Miss Webster and Chérif (29 page)

‘I’m really sorry we upset you,’ said Carmen with uncomprehending but unfeigned sincerity. ‘So is Mohammed. So is Chérif. You may not have known you were doing so, but you’ve been a huge help to us. You’ve made all the difference.’

Miss Webster failed to grasp the fact that Chérif was not one, but two people. Nevertheless, she heard the genuine regret in the apology and her heart softened.

Why is it that a lie in which we have believed, or passionately wished to believe, so disturbs us when it is revealed to be untrue? We build our worlds around the truths, however small, that we exchange with one another. We act according to the information in hand. If we tell one another that we care and will not be party to anyone else’s bitchiness or abandonment, then we trust that it is true. We believe that those whom we love will not betray us. Miss Webster’s life had been transformed by her visitor. She confronted illness and despair, her defences breached at last, and then a stranger came out of the night, not to help her, but asking for help. Her energy, wit and sharp tongue had been needed again, marshalled in his defence. She had someone else’s battles to fight. She could not afford to lay down her arms and stretch out in sculptured stone upon her tomb. She had been called up to fight. She had gained a friend. If someone offers us his name, we make that leap of faith, and believe that he is who he claims to be, and that we are no longer strangers. He had named himself Chérif. The lie disturbed Miss Webster to the roots of her being, but not because this revelation was unexpected. She had known that Chérif could not, or would not, tell her everything about himself, but she had wished him to be real and the story to be true.

‘Well, it’s all over now,’ said Carmen. ‘He can’t go back and finish his studies in England and we’re in financial shit up to our ears.’

‘So is Saïda,’ retorted Miss Webster. ‘How much of her money did you purloin for your own purposes?’

‘Well ... ten grand. It was at least that much in the end. But we weren’t to know that the tourists would vanish overnight out of fright.’

‘Dozens of people were blown to bits last September.’

‘Yes, but we didn’t do it. I didn’t do it.’

‘You did for one man, however.’ Miss Webster sniffed at Carmen’s slightly too earnest righteousness.

‘I think it’s better to kill someone you know,’ said Carmen. She leaped up from the bucket and stalked in a dusty circle, her dreadlocks shaking, the light deepening around her. The jingling clink that accompanied her every move disturbed Miss Webster. She watched the shifting image in the poster come to life at last.

‘It’s not right to kill anyone at all,’ returned Miss Webster, ‘for any reason.’

But she wondered – in spite of herself. How many would die in this war, this needless cruel war, the invasion that opened the gates, so that every man’s hand was against his brother? In whose name was the war being fought? And for whose benefit? In a world of random murder was it more dreadful to kill 3,000 people and then oneself, like the 9/11 bombers, or just one person, the man you had once loved, as Carmen had done? The widow of a man who had died in the plane that crashed into the second tower had said of his killers, ‘I think they were very brave men. I don’t share their beliefs and they have taken the man I loved most in the whole world, but they were brave men. They were prepared to die for what they believed.’ Miss Webster said none of this aloud and so her subsequent outburst was very startling.

‘May God preserve us from madmen and their intimate convictions. Every time we turned on the television in the last six months we were presented with a maniac muttering,
it is the cause, it is the cause, my soul
.
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars
. If a man is prepared to kill and die – or send other men to their deaths – for some dotty principle, it tells you nothing whatever about the worth of his cause, only how deluded he is on the strength of his feelings.’

Carmen couldn’t be bothered to make sense of this. They didn’t have electricity in the desert and never watched the television. She just pursued her own line of argument.

‘The man I killed was the one with the feelings. I didn’t plan to kill him. It wasn’t premeditated or in cold blood or all that. I just knew he would threaten me and that he meant it – so I thought I’d be ready for him.’ Miss Webster contemplated the ethics of slaughter on a world scale and Carmen rehearsed a scene she relived day after day.

‘He said I was trash. He accused me of fucking other men.’

‘And did you?’

Carmen then realised that she was on trial. Miss Webster, like cunning Old Fury, was both jury and judge. She was already considering her verdict on the case.

‘What’s that to you? That didn’t give him the right to knife me.’

‘So you aren’t any better than you ought to be,’ sneered Miss Webster.

There was an awful pause. Carmen stared at the empty desert and the lowering sun. The heat had gone out of the day and the wind had dropped. The great silence lapped against them. Miss Webster followed Carmen’s gaze. A faint tower of dust swelled in the distance. The colours of the dead riverbed darkened from ochre into red. They both felt the shift in the dying wind. Neither of them said anything.

‘I was knifed recently,’ said Miss Webster, who now regretted the severity of her earlier tone. The experience of being knifed was an unusual topic for polite conversation, but seemed to be the only thing they had in common. She pulled up her sleeve and revealed the long white scar on her forearm. The edges were still red. Carmen inspected the damage.

‘Nasty. At least my murderer didn’t actually get me. He lunged. But I had a gun and I shot him.’

‘Were there any witnesses?’

‘Dozens. It was in a café.’

‘Then my girl, why on earth haven’t you defended yourself in a court of law? That’s self-defence. It probably wouldn’t even count as an excessive use of force.’

‘He worked in military intelligence. I’d never have gotten away with it.’

Miss Webster now expected another pack of lies and immediately smelt something odd about Carmen’s tale. Why, if she could clap eyes on Carmen so easily, were the massed ranks of the British specialist forces unable to do so? Why had that still presence of a man sitting in her kitchen, the man she had been wise enough to fear, mentioned Carmen Campbell, in passing, over his shoulder, on the way out?

‘They know you’re here, don’t they?’

Carmen fixed her miserably.

‘I told them you’d know. I told them. I told them that you used to be a private detective and that you find everything out in the end.’

‘What on earth are you doing here? Working for them?’

‘I’m in cold storage. Deep cold after this little fiasco.’ Carmen made it sound like a tragic destiny. ‘I have to work for them. Or I’ll be sent to prison. It was their price. Are you going to tell them I’ve cracked and told you?’

‘My dear girl, who would I tell? I don’t know them. Or even who they are. And the only one I’ve ever met was a plain-clothes officer so frightening I flung him out of my house as quickly as I could.’ Miss Webster reflected for a moment. Carmen Campbell really was trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. ‘You’d better watch it here. You’ll end up decapitated. Saïda’s probably hired a dozen contract killers to hunt you down. She sported a vindictive glint, or so it seemed to me. You’d better be careful. These people aren’t civilised. They’re mired in the Middle Ages.’

This speech disturbed both of them. Miss Webster stared at the house, which had neither electricity nor indoor sanitation.

Carmen waited a moment and then replied, ‘That’s not true, Miss Webster. I came here to find sanctuary and they took me in. No one has ever judged me for what I did. I work hard. I try to repay the debt. It’s very difficult for me. I had to learn the languages. I only know English. And I’ve never lived outside all the time before. Goats and camels are hard work and it means you have to be outside no matter how awful the wind feels. I’m a jazz singer. I come from London.’

They stared at the Sahara Desert and imagined England. The old woman from the country of dark soil and big skies and the black girl from a nice suburban neighbourhood and a church-going family found themselves thinking of strangely linked, yet different things. Carmen remembered
EastEnders
going out up to three times a week and the theme tune from
Thunderbirds Are Go
. Miss Webster remembered frost on the lawns in the mornings and her Michaelmas daisies, pale purple against the red-brick walls of her vegetable garden. Carmen recalled the sweaty smell of the Northern Line and the CDs packed under the bathroom sink in Pepper’s flat. Miss Webster saw her potting shed and Chérif’s dark curls shining through the glass, as he planted out the seedlings. Carmen saw her name in huge blocks of red neon scudding across the forthcoming events electronic notice-board at the Royal Festival Hall, and remembered pounding the floor of the taxi in triumph with her high heels. Miss Webster relived the great recycling wheelie bin debate, which took place on the gravel in front of the village shop. Carmen heard her mother’s voice calling down the staircase and imagined the smell of chillies and onions cooking up together. Miss Webster recognised the trees beyond her cottage, swaying in the autumn storms.

‘You should go back, go home.’

‘I can’t.’ Carmen turned to face Miss Webster, who now saw that the young woman’s huge brown eyes were awash with tears. Without any hesitation Elizabeth Webster held out her handkerchief and opened her arms.

‘You poor girl, you poor wretched girl.’

They walked silently to and fro in the riverbed, Carmen crying uncontrollably, Miss Webster supporting her, speechless and moved. She realised that this was not repentance or regret, but homesickness, the most terrible longing that can ever seize our hearts. We are called home. Our desire to return, to go back to the place we recognise as our source, our first beginning, arises from our bitter rage against the old enemies, our only common foes: time, age, death. We long to burst over the threshold and find the dead still present, waiting for us with their arms outstretched. We must believe that we will find our welcome assured and the world unchanged. Carmen tasted the full measure of her loss. She would never, ever be able to go back or go home. They sat down at the edge of the palm groves in the shadow of a cracked mud wall. The sound of water rushed behind them. The late afternoon light brushed their faces.

‘I don’t usually break down like this. I’m not weak and feeble. I’ll be all right in a minute.’ Carmen sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘You know, it’s great being able to talk English again. To someone English.’

Miss Webster nodded. ‘Use the handkerchief.’

‘You wouldn’t grass me up, would you?’

‘No, my dear. It had never occurred to me to grass you up,’ she replied in stately tones. And indeed it hadn’t.

‘Miss Webster? Can I ask you to do something for me? To post a letter? In England. So that it won’t have foreign stamps.’

‘Yes, of course.’

Carmen dashed back across the wadi into the house and returned with a large smudged white envelope sealed up with wide brown tape. Miss Webster took out her glasses and looked at the name and the address. Percival Leroy Jones.

‘But I know this man,’ she exclaimed.

‘Everybody knows him. He’s very famous. He’s always on telly,’ crowed Carmen, full of pride.

‘But I know him personally. He was at the airport last year. In Casablanca. Looking for you.’

‘For me? Looking for me?’ Carmen’s childlike tone registered pleasure, gratitude and alarm.

‘He said he didn’t think he’d find you and he obviously hasn’t. But he came. He was here.’

‘Send him my letter.’

‘Is he your father?’

‘No,’ said Carmen, as if she was scoring a crucial point in the argument, ‘he was my manager. And he’s my friend.’

She pronounced the word
friend
as if it should be spoken only by princes, as if it was the one thing that was faithful and infinite, a loyalty and a passion that surpassed all other bonds, forgave all things, and knew no betrayal.

They became aware of a figure on the far horizon, coming out of the desert, a small cloud of dust rising behind him. He was still a long way off, walking slowly across the stony crest beyond the dunes. He carried a tall stick with which he flicked the battered scrub bushes. Carmen waved, but he did not respond. The sun was behind him. He may not have seen them.

‘He spent the night crying. We got very fed up,’ said Carmen.

Elizabeth Webster gazed at the hunched silhouette of the person who became steadily more unknowable, even as his familiar shadow stretched behind him, lengthening against the gold. The boy she knew was translated into a stranger. He reached a rock in the wadi twenty yards away and then stopped. Miss Webster was not prepared to put up with any more emotional scenes.

‘Come here, young man. Sit down in the shade of these palms and start talking. You have some explaining to do.’

The boy wove an erratic trail across the space between them, avoiding her eye. Carmen got up, her beads and skulls rattling.