by Alexei Sayle
One afternoon after practice at Harriet’s flat Patrick asked her, ‘You know sometimes in a film they have a photo that was supposed to have been taken in the past?’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Well, I always feel I know when a photograph was taken, not the exact moment or anything but the period, y’know? Like I say, sometimes in a TV programme or movie you see a picture that was meant to have been taken a hundred years ago or something. The film people have got the clothes of the people perfect and the haircuts and the pose and all that, the negative might be artificially scratched and faded, and yet to me there’s always something of the modern world that gets into the photo; it’s sort of as if the knowledge of all the things that have happened since Victorian times — jet travel, the war in Vietnam, a sex-change woman winning Big Brother Five — kinda seeps into a person’s skin so that they can never look like they didn’t know these things. I think I can even do the same for the backgrounds in these faked pictures. To me even the trees and the bushes in the false photo look kind of up to date, like the plants know all about jet travel and the sex-change woman winning Big Brother Five and all that too.’
When he’d told Harriet his thing about Film 2006 that first time up in her flat Patrick remembered how fascinated she’d been but when he finished telling her about the photos she just said, ‘Oh yeah?’ again.’
Harriet sat on the bed naked except for a vest and white pants while Lulu and Rose applied the last of her make-up. One of Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro’s young men had called into the shop that morning.
‘The party’s tonight,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘Next door,’ he replied, as if she’d be an idiot to think it would be anywhere else.
‘Oh, right.’
When Harriet told Lulu and Rose about her date with the people next door her two friends had got really excited and insisted on taking her appearance in hand.
‘It’ll be like playing with our dollies when we were kids,’ Rose said.
‘Yeah, you’ll be our Harriet Whore Dolly,’ Lulu added.
‘I’m not being a whore, they bought me a nice dress and I’m going to a party with them.’
‘We’re not judging you, darling,’ Rose said.
‘But you can’t go around looking so scruffy, it’s like keeping a Rembrandt in a shopping trolley — your beauty needs framing.’
Immediately they’d both cancelled all their work for the day. Earlier on in the afternoon Lulu and Rose had accompanied her to the hairdresser’s where they had bullied the owner into taking care of Harriet personally. Urged on by the two women, he cur her long unruly hair and straightened it into a sharp and glossy bob through which he streaked red lowlights to enhance the natural sleekness that had been there since she’d got fir. Then they had a couple of glasses of champagne in a hotel bar where some businessmen in suits tried to chat them up so they let the men pay for the drinks then went to the toilet and left by another exit.
They took a taxi back to Harriet’s flat where Lulu and Rose rook her into the bedroom and emptied their make-up bags on to the duvet and began to paint her face. Rose took a grubby sponge that had been lying at the bottom of her bag and used it to spread tinted moisturiser all over Harriet’s face as a base, then the two of them started to describe what they were doing as if cooking ‘an elaborate meal on television for a small child. Lulu said, ‘I’m rubbing some Touche Eclat concealer by Yves Saint Laurent under your eyes to hide any bags and to make the area shine.’
Rose added, ‘And I’ve been mixing up colours on my eye-shadow palette. I’m. taking a pearlised pale pink eyeshadow which I am applying to your eyelids starting next to the edge of the lashes and blending to the outer corner of your eyes.’
Next Lulu said, ‘I’m blending and smudging a brown colour with my finger underneath your eyes to give a sexy smoky effect.’
Together the two of them applied double-lash, full-volume mascara which automatically curled her lashes. Then, taking a side each, they rubbed liquid tinted cheek colour blended into the apples of her cheeks and brought up to highlight her recently revealed sharp cheekbones. With one finger Rose rubbed Clinique one hundred per cent red lipstick on to her lips, making them appear full, moist and luscious. Finally Harriet’s two friends dusted her cleavage and arms with Guerlain gold powder, making her skin sparkle.
‘There you go,’ Lulu said, stepping back ‘you don’t look like a whore at all.’
‘Well, the highest priced kind of whore anyway,’ Rose added.
A little while later after they had dressed her, smoked a joint together and had fallen into that uneasy period when the minicab’s been ordered to take you home from the dinner party but hasn’t arrived yet, the entryphone buzzed. Descending the stairs with unsteady steps, feeling like she was walking on a pair of stepladders rather than high heels, Harriet opened the door to one of the young men dressed in a shiny dark grey suit, while behind her, peeking out from the bend in the stairs, Rose and Lulu sniggered and whispered like mice behind the skirting board.
‘The boss sent me to come and get you,’ he said, and taking her arm led her next door.
In their hallway, seeing the chairlift, she said with a giggle, ‘I think it’s my turn,’ and with some difficulty because of the tightness of her dress sat down on the pink padded plastic seat, strapped herself in and with a beep set off for the party.
As the chair slowly turned the corner up to the first-floor landing, it momentarily jammed with a shaking and a grinding of cogs so that Harriet found herself suspended high above the entranceway facing straight back down the dirty stairs, her legs dangling helplessly in mid-air, and the young man scowling upwards impatiently waiting for her to complete her ascent.
For a second Harriet felt a distant panic but the chair began again and Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro was waiting for her in the doorway of the big room.
‘Harriet, welcome.’ Taking her hand and helping her out of the chair he asked, ‘I hope you didn’t have any difficulty getting here?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘it’s not too far to come.’
Leading Harriet by the fingertips into the big room, he said wistfully, ‘Ah well … you know, it would have been nice for me to take you to some smart place on the river perhaps or a fashionable restaurant in the West End but it is unfortunately not possible at the moment for us to travel very far. This city we live in, it is all overlapping territories. Areas we mark out, over which we try to exert influence. A male cat, an unneutered one of course, has a territory sometimes miles across that he must patrol every night before he can rest. For me there are certain streets in our neighbourhood where I am welcomed with gifts, while there are others especially in areas of Tooting and Streatham where I could not walk without serious risk of being killed. You, on the other hand, would be free to parade up and down those same streets all day and nobody would bother you. So for the moment we have to hold our parties in this house.’
In the room, the lights were turned down low; seated on the low couches were various stocky men in tight suits. Harriet felt with a shiver their eyes run up and down her body like an MRI scan. She didn’t know what food she expected these people to eat but on a couple of side tables were the same cheap supermarket quiches and wrinkled cocktail sausages that the poor serve at funerals. The drink was those stubby bottles of beer smuggled in from France and the litre bottles of whisky, vodka and gin from the same Pas de Calais drinks warehouse.
On the council-supplied couches the older men in suits sat nursing drinks, while in the centre of the room younger men, some in suits, others in expensive round-necked jumpers and cotton combat pants, danced with young women who were naked except that they wore gold shorts or black thongs and on their feet cheap high-heeled shoes. Though she kept her face blank, inside Harriet was feeling the same dark excitement as she’d experienced in the days after Patrick first made her jump from the tree. She’d heard that crack addicts were always chasing that first irre
trievable high but here she was and she’d managed to get the exact same feeling back, except this time it was better because now she was the one in control. Harriet wondered whether she was right to be so thrilled by this decadence; maybe identical parties were going on all around the neighbourhood where young women detached themselves from those they danced with to be fondled by men old enough to be their accountants then led off to the bedrooms in ones and twos.
Though they all wolfishly looked her over, nobody tried anything with Harriet. She assumed they thought that she belonged to Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro. Yet after a little while it was clear to her why her presence would bring him status. Sure, she thought, looking them over, some of the girls, especially the younger ones, were extremely pretty, springy unmarked bodies, lush hair and so on but when you looked closely there was some corruption that spoilt all of them: partly it was a hardness, she guessed — the imprint of the dreadful things they had done in their short lives — partly it was their brittle insincerity and partly it was simple fear. The girls covered up their fear with spiky bravado or a brittle sexiness but there was still the whisper of the knowledge of what these frightening men might do to them on every one of their pretty faces. All these things, Harriet told herself, were missing from her own features, making her easily the most beautiful woman there.
She knew at last why she had learnt to fight and why she had put up with the rigours of training though it went against so much of her nature. Sure, it had made her cool to look at but if she ever tried to use the blows and strikes of Li Kuan Yu outside the dojo she’d most likely end up in prison. That wasn’t it, here she was amongst these terrifying men unafraid — that was what her fighting skills were for: to give her the confidence to do exactly as she wanted. She’d tell Lulu and Rose tomorrow that she’d been accepted as an equal by a group of men who didn’t care what anybody thought about them, who lived a life of danger and debauchery. She was free and she loved it. As the voice of Dr King often shouted at her over the hidden speakers in the lavatories of the Admiral Codrington, ‘In the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at last, God awmighty, free at last!”’
Mind you, there were other people to whom Harriet would not mention this night at all: Helen for one, Toby as well and, though she would be seeing him for practice in about six hours’ time, Patrick.
Toby and Helen had been watching the television, a gardening show which they were both keen on: over the years they’d got a lot of interesting ideas for features in their own garden from it. About halfway through the show, though, Toby suddenly began shouting at the television, ‘Tree surgeons! Tree surgeons! Tree surgeons! They’re not fucking surgeons! How can they call themselves surgeons? They’re just gardeners! Not even proper overall gardeners, they’re just tree gardeners! A pack of jumped-up pretentious twats. I mean a mechanic’s not a car consultant, is he? A plumber’s not a drainage doctor! A window cleaner’s not a … a … a window surgeon!’
Then suddenly he began crying.
‘Toby, what’s the matter?’ Helen asked, touching his hand.
‘Can’t you see?’ be said, glaring at her furiously. ‘It’s the tree surgeons, they make me so angry …’
‘But I couldn’t help feeling that it had to be more than that,’ she told Julio, ‘though God knows what.’
‘It’s another woman,’ Julio stated bluntly.
She felt herself blushing bright red. ‘Another woman! Toby? You don’t know my husband if you think it’s another woman.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t know of any other thing that would make a man so crazy.’
‘No! No! No!. Maybe in Argentina, with all that tango dancing and machismo and the cars with no numverplates,’ she told him, ‘but not here in north London. He has a very stressful job — it’s probably something to do with that.’
Then it suddenly struck her that the Julio she was talking to inside her head was the old grumpy fellow she’d just met rather than the optimistic younger version. With an effort she conjured the younger man out of the shadows at the back of her brain.
‘Of course it’s not another woman,’ young Julio told her, ‘after all he is your husband as you say and you are such a beautiful woman, how could anybody ever tire of you?’
‘Exactly,’ Helen replied, finally satisfied with the conversation.
Yet the picture of the Argentinian that she held in her mind, an image of a handsome, long-haired, athletic youth, was constantly being overlaid like a faulty, juddering, antique videotape with the likeness of a mournful, bad-tempered, crippled old man.
The back of the mournful, bad-tempered, crippled old man was towards her as she sidled between the tables in the park café. It wasn’t true, despite what he’d told her, that he was in there all the time. She knew this because she’d called in on several occasions at different times of the day and there’d always been somebody else sitting in the seat he’d said was Julio’s seat. She knew in her heart that she should leave him be but there was a terrible compulsion within her to get him to conform more closely to the image of Julio she held in her mind.
She nearly missed him this time as he was at a completely different table by a window staring out into the busy, sunlit park.
‘Oh. Hello, the lady from the puppet show,’ he said, rising formally from his seat to greet her, at least remembering who she was but not smiling fondly as she’d imagined he might. ‘Please sit down,’ Julio said, gesturing to a red plastic bucket seat opposite. ‘You seem tired, it makes you look old.’
‘Oh well, you know,’ Helen replied, sinking down into the unyielding sweaty chair, ‘it’s my work. I work for a charity that looks after talking birds and there’s been sudden tribal uprisings in Papua New Guinea. The mudmen, after like fifty years of being peaceable, have suddenly taken to raiding Western targets. They attacked the British Consul’s summer residence in the Southern Highlands two weeks ago and they’ve taken his daughter’s parrot, Polly Williams, hostage. They’ve already released a video of Polly pleading for his life and saying he’ll be killed if the British government doesn’t, meet a number of insane conditions. We’re trying to put together a team of negotiators to go out there but it’s hard finding the right people, it’s wearing me out … worrying about that poor bird, poor Polly. I guess that’s me, I worry too much.’
‘It occurs to me you all worry too much, all you women,’ Julio said. ‘You know when I am in the newsagent’s I look at the men’s magazines and there’s hundreds of them about their many hobbies — trains, guns, cars, sailing, Asian women with enormous breasts. But then I look at the women’s magazines and I see every one of them is to do with self-improvement, a constant stribing to make yourselbes one hundred per cent perfect. Lose weight, get fitter, speak Chinese, knit this, weave that. The men they are completely happy with themselves the way they are, the women all hate themselbes.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ Helen said, smiling — she loved it when he said wise things — ‘we make it such hard work being a woman.’
Julio said, ‘When I was a child we were quite rich, so my mother didn’t need to work but still she couldn’t enjoy herself. Instead she was always going to night school, taking classes and half learning languages but then becoming dispirited and giving them up because she hadn’t become fluent in two weeks.’ Here he paused. ‘Then one day without warning she disappeared.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ Helen gasped. ‘The Triple A!’
‘No, nothing like that,’ he replied, annoyingly smiling a tiny bit in a pitying way at her melodramatic interruption. ‘It was long before the Triple A; even so the family were out of our minds with worry because she was gone for a month vefore we found out where she was. When we discovered her do you know what my mother was doing?’
‘No.’
‘Working as a chamvermaid in a hotel.’
‘A chambermaid?’
‘Yes, this woman who had servants to do any little thing she wanted was cleaning toilets and was happier than
she bad been for a long time. My mother told me afterwards when we got her home that it is many women’s plan if things become too much for them, they think they’ll run away and work in a hotel.’
‘Why a hotel?’
‘She said you are part of a community but have no responsibility. You get told what to do, a vit of a wage and somewhere to sleep. Working in a hotel lets you off all the endless effort of being a woman, all this responsibility to improve yourself.
‘Yes, you are still caring for other people but at a distance, not too involved. Because that is the women’s other thing: that they think secretly that they all are in charge of everything and have to work every hour of the day to make everyvody happy.’
10
The pond in the park, once dead and stagnant, now fumed with life, starlings, sparrows and blackbirds came to drink from its soupy waters, house martins and swifts looped low over the black surface to scoop up the dragonflies and water boatmen that skimmed across the surface. Wood pigeons cooed in the trees, dandelions, daisies and native poppies spotted the emerald grass. Harriet said to her sister, ‘The hardware store’s closed down, I hear it’s going to be a fucking Starbucks or one of those places that sells sandwiches made in India the day before and then packed into triangular little packs by people suffering from cholera.’