by Alexei Sayle
To get away from the fuzzy lines Harriet crossed the road and cut through the north-west corner of the park, heading towards her building. She wondered whether Toby fancied her — maybe he always had done and that was why he’d spent so much time in her shop, but right away her mind, snapping shut on this disturbing thought like a mousetrap, told her she was probably making it up or he maybe only had a little crush on her that would fade in a few weeks. Temporary relief swept through Harriet and the indistinct terror that she might have caused Toby to fall in love with her receded. It was as if a plane had suddenly dropped with a thump and a peculiar high-pitched noise had come from the engine and then the cabin crew rapidly began putting stuff away even though they were in the middle of serving dinner. Yet after a few tense seconds level flight resumes and slowly the cabin crew recommence serving dinner but their faces are like wax and their smiles are printed on.
Dark trees in the attitude of preying insects hung over her path and through their budding branches she fancied the welcoming lights of her upstairs room could be seen, the battered punchbag hanging from her ceiling like a tubby suicide. From the brittle undergrowth there came a rustling and sibilant voices that whispered foul obscenities but she didn’t feel the least bit afraid.
As well as great financial wealth donated by rich, bird-loving patrons, Warbird also owned a good deal of property. Indeed, though Helen kept it quiet, they held the leases on a number of shops in the parade facing the park, including the hardware store. Recently that lease had come to an end and the general improvements in the area coupled with the new, wealthier people moving in meant that the charity was in a position to raise the rent considerably. Unfortunately this was more than the old tenant could afford to pay so, after a brief fight, they were sadly forced to evict him.
Hauling Timon in her wake, as Helen passed the boarded-up shop and the tattered remains of a defiant banner Mr Sargassian had made, she heard that funny businessman who walked around the neighbourhood shouting into his mobile phone.
‘The bastard landlord’s turfed the old tenant out even though he’s been there thirty years. They say it’s going to be a Starbucks,’ he yelled, ‘or one of those places that sells sandwiches made in India the day before and then packed into triangular little packs by people with cholera.’
‘I have a responsibility to raise as much money for the charity as I can,’ she told Julio Spuciek in her head. ‘If Starbucks pays us more than Mr Sargassian I have a duty to the talking birds to evict him.’
‘Of course you do,’ Julio replied.
She then continued just so he understood, ‘But sometimes do you think people who campaign for things can have too narrow a view? That while we might set out with good intentions our vanity and competitiveness might occasionally take over?’
‘No, no, you mustn’t think like that, Helen. There may be others in your field who act like that but your motives are pure, you are a good person doing good work.’
‘You’re right of course, Julio, you are such a comfort to me.’
The reason Helen was dragging her son towards the community centre was because it was half term and the local mothers — well, the middle-class ones who cared about such things — had demanded that the council pay for a puppet show to be put on in the playground. They paid their taxes so the least the council could do was to occupy their children for a couple of hours.
At one end of the playground a tall thin stage made from faded fabric had been set up. It was a bit like the Punch and Judy tent she remembered from the seafront at Southport but wider and with a very un-Southport painted backdrop of sinister forests and mountains. There was already a fair-sized audience of expectant kids gathered there, wriggling about on folding chairs, eager to see the show. Helen heard one pale, six-year-old triplet in perfect imitation of overheard adults say to the child next to him, ‘How post-ironic, a puppet show.’
The other replied, ‘I was thinking if I like it I might option the film rights. My godfather’s chairman of British Screen and …‘ The child never finished the sentence as its tentative attempt at adulthood fell away and childish terror returned, its silent mouth hanging open, because to the accompaniment of strange discordant accordion music the first of the puppets shambled on stage. Helen thought she had not seen a more malevolent wooden figure since the time she’d asked a market stall owner in Port au Prince, Haiti, to show her her best, most authentic voodoo dolls, the ones that the tourists didn’t usually get to see.
‘This might not be so bad after all,’ Timon said, smiling.
The wooden figure turned in a jangly way to the front of the stage and began screaming at the audience in a high-pitched voice about the environment and the end of the world. By the time it finished its first speech several of the formerly sophisticated little ones were weeping in terror. Helen too was staring, suddenly realising where she had seen the puppet before. Though one of its glass eyes was splintered and milky, its mouth torn back to the jaw and one of its legs was little more than a splintery stump, it came to her that she was looking at the wooden face of Señor Chuckles, beloved marionette of Julio Spuciek.
At one point in her twenties Harriet had gone to see a proper old-style Freudian psychoanalyst with a place in Hampstead, a couch, substantial wallpaper, African sculptures on the shelves and everything — she thought there was probably a place like a pub outfitters where they bought this stuff, so identical did their consulting rooms seem. Following her first consultation the fee he’d asked for, written out with a fountain pen on thick creamy paper, was breathtakingly high. He also told her she was supposed to visit him three or four times a week. When Harriet asked this man why it cost so much ‘to sit and talk to him he said it was part of her therapy, that in order for her to take her treatment seriously the fee ‘should sting a bit’.
It seemed very convenient that these medical men had actually managed to work it into their ideology that they not only got to charge her a huge amount of money but they could pretend it was part of her treatment. She imagined if it was proved conclusively that her mental healing would be helped by them giving away treatment for nothing they wouldn’t be so keen to promote that theory.
A little while later the psychoanalyst, accurately spotting Harriet’s dogged reluctance to commit herself unquestioningly to anything, suggested that the best way for them to overcome this crucial, crippling inhibition might be for her to dress up as a jockey and ride him around the consulting room.
Patrick didn’t charge as much per session as the Freudian but it still stung a lot. He continued to charge one hundred and twenty pounds a week for her three private lessons, plus another ‘general fee’ of sixty pounds as he called it for all the other work they did together. She’d hinted at a possible reduction but with echoes of the analyst he had said that an important part of being a disciple was making a financial contribution to what he called ‘the cause’. Harriet felt a twinge of suspicion but had to admit he didn’t seem to be spending the money on himself: apart from his little red hatchback car he appeared to own virtually nothing. The few clothes Patrick possessed were worn in strict rotation and a number of these items had visited her shop for mending on several occasions, for free of course. The one time she had seen inside his fiat, though it was incredibly clean, it appeared to contain only a solitary office chair, a television, a computer balanced on a milk crate and a single mattress on the floor serving as his bed and it smelt rather horribly of what seemed like sour milk and turpentine.
Harriet felt spending so much money wouldn’t have seemed as bad if her business had been going well. Certainly more men and a few women seemed to be coming through the door with holes in their clothes but this was balanced by her losing several big contracts with West End theatres due to late delivery. The truth was she just found it harder and harder’ to repair holes: whatever therapeutic purpose it had served seemed to have gone. Harriet hadn’t realised how important her work had been in keeping her sane. Once invisible mending had been a
refuge for her; when the world had been full of fear she had been able to submerge herself into her work like a diver sinking down to the ocean floor so that as she drifted deeper the anxiety floated away.
Now she no longer felt fear, the urge to invisibly seal up holes had evaporated. Not that fear had been replaced by serenity as she’d hoped. When she had been Fat and Ugly Harriet she had found consolation through telling herself that there were many things in the world that clearly weren’t for her. Now, however, there was a terrible hunger for nearly everything.
Helen stood fidgeting in the playground as a stream of nannies and au pairs collected the weeping children and Julio Spuciek was shouted at by the unnaturally thin woman who organised children’s events in the borough. In the weeks since seeing his face Helen had more or less convinced herself that she’d been mistaken. But now the thin, bearded man, at least thirty years older than the person yelling at him, who turned his unhappy brown eyes to the ground as the angry woman’s words ripped through his ancient overcoat, could be none other than the person who’d lived inside her head since she was a young girl.
‘I’ve never seen the children so frightened!’ the council’s children’s entertainment officer bellowed. ‘And some of them have been to Shockheaded Peter four times.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Helen heard Julio whisper in accented English, his voice sounding almost exactly as she’d imagined it would — sort of sad and smoky. ‘It’s not me, it’s the puppets, they have their own, minds. Señor Chuckles is angry because of the destruction of the forests and …‘
Feeling breathless, on unsteady legs, she approached the council woman and touched her lightly on the arm. ‘Melanie,’ she said, ‘would it be possible to have a word with you?’
‘Oh, hi, Helen, yes I suppose so …‘ Then she turned back to the puppeteer. ‘I haven’t finished with you. Honestly, some of those kids have never heard such swear words even though a number of their parents are stand-up comedians …’
The two of them walked a few paces off. They had met a number of times at functions and for a while Melanie had worked for another talking bird charity. They knew each other to be professionals in the world of public service and as such were always happy to perform little favours for each other —speed up planning applications or jump waiting lists for serious operations, that kind of thing.
Melanie asked, ‘What can I do for you, Helen?’
‘The puppeteer,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t be so hard on him, Melanie; he was tortured.’
‘Not by the children he wasn’t,’ Melanie replied unforgivingly. ‘Well, maybe those Yentob twins, they’re capable of anything but really it’s not the little ones’ fault.’
‘Still, he was a political prisoner.’
‘Oh, they all say that when they get into trouble …‘ ‘No, I know he was genuinely, it’s Julio Spuciek. The Edge wrote a song about him, don’t you remember?’
‘Not Sting or Bono?’
‘No, the Edge. But please give him a break.’
‘Oh all right … I suppose so.’ She gave a testy glance towards the old man still standing head bent. ‘I’m only doing this for you though.’ The two of them returned to the old puppeteer.
‘Mr Spuciek, Helen here has asked me to go easy on you because of your … past but I have to tell you that if I have anything to do with it you will never be employed by this council again.
There was a pause while the man nodded, then raising his eyes he asked, ‘Do I still get paid?’
‘What?’
‘Do I still get paid?’ he asked again from under his grey-flecked eyebrows.
‘Get paid? I was given to understand you were doing this performance as part of your two hundred hours’ community service order.’
‘No, madam,’ he said, straightening and looking her in the eye for the first time. ‘I am a professional performer and a professional performer needs to get paid.’
‘Oh, I …‘ Melanie paused and then seeing no point in making a fight of it said,’… suppose so, though I can’t for the life of me really see why. I’ll put a cheque in the post.’
Julio Spuciek and Helen watched the council woman’s angry, bony bottom depart. ‘Could I possibly buy you a cup of coffee?’
For the first time he looked directly at her and smiled a sad rueful smile. ‘Madam, that would be most kind but really I have to pack up my puppets and then there are other things that …’
‘Oh, I can wait,’ she said.
‘No, really, you don’t need to …‘
‘Yes, really, I can wait. It’s not a problem for me.’
‘Shall we go there?’ Helen asked, pointing to the pub, certain that he would enjoy some nice risotto or a Barnsley chop on a bed of wilted greens, to fill him out a bit.
Before leaving the playground Julio had dumped his puppets into a big leather suitcase roughly in a tangle of strings and limbs on top of each other (Helen would really have liked to sort them out so they were lying more comfortably but kept quiet); they were with him now. His stage he’d folded with furious movements and thrown carelessly into a storeroom at the community centre.
‘No, we should go there,’ Julio replied, pointing instead towards the community centre café. ‘The place here is where I like to go.
Helen had to suppress a shiver of distaste as they sat down at a greasy Formica table.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, absolutely.’
“Ello ‘Oolio,’ the woman behind the counter shouted. ‘Coffee, is it?’
Helen ordered a KitKat bar for herself.
He said to her, ‘I suppose I have to thank you for interceding for me with that ugly woman.
‘Well, she was being a bit unfair; in a way it was her fault for booking you, it’s idiotic to assume a puppet show is going to be suitable for children.’
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s like always assuming …‘ But she couldn’t think of anything else so said, ‘Señor Spuciek, I have always been a great admirer of yours since … since I was a young girl.’
She’d thought he would be pleased as she said this but he sighed, seeming to shrink a little. ‘Ah yes, since you were a young girl, of course …‘ He paused. ‘In the 1960s when I was a big star of the left in Argentina, an invitation came one day via the Communist Party for me to go to China to give talks and to do my puppet shows.’ Again he stopped for a second, staring off into space. ‘Nobody went to China then, it was easier to go to the moon than to China, what an opportunity! Also amongst my circle there was great sympathy with the ideas of the Cultural Revolution, you know. That you could turn vack the clock to a simpler life untainted by the corruption of egotism. Writers, performers, painters — individualists every single one of us — dreamt of creating a world free of egotism, I don’t know why.
‘Maybe because I was simpatico the authorities allowed me to travel around a little bit, with a minder of course but still … One day we were going to see a place where they made steam engines whether anybody wanted them or not and we passed a group of schoolgirls leaving their college when they all suddenly started screaming. For a second I was excited, thinking maybe it was for me, the famous revolutionary puppeteer; in that country at that time anything seemed possible. It wasn’t for me though, the screaming, but vecause the young girls had seen this particularly huge poster of Chairman Mao Tse-tung travelling around on its own truck — the only behicle on the road. It was like film on the television about Elbis.’
For a second Helen was confused about who or what ‘Elbis’ was until she realised that like a lot of Spanish speakers he would sometimes conflate his ‘V’s and his ‘B’s.
‘They were becoming hysterical over Chairman Mao — a fat old Chinaman with a vig wart on his face. I understood then that while situations may change the nature of people is fixed. Young girls they always need somevody at a particular point in their lives when they are developing … you know … in certain ways. In China during the Cultural Revolution becau
se there was nobody else around they would get hysterical love and I guess touch themselves when they were alone to pictures in their mind of Chairman Mao, the vig fat old Chinaman who was putting their parents in prison.
‘When I was picked up by the junta in ‘75 I got what I had always wanted: to become sort of an international political star featured in all the magazines around the free world, except of course to vecome that famous I had to be in a cell a foot deep in water veing veaten with a stick, so I didn’t know about me being famous.
‘Since they let me out in ‘83 following the war of the Malvinas, I have met a few of the ones who fell for me and they were all the same. Clever girls who thought they were a bit more intelligent than their schoolfriends. Clever pretty girls who didn’t want to fall for Little Donny Osmond, so chose me instead — the poor tortured political prisoner with the soulful, brown eyes.’ And here he did look at her, head lowered, with his big brown eyes and they were soulful still.