Weep a While Longer

by Penny Freedman

  When I emerge from this reverie, Malcolm is speaking. ‘I had spoken to her once before,’ he says, ‘and she told me her name was Karen.’

  ‘What did she ring to talk about?’ David asks.

  Malcolm looks uncomfortable and I could intervene but I’m not risking another put-down, so I keep schtum.

  ‘She’s dead, Malcolm,’ David says. ‘Confidentiality hardly matters, does it?’

  Malcolm compromises. ‘She had worries,’ he says. ‘Single mother, husband in prison, isolated, short of money.’

  Nothing you couldn’t read in the paper, I think. Good one, Malcolm!

  ‘You say you spoke to her once before her last call. Was that it? Once?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘But she may have spoken to other Samaritans as well?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And did she talk about suicide?’

  ‘Not to me, but when I first heard about how she’d died I thought it was suicide and so, of course, I felt—’

  ‘Did you ask her if she was suicidal?’

  ‘We always ask.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said—’ He shoots a glance of appeal at me; I glance at David. ‘She said she wasn’t,’ he continues.

  ‘And the last call, when was that exactly?’

  ‘I checked it in our log. On Tuesday 17th at 17.10 she called, and the call lasted about three minutes.’

  I can feel David become instantly hyper-alert; it is as though he is suddenly emitting radar waves. ‘You’re sure of that, are you?’ he asks in an even tone that belies his body language. He is writing stuff down for the first time.

  ‘Yes. It’s second nature to check the time when we take a call.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said she had some information that the police ought to know about but she dared not go to them.’

  David has become very still. ‘Did she say what the information was about?’ he asks quietly.

  ‘No. I think – I think she was going to. She asked me if we could pass it to the police and I started explaining about confidentiality, but she said, “But you pass on bomb warnings to the police, don’t you? This would be like a bomb warning.”’

  ‘She was thinking of the IRA days?’

  ‘Yes.’ Malcolm turns to me. ‘Sometimes when the IRA wanted to give a bomb warning they would ring the Samaritans. Because they knew we were there twenty-four-seven. They used a particular form of words – a kind of password – so we would know if they were genuine, and then we would let the police know. It never happened in Marlbury, of course, but it did in some branches.’

  ‘How did she know about that?’ David asks. ‘It wasn’t common knowledge.’

  ‘She must know someone who’s a Samaritan.’

  ‘Or have been one herself?’ I mutter.

  ‘What did you say to her?’ David asks.

  ‘I said the bomb warning procedure was an exception and we didn’t pass other information to the police or to anyone else but I could see that she had a difficult decision to make and we would support her in making it.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She got quite emotional – said that was no good – and then she broke off the call.’

  ‘Just put down the phone?’

  ‘No. I could hear a dog start barking and then she said to someone, “Go upstairs, go on,” and then she cut off.’

  ‘Did you get a sense of who she was talking to?’

  ‘I—’ He gives a puff of frustration. ‘I think she said Lara, but I can’t be sure. I read in the paper that her daughter’s name was Lara and I’m not sure whether I’ve invented that.’

  ‘When you were talking to her, could you hear a TV in the background?’

  Malcolm looks surprised but thinks about it, eyes closed. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘OK.’ David picks up his undrunk coffee, stands up and puts his mug on Malcolm’s desk. ‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘I will probably need to talk to you about this again.’

  Malcolm takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. ‘I take it,’ he says, ‘that I was the last person to talk to her before her killer did.’

  ‘It seems likely.’

  ‘Well,’ Malcolm says, ‘I thought for a while that I was the last person she talked to before she killed herself and the child, so this is better, I suppose.’

  ‘Better for you,’ David says. ‘I’m not sure about her.’ And he leaves.

  *

  It takes a while to talk Malcolm down from the state of agitation David has left him in. I don’t like to leave him because he is a semi-recovered alcoholic and this is the kind of thing that could send him out for a bottle of vodka, so we go to the SCR for a proper cup of coffee and discuss some work issues before I go to my office to deal with emails. The only message of any substance is one from the vice-chancellor’s secretary asking me if I will make an appointment to see the VC at my earliest convenience. This can only be bad news. I have had no trouble from him over the past year; ever since he interfered outrageously in a disciplinary case involving one of my students, succumbing, quite frankly, to bribery by her father, he has been at pains to avoid me. He actually runs away from me. Once he hid behind the drama studio. So, if he is summoning me to his presence it can only mean that I’ve given him a reason to shout at me or that he feels he has got one over on me and he wants to flaunt his triumph. (Got one over on me – isn’t that a wonderful phrasal verb? It’s a very sophisticated non-native speaker who can come up with that one.) I delve into my memory for anything I may have done in the past few weeks that would give him an excuse to yell and I come up empty-handed, so it’s triumphing I have to expect, I suppose. I flag the message but do nothing about the appointment. He can wait.

  12

  Tuesday 24th July, Afternoon

  Interrogatives

  Unusually in this dreary summer the sun is shining and I decide to cycle into town, have lunch at The Pumpkin and buy a few treats for Freda and me to have this evening, since she is spending the night with me. Ellie and Ben are going out to supper with friends and taking Nico with them, so Freda and I can have a girls’ night in. Annie and her posse have a technical rehearsal this afternoon, which is bound to drag on into the evening, so we shall have the house to ourselves. She will have to sleep in my bed since every other bed in the house will be occupied but she will like that. I worry a bit that I’m not really bonding with Nico. He’s a lovely little boy – round-faced and cheerful, with melting brown eyes like chocolate buttons – but he’s not Freda. And Freda, who has shown commendably few signs of jealousy as far as Ellie and Ben are concerned, does like to claim me as hers alone.

  Fortified by quiche and salad, I return for my afternoon session with my wives. We are doing more work on questions. This follows on from the exercise they were doing on Friday but it doesn’t escape me that there is an irony in spending an hour teaching them how to ask questions when Paula Powell is waiting in the wings ready to get them to answer hers.

  Questions are a real problem for learners of English. They learn early on the simple survival questions of the ‘Wh’ type: Where is…? What is…? When is…? but anything more complex is inclined to defeat them, and social questions are a minefield. Let’s take my five students this afternoon: two Farsi speakers, one Spanish, one Greek and one Chinese. None of their languages has the equivalent of the do/does/did forms for asking questions and they are really difficult for learners to get their heads round. In Spanish and Greek, questions other than the ‘Wh’ kind are asked largely by making statements with a questioning inflection: You’re going out? It’s raining? et cetera. Farsi speakers tend to do the same since there is no equivalent in English to the all-purpose question word that turns statements into questions in Farsi. We can do it in English, of course, the statement-question, but it doesn’t work terribly well socially; it tends to sound abrupt and a bit challenging. Then there are question tags: is/isn’t
it? does/doesn’t it? have/haven’t you? and so on. We laugh at the all-purpose innit that peppers the street speech of the urban young but you can see how it arises because question tags are so various and complex in standard English, and other languages mostly have a simpler way of doing things (n’est-ce-pas, after all is only the French for innit.)

  Failure to use English question tags properly doesn’t make people incomprehensible but it does often make them sound rude. Farsi has the all-purpose tag, also used as an answer quite often – chera? – which translates into English as Why not? When questions like It’s time for our class, isn’t it? become It’s time for our class, why not? they take on an unintentionally aggressive edge, so I am trying to eliminate them, but the speakers of European languages in the class tend to attach yes? or no? to questions, which can sound equally aggressive, so that has to be dealt with too.

  This is a group of quite sophisticated young women so I start this afternoon with the idea that questioning is an intrinsically impolite activity: it is intrusive and demanding and so it requires language strategies that minimise the impoliteness. This is why we use the cumbersome and grammatically complex forms, Could you tell me…? Would you mind showing me…? I was wondering whether…? and so on. These present problems in the answering as well as the asking. When the girls were small and I was working, we had an au pair for a year, a lovely Finnish girl whose English was really very good, but she could never cope with my polite Would you mind…? requests. Would you mind getting the girls their lunch? I would ask; Yes, she would say, and then stop in confusion. Native speakers find all kinds of ways to answer that sort of non-question question, just as we find answers to Yorright?. In the end Aliisa settled for That’s fine as her all-purpose willing answer.

  We have quite a lot of fun with the questions once I assure my students that they don’t have to speak the truth in their answers – in fact, the wilder the better – and we are all laughing merrily when Paula Powell appears, bringing the unmistakeable aura of the authorities with her, and puts paid to the fun. As Juanita, Athene and Ning Wu leave, I explain to Farah and Jamilleh why Paula is here and the questioning starts in earnest.

  Paula, of course, breaks all the rules that I have been laying down with such care. I need not have worried that she would fluster them with the Would you mind answering a few questions? approach; she is not bothered, it seems, by the intrinsic impoliteness of asking questions but plunges straight in.

  ‘So you’re Jamilleh?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you were at the Acorns day nursery on the afternoon of Tuesday last week – 17th?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  If Jamilleh is surprised by the abruptness of Paula’s questioning she doesn’t show it. I guess, on the basis only of prejudice, that abruptness is the best you hope for from the Iranian police. She tells the story of the dog and the woman in the niqab quite coherently despite her struggle with the language. Paula turns to Farah. ‘You can confirm this?’ she asks.

  Oh for heaven’s sake, Paula, give up on the statement-questions and use some proper interrogatives.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And after the young woman got the dog on the lead what happened?’

  ‘The woman wearing niqab left.’

  ‘On her own?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Were you surprised at that?’

  Farah glances at Jamilleh. ‘Why I would be surprised?’ she asks.

  Oh, Farah, has this afternoon been completely wasted?

  ‘Well—’ Paula hesitates. She doesn’t want to make a crass remark about those sort of women generally being accompanied by a man. ‘Didn’t you expect her to be with one of the children?’ she asks.

  ‘She sat on her own at the concert,’ Farah says. ‘No family.’

  ‘Had you ever seen her before?’

  Farah shrugs. ‘It is hard knowing,’ she says.

  ‘Because she was all covered up?’

  ‘We never saw her before,’ Jamilleh says. ‘I know.’

  Paula turns her attention to her. ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘I spoke to her.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And?’ Jamilleh queries.

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. She said nothing.’

  She is beginning to look uncomfortable and Paula has noticed. ‘You’re quite sure?’ she demands.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you say to her?’

  ‘I asked, “Are you all right?”’

  ‘In English?’

  ‘First I try Arabic but she seemed not understanding. She was just walking, with back to me. Then I said in English and I took her arm, but she turned round and pushed me, like—’ She makes quite a violent pushing movement with her right arm.

  ‘You say she had her back to you but you also said you were sure you hadn’t seen her before. How can you be sure if you didn’t see her face?’

  Jamilleh twines her fingers together in her lap and looks at them. Then she looks at Farah, and at me. Finally, she looks Paula in the face. ‘When she pushed,’ she says, ‘I know how it feel when woman pushes. It was—’ She stops and takes a deep breath. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘she was man.’

  After that, Paula’s questions come thick and fast, and I get interrogated too. I feel stupid because as soon as Jamilleh drops her bombshell I know that she is right. When I visualise the figure now, as it limped away from us, I can see that, even under the black robe, it was too square, too broad in the shoulders to be female.

  ‘You couldn’t tell from the way she walked?’ Paula asks accusingly, and I explain about the limp but it sounds a pretty feeble excuse now.

  ‘Bloody Darren may have been right after all,’ I hear Paula mutter under her breath, but I don’t get the reference and don’t feel that now is the time to enquire.

  She looks back at Jamilleh. ‘Did you tell anyone that you thought she was a man?’ she demands.

  ‘No. Only to Farah.’

  ‘Why no-one else?’

  Jamilleh drops her head and says nothing.

  ‘Why, Jamilleh?’ Paula presses.

  Without raising her head, Jamilleh says quietly, ‘Because if it was man, then is man’s business.’

  ‘Tell me, Jamilleh,’ I ask. ‘Is that what you said to Farah? When you came back from talking to the “woman”, you said something in Farsi. I thought it was something like peasant because of what you’d said about the kind of women who wear niqab.’

  Farah looks at Jamilleh. ‘She said me “Wolf in sheep’s wool,”’ she says, ‘like in old story.’

  This makes me think of Red Riding Hood and the wolf sitting up in bed wearing her granny’s clothes. How can we bear to terrify children with such an idea? I am reminded too of an urban myth that was told to me in all seriousness a few years ago by a woman I knew only slightly. We had been at a meeting and she asked me if I would walk back to her car with her because she had been told a story that had made her nervous. The story involved a friend of a friend, as these urban myths generally do, and I hadn’t heard it before, though I have heard it, with variations, several times since. The friend’s friend, she told me, had parked her car in a multistorey car park one winter afternoon and returned to it, as it was growing dark, to find a nun sitting in the front passenger seat. The nun was terribly apologetic and explained that she was feeling ill and needed to get to a hospital. Could the woman drive her there? The woman agreed, feeling that she had no other option. She got into the driving seat and started the car, but as she was pulling out of her parking space, she noticed the nun’s hands, lying on her lap. Broad, strong and hairy, they were unmistakeably a man’s hands. Quick-thinking, the woman said she was having trouble manoeuvring out of the space and asked if the nun could get out and guide her. Once the nun was out of the car, she revved off as fast as she could go and drove straight to the nearest police station. When the police examined her car they fo
und a number of things in its boot. What they were varies in different versions of the tale but they usually include a length of rope and a meat cleaver.

  It’s a daft tale, as cheesy and full of holes as a piece of Emmental. Why didn’t the woman wonder what a poorly nun was doing wandering round a multistorey car park? How had the ‘nun’ got into her car and why didn’t the owner wonder how? Why wasn’t the ‘nun’ suspicious about being asked to get out of the car? That doesn’t matter, though. The story was effective enough to rattle a sensible professional woman because it tapped into a deep fear of the disguised other, the threatening male masquerading as the harmless female. Confronted with this, we are as fearful as a child who wonders if her granny just might be something else altogether.

  And now we have a new version of the myth, a new and specific fear. Why didn’t Jamilleh tell anyone else about her suspicion? Well, maybe because the thought was so scary that she wanted to put it in a box and forget it, but more likely because she knew that this was a story we were all waiting for, the story that plays to our terror of the masked and the disguised, the story that justifies our paranoia, that tells us that under any burqa, niqab, chador or hijab may lurk not an oppressed woman but a young man in a suicide vest.

  Paula perhaps understands some of this. She doesn’t press the point anyway. She thanks Jamilleh, says she may need to talk to her again, and leaves. If I thought she might let them go and stay behind to discuss things with me I was deluding myself. No-one is going to let me in on this case however helpful I make myself.

  I spend a bit of time with Jamilleh and Farah, telling them that they did well, reassuring them that they have done nothing wrong and reminding them that Paula is a police officer and that her interrogative style is not one to be imitated in more relaxed social situations. Then they leave, I gather up my files and walk out of the classroom straight into the arms of the vice-chancellor. Well, not into his arms exactly – I think his arms remain resolutely at his sides. I just bounce off the mound of his substantial belly, really, and drop my files on the floor.