by Alexei Sayle
‘Well, you know times change, if people can’t pay the going rate for a property …’
‘It doesn’t seem fair.’
‘I’d have thought you’d be all for change,’ Helen said.
‘You’re confusing my personal growth with a guy being thrown out of his shop after thirty years: they’re not the same thing.’
‘What about Starbucks’ personal growth?’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
When Harriet and her sister argued they never argued about what the argument was about. Like the superpowers in the last century fighting their surrogate wars over the territories of smaller nations, so Harriet and Helen would conduct furious rows over Vatican foreign policy or the correct way to make couscous with roasted Mediterranean vegetables, each of them adopting more and more extreme positions they didn’t believe in, while the real disagreement was over Harriet being expected to babysit at a moment’s notice or her dropping out of night school yet again. Sometimes it was unclear to both of them what the buried subject of the argument was: Harriet could remember one furious row over the ecological effects of tourism on the Great Barrier Reef where they both forgot what rabid views they’d started out with and had to end it with weak and confused agreement.
She supposed really it was always ultimately about the same thing — the upper hand.
‘Anyway,’ Helen said, ‘I’ve always found when a shop closes, a few weeks later I can’t remember what it used to sell. It’s only sometimes when you need some nails or a copy of the Koran you recall there used to be a shop that sold what. you wanted round the corner but then you go and get it somewhere else. And restaurants … think of the number of restaurants that have come and gone, you always know they’re in trouble when there’s a waiter standing in the doorway staring miserably up and down the street. That’s not going to encourage you to eat there, is it? Like that old-fashioned Italian place up the hill, do you remember it? That closed down last week because it was useless.’
Toby spent most of that sunny Saturday buying a light bulb. In their house there seemed to be an almost infinite number of different light fittings: there were lamps that required small continental screw fittings, lamps that required large continental screw fittings, some that took small bayonet bulbs and some that took large bayonet bulbs, not to mention all the halogen lights that were almost impossible to fit with their fiddly little prongy things.
In the past he could have got what he wanted from Mr Sargassian’s hardware store which apparently now was 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. Now he had to drive into Wood Green, find a parking place, find a lighting shop, then had to phone Helen. ‘What am I looking for again?’
‘Large continental screw-fitting energy-saving pearl candle.’
‘Right.’
‘That’s a small continental screw-fitting clear candle non-energy saving,’ Helen said when he got it home.
‘Oh.’
When Toby returned to Wood Green the lighting store was closed so he had to drive to a DIY warehouse off the North Circular Road. “What was it again?’ he asked his wife on the phone.
‘Large continental screw-fitting energy-saving pearl candle.’
‘Right,’ Toby said but the DIY warehouse didn’t have any of those so he had to drive back into Muswell Hill where he finally got the bulb in a shop identical to Mr Sargassian’s hardware store. The store was two shops down from the boarded-up Italian restaurant; a temporary sign on the hardboard window said it was soon to be a fitness place called Pontius Pilates.
‘Are you still looking for people to go to Papua New Guinea?’ Toby asked Helen as she wobbled on their dangerous stepladder trying to fit the bulb.
‘Yeah, why?’
‘I’d like to go.’ ‘You?’
‘Yes.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, why not me?’
‘What is wrong with you, Toby?’ she asked, descending the stepladder and facing him.
‘My life’s too comfortable.’
‘Well, you could buy some shoes that don’t fit, then, instead of going to Papua New Guinea. You’ll have to camp, you know, in the jungle. I mean you don’t like staying in any hotel that doesn’t have at least three AA stars.’
‘That’s the point, I want to rough it, while doing something worthwhile, for talking birds in danger of course.’
‘I know they’re not up to strength yet,’ Helen said doubtfully.
‘I suppose I can have a word with the PNG group coordinator,’ but Toby knew from her tone of voice that she wasn’t convinced and almost certainly nothing would happen. On the other hand, he told himself, at least he’d tried.
Unlike ‘her Julio’ — the one inside her head who was nearly always courteous, polite and kind — the ‘real’ Julio could sometimes be rather too crude for Helen’s taste. He said to her as she waited for them to leave his flat, ‘You know what my theory of human evolution is?’
‘No, natural selection maybe or the intervention of some all-knowing, all-seeing, essentially kindly spiritual entity like in the books of Paulho Puoncho?’
‘That pinche cabron! No. My theory of human evolution is shit.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yes, shit. You look at other animals — their arseholes are right on the outside of their vodies so their waste comes out nice and easy but we have these vig fat vuttocks that trap our shit. I think maybe we evolved so we could wipe our asses and get away from the stink of our own vacksides.’
Not very nice and terribly negative; she knew he’d been tortured and everything, but still. This conversation took place in Julio’s ‘apartment’, as he called it, actually a one-bedroomed flat on the Watney Estate. There were Spanish-style wrought-iron grilles over the windows and an ornate black security gate covering the front door which looked both vaguely exotic and sad at the same time and also looked stout enough to keep the emergency services out if there was a fire. Inside, the walls were painted in ochre reds and yellows, there were colourful posters with words in Spanish on them and on his desk piled with papers and magazines sat the corpses of his inexpertly mended marionettes Margarita, Tio Pajero, Abuela, El Gordo and Señor Chuckles.
As Julio moved about the flat preparing to go out, forgetting where he’d left his keys, patting each one of the many pockets of his trousers to ensure he’d got his reading glasses and his heart pills, the slow, jerky movements of his body reminded Helen of those badly repaired puppets. Surreptitiously she looked at his body but was disappointed that there were no apparent signs of torture on his stick-like arms projecting from the flappy short sleeves of his faded white shirt. Certainly he didn’t seem to be quite able to stand up straight, his body etching a slender, shallow ‘5’ in the overheated air of the room; this she took as evidence of abuse at the hands of Fascists. Of course you saw lots of elderly people just like that down the post office and nearly all of them hadn’t been tortured by a right-wing military junta so perhaps she was wrong.
A familiar but distant sensation had been dogging Helen since entering his flat and it was only now that she realised what it was: the feeling of being on a date. Trying to recall, Helen wasn’t sure she’d been alone in a room with a man for more than a few minutes since marrying Toby. All the people they saw socially were couples like themselves so the men came with the women, the women with the men. Before that the only males she’d been alone with she’d been having sex with. It seemed odd to be by herself with a man who had shown no interest in her. Helen wasn’t completely sure how to behave; in the end she thought she’d try for flirtatious indifference.
The experience of being in some guy’s flat, of looking for clues to his personality like a detective, of simple objects taking on the qualities of heroism or cuteness or repulsion, flooded back to her, almost like a memory of childhood. Helen cruised his books and his walls f
or revealing insights. Coming upon a group photo in black and white she picked it up to study more closely. The photograph showed a group of youngish men and women dressed in the style of the 1960s under a banner that read ‘Congreso des Marionetas. Buenos Aires 1970.’ With a jolt Helen recognised the young Julio Spuciek, the one who had lived in her mind for the last twenty years, standing in the centre of a group amongst whom to her kind of person were a selection of living gods. There was Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marquez and even the elusive Paulho Puoncho.
‘Quite a photo,’ she said to Julio, indicating the picture.
‘Oh yes,’ he agreed, short-sightedly peering at it. ‘At that time there was a great deal of Norwegian money abailable for those interested in writing for puppets, so many came. Though from what I remember we spent most of our time in and out of the brothels.’
‘The brothels?’ Helen repeated, though there isn’t really another word that ‘brothel’ can be confused with.
‘Yes, brothels, whorehouses, vordellos. Everyone in that group thought women were only truly beautiful when they were very young girls. There was a particular house in Vuenos Aires off the Abenida Florida, I think it was, Paulho Puoncho used to go there all the time. The girls were perhaps fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, at least that’s what the madam said and we chose to velieve her.’
Then Julio said, ‘At least I am no longer interested in any of that, thank God! At my age I will never fall for another woman. Now, shall we go and eat Chinese food?’
A few days before, Helen had gone to the café at the time of day when she thought he might be there. At first she couldn’t see him but sat at a slimy table anyway and ate a stale Mars Bar with a sell-by date in the last century. Through the dirty windows looking out over the playground it seemed to her that all the middle-class mums looked so terribly worried, while the few working-class mothers happily chatted and smoked as their kids fell off the swings and cracked their heads on the concrete.
“Ello, ‘Oolio!’ she heard behind her and he was there.
‘Listen,’ Helen said after he was seated opposite her and she’d paid for his coffee, ‘I’d really like to take you out to dinner one night this week. I can get us a table at the Ivy with a couple of days’ notice if you’d like to go somewhere like that.’
‘No, I don’t think so …’
‘Please, maybe not necessarily anywhere fancy.’
‘Well,’ Julio said, a distant look coming into his eyes, ‘I have heard that there is a place in Wood Green Shopping City. I read about it in the local paper, they say it is called Wow Tse Tung and you can eat all the Chinese food you wish to for nine pounds and ninety-five pence. Their advert in the local paper declares that a person can choose from over one hundred and twenty dishes — there’s sushi and roast Peking duck with pancakes on the weekends. Can you imagine that? So much food for so little money.’
This must be what they mean by ‘the Fat of the Land’, Helen thought to herself, surveying the customers of Wow Tse Tung. Or rather, she amended, ‘the Fat of the British Commonwealth’.
On this Friday night the place was full of the overweight of the United Kingdom’s former empire. There were fat Cypriots, fat Sikhs, fat Bangladeshis, fat Nigerians, fat Maltese, fat Chinese, fat Australians, fat Papuan Pygmies. Morbidly obese Guyanese overflowed their groaning plywood and chrome chairs, while enormous-bottomed Jamaican women creaked over the protesting blond laminate floor and corpulent Malays queued impatiently beside clinically overweight South Africans for their turn at the chicken wings. All of them made her feel sick. Helen was certain she had never revealed her revulsion — her extreme dislike of fatness — to Harriet but secretly she had always thought that to be overweight was simply a failure of personality, an inability to exert sufficient control over your body. She admitted to herself at that instant why she’d married Toby: it was because he had been so in love with her that she would always hold the power and he would never be able to hurt her, she would always be the one in control.
She and Julio had taken a minicab the mile and a half to Wood Green Shopping City, a red-brick ziggurat of shops, restaurants and walkways that had furious winds blowing down them on even the calmest of summer days.
Wow Tse Tung was on the second level and an elephantine pair of Hindus were just about to snag the last good table opposite the large plate-glass window overlooking the treacly traffic outside, but the Argentinian who up till then had been shuffling like an old man developed a sudden turn of speed and grabbed it for him and Helen. Outside, the buses, the dented vans and the Asian kids in their tricked-out Hondas and Subarus ground up and down the High Street as once their table was secured they ordered two Singapore Tiger beers and were free to start on the hunt for food.
‘There are six different kinds of soup!’ Julio said in wonder, stating at the stainless-steel tureens.
Soup, swoop, loop de loop, she was surprised to think but at least didn’t say out loud.
Helen helped herself to a small bowl of hot and sour and sat down; she took a couple of sips but found herself oddly unable to enjoy the food in front of her. In turn she tried to listen to what Julio was saying but instead all she could think about was what item of food she was going to have next. She said to herself, As soon as I get through this hot and sour, I’ll have a bowl of chicken and sweetcorn. Yet once an overflowing white bowl of wallpaper paste was in front of her her mind was already churning over which starters she was going to choose. First time round I’ll stick to dumplings and the smaller spring rolls, she thought. Then on the second run I’ll go for chicken wings, grilled prawns in chilli sauce and the Peking duck with hoi sin wrapped in pancakes. After her fourth trip to the servery for satay sticks, seaweed and char sui buns Helen thought if she forced herself to pause for a while her mania might subside, but as she sat at the table, her fingers fidgeting on the polished wood trying to listen to what her companion was saying, she could only count down the seconds until she would be able to return to the buffet.
Through the disturbing thoughts of Chinese food dancing across her mind Julio seemed to be going on about the time when he had first come to Britain as a refugee from Fascism. From what information managed to fight its way past the dumplings and spare ribs singing their siren songs, she was able to gather that he had in those days been a much more significant figure, almost at the centre of trendy London life. He babbled about the takeover of the magazine Puppetry Today by a group of Marxists, of the early days of The Muppet Show at Elstree studios and he made a violent denunciation of the man who’d had his hand up Roland Rat.
Halfway through one particular tale of a drunken wrestling march with a ventriloquist’s dummy who Julio had mistakenly thought was a dwarf that had been shouting insults at him, Helen could sit still no longer. She jumped up and ran back to the counter, this time for main course food, and returned to the table carrying a plate piled high with a massive mess of curries, sweet and sour pork in a strange orange sauce, chicken legs and wrinkled beef and black beans. Abandoning her chopsticks she also brought back with her a big spoon from the servery so that she could shovel food into her mouth more effectively until there was a sharp pain, across her chest and a sheet of sweat was running down her face, but still she was unable to stop.
Used to having her rapt attention, after a while Julio lapsed into silence. He ate in a different way to Helen, laying out his choices in a pattern on the plate then raising it to his lips slowly, taking tiny little bites of each morsel like a rodent. From time to time he would surreptitiously slip a chicken wing wrapped in a napkin or a peanut-sauce-coated satay stick into her handbag with a stagey wink.
In the humid night air they came out of the back of Shopping City and headed towards home accompanied by the bass beat of the air-conditioning units. The mismatched couple slipped past the wheely bins piled high with rubbish, their feet sliding on the greasy service road, the future behind them and solid Edwardian suburbia in front. Soon Helen and Julio passed the old-fashioned Itali
an restaurant now shuttered and boarded up. Helen had only stopped eating when Julio decided he wanted to leave. ‘I haven’t had any puddings,’ she moaned like a petulant child.
‘Chinese desserts are always a disappointment, just sponge cakes with soya veans in them,’ he said, unbending, then taking her under the arm led her to the cash desk to pay for them both and afterwards out of the shopping centre.
‘So did you enjoy that?’ Helen asked as she waddled down the tree-lined hill and over the railway bridge, the pain in her chest slowly transferring itself to her stomach.
‘No,’ be said, sighing, ‘I feel soiled …‘
‘Well,’ she replied, relieved to understand why he’d wanted to leave so abruptly, ‘that can happen if you eat too much Chinese food but it’s nothing to be ashamed of, we can go back to your place to change your trousers then you’ll be-.—’
‘No! I mean. I feel dirty, I tried to enjoy going to that place but there is something terribly wrong with such avundance, for people to dine every night as if they were at the wedding of the King of China for nine pounds and ninety-fibe pence.’
Helen found herself thinking, Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s only dinner! then gasped, she was arguing with Julio Spuciek! The man who had always agreed with her, whose opinion always concurred with hers, was talking miserable crap. Confusion filled her mind.
Not noticing any change in Helen’s manner, the old man grumbled on. ‘I went to B&Q only last week. I went in there only to get a right-angle square and a hammer but for the price of these two things I could buy a complete set in its own box, comprising over one hundred and fifty different tools, ratchet heads, socket sets, screwdrivers, craft knife, so many things for so little money It made me weep right there in the hardware section to see it.’
They came to a stop outside the Watney Flats. He said, ‘May I ask you something, Helen?’