by Alexei Sayle
Helen felt like when she’d walked into a wall, numb at that moment but knowing that severe pain was on the way. The face of Jesus in the potato had just told the Mexican peasant girl that he didn’t exist but was instead just random marks in a vegetable. To fill the space she asked, ‘What was that about a community service order?’
‘Ah, I have certain problems with anger,’ Julio replied. ‘Because of … you know, the things that happened to me. The prisons, the secret ones where I was taken were called Chupaderos. Chupo means to …‘ He made a face like a vacuum cleaner sucking up air.
‘Oh yeah,’ she said, ‘like Chupa Chups.’
“What?’
‘Chupa Chups, they’re a Spanish sweet I buy for my son, a sort of round ball on a little stick, you suck them.’
‘I can’t have sweets I am diavetic, also have pleurisy from my time in the prison.’ Julio was again silent for a while then said, ‘There used to be this car that was only made in Argentina called a Ford Falcon. It looked sort of like an American car but also like a European car, voth of them from years vefore … old-fashioned, you understand? Just like Argentina. So when they came for you — the Triple A they were called: “Alliance, Argentina …“ I forget the other thing — when they came for you it was always in these Ford Falcons and the cars always they had no numverplates. Everybody knew when they see this car outside your house that you are in vig trouble. I spent nine years in prison, until the junta collapsed after the war in the Malbinas. In a cell knee-deep in water. It was bery vad and worse — vy the time I got out I had gone out of fashion, yesterday’s news, you know.’
He gave her a sad smile, while she suddenly remembered she’d left Timon outside playing with the Yentob twins.
‘I’ve got to go,’ Helen said, rising.
‘Yes, well, goodvye,’ Julio said.
‘Perhaps we could meet again for coffee, at some time?’ she said. ‘For another chat.’
He replied with a shrug. ‘Well, I am always at this place in the afternoons, this is my seat — Julio’s seat, everyone knows it. If I am here I cannot stop you being here also.’
‘Right, great. Afternoon coffee it is then.’
Unwrapping the silver duct tape that bound her son to the tree she heard the funny businessman saying into his phone, ‘The Little One’s got a funny look about her now …’
In bed in the early morning light Toby stared down at Helen sleeping next to him and wondered how well he really knew her. More and more he was having these feelings. Before they got together, whenever he’d seen Helen it had always been in a public place — down the pub, driving to her mother’s house or at a party. When they first slept together, afterwards he had fallen asleep and on waking in the morning at first he thought that Helen had been replaced during the night by an exhausted child that had crawled into his bed for a nap. It was only when he looked down her naked body, when he saw with a start of guilt that the child had a splendid pair of breasts and a triangle of pubic hair, that he realised that it was Helen lying next to him but that their thrashing during the night or perhaps a wash had removed all her make-up.
Since then it had always disturbed him the way Helen would wake as one woman every morning then would paint on herself the face of an entirely different woman, like a police artist composing the image of a beautiful but hard-faced woman wanted for some crime of fraud or people-trafficking.
Harriet, on the other hand, had never thought it worth painting herself during her fat days and so didn’t bother now and so to him there was only one Harriet and that Harriet, that true Harriet, was staggering-looking without the addition of paint. She had told Toby that for a while when going out she would apply a slash of lipstick, but her efforts had been so incompetent that she looked like she was applying for work as a clown or was somebody whose facial features for some reason needed to be seen clearly from a couple of miles away. Harriet said that men in the most ridiculous places such as the nave of Westminster Abbey or a hospital casualty department were constantly asking her how much she charged for a blowjob until finally she got the message and went out without putting on any make-up.
Toby knew that he had to change his life soon or go completely mad; he needed to make a plan right away but thinking about Harriet got him to surreptitiously stroking himself and fantasising about what it would be like having sex with his wife and her sister at the same time. At first he got really excited but pretty soon in his fantasy Helen started ordering everybody about, ‘Harriet, you stick your head down there. Now, Toby, you put that in there …‘ So the whole thing dissolved as he returned to a troubled sleep.
9
Patrick had finally got an e-mail back from Martin Po but it hadn’t in any way set his mind at rest. His sifu told him next to nothing about the situation over there and what little there was was written in a very confusing way, rambling and repetitious, with many outrageous claims and paranoid denunciations of those around him. Worse, at the end of the e-mail was a long list of things Martin said Patrick absolutely had to send out to him immediately. A few of them he thought he could buy in the shops: the two-way radios, canned food, medicines and the bandages, but others he had no idea what they were. Some of them like the night vision equipment and the poisons he thought might be illegal and one — a Dragunov 7.62mm sniper’s rifle with infrared telescopic sights — he was certain was. Even if he knew where to get these things he was far from positive that he had enough cash to buy them. After all, he had handed over to Martin a great deal of money when he’d bought the dojo off him but he didn’t seem to remember or care about that and always demanded more.
The tone of the e-mail only added to Patrick’s worries.
Driving around in his little red hatchback he purchased a couple of the easier items from a supermarket, a chemist and a pet superstore. He wrapped them up and took them to the post office. The cost of the postage even for these few objects was horrendous and the clerk told him that the package would probably take over two months to arrive at its destination.
Once Harriet had gone on a school trip to Paris; they must have visited all the museums and the cobblestone-circled palaces yet the only thing she remembered seeing was a slogan painted by anarchists on a wall near the Sorbonne to express their superior disdain for the tedious life of the wage slave: ‘Métro Boulot Resto Dodo’ it read — ‘Tube Work Eat Sleep’. Now it seemed to Harriet if you substituted dojo for Métro that was pretty much her life too. The need to keep up the exercise seemed constant: one missed training session and she immediately imagined she could sense her muscles slackening and losing definition. Since invisible mending failed to satisfy any need in her, repairs that would have previously taken a few minutes now required hours of work so that she was forced to be at her worktable on a bright Saturday afternoon. Apart from dojo and Dodo all other tasks never got done, she couldn’t seem to find the time to buy herself any new clothes, for instance, but even if she did she wasn’t sure Patrick would approve; it had been made pretty clear at the dojo that taking too much of an interest in your appearance was considered a distraction from the serious business of learning how to whack people more effectively. Unfortunately all Harriet had in her wardrobe that fitted her now was the stuff she’d worn when she’d last been thin, back at college in the late eighties and only just out of her teens. Catching sight of herself in a full-length mirror she thought she looked like some sort of female nonce just released from prison after a fifteen-year stretch.
From her shop window Harriet gazed gloomily at the park. The sun was shining brightly and the park bustled with people, entwined couples lay in the grass furtively feeling each other up. For the last few years the grass, trees and plants had been more or less ignored by the contractors who were supposed to come and regularly mutilate it, so while the place remained glum and sinister in winter during the spring and summer months it had grown to be almost pleasant.
This year nature having secretly gathered its forces staged a summer breakout, silve
r birch saplings that in the two or three years previously had lain in small cracks in the park’s paths suddenly burst upwards splintering the concrete into powdery dust. Goat willow, bird cherry over a metre high and hawthorn trees hung heavy with white blossom, oak saplings sent out by the big tree in the centre suddenly stretched upwards. In the long grass native wild flowers ran unrestrained by pesticide, yellow cowslips and primrose burgeoned, while peacock butterflies flittered crazily between them.
Through the plate glass Harriet spotted Lulu and Rose rolling about on the grass, play-fighting with each other and drinking white wine.
Abandoning her work she got up and went to join them.
‘You’ve stopped losing weight,’ Lulu said to her as they lay on the grass, the sun warming their stomachs.
‘Yeah, this is me now,’ she replied.
‘Christ, I wish it was me,’ Lulu replied, running her eyes up and down her body, rather hungrily Harriet thought.
‘We’d sort of hoped you’d go all stringy like Madonna,’ Rose said, ‘but you’re hard yet still curvy where you need to be.’
‘Fit, beautiful and able to fight more or less anybody in the world,’ Lulu said. ‘Not bad.’
‘Still can’t get a bloke to shag me though. I bet if I’d eaten even more and got really, really fat weighing thirty or forty stone then I’d have had my pick of all kinds of perverts.’
‘I think the reason nobody’ll shag you is because your clothes are an absolute bloody fright,’ Rose said.
Leaving her two friends laid out on the warm grass starting on another bottle of white wine, she returned to the shop. As Harriet rose to leave, Lulu, looking around the park at the encompassing trees, the rippling grass and the nodding flowers, said, ‘Funny, this place used to creep me out but now it seems sort of nice …’
Back at the worktable under the hot light she sat staring gloomily at a John Smedley sweater, one arm eaten by termites. The night before at the dojo for the first time she’d managed to land a couple of kicks on the side of Patrick’s head. At first Harriet had felt wildly elated by this but catching a look at Patrick’s wounded expression made her suddenly overcome with’ contrition, having to resist the urge to hug him and to kiss the livid marks that she’d just planted on his cheek.
The door of her shop opened and one of her next-door neighbours entered. He stood in front of her and gesturing over his shoulder with his thumb said, ‘The old man wants to see you.’
‘What, now? I’m busy,’ Harriet grumbled.
‘Yeah. You don’t look busy.’
‘I can’t repair those inflammable tracksuits you lot wear,’ she said, rising.
She locked the shop door behind her, then they entered the adjacent building.
The stocky young man tried to sit down on the stairlift but she placed a hand on his arm and said, ‘Let’s just walk up the stairs, eh?’
Grumpily he acceded and rose, and together they climbed the stairs to enter the big upstairs room. As before the older man sat at the centre of the room on his reclining chair. When she came in his face burst into a big, seemingly genuine, smile and he spread his arms. ‘Ah, our beautiful neighbour! Please do sit down.’
Once Harriet had perched herself on one of the velour council-supplied couches arranged round the walls he said, ‘You know I have been so longing to have a decent chat with someone intelligent such as yourself, these young men while they have their uses are not strong on conversational skills. So, Harriet, tell me what do you think of this Damien Hirst I read about in all the newspapers: a great artist or merely a dwarf for dwarfish times?’
‘Well, I dunno really,’ she said. ‘Collectors certainly pay a lot of money for his work.’
‘Yes, I see what you’re saying, Harriet — that the avatars of society have given him and his ilk their imprimatur. But I still ask myself, where is the joy, the striving for magnificence? Hasn’t art these days simply replaced the carnival freak shows of the 1930s? Instead of a two-headed calf, the curious go and see a pickled shark, a painting made from elephant poo or an unmade bed.’
‘Yeah, I suppose, yeah … you might be right about that.’
‘Ah, it is good to have such conversations,’ Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said. For a while he sat in silence as if mulling over the interesting things that had been said, then, adopting a less declamatory style, he asked, pointing towards her, ‘Tell me, Harriet, what is that top you’re wearing?’
‘It’s a T-shirt.’
‘And who might that be who is on it?’
She had owned the shirt for so long that to her what was on it had become a collection of random abstract shapes without any meaning. She looked down at her T-shirt, pulling it out to see the figure printed in fading colours across her chest. ‘Oh yeah, she said. ‘It’s actually a man made out of cheese kicking a football, his name’s Señor Padano. I think Grana Padano is a brand of Italian cheese and it was the official hard cheese of Italia ‘90.’
‘Ah, Italia ‘90. Gazza, Gary Lineker, Diego Maradona. I was in Canada then but we were all entranced. But excuse me for saying this, don’t you think a beautiful woman such as yourself should be dressed in something, I don’t know … more modern?’
‘I guess …‘
‘Maybe you are wearing the T-shirt as some kind of retro fashion statement?’
‘No, it was all I had that was clean.’
‘Oh, that is not right, not right at all. A woman who looks as you do should have some handsome clothes. Coincidentally I might be able to help with that. I was wondering whether you might not do me the enormous favour of coming to a party with myself and my associates one evening.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, in the course of our business ventures we occasionally need to throw little get-togethers or visit nightclubs and such and the women we know are either too one way or the other if you know what I mean. To be frank, if we were accompanied by someone such as yourself it would boost our status.’
‘You want me to go on a night out with you. Nothing else?’
‘My goodness, certainly nothing else! But we would be happy to dress you in beautiful clothes that you could keep afterwards.’
Harriet knew that if she agreed and Patrick found out that she was staying out late at parties and wearing sexy dresses and hanging out with dubious Namibians he would accuse her of diluting her Shen or some such nonsense so she said, ‘Yeah, sure, why not?’
Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro made a gesture with his hands and one of the young men went into a back room. He re-emerged carrying a dress in a transparent cover. Without looking at it, Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said, ‘This is a dress by Stella McCartney which, I think, though tight, will fit you perfectly; it is made out of oyster satin apparently. The matching shoes are suede and by Gill Wing — apparently Stella McCartney being a vegetarian only makes footwear out of plastic which seems odd to me. I always thought only poor people wore shoes of plastic but there you are. We would like you to have them to keep, of course, but also to wear when you come out with us.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘It is a transaction but I hope a happy one for all concerned.’
Toby and Helen had been getting ready to go out to the launch party for the Penrith Fairground Disaster memorial crafted by a famous sculptor. It wasn’t in Penrith and didn’t look much like a memorial, rather it resembled a Second World War tank trap that’s been dipped in breadcrumbs and it had been built in a private square in Mayfair that you could only enter with a key. Of course nobody actually involved in the Penrith Fairground Disaster was invited since they would upset everyone with their horrible injuries and their constant crying.
However, just as they were going out there’d been a hysterical phone call from Katya; apparently two days before, their builder had removed the entire back wall of the house with a JCB and then vanished without a word so now they couldn’t leave their home for fear of looters. They wanted Toby and Helen to go round to thei
r place right away for an emergency dinner party.
‘I had to drive the JCB back to the hire place,’ Oscar said. ‘I felt awfully butch. It’s surprising how fast they can go, those things, and people certainly get out of your way.’
Katya gave her husband an annoyed look and said, referring to the builder while wringing her hands, ‘I’m terribly worried about him.’
‘Yes,’ added Oscar, ‘we’ve been round to his house with a Thermos of soup …’
‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop!’ Toby shouted.
‘… in case he’s ill in bed but there was no reply.’
If everybody in Toby and Helen’s circle was feeling calm then the talk would be all furious anger about speed cameras, parking fines and getting clamped, but if there had been a disturbance of some kind in their little pond then to calm themselves down and reassure themselves that all was well in their world, for the whole dinner they would talk about the mini breaks, weekends away, skiing holidays, diving holidays and lust plain holidays that they had planned in the next year or so. Harriet once said it was as if they thought if they moved around a lot from place to place then sadness wouldn’t be able to find them. That was just Harriet being her usual life-denying snippy self, Helen thought. She liked that their friends had the money to go on holiday all the time.
One secret she’d always hidden from the crowd was that she, Toby and Harriet had had to find the money to pay for their own houses, whereas their friends all had their first flats or houses bought for them by their parents or via trust funds or with a ‘little legacy from Granny’. Helen had always longed to be that sort of person. Of course Harriet didn’t agree, she said that they were all just big grown-up children for whom a loft-style apartment on the river is another Christmas present like a Scalextrix set or a carved rocking horse but Helen had always found it sophisticated to be free of that kind of financial worry. She liked stability and order and certainty — was there anything wrong with that? Harriet might want to go transforming herself but it would all end in tears, of that she was sure. She tried to ask Julio in her mind what he thought about her sister’s change of appearance but for once she couldn’t get him to say anything at all: he just sat in a plastic bucket seat sipping a cup of bad coffee. Instead she found herself thinking about the real Julio, the one that she’d met in the park. “Ello, ‘Oolio,’ the woman in the café had called to him, “Ello, ‘Oolio.’ Helen wondered what he was doing, where he was going, whether he was thinking about her.