The Weeping Women Hotel by Alexei Sayle

able to move to a bedsit in the place that nobody calls Pointless Park .
    When
Helen left college she liked to think it was a complete coincidence that she
moved there too, except she lived in a big house with the family of a lecturer
from the college whom she was having an affair with. Helen gave dinner parties,
she went to plays and the cinema and had lots and lots of boyfriends. If she
fell out with one boyfriend there was always another waiting: one took an
overdose because she chucked him, another became gay; one tried to join the
French Foreign Legion but was turned down and settled for a fast-track
management career at Waterstones. Sex was everywhere: in the same week as Cindy
Crawford and k.d. lang were pictured kissing on the front cover of Vogue Lulu
and Rose put their hands down each other’s-pants at a party and rummaged around
as if they were looking for something. Even Harriet had a married man who slunk
up to her little bedsit in the late afternoon.
    Always
in the background, almost unnoticed, there was Toby, hanging around without
making any great impression except that he was generally drunk and there was
often a crowd grouped around him looking down and asking, ‘Are you all right,
Toby?’
    In 1998
the sisters’ mother, who had suffered from ill health for years, suddenly
became very sick. Helen was twenty-seven when this happened, Harriet thirty.
Later on when they were in their mid-forties and they’d all begun to look like
their own deranged elderly relatives, there would always seem to be somebody
who was having to fly up to Scotland every weekend to comfort their father in a
hospice or who was forced into making eight-hour train journeys to obscure
mental institutions in Cumbria in order to visit their suicidal sister, but
back then they seemed to be the only ones who had to endure this kind of
crisis. When Helen told all her exciting lovers that she needed their help and
support at a difficult time in her and her sister’s life they all acted as if
it was they who were having some huge crisis.
    The men
said, ‘But I’ve got this meeting with a guy who might buy one of my pastry
sculptures,’ or ‘My allergies don’t allow me to go into or through the
countryside,’ or ‘If I’m away who’ll feed my iguana?’ One particular boyfriend
actually managed to develop all the symptoms of her mother’s throat cancer
including rapid weight loss, muscle weakness and coughing up blood whenever she
saw him.
    Only
Toby emerged from the mist and would drive them up and down the motorway in the
middle of the night, then wait patiently outside the hospital, would shop for
them and cook their meals when they were too tired and upset to do anything for
themselves.
     
    All of the next week
Harriet kept the lights turned off in the shop just in case Patrick was passing
and happened to glance inside and see she wasn’t in Cardiff . Unfortunately the door had to remain unlocked since she couldn’t
afford to be turning away customers. Just to be on the safe side though, her
worktable was dragged out of the shop window and into the space behind the
counter where it was mostly hidden from the street; the disadvantage of this
was that there was less light back there so she needed to keep her work lamp
burning simply to be able to do the repairs. On the day, at the hour when
Harriet should have been having her sixth lesson with Patrick the sky was grey
and clouded. Every few minutes, while working at her table in a pool of yellow
light repairing moth holes in a tweed jacket, she would glance up at the window
just in case he was there; in as much as she had a plan her thinking was that
before Patrick saw her she could quickly turn the lamp off and hide motionless
behind the hanging ranks of clothes. Though she told herself really she was
being ridiculous even worrying about it.
    When
she looked up and he was standing right in front of her she didn’t for a second
take it in; Harriet thought a grey cloud had