White Teeth

shaken, genuinely shaken, Millat hardly blinked. To Millat, it was so familiar. He was so unfazed by it. Because there aren’t any alien objects or events any more, just as there aren’t any sacred ones. It’s all so familiar. It’s all on TV. So handling the cold metal, feeling it next to his skin that first time: it was easy. And when things come to you easily, when things click effortlessly into place, it is so tempting to use the four-letter F-word. Fate. Which to Millat is a quantity very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written, produced and directed by somebody else.

Of course, now that he’s here, now that he’s stoned and scared, and it doesn’t feel so easy, and the right-hand side of his jacket feels like someone put a fucking cartoon anvil in there – now he sees the great difference between TV and life, and it kicks him right in the groin. Consequences. But even to think this is to look to the movies for reference (because he’s not like Samad or Mangal Pande; he didn’t get a war, he never saw action, he hasn’t got any analogies or anecdotes), is to remember Pacino in the first Godfather, huddled in the restaurant toilet (as Pande was huddled in the barracks room), considering for a moment what it means to burst out of the men’s room and blast the hell out of the two guys at the checkered table. And Millat remembers. He remembers rewinding and freeze- framing and slow-playing that scene countless times over the years. He remembers that no matter how long you pause the split-second of Pacino reflecting, no matter how often you replay the doubt that seems to cross his face, he never does anything else but what he was always going to do.

‘… and when we consider that the human significance of this technology… which will prove, I believe, the equal of this century’s discoveries in the field of physics: relativity, quantum mechanics… when we consider the choices it affords us… not between a blue eye and a brown eye, but between eyes that would be blind and those that might see…’

But Irie now believes there are things the human eye cannot detect, not with any magnifying glass, binocular or microscope. She should know, she’s tried. She’s looked at one and then the other, one and then the other – so many times they don’t seem like faces any more, just brown canvases with strange protrusions, like saying a word so often it ceases to make sense. Magid and Millat. Millat and Magid. Majlat. Milljid.

She’s asked her unborn child to offer some kind of a sign, but nothing. She’s had a lyric from Hortense’s house going through her head – Psalm 63 – early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee… But it asks too much of her. It requires her to go back, back, back to the root, to the fundamental moment when sperm met egg, when egg met sperm – so early in this history it cannot be traced. Irie’s child can never be mapped exactly nor spoken of with any certainty. Some secrets are permanent. In a vision, Irie has seen a time, a time not far from now, when roots won’t matter any more because they can’t because they mustn’t because they’re too long and they’re too tortuous and they’re just buried too damn deep. She looks forward to it.

‘He who would most valiant be. ’Gainst all disaster…’

For a few minutes now, beneath Marcus’s talk and the shutters of cameras, another sound (Millat in particular has been attuned to it), a faint singing sound, has been audible. Marcus is doing his best to ignore it and continue, but it has just got considerably louder. He has begun to pause between his words to look around, though the song is clearly not in the room.

‘Let him with constancy, follow the master…’

‘Oh God,’ murmurs Clara, leaning forward to speak in her husband’s ear. ‘It’s Hortense. It’s Hortense. Archie, you’ve got to go and sort it out. Please. It’s easiest for you to get out of your seat.’

But Archie is thoroughly enjoying himself. Between Marcus’s talk and Mickey’s commentary, it’s like watching two TVs at once. Very informative.

‘Ask Irie.’

‘I can’t. She’s too far in to get out. Archie,’ she growls, lapsing into a threatening patois, ‘you kyan jus leddem sing trew de whole ting!’

‘Sam,’ says Archie, trying to make his whisper travel, ‘Sam, you go. You don’t even want to be in here. Go on. You know Hortense. Just tell her to keep it down. ’Sjust I’d quite like to listen to the rest of this, you know. Very informative.’

‘With pleasure,’ hisses Samad, getting out of his seat abruptly, and not troubling to excuse himself as he steps firmly on Neena’s toes. ‘No need, I think, to save my place.’

Marcus, who is now a quarter of the way through a detailed description of the mouse’s seven years, looks up from his paper at the disturbance, and stops to watch the disappearing figure with the rest of the audience.

‘I think somebody realized this story doesn’t have a happy ending.’

As the audience laughs lightly and settles back into silence, Mickey nudges Archibald in his ribs. ‘Now you see, that’s a bit more like it,’ he says. ‘A bit of a comic touch – liven things up a bit. Layman’s terms, innit? Not everybody went to the bloody Oxbridge. Some of us went to the-’

‘University of Life,’ agrees Archie, nodding, because they were both there, though at different times. ‘Can’t beat it.’

Outside: Samad feels his resolve, strong when the door slammed behind him, weaken as he approaches the formidable Witness ladies, ten of them, all ferociously be-wigged, standing on the front steps, banging away at their percussion as if they wish to beat out something more substantial than rhythm. They are in full voice. Five security guards have already admitted defeat, and even Ryan Topps seems slightly in awe of his choral Frankenstein’s monster, preferring to stand at a distance on the pavement, handing out copies of the Watchtower to the great crowd heading for Soho.

‘Do I get a concession?’ inquires one drunken girl, inspecting the kitschy painting of heaven on the cover, adding it to her handful of New Year club fliers. ‘Has it got a dress code?’

With misgivings, Samad taps the triangle-player on her rugby-forward shoulders. He tries the full range of vocabulary available to an Indian man addressing potentially dangerous elderly Jamaican women (ifIcouldplease sorrypossiblypleasesorry – you learn it at bus stops), but the drums proceed, the kazoo buzzes, the cymbals crash. The ladies continue to crunch their sensible shoes in the frost. And Hortense Bowden, too old for marching, continues to sit on a fold-up chair, resolutely eyeballing the mass of dancing people in Trafalgar Square. She has a banner between her knees that states, simply,

THE TIME IS AT HAND – Rev. 1:3

‘Mrs Bowden?’ says Samad, stepping forward in a pause between verses. ‘I am Samad Iqbal. A friend of Archibald Jones.’

Because Hortense does not look at him or betray any twinge of recognition, Samad feels bound to delve deeper into the intricate web of their relations. ‘My wife is a very good friend of your daughter; my step-niece also. My sons are friends with your-’

Hortense kisses her teeth. ‘I know fe who you are, man. You know me, I know you. But at dis point, dere are only two kind of people in de world.’

‘It is just that we were wondering,’ Samad interrupts, spotting a sermon and wanting to sever it at the root, ‘if you could possibly reduce the noise somewhat… if only-’

But Hortense is already overlapping him, eyes closed, arm raised, testifying to the truth in the old Jamaican fashion: ‘Two kind of people: dem who sing for de Lord and dem who rejeck ’im at de peril of dem souls.’

She turns back. She stands. She shakes her banner furiously in the direction of the drunken hordes moving up and down as one in the Trafalgar fountains, and then she is asked to do it again for a cynical photo-journalist with a waiting space to fill on page six.

‘Bit higher with the banner, love,’ he says, camera held up, one knee in the snow. ‘Come on, get angry, that’s it. Lovely Jubbly.’