White Teeth (16 page)

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ blustered Archie, in lieu of an answer.

‘So that in the future we may be
free
. The question was always:
What kind of a world do you want your children to grow up in
? And we have done nothing. We are at a moral crossroads.’

‘Look, I don’t know what you’re on about and I don’t want to know,’ snapped Archie. ‘We’re going to dump this one’ — he motioned to the semi-conscious Sick — ‘at the first barracks we come across, then you and me are going our separate ways and that’s the only crossroads I care about.’

‘What I have realized, is that the generations,’ Samad continued as they sped through miles and miles of unchanging flatlands, ‘they speak to each other, Jones. It’s not a line, life is not a line — this is not palm-reading — it’s a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot
read
fate; you must
experience
it.’ Samad could feel the morphine bringing the information to him again — all the information in the universe and all the information on walls — in one fantastic revelation.

‘Do you know who this man is, Jones?’ Samad grabbed the Doctor by the back of his hair and bent his neck over the back seat. ‘The Russians told me. He’s a scientist, like me — but what is his science? Choosing who shall be born and who shall not — breeding people as if they were so many chickens, destroying them if the specifications are not correct. He wants to control, to dictate the future. He wants a race of men, a race of indestructible men, that will survive the last days of this earth. But it cannot be done in a laboratory. It must be done, it can only be done, with faith! Only Allah saves! I am no religious man — I have never possessed the strength — but I am not fool enough to deny the truth!’

‘Ah, now, but you said, didn’t you, you said it
wasn’t your argument
. On the hill — that’s what you said,’ gabbled Archie, excited to have caught Samad out on something. ‘So, so, so — so what if this bloke does . . . whatever he does — you said that was
our
problem, us in the
West
, that’s what you said.’

Dr Sick, watery eye-blood now streaming like rivers, was still being held by the hair by Samad and was gagging, now, on his own tongue.

‘Watch out, you’re choking him,’ said Archie.

‘What of it!’ yelled Samad into the echoless landscape. ‘Men like him believe that living organs should answer to design. They worship the science of the body, but not who has given it to us! He’s a Nazi. The worst kind.’

‘But you said — ’ Archie pressed on, determined to make his point. ‘You said that was nothing to do with you. Not your argument. If anyone in this jeep should have a score to settle with mad Jerry here—’

‘French. He’s French.’

‘All right, French — well if anyone’s got a score to settle it’d probably have to be me. It’s England’s future we’ve been fighting for. For England. You know,’ said Archie, searching his brain, ‘democracy and Sunday dinners, and . . . and . . . promenades and piers, and bangers and mash — and the things that are
ours
. Not
yours
.’

‘
Precisely
,’ said Samad.

‘You what?’

‘
You
must do it, Archie.’

‘I should cocoa!’

‘Jones, your destiny is staring you in the face and here you are slapping the salami,’ said Samad with a nasty laugh in his voice, and still holding the Doctor by the hair across the front seat.

‘Steady on,’ said Archie, trying to keep an eye on the road, as Samad bent the Doctor’s neck almost to breaking point. ‘Look, I’m not saying that he doesn’t deserve to die.’

‘Then do it.
Do it
.’

‘But why’s it so bloody important to you that I do it? You know, I’ve never killed a man — not like that, not face to face. A man shouldn’t die in a car . . . I can’t do that.’

‘Jones, it is simply a question of what you will do
when the chips are down
. This is a question that interests me a great deal. Call tonight the practical application of a long-held belief. An experiment, if you like.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I want to know what kind of a man you are, Jones. I want to know what you are capable of. Are you a coward, Jones?’

Archie brought the jeep to a shattering halt.

‘You’re bloody asking for it, you are.’

‘You don’t stand for anything, Jones,’ continued Samad. ‘Not for a faith, not for a politics. Not even for your country. How your lot ever conquered my lot is a bloody mystery. You’re a cipher, no?’

‘A what?’

‘And an idiot. What are you going to tell your children when they ask who you are, what you are? Will you know? Will you ever know?’

‘What are you that’s so bloody fantastic?’

‘I’m a Muslim and a Man and a Son and a Believer. I will survive the last days.’

‘You’re a bloody drunkard, and you’re — you’re drugged, you’re drugged tonight, aren’t you?’

‘I am a Muslim and a Man and a Son and a Believer. I will survive the last days,’ Samad repeated, as if it were a chant.

‘And what the bloody hell does that mean?’ As he shouted, Archie made a grab for Dr Sick. Pulled his now blood-covered face near his own until their noses touched.

‘You,’ Archie barked. ‘You’re coming with me.’

‘I would but, monsieur . . .’ The Doctor held up his handcuffed wrists.

Archie wrestled them open with the rusty key, pulled the Doctor out of the jeep and started walking away from the road into the darkness, a gun pointed at the base point of Dr Marc-Pierre Perret’s cranium.

‘Are you going to kill me, boy?’ asked Dr Sick as they walked.

‘Looks like it, dunnit?’ said Archie.

‘May I plead for my life?’

‘If you like,’ said Archie, pushing him on.

Sitting in the jeep, some five minutes later, Samad heard a shot ring out. It made him jump. He slapped dead an insect that had been winding its way round his wrist, looking for enough flesh to bite. Lifting his head, he saw in front of him that Archie was returning: bleeding and limping badly, made visible, then invisible, illuminated, obscured, as he wound in and out of the headlights. He looked his tender age, the lamps making his blond hair translucent, his moon-shaped face lit up like a big baby, head first, entering life.

‘The cricket test — which side do they cheer for? . . . Are you still looking back to where you came from or where you are?’

Norman Tebbit

Children. Samad had caught children like a disease. Yes, he had sired two of them willingly — as willingly as a man can — but he had not bargained for this other thing. This thing that no one tells you about. This thing of
knowing
children. For forty-odd years, travelling happily along life’s highway, Samad had been unaware that dotted along that road, in the crèche facilities of each service station, there lived a subclass of society, a mewling, puking underclass; he knew nothing of them and it did not concern him. Then suddenly, in the early eighties, he became infected with children;
other people’s
children, children who were friends of
his
children, and then
their
friends; then children in children’s programmes on children’s TV. By 1984 at least 30 per cent of his social and cultural circle was under the age of nine — and this all led, inevitably, to the position he now found himself in. He was a
parent-governor
.

By a strange process of symmetry, being a parent-governor perfectly mirrors the process of becoming a parent. It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual Spring Fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whisky (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you’re turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water-fountains — you’re
implicated
in the school, you’re
involved
in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your child at the school gates. You start following them in.

‘Put your hand down.’

‘I will
not
put it down.’

‘Put it down, please.’

‘Let go of me.’

‘Samad, why are you so eager to mortify me?
Put it down
.’

‘I have an opinion. I have a right to an opinion. And I have a right to
express
that opinion.’

‘Yes, but do you have to express it so often?’

This was the hissed exchange between Samad and Alsana Iqbal, as they sat at the back of a Wednesday school governors meeting in early July ’84, Alsana trying her best to force Samad’s determined left arm back to his side.

‘Get off, woman!’

Alsana put her two tiny hands to his wrist and tried applying a Chinese burn. ‘Samad Miah, can’t you understand that I am only trying to save you from yourself?’

As the covert wrestling continued, the chairwoman Katie Miniver, a lanky white divorcee with tight jeans, extremely curly hair and buck teeth, tried desperately to avoid Samad’s eye. She silently cursed Mrs Hanson, the fat lady just behind him, who was speaking about the woodworm in the school orchard, inadvertently making it impossible to pretend that Samad’s persistent raised hand had gone unseen. Sooner or later she was going to have to let him speak. In between nodding at Mrs Hanson, she snatched a surreptitious glance at the minutes which the secretary, Mrs Khilnani, was scribbling away on her left. She wanted to check that it was not her imagination, that she was not being unfair or undemocratic, or worse still
racist
(but she had read
Colour Blind
, a seminal leaflet from the Rainbow Coalition, she had scored well on the self-test), racist in ways that were so deeply ingrained and socially determining that they escaped her attention. But no, no. She wasn’t crazy. Any random extract highlighted the problem:

13
.
0  Mrs Janet Trott wishes to propose a second climbing frame be built in the playground to accommodate the large number of children who enjoy the present climbing frame but unfortunately have made it a safety risk through dangerous overcrowding. Mrs Trott’s husband, the architect Hanover Trott, is willing to design and oversee the building of such a frame at no cost to the school.
13
.
1  Chairwoman can see no objection. Moves to put the proposition to a vote.
13
.
2  Mr Iqbal wishes to know why the Western education system privileges activity of the body over activity of the mind and soul.
13
.
3  The Chairwoman wonders if this is quite relevant.
13
.
4  Mr Iqbal demands the vote be delayed until he can present a paper detailing the main arguments and emphasizes that his sons, Magid and Millat, get all the exercise they need via headstands that strengthen the muscles and send blood to stimulate the somatosensory cortex in the brain.
13
.
5  Mrs Wolfe asks whether Mr Iqbal expects her Susan to undertake compulsory headstands.
13
.
6  Mr Iqbal infers that, considering Susan’s academic performance and weight problems, a headstand regime might be desirable.

‘
Yes
, Mr Iqbal?’

Samad forcefully removed Alsana’s fingers from the clamp grip they had assumed on his lapel, stood up quite unnecessarily and sorted through a number of papers he had on a clipboard, removing the one he wanted and holding it out before him.

‘Yes, yes. I have a motion. I have a motion.’

The subtlest manifestation of a groan went round the group of governors, followed by a short period of shifting, scratching, leg-crossing, bag-rifling and the repositioning of coats-on-chairs.

‘
Another
one, Mr Iqbal?’

‘Oh yes, Mrs Miniver.’

‘Only you’ve tabled twelve motions already this evening; I think possibly somebody else—’

‘Oh, it is much too important to be delayed, Mrs Miniver. Now, if I can just—’

‘
Ms
Miniver.’

‘Pardon me?’

‘It’s just . . . it’s
Ms
Miniver. All evening you’ve been . . . and it’s, umm . . . actually not Mrs. It’s Ms. Ms.’

Samad looked quizzically at Katie Miniver, then at his papers as if to find the answer there, then at the beleaguered chairwoman again.

‘I’m sorry? You are not married?’

‘Divorced, actually, yes, divorced. I’m keeping the name.’

‘I see. You have my condolences, Miss Miniver. Now, the matter I—’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Katie, pulling her fingers through her intractable hair. ‘Umm, it’s not Miss, either. I’m sorry. I have
been
married you see, so—’

Ellen Corcoran and Janine Lanzerano, two friends from the Women’s Action Group, gave Katie a supportive smile. Ellen shook her head to indicate that Katie mustn’t cry (
because you’re doing well, really well
); Janine mouthed
Go On
and gave her a furtive thumbs-up.

‘I really wouldn’t feel comforta — I just feel marital status shouldn’t be an issue — it’s not that I want to embarrass you, Mr Iqbal. I just would feel more — if you — it’s Ms.’

‘Mzzz?’

‘Ms.’

‘And this is some kind of linguistic conflation between the words Mrs and Miss?’ asked Samad, genuinely curious and oblivious to the nether wobblings of Katie Miniver’s bottom lip. ‘Something to describe the woman who has either lost her husband or has no prospect of finding another?’

Alsana groaned and put her head in her hands.

Samad looked at his clipboard, underlined something in pen three times and turned to the parent-governors once more.

‘The Harvest Festival.’

Shifting, scratching, leg-crossing, coat-repositioning.

‘Yes, Mr Iqbal,’ said Katie Miniver. ‘What
about
the Harvest Festival?’