Miss Webster and Chérif (21 page)

‘Have you got any exams before the Easter break?’ Miss Webster demanded.

‘No. They’re all in May.’

‘Ah, good. Give me your timetable as soon as you have it.’

She winked at Karen. Miss Webster was clearly planning something.

On Monday 17 March 2003, President George Bush addressed the American people, and in passing, the rest of the world.

‘
My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised ... The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfil their stated ambition and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other ... before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed
.’

The weapons inspectors had already left Baghdad.

Chérif’s second term at university ended officially on 22 March 2003. His last bout of coursework had been handed in early, so that he could concentrate on the war. He spent the next four days in the cottage, glued to Al-Jazeera. The images were both disquieting and repetitive. Here was the skyline of Baghdad, exploding with flame, and here was a strange, gesticulating creature in battle fatigues, with a gun prominent beneath his armpit, haranguing the assembled journalists. This was Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi Minister of Information.

‘Does he say the same things in Arabic?’ enquired Miss Webster. ‘In English he sounds quite mad.’

At that moment al-Sahhaf declared that the Americans were all lying in a ditch with their throats cut, whereas a small inset screen above him showed a battalion of tanks speeding unopposed across the desert. Then one image arrested the attention of Miss Webster and Chérif and held them open-mouthed and staring. A tribal herdsman, muffled and swathed against the clouds of fine sand, stepped in front of his dark, low tent and his curious goats, defensive and alert, his gun ready. Behind him lurked two veiled women and a gaggle of frightened children, pointing and shrieking and running away from the convoy. The man stood, rigid and baffled, as the war rolled towards him and then away again, on the long road to Baghdad.

‘Look, look,’ cried Chérif, ‘that’s like home. That man could be one of my family.’

‘Indeed. It’s exactly like your desert,’ agreed Miss Webster. ‘What an apparition! Like a medieval figure. Or even older. Thousands of years older. And it’s that way of life that will survive.’

‘As long as the wells stay OK,’ said Chérif.

Miss Webster found the babble of Arabic oddly soothing. She continued with her golden quilt, looking up from time to time to see an intense and bearded man broadcasting from Baghdad, who gave a convincing impression of being terrified in the face of carpet bombs. Chérif explained opinions or translated speeches from time to time. They slithered between the BBC reports and the terrifying footage of Al-Jazeera, but always returned to
Newsnight
for their final dose of war reports. Chérif’s ravenous eyes wolfed down the images, as if he were hunting for a coded sign, something shining clearly through the sandstorm before the advancing tanks, something still visible through the deep smoke of the burning oil wells, the blazing buildings and the terrible confusion of war.

‘It will go on happening even if you don’t watch it, you know,’ said Miss Webster. ‘Come on, supper’s ready.’

Six months in England and he had never been to London. She purchased tickets for a show and made plans for a foray into the legendary bright lights. What could draw his fanatical attention away from an exploding desert, thousands of miles to the east? The garden remained un-weeded, un-dug, and the recycling piled up beside the shed. Karen tried to understand; in any case, she was busy making thousands in commission fees. She sold an old coach house with a dodgy roof and sagging gutters for £270,000, then recounted her exploits, propping up the sink. Chérif did not listen. He never moved from the green sofa.

‘It’s his people, I suppose. Being blown up.’

‘Nonsense girl, where’s your geography? He doesn’t come from Iraq.’

They stood side by side, worrying about Chérif.

‘I’ve got to go, Miss Webster, but I’ll take some of the bottles down to the recycling.’

She kissed Chérif’s black curls; he stroked her arm, but never lifted his eyes from the screen with the subtitles in Arabic cruising across the bottom. Once Karen had rumbled safely away down the lane, splashing through the puddles, Miss Webster took evasive action. She stepped in front of the television and turned it off. He looked up in shock.

‘You can watch the highlights at eleven. Come on, Chérif. You’ll make yourself ill. You’ve got to eat.’

Miss Webster unfolded her master plan for their night on the loose in the city.

‘I asked Karen to come too of course, but she has appointments all afternoon –’

He stared at her, expressionless, uncomprehending.

‘– Of course, if you’d rather not go.’

Chérif remembered his manners.

‘I would be honoured to accompany you, Madame Webster. It is most kind of you to invite me.’

They stared at one another across the chasm of the kitchen table.

This ill-fated expedition to London caused the first serious difference of opinion between Miss Webster and Chérif, and the initial error, which unleashed a chain of disasters, was the decision to drive down. Miss Elizabeth Webster had not approached central London for nearly a decade. Many of the country roads had simply disappeared into fields; three-lane motorways materialised in surprising places. Her antique
AA Map of Britain
no longer charted the landscape. The earth lay all before them, as they roared through Suffolk at sixty. Miss Webster leaned over the wheel, baffled by huge green signs for the A14, which promised The Midlands and The North. The M11 was much announced, but impossible to locate. They stalled, mired in roadworks. Above them loomed the huge spring skies and sharp light. The frost melted away from the ploughed earth and the washed black outlines of the trees, still bare, but luminous, expectant, impatient for the coming green, lined their way. Chérif deduced the route by working backwards from Stansted, his original point of arrival. However, as soon as they reached the M25, he too was lost.

‘Straight at ’em, sir,’ cried Miss Webster and put her foot down. They shot off the motorway into Tottenham and became instantly ensnared in a wiggle of jams and lights. They lost sight of signs to the City or the West End and then finally of any signs at all.

‘We’d better pull off and ask an inhabitant.’ Miss Webster feared being swept round and round the North Circular with no hope of a reprieve. They turned into a side road and stopped in front of a decrepit row of terraced houses. Many were abandoned, their windows bricked up. Some looked as if they had been in a war zone for years: doorways strewn with smashed glass backed by cardboard on the front panels, abandoned rotting furniture piled in the front gardens, black plastic sacks spewing rubbish oozed on to the pavements. This decaying slum was illuminated by the same brilliant white light that accompanied their doomed trajectory down the motorway. And there, resplendent on a red plastic sofa ripped and pock-marked by cigarette burns, blocking the Clio’s slow advance down the otherwise empty street, sat three black men, magnificent as kings, their dreadlocks carefully arranged, many cans of Red Stripe lined up beside their feet.

‘Good God,’ said Miss Webster, incredulous. She stopped the car.

‘It’s the Neighbourhood Watch,’ said Chérif, and got out. One of the black men rose up as he sauntered towards them. Chérif was not a big man, but he stood straight and his black curls gleamed glossy in the sunshine. He shook hands with all three men. They stared at his beauty, perplexed and interested. He was the first event of their day. But none of them could understand his accent, nor he theirs. They surrounded the car, peering in at the smartly dressed old lady, the clean floor, rugs and cushions.

‘Yu lost?’

The face which peered through the window at Miss Webster’s London
A–Z
had two stained yellow teeth and then a large gap. He smelled of beer and cigarettes; he knew exactly where they were and how to get back to the best route. He revealed himself as the hermit, waiting at the crossroads, replete with warnings, the wise man that always accosts the wandering knights.

‘Yu caan’ go into central London now without a ticket,’ he declared. ‘Five pound. Then yu pay parkin’ on top. Twenty-five pound. Yu don’ pay the ticket and yu get fine. Eighty pound.’

The red plastic sofa was the tollgate warning of the Congestion Zone, which had come into being on 17 February 2003. Miss Webster had forgotten all about the Zone. She tapped her fingers on the wheel with irritation. Of course, the Inner London Congestion Zone. It had been discussed endlessly on TV and everyone said that it would never work.

‘We’ll find a car park and go in on the bus.’ Their simple adventure now presented itself as an odyssey fraught with obstacles. The Neighbourhood Watch waved enthusiastically from the sofa as they zoomed backwards down the abandoned street.

It was midday by the time they found a Masterpark in which to abandon the Clio, and Miss Webster’s temper, frazzled by hunger and outrage at the accumulating expense, could no longer be trusted. The cheerful day trip had turned into a royal progress, the road ahead lined by her diminishing stock of £20 notes. She breathed fire and slaughter at the hapless security guard entrusted with the underground car park.

‘I don’t fix the tariffs, lady. Take it up with the management.’

Chérif stood by, like an inexperienced flunkey, embarrassed and desperate, carrying her handbag and umbrella. They decided to eat. The nearest restaurant was vegetarian and appropriately called ‘Manna in the Wilderness’. They gobbled down stuffed aubergines, £11.75 each, and then mounted a calculated assault on John Lewis. Chérif’s clothes, never numerous, were becoming much-washed, faded and shabby. Miss Webster insisted on a summer wardrobe of unostentatious top quality and put it on her credit card. He protested.

‘I’m an old woman, Chérif,’ she argued. ‘I have no children. I have never spent my money on anyone else before. Fais-moi plaisir. I’m the one who has to look at you every morning, so you may as well be easy on the eye. I don’t want other people saying my lodger is dressed like an asylum seeker.’

Miss Webster’s sting lodged in her tongue. She withheld as much as she gave. The shopping folly of the afternoon was a black leather jacket with an arc of red Chinese ideograms across the back.

‘What does it say?’ Chérif expected Miss Webster to know everything.

‘Made in Hong Kong,’ she said.

The wonders of London’s national monuments were rapidly exhausted. Chérif was nonplussed by the Houses of Parliament – he could not see why they should be interesting – and remained reserved on the marvels of queens, and ornamental toy soldiers marching back and forth in front of their barracks. Apparently the kings of his country embarked on extensive palace building projects as soon as they ascended the throne. These massive constructions brought no obvious benefits to the populace, but due to an effective propaganda campaign and many state visits to dilapidated rural areas, the country people loved the present king nevertheless. Chérif stared gloomily at the distant ramparts of Buckingham Palace and showed no interest whatsoever. They settled down with a thermos of tea before the ducks and daffodils in St James’s Park until their bums were too cold to stay put.

‘Ah well,’ said Miss Webster, who wasn’t interested in royalty either, but who had heard they were tourist attractions, ‘King Faruk was the last King of Egypt and he said that by the end of the century there would be only five kings left in the world: the King of Hearts, the King of Diamonds, the King of Clubs, the King of Spades and the King of England.’

‘He was a gambler,’ cried Chérif, delighted, ‘and he was exiled to a casino!’ A biopic of the unfortunate monarch had recently been screened on Channel 4.

‘Do I gather that you are opposed to all monarchies?’ Miss Webster enquired.

‘What good do they bring to their people?’

They pondered the assembled ducks and floods of daffodils, sweeping across the greening lawns. The spring day proved deceptive, for the afternoon dusk now hovered around them, masking the distances, carving deeper shadows on the buildings, lapping their naked hands with cold. And so they slipped into the National Portrait Gallery, not only bent on education and tourism, but to warm their freezing extremities. Miss Webster pulled her hat over her ears. Chérif drew his scarf across his nose. The long escalator bore them aloft to the emptying galleries on the upper floors. But here they got no further than the grandiose jewels of the Tudors: strange, flat, white faces; evil, shifty eyes and gorgeous, cunning textures worked in satins, rubies, pearls. They faced the last great Queen of England, who stood life-size before them, her feet, lopsided and unnatural, crushing the map of her country beneath her. She looked like a gigantic voodoo doll. Robes and furred gowns hide all. Around her stood the clerics and courtiers, their unstable loyalty and probable corruption written across their cheeks and foreheads. Chérif stared into the eyes of the recorded dead, which followed him across the empty floors. Beyond the first gallery stretched room after room of fixed, ageless, unlined faces.