Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  Karen chuckled, triumphant. Point proved. Carmen Campbell is innocent.

  ‘Calm down, my dear. You’re beginning to sound like a News of the World exclusive.’

  A somewhat sulky silence uncoiled at the other end of the phone. Chérif came into the red and green sitting room and stoked up her stove. They were still burning the wood that he had cut for the bonfire. He mouthed questions at her in French. Est-ce que c’est Karen au bout du fil?

  ‘Chérif’s just come in. I’ll pass him over.’

  ‘Oh Miss Webster, please come.’

  But Miss Webster remained non-committal.

  And so it was with some surprise that Karen saw her, squired by Chérif, approaching the theatre on the following night. It was Saturday 30 November and Miss Webster had known Chérif for precisely two months. It was indeed the anniversary of his arrival upon her windy doorstep. Karen bounded towards them, brandishing the tickets.

  ‘We’ve got great seats. I knew you’d come.’

  Miss Webster seated herself like a chaperone on the edge of the row, so that she could stretch out her knees. She looked round at the gathering public and noticed that she wasn’t the only person present who had advanced to the stage of white hair and a large home-knitted cardigan. She had not, however, set foot in the theatre for years. It still glowed crimson, an Edwardian gem which had acquired a new layer of red velour, fresh gilt and cheeky little lampshades topping out the house lights. Balconies and boxes perched like pigeon lofts all round the edges and the seating in the circle and the upper balcony stacked up straight, like a supermarket shelf, so that everyone was near the stage. There was a famous acoustic. The slightest whisper uttered near the backdrop could be heard in every stall of the ladies’ lavatory. This made the middlebrow murder mysteries, popular all year round, in which the butler had always done it with the help of the lady of the house, exceedingly thrilling. Any form of amplification was entirely unnecessary. Yet the stage was littered with huge black boxes, destined to magnify electric sound, and a fearsome array of speakers, one set five feet tall, trailing wires, and men in grimy white T-shirts sporting headphones. This conventional theatre presented itself as an utterly incongruous and unsuitable venue for loud bangs and unexpected explosions.

  ‘Would you both like a drink in the interval?’

  Miss Webster insisted on providing the drinks so that she could stroll up to the bar and inspect the premises. She didn’t ask either of the young people what they wanted. The bar, usually a hushed mutter of middle-class conversation and the odd plume from an isolated cigarette, vibrated with pounding hard rock. Behind the elegant ebony counter, once decorated with free peanuts and olives, men with death’s heads plastered across their chests sauntered to and fro, issuing Bacardi breezers to teenagers who were clearly too young to be drinking anything other than fizzy orange pop with straws. Miss Webster ordered a gin and tonic and two Cokes for the interval. This entailed a good deal of shouting on both sides. Turning down the volume was clearly out of the question. Part of the point of her withdrawal was to give the young people time alone to talk. Miss Webster did not misunderstand this situation, which was well within her experience. The canny observation of youthful courtship at a distance emerged as one of her fields of expertise. Chérif was being reeled gently in; the hook wasn’t yet locked in his gullet, nor had he swallowed the worm. Karen had not yet officially declared herself on the hunt; this evening established the continuation of her investigative prowl. Miss Webster liked girls who took their time.

  Either party could draw back at any point. Therefore Miss Webster’s role as safety device on the erotic pressure cooker proved essential – manifestly so – or she would not have been invited with such lunatic insistence. The old woman perched on a window ledge halfway down the staircase and added up what she knew about Chérif.

  Not much, in fact.

  He comes from a tiny sandy village on the brink of the Sahara. He has no father now and may never have known his father. His mother has a good job managing a hotel in a town four hours’ drive away from that village. She has a job no other woman has. He is clever and silent. He eats enough for six. His cousin is called Moha and he treasures a photograph, which he keeps under his pillow, of said desert, another young man, who may or may not be Moha, and a woman’s shadow. He is extremely gifted with electronics. He has set up my DVD and is responsible for my purchasing a sinister black parabolic dish and, on a monthly basis, thirty-eight channels of hot and cold flowing burble from the TV. He is obsessed by news. We watch at least two bloody hours of news every night. He is not particularly interested in films, but will watch one with me if it doesn’t interfere with the news. He has mended the car’s rear door, which was sticking fast, and changed the oil. He loves doing the shopping and has dug the garden. Twice. He watches the birds. His English is better. He asks intelligent questions. He makes me laugh. He works very hard at his studies. He receives no letters or phone calls – or at least not at my house. He loves rain. He is good company because he never intrudes. He has the trick of vanishing.

  But what did one ever know about young people anyway? They lead their own dark lives. And it would be a mistake to imagine that whatever thoughts roared through their brains were of more than passing significance. Except that, without much reflection, they are inclined to make that dreadful leap across the abyss from thought to act. The lurking act, which flicked incessantly into her mind, happened to be murder – mass murder, privatised murder, sexual murder, self-murder.

  The French courts were still trying to make up their minds concerning a shocking case of a young boy who had murdered his playmate, a girl of thirteen. He had taken her into the garden to play, then proceeded to dress up as The Scream, complete with white horror mask and butcher’s knife. He stabbed her fifty-two times, but could give no reason why. He must have had a reason, even if it could never be spoken. Another adolescent murdered his parents wearing the same costume, which you can buy in novelty shops in every high street, Europe-wide. They were becoming known as ‘the Scream Killings’. Elizabeth Webster pondered the past. Had she wanted to kill her parents? Most certainly so. Of course she had. Everybody wants to do that. And had she not burnt her loathed sister in effigy, not a fortnight since? We are all perfectly capable of becoming The Scream.

  The vicar thinks Chérif is a terrorist. She had seen it in his eyes. Here was a young Arab, aflame with the love of Allah, but keeping it well hidden, hell-bent on sending the Houses of Parliament and all that therein is, straight to eternity. Or perhaps a suicide plane, bristling with armed explosives, cutting through the lawns at Balmoral. Maybe it’s the end for the university, which had once harboured Saddam Hussein’s ravishing Lady of Death, the only woman in his government. Is Chérif following in her footsteps and genning up on poison gases? Are his tutors teaching him to tinker with weapons of mass destruction? We must take responsibility for this, she thought. We’ve trained them all. Even the Americans taught their own 9/11 bombers how to fly jet planes into buildings. You can do anything in America, pay up front and no questions asked.

  What puzzled her most was the fact that terrorism was impersonal. You need not hate those that you kill. You need not even know who they are. I know that I shall meet my fate, somewhere among the clouds above. Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love. Terrorism is therefore exactly like an act of war, and just as self-indulgent, dissolute, corrupt. Elizabeth Webster did not believe in just wars. Murder should be personal and passionate, whether planned or spontaneous. An act so momentous and decisive as the ending of a life should be executed with verve, panache and a deliberate, responsible devotion to the consequences. You murder the one you know well, the one who is close enough to do you harm. You murder the one you love.

  But what tipped normal people over the edge?

  And why was she thinking about slaughter, personal or otherwise?

  Ah! She was looking at a murderer. There before her, sinuous in a dress of bl
ue scales, Carmen Campbell, the singer of whom she had never heard, greeted her from the poster on the stair. Miss Webster looked straight into the eyes of the haughty gorgeous face, beautiful as the Black Goddess. The singer clasped a microphone and countered her stare. The old woman, unimpressed by glamour, addressed the image. They say you killed your lover in self-defence, but can it ever be so simple when the one you kill is the one you loved? Surely there were many times you wished him dead? What made you do it then? The woman in the poster shrugged and turned away. But as she turned Miss Webster suddenly heard a strange jingling clink, the sound of coins or seashells rebounding off each other. Had the poster really moved? She fixed the image. Crimes of passion. Was it a crime to be passionate? CRIME OF PASSION KILLER GOES FREE. But I have heard of you. I know who you are, snapped Miss Webster and found herself, teetering on a bare concrete fire stair in a provincial theatre, talking out loud to a poster on the wall.

  I must be going mad.

  A bell rang somewhere in the building. Two minutes. As she scampered down the staircase to the stalls she caught sight of Chérif in the doorway, looking about anxiously, clutching his ticket. He suddenly smiled when he saw her.

  ‘Oh, we got scared that you’d gone home.’

  ‘Thought I’d done a runner, did you?’

  ‘A runner?’

  ‘Never mind, Chérif. Come on. Where’s Karen? I’ve organised the drinks.’

  The concert was horrendous. A support band, which appeared to consist entirely of girls who had been beaten up in the green room and staggered forth with black eyes, performed under the name of Big Bang. The lead singer read out an overlong ideological statement in support of Carmen Campbell which never actually mentioned what she was supposed to have done. Elizabeth shifted about in her seat, irritated by the fact that she kept encountering stories everybody else already knew. She was not used to feeling ignorant and out of date. The band thumped and droned their way through twenty-five minutes of bad taste cover versions and, worse still, their own compositions.

  ‘They’re local,’ shouted Karen, in the lulls above the eponymous big bangs. ‘I heard them in the Black Lion. Not very good.’

  The audience rustled and clapped without conviction. Elizabeth Webster marvelled at the fact that a rock concert could be a sit-down affair. All the televised occasions she had glanced at in passing showed hordes gathered in parks enjoying a bout of hysteria, flinging themselves at the stage, their eyes crazed, their mouths twisted like The Scream. Chérif sat between them. She noticed that Karen was holding his right hand. Good, good. Progress. The girl wore a tacky gold identity bracelet with ‘Karen’ inscribed in italics. He’ll soon be wearing that thing for the duration, however long it lasts.

  The Big Bangs subsided and the technicians again invaded the stage.

  ‘Should we go upstairs?’

  ‘No, it’s only a pause. There’s a proper interval between the two sets.’

  The women talked across Chérif.

  ‘Do you like this sort of thing?’ Elizabeth asked him directly. It turned out that Chérif had never been to a rock concert either, but that the entire evening had been his idea. Miss Webster looked at him, amazed; he too had clearly gone quite mad.

  ‘I saw Carmen Campbell on the posters,’ he said.

  ‘But have you seen or heard this band before?’

  ‘The Usual Suspects? Oh yes,’ he said cheerfully, ‘on MTV.’

  ‘My dear child, you appear to have spent your entire life peering at a screen.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  Karen giggled.

  And then all around them, the audience erupted. Five mangy men of uncertain age stormed the stage like gladiators, several wielding their guitars. They grabbed the microphones and blazed forth in a torrid blast of surging rhythm. Some members of the audience could remain in their seats no more and had to be contained by a row of bouncers, who appeared from nowhere. The Edwardian theatre changed colour and shape as air-raid lights of blue, red and white began to pick out pale, screaming faces in the crowd. A peculiar stream of mist trailed across the musicians’ feet like the seventh plague of Egypt and tipped over into the orchestra. The atmosphere of the arena gripped them all. Elizabeth Webster looked on, curious and disconcerted; would these insalubrious entertainers be gobbled up by the hordes? Would she be able to sit through these terrible pounding howls? The words to the songs could not be heard at all. To her horror she realised that Karen was singing along to the peculiar enraged shriek. Once again she confronted a culture everyone else had effortlessly occupied and claimed as their own while she had passed by on the other side of the road.

  ‘That’s their big hit,’ yelled Karen above the roar of eulogy. ‘They’ll have to play it again at the end as an encore.’

  Miss Webster sat through four more numbers and then took an unscheduled break in the corridor, her hands sunk deep into her cardigan pockets. Even the carpet vibrated with the noise. It was disturbing, but not unpleasant. The band flung everything they had into their act. The drummer tore off his T-shirt and hammered his cymbals in a torrent of sweat, indeed the entire tribe shone and glistened, pouring forth an excessive flood of energy. The lead guitarist pranced and bellowed like a charismatic preacher whipping up a revivalist gathering to the proper level of communal passion, so that if anyone present had not already given their lives to Jesus, they would feel compelled to do so. Elizabeth Webster approved of people who worked hard at their jobs. The band were clearly working very hard indeed; she was therefore on their side.

  The last song at the end of the first set was dedicated to Carmen Campbell. This was the song that had made her famous, written for her by The Great Richard Thompson – Miss Webster had never heard of Richard Thompson – writ-ten for her smoky voice, her sinister, suggestive presence, her sexual allure. This is ‘The Way that it Shows’. A deep clamour of recognition surged out from the mass in the theatre and greeted Miss Webster as she regained her seat. The green searchlights picked her out, grappling with the handrails, and she felt inadvertently exposed.

  ‘You must listen to this one! They do a great version.’ Karen leaned across Chérif and urged her on – welcome to your secret initiation into the world of rock. Miss Webster made a serious effort to concentrate. The song began softly and for the first time she could hear the words.

  You’re going to give yourself away

  One of these nights ...

  It’s the little things betray ...

  Must be the enemy within

  That’s the way that it shows ...

  A slip of the tongue ...

  Your artful stammer, a little too rushed

  All passion to the eye, all cold to the touch ...

  A crack in your defences ...

  And that’s enough ...

  That’s the way that it shows

  The way that it shows ...

  Miss Elizabeth Webster suddenly looked at Chérif in horror. He had appeared on her doorstep in the middle of the night, become the super-serviceable young lodger, charming, vulnerable, quiet. He was here for a purpose. The concentrated single-mindedness of his endeavours confirmed the existence of that purpose as clearly as its nature and the reasons for his presence remained obscure. How could she have ignored what was obvious to everybody else? Chérif could not possibly be whoever he declared himself to be. He was hiding something. A crack in your defences, and that’s enough. That’s the way it shows. He was not called Chérif at all. She saw him again, standing frozen at the bottom of her garden, the bonfire before him and the rake in his hand. He had not known his own name.

  But as the night went on she became less and less certain what she wished to do with this fresh information. Karen belted off home, well after midnight, still raving about the band. Nothing was untoward or even different from usual. By now they had a routine. They watched the late news on BBC 24 at one in the morning. Chérif sat tranquil among the cushions, his eyes fixed on tanks, Land Rovers
and armoured cars, zooming across the desert.

  Elizabeth Webster could not sleep. What did it matter who he was? He wasn’t going to blow her up. And if he does disappear it will be just as he came, the parting without farewells, the vanishing in the dark. By 3 a.m. she was quite certain that she was being both racist and ridiculous. She knew his mother, for heaven’s sake. She had met some of his family. Surely all that counted for something? But the 9/11 bombers all had families, often wealthy and respectable families, none of whom could believe that their sons had done this thing. They produced videos of cheerful young boys in Western clothes dancing with ordinary girls at discos and wept before the cameras. No one appeared wearing either beards or veils. No, no, not my boy, not my son. She watched them howling and beating their breasts and she saw that the grief was real. They were confronted with a lie, a lie that sank home and destroyed the past. You were my own flesh and blood and I did not know you. The lie that could no longer be justified, explained and undone was the bitterest thing, for their children were twice lost, even the most intimate memories had become faithless and untrue. Elizabeth Webster had a distinct advantage over the wailing parents. She knew about the other lives, muffled in obscurity, that people lead and conceal, sometimes even from themselves. She realised that the stranger who had come to her would always be as strange to her as she was to him. But she felt neither resentment nor fear. And this invisible knowledge – for whom could she tell? – marked her out from all the rest.

  By morning she was peacefully asleep. She had decided to write a warm encouraging letter to Saïda, telling her how well Chérif was doing at his studies and how proud of him she had the right to be.