White Teeth (4 page)

Now, as Archie understood it, in movies and the like it is common for someone to be so striking that when they walk down the stairs the crowd goes silent. In life he had never seen it. But it happened with Clara Bowden. She walked down the stairs in slow motion, surrounded by afterglow and fuzzy lighting. And not only was she the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she was also the most comforting woman he had ever met. Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelt musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favourite clothes. Though she was disorganized physically — legs and arms speaking a slightly different dialect from her central nervous system — even her gangly demeanour seemed to Archie exceptionally elegant. She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it or when to just put it down.

‘Cheer up, bwoy,’ she said in a lilting Caribbean accent that reminded Archie of That Jamaican Cricketer, ‘it might never happen.’

‘I think it already has.’

Archie, who had just dropped a fag from his mouth which had been burning itself to death anyway, saw Clara quickly tread it underfoot. She gave him a wide grin that revealed possibly her one imperfection. A complete lack of teeth in the top of her mouth.

‘Man . . . dey get knock out,’ she lisped, seeing his surprise. ‘But I tink to myself: come de end of de world, d’Lord won’t mind if I have no toofs.’ She laughed softly.

‘Archie Jones,’ said Archie, offering her a Marlboro.

‘Clara.’ She whistled inadvertently as she smiled and breathed in the smoke. ‘Archie Jones, you look justabout exackly how I feel. Have Clive and dem people been talking foolishness at you? Clive, you bin playing wid dis poor man?’

Clive grunted — the memory of Archie had all but disappeared with the effects of the wine — and continued where he left off, accusing Leo of misunderstanding the difference between political and physical sacrifice.

‘Oh, no . . . nothing serious,’ Archie burbled, useless in the face of her exquisite face. ‘Bit of a disagreement, that’s all. Clive and I have different views about a few things. Generation gap, I suppose.’

Clara slapped him on the hand. ‘Hush yo mout! You’re nat dat ol’. I seen older.’

‘I’m old enough,’ said Archie, and then, just because he felt like telling her, ‘You won’t believe me, but I almost died today.’

Clara raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t say. Well, come and join de club. Dere are a lot of us about dis marnin’. What a
strange
party dis is. You know,’ she said brushing a long hand across his bald spot, ‘you look pretty djam good for someone come so close to St Peter’s Gate. You wan’ some advice?’

Archie nodded vigorously. He always wanted advice, he was a huge fan of second opinions. That’s why he never went anywhere without a ten pence coin.

‘Go home, get some rest. Marnin’ de the world new, every time. Man . . . dis life no easy!’

What home? thought Archie. He had unhooked the old life, he was walking into unknown territory.

‘Man . . .’ Clara repeated, patting him on the back, ‘dis life no easy!’

She let off another long whistle and a rueful laugh, and, unless he was really going nuts, Archie saw that
come hither
look; identical to Daria’s; tinged with a kind of sadness, disappointment; like she didn’t have a great deal of other options. Clara was nineteen. Archibald was forty-seven.

Six weeks later they were married.

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was
from
somewhere. She had
roots
. More specifically, she was from Lambeth (via Jamaica) and she was connected, through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was ugly. And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler’s Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. There was Clara and Ryan for eight months before Clara and Archie were drawn together from opposite ends of a staircase. And Clara might never have run into the arms of Archie Jones if she hadn’t been running, quite as fast as she could, away from Ryan Topps.

Poor Ryan Topps. He was a mass of unfortunate physical characteristics. He was very thin and very tall, red-headed, flat-footed and freckled to such an extent that his skin was rarer than his freckles. Ryan fancied himself as a bit of a Mod. He wore ill-fitting grey suits with black polo-necks. He wore Chelsea boots after everyone else had stopped wearing them. While the rest of the world discovered the joys of the electronic synthesizer, Ryan swore allegiance to the little men with big guitars: to the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who. Ryan Topps rode a green Vespa GS scooter which he polished twice a day with a baby’s nappy and kept encased in a custom-built corrugated-iron shield. To Ryan’s way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but an ideology, family, friend and lover all rolled into one paragon of late forties engineering.

Ryan Topps, as one might expect, had few friends.

Clara Bowden was gangly, buck-toothed, a Jehovah’s Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit. A typical teenage female panopticon, she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps long before they ever spoke. She knew the basics: same school (St Jude’s Community School, Lambeth), same height (six foot one); she knew he was, like her, neither Irish nor Roman Catholic, which made them two islands floating surrounded by the popish ocean of St Jude’s, enrolled in the school by the accident of their postcodes, reviled by teachers and pupils alike. She knew the name of his bike, she read the tops of his records as they popped up over the brim of his bag. She even knew things about him he didn’t know: for example, she knew he was the Last Man on Earth. Every school has one, and in St Jude’s, as in other seats of learning, it was the girls who chose this moniker and dished it out. There were, of course, variations:

Mr
Not for a Million Pounds
.

Mr
Not to Save My Mother’s Life
.

Mr
Not for World Peace
.

But, generally, the schoolgirls of St Jude’s kept to the tried and tested formula. Though Ryan would never be privy to the conversations of the school’s female changing rooms, Clara knew. She knew how the object of her affections was discussed, she kept an ear out, she knew what he amounted to when you got down to it, down amongst the sweat and the training bras and the sharp flick of a wet towel.

‘Ah, Jaysus, you’re not listening. I’m saying, if he was the
last
man on earth!’

‘I
still
wouldn’t.’

‘Ah, bollocks you
would
!’

‘But listen: the whole bleedin’ world has been hit by the bomb, like in Japan, roight? An’ all the good-lookin’ men, all the
rides
like your man Nicky Laird, they’re all dead. They’ve all been burnt to a crisp. An’ all that’s left is Ryan Topps and a bunch of cockroaches.’

‘On me life, I’d rather sleep with the cockroaches.’

Ryan’s unpopularity at St Jude’s was equalled only by Clara’s. On her first day at the school her mother had explained to her she was about to enter the devil’s lair, filled her satchel with two hundred copies of the
Watchtower
and instructed her to go and do the Lord’s work. Week after week she shuffled through the school, head hung to the ground, handing out magazines, murmuring, ‘Only Jehovah saves’; in a school where an overexcitable pustule could send you to Coventry, a six-foot black missionary in knee socks attempting to convert six hundred Catholics to the church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses equalled social leprosy.

So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot. Ryan’s freckles were a join-the-dots enthusiast’s wet dream. Clara could circumnavigate an apple with her front teeth before her tongue got anywhere near it. Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give out); not even St Jude, who got saddled way back in the 1st century with the patronage of hopeless causes (due to the tonal similarity between Jude and Judas), was prepared to get involved.

At five o’clock each day, as Clara sat in her house attending to the message of the gospels or composing a leaflet condemning the heathen practice of blood transfusion, Ryan Topps would scoot by her open window on his way home. The Bowden living room sat just below street level, and had bars on its window, so all views were partial. Generally, she would see feet, wheels, car exhausts, swinging umbrellas. Such slight glimpses were often telling; a lively imagination could squeeze much pathos out of a frayed lace, a darned sock, a low swinging bag that had seen better days. But nothing affected her more deeply than gazing after the disappearing tailpipe of Ryan’s scooter. Lacking any name for the furtive rumblings that appeared in her lower abdomen on these occasions, Clara called it the spirit of the Lord. She felt that somehow she was going to save the heathen Ryan Topps. Clara meant to gather this boy close to her breast, keep him safe from the temptation that besets us all around, prepare him for the day of his redemption. (And wasn’t there somewhere, lower than her abdomen — somewhere down in the nether region of the unmentionables — was there not the half-conceived hope that Ryan Topps might save
her
?)

If Hortense Bowden caught her daughter sitting wistfully by the barred window, listening to the retreating splutter of an engine while the pages of the
New Bible
flicked over in the breeze, she koofed her up-side her head and thanked her to remember that only 144,000 of the Witnesses of Jehovah would sit in the court of the Lord on Judgement Day. Amongst which number of the Anointed there was no space for nasty-looking so-and-sos on motorcycles.

‘But what if we saved—’

‘Some people,’ Hortense asserted with a snort, ‘have done such a hol’ heap of sinning, it
late
for dem to be making eyes at Jehovah. It take effort to be close to Jehovah. It take devotion and dedication.
Blessed are the pure in heart for they alone shall see God
. Matthew 5:8. Isn’t dat right, Darcus?’

Darcus Bowden, Clara’s father, was an odoriferous, moribund, salivating old man entombed in a bug-infested armchair from which he had never been seen to remove himself, not even, thanks to a catheter, to visit the outdoor toilet. Darcus had come over to England fourteen years earlier and spent the whole of that period in the far corner of the living room, watching television. The original intention had been that he should come to England and earn enough money to enable Clara and Hortense to come over, join him and settle down. However, on arrival, a mysterious illness had debilitated Darcus Bowden. An illness that no doctor could find any physical symptoms of, but which manifested itself in the most incredible lethargy, creating in Darcus — admittedly, never the most vibrant of men — a lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair and British television. In 1972, enraged by a fourteen-year wait, Hortense decided finally to make the journey on her own steam. Steam was something Hortense had in abundance. She arrived on the doorstep with the seventeen-year-old Clara, broke down the door in a fury and — so the legend went back in St Elizabeth — gave Darcus Bowden the tongue-whipping of his life. Some say this onslaught lasted four hours, some say she quoted every book of the bible by memory and it took a whole day and a whole night. What is certain is, at the end of it all, Darcus slumped deeper into the recesses of his chair, looked mournfully at the television with whom he had had such an understanding, compassionate relationship — so uncomplicated, so much innocent affection — and a tear squeezed its way out of its duct and settled in a crag underneath his eye. Then he said just one word: Hmph.

Hmph
was all Darcus said or ever was to say after. Ask Darcus anything; query him on any subject at any hour of the day and night; interrogate him; chat with him; implore him; declare your love for him; accuse him or vindicate him and he will give you only one answer.

‘I say, isn’t dat right, Darcus?’

‘
Hmph
.’

‘An’ it not,’ exclaimed Hortense, returning to Clara, having received Darcus’s grunt of approval, ‘dat young man’s
soul
you boddrin’ yourself wid! How many times must I tell you — you got no time for bwoys!’

For Time was running out in the Bowden household. This was 1974, and Hortense was preparing for the End of the World, which, in the house diary, she had marked carefully in blue biro: 1 January 1975. This was not a solitary psychosis of the Bowdens. There were eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses waiting with her. Hortense was in large, albeit eccentric, company. A personal letter had come to Hortense (as secretary of the Lambeth branch of the Kingdom Halls), with a photocopied signature from William J. Rangeforth of the largest Kingdom Hall in the USA, Brooklyn, confirming the date. The end of the world had been
officially
confirmed with a gold-plated letterhead, and Hortense had risen to the occasion by setting it in an attractive mahogany frame. She had given it pride of place on a doily on top of the television between a glass figurine of Cinderella on her way to the Ball and a tea-cosy embroidered with the Ten Commandments. She had asked Darcus whether he thought it looked nice. He had hmphed his assent.

The end of the world was nigh. And this was not — the Lambeth branch of the church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses was to be assured — like the mistakes of 1914 and 1925. They had been promised the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees, and this time the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees
would
appear. They had waited so long for the rivers of blood to overflow the gutters in the high street, and now their thirst
would
be satiated. The time had come. This was the right date, this was the only date, all other dates that might have been proffered in the past were the result of some bad calculations: someone forgot to add, someone forgot to minus, someone forgot to carry the one. But now was the time. The real thing. 1 January 1975.