White Teeth (3 page)

And the postcard that lay on the dashboard this very day, the day of his Almost Death:

28 December 1974
Dear Archibald,
I am taking up the harp. A New Year’s resolution, if you like. Late in the day, I realize, but you’re never too old to teach the old dog in you new tricks, don’t you feel? I tell you, it’s a heavy instrument to lay against your shoulder, but the sound of it is quite angelic and my wife thinks me quite sensitive because of it. Which is more than she could say for my old cycling obsession! But then, cycling was only ever understood by old boys like you, Archie, and of course the author of this little note, your old contender,
Horst Ibelgaufts

He had not met Horst since the race, but he remembered him affectionately as an enormous man with strawberry-blond hair, orange freckles and misaligned nostrils, who dressed like an international playboy and seemed too large for his bike. After the race Horst had got Archie horribly drunk and procured two Soho whores who seemed to know Horst well (‘I make many business trips to your fair capital, Archibald,’ Horst had explained). The last Archie had ever seen of Horst was an unwanted glimpse of his humongous pink arse bobbing up and down in the adjoining room of an Olympic chalet. The next morning, waiting at the front desk, was the first letter of his large correspondence:

Dear Archibald,
In an oasis of work and competition, women are truly sweet and easy refreshment, don’t you agree? I’m afraid I had to leave early to catch the necessary plane, but I compel you, Archie: Don’t be a stranger! I think of us now as two men as close as our finish! I tell you, whoever said thirteenth was unlucky was a bigger fool than your friend,
Horst Ibelgaufts
P.S. Please make sure that Daria and Melanie get home fine and well.

Daria was his one. Terribly skinny, ribs like lobster cages and no chest to speak of, but she was a lovely sort: kind; soft with her kisses and with double-jointed wrists she liked to show off in a pair of long silk gloves — set you back four clothing coupons at least. ‘I
like
you,’ Archie remembered saying helplessly, as she replaced the gloves and put on her stockings. She turned, smiled. And though she was a professional, he got the feeling she liked him too. Maybe he should have left with her right then, run to the hills. But at the time it seemed impossible, too involved, what with a young wife with one in the oven (an hysterical, fictional pregnancy, as it turned out, a big bump full of hot air), what with his dodgy leg, what with the lack of hills.

Strangely, Daria was the final pulse of thought that passed through Archie just before he blacked out. It was the thought of a whore he met once twenty years ago, it was Daria and her smile which made him cover Mo’s apron with tears of joy as the butcher saved his life. He had seen her in his mind: a beautiful woman in a doorway with a
come hither
look; and realized he regretted not coming hither. If there was any chance of ever seeing a look like that again, then he wanted the second chance, he wanted the extra time. Not just this second, but the next and the next — all the time in the world.

Later that morning, Archie did an ecstatic eight circuits of Swiss Cottage roundabout in his car, his head stuck out the window while a stream of air hit the teeth at the back of his mouth like a wind sock. He thought:
Blimey. So this is what it feels like when some bugger saves your life. Like you’ve just been handed a great big wad of Time
. He drove straight past his flat, straight past the street signs (Hendon 3¾), laughing like a loon. At the traffic lights he flipped ten pence and smiled when the result seemed to agree that Fate was pulling him towards another life. Like a dog on a lead round a corner. Generally, women can’t do this, but men retain the ancient ability to leave a family and a past. They just unhook themselves, like removing a fake beard, and skulk discreetly back into society, changed men. Unrecognizable. In this manner, a new Archie is about to emerge. We have caught him on the hop. For he is in a past-tense, future-perfect kind of mood. He is in a
maybe this, maybe that
kind of mood. Approaching a forked road, he slows down, checks his undistinguished face in the wing-mirror, and quite indiscriminately chooses a route he’s never taken before, a residential street leading to a place called Queens Park. Go straight past
Go
!, Archie-boy, he tells himself; collect two hundred and don’t for gawd’s sake look back.

Tim Westleigh (more commonly known as Merlin) finally registered the persistent ringing of a doorbell. He picked himself off the kitchen floor, waded through an ocean of supine bodies, and opened the door to arrive face-to-face with a middle-aged man dressed head-to-toe in grey corduroy, holding a ten pence coin in his open palm. As Merlin was later to reflect when describing the incident, at any time of the day corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent men wear it. Tax men too. History teachers add leather elbow patches. To be confronted with a mass of it, at nine in the a.m., on the first day of a New Year, is an apparition lethal in its sheer quantity of negative vibes.

‘What’s the deal, man?’ Merlin blinked in the doorway at the man in corduroy who stood on his doorstep illuminated by winter sunshine. ‘Encyclopedias or God?’

Archie noted the kid had an unnerving way of emphasizing certain words by moving his head in a wide circular movement from the right shoulder to the left. Then, when the circle was completed, he would nod several times.

‘ ’Cos if it’s encyclopedias we’ve got enough, like,
information
. . . and if it’s God, you’ve got the wrong house. We’re in a mellow place, here. Know what I mean?’ Merlin concluded, doing the nodding thing and moving to shut the door.

Archie shook his head, smiled and remained where he was.

‘Erm . . . are you all right?’ asked Merlin, hand on the doorknob. ‘Is there something I can do for you? Are you high on something?’

‘I saw your sign,’ said Archie.

Merlin pulled on a joint and looked amused. ‘That sign?’ He bent his head to follow Archie’s gaze. The white bedsheet hanging down from an upper window. Across it, in large rainbow-coloured lettering, was painted: WELCOME TO THE ‘END OF THE WORLD’ PARTY, 1975.

Merlin shrugged. ‘Yeah, sorry, man, looks like it wasn’t. Bit of a disappointment, that. Or a blessing,’ he added amiably, ‘depending on your point of view.’

‘Blessing,’ said Archie, with passion. ‘Hundred per cent, bona fide
blessing
.’

‘Did you, er, dig the sign, then?’ asked Merlin, taking a step back behind the doorstep in case the man was violent as well as schiz. ‘You into that kind of scene? It was kind of a joke, you see, more than anything.’

‘Caught my eye, you might say,’ said Archie, still beaming like a mad man. ‘I was just driving along looking for somewhere, you know, somewhere to have another drink, New Year’s Day, hair of the dog and all that — and I’ve had a bit of a rough morning all in all — and it just sort of
struck
me. I flipped a coin and thought: why not?’

Merlin looked perplexed at the turn the conversation was taking. ‘Er . . . party’s pretty much over, man. Besides, I think you’re a little
advanced
in years . . . if you know what I mean . . .’ Here Merlin turned gauche; underneath the dakshiki he was at heart a good middle-class boy, instilled with respect for his elders. ‘I mean,’ he said after a difficult pause, ‘it’s a bit of a younger crowd than you might be used to. Kind of a commune scene.’

‘
But I was so much older then
,’ sang Archie mischievously, quoting a ten-year-old Dylan track, arching his head round the door, ‘
I’m younger than that now
.’

Merlin took a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and frowned. ‘Look, man . . . I can’t just let anyone in off the street, you know? I mean, you could be the police, you could be a freak, you could—’

But something about Archie’s face — huge, innocent, sweetly expectant — reminded Tim what his estranged father, the Vicar of Snarebrook, had to say about Christian charity every Sunday from his pulpit. ‘Oh, what the hell. It’s New Year’s Day, for fuckssake. You best come in.’

Archie sidestepped Merlin, and moved into a long hallway with four open-doored rooms branching off from it, a staircase leading to another storey, and a garden at the end of it all. Detritus of every variety — animal, mineral, vegetable — lined the floor; a great mass of bedding, under which people lay sleeping, stretched from one end of the hallway to the other, a red sea which grudgingly separated each time Archie took a step forward. Inside the rooms, in certain corners, could be witnessed the passing of bodily fluids: kissing, breast-feeding, fucking, throwing up — all the things Archie’s Sunday Supplement had informed him could be found in a commune. He toyed for a moment with the idea of entering the fray, losing himself between the bodies (he had all this new
time
on his hands, masses and masses of it, dribbling through his fingers), but decided a stiff drink was preferable. He tackled the hallway until he reached the other end of the house and stepped out into the chilly garden, where some, having given up on finding a space in the warm house, had opted for the cold lawn. With a whisky tonic in mind, he headed for the picnic table, where something the shape and colour of Jack Daniels had sprung up like a mirage in a desert of empty wine bottles.

‘Mind if I . . . ?’

Two black guys, a topless Chinese girl, and a white woman wearing a toga were sitting around on wooden kitchen chairs, playing rummy. Just as Archie reached for the Jack Daniels, the white woman shook her head and made the signal of a stubbed-out cigarette.

‘Tobacco sea, I’m afraid, darling. Some evil bastard put his fag out in some perfectly acceptable whisky. There’s Babycham and some other inexorable shit over here.’

Archie smiled in gratitude for the warning and the kind offer. He took a seat and poured himself a big glass of Liebfraumilch instead.

Many drinks later, and Archie could not remember a time in his life when he had not known Clive and Leo, Wan-Si and Petronia, intimately. With his back turned and a piece of charcoal, he could have rendered every puckered goosepimple around Wan-Si’s nipples, every stray hair that fell in Petronia’s face as she spoke. By 11 a.m., he loved them all dearly, they were the children he had never had. In return, they told him he was in possession of a unique soul for a man of his age. Everybody agreed some intensely positive karmic energy was circulating in and around Archie, the kind of thing strong enough to prompt a butcher to pull down a car window at the critical moment. And it turned out Archie was the first man over forty ever invited to join the commune; it turned out there had been talk for some time of the need for an older sexual presence to satisfy some of the more adventurous women. ‘Great,’ said Archie. ‘Fantastic. That’ll be me, then.’ He felt so close to them that he was confused when around midday their relationship suddenly soured, and he found himself stabbed by a hangover and knee deep in an argument about the Second World War, of all things.

‘I don’t even know how we got into this,’ groaned Wan-Si, who had covered up finally just when they decided to move indoors, Archie’s corduroy slung round her petite shoulders. ‘Let’s not get into this. I’d rather go to bed than get into this.’

‘We
are
into it, we
are
into it,’ Clive was ranting. ‘This is the whole problem with his generation, they think they can hold up the war as some kind of—’

Archie was grateful when Leo interrupted Clive and dragged the argument into some further subset of the original one, which Archie had started (some unwise remark three quarters of an hour ago about military service building up a young man’s character) and then immediately regretted when it required him to defend himself at regular interludes. Freed finally of this obligation, he sat on the stairs, letting the row continue above while he placed his head in his hands.

Shame. He would have
liked
to have been part of a commune. If he’d played his cards right instead of starting a ding-dong, he might have had free love and bare breasts all over the gaff; maybe even a portion of allotment for growing fresh food. For a while (around 2 a.m., when he was telling Wan-Si about his childhood) it had looked like his new life was going to be fabulous, and from now on he was always going to say the right thing at the right time, and everywhere he went people would love him.
Nobody’s fault
, thought Archie, mulling over the balls-up,
nobody’s fault but my own
, but he wondered whether there wasn’t some higher pattern to it. Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, centre stage, for all to see.

A dark line would now be drawn underneath the whole incident, underneath the whole sorry day, had not something happened that led to the transformation of Archie Jones in every particular that a man can be transformed; and not due to any particular effort on his part, but by means of the entirely random, adventitious collision of one person with another. Something happened by accident. That accident was Clara Bowden.

But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except maybe, by virtue of being black, the classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair plaited in a horseshoe which pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn’t. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant.

She needed no bra — she was independent, even of gravity — she wore a red halterneck which stopped below her bust, underneath which she wore her belly button (beautifully) and underneath that some very tight yellow jeans. At the end of it all were some strappy heels of a light brown suede, and she came striding down the stairs on them like some kind of vision or, as it seemed to Archie as he turned to observe her, like a reared-up thoroughbred.