Miss Webster and Chérif

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘It rained,’ shouted Abdou, repenting of his over-hasty rebuke and implied defence of sorcery. He had just noticed that his text message promised TOP FEES. ‘The date palms are growing green again. This is the first time we have real rain in six years!’

  ‘Really!’ Miss Webster shouted back. Peace and unanimity were re-established in the taxi.

  For here in the austere waste of dark sand and red rock was proof of life, the promise of prosperity, the massive palms, the flood of green. Miss Webster wanted to give thanks out loud, but restrained herself. They swooped down the mountain road and at every turn she saw the long scarf of green draped across the land. They had been driving for three hours. She had drunk both litres of water and eaten one packet of dates, but lunch had simply never happened. Miss Webster rocked inside that light-headed feeling that she had left all ports astern and was now facing the ravaged beauty of a world in which all frontiers had disappeared. Anything could happen and probably would.

  ‘Shouldn’t we eat something, Abdou?’ she roared above the music.

  ‘Soon, soon, soon,’ came the cry from the taxi driver as they pounded onwards.

  As she had no idea where they were going she remained uncertain as to whether they had actually arrived when they turned down a narrow earth road between mud walls. On the rocks above the palm groves she saw the whitewashed dome of a saint’s tomb – the defunct local marabout.

  ‘This is Amazrou,’ said Abdou. Small vegetable gardens flourished beneath and between the date palms. On either side were little gullies filled with rushing water which smelled fresh and strong in the heat. She noticed a heron rising between the palm trees in a slick flash of white and grey. They came out where the river should have been, but no longer flowed. A wadi of rounded stone and fine sand crumbled beneath the taxi, which negotiated a bumpy descent into the dry riverbed, then a perilous climb up the opposite side through loose sand. Abdou urged the car on with the same wild noises he used for the camels.

  They crunched to a halt before a small blockhouse built of stone with blue shutters, but no windows. The roar of the engine died and Miss Webster became aware of the wind tugging at the taxi’s rattling frame, licking sand against the doors, pulling her veil tight against her face like a death mask. The violent light slowly eased against the earth, and the white shroud of heat mellowed into gold. Miss Webster climbed stiffly out of the taxi. A child carrying a baby hovered in the open doorway, staring. Infant and child were both encircled by large black flies. Around the house a broken-down wall enclosed some gnawed acacia tees and browning rushes with depleted feathery crests. Behind the building, inside the derelict walls facing the desert, stood a giant barrage of date palms, which acted as a windbreak. There were chickens ruffled up against the persistent rushing gusts, nestling against the hot stones. An intrepid band of goats cantered loose in the scrub; they all paused from foraging to stare at the strangers, their eyes blank and golden in the changing light.

  ‘C’est ici,’ said Abdou, offering his arm. Her sensible flat shoes sank into the sand. Abdou harangued the child for a moment in a version of the southern Berber dialect. Miss Webster knew how to say no, yes, please, thank you, and I want that done now, in Tashelhaït, but was incapable of following Abdou any further than the greetings.

  ‘They are out with the camels. I put the car in the palm grove and ring them on the mobile. You sit down and wait.’

  He placed a chair for her in the shade of the overhanging terrace, which ran alongside the length of the house. The floor was made of mud tiles. A worn bench hugged the wall beneath the shuttered windows. Then Miss Webster looked up. Above the main door, gazing outwards into the desert, hung the only object that wasn’t functional, the only thing that could be described as decorative, and therefore redundant. The fixed mad eyes, which in her own sitting room always sought her own, looked past her, outwards, into the endless void of blown sand and giant rocks. It was the green man. The girl with the baby took up her post to study Miss Webster’s every move. She too gazed up at the strange, displaced image from the Gothic vault of a medieval English cathedral. For here the icon seemed undomesticated, savage, his original power restored. Miss Webster inspected the children; neither was terribly clean, but they had no immediate signs of ringworm, jiggers or lice. They were dark-skinned, with the same vast brown eyes. The baby, of uncertain sex and very tiny, wore a nappy tied at both hips, and was draped in soft cotton folds which resembled swathes of bandages. It sucked at a grimy bottle, filled with a murky fluid. The girl ignored the flies and nibbled her middle finger, expectant.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said Miss Webster and lowered her veil for added privacy.

  The child did not reply, but continued to stare at Miss Webster’s clothes, veils, shoes, bags, hat. She placed the baby in a rush basket. The thing gurgled and kicked, but did not cry, just stared at Miss Webster. They all settled down to wait. Miss Webster now felt safely sheltered from the hot wind and began to measure and assess her surroundings. Palms, trees with thorns, an old wall in need of repair, a well. That must be a well. It is a round font built of stone with a wooden crossbar and a chain that dips out of sight. She noticed the iron pump and the wheel. That’s why they live here. Water. There is water. She looked up at the rustling palms with the scabbed trunks and then out towards the desert. There, beyond the farm wall, the great ocean of silence rolled in, the sand breaking like spray against the stones. At first she saw nothing but the rocky slopes marking the river’s death, but beyond that, now becoming clear as the light deepened against shadow, were the changing, endless dunes. The child scrabbled in the dust at her feet, patient, uncomplaining. The baby dozed, its feet still twitching. Miss Webster slumped down in her chair. The silence and emptiness that leaned against the rocks and palms hollowed out the sky, cradled their bodies against its vast indifference. She sensed the stealthy, breathing thing, animate, gigantic, which overflowed the great spaces of the desert, nuzzling against the dilapidated walls. It was tangible, so close, that she could touch it, were she to raise her palm and press against the air. With a sigh she closed her eyes and shuddered, confronting the immensity of absence and soundlessness. The silence folded round her and the waste spaces of sand and rock slid open to receive one more.

  When she opened her eyes again she was aware of someone close, present, attentive. The children had disappeared, but someone was standing behind her. She looked down into the sand at her feet and saw the shadowed outline of a woman. There was the foulard, blowing sideways in the gentler evening wind, the sharp waist and wide skirts; there was the image sketched clearly in the sand before her. She looked up and expected to see the two young men, Moha and Chérif, with their arms around one another, standing under the palm trees on the edge of the desert. She was looking at the photograph. She sat up straight and turned around.

  Before her stood a young black woman wearing the traditional layered costume of the desert people. The top of her head and her ears were covered by her veil, but a heavy mass of dreadlocks hung over her shoulders. Small seashells were stitched into them so that they rustled and shifted with a life of their own. Miss Webster looked carefully at the dreadlocks. The cowry shells were held in place by strange glass beads and tiny silver death’s heads. No wonder she was called the Black Witch. The woman was out of breath.

  ‘I ran all the way back,’ she gulped, ‘as soon as I got Abdou’s call. I’ve got a message for you from the boy you know as Chérif. He says he’s really, really sorry.’

  The voice was pure South London, but Miss Webster only recognised its origins from sitcoms on the television. No one was black in Little Blessington and the only black girls who had ever attended the convent were two Nigerian princesses who could afford silk underwear. This encounter was therefore an unusual occasion for Miss Webster. She made herself more comfortable in her chair, did not offer to get up or shake hands, eyed her hostess suspiciously, and then said, ‘Perhaps you could begin by explaining who he actually is.’

&nb
sp; The woman squatted down on an upturned blue bucket.

  ‘My name’s Carmen,’ she said.

  ‘I’m well aware of that,’ snapped Miss Webster, whose heavy guns were now loaded and aimed. ‘Your name is Carmen Campbell and if I’m not mistaken you’re wanted for murder.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Carmen, and gave a huge shrug of incredible relief. ‘I don’t have to explain. You already know. Is my picture up everywhere?’

  Both of them imagined a WANTED poster, with a desperate black and white image ringed by slogans. Have you seen this woman? Huge Reward. Dead or Alive.

  ‘No,’ said Miss Webster, ice cool, ‘don’t flatter yourself. It isn’t up everywhere, but I spent an evening staring at your face last year. At a fund-raising benefit concert. To pay for your defence.’ Her tone was scandalised and incredulous. How could she have spent an entire evening listening to unsuitable music in support of this dissolute wastrel, who lived in a desert and bumped off her boyfriends?

  Carmen beamed, inordinately pleased. The fans were rallying round after all.

  ‘Do you want to hear my side of things?’

  ‘No. It’s your business, not mine. I want to know who Chérif Al Faraj actually is. And then I want to visit the Alimentation Générale and the Hôtel des Voyageurs in Tinnazit. Perhaps you can help me on both counts by being quite frank and then calling Abdou back again.’

  Carmen gazed at Miss Webster, astonished and a little annoyed. She did not like Miss Webster’s insinuation that being a murderer was not especially interesting or that she was marginal to the affair in hand. She shrugged.

  ‘Oh, well. It’s all easily explained. Chérif and Mohammed are cousins. Chérif is Saïda’s son and Moha’s parents run the store and the Hôtel des Voyageurs in Tinnazit. I’m married to Chérif and that’s why he didn’t want to go to England. Saïda doesn’t like me. She thinks I’ve ruined his life. One of the reasons she wants to send him away is to separate him from me. But we’ve got a baby now. And work. Moha did want to go and study in England. So he went instead. That’s it.’

  ‘That’s it? That’s it?’ Miss Webster lifted her veils and rose up like a resurrected Ouija queen. ‘What do you mean, that’s it? You stole money from Saïda, tricked her into squandering all her savings on her sister’s son, imposed upon me with a pack of lies – and you think that you can solve the whole thing by telling me they just changed places? It’s illegal immigration, although that’s not important. You told lies. All of you. A pack of lies, with intent to deceive! Do you realise what you’ve done?’

  Carmen clearly didn’t. The implications of the affair escaped her entirely. She crouched on the bucket, staring at Miss Webster, baffled by her rage. Then she thought how wonderful it was to be talking proper English with someone else from England, even if they were having a row. The fact that they had lied seemed to her to be the least of it. The money, she had to admit, was a bit of a problem. But it wasn’t exactly stolen, just recycled. They had divided the funds. Half of it went to Mohammed to fend for himself in the white North, and the other half had been the down payment on the farm, which now gave them a living and a home. Chérif, the real Chérif, ran a string of eight camels and two 464 white jeeps. He was building up a highly successful safari business. He was the only desert bivouac service in their sector that had survived the bombs, and now he employed everybody else. His trans-Sahara caravans carried precious products other than tourists, but when they travelled, armed to the teeth like real bandits, they used the tourists’ protection and security as a handy excuse. So far no one had been killed in any shoot-outs.

  ‘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?