White Teeth (51 page)

‘
Side
car,’ corrected Ryan tetchily. ‘It’s called a sidecar. Minetto Motorcycle-combination, 1973 model.’

‘Yes, of course, a
sidecar
, an’ it is comfortable as a bed. We go everywhere in it, Mr Topps an’ I.’

Hortense took down her overcoat from a hook on the door, and reached in the pockets for two Velcro reflector bands which she strapped round each arm.

‘Now, Irie, I’ve got a great deal of bizness to be gettin’ on with today, so you’re going to have to cook for yourself, because I kyan tell what time we’ll be home. But don’ worry. Me soon come.’

‘No problem.’

Hortense sucked her teeth. ‘
No problem
. Dat’s what her name mean in patois:
Irie
, no problem. Now, what kind of a name is datto . . . ?’

Mr Topps didn’t answer. He was already out on the pavement, revving up the Vespa.

‘First I have to keep her from those Chalfens,’ growls Clara over the phone, her voice a resonant
tremolando
of anger and fear. ‘And now
you
people again.’

On the other end, her mother takes the washing out of the machine and listens silently through the cordless that is tucked between ear and weary shoulder, biding her time.

‘Hortense, I don’t want you filling her head with a whole load of nonsense. You hear me? Your mother was fool to it, and then you were fool to it, but the buck stopped with me and it ain’t going no further. If Irie comes home spouting any of that claptrap, you can forget about the Second Comin’ ’cos you’ll be dead by the time it arrives.’

Big words. But how fragile is Clara’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the lounge cabinet — a breath would knock it over. Talking of which, Clara still holds hers when passing churches the same way adolescent vegetarians scurry by butchers; she avoids Kilburn on a Saturday for fear of streetside preachers on their upturned apple crates. Hortense senses Clara’s terror. Coolly cramming in another load of whites and measuring out the liquid with a thrifty woman’s eye, she is short and decided: ‘Don’ you worry about Irie Ambrosia. She in a good place now. She’ll tell you herself.’ As if she had ascended with the heavenly host rather than entombed herself below ground in the borough of Lambeth with Ryan Topps.

Clara hears her daughter getting on the extension; an initial crackle and then a voice as clear as a carillon. ‘Look, I’m not coming home, all right, so don’t bother. I’ll be back when I’m back, just don’t worry about me.’ And there
should
be nothing to worry about and there
is
nothing to worry about, except maybe that outside in the streets it is cold packed on cold, even the dogshit has crystallized, there is the first suggestion of ice on the windscreens and Clara has been in that house through the winters. She
knows
what it means. Oh, wonderfully bright at 6 a.m., yes, wonderfully clear for an
hour
. But the shorter the days, the longer the nights, the darker the house, the easier it is, the easier it is, the easier it is, to mistake a shadow for the writing on the wall, the sound of overland footsteps for the distant crack of thunder, and the midnight chime of a New Year clock for the bell that tolls the end of the world.

But Clara needn’t have feared. Irie’s atheism was robust. It was Chalfenist in its confidence, and she approached her stay with Hortense with detached amusement. She was intrigued by the Bowden household. It was a place of endgames and aftertimes, fullstops and finales; where to count on the arrival of tomorrow was an indulgence, and every service in the house, from the milkman to the electricity, was paid for on a strictly daily basis so as not to spend money on utilities or goods that would be wasted should God turn up in all his holy vengeance the very next day. Bowdenism gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘hand-to-mouth’. This was living in the eternal instant, ceaselessly teetering on the precipice of total annihilation; there are people who take a great deal of drugs simply to experience something comparable to 84-year-old Hortense Bowden’s day-to-day existence. So you’ve seen dwarfs rip open their bellies and show you their insides, you’ve been a television switched off without warning, you’ve experienced the whole world as one Krishna consciousness, free of individual ego, floating through the infinite cosmos of the soul? Big fucking deal. That’s all bullshit next to St John’s trip when Christ laid the twenty-two chapters of Revelation on him. It must have been a hell of a shock for the apostle (after that thorough spin-job, the New Testament, all those sweet words and sublime sentiments) to discover Old Testament vengeance lurking round the corner after all.
As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten
. That must have been some eye-opener.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express. And Bowdenism, which was the Witnesses plus Revelation
and then some
, was as left field as they come.
Par exemple
: Hortense Bowden interpreted Revelation 3:15 —
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth
— as a literal mandate. She understood ‘lukewarm’ to be an evil property in and of itself. She kept a microwave on hand at all times (her sole concession to modern technology — for a long time it was a toss-up between pleasing the Lord and laying oneself open to the United States mind-ray control programme as operated through high-frequency radiowaves) in order to heat every meal to an impossible temperature; she kept whole buckets of ice to chill every glass of water ‘colder than cold’. She wore two pairs of knickers at all times like a wary potential traffic-victim; when Irie asked why, she sheepishly revealed that upon hearing the first signs of the Lord (approaching thunder, bellowing voice, Wagner’s Ring Cycle), she intended to whip off the one closest to her and replace it with the outer pair, so that Jesus would find her fresh and odourless and ready for heaven. She kept a tub of black paint in the hallway so when the time came she might daub the neighbours’ doors with the sign of the Beast, saving the Lord all that trouble of weeding out the baddies, separating sheep from goats. And you couldn’t form any sentence in that house which included the words ‘end’, ‘finished’, ‘done’, etc., for these were like so many triggers setting off both Hortense and Ryan with the usual ghoulish relish:

Irie
: I finished the washing-up.
Ryan Topps
(shaking his head solemnly at the truth of it): As one day we all shall be finished, Irie, my dear; be zealous therefore, and repent.
Or
Irie
: It was a such a good film. The end was great!
Hortense Bowden
(tearfully): And dem dat expeck such an end to dis world will be sorely disappointed, for He will come trailin’ terror and Lo de generation dat witness de events of 1914 shall now witness de turd part of de trees burn, and the turd part of de sea become as blood, and de turd part of de . . .

And then there was Hortense’s horror of weather reports. Whoever it was, however benign, honey-voiced and inoffensively dressed, she cursed them bitterly for the five minutes they stood there, and then, out of what appeared to be sheer perversity, proceeded to take the opposite of whatever advice had been proffered (light jacket and no umbrella for rain, full cagoule and rain hat for sun). It was several weeks before Irie understood that weathermen were the secular antithesis of Hortense’s life work, which was, essentially, a kind of supercosmic attempt to second-guess the Lord with one almighty biblical exegesis of a weather report. Next to that weathermen were nothing but upstarts . . .
And tomorrow, coming in from the east, we can expect a great furnace to rise up and envelop the area with flames that give no light, but rather darkness visible . . . while I’m afraid the northern regions are advised to wrap up warm against thick-ribbed ice, and there’s a fair likelihood that the coast will be beaten with perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire hail which on firm land thaws not
 . . . Michael Fish and his ilk were stabbers-in-the-dark, trusting to the tomfoolery of the Met Office, making a mockery of that precise science, eschatology, that Hortense had spent over fifty years in the study of.

‘Any news, Mr Topps?’ (This question almost invariably asked over breakfast; and girlishly, breathlessly, like a child asking after Santa.)

‘No, Mrs B. We are still completing our studies. You must let my colleagues and myself deliberate thoroughly. In this life there are them that are teachers and then there are them that are pupils. There are eight million Witnesses of Jehovah waiting for our decision, waiting for the Judgement Day. But you must learn to leave such fings to them that ’ave the direct line, Mrs B., the direct line.’

After bunking for a few weeks, Irie returned to school. But it seemed so distant; even the journey from South to North each morning felt like an almighty polar trek, and worse, one that stopped short of its goal and ended up instead in the tepid regions, a non-event compared with the boiling maelstrom of the Bowden home.
So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth
. You become so used to extremity, suddenly nothing else will do.

She saw Millat regularly, but their conversations were brief. He was green-tied now and otherwise engaged. She still did Marcus’s filing twice a week, but avoided the rest of the family. She saw Josh fleetingly. He seemed to be avoiding the Chalfens as assiduously as she. Her parents she saw on weekends, icy occasions when everybody called everybody by their first names (
Irie, can you pass the salt to Archie? Clara, Archie wants to know where the scissors are
), and all parties felt deserted. She sensed that she was being whispered about in N W 2, the way North Londoners will when they suspect someone of coming down with religion, that nasty disease. So she hurried back to No. 28 Lindaker Road, Lambeth, relieved to be back in the darkness, for it was like hibernating or being cocooned, and she was as curious as everyone else to see what kind of Irie would emerge. It wasn’t any kind of prison. That house was an
adventure
. In cupboards and neglected drawers and in grimy frames were the secrets that had been hoarded for so long, as if secrets were going out of fashion. She found pictures of her great-grandmother Ambrosia, a bony, beautiful thing, with huge almond eyes, and one of Charlie ‘Whitey’ Durham standing in a pile of rubble with a sepia-print sea behind him. She found a bible with one line torn from it. She found photo-booth snaps of Clara in school uniform, grinning maniacally, the true horror of the teeth revealed. She read alternately from
Dental Anatomy
by Gerald M. Cathey and
The Good News Bible
, and raced voraciously through Hortense’s small and eclectic library, blowing the red dust of a Jamaican schoolhouse off the covers and often using a pen knife to cut never-before-read pages. February’s list was as follows:

An Account of a West Indian Sanatorium
, by Geo. J. H. Sutton Moxly. London: Sampson, Low, Marston & Co., 1886. (There was an inverse correlation between the length of the author’s name and the poor quality of his book.)
Tom Cringle’s Log
, by Michael Scott. Edinburgh: 1875.
In Sugar Cane Land
, by Eden Phillpotts. London: McClure & Co., 1893.
Dominica: Hints and Notes to Intending Settlers
, by His Honour H. Hesketh Bell, CMG. London: A. & C. Black, 1906.

The more she read, the more that picture of dashing Capt. Durham aroused her natural curiosity: handsome and melancholy, surveying the bricks of half a church, looking worldly-wise despite his youth, looking every inch the Englishman, looking like he could tell someone or another a thing or two about something. Maybe Irie herself. Just in case, she kept him under her pillow. And in the mornings it wasn’t Italianate vineyards out there any more, it was sugar, sugar, sugar, and next door was nothing but tobacco and she presumptuously fancied that the smell of plantain sent her back to somewhere, somewhere quite fictional, for she’d never been there. Somewhere Columbus called St Jago but the arawaks stubbornly re-named Xaymaca, the name lasting longer than they did.
Well-wooded and Watered
. Not that Irie had heard of those little sweet-tempered pot-bellied victims of their own sweet-tempers. Those were some
other
Jamaicans, fallen short of the attention-span of history. She laid claim to the past — her version of the past — aggressively, as if retrieving misdirected mail. So
this
was where she came from. This all
belonged
to her, her birthright, like a pair of pearl earrings or a post office bond. X marks the spot, and Irie put an X on everything she found, collecting bits and bobs (birth certificates, maps, army reports, news articles) and storing them under the sofa, so that as if by osmosis the richness of them would pass through the fabric while she was sleeping and seep right into her.

As the buds came with the spring, so like any anchoress she was visited. First, by voices. Coming crackling over Hortense’s neolithic radio, Joyce Chalfen on
Gardeners’ Question Time
:

Foreman
: Another question from the audience, I think. Mrs Sally Whitaker from Bournemouth has a question for the panel, I believe. Mrs Whitaker?
Mrs Whitaker
: Thank you, Brian. Well, I’m a new gardener and this is my first frost and in two short months my garden’s gone from being a real colour explosion to a very bare thing indeed . . . Friends have advised flowers with a compact habit but that leaves me with lots of tiny auricula and double daisies, which look silly because the garden’s really quite large. Now, I’d really like to plant something a little more striking, around the height of a delphinium, but then the wind gets it and people look over their fences thinking:
Dear oh dear
(
sympathetic laughter from the studio audience
). So, my question to the panel is, how do you keep up appearances in the bleak midwinter?
Foreman
: Thank you, Mrs Whitaker. Well, it’s a common problem . . . and it doesn’t necessarily get any easier for the seasoned gardener. Personally, I never get it quite right. Well, let’s hand the question over to the panel, shall we? Joyce Chalfen, any answers or suggestions for the bleak midwinter?
Joyce Chalfen
: Well, first I must say your neighbours sound
very
nosy. I’d tell them to mind their own beeswax if I were you (
laughter from audience
). But to be serious, I think this whole trend for round-the-clock bloom is actually very unhealthy for the garden and the gardener and
particularly
the soil, I really do . . . I think the winter should be a time of
rest
, subdued colours, you know — and then when the late spring does finally arrive the neighbours get a hell of a shock! Boom! There it is, this wonderful explosion of growth. I think the deep winter is really a time for
nurturing
the soil, turning it over, allowing it a rest and plotting its future all the better to
surprise
the nosy people next door. I always think of a garden’s soil like a woman’s body — moving in cycles, you know, fertile at some times and not others, and that’s really quite natural. But if you
really
are determined, then Lenten roses —
Helleborus corsicus
— do remarkably well in cold, calcareous soil, even if they’re quite in the—