Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘You’ve got severe concussion. You’ll have to lie quietly in a darkened room. Pity about the lights in here. Hospitals are always lit up like film sets. You haven’t had any stitches and they didn’t think you needed a transfusion. Apparently head wounds often look much worse than they are. You’ve had a brain scan. You were whisked off to X-ray while I was being stitched up. Your bruises are dreadful. And you won’t be so beautiful for quite a while. But they patched you up with sticky tape. Your eyebrow looks like a quilt ...’

  ‘Thank you, Madame,’ whispered Chérif. She leaned closer.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Whatever for? We didn’t come out of that fracas particularly well, let me tell you. We should take a self-defence class. Did you see which one knifed me? The police will need you to make a statement. Several statements I expect ...’

  A white coat topped by a young face appeared in the booth, and gazed tenderly down at Chérif.

  ‘Ah, welcome back to the world. Miss Webster, Chérif must rest now. I’m going to give him something to help with the pain. And you can have a bit of a rest next door.’ He helped her to her feet. ‘Now, is anyone expecting you back tonight?’

  ‘Not much night left, is there? And I’ve got my car running up a gigantic bill in Masterpark.’

  ‘It’s four-thirty. We’ve just cleared the backlog. Can I ring someone for you?’

  Miss Webster made a swift set of decisions, demonstrating the fact that she was still in possession of all her marbles.

  ‘We’ll ring Chérif’s girlfriend in the morning. If he’s fit to travel she’ll come down on the train and then she can drive us both back home in my car. I must get it out of that car park.’ She turned to the doctor, her spiky hair flattened and dank, her face still smudged with blood, and bowed like a guest at a country-house party. ‘I do hope that we haven’t overstayed our welcome.’

  The young doctor supported her down the corridor. He smiled.

  ‘Actually you have friends in high places. One of the consultants in Cardiology came down to ask after you both. You were having your stitches done, but he spent quite some time with Chérif. He checked all the scans himself and he dealt with the police. I can’t remember his name, I don’t think I’ve seen him before. But he said you were one of his patients. He has very strange, damaged hands, very disturbing to look at and he doesn’t wear gloves in the ordinary way. But he must do for surgery.’

  ‘That’s Dr Broadhurst!’ cried Miss Webster, genuinely startled. ‘So he runs a London practice too.’

  ‘I don’t know him. You’d remember those hands. I was told that he was over in Cardiology. He wasn’t worried about you at all. He said you’d got through the worst, even though you were the one who’d actually been stabbed. And he didn’t go to see you, but he sat with Chérif for ages, holding his hand like a father and looking very concerned. He gave us lots of instructions about Chérif and told the police to clear off. They’ll be back in the morning.’

  The doctor’s buzzer vibrated gently.

  ‘I have to go. Nurse, can you settle Miss Webster in the upstairs ward?’

  ‘I want to clean my teeth and take out my bridge,’ Miss Webster demanded.

  But before the sound-proofed square of her hospital window lightened, and before she fell fast and deeply asleep, despite being confined to her back and left side, Miss Webster pondered the mysterious reappearance of the doctor with the ravaged hands. What an extraordinary coincidence! Miss Webster did not believe in coincidence. How could he possibly know who Chérif was? Why had he taken them under his wing? But, upon reflection, everything the strange doctor bearing chocolates from Switzerland had said to her seemed so odd, she began to suspect him of espionage. He had sent her off on that wild goose chase across the desert, when she clearly wasn’t well enough to travel, and had practically caused her early death by terrorist attack. And now here he was, in this very hospital, minimising her stab wounds and having fits about Chérif’s headache. She prepared a few contemptuous sentences with which to despatch the doctor should he reappear, and then sank back into blessedness and oblivion.

  She was very much the worse for wear the next morning, her remaining teeth rattled and her tongue tasted bitter and dry, as if she had spent a week drinking. She felt for her handbag, which was carefully stowed under her pillow. It was Saturday. One of the assistant kitchen staff menaced her with orange juice and scrambled eggs. She looked at the watery offering, which came perched on soggy white toast, then wolfed the lot. A different set of nurses in green appeared to check her pulse, temperature, blood pressure and heart rate. They perused her notes, examined her bandages and delivered their opinions on stabbings and muggings.

  ‘Why is it so silent?’ she asked. Surely if they were in Accident and Emergency it should be all go – sirens and stretchers and transfusion sacs of evil red blood racing past on metal wheels.

  ‘Everything happens downstairs,’ smiled the nurse, ‘you’re up in the ward.’ She pulled back the curtains.

  Miss Webster found herself in a big square room. The patients along one wall were all wired up to machines that printed their heart rates into huge computers. Along the other wall lay a row of silent bodies, eerie and still, some bandaged, all motionless. A sealed glass box, staffed by white coats, projected out into the middle of the square, as if they were all taking part in some illegal experiment and the scientists feared contagion. She searched for Chérif and could not find him. A large black woman appeared and offered to help her wash. Miss Webster gratefully accepted the vast, outstretched arm. They set off down the ward.

  ‘Who are these people?’ Miss Webster glared at the row of calcified mummies.

  ‘Those are the heart attacks,’ explained the black woman, indicating the cyberbodies attached to the machines, ‘and these are the suicides. Road accidents downstairs.’

  Miss Webster scanned the rows of overdose coma cases; some sported bandaged limbs, just as she did. ‘Why am I in with the suicides? I haven’t killed myself. I was attacked.’

  ‘But you weren’t attacked by a car.’ The black woman’s laughing bellow echoed round the shower. There was still no sign of Chérif.

  The hospital provided the basics: toothbrush, soap and flannel, even down to a pair of disposable knickers. Miss Webster returned clutching a plastic bag of bloody clothes and a row of swanky, fluffed towels with the John Lewis barcodes still firmly attached. The right sleeve of her green coat had been slashed to shreds. Did she want it back? Yes, she did. Miss Webster decided to convert the coat into a laundry-basket lining. Her jewellery – one gold chain, one gold watch, one gold ring, her father’s wedding ring – was all stashed in a sealed plastic envelope down in Casualty, awaiting her signature for its release. She had never let go of her handbag and still clutched the thing to her chest like a pilgrim’s offering. The green leather bore a few speckles of splashed water from the shower. Still no sign of Chérif.

  Miss Webster re-emerged on the ward shortly after 8.30 a.m., compos mentis, perfectly clean, clear-headed, if a little bleary with painkillers, and prepared to join battle with all comers. She came upon Karen, standing over her disordered bed and staring round at the immobile coma cases and the fabulous machines with the leaping green dots. Karen wore her Biggles jacket and white airman’s scarf. Her face, filled with alarm and misgiving at the strangeness of the ward, exploded into joy when she saw Miss Webster. She bounded forwards, then stopped in mid-embrace when she noticed the plastered arm.

  ‘Oh no,’ she gasped, ‘the doctor said that you were OK and that Chérif was in the dreadful state. But you’ve broken your arm.’

  ‘My dear girl,’ Miss Webster cut to the chase, ‘how did you get here? I haven’t rung you yet. And I haven’t broken my arm. I’ve been stabbed.’

  ‘But you sent the doctor. He rang me on my mobile and picked me up at six o’clock this morning in his dirty great Merc. We came whizzing down in two hours flat. Mum’s really worried
. She wanted to come too, but the doctor said no, just me. And I’m to drive you both home if Chérif is fit to travel.’

  ‘Who is this doctor?’

  ‘He says he’s your doctor. He’s ever so nice and he filled me full of chocolates. I shouldn’t say this – Mum says you mustn’t make personal comments – but he’s done something horrible to his hands. Like an acid bath or a fire.’

  The ubiquitous Dr Broadhurst. Her life was being fingered in strange ways. Someone had interfered with her arrangements, anticipating the freedom of her decisions. She was not pleased.

  ‘Have you seen his car? De luxe!’ Karen wanted to talk about fitted CD players and real leather upholstery.

  ‘Help me pack up my things, dear. Some of the shopping is still a little damp. There’s a present for you in there. Oh no, we can’t go yet. Here come the police.’

  In the end Chérif came back to the cottage in an ambulance, his head wrapped in swaddling bands. He carried a box full of medicines; reading and television were both prohibited. And so it came to pass that Chérif missed most of the assault on Baghdad. Miss Webster gave him the radio and From Our Own Correspondent became electric listening. He metamorphosed overnight into a radio news junkie. Karen sat on his bed and read the foreign news sections of the newspapers and the polemical editorials, for and against, aloud to him. Karen’s Mum came round with fruitcakes and marmalade. The church sent flowers and a huge card addressed to both of them, signed by some people Miss Webster had never heard of. Did they really all live in the village? I’ve been here thirty years and I’ve never heard of them. They’ve never spoken to me. How do they know who I am? Would you send a card to any old woman who’d been mugged?

  On the nights of 27 and 28 March 2003, US forces devastated the centre of Baghdad. Miss Webster read out the reports from the last Western journalists lurking in the stricken city. The planes hurled down missiles known as bunker-busters, gigantic precision bombs which burrowed deep into the earth before exploding, rocking the buildings and sending huge sheets of glass cascading down the stairwells and into the streets. The two women surrounded Chérif with their comfort and their love, and read aloud together these Arabian Nights tales of slaughter and ruin. He cowered in the bed, spattered with half-healed cuts, looking like the victim of a shrapnel catastrophe.

  When a tale is read aloud it hollows out an echo in the air that remains even after the reader falls silent. The word has been spoken; it is no longer elusive and imagined, as it always is in writing. It blossoms with the authority of being heard; the spoken word is greeted, witnessed. Miss Webster folded the paper when she finished describing the scenes in the Al Noor hospital, whence the dead had been carried from the place known as Al Sho’la. The hospital swelled with the sound of the women screaming out the names of their loved dead and beating their breasts in the formal gesture of grief. Their lament filled the small bedroom, thousands of miles away, where three were gathered together, and thundered across the damp English gardens, the woodlands, the rising meadows. Their voices careered against the hedgerows, the phone box, the bus shelter. Their cry disturbed the chickens in their wire pens, the cows brooding in their stalls and the dog fox, who paused, his brush lifted, in his furtive patrol round the edge of the copse. The rooks gathered in the great bare trees heard the women’s cry, and flooded the spring sky with their dark reply and the gaunt flutter of their wings. Karen sat, white-faced, her back wedged against the wall, her stockinged feet hanging over the bed. Miss Webster, whose voice had remained carefully neutral and impassive, fell silent.

  ‘Allah karim,’ whispered Chérif.

  ‘Will it come here?’ Karen pleaded with the old woman to keep the war at a great distance, away from her mother and father, her little sister, her friends at work, the cottage on the edge of the woods and her beautiful Arab boy. But Miss Webster had no comfortable words for her to hear.

  ‘War will always be with us in one of its several shapes. But it may not pass directly through Bolt or Little Blessington.’

  And if it did?

  Miss Webster imagined a medieval dance of death, the bishop and the king leading the knight and the merchant hand in hand past the church and the village shop, following the grisly black silhouette of the skeleton cut out of darkness, armed with the scythe and the hourglass. Karen pictured her new office transformed into a heap of glass and metal, the board with NEW INSTRUCTIONS reduced to a shredded mass of green baize and painted beading, the burning photographs of desirable residences curling at the tips in flame. Chérif saw the market square of Al Sho’la, the stalls, cars and people blown to bits, and then he saw the market at Tinnazit and his uncle buying rice. He saw the old scales, carefully polished scoops of brass and the row of different weights that the vendor wrapped in paper before packing them away at the end of his working day. He saw the brown paper bags in which the rice was sold. Behind the stall he saw the donkeys tied to wooden stakes, the smoke rising from the outdoor restaurants, which amounted to a row of benches and stones facing the baked hills. He heard the boys singing and saw them chasing one another in the dust. Everything was safe and ordinary, the market conducted its business to a noisy accompaniment of taped dance music and exasperated shouts. He smelt the hot wind from the desert. Then he clasped his hands before him on the sheets and looked up at Miss Webster.

  ‘I know,’ the old woman smiled, ‘you want to go home.’

  The weather turned warm. The apple tree blossomed and filled the garden with a dense, pink scent. The hedges and beds unfolded like a clenched fist, as if the earth, suddenly convinced that it is better to be generous, squandered her gifts. Chérif reclined on the somewhat mouldy sun-lounger and listened to tales of bombs descending on men and women shopping for flour and cooking oil, far away, in another world. On 3 April 2003 the Americans destroyed the electricity power grid which supplied Baghdad and the city fell into darkness. The marines captured the airport and were inside the perimeter within days. Chaos overwhelmed the city. The giant metal statue of Saddam Hussein buckled and fell into the midst of spitting, cheering crowds. The siege was almost over and the looting began.

  A plain-clothes officer materialised upon the cottage doorstep at around 11 a.m. about a month after the attack in London. He flashed a plastic card in a little leather wallet. She didn’t have time to read the name, but suspicion flared in her stomach.

  ‘Miss Elizabeth Webster?’

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’

  ‘We’re following up the incident in London. I hope you’re quite recovered.’

  ‘I’ve had the stitches taken out of my stab wounds if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘Well, are you busy? May I come in? It won’t take long.’

  She stood aside and drilled the back of his light coat with her malevolent glare, then sat him down at the kitchen table and looked him over. He was about forty with calm, still features and he carried a battered foolscap folder which he laid out on the table before him. The stillness alarmed her. Never trust people who don’t fidget. They are preparing to strike. She stood before the sink, refused to offer coffee as a bribe and said nothing. He gazed back, very calm, very settled. Probably a trained killer, thought Miss Webster and assessed the distance between her hand and the kitchen knives, nestled in the wooden block. She knew what it felt like to be stabbed. What would it take to stab someone else? He opened the file.

  ‘And Mr Chérif Al Faraj, your lodger, how is he now?’

  ‘He’s at college.’

  Who wants to know? All the hair on the back of her neck bristled and rose up beside the raised white spikes.

  ‘I have your earlier statement to the Met. Here. Were you present at all times when Mr Al Faraj spoke to the investigating officers?’

  ‘No. He speaks English perfectly well. He doesn’t need me.’

  ‘And is it your view, Miss Webster, that this assault in London was a simple attempt at robbery?’

  ‘What are you getting at? They wanted his coat and my handbag.
Isn’t that robbery?’

  This meddling intruder had invaded her territory. She should have felt more secure standing over him, but she didn’t. Neither spoke. Neither moved. His stillness enveloped the kitchen.

  ‘Miss Webster. Did you suspect or did you have any inkling that Chérif Al Faraj may have known his attackers?’

  That took the biscuit and Miss Webster began a low rising growl.

  ‘What are you accusing him of? Beating himself up? Egging them on? Damaging his own kidneys? Asking for it?’

  Silence.

  ‘Well?’

  The visitor spread out his fingers, very pale, very steady, across the folder.

  ‘I’ll be frank with you, Miss Webster. Since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks against our embassies we are investigating all foreign students who originate from volatile states. Mr Al Faraj has been involved in a very odd incident –’

  ‘Are muggings odd in central London?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You say that he spoke to his attackers.’

  ‘Yes, he did. He probably didn’t understand them. It takes him a moment sometimes to get hold of someone’s accent. But I saw what they were doing. They caught him off guard. They wanted his jacket.’

  The officer changed tack.

  ‘And has he any other friends here? Arab boys his age?’

  ‘I’m not his keeper. He has an English girlfriend.’

  ‘And does he attend the local mosque regularly?’

  ‘If you’d done your research you’d know that there isn’t one,’ snapped Miss Webster. ‘And for your information we fasted for Ramadan together. I’m not a spy and I don’t like answering questions about my lodger when he’s not here to defend himself. If you want to know more about Chérif, ask him.’