful blonde woman. Though smaller and more slender than the muscular young men around him it was clear they deferred totally to the older man. Since obtaining a little of it, Harriet had become interested in the exercise of power, reflecting that maybe you didn’t need to learn how to punch and kick and jump on your enemies from trees if you could get others to do it for you.
She had always had the feeling that only creepy people such as Oscar and Katya’s weird builder got on well with foreigners, not all foreigners of course, not sophisticated architects from Madrid or painters from Los Angeles but rather primitive foreigners, goatherds, tribal foreigners, foreigners like this lot. Toby had told her once that he reckoned the people in the slums of Rio — the favelas — whom the weird builder stayed with, were just nice to him because they were after his money, but she wasn’t so sure, feeling that they really, really, truly liked him for who he was. Though of course they still took as much money off him as they could. In her experience foreigners often responded to the bogus, the fake, the untrue in other nationalities.
But then it occurred to her that Martin Po was a foreigner and Patrick had got on with him so well that he’d saved his life and become Patrick’s sifu. Well, Harriet reasoned to herself, Martin was Chinese and somehow they didn’t count as foreigners: Chinese people managed to be both really alien and familiar at the same time.
The young man who had answered the door crossed to the older one and spoke in a low voice. He listened then bade the woman come and sit facing him on a leather footstool. She considered remaining standing but in the end sat down.
‘You wish to speak to us?’ the older man enquired in a treacly accented voice.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I live-next door to you and I’m getting really sick of you people leaving your crap outside my door.’
The head man didn’t appear to be listening. ‘So,’ he said, acting all cunning and vague like a wily’ wolf in a cartoon, ‘you say you are the woman who lives next door.’
‘Yes, that’s right I do, I am.’
‘Then explain me this if you can, the woman who lives next door is a big fat woman. How can that be you? You are not a big fat woman.’
‘I’ve lost weight,’ she replied.
This seemed to throw him for a second but then he came over all wily again. ‘I see, then explain me this. She seemed also to be a frightened woman, the woman who lived next door. We used ‘to see her from our window, pulling angry little faces at our front door then running inside her house as if angry parrots were pursuing her.’
‘Well,’ she said, lapsing into his portentous way of speaking, ‘it seems that I have lost my fear along with my fat.’
‘That is unusual …’ There was silence as he mused on this for half a minute then he began again. ‘So now tell me this, when you were fat and fearful and you saw rubbish on your step what did you feel?’
It was her turn to ponder in silence before saying, ‘Angry, powerless, humiliated, it was like you were insulting me.’
‘And now you’ve come up here and you’ve faced us, told us of your righteous anger …’
Harriet thought for a further few seconds then laughed, raising her arms and letting them flop to her side. ‘I don’t care any more.’
The old man smiled too. ‘Of course you don’t! Because it wasn’t the rubbish that was making you angry but your own weakness. Now you’ve faced us without fear, you’ve done what you can and we are no longer a faceless enemy — you know us now a little. I hope in future you can come and visit us many times, neighbour, and tell us of the many ways in which we are annoying you.’
‘And does that mean, now we’re friends, that you’re going to stop piling your rubbish across my door?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘Oh.’
‘Let me introduce myself, I am Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro; my name reflects the polyglot nature of our beloved Namibia. The names of these others,’ he said, waving his hand vaguely in the direction of the young men, ‘do not matter.’
‘Harriet Tingle,’ she said.
‘Wait a second, Harriet Tingle …‘ He spoke in what she thought must have been Swahili to one of the young men who immediately left to return a few seconds later clutching something small which he gave to the head man.
‘Here, now we are good neighbours, I have a gift for you. ‘Then, leaning forward, and taking her hand in his own he placed something in Harriet’s palm then folded her fingers over it. When she looked down she saw that they now held her mother’s brooch.
Toby typed ‘surplus computer leads’ into his Brother P-Touch 2000 Label Maker then pressed the ‘Print’ button. He watched as the slender label spooled out of the machine, next he chopped off the label with the built-in guillotine and peeling off the sticky back stuck it on to the front of a drawer in his office desk filled with leads for various obsolete computers that would never ever be used again.
Then he sat back wondering what to do next. One thing about being a drunk, empty hours had never been a problem when he drank because of course you filled them with being drunk. You never had to think what to do when you were out of your head and every decision you made seemed brilliant at the time though not necessarily afterwards. Sure his life was better in many ways now: he had his Brother P-Touch 2000 Label Maker for a start which he loved more than nearly anything else. He loved the Brother P-Touch 2000 Label Maker so much that he kept one at home and another here in his office, though he’d never told each about the other’s existence in case they got jealous. Toby loved to figure out exactly what a thing was, then label it —already that morning he’d done the separate shelves in his cupboard, ‘Rejection Letters’ he’d printed out in rather nice black on silver, then switching to black outline on white he’d typed ‘Refusal Letters’ and ‘Lost Research Application Form Letters’.
Then just as suddenly his fragile, happy mood dissipated; it occurred to Toby that if he could just figure out what precisely his feelings were for his sister-in-law and label them, then maybe he’d feel a bit less miserable such a lot of the time. He had no doubt that his recent agitation was connected with the sudden and unexpected alteration in Harriet’s appearance: who’d have thought Big Fat Hat was a stunner underneath all that blubber? Then perhaps the label should read ‘Confused Feelings Created by Relative’s Sudden and Unexpected Beauty’.
Looking back, Toby realised that he’d succeeded for quite a long time in deliberately not noticing what was happening to Helen’s sister but when she’d come round to the house to babysit the other night, when she’d done that little turn in front of him in their hallway, turning and twisting her wonderful body, he could no longer ignore the fact that over the last few months his sister-in-law had gone from being a huge fat ugly blob to someone who was on their way to looking absolutely ravishing. He’d genuinely thought he was going to faint in the hall like a Victorian lady.
So maybe the label should be ‘Sexual Desire for Close Relative Like in Family on Leeds Council Estate’. It wasn’t just her appearance though. That was only a part of it, though certainly her features were beautiful — her caramel skin flawless, her eyes sparkling and bright, her black hair lustrous — but more than that there was a wild brave energy about her now so that it seemed as if her whole body was lit up from inside with a powerful lamp.
Toby thought mournfully to himself that you could say he’d been uniquely unlucky: ‘Unique Situation — Not Your Fault At All’ might be a good label for the situation. What he meant was that he loved the way his wife looked, it was her remarkable beauty that he’d fallen for in the first place, but then that was sort of the problem because suddenly he’d been presented with a taller, fitter, less smug, more amusing, more intelligent replica of his wife. How many times did that happen? It was like when Porsche brought out a new car that sort of looked like the car they’d been making before but was better in every way:
bigger engine, twin turbos, electronic traction control, fifty airbags, MP3 player. He’d often thought that if you’d bought the old car just before the new one came out you’d be really pissed off. Well, that’s what had happened to him: he’d been stuck with last year’s Porsche and the payments would last for another fifty years.
It occurred to Toby that Helen’s beauty wasn’t her, it wasn’t her nature, it was just a thing she possessed. Her beauty had made her seem wonderful to him but now he wondered whether he’d been looking at his wife for eight years without actually seeing the personality underneath it. All of a sudden he wasn’t sure whether she was a nice person or not. The way when she came into a room she acted like she was doing it a favour, for example. Harriet didn’t do that. Harriet was like Helen but because she hadn’t been pretty all her life she wasn’t so extraordinarily full of herself. Harriet didn’t feel that people should just pay attention to her without her saying or doing anything the least bit interesting ever.
Then his emotions did a handbrake turn and his mind was flooded with what he thought was a sudden and overwhelming love for his wife and what certainly was a great pity for himself.
How could he say these terrible things to himself about Helen? She was the loveliest thing in his life, she was a brilliant mother and a devoted wife, a successful career woman. Instead, massive feelings of resentment towards Harriet engulfed him. What was she doing suddenly changing like that? He’d been happy before and now he wasn’t and he could date his unhappiness from the point where he’d noticed the difference in Harriet’s appearance, so that proved him being unhappy and mad was his sister-in-law’s fault.
Toby knew he was definitely unhappy and mad because the voices, the tics, the mannerisms had got worse. He wasn’t sure but he was worried that he’d started yelling stuff out without knowing he was doing it. On the tube or somewhere else public he’d drift off on a train of thought about his problems, trying to figure out what was bothering him and what to do about it, then suddenly he would sort of return to his body to find all the other passengers staring at him and the faint echo of a demented sound ringing in the air.