White Teeth (48 page)

But every time Irie felt herself closer to it, to the perfect blankness of the past, something of the present would ring the Bowden doorbell and intrude. Mothering Sunday brought a surprise visit from Joshua, angry on the doorstep, at least twenty-one pounds lighter, and much scruffier than usual. Before Irie had a chance to express either concern or shock, he had flounced into the room and slammed the door. “I'm sick of it! Sick to the back fucking teeth with it!”

The vibration of the door knocked Capt. Durham from his perch on Irie's windowsill, and she carefully reerected him.

“Yeah, nice to see you too, man. Why don't you sit down and slow down. Sick of what?”

“
Them.
They sicken me. They go on about rights and freedoms, and then they eat fifty chickens every fucking week! Hypocrites!”

Irie couldn't immediately see the connection. She took out a fag in preparation for a long story. To her surprise Joshua took one too, and they went to kneel on the window seat, blowing smoke through the grate up into the street.

“Do you
know
how battery chickens live?”

Irie didn't. Joshua explained. Cooped up for most of their poor chicken lives in total chicken darkness, packed together like chicken sardines in their chicken shit and fed the worst type of chicken grain.

And this, according to Joshua, was apparently nothing on how pigs and cows and sheep spent their time. “It's a fucking
crime.
But try telling Marcus that. Try getting him to give up his Sunday hog-fest. He's so
fucking
ill-informed. Have you ever noticed that? He knows this enormous amount about one thing, but there's this whole other world that . . . Oh, before I forget—you should take a leaflet.”

Irie never thought she would see the day when Joshua Chalfen handed her a leaflet. But here it was in her palm. It was called:
Meat Is Murder: The Facts and the Fiction,
a publication from the FATE organization.

“It stands for Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation. They're like the hardcore end of Greenpeace or whatever. Read it—they're not just hippie freaks, they're coming from a solid scientific and academic background and they're working from an anarchist perspective. I feel like I've really found my niche, you know? It's a really incredible group. Dedicated to direct action. The deputy's an ex-Oxford fellow.”

“Mmmm. How's Millat?”

Joshua shook off the question. “Oh, I don't know. Barmy. Going barmy. And Joyce is still pandering to his every whim. Just don't ask me. They all sicken me. Everything's changed.” Josh ran his fingers anxiously through his hair, which just reached his shoulders now in what Willesdeners affectionately call a Jewfro Mullet. “I just can't tell you how everything's changed. I'm having these real
. . . moments of clarity.
”

Irie nodded. She was sympathetic to moments of clarity. Her seventeenth year was proving chock-a-block with them. And she wasn't surprised by Joshua's metamorphosis. Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; Stones fans into Beatles fans, Tories into Liberal Democrats and back again, vinyl junkies to CD freaks. Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

“I
knew
you'd understand. I wish I'd talked to you before, but I just can't bear to be in the house these days and when I do see you Millat always seems to be in the way. It's really
good
to see you.”

“You too. You look different.”

Josh gestured dismissively at his clothes, which were distinctly less nerdy than they had been.

“I guess you can't wear your father's old corduroys forever.”

“I guess not.”

Joshua clapped his hands together. “Well, I've booked my ticket for Glastonbury and I might not come back. I met these people from FATE and I'm going with them.”

“It's March. Not till the summer, surely.”

“Joely and Crispin—that's these people I met—say we might go up there early. You know, camp out for a bit.”

“And school?”

“If you can bunk, I can bunk . . . it's not as if I'm going to fall behind. I've still got a Chalfen head on my shoulders, I'll just come back for the exams and then fuck off again. Irie, you've just got to meet these people. They're just . . . incredible. He's a Dadaist. And she's an anarchist. A real one. Not like Marcus. I told her about Marcus and his bloody FutureMouse. She thinks he's a dangerous individual. Quite possibly psychopathic.”

Irie thought about this. “Mmm. I'd be surprised.”

Without stubbing out his fag, he threw it up onto the pavement. “And I'm giving up all meat. I'm a pescatarian at the moment, but that's just half measures. I'm becoming a fucking vegetarian.”

Irie shrugged, not certain what the right response should be.

“There's a lot to be said for the old motto, you know?”

“Old motto?”

“
Fight fire with fire.
It's only by really fucking extreme behavior that you can get through to somebody like Marcus. He doesn't even know how
out there
he is. There's no point being reasonable with him because he thinks he
owns
reasonableness. How do you deal with people like that? Oh, and I'm giving up leather—wearing it—and all other animal by-products. Gelatin and stuff.”

After a while of watching the feet go by—leathers, sneakers, heels—Irie said, “That'll show 'em.”

On April Fool's Day, Samad turned up. He was all in white, on his way to the restaurant, crumpled and creased like a disappointed saint. He looked to be on the brink of tears. Irie let him in.

“Hello, Miss Jones,” said Samad, bowing ever so slightly. “And how is your father?”

Irie smiled with recognition. “You see him more than we do. How's God?”

“Perfectly fine, thank you. Have you seen my good-for-nothing son recently?”

Before Irie had a chance to give her next line, Samad broke down in front of her and had to be led into the living room, sat in Darcus's chair, and brought a cup of tea before he could speak.

“Mr. Iqbal, what's wrong?”

“What is right?”

“Has something happened to Dad?”

“Oh no, no . . . Archibald is fine. He is like the washing-machine advert. He carries on and on as ever.”

“Then what?”

“Millat. He has been missing these three weeks.”

“God. Well, have you tried the Chalfens?”

“He is not with them. I know where he is. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. He is on some retreat with these lunatic green-tie people. In a sports center in Chester.”

“Bloody hell.”

Irie sat down cross-legged and took out a fag. “I hadn't seen him in school, but I didn't realize how long it had been. But if you know where he is . . .”

“I didn't come here to find him, I came to ask your advice, Irie. What can I do? You know him—how does one get through?”

Irie bit her lip, her mother's old habit. “I mean, I don't know . . . we're not as close as we were . . . but I've always thought that maybe it's the Magid thing . . . missing him . . . I mean he'd never admit it . . . but Magid's his twin and maybe if he saw him—”

“No, no. No, no, no. I wish that were the solution. Allah knows how I pinned all my hopes on Magid. And now he says he is coming back to study the English law—paid for by these Chalfen people. He wants to enforce the laws of man rather than the laws of God. He has learned none of the lessons of Muhammad—peace be upon Him! Of course, his mother is delighted. But he is nothing but a disappointment to me. More English than the English. Believe me, Magid will do Millat no good and Millat will do Magid no good. They have both lost their way. Strayed so far from the life I had intended for them. No doubt they will both marry white women called Sheila and put me in an early grave. All I wanted was two good Muslim boys. Oh, Irie . . .” Samad took her free hand and patted it with sad affection. “I just don't understand where I have gone wrong. You teach them but they do not listen because they have the Public Enemy music on at full blast. You show them the road and they take the bloody path to the Inns of Court. You guide them and they run from your grasp to a Chester sports center. You try to plan everything and nothing happens in the way that you expected . . .”

But if you could begin again, thought Irie, if you could take them back to the source of the river, to the start of the story, to the homeland . . . But she didn't say that, because he felt it as she felt it and both knew it was as useless as chasing your own shadow. Instead she took her hand from underneath his and placed it on top, returning the stroke. “Oh, Mr. Iqbal. I don't know what to say . . .”

“There are no words. The one I send home comes out a pukka Englishman, white-suited, silly wig lawyer. The one I keep here is fully paid-up green-bow-tie-wearing fundamentalist terrorist. I sometimes wonder why I bother,” said Samad bitterly, betraying the English inflections of twenty years in the country, “I really do. These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started . . . but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers—who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally housebroken. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact . . . it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere.”

“Oh, that's not true, surely.”

“And then you begin to give up the
very idea
of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this
belonging,
it seems like some long, dirty lie . . . and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an
accident.
But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?”

As Samad described this dystopia with a look of horror, Irie was ashamed to find that the land of accidents sounded like
paradise
to her. Sounded like freedom.

“Do you understand, child? I know you understand.”

And what he really meant was: do we speak the same language? Are we from the same place? Are we the same?

Irie squeezed his hand and nodded vigorously, trying to ward off his tears. What else could she tell him but what he wanted to hear?

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, yes.”

When Hortense and Ryan came home that evening after a late-night prayer meeting, both were in a state of high excitement. Tonight was the night. After giving Hortense a flurry of instructions as to the typesetting and layout of his latest
Watchtower
article, Ryan went into the hallway to make his telephone call to Brooklyn to get the news.

“But I thought he was in consultation
with
them.”

“Yes, yes, he is . . . but de final confirmation, you understand, mus' come from Mr. Charles Wintry himself in Brooklyn,” said Hortense breathlessly. “What a day dis is! What a day! Help me wid liftin' dis typewriter now . . . I need it on de table.”

Irie did as she was told, carrying the enormous old Remington to the kitchen and putting it down in front of Hortense. Hortense passed Irie a bundle of white paper covered in Ryan's tiny script.

“Now you read dat to me, Irie Ambrosia, slowly now . . . an' I'll get it down in type.”

Irie read for half an hour or so, wincing at Ryan's horrible corkscrew prose, passing the whitening fluid when it was required, and gritting her teeth at the author's interruptions, as every ten minutes he popped back into the room to adjust his syntax or rephrase a paragraph.

“Mr. Topps, did you get trew yet?”

“Not yet, Mrs. B., not yet. Very busy, Mr. Charles Wintry. I'm going to try again now.”

A sentence, Samad's sentence, was passing through Irie's tired brain.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother.
And now that Ryan was out of the way, Irie saw her opportunity to ask it, though she phrased it carefully.

Hortense leaned back in her chair and placed her hands in her lap. “I bin doin' dis a very long time, Irie Ambrosia. I bin' waitin' ever since I was a pickney in long socks.”

“But that's no reason—”

“What d'you know fe reasons? Nuttin' at all. The Witness church is where my roots are. It bin good to me when nobody else has. It was de good ting my mudder gave me, an' I nat going to let it go now we so close to de end.”

“But Gran, it's not . . . you won't ever . . .”

“Lemme tell you someting. I'm not like dem Witnesses jus' scared of dyin'. Jus' scared. Dem wan' everybody to die excep' dem. Dat's not a reason to dedicate your life to Jesus Christ. I gat very different aims. I still hope to be one of de Anointed evan if I am a woman. I want it all my life. I want to be dere wid de Lord making de laws and de decisions.” Hortense sucked her teeth long and loud. “I gat so tired wid de church always tellin' me I'm a woman or I'm nat heducated enough. Everybody always tryin' to heducate you; heducate you about dis, heducate you about dat . . . Dat's always bin de problem wid de women in dis family. Somebody always tryin' to heducate them about someting, pretendin' it all about learnin' when it all about a battle of de wills. But if I were one of de hundred an' forty-four, no one gwan try to heducate
me.
Dat would be
my
job! I'd make my own laws an' I wouldn't be wanting anybody else's opinions. My mudder was strong-willed deep down, and I'm de same. Lord knows, your mudder was de same. And you de same.”

“Tell me about Ambrosia,” said Irie, spotting a chink in Hortense's armor that one might squeeze through. “Please.”