White Teeth (3 page)

Strangely, Daria was the final pulse of thought that passed through Archie just before he blacked out. It was the thought of a whore he met once twenty years ago, it was Daria and her smile that made him cover Mo's apron with tears of joy as the butcher saved his life. He had seen her in his mind: a beautiful woman in a doorway with a
come-hither
look; and realized he regretted not coming hither. If there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance, he wanted the extra time. Not just this second, but the next and the next—all the time in the world.

Later that morning, Archie did an ecstatic eight circuits of Swiss Cottage traffic circle in his car, his head stuck out the window, a stream of air hitting the teeth at the back of his mouth like a windsock. He thought:
Blimey. So this is what it feels like when some bugger saves your life. Like you've just been handed a great big wad of Time.
He drove straight past his flat, straight past the street signs (Hendon 33⁄4 miles), laughing like a loon. At the traffic lights he flipped a ten-pence coin and smiled when the result seemed to agree that Fate was pulling him toward another life. Like a dog on a leash round a corner. Generally, women can't do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. In this manner, a new Archie is about to emerge. We have caught him on the hop. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in a
maybe this, maybe that
kind of mood. When he approaches a forked road, he slows down, checks his undistinguished face in the rearview mirror, and quite indiscriminately chooses a route he's never taken before, a residential street leading to a place called Queen's Park. Go straight past
Go!,
Archie-boy, he tells himself; collect two hundred, and don't for Gawd's sake look back.

Tim Westleigh (more commonly known as Merlin) finally registered the persistent ringing of a doorbell. He picked himself off the kitchen floor, waded through an ocean of supine bodies, and opened the door to arrive face-to-face with a middle-aged man dressed head-to-toe in gray corduroy, holding a ten-pence coin in his open palm. As Merlin was later to reflect when describing the incident, at any time of the day corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches. To be confronted with a mass of it, at nine in the
A.M.,
on the first day of a New Year, is an apparition lethal in its sheer quantity of negative vibes.

“What's the deal, man?” Merlin blinked in the doorway at the man in corduroy who stood on his doorstep illuminated by winter sunshine. “Encyclopedias or God?”

Archie noted the kid had an unnerving way of emphasizing certain words by turning his head in a wide circular movement from the right shoulder to the left. Then, when the circle was completed, he would nod several times.

“ 'Cos if it's encyclopedias we've got enough, like,
information . . .
and if it's God, you've got the wrong house. We're in a mellow place, here. Know what I mean?” Merlin concluded, doing the nodding thing and moving to shut the door.

Archie shook his head, smiled, and remained where he was.

“Erm . . . are you all right?” asked Merlin, hand on the doorknob. “Is there something I can do for you? Are you high on something?”

“I saw your sign,” said Archie.

Merlin pulled on a joint and looked amused. “That sign?” He bent his head to follow Archie's gaze. The white bedsheet hanging down from an upper window. Across it, in large rainbow-colored lettering, was painted:
WELCOME TO THE “END OF THE WORLD” PARTY,
1975.

Merlin shrugged. “Yeah, sorry, man, looks like it wasn't. Bit of a disappointment, that. Or a blessing,” he added amiably, “depending on your point of view.”

“Blessing,” said Archie, with passion. “Hundred percent, bona fide
blessing.
”

“Did you, er, dig the sign, then?” asked Merlin, taking a step back behind the doorstep in case the man was violent as well as schiz. “You into that kind of scene? It was kind of a joke, you see, more than anything.”

“Caught my eye, you might say,” said Archie, still beaming like a madman. “I was just driving along looking for somewhere, you know, somewhere to have another drink, New Year's Day, hair of the dog and all that—and I've had a bit of a rough morning all in all—and it just sort of
struck
me. I flipped a coin and thought: why not?”

Merlin looked perplexed at the turn the conversation was taking. “Er . . . party's pretty much over, man. Besides, I think you're a little
advanced
in years . . . if you know what I mean . . .” Here Merlin turned gauche; underneath the dashiki he was at heart a good, middle-class boy, instilled with respect for his elders. “I mean,” he said after a difficult pause, “it's a bit of a younger crowd than you might be used to. Kind of a commune scene.”

“But I was so much older then,”
sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door,
“I'm younger than that now.”

Merlin took a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and frowned. “Look, man . . . I can't just let anyone in off the street, you know? I mean, you could be the police, you could be a freak, you could—”

But something about Archie's face—huge, innocent, sweetly expectant—reminded Tim what his estranged father, the vicar of Snarebrook, had to say about Christian charity every Sunday from his pulpit. “Oh, what the hell. It's New Year's Day, for fuckssake. You best come in.”

Archie sidestepped Merlin, and moved into a long hallway with four open-doored rooms branching off from it, a staircase leading to another story, and a garden at the end of it all. Detritus of every variety—animal, mineral, vegetable—lined the floor; a great mass of bedding, under which people lay sleeping, stretched from one end of the hallway to the other, a red sea that grudgingly separated each time Archie took a step forward. Inside the rooms, in certain corners, could be witnessed the passing of bodily fluids: kissing, breast-feeding, fucking, throwing up—all the things Archie's Sunday Supplement had informed him could be found in a commune. He toyed for a moment with the idea of entering the fray, losing himself between the bodies (he had all this new
time
on his hands, masses and masses of it, dribbling through his fingers), but decided a stiff drink was preferable. He tackled the hallway until he reached the other end of the house and stepped out into the chilly garden, where some, having given up on finding a space in the warm house, had opted for the cold lawn. With a whiskey tonic in mind, he headed for the picnic table, where something the shape and color of Jack Daniel's had sprung up like a mirage in a desert of empty wine bottles.

“Mind if I . . . ?”

Two black guys, a topless Chinese girl, and a white woman wearing a toga were sitting around on wooden kitchen chairs, playing rummy. Just as Archie reached for the Jack Daniel's, the white woman shook her head and mimed stubbing out a cigarette.

“Tobacco sea, I'm afraid, darling. Some evil bastard put his fag out in some perfectly acceptable whiskey. There's Babycham and some other inexorable shit over here.”

Archie smiled in gratitude for the warning and the kind offer. He took a seat and poured himself a big glass of liebfraumilch instead.

Many drinks later, and Archie could not remember a time in his life when he had not known Clive and Leo, Wan-Si and Petronia, intimately. With his back turned and a piece of charcoal, he could have rendered every puckered goosepimple around Wan-Si's nipples, every stray hair that fell in Petronia's face as she spoke. By 11:00
A.M.,
he loved them all dearly, they were the children he had never had. In return, they told him he was in possession of a unique soul for a man of his age. Everybody agreed some intensely positive karmic energy was circulating in and around Archie, the kind of thing strong enough to prompt a butcher to roll down a car window at the critical moment. And it turned out Archie was the first man over forty ever invited to join the commune; it turned out there had been talk for some time of the need for an older sexual presence to satisfy some of the more adventurous women. “Great,” said Archie. “Fantastic. That'll be me, then.” He felt so close to them that he was confused when around midday their relationship suddenly soured, and he found himself stabbed by a hangover and knee-deep in an argument about World War II, of all things.

“I don't even know how we got into this,” groaned Wan-Si, who had covered up finally just when they decided to move indoors, Archie's corduroy jacket slung round her petite shoulders. “Let's not get into this. I'd rather go to bed than get into this.”

“We
are
into it, we
are
into it,” Clive was ranting. “This is the whole problem with his generation, they think they can hold up the war as some kind of—”

Archie was grateful when Leo interrupted Clive and dragged the argument into some further subset of the original one, which Archie had started (some unwise remark three-quarters of an hour ago about military service building up a young man's character) and then immediately regretted when it required him to defend himself at regular intervals. Freed finally of this obligation, he sat on the stairs, letting the row continue above while he placed his head in his hands.

Shame. He would have
liked
to have been part of a commune. If he'd played his cards right instead of starting a ding-dong, he might have had free love and bare breasts all over the place; maybe even a portion of allotment for growing fresh food. For a while (around 2:00
P.M.,
when he was telling Wan-Si about his childhood) it had looked like his new life was going to be fabulous, and from now on he was always going to say the right thing at the right time, and everywhere he went people would love him.
Nobody's fault,
thought Archie, mulling over the balls-up,
nobody's fault but my own,
but he wondered whether there wasn't some higher pattern to it. Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones, who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, center stage, for all to see.

A dark line would now be drawn underneath the whole incident, underneath the whole sorry day, had something not happened that led to the transformation of Archie Jones in every particular that a man can be transformed; and not due to any particular effort on his part, but by means of the entirely random, adventitious collision of one person with another. Something happened by accident. That accident was Clara Bowden.

But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except, maybe, by virtue of being black. The classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair braided in a horseshoe that pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn't. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant.

She needed no bra—she was independent, even of gravity—she wore a red halter that stopped below her bust, underneath which she wore her belly button (beautifully) and underneath that some very tight yellow jeans. At the end of it all were some strappy heels of light-brown suede, and she came striding down the stairs on them like some kind of vision, or, as it seemed to Archie when he turned to observe her, like a reared-up thoroughbred.

Now, as Archie understood it, in movies and the like it is common for someone to be so striking that when they walk down the stairs the crowd goes silent. In life he had never seen this. But it happened with Clara Bowden. She walked down the stairs in slow motion, surrounded by afterglow and fuzzy lighting. And not only was she the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she was also the most comforting woman he had ever met. Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelled musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favorite clothes. Though she was disorganized physically—legs and arms speaking a slightly different dialect from her central nervous system—even her gangly demeanor seemed to Archie exceptionally elegant. She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.

“Cheer up, bwoy,” she said in a lilting Caribbean accent that reminded Archie of That Jamaican Cricketer, “it might never happen.”

“I think it already has.”

Archie, who had just dropped a fag from his mouth that had been burning itself to death anyway, saw Clara quickly tread it underfoot. She gave him a wide grin that revealed possibly her one imperfection. A complete lack of teeth in the top of her mouth.

“Man . . . dey get knock out,” she lisped, seeing his surprise. “But I tink to myself: come de end of de world, d'Lord won't mind if I have no toofs.” She laughed softly.

“Archie Jones,” said Archie, offering her a Marlboro.

“Clara.” She whistled inadvertently as she smiled and breathed in the smoke. “Archie Jones, you look justabout exackly how I feel. Have Clive and dem people been talking foolishness at you? Clive, you bin playing wid dis poor man?”

Clive grunted—the memory of Archie had all but disappeared with the effects of the wine—and continued where he left off, accusing Leo of misunderstanding the difference between political and physical sacrifice.

“Oh, no . . . nothing serious,” Archie burbled, useless in the face of her exquisite face. “Bit of a disagreement, that's all. Clive and I have different views about a few things. Generation gap, I suppose.”