Bettany's Book (99 page)

Dr Taha has brought his case against his two fellow Sudanese physicians to Amends UK, a British organisation which counsels and gives aid to the victims of torture. Other witnesses amongst Britain’s community of Sudanese exiles have identified Drs Khalig and Siddiq as having worked in detention centres and given orders which exacerbated the treatment of prisoners. Amends has brought the case of Dr Taha and these other witnesses to the General Medical Council, which has agreed
to investigate. The existence of ‘ghost houses’ and the complicity of some doctors has been reported by the United Nations Special Rapporteur and by Amnesty International. Dr Taha said, ‘I sometimes saw regret or reluctance in guards, but I never saw it in Doctors Khalig or Siddiq. In giving their professional approval to what happened, in being complicit, they were more guilty even than the torturers.’ But Dr Khalig, of St Thomas’s, under suspension by his own hospital board, says, ‘These people are fanatics who hate the Sudanese people and government. They are saying what one would expect them to say.’

So Sherif was liberating himself, was shouting testimony on the internet. Delighted, Prim called the
Observer
in London and spoke to the journalists covering the General Medical Council’s inquiry. She was anxious not only for justice, but for every piece of evidence of what Sherif had been through. Only then would she be reconciled. Anger kept her going by day, though depression hit her at night. She told the team of English journalists – there were three of them working on the story – that she had been party to the situation which led to Taha’s imprisonment. She begged them not to let Sherif know she was talking to them. She did not choose to use them as messengers. She told them what he had looked like in the military hospital, his swollen head and face, and what she had seen of his body when she lifted the sheet.

Sherif did not contact her. His soul was obviously consumed, thought Prim, by what must have been a near-physical need for justice. And gradually he was satisfied. Khalig and Siddiq were disbarred by the General Medical Council. The Home Office began investigating their immigration status. Prim herself was soothed and appeased as the wheels of equity rolled on over the careers and hopes of Khalig and Siddiq.

She began to confess these events to the anaesthetist. She began too to comment to Dimp on the charms of Sydney. ‘They have really good delicatessens in this city,’ she told Dimp studiously one night. It was as if she were limping her way back towards average enthusiasms, as if she had only just noticed. She gave up her work at the hospital round about the time principal photography began on
Bettany’s Book
. She began to do promotional work for some NGOs: Community Aid Aboard, Save the Children, Doctors Without Borders. Slowly, over the course of the year, and particularly after the two Sudanese doctors were expelled from Britain, she settled herself to become what Sarah Bernard had no choice in becoming: an Australian.