by Alexei Sayle
A few years after stopping work on Miss Saigon Harriet had bumped into the dresser in Brent Cross Shopping Centre. He’d gone bald, amazingly had a wife and son and told her he was now in a band called Metal Negro. But she hadn’t ever seen any posters for Metal Negro anywhere.
‘Isn’t Southport all posh people and multi-millionaire footballers playing golf?’ Toby asked Helen the first time he drove the two sisters to their parents’ shabby little terraced house in the dull flatlands behind the railway station.
‘Not all of it obviously,’ Harriet mumbled from the back seat where she was lying sprawled out, her legs twisted into the backs of the front seats.
‘But this is just like Swindon where I come from.’
The Percussionists Licensing Society had given Toby a very smart black diesel Saab as part of his job package. The front wheels sizzled over the sand in the gutter as he parked in the frosty, salty, seaside night air amongst the papery, dented Hyundais and Protons lined up along the narrow pavement.
The three of them had met four and a half hours before, at dosing time, outside the Admiral Codrington. Harriet had spent the three and a half hours before that inside the pub with her two horrible cronies but Helen had been at home reading so just needed to walk round the corner from her flat. Together they’d driven north.
The phone call from the next-door neighbour telling Helen that Mum had been taken to hospital had come a little while before. In the shiny grey leather front seat of the car, as blacked-out England slithered past, Helen was so upset that everything felt sort of weirdly disconnected and floaty, but oddly there was still the air of an outing hanging over their trip. At a twenty-four-hour petrol station, after he’d filled up the car, Toby bought two big bottles of Tango, a supersize bag of Skittles and a CD of the number one hits from the eighties. As they hissed up the dark motorways the two of them sang along to T’Pau, Culture Club and Duran Duran while Harriet slept sprawled out, snoring, in the back.
Somewhere near Stafford in a comfortable period of silence Julio Spuciek said to her, ‘You know, fifty years ago you would not have had to make these terrible journeys — a girl of your class would have lived round the corner from her mother, married a man from the neighbourhood, cooked a roast dinner for her aunties every Sunday, had few decisions to make and been nearby when a crisis arose. Or, on the other hand, you might have lived in India or somewhere else colonial with your husband who was a sergeant in the sappers’ (Julio got some of his ideas about England from the works of Rudyard Kipling) ‘and the trip home would have taken six weeks by steamship so the whole emergency would have been resolved by the time you got there.’
Either way she wouldn’t have had to endure these trips. There were times when Toby couldn’t drive them and then they had to submit to the human rights violation that was inter-city train travel. The railways had been privatised a few years before and at the same time as the carriages of the many companies were being painted in gorgeous colours they began to rot from inside like the tropical flowers they had come to resemble. Helen remembered one train they were on, its heating going full pelt though it was a sweltering summer’s day so that Harriet was cascading with sweat, locked wheels outside Crewe Station and stayed there for three hours. Out of the window Helen and her sister were able to examine in detail the Co-op supermarket car park, the weird train-spotters looking at them looking at them and the hulking red-brick hotel like a pirate ship with jolly flags flapping and cracking from its round medieval towers.
Whenever Helen saw a movie in which the happy ending was that the super-intelligent working-class girl received the letter telling her she’d been accepted for the swanky academy, she always wondered whether that really was a happy ending. The likely outcome of the girl getting her education would be that in the future even if she loved her parents dearly she wouldn’t be able to stop herself being bored and petulant with them and though she struggled against it she wouldn’t be able to resist finding her home town tedious, tiny and peculiar.
She and her sister had hardly returned home at all until their mother got sick so that now, aft-er London, Southport reminded Helen of a model village in the window of a toy shop, with its neat flowerbeds and fountains that actually worked and the little electric trains that ran to and from the not-at-all toytown of Liverpool.
When they weren’t visiting the hospital she would take Toby into town or to the beach or the pine woods; she showed him the Art School which Marc Almond had attended and Lord Street where, standing by the war memorial, she told him how the Protestant Fanatics — the Orange Lodges — from Liverpool, Londonderry, Belfast and Glasgow would parade every July 12th, marching pipe bands and pallid slum boys dressed up as King William precariously balanced on white cart-horses.
As they wandered the wrought-iron-canopied streets of the northern seaside town and looked out over its grey sands Helen wasn’t sure then what she felt about Toby; certainly intensely grateful to him for all his help, but unsure whether there could be anything more between them. She’d had men crazy about her before, but his level of looming devotion could sometimes verge on the disturbing.
Mostly she took Toby out in order to get away from her parents’ uncomfortable furniture. Every time she sat down on Mum’s couch immediately there would be a terrible and familiar pain running across her shoulders. It became automatic for Helen to wonder at this point where working-class people like her parents managed to buy their furniture. In the homes of her friends in the big city there were big comfy couches that you sank into as if falling into a delicious sleep, whereas all the sofas and chairs in their parents’ and their aunties’ homes seemed to contain hidden pointy bits, like mantraps devised by the Viet Cong, that forced the sitter’s spine into all kinds of uncomfortable, sometimes permanently damaging, contortions. The couch in the living room of their childhood home had an upholstered ridge that ran along the back of it that forced anyone sitting on it into a hunched simian posture. Maybe, Helen thought, that was some marker of the difference between her generation and her parents’. For Helen and her friends, their furniture was like their lives: it was there to look good and be lounged on, to be enjoyed in a sensual fashion, while for Mum and Dad and everyone they knew their couches and armchairs were uncomfortable and full of hidden pain and would eventually leave you bent, broken and in great physical distress.
In the big upstairs room above the shop, as hail battered on the windows, eager to begin her new life as a devoted disciple and thirsting to know more, Harriet said to Patrick after practice, ‘We never really talked about it but you said you came to Li Kuan Yu because of your fear of death.’
‘That’s right,’ he replied, only half concentrating as he had been balancing in Golden Cock Stands on One Leg for the last twenty minutes.
‘So I assume meeting Sifu Martin Po and learning Li Kuan Yu helped you conquer your fear of death, did it?’
Her expectation had him replying that he had learnt some great, marvellous calming wisdom from Sifu Po but instead he said, ‘In a way, yeah, you could say that.’
‘So can you tell me how?’
‘Sure, because quite soon I’m not going to die.’
‘No, well, hopefully you’re not, especially with all this exercise and healthy living, you’ll live a long life, so no, you won’t die quite soon, no.’
He look directly at her for once, before putting both feet on the ground and stating, ‘No, that’s not what I’m saying, Harriet. What I’m saying is that in five months’ time I will be immortal.’
‘Really, immortal you say?’
‘Let’s stretch our tendons,’ he suggested. So they squatted down facing each other (rather like a traveller child crapping in a car) while he went on, ‘Yes, there’s nobody at the dojo knows this, not even Jack.’
‘No, well, I can see why you wouldn’t want to tell them.’
‘At first in the early days as I worked with the Founder my depression felt a little better but I was still haunted with thoughts
of death. The idea that when I died all my memories, all my thoughts would be gone, I still couldn’t take it. That Patrick would be gone as if he’d never existed and if Patrick was gone and nothing remained of him then what’s the point of doing anything because it would all evaporate. Everybody dies and nothing remains. Death was coming to get me.
‘Even with the help of Sifu Ma Po for three months some days I thought of nothing else and it was all I could do to lift me head off me chest. Finally, as I say, I began to feel a tiny bit better with all the exercise, better chemicals getting into my system and so on. Yet the Founder could see without being told ‘cos he was that wise that there was still a great fear of dying at the heart of me. So one day he brought me to the oak tree in the park and told me more of his story.
‘After Martin Po killed Scots Billy and ran to London he took many jobs, working in the laundries of lots of smart hotels, a waiter in the Won Kei restaurant in Wardour Street known to have the rudest waiters in Chinatown, runner for the illegal bookmakers controlled by the 44K Triad. In the free time he had he worked solely on perfecting the form of Li Kuan Yu. When two years had gone by Martin had saved a little money, not wasted it on drink and gambling like so many other Chinese. For some time the Founder had, he told me, been thinking about his time when he had been a child growing up in the Walled City.
‘Sifu said he was thinking about a place all the kids knew —and avoided — a red door with a curved yellow portal, temple style, at the bottom of a dead-end corridor on the fifth level at the very epicentre of the Walled Citadel. Even the Snakeheads left its inhabitant alone. There were a pair of porcelain guardian dragons on either side of the studded metal door and a pot burning incense. Behind this door was supposed to live a Master. Some said the Master was an Immortal — over one thousand years old — who lived on the blood of young virgins and graveyard herbs, both of which he picked up at night by adopting the shape of a Flying Fox. Others stated he was a much younger Taoist priest — only a hundred and twenty years old — who owed his longevity to a yin/yang alchemy of breathing techniques and T’ai Chi Ch’uan which also gave him limitless fighting powers. Yet others claimed he was himself the leader of the most powerful Triad group in Hong Kong, the Tyan T’ai Pitchfork Clan. Some swore the Red Door became invisible during police raids. Others told the tale of five youths from the notorious Jonny Swords Triad gang who tried to rob the Master and were found blinded, with massive internal bleeding and insane with terror.
‘In 1976 Martin Po, the Founder, returned to the Walled City, found his way to that door, knocked and asked the Master to teach him how to fight.
‘The Master had heard of Martin from his time as the best student ever at Blue Cloud Mountain but he still had to take a test; he was forced to hang upside down, bat-style, suspended by his insteps from a beam inside the Master’s temple for twenty-four hours, and only then would the Master agree to take him on.
‘For the following three years Martin spent most of his waking hours at the feet of the Master or standing on one leg in a corner. He learnt Taoist breathing, the reverse of the normal inhale-exhale cycle, cat-walking on burning coals, a hundred and twenty-two deadly and semi-deadly pressure points, the ancient five animal exercises, hurling anathemas and a lethal cookbook of poisons made with readily available herbs and spices. These were things Martin had expected to learn but one November morning the Master showed him a copy of a book called The Jade Monk’s Doorway of Light. The book was written in Mandarin and contained many odd diagrams, but the main text was concise and talked of Ching which is essence or sexual fluid, Chi which is breath and Shen which is spirit. At its core was a poem which the Master told Ma Po to “memorise and recite nine times a day”.’
Then closing his eyes Patrick recited:
Listening not to me but to the account
It is wise to agree all things are one
They do not comprehend how in differing it agrees with itself
A backward-turning connection like that of a bow and a lyre
Unapparent connection is better than apparent
But of this account which holds forever men prove uncomprehending
Both before hearing it and when they hear it.
But nine hundred times nine the morning recitation shall rise
Nine years shall see the release of the spirit
Rising above the accounts of men
The immortal shall be mortal
The mortal immortal
Living their death
Dying their life
Soul has a self-increasing account
Holding its jade in special esteem
If you do not expect the unexpected you will not discover it
Cold things grow hot, the hot cools, the wet dries, the parched moistens
Souls are exhaled from the moist things
For souls it is death to become water
For water death to become earth
But from earth water comes into being
From water soul
Keep close to yourself the moisture of your body
Neither depleted nor injured
In your fastness shall come life
The cure is within you
In a nine-year spirit shall fly.
Then Patrick opened his eyes and, his voice returning to normal, he said, ‘Do you see what it’s saying, Harriet?’
It didn’t seem to be saying anything as far as she could tell but then many Oriental things were a mystery to her, she was never sure whether their poetry was deeply profound or just stupid stuff broken into short lines. ‘I think so a bit,’ Harriet said, ‘but just explain it to me a little better.’
‘Martin told me that basically this poem means that if a man doesn’t spill his fluids for nine years — you understand what fluids I am talking about here? The Ching fluids — and does the breathing exercises and all other exercises and becomes wise in the fighting arts then it will lead to a reversal of the ageing process and to immortality.
‘He said that Taoists believe that when a human is born they acquire a hun spirit and a p’o spirit. Hun is yang which is heaven, immortality, and p’o is yin, which means earth and mortality. If we have lived within the nine emotions of the desire realm —that’s all the stuff I was talking about — then at death when hun and p’o separate our spirit will leave through the top of our head and we will return as one type of ghost which is called kuei. That’s the hun type which is immortal. If we have spilt our seed and not lived within the nine emotions of the desire realm we will become a p’o spirit. This type doesn’t survive very long and soon becomes a dead ghost which is no good at all. If you are a hun spirit after some time you can locate a p’o spirit which has just died to unite with to return to earth and try again.
‘You can’t believe the effect this had on me, Harriet — at that instant all my fear of death disappeared because I was being told of a way not just to live a longer time in this realm but a way to be immortal. It was eight years and seven months ago that Martin Po told me this. If I can hold on to my fluids for five months more then I will never die. I will live a long, long, long time and even if I’m killed by somebody my spirit will be hun. At the moment of death it will leave through the top of my head, I’ll hang around for a while then return to earth.’ He paused for a few seconds, his brow rippled with thought. ‘Of course what Martin Po told me means I can’t have sex ever a gain or you know … do anything else along those lines because I can’t spill my seed. Still, on balance I’d say it’s definitely worth it.’
Harriet asked herself what was that familiar sensation she felt? It was the plummeting feeling experienced the first time she’d launched herself from the branch of the oak tree, except this time there was no excitement, only the sick sensation of falling. She said to him, ‘But you won’t be able to have children or anything.’
‘Oh,’ he replied nonchalantly, ‘that’s not a problem. See, I’ve got a kid. By a girl in the flats, we were married and everything but Marti
n told me I had to leave her as she was getting in the way of my Li Kuan Yu.’
‘So,’ she enquired, ‘erm … if I keep doing my Li Kuan Yu and stuff, after nine years will I achieve immortality then?’
‘Oh no,’ he stated, smiling in a patronising way she’d never noticed in him before, ‘you women don’t have fluids, do you? Fluids like men? All the adepts agree the only way women can live forever is through having children. That’s why they’re always trying to steal men’s vital fluids so they can make babies and become immortal themselves.’
‘Oh, right …‘ Harriet said, nodding. It figured. Apparently immortality, at least according to the laws of Li Kuan Yu, was one of those things, like being an ayatollah, a chief constable or a football commentator, that men had reserved solely for themselves.
Before she had known anything about martial arts she’d sort of vaguely assumed that if you became an adept then there was naturally a calm serenity that came with it, like that guy on the TV show Kung Fu or Jackie Chan who seemed like a happy sort of bloke despite all the injuries he’d picked up in his career, but her experience had shown her that that wasn’t the case — if anything it seemed to make people more angry to know that they could pulverise most others in the world.
In Harriet’s case her feelings of calmness towards her neighbours had not continued; as promised they had carried on leaving their rubbish on her step and instead of learning to live with it in a state of serene acceptance as she’d hoped she might, she’d taken to stuffing it back through their letterbox, sometimes dousing it in petrol and setting fire to it first. The Namibians next door didn’t match her escalation but they didn’t stop leaving their garbage piled against her front door either.