White Teeth (51 page)

But you couldn't upset Magid with words. He turned the other cheek. Sometimes hundreds of times a day, like a lollipop lady on Ecstasy. He had this way of smiling at you, neither wounded nor angry, and then inclining his head (to the exact same angle his father did when taking an order for curried prawns) in a gesture of total forgiveness. He had absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.

“Umm, I didn't mean to . . . Oh shit. Sorry. Look . . . I don't know . . . you're just so . . . have you heard from Millat?”

“My brother shuns me,” said Magid, that same expression of universal calm and forgiveness unchanged. “He marks me like Cain because I am a nonbeliever. At least not in his god or any others with a name. Because of this, he refuses to meet me, even to talk on the telephone.”

“Oh, you know, he'll probably come round. He always was a stubborn bastard.”

“Of course, yes, you love him,” continued Magid, not giving Irie a chance to protest. “So you know his habits, his manners. You will understand, then, how fiercely he takes my conversion. I have converted to Life. I see his god in the millionth position of
pi,
in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. But that is not enough for Millat.”

Irie looked him square in the face. There was something in there she had been unable to put her finger on these four months, because it was obscured by his youth, his looks, his clean clothes, and his personal hygiene. Now she saw it clearly. He was touched by it—the same as Mad Mary, the Indian with the white face and the blue lips, and the guy who carried his wig around on a piece of string. The same as those people who walk the Willesden streets with no intention of buying Black Label beer or stealing a stereo, collecting the dole or pissing in an alleyway. The ones with a wholly different business.
Prophecy.
And Magid had it in his face. He wanted to tell you and tell you and tell you.

“Millat demands complete surrender.”

“Sounds typical.”

“He wants me to join Keepers of the Eternal and—”

“Yeah, KEVIN, I know them. So you
have
spoken to him.”

“I don't need to speak to him to know what he thinks. He is my twin. I don't wish to see him. I don't need to. Do you understand the nature of twins? Do you understand the meaning of the word
cleave
? Or rather, the double meaning that—”

“Magid. No offense, but I've got work to do.”

Magid gave a little bow. “Naturally. You will excuse me, I have to go and submit my Chicago jeans to the experiment you proposed.”

Irie gritted her teeth, picked up the phone, and redialed the number she had cut off. It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She'd had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her there was no point in trying to deal with each one separately. To give some unique point of view to the
Financial Times
and then to the
Mirror
and then to the
Daily Mail
was impossible. It was their job, not yours, to get the angle, to write their separate book of the huge media bible. Each to their own. Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn't trust these guys. Irie's job, then, was to give the information as it stood, every time, verbatim from a piece of paper written by Marcus and Magid, stapled to the wall.

“All right,” said the journo. “Tape's running.”

And here Irie stumbled at the first hurdle of PR: believing in what you sell. It wasn't that she lacked the moral faith. It was more fundamental than that. She didn't believe in it as a
physical fact.
She didn't believe it existed. FutureMouse
^©
was now such an enormous, spectacular,
cartoon
of an idea (in every paper's column, agonized over by journos
—Should it get a patent?
Eulogized by hacks
—Greatest achievement of the century?
), one expected the damn mouse to stand up and speak by itself. Irie took a deep breath. Though she had repeated the words many times, they still seemed fantastical, absurd—fiction on the wings of fantasy—with more than a dash of Surrey T. Banks in them:

 

PRESS RELEASE: OCTOBER
15 , 1992

Subject: Launch of FutureMouse
^©

 

Professor Marcus Chalfen, writer, celebrated scientist, and leading figure of a group of research geneticists from St. Jude's College, intends to “launch” his latest “design” in a public space; to increase understanding of transgenics and to raise interest and further investment in his work. The design will demonstrate the sophistication of the work being done on gene manipulation and demystify this much-maligned branch of biological research. It will be accompanied by a full exhibition, a lecture hall, a multimedia area, and interactive games for children. It will be funded in part by the government's Millennial Science Commission, with additional monies from business and industry.

A two-week-old FutureMouse
^©
is to be put on display at the Perret Institute in London on December 31, 1992. There it will remain on public display until December 31, 1999. This mouse is genetically normal except for a select group of novel genes that are added to the genome. A DNA clone of these genes is injected into the fertilized mouse egg, thus linking them to the chromosomal DNA in the zygote, which is subsequently inherited by cells of the resulting embryo. Before injection into the germ line, these genes are custom-designed so they can be “turned on” and expressed only in specific mouse tissue and along a predictable timetable. The mouse will be the site for an experiment into the aging of cells, the progression of cancer within cells, and a few other matters that will serve as surprises along the way!

The journalist laughed. “Jesus. What the fuck does that mean?”

“I dunno,” said Irie. “Surprises, I guess.”

She continued:

 

The mouse will live the seven years it is on display, roughly double the normal life expectancy of a mouse. The mouse development is retarded, therefore, at a ratio of two years for every one. At the end of the first year the
SV
40 large-T oncogene, which the mouse carries in the insulin-producing pancreas cells, will express itself in pancreatic carcinomas that will continue to develop at a retarded pace throughout its life. At the end of the second year the H-ras oncogene in its skin cells will begin to express itself in multiple benign papillomas that an observer will be able to see clearly three months later with the naked eye. Four years into the experiment the mouse will begin to lose its ability to produce melanin by means of a slow, programmed eradication of the enzyme tyrosinase. At this point the mouse will lose all its pigmentation and become albino: a white mouse. If no external or unexpected interference occurs, the mouse will live until December 31, 1999, dying within the month after that date. The FutureMouse
^©
experiment offers the public a unique opportunity to see a life and death in “close-up.” The opportunity to witness for themselves a technology that might yet slow the progress of disease, control the process of aging, and eliminate genetic defect. The FutureMouse
^©
holds out the tantalizing promise of a new phase in human history, where we are not victims of the random but instead directors and arbitrators of our own fate.

 

“Bloody hell,” said the journo. “Scary shit.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Irie vacantly (she had ten more calls to make this morning). “Do you want me to post on some of the photographic material?”

“Yeah, go on. Save me going through the archive. Cheers.”

Just as Irie put down the phone, Joyce flew into the room like a hippie comet, a great stream of black fringed velvet, caftan, and multiple silk scarves.

“Don't use the phone! I've told you before. We've got to keep the phone free. Millat might be trying to ring.”

Four days earlier Millat had missed a psychiatrist's appointment Joyce had arranged for him. He had not been seen since. Everyone knew he was with KEVIN, and everyone knew he had no intention of ringing Joyce. Everyone except Joyce.

“It's simply
essential
that I talk with him if he rings. We're
so
close to a breakthrough. Marjorie's almost certain it's Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.”

“And how come
you
know all this? I thought Marjorie was a doctor. What the fuck happened to doctor-patient privilege?”

“Oh, Irie, don't be silly. She's a
friend
too. She's just trying to keep me informed.”

“Middle-class mafia, more like.”

“Oh
really.
Don't be so hysterical. You're getting more
hysterical
by the day. Look, I need you to keep off the phone.”

“I know. You said.”

“Because if Marjorie's right, and it is ADHD, he really needs to get to a doctor and some methylphenidate. It's a very debilitative condition.”

“Joyce, he hasn't got a disorder, he's just a Muslim. There are one billion of them. They can't all have ADHD.”

Joyce took in a little gasp of air. “I think you're being very cruel. That's
exactly
the kind of comment that isn't helpful.”

She stalked over to the breadboard, tearfully cut off a huge lump of cheese, and said, “Look. The most important thing is that I get the two of them to face each other. It's time.”

Irie looked dubious. “Why is it time?”

Joyce popped the lump of cheese into her mouth. “It's time because they need each other.”

“But if they don't want to, they don't want to.”

“Sometimes people don't know what they want. They don't know what they need. Those boys need each other like . . .” Joyce thought for a moment. She was bad with metaphor. In a garden you never planted something where something else was meant to be. “They need each other like Laurel and Hardy, like Crick needed Watson—”

“Like East Pakistan needed West Pakistan.”

“Well, I don't think that's very funny, Irie.”

“I'm not laughing, Joyce.”

Joyce cut more cheese from the block, tore two hunks of bread from a loaf, and sandwiched the three together.

“The fact is both these boys have serious emotional problems and it's not helped by Millat refusing to see Magid. It upsets him so much. They've been split by their religions, by their cultures. Can you imagine the
trauma
?”

Irie wished at that moment she had allowed Magid to tell her to tell her to tell her. She would at least have had information. She would have had something to use against Joyce. Because if you listen to prophets, they give you ammunition. The nature of twins. The millionth position of
pi
(do infinite numbers have beginnings?). And most of all, the double meaning of the word
cleave.
Did he know which was worse, which more traumatic: pulling together or tearing apart?

“Joyce, why don't you worry about your own family for once? Just for a change. What about Josh? When's the last time you saw Josh?”

Joyce's upper lip stiffened. “Josh is in Glastonbury.”

“Right. Glastonbury's been over two months, Joyce.”

“He's doing a little traveling. He said he might.”

“And who's he with? You don't
know
anything about those people. Why don't you worry about
that
for a while, and keep the
fuck
out of everybody else's business.”

Joyce didn't even flinch at this. It is hard to explain just how familiar teenage abuse was to Joyce; she got it so regularly these days from her own children and other people's that a swearword or a cruel comment just couldn't affect her. She simply weeded them out.

“The reason I don't worry about Josh, as you well know,” said Joyce, smiling broadly and speaking in her Chalfen-guide-to-parenting voice, “is because he's just trying to get a little bit of attention. Rather like you are at this moment. It's perfectly natural for well-educated middle-class children to act up at his age.” (Unlike many others around this time, Joyce felt no shame about using the term “middle class.” In the Chalfen lexicon the middle classes were the inheritors of the enlightenment, the creators of the welfare state, the intellectual elite, and the source of all culture. Where they got this idea, it's hard to say.) “But they soon come back into the fold. I'm perfectly confident about Joshua. He's just acting up against his father and it will pass. But Magid has some real problems. I've been doing my research, Irie. And there are just so many
signs.
I can read them.”

“Well, you must be
mis
reading them,” Irie shot back, because a battle was about to begin, she could sense it. “Magid's
fine.
I was just talking to him. He's a Zen master. He's the most fucking serene individual I ever met in my life. He's working with Marcus, which is what he wants to do, and he's
happy.
How about we all try a policy of noninvolvement for once? A little laissez-faire? Magid's
fine.
”

“Irie, darling,” said Joyce, moving Irie along one chair and positioning herself next to the phone. “What you never understand is that people are
extreme.
It would be wonderful if everyone was like your father, carrying on as normal even if the ceiling's coming down around his ears. But a lot of people can't do that. Magid and Millat display extreme behavior. It's all very well saying laissez-faire and being terribly clever about it, but the bottom line is Millat's going to get himself into terrible trouble with these fundamentalist people. Terrible trouble. I hardly sleep for worrying about him. You read about these groups in the news . . . And it's putting a terrible mental strain on Magid. Now, am I meant to just sit back and watch them tear themselves apart, just because their parents—no, I will say it, because it's true—just because their parents don't seem concerned? I've only ever had those boys' welfare at heart, you of all people should know that. They need help. I just walked past the bathroom and Magid is sitting in the bath with his jeans on.
Yes.
All right? Now,” said Joyce, serene as a bovine, “I should think I know a traumatized child when I see one.”