by Alexei Sayle
He’d started to see sex everywhere too, struggling to hide sudden erections in a way he hadn’t since he was a teenager. The few centimetres of flesh that girls began to expose at this time of year sent his mind boiling. In his calmer moments he feared that there was going to be a generation of young girls who were going to have terrible kidney problems in later life due to the delicious little slivers of skin on their rounded stomachs and curved lower backs that they showed off to the frigid air. Not to mention a generation of sexually deranged middle-aged men.
In addition he feared he might be revealing the turmoil going on inside his head to Helen. The previous evening they had been watching television.
‘Allons enfants de la Patrie …‘ Toby sang as usual as the theme music for the main news bulletin faded then abruptly he couldn’t stop himself shouting, ‘Another bloody pregnant weather girl!’
‘What?’ Helen asked, looking up from her magazine.
‘That girl there doing the weather, she’s pregnant! Lots of them are, newsreaders, traffic women, weather girls, they’re always up the duff one after another. I bet there’s all these satanic orgies once they’re off the air. All these young dollies naked, spread out in an X shape and Michael Fish going round dressed as a goat impregnating them.’
‘I think Michael Fish has retired.’
‘Well, some other weatherman then!’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Helen asked.
‘Nothing, well, I dunno, maybe I do feel a bit funny.’
She said, ‘Maybe you need to get more exercise, like my sister.’
‘Yeah, exercise!’ he gurgled. ‘That’s the thing! Like your sister!’
Finally alone in his office he picked up his Brother P-Touch 2000 and slowly tapped into the keyboard, ‘Bloke — Completely Fucked by Impossible Situation’. Then he printed out the label, peeled off the backing and stuck it to his forehead.
7
Years ago in her late twenties, Harriet had owned a little Morris Minor convertible car. That’s who she thought she was back then, a big fat girl, huge tinted brown glasses, crocheted poncho, knitted hat on her head, driving around in a comedy clown car with the pram top down, parp! parp! Had loved that dumpy little car though. Since it was a fragile classic, unsafe on the streets, ‘Marcus’ had to be kept parked in a lock-up garage, one of about ten built around a square on a piece of land alongside the railway tracks on the other side of the little railway station. One day, intending to take a drive to Suffolk to attend a concert at the Henry Moore sculpture centre, on turning into the garages she found her way blocked, disorientatingly, by a big caravan with net curtains and pottery shepherd and shepherdess figurines in the window. What had happened was that during the night several families of travellers had parked their caravans on the square. Every metal door of the garages had been ripped open and the cars inside had already been gutted down to their entrails. As she came to where her Morris Minor was parked a traveller child was crouched defecating inside it.
Staring open-mouthed at this violation of her property, she was filled with the familiar feelings of impotent anger and rage that she felt most days but she was also surprised to detect a hungry sense of envy that fizzled alongside it. She thought that to be so careless of the feelings and property of others must be a wonderful thing’ — such freedom! Harriet imagined that nobody in those caravans kept a list of all their friends’ and acquaintances’ hat, shoe and ring sizes so they could buy them the perfect anniversary present, none of those travellers had ever biked anybody over an extra large muffin basket, not one of those tinkers had ever spent all day carving a birthday card out of a potato. Of course the travellers didn’t have friends and acquaintances: they only had their tribe and anybody outside it could go get fucked but they seemed happy enough with that. In the past she’d been obsessed with not upsetting not just the people who were important to her but total strangers as well. That situation was changing — since starting Li Kuan Yu Harriet seemed to care a good deal less about the opinions of others: she wasn’t yet with those travellers ripping open people’s lockups and shitting in their cars but sometimes she thought she was getting there.
Remembering her little Marcus (whom she’d never been able to look at again no matter how many times he’d been steam cleaned) made her think that it was time to get a new car. Up until then, Old Fat Harriet had owned a bland little beige hatchback made in Malaysia and called something like a WeeWee One Point One SPLX, which she always drove as if she was taking her driving test right there and then. This sad, self-effacing little vehicle did not in any way suit New Thin Harriet, so one day in March she part-exchanged it for a big silver Japanese 4 x 4 pick-up truck with a crew cab. She wasn’t sure how she’d be able to manage the finance payments on this enormous thing — but New Thin Harriet put the problem out of her mind. Being careful with money, paying off your credit card every month, watching the pennies, buying reasonably priced food down the street market rather than grabbing expensive delicacies in tiny jars and tins from all-night delis, seemed like the sort of thing a big, ugly, fat girl would do.
The truck she drove as if she was a character appearing in a film, swiftly and with confidence, often not looking for a parking space but simply leaving it outside wherever she was going just as they did in the movies. One day in north London picking up some material for a repair, Harriet parked her truck on a patch of waste land, a decommissioned petrol station awaiting redevelopment, conveniently sited opposite her destination. Returning twenty minutes later she found a battered green metal clamp attached to the front wheel along with a sticker demanding one hundred and fifty-eight pounds for somebody to come along to remove it.
In a fury she called the mobile phone number on the sticker, a man’s voice told her to go to a cash machine and get the money, then to wait for somebody who would be along to release her vehicle sometime within the next month and a half.
After returning from the money machine, unable to contain her frustration, she phoned Patrick. It struck her as she was punching in the numbers that she’d never called him before except on dojo business but seeing as most of Helen and Toby’s friends spent a huge amount of the time at dinner parties whining about speeding tickets and traffic lane cameras and getting clamped she expected him to do what she’d been forced to do hundreds of times — that is to half listen to her moan on and on about the terrible iniquity of it all and throw in the odd sympathetic comment.
Instead, after she’d explained what had happened, he said coldly, ‘So you parked on this private land and got clamped?’
‘Yeah, that’s right and it’s so unfai—’
‘So what are you complaining about? You were drawn into a trap by your enemy and you were defeated.’
‘But it’s not fair.’
‘Did the Founder moan about it not being fair when Scots Billy crippled his father?’
‘No, but …‘
‘Did the great swordsman Sasaki Kojiro complain when the Samurai Musashi defeated him in a duel?’
‘Well, he had no head so he couldn’t but I suppose he wouldn’t have, no …’
‘So I want you to go to a place called an HSS Hire Centre where they will rent you a thing called an angle grinder; with it you can cut the clamp away.’
‘But won’t they have a record of my car’s number plate so the police can track me down and do me for criminal damage or they can find out my address and send the bailiffs round or worse?’
‘True. You could attack the man as he’s taking the clamp off, wait until he bends down then use Panda Bear Breaks Neck on him, but then you’d be in even more trouble with the police.
‘See, I wouldn’t have that problem because I don’t exist.’
‘What do you mean?’ Harriet asked, suddenly panicked. ‘You’re not my imaginary friend, are you?’
‘No …‘ he laughed. ‘I mean I don’t exist to the authorities. My car’s reg is a clone, I don’t have a bank account, the flat’s still in me paren
ts’ name, I don’t exist, so my enemies can’t find me.’
‘That’s not much use to me, what am I supposed to do? I can’t disappear myself in the next half-hour.’
He was silent for a second before asking, ‘How many times did Sifu Po say we should jump from the branch of a tree?’
‘Nine.’
‘And how many branches are there on the tree that we jump from?’
‘Four.’
‘Four, that’s right.’ Then he rang off.
Eventually an old white Ford Escort van pulled into the petrol station. It parked blocking the exit and a bulky man of about fifty-five, shaven-headed and gone to fat, climbed out. Hitching up his sagging jeans, he crossed to where she stood, a big bunch of keys in one beefy, scabbed hand.
‘You got the money?’ he asked.
‘This is a rip-off,’ Harriet said.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ he replied in a bored voice used to hearing a thousand complaints and excuses. ‘It’s clearly notified that you risk clamping if you park here.’ It struck her that his voice was the same as the one she’d heard on the phone.
‘Where?’ she asked, looking around.
‘There,’ said the man, pointing to a sheet of plywood with some writing on it screwed halfway up a brick wall some distance away and half concealed by a bush of wild buddleia.
Harriet walked over, stared at it hard then returned and said, ‘That sign is written in what I think might be Tagalog, a language that is only spoken in certain remote parts of Malaya, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea.’
‘Yeah, well, that’s your multi-cultural Britain for you, innit?’ the man replied. ‘Still means you have to pay up, love.’
She angrily handed over the cash but as the man bent to remove the clamp she saw a stained, streaked length of aluminium pipe lying on the ground. Harriet walked over to it, picked it up and began, slowly at first, to practise Broom Staff Pike Stance.
As the pole tumbled and swished through the air inches from the head of the clamp man kneeling by the front wheel of her truck, he began to look uncomfortable and confused, dropping the big bundle of keys as he fumbled with the brass padlock. Then, to her mind, he began to look a little afraid.
As the man finally straightened to his feet, holding in both hands the separate bits of his money-making slabs of metal she, continuing with her stabs and sweeps, suddenly said, not looking at him, ‘I want thirty-six pounds back.’
‘What?’ he asked. The man was pinned back against the front of her truck and unable to reach his van without walking into the orbit of her swirling metal pipe.
‘I want, four times nine, thirty-six pounds back, to erm … buy a friend some flowers.’
‘Eh, what?’ he asked again, his eyes distracted by the pole hissing inches from his face.
‘C’mon,’ the woman said, moderating her tone a little but not discontinuing the ferocity of her movements, ‘it’s your firm, isn’t it? It was you I spoke to on the phone so you’re getting one hundred and fifty-eight pounds for basically nothing and you can afford to give me thirty-six pounds back.’
The man was forced to duck as she swiped the pole through the air behind him.
‘Are you happy with your life?’ she asked.
‘Is that a threat?’
‘No, no, no, I’m just asking, ‘is this the way you imagined things turning out, is this what you thought you’d be doing and are you satisfied with it?’
‘Yes. No, well, no, I have suffered a couple of bouts of moderate to severe clinical depression.’
‘So maybe you should change your life. Do you think your life might be to blame?’
‘Possibly. I’ve done some things …‘
‘So perhaps you should change it, not totally at first, but gradually in small pieces, a little at a time … to show that you are in charge of events, in charge of your life.’
‘And I could start by like giving somebody thirty-six pounds back from their fine?’
‘Yeah, if you felt that that was the right thing to do.’
‘To buy flowers for a person in hospital?’
‘That’s right.’
Harriet did not immediately lower the pike to her side but continued lunging and poking for thirty seconds then stopped. The man took out a wad of notes from his back pocket and handed back to her some of her own money with a sigh. Returning, she thought, wearily to his vehicle he threw the separate bits of clamp in the back where they crashed on to a pile of others. As the man squeezed himself into the driving seat of his van Harriet felt a sense of exultation sweep through her.
The clamper started up the Escort then drove in a big sweeping circle to exit the petrol station. As he passed her he slowed down and said out of the window, ‘You want to be careful with that stick, love, you could hurt someone with it.’
‘I will be,’ she called after him.
When Harriet had left college in the early nineties and taken her first job working backstage on Miss Saigon, one of the male dressers had been in a band called the Sissy Robots. At that time, making one of her vain attempts to break away a little, to forge new friendships outside those she was related to or had been at college with, Harriet went along to a few of their performances. On Sunday nights, taking unfamiliar tube lines and buses with strange numbers like the W 564 and the K6 N, to scout huts and Oddfellows Halls in distant suburbs, she discovered that the Sissy Robots were pretty much as bad as any band could ever be. Really it was unlikely that a trio of drums, xylophone and vocals singing songs inspired by the poetry of Mario Vargas Llosa were going to be any good. Yet as she sat in three-quarters-empty basement theatres in Wood Green and eighth-full town hall function rooms in Lewisham, an amazing fact struck her: the band, appalling as they were, actually had a following. There was a married couple call Rex and Marion who would drive in from Colchester to every one of their performances, there were three girls all called something like Lucy who followed them from place to place and were planning one day to run the Sissy Robots fan club and there was a futures trader from the City called Robert who went so far in his dedication as to hire the band to play at his wedding where they were so bad that his wife left him on the honeymoon. The intensity of the clique’s interest in the Sissy Robots, the late-night talks on the phone discussing their preferred track off the band’s cassette, the comparing of favourite gigs and also the sneering dismissal of competing musicians allowed these few fans to imagine that the world outside their little circle was almost as taken as they were with the band, instead of utterly indifferent.
The S Robots as the fans referred to them even had a record out with posters that the illegal flyposters plastered over all the streets in the neighbourhood of the record company headquarters but nowhere else. The three Lucies bought a hundred copies each and Robert made everybody at Citibank phone in to Steve Wright on Radio 1 to try and get their single on the playlist, but even with all this effort the song only got to number eighty-five in the charts so the record company dropped them and the band split up.
The lesson Harriet took from her brief period following the Sissy Robots was that people seemed to need something, anything, to believe in and that more or less anybody could have a following. Any ideology no matter how mad could attract disciples, any leader of anything could have themselves a small band of devout believers. She thought at that time that she would never fall completely for anything herself — all right, she might attempt all kinds of diets and miracle cures for fatness but there was a tiny part of her that always hung back and she had been proud of that part. What she hung on to (along with the fat and the high blood pressure) was the idea of herself as Harriet the Sceptic, the big fat girl who no matter what else was wrong with her you couldn’t fool.
Even with Li Kuan Yu, even though it was transforming her appearance, she still couldn’t quite become a true believer: unlike the others at the dojo it was impossible for her to completely swallow all the stuff Patrick told them about the triple-burner chi-raising techniques of Tummo Ti
betan monks who would test their powers by sitting naked in the snow, covered by freezing wet sheets, mastery being demonstrated by the number of sheets that could be dried solely by the internal heat the monks were able to generate. All the others seemed to believe this story was true and that it actually happened, while Harriet just found herself thinking if it was feasible she’d be able to cut down on her laundry bills. To her it was just a story, a fable, an illustration of a hoped-for sort of martial arts fairy world where such things were truly possible.
All the same, she was beginning to think that maybe it was time to give up this long-held scepticism. ‘Right, Harriet,’ she said to herself, ‘it’s time, for once in your life, to let go of all these doubts and quibbles that have been holding you back. It’s time for you truly to let them all go.’ While going through her Li Kuan Yu form, during freezing early mornings in the park or late at night in her echoing upstairs room, dust exploding from the floorboards as she stamped and turned, her dreams were of what it would be like when she became finally a true believer. There was no knowing what wonders awaited her on the other side of cynicism.
Unfortunately she had to admit to herself there were going to be casualties. There had always been one big area of disagreement that had existed from the earliest days between her and Patrick. Though he was immensely pleased with her progress and proud of his new student, the single grain of discord dividing them had been her continuing friendship with Lulu and Rose: Harriet’s sifu couldn’t understand how somebody who was proving themselves to be so adept at Li Kuan Yu would still choose to hang round with a pair of drunken harridans like those two. He told her time and time again that the true martial artist only mixed with others who were totally dedicated to their training. ‘Stick with the winners, win with the stickers,’ he told her. Patrick was also constantly hinting that for those who went deeper into their fighting style there were all kinds of magical things that would be revealed, so maybe now it was finally time for her to cut Lulu and Rose off and become a true disciple.