White Teeth

end, boy.’ He spat this last word, boy, and it was a thief that changed the balance of power between them, stealing whatever strength was left in Archie and dispersing it on the wind. ‘Imagine, if you can, events in the world happening repeatedly, endlessly, in the way they always have…’

‘Stay where you fucking are!’

‘Imagine this war over and over a million times…’

‘No thanks,’ said Archie, choking on snot. ‘ ’Sbad enough the first time.’

‘It is not a serious proposition. It is a test. Only those who are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it – even if it will just keep on repeating – have what it takes to endure the worst blackness. I could see the things I have done repeated infinitely. I am one of the confident ones. But you are not one of them…’

‘Please, just stop talking, please, so I can-’

‘The decision you make, Archie,’ said Dr Sick, betraying a knowledge that he had possessed from the start, the boy’s name, which he had been waiting to employ when it would have the most power, ‘could you see it repeated again and again, through eternity? Could you?’

‘I’ve got a coin!’ yelled Archie, screamed it with joy, because he had just remembered it. ‘I’ve got a coin!’

Dr Sick looked confused, and stopped his stumbling steps forward.

‘Ha! I have a coin, you bastard. Ha! So balls to you!’

Then another step. His hands reaching out, palms up, innocent.

‘Stay back. Stay where you are. Right. This is what we’re going to do. Enough talking. I’m going to put my gun down here… slowly… here.’

Archie crouched and placed it on the floor, roughly between the two of them. ‘That’s so you can trust me. I’ll stand by my word. And now I’m going to throw this coin. And if it’s heads, I’m going to kill you.’

‘But – ’ said Dr Sick. And for the first time Archie saw something like real fear in his eyes, the same fear that Archie felt so thoroughly he could hardly speak.

‘And if it’s tails, I won’t. No, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not much of a thinker, when you get down to it. That’s the best I can offer. All right, here goes.’

The coin rose and flipped as a coin would rise and flip every time in a perfect world, flashing its light and then revealing its dark enough times to mesmerize a man. Then, at some point in its triumphant ascension, it began to arc, and the arc went wrong, and Archibald realized that it was not coming back to him at all but going behind him, a fair way behind him, and he turned round to watch it fall in the dirt. He was bending to pick it up when a shot rang out, and he felt a blistering pain in his right thigh. He looked down. Blood. The bullet had passed straight through, just missing the bone, but leaving a shard of the cap embedded deep in the flesh. The pain was excruciating and strangely distant at the same time. Archie turned back round to see Dr Sick, half bent over, the gun hanging weakly in his right hand.

‘For fuckssake, why did you do that?’ said Archie furious, grabbing the gun off the Doctor, easily and forcefully. ‘It’s tails. See? It’s tails. Look. Tails. It was tails.’

So Archie is there, there in the trajectory of the bullet, about to do something unusual, even for TV: save the same man twice and with no more reason or rhyme than the first time. And it’s a messy business, this saving people lark. Everybody in the room watches in horror as he takes it in the thigh, right in the femur, spins round with some melodrama and falls right through the mouse’s glass box. Shards of glass all over the gaff. What a performance. If it were TV you would hear the saxophone around now; the credits would be rolling.

But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story. The same focus group who picked out the colour of this room, the carpet, the font for the posters, the height of the table, would no doubt tick the box that asks to see all these things played to their finish… and there is surely a demographic pattern to all those who wish to see the eyewitness statements that identified Magid as many times as Millat, the confusing transcripts, the videotape of uncooperating victim and families, a court case so impossible the judge gave in and issued four hundred hours community service to both twins, which they served, naturally, as gardeners in Joyce’s new project, a huge millennial park by the banks of the Thames…

And is it young professional women aged eighteen to thirty-two who would like a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea (for Irie and Joshua become lovers in the end; you can only avoid your fate for so long), while Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid and feels free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings? And could it be that it is largely the criminal class and the elderly who find themselves wanting to make bets on the winner of a blackjack game, the one played by Alsana and Samad, Archie and Clara, in O’Connell’s, 31 December 1999, that historic night when Abdul-Mickey finally opened his doors to women?

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that. It’s never been like that.

It would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown rebel mouse. Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to both Lisa and Joshua Appignanesi for contriving between them to get me a room of my own when it was most required. Thanks are due to Tristan Hughes and Yvonne Bailey-Smith for providing two happy homes for this book and its author. I am also indebted to the bright ideas and sharp eyes of the following people: Paul Hilder, friend and sounding-board; Nicholas Laird, fellow idiot savant; Donna Poppy, meticulous in everything; Simon Prosser, as judicious an editor as one could hope for; and finally my agent, Georgia Garrett, from whom nothing escapes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975 and continues to live in the area. She is the author of two novels. Her first book, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, is also available as an ePenguin ebook.

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The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce the following extracts:

‘As Time Goes By’, words and music by Herman Hupfeld, copyright 1931 by T. B. Harms