Miss Webster and Chérif (18 page)

But what tipped normal people over the edge?

And why was she thinking about slaughter, personal or otherwise?

Ah! She was looking at a murderer. There before her, sinuous in a dress of blue scales, Carmen Campbell, the singer of whom she had never heard, greeted her from the poster on the stair. Miss Webster looked straight into the eyes of the haughty gorgeous face, beautiful as the Black Goddess. The singer clasped a microphone and countered her stare. The old woman, unimpressed by glamour, addressed the image. They say you killed your lover in self-defence, but can it ever be so simple when the one you kill is the one you loved? Surely there were many times you wished him dead? What made you do it then? The woman in the poster shrugged and turned away. But as she turned Miss Webster suddenly heard a strange jingling clink, the sound of coins or seashells rebounding off each other. Had the poster really moved? She fixed the image. Crimes of passion. Was it a crime to be passionate? CRIME OF PASSION KILLER GOES FREE. But I have heard of you. I know who you are, snapped Miss Webster and found herself, teetering on a bare concrete fire stair in a provincial theatre, talking out loud to a poster on the wall.

I must be going mad.

A bell rang somewhere in the building. Two minutes. As she scampered down the staircase to the stalls she caught sight of Chérif in the doorway, looking about anxiously, clutching his ticket. He suddenly smiled when he saw her.

‘Oh, we got scared that you’d gone home.’

‘Thought I’d done a runner, did you?’

‘A runner?’

‘Never mind, Chérif. Come on. Where’s Karen? I’ve organised the drinks.’

The concert was horrendous. A support band, which appeared to consist entirely of girls who had been beaten up in the green room and staggered forth with black eyes, performed under the name of Big Bang. The lead singer read out an overlong ideological statement in support of Carmen Campbell which never actually mentioned what she was supposed to have done. Elizabeth shifted about in her seat, irritated by the fact that she kept encountering stories everybody else already knew. She was not used to feeling ignorant and out of date. The band thumped and droned their way through twenty-five minutes of bad taste cover versions and, worse still, their own compositions.

‘They’re local,’ shouted Karen, in the lulls above the eponymous big bangs. ‘I heard them in the Black Lion. Not very good.’

The audience rustled and clapped without conviction. Elizabeth Webster marvelled at the fact that a rock concert could be a sit-down affair. All the televised occasions she had glanced at in passing showed hordes gathered in parks enjoying a bout of hysteria, flinging themselves at the stage, their eyes crazed, their mouths twisted like
The Scream
. Chérif sat between them. She noticed that Karen was holding his right hand. Good, good. Progress. The girl wore a tacky gold identity bracelet with ‘Karen’ inscribed in italics. He’ll soon be wearing that thing for the duration, however long it lasts.

The Big Bangs subsided and the technicians again invaded the stage.

‘Should we go upstairs?’

‘No, it’s only a pause. There’s a proper interval between the two sets.’

The women talked across Chérif.

‘Do you like this sort of thing?’ Elizabeth asked him directly. It turned out that Chérif had never been to a rock concert either, but that the entire evening had been his idea. Miss Webster looked at him, amazed; he too had clearly gone quite mad.

‘I saw Carmen Campbell on the posters,’ he said.

‘But have you seen or heard this band before?’

‘The Usual Suspects? Oh yes,’ he said cheerfully, ‘on MTV.’

‘My dear child, you appear to have spent your entire life peering at a screen.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Never mind.’

Karen giggled.

And then all around them, the audience erupted. Five mangy men of uncertain age stormed the stage like gladiators, several wielding their guitars. They grabbed the microphones and blazed forth in a torrid blast of surging rhythm. Some members of the audience could remain in their seats no more and had to be contained by a row of bouncers, who appeared from nowhere. The Edwardian theatre changed colour and shape as air-raid lights of blue, red and white began to pick out pale, screaming faces in the crowd. A peculiar stream of mist trailed across the musicians’ feet like the seventh plague of Egypt and tipped over into the orchestra. The atmosphere of the arena gripped them all. Elizabeth Webster looked on, curious and disconcerted; would these insalubrious entertainers be gobbled up by the hordes? Would she be able to sit through these terrible pounding howls? The words to the songs could not be heard at all. To her horror she realised that Karen was singing along to the peculiar enraged shriek. Once again she confronted a culture everyone else had effortlessly occupied and claimed as their own while she had passed by on the other side of the road.

‘That’s their big hit,’ yelled Karen above the roar of eulogy. ‘They’ll have to play it again at the end as an encore.’

Miss Webster sat through four more numbers and then took an unscheduled break in the corridor, her hands sunk deep into her cardigan pockets. Even the carpet vibrated with the noise. It was disturbing, but not unpleasant. The band flung everything they had into their act. The drummer tore off his T-shirt and hammered his cymbals in a torrent of sweat, indeed the entire tribe shone and glistened, pouring forth an excessive flood of energy. The lead guitarist pranced and bellowed like a charismatic preacher whipping up a revivalist gathering to the proper level of communal passion, so that if anyone present had not already given their lives to Jesus, they would feel compelled to do so. Elizabeth Webster approved of people who worked hard at their jobs. The band were clearly working very hard indeed; she was therefore on their side.

The last song at the end of the first set was dedicated to Carmen Campbell. This was the song that had made her famous, written for her by The Great Richard Thompson – Miss Webster had never heard of Richard Thompson – writ-ten for her smoky voice, her sinister, suggestive presence, her sexual allure. This is ‘The Way that it Shows’. A deep clamour of recognition surged out from the mass in the theatre and greeted Miss Webster as she regained her seat. The green searchlights picked her out, grappling with the handrails, and she felt inadvertently exposed.

‘You must listen to this one! They do a great version.’ Karen leaned across Chérif and urged her on – welcome to your secret initiation into the world of rock. Miss Webster made a serious effort to concentrate. The song began softly and for the first time she could hear the words.

You’re going to give yourself away

One of these nights  ...

It’s the little things betray  ...

Must be the enemy within

That’s the way that it shows  ...

A slip of the tongue  ...

Your artful stammer, a little too rushed

All passion to the eye, all cold to the touch  ...

A crack in your defences  ...

And that’s enough  ...

That’s the way that it shows

The way that it shows
  ...

Miss Elizabeth Webster suddenly looked at Chérif in horror. He had appeared on her doorstep in the middle of the night, become the super-serviceable young lodger, charming, vulnerable, quiet. He was here for a purpose. The concentrated single-mindedness of his endeavours confirmed the existence of that purpose as clearly as its nature and the reasons for his presence remained obscure. How could she have ignored what was obvious to everybody else? Chérif could not possibly be whoever he declared himself to be. He was hiding something.
A crack in your defences, and that’s enough. That’s the way it shows
. He was not called Chérif at all. She saw him again, standing frozen at the bottom of her garden, the bonfire before him and the rake in his hand. He had not known his own name.

But as the night went on she became less and less certain what she wished to do with this fresh information. Karen belted off home, well after midnight, still raving about the band. Nothing was untoward or even different from usual. By now they had a routine. They watched the late news on BBC 24 at one in the morning. Chérif sat tranquil among the cushions, his eyes fixed on tanks, Land Rovers and armoured cars, zooming across the desert.

Elizabeth Webster could not sleep. What did it matter who he was? He wasn’t going to blow her up. And if he does disappear it will be just as he came, the parting without farewells, the vanishing in the dark. By 3 a.m. she was quite certain that she was being both racist and ridiculous. She knew his mother, for heaven’s sake. She had met some of his family. Surely all that counted for something? But the 9/11 bombers all had families, often wealthy and respectable families, none of whom could believe that their sons had done this thing. They produced videos of cheerful young boys in Western clothes dancing with ordinary girls at discos and wept before the cameras. No one appeared wearing either beards or veils. No, no, not my boy, not my son. She watched them howling and beating their breasts and she saw that the grief was real. They were confronted with a lie, a lie that sank home and destroyed the past. You were my own flesh and blood and I did not know you. The lie that could no longer be justified, explained and undone was the bitterest thing, for their children were twice lost, even the most intimate memories had become faithless and untrue. Elizabeth Webster had a distinct advantage over the wailing parents. She knew about the other lives, muffled in obscurity, that people lead and conceal, sometimes even from themselves. She realised that the stranger who had come to her would always be as strange to her as she was to him. But she felt neither resentment nor fear. And this invisible knowledge – for whom could she tell? – marked her out from all the rest.

By morning she was peacefully asleep. She had decided to write a warm encouraging letter to Saïda, telling her how well Chérif was doing at his studies and how proud of him she had the right to be.

The church at Great Blessington was always chosen as a compromise for
C
hristmas. The faithful were not sufficiently numerous in any one of the three parishes to merit separate services at each church, but the united congregations could never have eased themselves into either of the two smaller churches at Bolt or Little Blessington. Entire families, lured by carols and sentimental handmade cards produced by desperate primary school teachers during the run-up to the feasts, turned out, replete with pushchairs and babies in red bobble hats who always started yelling during the lessons. A lukewarm love of tradition began to manifest itself among the people. The Baby Jesus launched himself once more upon the unsuspecting world in a flurry of stars, camels, shepherds and wandering kings. Chérif delighted in the camels. He also noted the proof of approaching climactic chaos in the front windows of Ottakar’s, which presented a desert, much like the one where he had been born, backed by pine trees and fir cones. North and South embraced one another across the rickety crib stuffed with cotton wool.

The spending spree gathered pace and intensity. Chérif had been conned into purchasing a holly wreath, which Miss Webster now affixed to the cottage knocker in a series of red-ribboned nautical knots. She pulled on her gardening gauntlets to avoid being spiked by the greenery. Chérif ambushed the old lady with an unexpected request. ‘I would like to go to church at Christmas,’ he announced. And then added, ‘with you.’

‘Would you really? Well, that’d cause a sensation. The midnight carols? Or the early morning mass?’

Chérif didn’t understand the difference. He had asserted his desire to attend in the hope of pleasing her. The only other Muslim in his seminar group was a Pakistani hippie from Peterborough, who actually wore a retro Afghan coat and who had told him that Christians had everybody on board to switch on the Christmas lights, which were a sign of hope and not specifically Christian. Everybody goes, man, women and men together, whole families, any religion, especially Jews, they love candles and call it the festival of lights, everybody all mixed up, and you don’t have to believe in anything, it’s cool, man.

‘When do you switch on the lights?’

‘Midnight. We have all the lights off. One candle comes in. Saintly little face of innocence illuminated from beneath. “Once in Royal David’s City”, then full boom for “O come, O come Emmanuel”. You have to light each other’s bloody candles. All the Christmas tree lights go pop and there we are, in a cosy glow clutching the Light of the World. Candles everywhere, and not a dry eye present on account of that odious little shit who sings soprano. Rumour has it that he strangled one of Mrs Harris’s cats.’

Miss Webster scorned the midnight carols with all her vindictive angry soul. Chérif had learned to deal with the rapidity of her occasional explosions, which were beyond him linguistically, by grabbing hold of the two or three phrases that meant something. Candles. Midnight. Lights on. And one of the singers was a murderer.

‘Let’s go to the midnight carols,’ he beamed at Miss Webster.

‘OK,’ she shrugged her shoulders and straightened the trailing red ribbons on the festive wreath.