by Alexei Sayle
‘Now I can’t say where he’s gone but we’re still in touch. There is a problem though: the problem is there’s things he needs that he can’t get where he is. Some of these things I know you can get here, others I’m pretty sure they’re illegal but if you know the right people …‘
‘Right, so …?‘
‘You’re more wordly than me, Harriet, you know more about life outside the dojo. Can I show you the list of things and ask what you think?’
‘Sure, I guess.’
He handed over a long list of items which he’d printed off from his computer. Studying it, she thought Martin Po might as well have been asking for winged unicorns and a magical goose. If she hadn’t been angry at him for ignoring how brilliant her performance had been she might not have said, ‘Well, I know some people might be able to fix you up with some of this stuff, at a price.’
‘Good, perhaps you can contact them for a meeting?’ he said. ‘I’ll see you on Monday for practice then.’ And pushing through the pampas grass he disappeared.
As she was sitting back down at the wooden bench table with her friends, Lulu said, ‘Here comes Toby and your sister. Christ! He looks pissed and she looks … I dunno, sort of weird.’
Julio Spuciek was at the fair! Helen had caught sight of him amongst a bumbling little group of junkies and petty thieves, all of them she supposed under community service orders, who shuffled narcoleptically around picking up litter and emptying the bins like a Southern chain gang but without the gospel singing. It was a shock to see him; since their dinner at the Chinese all-you-can eat place she’d had to force herself not to go down to the café daily, she’d fought the urge to stand for an hour or so outside the Watney Flats hoping to see him leave or to take food or hot soup, swoop, loop de loop round to his apartment.
Though she knew she shouldn’t she still couldn’t prevent herself from going looking for him and finally tracked him down beside the football pitch where he was idly poking at a discarded crisp packet with a pointed stick.
‘Hi, Julio,’ she said. ‘Have you been all right?’ She noticed he seemed to have a silly smile on his face.
He looked up with a start. ‘My goodness your sister, what a woman! So beautiful,’ was the first thing Julio said to her. ‘I started looking at her on the stage because I see this woman and there was a strong resemblance to you. How can this be? I thought. Then when she started to move I fell in love with her beauty just like that! I thought I was finished with such things but there you are, it’s happened.’
‘But,’ Helen stammered’… I thought you said only young girls of fourteen were beautiful?’
‘When? When did I say that?’
‘You said you and all your lecherous South American mates agreed that women are only truly beautiful when they are young — fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. You and Paulho Puoncho went to a brothel off the Avenida Florida where the girls were maybe fourteen, fifteen.’
‘Oh, that was some nonsense that we used to say when we were young. I went along with it but never really believed. No, your sister up there on the stage, a body of such grace, such power and, I think the most attractive of all, capable of great cruelty.’
‘My sister capable of great cruelty! Hat? You must be joking.’
‘No, she is magnificent.’
She couldn’t stop herself asking, ‘What about me?’
‘What about you?’
‘Don’t I have grace, power, cruelty?’
‘You?’ He looked at Helen and laughed. ‘You are a girl. A pretty girl, sure, but one whose looks mean too much to her. Everyone must love you. or you feel you are nothing. Perhaps you will introduce me to your sister Harriet?’
She was saved from figuring out what her response to this would be by a young community worker rounding the corner. ‘Oi, ‘Oolio!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve been warned about chatting to the girls. Do you want another two hundred hours?’
So he scuttled off, leaving her feeling even more uncomfortable and confused.
Martin and Patrick had once discussed the idea of whether it might be possible to form a squad of trained killers, of ninjas, from those who are suffering or who had suffered from panic attacks and related acute anxiety disorders — phobias, obsessive compulsive-behaviour, intrusive fearful thoughts and so on. Sifu Po had a notion that if getting out of the house in the morning was the most frightening thing in the world then a midnight parachute drop into the Yemen would be no more frightening. He reasoned that if you are frightened of everything you are therefore frightened of nothing. If you are phobic, he said, it takes as much courage to touch a frozen chicken as it does to murder a Russian gangster in his sleep, if you are scared nearly to death of the voices in your head telling you to take your pants down in public then going up against the Colombian drug cartels might be a cakewalk by comparison. As he said to his young disciple, ‘Let’s face it, Patrick you can run away or kill the Colombian drug cartel but the voices in your head, you’re stuck with them.’ For a while the two of them had hung around outside the Nightingale Clinic which Martin said was a famous mental place and eventually they found a number of people who were suffering from anxiety disorders, but when the two men tried to take these people somewhere to explain their ideas they kept crying, fainting on the pavement and begging the martial arts adepts to let them go. Still, it had been a happy time for Martin and Patrick travelling around together, stalking the mentally ill.
Patrick had thought that maybe with Harriet he would become Martin — the wise sifu — and she would become him, sort of — the disciple, the one who learnt and admired. But she seemed more interested in the gangsters next door.
Harriet sat in front of her computer, accessed Google and started looking for information on Li Kuan Yu. She didn’t know why she hadn’t done it before; perhaps it was because when she had been in love with it, she’d wanted to think that Li Kuan Yu was unique, a private magical thing that existed in a world outside the tawdry goings-on that you found on the internet.
The first few searches produced bewildering references to impossible Chinese classical books, myths and legends, but no martial arts, apart from a reference to Kuan Yu, apparently the god of choice of the Triads, the police and kung fu masters. Changing the spelling to Lee Kuan Yew brought reams of entries referring to the semi-retired dictator of Singapore but this wasn’t what she was after.
Altering the spelling several times, ‘LKY: Kettering: Martial Arts’. finally produced a number of entries. In a Forum on the site ‘www.Obscurexternalmartialarts.com’ she read: ‘Web-forum: The Master of Northampton. Does anyone know what happened to Martin Po?’ Somebody calling themselves ‘Tim from Vancouver’ asked this question.
There were a number of replies.
ENTRY: From William Tang, PhD, Dept of Sino Tibetan Studies, University of Durham. Posted 16/10/99.
Martin Po was reputedly master of the Legend of Li Xian Ieou (Silver Fin Fish Fist), an allegedly deadly martial arts form. There are no published photographs either of the art or its founder.
Origin: Some trace the roots of Silver Fin Fish Fist to Tönpa Shenrab, the founder of Bon, a shamanistic folk religion which pre-dated Buddhism. He is said to have been born in the mythical land of Olmo Lung Ring, whose location remains something of a mystery. The land is traditionally described as dominated by Mount Yung-drung Gu-tzeg (Edifice of Nine Swastikas), which many identify as Mount Kailash in western Tibet. Due to the sacredness of Olmo Lung Ring and the mountain, both the counter-clockwise swastika and the number nine are of great significance. (See Snellgrove: The Nine Ways of Bon, 1957.)
Certainly the swastika featured large in the sect which surrounded the cult of Li Xian Yeow. The Happy Garden, headquarters and temple, was situated at number 9 Boncastle Road, Kettering. See Leicester Mercury, Jan. 1982, pp. 2—3, ‘Chinese Nazis in Northampton?’.
Though never numerous there have been no known references to Martin Po since 1997.
There were several other entries, one from somebo
dy calling themselves ‘Iron Fist Tony Roberts’ which read: ‘Sure. I studied his so-called LKY some time back. He’s a fraud. It doesn’t work. I hurt my back quite severely from falling off a ladder practising one of the forms. Don’t go there.’
This had led to two responses:
From Anna Conda, Leipzig, Germany: ‘Fraud yourself. Liar! LKY is best world martial art. I will defend my master to the death against all detractors, you crippled pimp. Martin Po is in the Far East, by the way, learning at the feet of his Master. He will return and crush his enemies, probably soon.’
And lastly from somebody called ‘John in Daventry’, who wrote: ‘I went to school with a Chinese kid called Martin Po. I seem to remember he got done by the police for jumping out of trees and wrapping his legs round schoolgirls, after that he went away. I don’t know anything about LKY but students should try Drunken Monkey Fist. Much more effective and no trees.’
Not a unique, private, magical thing that exists in a world outside the tawdry goings-on found on the internet then.
It was a particularly busy time at work for Helen since the following week would be National Talking Bird Awareness Week. However, since the same seven days were also European Leprosy Awareness Week and had within it UK Banana Day and National Ride to Work Day not to mention the entire year being United Nations International Year of the Environmentally Aware they struggled to get media attention. Sometimes she thought that perhaps the authorities could extend the year, say, to six hundred days then every cause could have its day. Yet she knew that inevitably even this unlikely solution would lead to problems; the football season would be too long for a start and the worthwhile days, weeks and months would simply expand to fill the extra time. Maybe, Helen thought, some of these special days could be combined so that you’d get something like National Ride to Work on a Leper Day. It might be nice for people to chat to a leper while they were carried into work, they might learn something about the disease that they wouldn’t get from reading an article in the paper.
It occurred to her that she might be able to conserve two birds with one stone. The rescue of the British Consul’s daughter’s parrot from rebel mudmen in Papua New Guinea was just the kind of heart-warming story Warbird needed to put it in front of other charities. Secondly, if the rescue mission was led by the husband of one of the charity’s senior administrators that would certainly help her standing within the organisation; after all it had been a while now since the Rwanda triumph. Or it might all be a complete disaster.
11
The summer was hot with periods of humidity (‘humadidity’ as Toby called it) mixed with warm rain that in previous years would have sent plant diseases racing round the park. However, because of their wild mongrel nature the plants were strong this year and fought off illness with ease. The store that had once belonged to Mr Sargassian finally reopened but not as predicted as a corporate coffee shop or a place that sold sandwiches packed in India, rather as a charity shop supposedly for the Namibian Disaster Relief Fund.
‘They’ve opened a shop now,’ Harriet heard the Can Man say, ‘yes, them.’
As she browsed the store, it seemed to her that many of the products on show appeared to be at remarkably low prices and were suspiciously new compared with the cast-offs in other charity shops she’d visited. Stacked up were the latest DVD recorders, top-of-the-line computers and iPods that she thought were only on sale in the United States alongside huge piles of round tins of mackerel from Turkey and big fat rolls of shiny black rubbish bags for a pound.
Since the party at the flat next door there had been several excursions and on each occasion there had been a new outfit for Harriet. Often these were waiting for her in the next-door flat but at other times Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro took Harriet to smart clothes and jewellery places in Crouch End and Muswell Hill where the women serving in the shops would give her funny looks. Sometimes they went to nightclubs, once to the dog racing at Walthamstow and once to a party in a flat on the Greenwich Peninsula overlooking the Dome.
Sometimes when they went out they’d travel around in one of those stretch limousines; with its dimly lit interior yawning off into the distance, it felt to Harriet like they were travelling around outer London in a carpeted coal mine. The gang of young men dressed in smart suits would perch sideways on foldout chairs and drink whisky from a line of cut-glass decanters arrayed on a drinks cabinet to the side of the limousine, their contents described on a little brass dog tag worn round the neck.
One night as she came out of her shop towards the limousine the Tin Can Man was on the opposite pavement standing just inside the park, knee-deep in the long grass; unusually she could see the silver glint of his phone as it hung silent in his hand.
Clambering into the back seat of the limousine, Harriet cast another quick look at the silent watcher. Following the direction of her gaze Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro asked, indicating the Tin Can Man, ‘Friend of yours?’
‘No, not really, I just see him around, you know, and he says things about me or he used to …‘
‘I see. Well, actually, we used to be quite close to him.’
‘Him?’
‘Yes, before his troubles he was something of a wealthy man.’
‘Really? He doesn’t seem like it now.’
‘Nevertheless it is true; you know, he owned that building where the gym that is only for women is now. Used to manufacture women’s clothes there. When he had his troubles we were luckily able to help him out a little by buying the building off him. Unfortunately he was not grateful because by then his mind had turned; still we tried to be his friend and that is the main thing.’
When Harriet had first become involved with Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro and the Namibians and had gone to that first party she’d wondered whether she’d finally found her gang of travellers, her posse, her tribe, her crew. Certainly being in their company gave her a delirious sense of being unrestrained. To Harriet Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro and all the others whom he mixed with were not bound by parking tickets, planning regulations and refraining from putting your rubbish out until after 8.30 on bin night. They did not submit to the petty rules of society. Of course there was a price to pay for this freedom — the price they paid was that they didn’t have the protection of society and other people sometimes tried to kill them but they seemed OK with that.
Yet as she spent more time with them it slowly became clear to her that they weren’t free at all, that their lives actually required much, much more effort than the average law-abiding civilian’s whom they so despised. The Namibians had no friends who hadn’t been bribed not to rat on them and they had to act, to keep up a front of hardness at all times like they were in some sort of a twenty-four-hour British gangster film. Worse than that they weren’t nice and nobody they knew was nice, the normal give and take of human contact didn’t apply, every second everybody they came into contact with was looking to achieve some advantage over them and they were trying to do the same. The revelation to Harriet was that knowing all this didn’t affect her attitude towards them — they were fun, a welcome contrast to Patrick’s gloomy asceticism, Toby’s mooning devotion or the constant struggle with her sister for the upper hand. Which didn’t mean she could relax; there was no doubt it was her physical beauty that bought her a place at the party. Each time they asked her to go somewhere with them it meant that she was still beautiful.
But going out all night meant she needed to train extra hard during the day; if she let her workout regime slip for even an afternoon she instantly thought she could feel her muscles softening. Sometimes when her bones were burning from exercise and her knuckles bleeding from punching practice she wondered what it was about Old Fat Harriet that was so bad that she’d had to be starved to death. She’d certainly required a lot less upkeep than the new Harriet and she’d certainly been a lot better off financially. The thing that suffered most in all her constant exercise and late-night partying was the shop, her credit card bills
lay unpaid and she had to fight really hard not to remember that she was way behind on the mortgage.
‘Is Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro around?’ Harriet asked one of the young men manning the counter in the Namibian Disaster Relief Fund shop. Sulkily he turned to a doorway which led to a back storeroom and called out; after a few seconds she heard the older man emerging.
‘Ah, Harriet,’ he said with a big smile when he saw her, ‘just the person I was wishing to see. I was wanting to see you to ask whether you thought that the invention of the camera had destroyed painting and sculpture or had liberated it?’
‘Liberated it?’
‘Really? But don’t you feel that photography reproducing this perfect representation of the external world meant painting and sculpture went from attempting faithfully to express the universal world of everybody to instead representing the interior world of only the artist? Maybe as you say that was liberating but surely it made things much more difficult for the viewer since we can never know precisely what’s going on in anybody else’s mind, crikey! It’s hard enough to know what’s going on in your own.’
‘Yeah, you might be right.’
‘Also this abstractionism that you so champion so forcefully, Harriet, means that the average person can no longer know whether a work of art speaks to them or not. Nowadays a cabal of high priests, critics and gallery owners tells the public what is worthy and what is not and they follow like a herd of concrete cows.’
‘Yes, you’ve convinced me. Now look,’ she said, ‘there’s a friend of mine who wants to acquire a number of items that aren’t, shall we say … available on the open market.’
‘I see,’ replied Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro, his manner changing completely, stiffening a little like a gun dog at the scent of a business opportunity. ‘Do you have a list of these things?’