Miss Webster and Chérif (24 page)

The emergency services were arriving just as he returned. Miss Webster, still propped up in the gutter, was now encircled by paramedics in luminous yellow jackets with reflecting white bands. She could neither turn her head, nor move, but his return did not go unremarked. The Good Samaritan pointed straight at him. A moment later the police surrounded him and grabbed all the shopping. He yelped with pain as a blue man bent his arms into unnatural positions.

‘That’s him.’

‘Got him!’

‘Well done, Missus, you clearly landed quite a blow.’

Chérif realised that he was being arrested just before he collapsed. His chief worry centred on the shopping. Where were they taking Miss Webster’s new suit and towels? What about the shirts and trousers she had bought for him? The last thing he heard was Miss Webster taking on the Metropolitan Police with the same energy and venom with which she had despatched the unfortunate Mrs Harris.

‘That’s my lodger, you incompetent idiots. And take your hands off my shopping.’

Miss Webster’s voice was the last thing he heard before the world closed down and the lights went out with a snap. It was also the first thing he heard, even before he dared to look up at the shabby green screens surrounding his trolley in Accident and Emergency.

‘Oh good, you’ve come round. I told them that you’d lost a lot of blood. Can you see anything out of your left eye? It’s practically closed over. We’re in Casualty. I’ve had fourteen stitches. My knife wound is spectacular, but I think your injuries are actually worse.’

Miss Webster had switched to information overdrive, like an accelerating car. Chérif could not speak, or even acknowledge the fragile old woman perched beside him in a green plastic armchair. She wore one of the new shirts they had bought for him, a chunky tartan lumberjack pattern in brushed cotton. It sagged over her narrow shoulders. Miss Webster, bent on explanations, talked nineteen to the dozen.

‘Do you realise that they tried to arrest you? They actually accused you of mugging me! Now, is that likely? Surely if you’d fled the crime scene you wouldn’t come back carrying the victim’s shopping? Sorry about nicking your new shirt. Those swine wrecked my cardigan and my blouse was a dustbin job too. They nearly cut all your clothes off you, while you were out for the count. But I stopped them. Did the bastards get your wallet? Not the doctors, the muggers. Your new jacket’s on the chair there. I’ve sponged off all the blood, otherwise it stains. I can’t reach it. I won’t be able to lift anything substantial with my right arm for at least two months. Dreadful. How are you feeling?

‘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.