Read The Weeping Women Hotel for Free Online Page A

thinking about what it
might be like to be a personal trainer. It was kind of stupid that Harriet
thought anybody at Muscle Bitch, least of all him, held any qualifications,
unless you thought looking nice in a tight. polo shirt counted as a qualification.
    Not
that it was a particular shock for him to be asked to do something he didn’t
know anything about. He didn’t have any memory of it happening when he was a
kid but sometime around the time he became a teenager Patrick began to notice
people would always be asking his opinion on stuff when he only had the vaguest
idea what they were talking about. At school the teachers would often turn to
him to answer questions on all kinds of subjects and even when his replies were
stumbling or just plain wrong many times they acted as if he’d said something
dead intelligent and when they marked his essays he got grades that were much
better than he reckoned his confused ramblings on ox-bow lakes or the rise of
the Nazi Party in pre-war Germany really deserved. For the longest time
Patrick couldn’t explain it, beginning to think that perhaps he was brighter
than he thought he was: until he failed every single one of his GCSEs.
    Very
confused, he took ages to figure it out. Slowly the fact dawned that those
people who marked the exam papers from the exams didn’t know him. Or rather
they couldn’t see him. Staring at his face in the mirror and trying to imagine
how he appeared to others he saw that the stillness, the blankness with which
he held his features, added to the way the planes of his face fell, the bright
clear blue of his eyes, the sharp, straight line of his nose, the firm cut of
his mouth, made him look really, really, really intelligent. Patrick thought,
turning his head from side to side in the pitiless light of the shaving mirror,
that if he didn’t know the true ordinariness of his own mind he’d ask himself
for advice on all sorts of difficult and baffling matters.
    Beneath
Patrick’s spread legs, on her eighteenth lift the woman’s strength did suddenly
leave her and she found herself unable to straighten her arms, and the silvery
bar barely held by shaking limbs began slowly to descend on to her windpipe.
While the customer gurgled and gagged, her legs waving in the air, Patrick
mulled over what might happen if he became a successful personal trainer. He
assumed that if he did a good job for Harriet she might recommend him to her
friends, then to her whole social circle and if he did a good job for them too
then they might want him to be their friend. He knew this because sometimes he
liked to eavesdrop on the customers at the gym and from time to time he’d hear
the women discuss the valued people who came to their houses. ‘You really must
use our painter and decorator Vaclav, he’s more of a friend than anything
else,’ he’d heard them say more than once, or ‘We’re spending our summer
holidays with the, nanny’s family on their farm just outside Kraków,’ or ‘We’re
taking our Colombian cleaner to a comedy club on Saturday night, she doesn’t
speak any English so we’re not sure how much she’ll take in, but still …‘
    Only if
they were good though, they didn’t seem to recommend those who were bad; he
imagined people didn’t say to their friends, ‘I’ve found this really
unreliable, incompetent and expensive plumber, you really must use him as soon
as he’s finished wrecking my central heating.’ Mind you, from what he heard at
the gym most plumbers still seemed to be unreliable, incompetent and expensive
anyway so how did that happen? It was another mystery.
    Not for
the first time he wished Martin was there so he could discuss these things as
they had done so many times in the past. He’d tried again to e-mail Martin last
night but the satellite uplink wasn’t working, just as it hadn’t been for the
last month and a half.
    From
beneath him Patrick heard a strange gurgling sound, a final death rattle from
the female