Miss Webster and Chérif (2 page)

The voice – and he was rapidly dissolving into nothing but the voice – managed to convey respect and concern. She didn’t have to go into details if she didn’t want to do so. On the other hand the voice made it clear that she could have flung an entire nervous breakdown into the abyss between them. The black man possessed a golden tooth, somewhere up to the left. He smouldered slightly, now that she was close to him, exhaling an interesting perfume. What was it?
Opium pour homme
. She peered at the stitching on the pocket of his suit. The whole thing was handmade, tailored to fit. He smelt of wealth. He would not abandon her until her situation was resolved. He would carry her bags. The cool patrician patina of the English middle classes hit her again like the first wave of a typhoon. Another moment and she would break down and gabble. She blinked. No, the gentleman was still there, still listening, still black. He was a sort of miracle.

‘Yes. I have been very ill,’ she whispered with relief.

In fact she had come to a full stop; not on the street or on the bus, which would have attracted attention, but in the privacy of her own sitting room, slumped before
Newsnight
on her green striped sofa. The television, still murmuring gently, retreated to a great distance. George Bush was addressing The World. ‘
States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world ... The United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons
.’ The scene cut to a stage-managed international conference around a horseshoe table with pink curtains as a backdrop. She could still hear it, far away, as her blood stilled and her eyes became fixed. The flickering blur accompanied her into a dark place of buzzing silence. The midnight serial-killer movie played itself out with no one aware of its terrors and expensive special effects. The lights still burned above the fireplace and in the kitchen, but the curtains upstairs were never drawn that night. Elizabeth Webster sat, silent and rigid, surrounded by all her possessions, magnificent and colossal as the embalmed pharaohs, far embarked upon that journey from which there is usually no return.

Yet when the early spring dawn came, she was still there.

The television hummed to itself, the screen presented a young girl hugging a labrador, surrounded by gaudy radiating colours, the lights dimmed. The jubilant birds in her garden and in the meadow that confronted her house celebrated a new day. They were the first things she heard again in her own flesh. She sat paralysed, confused. She had lost seven hours of time. She could not remember what had happened, or where she had been.

The first person to approach the house was the postman. Sometimes, when she had not spoken to another human being for many days, she apprehended him in the tiny space of the porch and assailed him with conversational clichés. But on that day he slapped down three offers of car insurance, one for MasterCard, and a special reduced subscription offer. Join The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and receive a free gift – an illustrated pamphlet on migrating species. He had to double this over to get it through the letter box, but as it hit the mat he pushed off back down the lane. He did not notice that the curtains remained closed downstairs and that the lights were still burning. He passed on, moving from house to house.

Elizabeth Webster was unable to stir her limbs or see clearly, but her hearing strengthened as the morning advanced. By nine o’clock she was capable of extending her right hand, crisped like a dead chicken’s claw, towards the telephone, which perched beside the sofa. The telephone had a row of numbers, ordered alphabetically and buried in the small computer’s brain: Council tax, CPS Gas Supplies, Garage, Gardener, Hairdresser, Shop, Surgery. One button, waveringly disturbed by her clenched knuckles, resulted in a dialling tone and then a voice.

‘Great Blessington Medical Group. How can I help you?’

But she could not speak.

A sort of burr, burr, burr, gathering strength and resonance, emerged from her throat.

‘Hello? Is anyone there?

‘Hello?

‘Hello? Who’s there, please?’

Click.

But the receptionist at Great Blessington Medical Group was mistrustful of mystery calls. Someone was trying to get through. She rang 1471 and then traced the call, so that when the phone rang and rang in the eerie, illuminated stillness of the sitting room, Elizabeth Webster knew that her muffled yell for help was being slowly heard.

‘It’s Miss Webster.’ The receptionist checked the name back against the computer’s list of patients’ numbers, carefully ordered by village and doctor in attendance. The practice now boasted a website and on-line services. ‘I remember her. She won’t come in for check-ups. Aged sixty-nine. Forcibly retired at sixty-four. Ex French teacher at the convent. Lives alone. Very high blood pressure. They must have dragged her out of the classroom. I bet she’s had a stroke.’

Behold Dr Humphreys banging on her front door twenty minutes later, thirty-four years old with a young wife and twins. He didn’t get much sleep at the best of times and felt as if he too had lost seven hours the previous night. He lurched around the porch as if swimming through soup. He didn’t know the retired old lady who lived alone at the end of a rough un-made-up track, the last cottage before the woods, a little brick and flint building facing the meadows, covered all summer in sweet peas and climbing roses. Here it is, the greening process of spring just beginning. Why do I always end up with the tricky home visits? She’s one of Dr Brody’s patients. The old boy should set the date for his retirement party. Then we can get someone younger for the practice who’ll help me out with the rural clean-up jobs.

‘Hello? Miss Webster? Hello?’

Curtains still closed, lights on. She’s had a fall. Quick, round the back. He could look in through the kitchen window. Behind the garage, down past the dustbins, through the flickering hard sunshine beneath the apple tree. He peered through the uncurtained back window.

There she was, still upright, grey-faced, eyes fixed. She must be dead. She may have been dead for hours. I thought the surgery said she’d phoned in for help. Dear God, she’s dead. He attacked the back door in a panic. It was open. Dr Humphreys flung himself through the kitchen, bouncing off the solid wooden table, disturbing every cup hanging on the dresser, across the dining room, and into the warm cluttered space where the morning breakfast show on the television stuttered into the weather forecast and a list of forthcoming programmes to a ludicrous accompaniment of banal music. Out of respect he turned it off. Then he noticed that her eyes had moved. She looked dishevelled, shifty, distressed, as if she had spent the night drinking. He knelt quietly beside her and took her hand. The hand transmitted a rush of glacial cold. She must be dead. But she was looking at him.

‘Miss Webster? You are not at all well.’

But she did not reply.

He felt for her pulse and then called the ambulance. She was very much alive, but had come to a dead halt. When the ambulance men lifted her tenderly on to the stretcher a pond of urine rushed down her legs and saturated the red blanket.

‘Whoops-a-daisy.’

The men were gentle, unperturbed.

‘Let’s get you to hospital, dear, and make you more comfortable.’

Dr Humphreys locked the back door, shut down the central heating and turned out all the lights.

The lights never seemed to go out in the hospital. Alarmingly, the ward was mixed. Men to the right, women to the left. They were cordoned off in bays of four beds, islands of white separated by green plastic armchairs and yellow screens. She awoke attached to a floating bottle, suspended by invisible wires, three feet above her head. The nurses looked at the clipboard attached to her iron cage, but not at her. NIL BY MOUTH. She saw this sign hanging upside down on the bed next to her and twitched, irrationally pleased that she could still read, albeit like Alice, from the other side of the glass. Somewhere, far away, she heard voices. But on the whole the ward resembled a silent film, played out in unfocused shots with an alarming zoom for close-ups and much repetition. The doctors touched her wrist, her forehead. The nurses issued endearments and instructions.

‘I’m just going to take a little bit of blood, dear.’

‘Can you hear me, dear? If you can, move your eyes to the left. Ooh yes. Aren’t you the clever one? Now to the right.’ A pencil torch shone directly into her shrinking pupils.

‘Left again.’

She closed her eyes. Someone patted her hand. She felt belittled, patronised. She began to worry about her house. Who would water her plants? Thank God the cat was dead. It had been dead for years. She groaned slightly. The patronising voice was immediately present, as if she had set off a recorded message.

‘Are you in pain, dear? Squeeze my hand if you are.’

Elizabeth Webster opened both eyes and glared at the blue mass topped with a blurred white label. Staff Nurse Something or Other. Piss off, she snarled. But all that came out was a burr, burr, burr, deep in her chest.

Another voice said, ‘I’ll arrange for the brain scan to be brought forward.’

Elizabeth Webster heard someone chanting.

This man hath penance done

And penance more will do
.

Then the boat drifted out of reach on to an immense shelf of darkness.

She lay beached on a coral shelf. A huge machine purred all around her, the note changed to a gentle hum, the lights scorched her eyeballs. She saw the reflection of red – red sky, red dunes, red sand. She had crash-landed in a desert. There were no other passengers.

‘Is there anyone we can ring, dear? To let them know where you are.’

‘Do you have any family?’

They always ask the same fucking questions.
Où est votre mari? Où sont vos enfants
? As if you couldn’t conduct your life without assistance from either one or the other. A small fast car, driven by a youth convinced of his immortality, had smashed into her on a hill in Normandy. They were all scraped up by the
pompiers
, who had asked exactly the same questions, over and over again.
Où habitez-vous? Où est votre mari? Où sont vos enfants?
She was always in the dock, always being cross-examined.

But I ask the questions. I have the right to ask the questions.

I’m not timid.

I’m not scared.

They see a little old lady, bird bones collapsed together in a fragile heap. I’m inside. I have a voice.

But she didn’t. Burr, burr, burr.

Do you have any family, dear?
Où est votre mari
?
Où sont vos enfants
?

She heard the slow lap of water. The keel shuddered and rose into the air. She was sailing back from X-ray.

Repeat after me: I am not helpless. I am not a victim. I am an old woman. But I am still here.

‘Move your eyes if you can hear me.’

She glanced slightly to the left. Turn to the right. There was something horrible between her legs. Oh God, they have inserted a catheter. Elizabeth Webster suffered from a horror of incontinence. A second childhood of nappies and leaking urine yawned before her. She tried to wriggle free, but this was interpreted as distress. The staff nurse materialised, armed with a disposable syringe, determined to suppress the violent thrashing. Elizabeth shuddered as the needle went in.

‘The blood tests are back. The scans are clear. She hasn’t had a heart attack. She hasn’t had a stroke. I don’t quite understand it.’

The pilot’s boy

Who now doth crazy go
.

Smells became clearer. Detergent. Bleach. Urine. Overcooked vegetables. Burnt custard. Spilt orange juice. Washing powder. Furniture polish. Her sight remained compromised. Colours were indistinct. White and cream blurred into a glowing mass as if an apparition had heaved itself into her range of perception. She could not see. She could not speak. But she could still smell the odours of the hospital, some rank, some comforting. And when she was conscious, she could hear everything.

‘Poor old thing. Has she had a stroke?’

‘Better to let them go when they get like that.’

Elizabeth Webster longed to rise up from her bed of death and hit them. Her anger was transparent, articulate, vivid – like a falling sheet of clear water, but it had no channels in which to flow. She tried to bite her silent tongue and discovered that the nurse had removed her bridge. One half of her mouth gaped empty of teeth. They were taking her apart, like a dilapidated robot, piece by rusting piece.

She slid back into the dream time and saw an angel, all feathered wings, white robes and androgynous Pre-Raphaelite sweetness, lurking above the waters. As she watched, the angel descended and dipped its long silken sleeves into the pool, stirring the surface into choppy froth. Quick, lift me up. Carry my bier to the brink of the flood. Lay me in the foaming whirlpool before the angel goes. Bring me to the waters she has touched and I shall be healed. I need water, not the Word of God. Bring me water.