White Teeth (6 page)

It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company — an over-compensation of all the consonants — the voice she used for pastors and white women.

Clara closed the front door behind her, and walked in a kind of terror through the living room, past the framed hologram of Jesus who wept (and then didn’t), and into the kitchen.

‘Dear Lord, she look like someting de cat dragged in, hmm?’

‘Mmm,’ said Ryan, who was happily shovelling a plate of ackee and saltfish into his mouth on the other side of the tiny kitchen table.

Clara stuttered, her buck teeth cutting shapes into her bottom lip. ‘What are you doing
here
?’

‘Ha!’ cried Hortense, almost triumphant. ‘You tink you can hide your friends from me for ever? De bwoy was cold, I let ’im in, we been havin’ a nice chat, haven’t we young man?’

‘Mmm, yes, Mrs Bowden.’

‘Well, don’ look so shock. You’d tink I was gwan eat ’im up or someting, eh Ryan?’ said Hortense, glowing in a manner Clara had never seen before.

‘Yeah, right,’ smirked Ryan. And together, Ryan Topps and Clara’s mother began to laugh.

Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee’s mother? As the nights got darker and shorter and it became harder to pick Ryan out of the crowd who milled outside the school gates each day at three thirty, a dejected Clara would make the long walk home only to find her lover once more in the kitchen, chatting happily with Hortense, devouring the Bowden household’s cornucopia of goodies: ackee and saltfish, beef jerky, chicken-rice-and-peas, ginger cake and coconut ices.

These conversations, lively as they sounded when Clara turned the key in the door, always fell silent as she approached the kitchen. Like children caught out, they would become sullen, then awkward, then Ryan would make his excuses and leave. There was also a look, she noticed, that they had begun to give her, a look of sympathy, of condescension; and not only that — they began to comment on her clothing, which had become steadily more youthful, more colourful; and Ryan — what was happening to Ryan? — shed his polo-neck, avoided her in school,
bought a tie
.

Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbour of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. She had once known everything about Ryan — before Ryan himself knew it — she had been a Ryan
expert
. Now she was reduced to overhearing the Irish girls assert that Clara Bowden and Ryan Topps were not dealing with each other — definitively, definitely
not
dealing with each other — oh no,
not any more
.

If Clara realized what was happening, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe it. On the occasion she spotted Ryan at the kitchen table, surrounded by leaflets — and Hortense hurriedly gathering them up and shoving them into her apron pocket — Clara
willed
herself to forget it. Later that month, when Clara persuaded a doleful Ryan to go through the motions with her in the disabled toilet, she squinted so she couldn’t see what she didn’t
want
to see. But it was there, underneath his jumper, there as he leant back on the sink was the glint of silver, its gleam hardly visible in the dismal light — it couldn’t be, but it
was
— the silver glint of a tiny silver cross.

It couldn’t be,
but it was
. That is how people describe a miracle. Somehow the opposites of Hortense and Ryan had met at their logical extremes, their mutual predilection for the pain and death of others meeting like perspective points on some morbid horizon. Suddenly the saved and the unsaved had come a miraculous full circle. Hortense and Ryan were now trying to save
her
.

‘Get on the bike.’

Clara had just stepped out of school into the dusk and it was Ryan, his scooter coming to a sharp halt at her feet.

‘Claz, get on the bike.’

‘Go ask my mudder if she wan’ get on de bike!’

‘Please,’ said Ryan, proffering the spare scooter helmet. ‘ ’Simportant. Need to talk to you. Ain’t much time left.’

‘Why?’ snapped Clara, rocking petulantly on her platform heels. ‘You goin’ someplace?’

‘You and me both,’ murmured Ryan. ‘The right place, ’opefully.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Claz.’

‘
No
.’

‘
Please
. ’Simportant. Life or death.’

‘Man . . . all right. But me nah wearin’ dat ting’ — she passed back the helmet and got astride the scooter — ‘not mussin’ up me hair.’

Ryan drove her across London and up to Hampstead Heath, the very top of Parliament Hill, where, looking down from that peak on to the sickly orange fluorescence of the city, carefully, tortuously, and in language that was not his own, he put forward his case. The bottom line of which was this: there was only a month until the end of the world.

‘And the fing is, herself and myself, we’re just—’

‘We!’

‘Your mum — your mum and myself,’ mumbled Ryan, ‘we’re worried. ’Bout you. There ain’t that many wot will survive the last days. You been wiv a bad crowd, Claz—’

‘
Man
,’ said Clara, shaking her head and sucking her teeth, ‘I don’
believe
dis biznezz. Dem were
your
friends.’

‘No, no, they ain’t. Not no more. The weed — the weed is evil. And all that lot — Wan-Si, Petronia.’

‘Dey my friends!’

‘They ain’t nice girls, Clara. They should be with their families, not dressing like they do and doing things with them men in that house. You yourself shouldn’t be doin’ that, neither. And dressing like, like, like—’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a whore!’ said Ryan, the word exploding from him like it was a relief to be rid of it. ‘Like a loose woman!’

‘Oh bwoy, I heard
everyting
now . . . take me home, man.’

‘They’re going to get theirs,’ said Ryan, nodding to himself, his arm stretched and gesturing over London from Chiswick to Archway. ‘There’s still time for you. Who do you want to be with, Claz? Who d’ya want to be with? With the 144,000, in heaven, ruling with Christ? Or do you want to be one of the Great Crowd, living in earthly paradise, which is all right but . . . Or are you going to be one of them who get it in the neck, torture and death. Eh? I’m just separating the sheep from the goats, Claz, the sheep from the goats. That’s Matthew. And I think you yourself are a sheep, innit?’

‘Lemme tell you someting,’ said Clara, walking back over to the scooter and taking the back seat, ‘I’m a goat. I
like
bein’ a goat. I
wanna
be a goat. An’ I’d rather be sizzling in de rains of sulphur wid my friends than sittin’ in heaven, bored to tears, wid Darcus, my mudder and you!’

‘Shouldn’ta said that, Claz,’ said Ryan solemnly, putting his helmet on. ‘I really wish you ’adn’t said that. For your sake.
He
can hear us.’

‘An’ I’m
tired
of hearin’ you. Take me home.’

‘It’s the truth! He can hear us!’ he shouted, turning backwards, yelling above the exhaust-pipe noise as they revved up and scooted downhill. ‘He can see it all! He watches over us!’

‘Watch over where you goin’,’ Clara yelled back, as they sent a cluster of Hasidic Jews running in all directions. ‘Watch de path!’

‘Only the few — that’s wot it says — only the few. They’ll all get it — that’s what it says in Dyoot-er-ronomee — they’ll all get what’s comin’ and only the few—’

Somewhere in the middle of Ryan Topps’s enlightening biblical exegesis, his former false idol, the Vespa GS, cracked right into a 400-year-old oak tree. Nature triumphed over the presumptions of engineering. The tree survived; the bike died; Ryan was hurled one way; Clara the other.

The principles of Christianity and Sod’s Law (also known as Murphy’s Law) are the same:
Everything happens to me, for me
. So if a man drops a piece of toast and it lands butter-side down, this unlucky event is interpreted as being proof of an essential truth about bad luck: that the toast fell as it did just to prove to
you
, Mr Unlucky, that there is a defining force in the universe and it is bad luck. It’s not random. It could never have fallen on the right side, so the argument goes, because that’s Sod’s Law. In short, Sod’s Law happens to you to prove to you that there is Sod’s Law. Yet, unlike gravity, it is a law that does not exist whatever happens: when the toast lands on the
right
side, Sod’s Law mysteriously disappears. Likewise, when Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved. Not because one was wearing a helmet and the other wasn’t. And had it happened the other way round, had gravity reclaimed Ryan’s teeth and sent them rolling down Primrose Hill like tiny enamel snowballs, well . . . you can bet your life that God, in Ryan’s mind, would have done a vanishing act.

As it was, this was the final sign Ryan needed. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, he was there in the living room, sitting in the middle of a circle of candles with Hortense, ardently praying for Clara’s soul while Darcus pissed into his tube and watched the
Generation Game
on BBC One. Clara, meanwhile, had put on a pair of yellow flares and a red halterneck top and gone to a party. She suggested its theme, helped to paint the banner and hang it from the window; she danced and smoked with the rest of them and felt herself, without undue modesty, to be quite the belle of the squat. But as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling sea-water to retrieve the salt — something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends — Merlin, Wan-Si, et al. — clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcizing those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Saviour, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the man who was meant to take her away from all this, from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in Lambeth. What now for Clara? Ryan would find another fad; Darcus need only turn to the other channel; for Hortense another date would of course materialize, along with more leaflets, ever more faith. But Clara was not like Hortense.

Yet a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara’s faith, remained. She still wished for a saviour. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might
Walk in white with Him: for
[she]
was worthy
. Revelation 3:4.

Perhaps it is not so inexplicable then, that when Clara Bowden met Archie Jones at the bottom of some stairs the next morning she saw more in him than simply a rather short, rather chubby middle-aged white man in a badly tailored suit. Clara saw Archie through the grey-green eyes of loss; her world had just disappeared, the faith she lived by had receded like a low tide, and Archie, quite by accident, had become the bloke in the joke: the last man on earth.

It is better to marry than to burn
, says Corinthians I, chapter seven, verse nine.

Good advice. Of course, Corinthians also informs us that we
should not muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain
— so, go figure.

By February 1975, Clara had deserted the church and all its biblical literalism for Archibald Jones, but she was not yet the kind of carefree atheist who could laugh near altars or entirely dismiss the teachings of St Paul. The second dictum wasn’t a problem — having no ox, she was excluded by proxy. But the first was giving her sleepless nights. Was it better to marry? Even if the man was a heathen? There was no way of knowing: she was living without props now,
sans
safety net. More worrying than God was her mother. Hortense was fiercely opposed to the affair, on grounds of colour rather than of age, and on hearing of it had promptly ostracized her daughter one morning on the doorstep.

Clara still felt that deep down her mother would prefer her to marry an unsuitable man rather than live with him in sin, so she did it on impulse and begged Archie to take her as far away from Lambeth as a man of his means could manage — Morocco, Belgium, Italy. Archie had clasped her hand and nodded and whispered sweet nothings in the full knowledge that the furthest a man of his means was going was a newly acquired, heavily mortgaged, two-storey house in Willesden Green. But no need to mention that now, he felt, not right now in the heat of the moment. Let her down gently, like.

Three months later Clara had been gently let down and here they were, moving in. Archie scrabbling up the stairs, as usual cursing and blinding, wilting under the weight of boxes which Clara could carry two, three at a time without effort; Clara taking a break, squinting in the warm May sunshine, trying to get her bearings. She peeled down to a little purple vest and leant against her front gate. What kind of a place
was
this? That was the thing, you see, you couldn’t be
sure
. Travelling in the front passenger seat of the removal van, she’d seen the high road and it had been ugly and poor and familiar (though there were no Kingdom Halls or Episcopalian churches), but then at the turn of a corner suddenly roads had exploded in greenery, beautiful oaks, the houses got taller, wider and more detached, she could see parks, she could see libraries. And then abruptly the trees would be gone, reverting back into bus-stops as if by the strike of some midnight bell; a signal which the houses too obeyed, transforming themselves into smaller, stairless dwellings that sat splay opposite derelict shopping arcades, those peculiar lines of establishments that include, without exception, one defunct sandwich bar still advertising breakfast one locksmith uninterested in marketing frills (KEYS CUT HERE)

and one permanently shut unisex hair salon, the proud bearer of some unspeakable pun (
Upper Cuts
or
Fringe Benefits
or
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
).