The Weeping Women Hotel (7 page)

It was
up these stairs that she led Patrick to the first floor and the big empty
tobacco-yellow storeroom; at the front this room retained its original windows
which ran almost from floor to ceiling, the ancient beige paint of the glazing
bars splintered and cracked, while the frames, off-square from subsidence,
jutted into the brickwork at an angle and they hadn’t been able to be opened
since the war in Korea. Through the dusty glass there, was a vista of the road
and the park beyond it. At the rear, metal-framed windows installed in the
1920s gave a view of her tiny yard and the blank rears of the houses and shops
that ran away from the park towards
Alexandra
Palace
up on its
hill, resembling the château of a particularly mournful Fascist dictator.

At this level the
vegetation of the park filled the floor-length Georgian windows and appeared
almost pleasant if you didn’t look too closely. Patrick stared around at the
space deep in thought. Harriet assumed he was working out where it would be
best to exercise but when he finally spoke he said, ‘Carpet shop.’’

‘Eh?’

‘Carpet
shop. This used to be a carpet shop when I was a kid.’

‘Really?’
she replied, glad for a minute to put off the moment when she’d have to start
exercising. ‘You’re from round here?’

‘Yeah,
the Watney Trust there over the way, still live in me parents’ old flat. Y’know
I actually worked in this place when I was fifteen, Saturday job. I remember
one time the boss was out and a woman come in and she looked around at all the
stock, took hours and she said to me, ‘Oh that’s a lovely shade of carpet
that’d go great in my front room,’ so she gave me all the measurements and I
was real pleased with myself thinking how glad the boss would be that I’d done
this big deal for him. I cut the carpet to shape while the woman went to get
the money from the bank. When the boss come in and I told him he went mad with
me, he said, “You idiot, she’ll never come back …“‘ Patrick paused. ‘And she
didn’t.’

‘Why
did she get you to cut the carpet then?’

The
young man stared straight into her eyes. ‘Because women are liars. They can’t
say what they want and they can’t say what they don’t want. That woman just
.wanted to have a look round but she couldn’t leave without pretending to buy
something. She didn’t want to upset me by leaving the shop without buying
something.’

‘But
she never came back and you got in trouble with your boss,’ Harriet said.

‘Yeah,
that’s right but she was out of the shop by then, she’d stopped thinking about
me, she didn’t feel responsible any more.’ He paused. ‘So shall we get started
then, Harriet?’

‘Yes
indeed, I’ve really been looking forward to this,’ she lied.

Patrick had brought along
one of the yellow programme cards from the gym and on it he listed all the
things she had to do to get fit. Harriet felt an immediate sense of
disappointment; she had assumed somehow because she alone was employing him
that he might now show her the secret personal trainer things that you wouldn’t
gain access to in the public press of the gym. The article in
Marie Claire
about.
the formerly fat woman had hinted that there was some mystical effect simply in
having your own personal trainer person, that when you had one-on-one tuition
the weight more or less fell off you of its own volition. Her feelings of
disillusion continued when Patrick first’ took her through a series of
stretches just about identical to the ones she’d done at Muscle Bitch, then
sit-ups, press-ups and finally an aerobic workout precisely the same as any
number she had bought on video, CD and DVD over the years. Harriet had hoped,
even if she didn’t learn secret things, that’ having Patrick doing the
exercises in front of her might stir her to greater exertion but instead the
disdainful ease with which he did all the movements — movements that were
utterly impossible for Harriet — and the fact that he was clearly only using a
twentieth of his energy, merely served to dispirit her even more, so that she
felt she was actually performing even worse than she had done at the gym. On
reflection, Harriet supposed she shouldn’t have really expected any more, after
all the same edition of
Marie Claire
in which she’d read about the
formerly fat woman’s weight loss had also hinted that avocados could cure
Parkinson’s disease.

After a
painful hour it was over. He said, ‘Now we’ll do this every week, OK? But
you’ve also got to do the workouts that I’ve marked down for you on your own.
You’ll never progress if you don’t.’

‘No, I
understand that, I’m highly motivated,’ she replied.

Harriet had expected him
to leave after the session; her track-suit was clammy and she longed to have a
shower and then eat a whole packet of wholemeal chocolate biscuits, but Patrick
simply stood tree-like in the empty room so that after an uncomfortable thirty
seconds she felt compelled to invite him upstairs to her flat.

‘This
is lovely,’ he said, staring at the light-up Madonna in a shrine of seashells
that Rose had brought her back from
Guadeloupe
.

‘Yeah,
it’s hilarious, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘How do
you mean hilarious?’

‘Er …
no, you’re right, it’s lovely. Would you like tea?’

He sat
himself down tentatively in her inflatable pink armchair. Harriet could hear
him causing it to squeak and squeal while she made them both Chinese tea in the
kitchen. Returning with the tray, she set it down on the purple Formica coffee
table and sat perched on her zebra-striped couch facing Patrick. He had been
staring ruminatively up at the clouds painted on the ceiling but came back to
earth focusing on the tea things — the porcelain pot and the two mugs
celebrating the marriage of Princess Diana to Prince Charles.

‘You have
a beautiful flat,’ he said.

‘Thank
you.’

‘Painting
clouds on the ceiling, I don’t know how anybody thinks of that.’

‘Well,
you know …’

But
then, like an interrogator on a cop show, he abruptly switched his gaze to her
tiny black plastic television connected to an ancient VCR, both of them
balanced on a small box ottoman, and stated in a sharp tone,. ‘I bet you rent
that, don’t you?’

‘Er,
yes, I do actually,’ Harriet responded, feeling uncomfortable at being
questioned like this in her own home.

‘How
much do you pay a month?’

‘Twenty-five
pounds,’ she replied, automatically knocking off ten pounds.

‘It’s
rubbish,’ Patrick said vehemently. ‘You could buy a nice big wide-screen plasma
LCD TV, digital ready, with built-in DVD and nicam digital surround sound for
what you’re paying in a year for that crap.’

‘Yes,
but there’s the … the, erm, free upgrades and the maintenance contract that
gives you peace of mind,’ Harriet retorted, trying feebly to stick up for
herself. Even as she said all this she knew it to be a lie. Rose had been
paying three hundred and eighty pounds a year for a TV that had broken down
eighteen months before but she refused to call out the company’s engineers in
case she upset them. Harriet knew that if her television stopped working she
would react in exactly the same way.

Patrick
went on boastfully, ‘A lot of the ladies at the gym are still renting their TVs
as if they were students. Modern audiovisual equipment rarely breaks down. I
tell them to buy new stuff and when they do they’re always satisfied.’ Less
emphatically but still staring at her tiny scratched TV screen, he asked, ‘You
know that show that’s on BBC 1 about movies, used to be presented by some bloke
who liked cricket, now Jonathan Ross does it?’

‘Barry
Norman was the other bloke,’ she said, happy to get off the subject of renting
audiovisual equipment.

‘Right …‘
Then he leant forward and staring into her eyes said very rapidly, ‘Now quickly
without thinking tell me what that show’s called right now!’

‘Film
1988!’
she shouted, then was silently surprised at
what she’d said.

‘Exactly,’
replied Patrick, leaning back, his air of wisdom slightly spoilt by the
squeaking and squealing of the chair. ‘But it’s not 1988, is it, Harriet? It’s
2006, isn’t it? That’s what the show’s actually called:
Film
2006.’

‘You’re
right …’ Harriet responded slowly then asked wonderingly, ‘So why would I say
1988?’

‘Because,’
he stated, ‘that’s when you were happiest, in 1988. Everybody always shouts out
the year when they were happiest. Do you know what year I’d say?’

‘No,’
she replied, though she could guess.

‘Two
thousand and six,’ he said smugly. ‘I’d say
Film
2006 That’s what I’d
say.’

‘Because
you’re incredibly happy right now?’ Harriet asked sarcastically. Then,
attempting a joke, ‘Because you’re here with me?’

‘No,’
he said, ‘of course not, not at all. But I live in the moment, do you see?’

‘Right.’

‘So
what were you doing in 1988?’ Patrick asked the fat woman sitting in front of
him, sweat still sparkling on her forehead like industrial diamonds.

She
thought about it hard, screwing her face up before finally saying in a wistful
voice, ‘I was twenty years old in my second year of college just outside
London
. You got a full grant back then, I
lived on campus, in the hall of residence. There seemed so many possibilities
and …‘ she trailed off.

‘And
what?’ he asked.

‘And I
wasn’t fat.’

‘Now remember you’re not
allowed to smoke those filthy roll-ups,’ Helen said.

‘Of
course not,’ Harriet replied indignantly.

It was
the night after her first session with Patrick. Harriet had walked to her
sister’s house, staying firmly on the pavement away from the threatening
hulking gloom of the park. The route took her past rows of housing running away
from the park on tree-lined streets. There was a smattering of spiky Gothic
villas, Edwardian semis, artisan cottages, but mostly identical three-storey
Victorian terraces built of
London
stock brick. Behind iron railings set in a low wall there was a
huge, grey-brick, late nineteenth-century charitable housing estate called the
Watney Trust Flats where Patrick lived. Then she arrived at her sister’s house,
a villa with twin bay windows facing the park.

Harriet’s
limbs ached horribly and she couldn’t raise her arms above her shoulders, all
of which she took to be a good sign. Helen and Toby were getting ready to go
out, just as they did five or six nights a week.

Helen
was worried they were going to be late but she forced herself to sit on the
couch and let her sister talk about this strange Patrick, one of a long line of
oddities she’d found for herself over the years. He didn’t sound up to much but
she always went out of her way to encourage Harriet to spend time with anybody
who wasn’t Lulu and Rose whom she considered a pair of unsuitable, drunken
harpies. Her opinion of these two women was coloured by the fact that Toby had
lived with ‘that mad bitch Lulu’ as she described her in a big flat above a
vacuum cleaner shop in
Enfield
for all of their first two years of college.

‘He’s
actually lived all his life round here and his parents and grandparents too,’
Harriet said. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’

‘Mr
Sargassian’s been here since the 1970s,’ replied Toby, entering the room
buttoning up his shirt.

‘Yes,
Toby, but not since the 1870s or whenever like Patrick’s family,’ she stated
emphatically.

‘No, I
guess not …’

‘I
mean,’ Harriet continued, ‘look at everybody we know round here, none of them
is even from
London
. They’re
all from the north like us, or
Scotland
or the States or
Armenia
, Toby, like Mr Sargassian is.’

‘And
you do your exercises together in that upstairs room?’ Helen asked, to stop her
going on at Toby.

‘Yeah,
it’s brilliant, I’ve already lost pounds.’

‘He’s
dead fit, is he, this bloke?’ Toby asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘And a
good teacher, is he?’

‘Yeah,
why?’ she asked, unsure where Toby was going. ‘Do you want personal training?’

‘No,
not exactly,’ said Toby ‘I was thinking … do you think he’d do football
lessons?’

‘Football
lessons!?’ Harriet and Helen said at the same time. ‘Yeah,’ Toby said,
blushing. ‘It’s just those guys I play five-aside with on a Thursday night are
pretty competitive; if I could improve my technique they’d respect me more.
And, I dunno, maybe me and this Patrick might become mates, it’d be cool to
know somebody from around here who was all fit and stuff.’

‘I’ll
ask him, Toby,’ his sister-in-law said, knowing as. she spoke that she didn’t
want to be sharing Patrick with anyone else.

‘Great.
Thonks a lot, Hat Hat.’