White Teeth (4 page)

Clara slapped him on the hand. “Hush yo mout! You're nat dat ol'. I seen older.”

“I'm old enough,” said Archie, and then, just because he felt like telling her, “You won't believe me, but I almost died today.”

Clara raised an eyebrow. “You don't say. Well, come and join de club. Dere are a lot of us about dis marnin'. What a
strange
party dis is. You know,” she said, brushing a long hand across his bald spot, “you look pretty djam good for someone come so close to St. Peter's Gate. You wan' some advice?”

Archie nodded vigorously. He always wanted advice, he was a huge fan of second opinions. That's why he never went anywhere without a ten-pence coin.

“Go home, get some rest. Marnin' de the world new, every time. Man . . . dis life no easy!”

What home? thought Archie. He had unhooked the old life, he was walking into unknown territory.

“Man . . .” Clara repeated, patting him on the back, “dis life no easy!”

She let off another long whistle and a rueful laugh, and, unless he was really going nuts, Archie saw that
come-hither
look, identical to Daria's; tinged with a kind of sadness, disappointment; like she didn't have a great deal of other options. Clara was nineteen. Archibald was forty-seven.

Six weeks later they were married.

CHAPTER TWO

Teething Trouble

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was
from
somewhere. She had
roots.
More specifically, she was from Lambeth (via Jamaica) and she was connected, through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was ugly. And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. There was Clara and Ryan for eight months before Clara and Archie were drawn together from opposite ends of a staircase. And Clara might never have run into the arms of Archie Jones if she hadn't been running, quite as fast as she could, away from Ryan Topps.

Poor Ryan Topps. He was a mass of unfortunate physical characteristics. He was very thin and very tall, redheaded, flat-footed, and freckled to such an extent that his skin was rarer than his freckles. Ryan fancied himself as a bit of a mod. He wore ill-fitting gray suits with black turtlenecks. While the rest of the world discovered the joys of the electronic synthesizer, Ryan swore allegiance to the little men with big guitars: to the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who. Ryan Topps rode a green Vespa GS scooter that he polished twice a day with a baby's diaper and kept encased in a custom-built corrugated-iron shield. To Ryan's way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but an ideology, family, friend, and lover all rolled into one paragon of late-forties engineering.

Ryan Topps, as one might expect, had few friends.

Clara Bowden, aged seventeen, was gangly, bucktoothed, a Jehovah's Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit. A typical teenage female panopticon, she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps long before they ever spoke. She knew the basics: same school (St. Jude's Community School, Lambeth), same height (six foot one); she knew he was, like her, neither Irish nor Roman Catholic, which made them two islands floating around the popish ocean of St. Jude's, enrolled in the school by the accident of their zipcodes, reviled by teachers and pupils alike. She knew the name of his bike, she read the tops of his records as they popped up over the brim of his bag. She even knew things about him he didn't know: for example, she knew he was the Last Man on Earth. Every school has one, and in St. Jude's, as in other seats of learning, it was the girls who chose this moniker and dished it out. There were, of course, variations:

Mr.
Not for a Million Pounds.

Mr.
Not to Save My Mother's Life.

Mr.
Not for World Peace.

But, generally, the schoolgirls of St. Jude's kept to the tried and tested formula. Though Ryan would never be privy to the conversations of the school's female changing rooms, Clara knew. She knew how the object of her affections was discussed, she kept an ear out, she knew what he amounted to when you got down to it, down among the sweat and the training bras and the sharp flick of a wet towel.

“Ah, Jaysus, you're not listening. I'm saying, if he was the
last
man on earth!”

“I
still
wouldn't.”

“Ah, bollocks you
would
!”

“But listen: the whole bleedin' world has been hit by the bomb, like in Japan, roight? An' all the good-lookin' men, all the
rides
like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead. They've all been burned to a crisp. An' all that's left is Ryan Topps and a bunch of cockroaches.”

“On me life, I'd rather sleep with the cockroaches.”

Ryan's unpopularity at St. Jude's was equaled only by Clara's. On her first day at the school her mother had explained to her she was about to enter the devil's lair, filled her satchel with two hundred copies of the
Watchtower,
and instructed her to go and do the Lord's work. Week after week she shuffled through the school, head hung to the ground, handing out magazines, murmuring, “Only Jehovah saves”; in a school where an overexcitable pustule could send you to Coventry, a six-foot black missionary in knee socks attempting to convert six hundred Catholics to the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses equaled social leprosy.

So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot. Ryan's freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream. Clara could circumnavigate an apple with her front teeth before her tongue got anywhere near it. Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out); not even St. Jude, who got saddled way back in the first century with the patronage of hopeless causes (due to the tonal similarity between Jude and Judas), was prepared to get involved.

At five o'clock each day, as Clara sat in her house attending to the message of the Gospels or composing a leaflet condemning the heathen practice of blood transfusion, Ryan Topps would scoot by her open window on his way home. The Bowden living room sat just below street level, and had bars on its window, so all views were partial. Generally, she would see feet, wheels, car exhausts, swinging umbrellas. Such slight glimpses were often telling; a lively imagination could squeeze much pathos out of a frayed lace, a darned sock, a low-swinging bag that had seen better days. But nothing affected her more deeply than gazing after the disappearing tailpipe of Ryan's scooter. Lacking any name for the furtive rumblings that appeared in her lower abdomen on these occasions, Clara called it the spirit of the Lord. She felt that somehow she was going to save the heathen Ryan Topps. Clara meant to gather this boy close to her breast, keep him safe from the temptation that besets us all around, prepare him for the day of his redemption. (And wasn't there somewhere, lower than her abdomen—somewhere down in the nether region of the unmentionables—the half-conceived hope that Ryan Topps might save
her
?)

If Hortense Bowden caught her daughter sitting wistfully by the barred window, listening to the retreating splutter of an engine while the pages of the
New Bible
flicked over in the breeze, she koofed her upside her head and thanked her to remember that only 144,000 of the Witnesses of Jehovah would sit in the court of the Lord on Judgment Day. Among which number of the Anointed there was no space for nasty-looking so-and-sos on motorcycles.

“But what if we saved—”

“Some people,” Hortense asserted with a snort, “have done such a hol' heap of sinning, it
late
for dem to be making eyes at Jehovah. It take effort to be close to Jehovah. It take devotion and dedication.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they alone shall see God.
Matthew 5:8. Isn't dat right, Darcus?”

Darcus Bowden, Clara's father, was an odoriferous, moribund, salivating old man entombed in a bug-infested armchair from which he had never been seen to remove himself, not even, thanks to a catheter, to visit the outdoor toilet. Darcus had come over to England fourteen years earlier and spent the whole of that period in the far corner of the living room, watching television. The original intention had been that he should come to England and earn enough money to enable Clara and Hortense to come over, join him, and settle down. However, on arrival, a mysterious illness had debilitated Darcus Bowden. An illness that no doctor could find any physical symptoms of, but which manifested itself in the most incredible lethargy, creating in Darcus—admittedly, never the most vibrant of men—a lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair, and British television. In 1972, enraged by a fourteen-year wait, Hortense decided finally to make the journey under her own steam. Steam was something Hortense had in abundance. She arrived on the doorstep with the sixteen-year-old Clara, broke down the door in a fury and—so the legend went back in St. Elizabeth—gave Darcus Bowden the tongue-lashing of his life. Some say this onslaught lasted four hours, some say she quoted every book of the Bible from memory and it took a whole day and a whole night. What is certain is, at the end of it all, Darcus slumped deeper into the recesses of his chair, looked mournfully at the television with which he had had such an understanding, compassionate relationship—so uncomplicated, so much innocent affection—and a tear squeezed its way out of its duct and settled in a crag underneath his eye. Then he said just one word: Hmph.

Hmph
was all Darcus said or ever was to say after. Ask Darcus anything; query him on any subject at any hour of the day or night; interrogate him; chat with him; implore him; declare your love for him; accuse him or vindicate him and he will give you only one answer.

“I say, isn't dat right, Darcus?”

“Hmph.”

“An' it not,” exclaimed Hortense, returning to Clara, having received Darcus's grunt of approval, “dat young man's
soul
you boddrin' yourself wid! How many times must I tell you—you got no time for bwoys!”

For Time was running out in the Bowden household. This was 1974, and Hortense was preparing for the End of the World, which, in the house diary, she had marked carefully in blue Biro: January 1, 1975. This was not a solitary psychosis of the Bowdens. There were eight million Jehovah's Witnesses waiting with her. Hortense was in large, albeit eccentric, company. A personal letter had come to Hortense (as secretary of the Lambeth branch of the Kingdom Halls), with a photocopied signature from William J. Rangeforth of the world headquarters of the Watchtower Society in Brooklyn, USA, confirming the date. The end of the world had been
officially
confirmed with a gold-plated letterhead, and Hortense had risen to the occasion by setting it in an attractive mahogany frame. She had given it pride of place on a doily on top of the television, between a glass figurine of Cinderella on her way to the ball and a tea cozy embroidered with the Ten Commandments. She had asked Darcus whether he thought it looked nice. He had hmphed his assent.

The end of the world was nigh. And this was not—the Lambeth branch of the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses was to be assured—like the mistakes of 1914 and 1925. They had been promised the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees, and this time the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees
would
appear. They had waited so long for the rivers of blood to overflow the gutters in the high street, and now their thirst
would
be satiated. The time had come. This was the right date, this was the only date, all other dates that might have been proffered in the past were the result of some bad calculations: someone forgot to add, someone forgot to minus, someone forgot to carry the one. But now was the time. The real thing. January 1, 1975.

Hortense, for one, was glad to hear it. The first morning of 1925 she had wept like a baby when she awoke to find—instead of hail and brimstone and universal destruction—the continuance of daily life, the regular running of the buses and trains. It had been for nothing, then, all that tossing and turning the previous night; waiting for those neighbors, those who failed to listen to your warnings, shall sink under a hot and terrible fire that shall separate their skin from their bones, shall melt the eyes in their sockets, and burn the babies that suckle at their mothers' breasts . . . so many of your neighbours shall die that day that their bodies, if lined up side by side, will stretch three hundred times round the earth and on their charred remains shall the true Witnesses of the Lord walk to his side.

—The Clarion Bell,
issue 245

 

How bitterly she had been disappointed! But the wounds of 1925 had healed, and Hortense was once again ready to be convinced that apocalypse, just as the right holy Mr. Rangeforth had explained, was round the corner. The promise of the 1914 generation still stood:
This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled
(Matthew 24:34). Those who were alive in 1914 would live to see the Armageddon. It had been promised. Born in 1907, Hortense was getting old now, she was getting tired and her peers were dying off like flies. 1975 looked like the last chance.

Had not two hundred of the church's best intellectuals spent twenty years examining the Bible, and hadn't this date been their unanimous conclusion? Had they not read between the lines in Daniel, scanned for the hidden meaning in Revelation, correctly identified the Asian wars (Korea and Vietnam) as the period spoken of by the angel, “a time, and times, and half a time”? Hortense was convinced these were the sign of signs. These were the final days. There were eight months to the end of the world. Hardly enough time! There were banners to be made, articles to be written (“Will the Lord Forgive the Onanist?”), doorsteps to be trod, bells to be rung. There was Darcus to think about—who could not walk to the fridge without assistance—how was he to make it to the kingdom of the Lord? And in all Clara must lend a hand; there was no time for boys, for Ryan Topps, for skulking around, for adolescent angst. For Clara was not like other teenagers. She was the Lord's child, Hortense's miracle baby. Hortense was all of forty-eight when she heard the Lord's voice while gutting a fish one morning, Montego Bay, 1955. Straightaway she threw down the marlin, caught the trolley car home, and submitted to her least favorite activity in order to conceive the child He had asked for. Why had the Lord waited so long? Because the Lord wanted to show Hortense a miracle. For Hortense had been a miracle child herself, born in the middle of the legendary Kingston earthquake, 1907, when everybody else was busy dying—miracles ran in the family. Hortense saw it this way: if she could come into this world in the middle of a ground-shaker, as parts of Montego Bay slipped into the sea, and fires came down from the mountains, then nobody had no excuses about nothing no how. She liked to say: “Bein'
barn
is de hardest part! Once ya done dat—no problems.” So now that Clara was
here,
old enough to help her with doorstepping, administration, writing speeches, and all the varied business of the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she'd better get on with it. No time for boys. This child's work was just beginning. Hortense—born while Jamaica crumbled—did not accept apocalypse before one's twentieth birthday as any excuse for tardiness.