White Teeth (61 page)

‘Very impressive, Millat, hey? Everything we hope for.’

‘Yeah,’ said Millat, despondent. ‘I s’pose. Less talk, more action, though, if you ask me. The infidel are everywhere.’

Mo nodded vigorously. ‘Oh definitely, Brother. We are two birds from the same bush on that matter. I hear there are some others,’ said Mo, lowering his voice and putting his fat, sweaty lips by Millat’s ear, ‘who are very keen on action. Immediate action. Brother Hifan spoke to me. About the 31st of December. And Brother Shiva and Brother Tyrone . . .’

‘Yes, yes. I know who they are. They are the beating heart of KEVIN.’

‘And they say
you
know the man himself — this scientist. You in good position. I hear you are his friend.’

‘Was.
Was
.’

‘Brother Hifan says you have the tickets to get in, that you are organizing—’

‘Shhh,’ said Millat irritably. ‘Not everyone can know. If you want to get near the centre, you’ve got to keep shtoom.’

Millat looked Mo up and down. The kurta-pyjamas that he somehow managed to make look like a late seventies Elvis flared jumpsuit. The huge stomach he rested on his knee like a friend.

Sharply, he asked, ‘You’re a bit old aren’t you?’

‘You rude little bastard. I’m strong as a bloody bull.’

‘Yeah, well, we don’t need strength,’ said Millat tapping his temple, ‘we need a little of the stuff upstairs. We’ve got to get in the place discreetly first, innit? The first evening. It’ll be crawling.’

Mo blew his nose in his hand. ‘I can be discreet.’

‘Yeah, but that means keeping shtoom.’

‘And the third thing,’ said Brother Ibrāhīm ad-Din Shukrallah, interrupting them, suddenly louder and buzzing the PA system, ‘the third thing they will try to do, is to convince you that it is human intellect and not Allah that is omnipotent, unlimited,
all-powerful
. They will try to convince you that your minds are not to be used to pronounce the greater glory of the Creator but to raise yourselves up equal to or beyond the Creator! And now we approach the most serious business of this evening. The greatest evil of the infidel is here, in this very borough of Brent. I will tell you, and you will not believe it, Brothers, but there is a man in this very community who believes that he can improve upon the creation of Allah. There is a man who presumes to change, adjust,
modify
what has been decreed. He will take an animal — an animal that Allah has created — and presume to change that creation. To create a new animal that has no name but is simply an abomination. And when he has finished with that small animal, a mouse, Brothers, when he has finished he will move to sheep, and cats and
dogs
. And who in this lawless society will stop him from one day creating a
man
? A man born not of woman but from a man’s intellect alone! And he will tell you that it is medicine . . . but KEVIN makes no complaint against medicine. We are a sophisticated community who count many doctors amongst us, my Brothers. Don’t be misled, deluded,
fooled
. This is not medicine. And my question to you, Brothers of KEVIN, is who will make the sacrifice and stop this man? Who will stand up alone in the name of the Creator, and show the modernists that the Creator’s laws still exist and are eternal? Because they will try and tell you, the modernists, the cynics, the
Orientalists
, that there are no more beliefs, that our history, our culture,
our world
is over. So thinks this scientist. That is why he so confidently presumes. But he will soon understand what is truly meant by
last days
. So who will show him—’

‘Yes, shtoom, yes, I understand,’ said Mo, speaking to Millat, but looking straight ahead as in a spy movie.

Millat looked around the room and saw that Hifan was giving him the eye, so he gave it to Shiva, who gave it to Abdul-Jimmy and Abdul-Colin, to Tyrone and the rest of the Kilburn crew, who were stationed by the walls as stewards at particular points in the room. Hifan gave Millat the eye once more, then he looked at the back room. Discreet movement began.

‘Something is happening?’ whispered Mo, spotting the men with the green steward sashes, making their way through the crowds.

‘Come into the office,’ said Millat.

‘OK, so, I think the key thing here is to come at the issue from two sides. Because it
is
a matter of straight laboratory torture and we can certainly play that to the gallery, but the central emphasis
has
to go to the anti-patent argument. Because that’s really an angle we can work. And if we lay our emphasis there, then there are a number of other groups we can call upon — the NCGA, the OHNO, etc., and Crispin’s been in touch with them. Because, you know, we haven’t really dealt in this area extensively before, but it’s clearly a key issue — I think Crispin’s going to talk to us about that in more depth in a minute — but for now, I just want to talk about the public support we have here. I mean, particularly the recent press, even the tabloid element have really come up trumps on this . . . there’s a lot of bad feeling regarding the patenting of living organisms . . . I think people feel very uncomfortable, rightly, with that concept, and it’s really up to FATE to
play
on that, and really get a comprehensive campaign together, so if . . .’

Ah
, Joely. Joely, Joely,
Joely
. Joshua knew he should be listening, but looking was so
good
. Looking at Joely was
great
. The way she sat (on a table, knees pulled up to chest), the way she looked up from her notes (kittenishly!), the way the air whistled between her gappy front teeth, the way she continuously tucked her straggly blonde hair behind her ear with one hand and tapped out a rhythm on her huge Doc Martens with the other. Blonde hair aside, she looked a lot like his mother when young: those fulsome English lips, ski-jump nose, big hazel eyes. But the face, spectacular as it might be, was mere
decoration
to top off the most luxurious body in the world. Long in all its lines, muscular in the thigh and soft in the stomach, with breasts that had never known a bra but were an utter delight, and a bottom which was the platonic ideal of all English bottomrey, flat yet peachy, wide but welcoming. Plus she was intelligent. Plus she was devoted to her cause. Plus she despised his father. Plus she was ten years older (which suggested to Joshua all kinds of sexual expertise he couldn’t even
imagine
without getting an enormous hard-on right now right here in the middle of the meeting). Plus she was the most wonderful woman Joshua had ever met. Oh, Joely!

‘As I see it, what we have to impress upon people is this idea of setting a precedent. You know, the “What next?” kind of argument — and I understand Kenny’s POV, that that’s way too simplistic a take on it — but I have to argue, I think it’s necessary, and we’ll put it to a vote in a minute. Is that all right, Kenny? If I can just get on . . . right? Right. Where was I . . . precedent. Because, if it can be argued that the animal under experimentation is owned by any group of people, i.e., it is not a cat but effectively an
invention
with-cat-like-qualities, then that very cleverly and very dangerously short-circuits the work of animal rights groups and that leads to a pretty fucking
scary
vision of the future. Umm . . . I want to bring Crispin in here, to talk a little more about that.’

Of course the cunt of it was, Joely was married to Crispin. And the double-cunt of it was, theirs was a marriage of true love, total spiritual bonding and dedicated political union. Fan-fucking-tastic. Even worse, amongst the members of FATE, Joely’s and Crispin’s marriage served as a kind of cosmogony, an originating myth that explained succinctly what people could and should be, how the group began and how it should proceed in the future. Though Joely and Crispin didn’t encourage ideas of leadership or any kind of icon worship, it had happened anyway, they were
worshipped
. And they were indivisible. When Joshua first joined the group, he had tried to sniff out a little information on the couple, get the low-down on his chances. Were they wobbly? Had the harsh nature of their business driven them apart? Fat chance. He was told the whole depressing fable by two seasoned FATE activists over some pints in the Spotted Dog: a psychotic ex-postal worker called Kenny who as a child had witnessed his father kill his puppy, and Paddy, a sensitive life-time dole collector and pigeon-fancier.

‘Everyone begins wanting to shag Joely,’ Kenny had explained, sympathetically, ‘but you get over it. You realize the best thing you can do for her is dedicate yourself to the struggle. And then the second thing you realize, is that Crispin’s just this
incredible
dude—’

‘Yeah, yeah, get on with it.’

Kenny got on with it.

It seemed Joely and Crispin met and fell in love at the University of Leeds the winter of 1982, two young student radicals, with Che Guevara on their walls, idealism in their hearts and a mutual passion for all the creatures that fly, trot, crawl and slime across the earth. At the time, they were both active members of a great variety of far-left groups, but political in-fighting, back-stabbing and endless factionalizing soon disillusioned them as far as the fate of
homo erectus
was concerned. At some point they grew tired of speaking up for this species of ours who will so often organize a coup, bitch behind your back, choose another representative and throw it all back in your face. Instead they turned their attention to our mute animal friends. Joely and Crispin upgraded their vegetarianism to veganism, dropped out of college, got married and formed Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation in 1985. Crispin’s magnetic personality and Joely’s natural charm attracted other political drifters, and soon they had become a commune of twenty-five (plus ten cats, fourteen dogs, a garden full of wild rabbits, a sheep, two pigs and a family of foxes) living and working from a Brixton bedsit which backed on to a large expanse of unused allotment. They were pioneers in many senses. Recycling before it became the fashion, making a tropical biosphere of their sweaty bathroom, and dedicating themselves to organic food production. Politically they were equally circumspect. From the very beginning their extremist credentials were impeccable, FATE being to the RSPCA what Stalinism is to the Liberal Democrats. For three years FATE conducted a terror campaign against animal testers, torturers and exploiters, sending death threats to personnel at make-up firms, breaking into labs, kidnapping technicians and chaining themselves to hospital gates. They also ruined fox-hunts, filmed battery chickens, burnt down farms, fire-bombed food outlets and smashed up circus tents. Their brief being so broad and so fanatical (any animal in any level of discomfort), they were kept seriously busy, and life for FATE members was difficult, dangerous and punctuated by frequent imprisonment. Through all of this, Joely’s and Crispin’s relationship grew stronger and served as an example to them all, a beacon in the storm, the ideal example of love between activists (‘Yada yada yada. Get on with it’). Then in 1987 Crispin went to jail for three years for his part in fire-bombing a Welsh laboratory and releasing 40 cats, 350 rabbits and 1,000 rats from their captivity. Before being taken down to Wormwood Scrubs, Crispin generously informed Joely that she had his permission to go to other FATE members if she was in need of sexual satisfaction while he was gone (‘And did she?’ asked Joshua. ‘Did she
fuck
,’ replied Kenny sadly).

During Crispin’s captivity, Joely devoted herself to transforming FATE from a small gang of highly strung friends to a viable underground political force. She began to put less emphasis on terror tactics and, after reading Guy Debord, grew interested in situationism as a political tactic, which she understood to mean the increased use of large banners, costumes, videos and gruesome re-enactments. By the time Crispin emerged from jail, FATE had grown four-fold, and Crispin’s legend (lover, fighter, rebel, hero) had grown with it, fuelled by Joely’s passionate interpretation of his life and works and a carefully chosen photo of him circa 1980 in which he looked a bit like Nick Drake. But though his image had been airbrushed, Crispin appeared to have lost none of his radicalism. His first act as a free citizen was to mastermind the release of several hundred voles, an event that received widespread newspaper coverage, though Crispin delegated responsibility for the actual act to Kenny, who was sent down for four months of high security (‘Greatest moment of my life’). And then last summer, ’91, Joely persuaded Crispin to go to California with her to join the other groups fighting the patent on transgenic animals. Though courtrooms weren’t Crispin’s scene (‘Crispin’s a front-line dude’), he succeeded in sufficiently disrupting proceedings to officially warrant a mistrial. The couple flew back to England, elated but with funds perilously low, to find they had been turfed out of their Brixton pad and—

Well, Joshua could take the narrative from here. He met them a week later, wandering up and down the Willesden High Road, looking for a suitable squat. They looked lost, and Joshua, emboldened by the summer vibe and Joely’s beauty, went up to talk to them. They ended up going for a pint. They drank, as everybody in Willesden drank, in the aforementioned Spotted Dog, a famous Willesden landmark, described in 1792 as ‘being a well accostomed Publick house’ (
Willesden Past
, by Len Snow), which became a favourite resort for mid-Victorian Londoners wishing a day out ‘in the country’, then the meeting point for the horse-buses; later still, a watering hole for local Irish builders. By 1992 it had transformed again, this time into the focal point of the huge Australian immigrant population of Willesden, who, for the last five years, had been leaving their silky beaches and emerald seas and inexplicably arriving in NW2. The afternoon Joshua walked in with Joely and Crispin, this community was in a state of high excitement. After a complaint of a terrible smell above Sister Mary’s Palm Readers on the high road, the upper flat had been raided by Health Officers and found to be sheltering sixteen squatting Aussies who had dug a huge hole in the floor and roasted a pig in there, apparently trying to re-create the effect of a South Seas underground kiln. Thrown out on the street, they were presently bemoaning their fate to the publican, a huge bearded Scotsman who had little sympathy for his Antipodean clientele (‘Is there some fuckin’ sign in fuckin’ Sydney that says come to fuckin’ Willesden?’). Overhearing the story, Joshua surmised the flat must now be empty and took Joely and Crispin to look at it, his mind already ticking over . . .
if I can get her to live near by
 . . .