by Alexei Sayle
Despite the seriousness of their mission Helen was pleased to find she was able to take a good deal of pleasure in the mindless physicality of walking. It struck her as odd how so much of the vegetation that blocked their path was a vigorous, feral version of the pot plants you found tamed back in everybody’s home: from time to time she had the odd sensation that she was chopping her way through the gardening department of a large B&Q. On the second day, climbing upwards along the muddy path, they had picked up three of the original party sent by Warbird to negotiate the release of Polly Williams the parrot. Confused and dehydrated, the trio had no up-to-date news of what had happened to Toby and the rest of the party; instead they babbled about the treachery of their Papuan army guards and of being held in terrible conditions by the rebel tribesmen before managing to escape through a hole eaten by termites in the longhouse in which they’d been held. Fed and watered as best they could, the survivors had been sent back down the track with a couple of soldiers to wait for the Land-Rovers at the rendezvous site.
Helen had spoken to Timon the day before on the satellite phone; he’d been sent to stay at Martin and Swei Chiang’s place in Andalusia. ‘Why can’t I go and stay with Auntie Hat?’ he’d asked for the hundredth time. She told him he should be grateful to be able to enjoy the splendours of Seville and Granada.
‘Any news of Toby?’ Rose asked Harriet in the pub that night.
‘No, but I’m sure he’ll be all right.’
‘Why?’ asked Rose.
‘Dunno,’ Harriet replied glumly. ‘Just trying to stay positive. You know, I dislike everything about them but I’m beginning to think life would be a lot easier if you could be one of those religious people that thinks God’s watching over them and everything’s going to turn out fine in the end and that life isn’t really dangerous and a big random nothing.’
Lulu said, ‘Oh that only works as long as things are going well.’
‘How do you mean? I’m always reading in the paper or hearing on the radio that religious believers have better lives. They always tell everyone they do.’
‘Well, you say that, kitten,’ her friend replied, ‘but some of them are lying and as for the rest, well, when they have a crisis the religious people suffer post traumatic stress disorder much, much more severely than those like us who don’t believe in anything.’
‘Really? Wow …‘ Harriet’s awed tone wasn’t solely for the information she’d just been given but was also because it always came as a shock to her when Lulu showed any signs of having special knowledge and expertise and wasn’t just a crazy woman who drank and acted mad for a living. Helen, on the other hand, had always refused to accept Lulu’s eminence.
‘But, Hel,’ Harriet would always say to her sister. ‘She studied for five years.’
And her sister would inevitably reply, ‘It doesn’t matter how long you study something if the thing you’re studying is idiotic and wrong in the first place and the person studying it is a drunken whore.’
Harriet asked Lulu, ‘But don’t the religious people live longer, suffer less stress, have better hair then?’
‘Yeah, up to a point, except that’s only as long as nothing bad ever happens to them ever. But if they do have some sort of a disaster, couple of family members killed in a car crash, severe illness or losing their house keys then wallop! They fold like a map, go around tearing at their clothes, weeping, stamping on their bishop’s mitre and wailing about God having forsaken them and how could it happen to them and what kind of a world is this we’re living in? Where are their personal angels now they need them? And yadda yadda yadda, blackness, despair, the horror, the horror, all that. The big crybabies!’
‘Do you think you should call your patients big crybabies?’
‘What, you don’t think we hate you all? And the religious ones are big crybabies. See, deep down I don’t know what they really, truly believe. I do know that if you’re a fervent believer you have this desperate air of needing to be right all the time and if you’re religious you can be because you’ve got the word of God in your head to tell you you’re right all the time and these idiots feel all safe and snug on the surface seeing as the Lord is looking out for their family and pets and their career in the civil service. Until he stops of course. Then the world falls to bits and it’s terribly hard for them to get it back.’
‘So in some ways what you’re saying is,’ Harriet mused, ‘you’d actually be doing somebody a favour by proving to them that their religion, what they believed in, was nonsense. You’d be saving them pain in the future?’
But she didn’t get an answer from her friend as Lulu was staring at a harmless-looking man at the bar. ‘I’m sure that’s the bloke who’s been putting poison in my rubbish bags,’ she said.
On the third day of walking when they were a little way from the village there was a sudden crashing up ahead of them on the trail; the Australian soldiers immediately raised their rifles and slipped the safeties off but it was only one of the doctors from Medicos Sin Sombreros, accompanied by a native guide, red-faced and sweating. Ignoring the captain he located Helen halfway up the file and reaching her breathlessly said, ‘Madam, we have found your husband, he is injured but alive and God willing will make a full recovery.’
All the emotions Helen had been holding back, like a hundred unwatched TV programmes held on a digital hard-drive recorder, poured out of her now. Images of herself as she had been before flashed into her vision, the endless pointless parties, the conversations about nothing, her anger and intractability, her obsession with Julio, all these could be recorded over now and they could start again.
In a rush the party tumbled into the village square. On the rectangle made of tightly packed earth an impatient group of natives stood waiting, short, ageless and deep brown. These too joined the press of people heading for the air-conditioned Portakabin that by day served as the clinic of Medicos Sin Sombreros.
The doctor, Helen and the SAS captain squeezed through the door first and then the soldiers barred the way of the tribespeople who were forced to peer over each other’s shoulders into the frigid air.
On simple hospital beds, gauzy white mosquito nets giving the place the air of a Tennessee Williams play, lay the rest of the Warbird party.
Toby was in the centre bed. Helen frantically scrabbled under the net and crouching by his side took her husband’s hand.
He was in a bad way, bandaged and bruised, his skin purple and verdigris, a drip disappeared into his arm, yet at her touch he woke. Prising his gluey eyes apart he managed to croak, ‘Hi, babe.’
‘Oh Toby,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m so glad you’re all right, I’ve been such a cow to you, I’ve been so distracted lately I feel like I haven’t been there for you …’
‘No, no, it’s OK,’ he replied feebly, patting her arm, ‘this was a thing … a thing I had to do.’
‘I drove you to-it …’
‘No, no.’
‘Well, everything’s going to be better from now on.’
‘I’m sure it will be … and I did it, you know, I did it.’
‘Did what, darling?’
‘Tested myself, like I came here to. They kept us all tied up in the one longhouse; things weren’t too rough until those others escaped then the bloke who was leading the rebels, the one who was urging the tribespeople to turn their backs on modern things, to drive out the white men, revive cannibalism, all that, Chinese guy, very fit but well over sixty, dyed black hair, he went completely mental, yelling at the natives and beating them with a stick.
‘All us hostages got pretty sick with hunger and dehydration and malaria, so sick we could hardly move. One night I had a dream, we were in the Admiral Codrington, me, you, Harriet, Oscar and Katya and Oscar and Katya’s builder wearing quite a restrained black and gold bikini and Polly Williams was there too. So Polly Williams says to me, “You remember we were watching that documentary the other week about social conditions in London in the 1950s?” Do you remember, bab
e, it was on BBC 4?’
‘I think so, Toby, yes.’
‘Anyway Polly Williams says, “And do you remember that the landladies who rented flats used to have signs in their windows that read ‘No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs’ but what I want to know, Toby, is why were the dogs trying to rent flats? They didn’t need their own flats, did they, the dogs? Not like the Blacks and the Irish.” Then Polly Williams pointed to Oscar and Katya’s builder with his wing and he said, “But he built them the flats, he was their friend and he built them all the flats, the Blacks and the Irish and the Dogs …’
‘Right …’ Helen said.
‘Do you see what Polly Williams was trying to tell me? Oscar and Katya’s builder, I used to laugh at him because he was friendly with simple foreigners but I was wrong. I was being a fool, a supercilious fool. So I got sort of talking to a couple of them, the natives who were guarding us, in sign language and pidgin English. Turns out they’d been enthusiastic at first but were going off the whole idea of being rebels. Didn’t like being cruel to us or being nasty to Polly Williams the parrot; they were worried that if he was killed his spirit would come back and haunt them.
‘Apparently the Chinese guy, his whole plan was he wanted to lure the Australians into a trap, to jump on them out of the trees, seize their weapons. He had been expecting to receive a big shipment of things that would help him march on Port Moresby and declare himself King of Papua New Guinea or something but they hadn’t come through. So anyway one night these friendly natives freed me and the other hostages and together with stones and sticks we jumped the Chinese guy and his lieutenants while they slept. Christ, Helen it was nasty … I didn’t know, babe, I could, I didn’t know they could …‘ During the last few minutes Toby had become increasingly agitated, a fuddled look rising in his eyes.
The Spanish doctor lifted the mosquito net, a syringe in his hand. ‘Tovi,’ he said, ‘Tovi, you need to calm down,’ as he injected clear liquid into the prone man’s arm.
‘Now one thing, Helen,’ Toby said, grabbing her arm, ‘I need to tell you, one thing, at the banquet tonight … at the banquet don’t, whatever you do don’t …‘ then he slumped abruptly into unconsciousness.
As Toby had said there was a banquet that night. The doctor told them, ‘Yes, I’m sorry about this but the headman wants you to come and eat with the tribe tonight, it’s a big honour so you can’t really refuse without giving offence.’
She asked, ‘Are any of the hostages well enough to attend?’
‘No, they are all sedated, they’ve had a tough time, but on the good side several of the tribespeople have told me that Polly Williams was able to fly away in the confusion and that they have seen him since sitting in a tree telling them wise things.’
The houses in the-village were divided into those for the men and those for the women, all were built on stilts with open sides and intricately thatched roofs. In the centre of the community to one side of the square there was a longer house which was kept for ceremonial occasions such as the dinner tonight.
The doctor, the captain and Helen arrived just as night abruptly fell. When they trooped up the stairs, women led them to the middle of the hut and they sat cross-legged in a circle on a woven mat alongside all the elders of the tribe, several of whose ceremonial dress included red and yellow face paint and large human-hair wigs trimmed with yellow everlasting daisies.
Helen asked the SAS captain, ‘If they’d jumped on you out of the trees what do you think would have happened?’
‘We’d have shot them, I’d guess.’
‘Yes, that’d be my guess too.’
Young girls dressed only in long cloth skirts with garlands of flowers round their necks entered bearing large roughly carved wooden bowls containing a thick, gluey broth in which were suspended masses of strange tuber-like vegetables and lumps of grey stringy meat. As the bowls of soup were placed in front of them, there was a significant pause during which the headman climbed slowly to his feet, made an expansive gesture extending both his arms out wide and, smiling at his honoured guests, declared in a sonorous voice: ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop.’
Because she wanted something from this party Harriet didn’t ask for a dress to wear but instead took out from the very back of her wardrobe a Mary Quant minidress in black velvet shot through with silver thread, already vintage when she bought it in her last year of college from a shop called the Frock Exchange in Muswell Hill and already too small for her to fit into. She chose to wear black suede high-heeled shoes by Patrick Cox with it; these had been given to her by Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro.
She phoned Patrick and told him that the Namibians would like to meet him but he’d need to come to a party next door. Harriet detected a note of girlish panic in his voice when he said, ‘Party, but I don’t have anything to wear to a party, they wear sharp suits at those parties, I don’t have anything to wear, not a sharp suit.’
Sighing, she replied, ‘I’ll find you something.’ Rootling in the back amongst the thinned-out ranks of hanging garments in her shop, Harriet finally located a dark blue Hugo Boss suit in Patrick’s size that had had a couple of tiny holes in it, brought into the shop by a City trader and never picked up.
‘I don’t have any shoes apart from trainers,’ he then moaned. ‘You’ll get away with that,’ Harriet said, ‘a suit and trainers is quite fashionable, and I’ll bring you round a white shirt from Gap or somewhere.’
That evening, in the coppery sunlight, Harriet strode round to Patrick’s flat in her high heels, carrying the suit in a bag over her shoulder. When she’d been fat, men on the street had often shouted insults at her about her weight, now instead they came close and whispered entreaties and compliments, offers of dinner or electrical goods; at first she’d liked it but after a while it seemed the same as when she’d been obese.
Again she thought about Old Fat Harriet. Wasn’t her new thin self a sort of collaborator, keeping herself thin for a pack of gangsters? The old her had been kind, considerate, had lots of friends, a good business and didn’t feel sour and exhausted all the time.
Up in Patrick’s bare flat the stiffness between them made her want to say something nice to him so she said, ‘I must say it’s very clean in here.’
‘Well, you know,’ he replied, ‘I never really had any hobbies as such. If any of the women in the gym ask I always say “cleaning”. What I really like is to use a cotton bud soaked in lemon oil to get at the space behind the taps in my bathroom, an area a lot of people ignore, then later give the taps an extra sparkle with a little glycerine. I find it’s easy to get the bloodstains out of a white T-shirt with little dabs of detergent, followed by hydrogen peroxide and then I rub on my secret weapon — unseasoned meat tenderiser. Of course I use cold rather than warm water for this, only fools use warm water which would just set the stains. To clean my floors I wipe the lino with one part fresh milk mixed with one part turpentine.’
Then he experienced a feeling of panic. Patrick had never got on with any of the teachers at school but the ones he hated most were those who tried to be your mate, who said, ‘Call me Steve,’ who offered you a fag or amphetamine tablets and asked what kind of rap music you were into. Had he become that kind of teacher? Should he have been more distant with Harriet, not got her into this? Well, no, who was he kidding? In this situation it was Harriet his pupil who was protecting him; he felt so out of his depth and suddenly wished he wasn’t going to this parry but could instead stay in his flat repeatedly punching a bucket of gravel to toughen up his knuckles.
Still, he had to admit to feeling immensely proud entering the party with Harriet on his arm. Of course he had been much closer to her, had touched her all over when they fought, but there was something about the sweetness of her perfume, something about her dress — what it revealed and what it hid, something about the material of her dress and her body moving beneath it that prompted faint and unfamiliar stirrings within him, feelings long suppressed but moving closer like a tw
o-stroke motorbike heard far off on a country road.
In the big room the lights were low and the music loud, yet the darkness was alive with a squirming of bodies that reminded Patrick of worms in a Tupperware box when as a kid he used to go fishing.
Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro came towards the two of them; he took Harriet by the hand, kissed her cheek, then shook hands with the younger man. ‘Ah, I believe you are the fellow who would like to get his hands on the various … shall we say hard-to-procure items.’
‘That’s right,’ Patrick replied, trying to keep his voice neutral.
‘Well, let us sit down and discuss it.’ He led the couple to a low table in the corner where the noise was slightly less.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘Of course. A white wine, the good stuff not the crap you’d give to anyone else,’ Harriet said, smiling fondly.
Patrick tried to ask for a tomato juice but Mr Iqubal Fitzherbert De Castro said, ‘No, you must have a drink with us.’
‘I couldn’t …’
‘Tell him, Harriet, tell him he must have a drink with us, we will be offended if he does not.’
‘C’mon, Patrick,’ she said, ‘one drink that’s all, don’t be a stiff.’
A bottle of white wine was soon brought to their table. Harriet took a glass and handed it to him.