The Weeping Women Hotel Read online

  Alexei Sayle

  The Weeping Women Hotel

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Firstly I must express my deepest thanks to Sifu John Kelly: without his extensive and occasionally disturbing knowledge of Oriental martial arts I would not have been able to write this book.

  Secondly I have to thank Siobhan Redmond whose neighbourhood, flat and occasional items of furniture form the basis of the place where Harriet lives.

  And, as ever, Linda.

  Oh! Mister Porter, what shall I do?

  I want to go to Birmingham

  And they’re taking me on to Crewe,

  Send me back to London as quickly as you can,

  Oh! Mister Porter, what a silly girl I am!

  1

  I stared at the poster stuck inside the darkened window of the nightclub and wondered why the President of the Ukraine had chosen to have his picture taken wearing a blond nylon wig, pink tie and a bright yellow jacket. Underneath the President there was printed in big red letters the claim: ‘Yussuf Younos —undeniably Cheshire’s Premier Rod Stewart Tribute Act’. At the bottom of the poster was a white space — an oblong inside which there was scrawled in black marker pen, ‘Tuesday, August 29th 2007’s the Night.’

  Even in the darkness I could see that the window was crammed full of posters, pale rectangles clinging to the inside like moths. Trailing my finger along the warm glass I tried to read them all; the most frequently repeated seemed to feature a group of allied airmen from the first Gulf War recently released from torture. Above the prisoners of war it read: ‘Pret a Manger definitively the UK’s Number One Depeche Mode Impersonators. Pret a Manger will be appearing at …‘ and written in another white oblong: ‘Guantanamo Bay September 4th 2007’. Guantanamo Bay was the name of the nightclub spelt out above my head in dead neon lights. The club formed almost one half of the ground floor of a huge red Gothic revival hotel that teetered on the edge of the narrow pavement like an uncertain fat man on the rim of a swimming pool.

  A distant clanking and the squeal of metal grinding on metal caught my ears: it was the sound of my night train leaving.

  Pushing at the carved wooden door of the hotel, above which a single light burnt, half expecting it to be locked or to resist my touch in some way, it swung open easily enough so, with no reason not to, I slipped through and entered. Finding myself in a small reception area, I saw that ahead was a locked single half-glazed door, to my right a reception desk and beyond it a view into the silent pub that took up the opposite corner of the hotel to Guantanamo Bay; on my left there were double doors through which could be seen some sort of dining room, again deserted since it was the middle of the night, but already laid for breakfast.

  In the cluttered space behind the reception a young woman was seated at a battered wooden desk, clacking away at the keys of a computer. As I approached the counter the receptionist looked up, smiled and said, ‘Hi, can I help you?’ in a voice extremely bright for this time of morning. I had been worried that the people at the hotel might send me away or ask in a sympathetic voice if I was in trouble and call in the police or social services since it was 3 a.m., I was a woman whose only luggage was in a carrier bag, whose face’ was patched and roughly bandaged and whose hair still had traces of blood streaked through it; but though the girl seemed to take all this in quickly it didn’t affect in any way the warmth of her smile or the neutrality of her welcome.

  ‘Yes, if you don’t mind I’d like a room… for a few days,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ the girl replied, reaching behind her and taking a blue fob with two keys on it from the board. Then she rose and came to the counter, held one key up to me and explained, ‘This one lets you in the front door and through this door here’ — she indicated the half-glazed door — ‘and the other’s for your room: number three on the first floor.’ She also handed over a small piece of paper slightly larger than a postage stamp with printing on it. I read: ‘Station Hotel. Restaurant Pass. Breakfast Only. Room Number…’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure I’ll want breakfast,’ I said to the receptionist.

  ‘Oh, you’ll want the breakfast,’ the girl replied confidently and turned back to her computer.

  Letting myself through the door and mounting a hefty, dull brown varnished, carved wooden arts and crafts staircase, I ascended to my room. It was much larger than I had imagined, furnished with two narrow, single beds on each of which had been placed a folded towel, a square of soap wrapped like a biscuit and sachets of shampoo and shower gel; there was a small TV on a wooden chest of drawers. I had planned to have a wash but instead lay down on one of the beds and was almost instantly asleep. Drifting away I heard the high-pitched insect sound of a two-stroke motorbike far into the countryside; it came fast down the arrow-straight road, rattled past my window before fading off again into the night.

  My only plan was that I would sleep till at least the middle of the morning but instead I was woken at around 8 a.m. by a voice that intruded into my dreams chanting echoey things about Glasgow, Preston and Carlisle. I groggily deduced that the voice was coming from Crewe Station in its trench across the road.

  Now irredeemably awake, I thought I might as well try the famous breakfast. Having stayed in quite a few provincial hotels over the years, descending the stairs I glumly thought I would be able to paint the ingredients from memory in all their fried colours.

  I entered the fragrant interior of the dining room. Some time during the night, along the back wall of the restaurant a long buffet table had been laid out; walking its entire length twice, my sense of amazement grew as I studied the food set upon it. First there was a row of brown ceramic jugs, elegantly handwritten labels before them on the stiff white-linened table describing the contents of each: ‘there was orange, mango, melon, peach and pear juice, and all of them seemed on inspection to be freshly squeezed. Then there were platters of cheeses, sliced ham, fresh figs. Further along were lidded dishes with a little paraffin flame burning beneath each: these were labelled ‘bacon’, ‘sausages’, ‘scrambled eggs’, ‘wild field mushrooms’, and ‘today’s special — huevos rancheros con chorizo’. There were piles of toast wrapped in thin creamy linen and freshly baked baguettes, pots of thick home-made jams, slabs of farmhouse butter.

  I took some bread, jam, Spanish manchego cheese and figs then seated myself at the only available place, a small table with a single wooden chair in the far corner of the room. A pretty young waitress soon came from the kitchens carrying a coffee pot in each hand. ‘Can I get you coffee?’ she asked. ‘Our special this month is Kenyan Blue Mountain.’

  ‘Er … sure,’ I replied, more used to being served watery brown outflow to drink with my British hotel breakfasts.

  While the waitress was pouring the coffee I slipped out into the foyer and looked at the room tariff displayed in a glass frame by the desk: a single room apparently cost thirty-five pounds a night; this seemed incredibly cheap for such luxury — most hotels in Britain could only manage shabby, dirty indifference at that price.

  As I ate my breakfast I looked around the dining room: coming up to eight thirty most of the guests were already finishing their meals and preparing to leave — they were all men, sitting either singly or in groups; some wore papery thin office-worker suits, others were more casually dressed in golfers’ shirts, neat jeans and very clean trainers. The men in the most exuberant groups wore synthetic overalls in blue, green or orange emblazoned on the back with company logos: ‘GEC, Alstrom’, ‘Amec’ or ‘Bentley’.

  At exactly ten minutes to nine all the men got up and left the dining room. I realised then that I’d been wrong, there had been women there all along, at the edges of the room like corner flags, four solitary women. O
ne was in her mid-fifties, tears ran sown her cheeks and with pale fingers she nervously shredded a freshly baked peach muffin; another was no more than a teenager, she had her head in her hands and her whole body was racked with silent sobs; the third was middle-aged and expensively dressed in a Nicole Farhi matching pale jumper and trousers, gold necklace round the neck and gold bangles at her wrists, she was eating bacon and sausages rapidly. I noted that both hands which gripped the knife and fork were wrapped in bloodstained bandages and tears dripped on to the bacon. The fourth was me.

  In the following week my only meal was breakfast, I found I was able to pack enough away at the buffet table to last me until the next morning, occasionally supplemented by my sneaking a few pieces of fresh fruit or a sausage up to my room for later. b After the mental confusion of arriving at the hotel, my mind subsequently settled into a b reasonably pleasant state of numbness. I knew there were things I would have to think about but the time didn’t have to be right now. During the day as my wounds slowly healed I took long walks into the rich Cheshire countryside along disused railway tracks overhung with copper beech and Scotch pine, or I wandered through the flat, amorphous town marvelling at the number of confident, beefy girls in their skimpy tops striding along the greasy pavement clutching carrier bags full of outsize clothing.

  Often older women, catching sight of the cuts and bruises on my face, the black eye and the stitches, would give me a sad, knowing, sympathetic look. ‘No,’ I wanted say to them, it’s not that.’ Sometimes 1 would go down to the station; it gave me particular pleasure to watch the new modern expresses slide like fat silver eels under its dirty, glass canopy Maliciously on occasion I would occupy the same end of the platform as the train-spotters, their flapping anoraks giving them the b appearance of cormorants perched on the edge of a pier; this strange intense female standing in their midst made the men extremely threatened and twitchy; they shielded their male children from me with their plastic coats.

  In the evenings the women who guarded the door of Guantanamo Bay were happy to let me slip inside without paying. I would sit in a corner sipping at a glass of tap water and watch the entertainers onstage. The main business of the club was tribute acts who performed four or five nights a week. I soon noticed that, strangely, the popularity of these acts was linked more to the fame of the, people they were imitating rather than to the quality of their imitation. The Abba tribute band Bjorn Cjrazy got a full house though they couldn’t match any of the Swedish group’s complex harmonies and despite the fact that the singer who I initially thought was supposed to be Benny was in fact attempting to do Agnetha. On the other hand the Scottish Peter Gabriel impersonator Jock the Monkey, who was an almost exact copy, both vocally and visually, of the real former lead singer of Genesis, drew only a handful of discontented locals who threw empty beer cans at him during his almost entirely authentic rendition of the video for ‘Big Mouth’. I was also nearly certain that the Gene Pitney impersonator who appeared there one Saturday night was actually the real Gene Pitney.

  Of the three weeping women who had been in the breakfast room on my first day, one was not there the next, one stayed a week then was gone and the third, the woman dressed in the accessorised Nicole Farhi, I saw one morning in the corridor on the first floor, pushing a cleaning cart, going from room to room singing a tuneless song to herself, wearing a blue nylon overall, her face free from make-up and her arms unadorned by bracelets.

  After breakfast on my eighth day at the hotel I went to the reception desk and spoke to the young girl working at the computer.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  ‘Hi there,’ the girl replied.

  ‘Look, I think there might be a bit of a… erm, problem with my bill. I can pay up to today but after that my funds are going to get a little low. I need, I guess, to speak to the manager, maybe about some sort of a job?’

  Rather than treating this as a problem the girl smiled sweetly, then with a couple of sweeps of her slender fingers put her computer to sleep and said, ‘OK, we need to find solace.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose we all do,’ I said. ‘That’d be nice.’

  The girl lifted the flap of the counter and beckoned me through, led me across the little reception and through another door at the rear, down a narrow wood-panelled corridor past the hotel’s clattering kitchens to another small office with a battered cream-painted door.

  She knocked and a woman’s voice called for us to enter.

  We both squeezed into a tiny space lined with shelves on which box files, stacks of papers and accountancy books were precariously balanced. On the wall was a year planner covered in stickers and a calendar from an organic farm.

  Seated at a cheap office desk was a black woman in her mid-forties; her skin was that black that is almost blue, her head and body might have been taken from a Benin sculpture, while her clothes had come from B&Q. The woman was dressed in a grimy overall dress of murky shades of orange as worn by employees of the DIY store and in a space above her left breast was written in Biro the name ‘Solace’.

  ‘Solace…’ the young girl said to the African woman, indicating me with a wave of her hand,’… Room 3.’

  ‘Room 3,’ said Solace, looking up at me, ‘sit down, dear.’

  Once I was seated on a wobbly, cracked plastic stacking chair the older woman leant forward and asked, ‘Did you hear the voices, dear? Did they tell you to come here, the voices?’

  ‘Eh?’ I asked, primed as I was for some kind of quizzing about my financial resources.

  The young girl said, ‘Some hear voices, some see pictures in their minds like a film.’

  Getting no response from me, Solace added, ‘Or drawings; other women get letters through the post addressed to them in their own handwriting and inside are maps on how to get here and a bus timetable. One said a statue of Florence Nightingale told her to cycle all the way to Crewe from Lincoln but she was a bit…’

  Finally I said, ‘I took a train, I took a night train and I don’t know why but it seemed like a good idea if I got off here.’

  They moved me out of my room in the kindliest way as if it was my idea; instead I was given a bed in a cramped, wooden-walled little cubicle slotted into the hot roof space of the hotel. In addition to the narrow metal-framed bed, the cubicle contained a small hardboard wardrobe, a desk and a bedside table; it felt like that was enough.

  To pay my way they assigned me a job in Guantanamo Bay serving behind the bar, something I found I was unexpectedly bad at. Yet Solace never even hinted that they would move me, and because the drink was cheap and the atmosphere unthreatening none of the customers seemed to mind the occasional wrong order, incorrect change or cranberry juice knocked down the front of their white T-shirt. For my part the brainless work was a balm for my overheated nerves and I felt safe and looked after. The big beefy women who manned the door of the club looked like they would be a match for most men in a fight, though somehow it rarely came down to violence, they always seemed to be able to defuse a situation before it climbed out of control and became irreversible; unlike a lot of male security staff they never acted like they had anything to prove.

  In the early hours of the morning once all the customers had reeled off into the night, those who had worked late would sometimes sit around in the staff canteen: a large, bare, functional room at the rear of the building, white-painted, lined with simple wooden tables and benches, where they would recount how they had come to the Station Hotel Crewe. I sat and listened but never joined in, to tell the truth I’d hardly had time to digest it myself. Important, crucial bits I’d forgotten would suddenly slip back into my mind, often with a jolt of shame, fear or sadness.

  When you came down to it many of the women’s tales amounted to extended nervous breakdowns, all sort of the same in the end though the details could be unbelievably shocking. A lot had had terrible things done to them, a few had done terrible things to others; some were clear on their motives, others told their tale still wrapped around wit
h self-justification and evasion that only they couldn’t see. I found all the stories I listened to during these early morning sessions absolutely riveting, apart from one. There was a woman there named Mrs Costello whose duties around the hotel seemed to consist of occasionally putting a spoon out at breakfast and whose crisis seemed to consist solely of her husband once slightly burning a corner of their living room curtains. This paucity of incident did not prevent her relating this yarn over and over again on nights such as this.

  We’d had a particularly busy evening with a spirited performance by The Jim, a Paul Weller tribute act fronted by a lead singer whose real name was Jim, so it wasn’t until after 2 a.m. that the empties had been cleared away and the mistakes I’d made in giving change had been accounted for so the cash could be counted and locked in the safe. It was a warm night and the windows were propped open; nobody from the club staff wished to go to bed yet and before anyone could stop her Mrs Costello was off again. Drifting away, I wondered to myself whether I would ever tell my own story like this, during one of these early mornings. I was certain if I ever did, even though I say so myself, the story would have a lot more to it than somebody setting fire to the curtains.

  2

  Toby stood in the doorway of Harriet’s shop, letting the September wind rush in to riffle the clothes hanging on racks behind the counter; he was straining to see the police helicopter that was slowly and noisily circling the neighbourhood. The machine itself was so low in the sky that it was hidden by the tall trees in the park opposite but its searchlight backlit them in black, angular silhouette, giving the appearance of a sinister wood in a Balinese shadow play.

  ‘The Pointless Park airshow beginneth early tonight,’ Toby said, coming back into the warmth and closing the door so that the clothes abruptly stopped their frantic dance.