Miss Webster and Chérif (10 page)

‘Is this how you treat tourists?’ She raised her voice in indignation. A uniformed policeman approached. He rose to the challenge.

‘It is for your own protection, Madame.’ He spoke English.

‘Would you be so kind as to tell me what is going on?’ She drew herself up in the dark and wrapped her shawl around her with a contemptuous flick. The policeman looked a little dusty, but had been well ironed that morning. He sported an excessively neat, clipped beard, a natty piece of facial architecture which appeared scrupulous and vain. She could not see his eyes, so she lowered her veil and made sure that he was unable to see hers.

He hesitated for a second, then he said in English, ‘There has been a terrorist attack on the main marketplace. A car bomb. Four people have been killed and many more injured. The death toll will certainly rise. And there has been a warning, or at least a rumour, that another bomb is timed to explode somewhere else. We have no idea where. So the town is sealed off.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘About three hours ago.’

‘We have been visiting the desert all day, officer. We therefore cannot possibly have been involved in this bomb. And as you well know, the Hôtel du Désert is outside the town walls. I beg you to allow my driver to return me to my hotel.’

Elizabeth Webster presented this as a formal request, but her manner was both fearsome and severe. The delivery suggested a command. The officer hesitated. She pounced.

‘We have no need to cross the town. We can go round by the desert tracks. Please call off these soldiers and allow us to depart. I will vouch for Monsieur Abdou. I am his employer.’

For a terrible moment the outcome was in doubt. Abdou watched her without appearing to do so. He had not understood her words, but he had grasped the method. Make them think that you are more important than you are, and that if they don’t look sharp there’ll be consequences. Then the officer stood aside and roared at the soldiers.

‘Quick, Abdou!’ said Miss Webster. ‘We’re off!’

She climbed into the back seat unaided and then realised that she had been walking without her sticks. Abdou pulled the taxi out of line. There was now a queue of drivers behind them being bullied and menaced, their vehicles threatened with immediate dismemberment if any irregularities were discovered in their papers.

‘I assume that you can find a back route that is passable.’

‘With my eyes shut. Thank you, Miss Webster. Accrochez-vous! We will escape!’

And off they went, shuddering across undulating gravel at crawler speeds. A row of sitting camels loomed up in the headlights. Abdou passed so close that Elizabeth could smell them and heard one belch. A small brick shack with a paraffin lantern hung outside the doorway materialised from hulks of darkness. They saw three sepulchral faces, gaunt and fixed like images on tombstones, peering fearfully at the approaching lights. Abdou turned on the radio, but the dance music didn’t come on line. Instead he picked up explosions of static and thin muttered voices.

‘I can get the police channels.’

Everything was in Arabic, or as Abdou explained, approximately Arabic. Elizabeth clutched the front seat and bent over, straining to decipher a language she would never understand. Abdou translated the essentials.

‘They are still searching all the public buildings. The death toll has risen. My cousins were in the market today. No one has claimed responsibility. There is a news blackout. But the news has got out anyway.’

The torpor of the day vanished; they both sizzled with adrenaline and muffled terror.

‘Abdou! Are you sure we’re going the right way?’

It occurred to Elizabeth that they might be heading straight for another roadblock, or that they would be taken for escaping terrorists and liquidated by mistake. She imagined bullets, fine as sand, peppering the taxi. The unruly desert juddered beneath her as the taxi bucked and swung.

‘Mais non. Je suis bien sûr. I know where we have to go. Sit back, Madame Webster. It is very rough underfoot.’

The headlights rose and dipped, like a ship at sea. Suddenly the car wallowed and slumped. They were stuck in a patch of soft sand. Abdou cursed and leaped out. He scrabbled around the back wheels, which had the effect of burying the taxi ever deeper. Miss Webster became aware of a decided list to port. Abdou abandoned the futile attempt to dig the taxi out with his bare hands and grappled with the ropes on the roof rack. Elizabeth Webster finally glimpsed what the surfboards were actually for. She climbed out and helped Abdou lay the boards under the tyres. As she grovelled in the dirt she noticed that the deeper sand was still warm. They could hear someone crying and a chorus of yells and howls, far, far away. As their eyes became used to the moonlight they managed to wedge the ends of the surfboards on a solid gravel surface.

‘Get in. Drive. I’ll push.’

‘Madame Webster! You are a lady. You cannot push.’ Abdou looked desperately around at the all-encompassing dark and the distant fiery lights above the town. If she didn’t push no one else was going to.

‘In my country, ladies push. Get behind that wheel and drive. Go on, get in,’ she snapped, and he did.

And so Elizabeth Webster, who a month before had barely been able to walk one hundred yards to the village shop, sank up to her ankles in warm sand, heaving an old black Citroën on to the surface of the
tôles
, whose purpose she had at last understood. Our situation is not desperate and we will soon be home. The radio hissed and crackled as the taxi crept along the barely visible trails in the dark. It was midnight before they saw the seven palms outlined by the security lights. The gate was guarded by two uniformed men who raised their guns as Abdou drew up in front of the hotel. The children had vanished. There were very few lights on in the main buildings and no music floated out on to the terrace of the Desert Rendezvous. Everyone was inside, clustered into the salon, watching alarmingly local horror on CNN.

‘Abdou! Miss Webster! Thank God!’

Saïda rushed down the steps, her high-heeled sandals, an evening speciality, clattering beneath her. In the security lights her jewels winked and glittered, sinister as the eye of a toad.

‘How did you get through the town? There are roadblocks everywhere. Oh Miss Webster, thank God you have returned safely. Four of my Dutch guests are missing. They were out in the town. We have no idea where they are or what has happened to them. The bomb went off in the main square – where there are all the restaurants and clubs  ...’

‘Really? They said it was in the market.’ Miss Webster liked to get things right. Abdou was unpacking all her equipment. She ignored the soldiers and the guns and accepted her basket from his hands. ‘Thank you, Abdou. Please don’t worry about me, Saïda. The English are quite used to bombs. The IRA has been blowing us up for decades. I have been in good hands, quite safe and very comfortable. We had the pleasure of meeting your family.’

Everyone clustered around them, anxious to hear the whole story, as if they were shipwreck survivors. But she spoke only to her guide. They kissed each other on both cheeks in the French style and then shook hands warmly as if they had served in the same company and survived the assault together. The little taxi man no longer looked cheeky and confident; his white djellaba was crumpled and soiled, his turban had been destabilised by the episode in the sandbank and his teeth now looked like an unfortunate dental disaster, rather than a special effect. The old English lady stood up straight in the glossy night. She carefully balanced her sticks, basket, shawl, veils and hat, and reached into her jacket pocket. No one could see how much money she gave him as it was carefully folded into a roll. The transaction remained private.

‘Thank you, Abdou, for a wonderful day. Here is a little extra recompense for all your trouble, and thank you for bringing me safely home.’

3

The Visitor

Why had anyone bothered to bomb a public square in a small desert town on the remote edge of the Atlas Mountains? The square contained a mosque with an elegant minaret, a daily market, a donkey park, two cafés, a small hotel, three restaurants, one of which was in every known guide to the country and much photographed on account of the green, ceramic tiles around the dining room and its old French colonial décor. What was there to bomb? Terrorists went for capitals, for spectacular atrocities, which would kill thousands at a stroke. The masterclass had been given by the 9/11 bombers. But even the Al-Qaida experts were forced to make two assaults on the World Trade Center before they got it down. Practising, that’s what my local terrorists were doing. That was a practice run. And a great success it turned out to be – I don’t think. Two dozen dead and scores of wounded, some of them maimed and crippled for the rest of their lives. Four Dutch tourists and all the rest their own people. Inefficient, that’s my view. Far better to pick off the white Western tourists with crack snipers. After all, they’re easy enough to spot, wandering round the market nearly naked in skintight shorts and off-the-shoulder T-shirts. But maybe they are after their own government. Maybe it’ll be the king’s palace in Rabat next time. Or the police headquarters. A bomb left inside the lift. Or maybe a guided missile attack on the British fleet nestled in the lee of Gibraltar? Theatre is the language of terrorism. They need an audience to witness the event; otherwise the performance is worthless. If they could hire Jean Michel Jarre to do the fireworks, or that fat madman who filmed all the Tolkein, and get them to design the special effects on the tie-in computer game, they would. Maybe even terrorism has to be commercially viable. Late September, and time to get on with clearing up my garden before the winter. Oh my God, just look at my rhubarb, wolfed by slugs.

Elizabeth Webster, two weeks back from her eventful sortie to the land far away, to which she had travelled, obedient and puzzled, without knowing why, now stamped round her receding flowers and shrubs, pruning back dead shoots and clearing out the first fallen leaves. She bagged up the rubbish. Not enough yet for a bonfire. I’ll have one at the end of October. She rubbed mud off her gloves and stood leaning on her rake. And what have I gained from going far, far away to a land that I shall never see again? She looked up at the apple tree, demanding an answer. The huge mass of ripening apples leered down at her. She collected all the decent windfalls that were not pierced by the invisible worm that flies in the night in the howling storm. I have come home, she thought. I was not myself. I had become old, frail and twittering. And I was lost, even in familiar surroundings. But now I have come home. She smiled at the Michaelmas daisies and last year’s Christmas tree, which had rooted nicely.

She purchased a discreet haul of new skirts and cardigans and stashed the walking sticks in the coat cupboard. Miss Elizabeth Webster lifted her chin and tightened her lips. Business as usual. She rummaged deep within the shoebox and retrieved her cherished galoshes. Miss Webster set great store by her log stove and her elderly galoshes. Everyone in the village, who saw her at church or in the shop, told her how well she was looking.

‘Amazing what good a little holiday can do.’

‘Well, you look quite transformed.’

‘That haircut really suits you. Chic!’

‘Oh Miss Webster, your nose is all sunburnt. But you do look well.’

(This contribution supplied by Sophie at Snippets.)

‘I say, you weren’t anywhere near those frightful bombings, were you?’

She no longer ripped their heads off when they made personal comments; instead she heard genuine concern rather than impertinence. She began reading again and renewed her subscription to her foreign language book club: New Books in French and German. She signed up for a course of t’ai chi, ten lessons, at the university sports centre and felt full of energy after the first session, swaying and rising in rhythm with the teacher, a woman sculpted in muscles, who wore a kung fu headband, struck fierce poses, and then held them, her face expressionless. She bought a DVD player that was on special offer at Dixons to watch French films, also available from the predatory book club. This was an ambitious move and the SCART leads unfortunately defeated her. But she put it aside and summoned up the local TV men to make all the necessary adjustments. She was no longer catapulted into rages when inanimate objects put up a malevolent resistance.
Tant pis
, I’ll do it tomorrow.

Miss Elizabeth Webster was sitting on the green striped sofa beneath her Anglepoise reading light, at 10.45 p.m., watching
Newsnight
, in precisely the same position she had occupied at the very moment she came to a dead halt, six months previously, when the doorbell wheezed and sprang into life. She took a long time drawing back the heavy velvet draught excluder from the porch door. The t’ai chi had had an unexpected effect on her knees and she wobbled into her porch, stumbling over her shopping bag and umbrella, which both fell away from the wall and landed on her toes. The shape outside in the gusty night, illuminated by her automatic floodlight, was curly-headed, young and male. She flung open the front door and glared at him.

‘Yes? What is it?’

The young man had the kind of beauty which silences crowds and persuades elderly pederasts to reach for their flies and their cameras, for their time of joy has come again. His smooth olive features and merry dark eyes met hers with confidence and amusement. He knew exactly who she was.