White Teeth

‘Just them Pakistani foods aren’t always… I’ve got a bit of a funny…’

Noel patted his stomach and looked desperate. Despite being in the direct mail business, Noel hated to be spoken to directly. He liked being the intermediary at MorganHero. He liked putting calls through, telling one person what another person said, forwarding letters.

‘Bloody hell, Noel… it’s just a sweet. I’m just trying to celebrate, mate. Don’t you hippies eat sweets or something?’

Noel’s hair was ever so slightly longer than everyone else’s, and he had once bought an incense stick to burn in the coffee room. It was a small office, there was little to talk about, so these two things made Noel second only to Janis Joplin, just as Archie was the white Jesse Owens because he came thirteenth in the Olympics twenty-seven years ago, Gary from Accounts had a French grandmother and blew cigarette smoke out of his nose so he was Maurice Chevalier, and Elmott, Archie’s fellow paper-folder, was Einstein because he could manage two thirds of The Times crossword.

Noel looked pained. ‘Archie… Did you get my note from Mr Hero about the folds on the…?’

Archie sighed. ‘On the Mothercare account. Yes, Noel, I’ve told Elmott to move the perforation.’

Noel looked thankful. ‘Well, congratulations about the… I’ll be getting on with…’ Noel returned to his desk.

Archie left to try Maureen the receptionist. Maureen had good legs for a woman her age – legs like sausages tightly packed in their skins – and she’d always fancied him a bit.

‘Maureen, love. I’m going to be a father!’

‘Are you, love? Oh, I am pleased. Girl or-’

‘Too early to tell as yet. Blue eyes, though!’ said Archie, for whom these eyes had passed from rare genetic possibility to solid fact. ‘Would you credit it!’

‘Did you say blue eyes, Archie, love?’ said Maureen, speaking slowly so she might find a way to phrase it. ‘I’m not bein’ funny… but in’t your wife, well, coloured?’

Archie shook his head wonderingly. ‘I know! Her and me have a child, the genes mix up, and blue eyes! Miracle of nature!’

‘Oh yes, miracle,’ said Maureen tersely, thinking that was a polite word for what it was.

‘Have a sweet?’

Maureen looked dubious. She patted her pitted pink thighs encased in their white tights. ‘Oh, Archie, love, I shouldn’t. Goes straight on the legs and hips, don’t it? An’ neither of us is getting any younger, are we, eh? Are we, eh? None of us can turn back the clock, can we, eh? That Joan Rivers, I wish I knew how she does it!’

Maureen laughed for a long time, her trademark laugh at MorganHero: shrill and loud, but with her mouth only slightly open, for Maureen had a morbid dread of laughter lines.

She poked one of the sweets with a sceptical, blood-red fingernail. ‘Indian, are they?’

‘Yes, Maureen,’ said Archie with a blokeish grin, ‘spicy and sweet at the same time. Bit like you.’

‘Oh, Archie, you are funny,’ said Maureen sadly, for she had always fancied Archie a bit but never more than a bit because of this strange way he had about him, always talking to Pakistanis and Caribbeans like he didn’t even notice and now he’d gone and married one and hadn’t even thought it worth mentioning what colour she was until the office dinner when she turned up black as anything and Maureen almost choked on her prawn cocktail.

Maureen stretched over her desk to attend to a ringing telephone. ‘I don’t think I will, Archie, love…’

‘Please yourself. Don’t know what you’re missing, though.’

Maureen smiled weakly and picked up the receiver. ‘Yes, Mr Hero, he’s right here, he’s just found out he’s going to be a daddy… yes, it’ll have blue eyes, apparently… yes, that’s what I said, something to do with genes, I suppose… oh yes, all right… I’ll tell him, I’ll send him in… Oh, thank you, Mr Hero, you’re very kind.’ Maureen stretched her talons across the receiver and spoke in a stage-whisper to Archie, ‘Archibald, love, Mr Hero wants to see you. Urgent, he says. You been a naughty boy or sommink?’

‘I should cocoa!’ said Archie, heading for the lift.

The door said:

Kelvin Hero

Company Director

MorganHero

Direct Mail Specialists

It was meant to intimidate and Archie responded in kind, rapping the door too lightly and then too hard and then kind of falling through it when Kelvin Hero, dressed in moleskin, turned the handle to let him in.

‘Archie,’ said Kelvin Hero, revealing a double row of pearly whites that owed more to expensive dentistry than to regular brushing. ‘Archie, Archie, Archie, Archie.’

‘Mr Hero,’ said Archie.

‘You puzzle me, Archie,’ said Mr Hero.

‘Mr Hero,’ said Archie.

‘Sit down there, Archie,’ said Mr Hero.

‘Right you are, Mr Hero,’ said Archie.

Kelvin wiped a streak of grimy sweat from around his shirt collar, turned his silver Parker pen over a few times in his hand and took a series of deep breaths. ‘Now, this is quite delicate… and I have never considered myself a racialist, Archie…’

‘Mr Hero?’

Blimey, thought Kelvin, what an eye-to-face ratio. When you want to say something delicate, you don’t want that eye-to-face ratio staring up at you. Big eyes, like a child’s or a baby seal’s; the physiognomy of innocence – looking at Archie Jones is like looking at something that expects to be clubbed round the head any second.

Kelvin tried a softer tack. ‘Let me put it another way. Usually, when confronted with this type of delicate situation, I would, as you know, confer with you. Because I’ve always had a lot of time for you, Arch. I respect you. You’re not flashy, Archie, you’ve never been flashy, but you’re-’

‘Sturdy,’ finished Archie, because he knew this speech.

Kelvin smiled: a big gash across his face that came and went with the sudden violence of a fat man marching through swing doors. ‘Right, yeah, sturdy. People trust you, Archie. I know you’re getting on a bit, and the old leg gives you a bit of trouble – but when this business changed hands, I kept you on, Arch, because I could see straight off: people trust you. That’s why you’ve stayed in the direct mail business so long. And I’m trusting you, Arch, to take what I’ve got to say in the right way.’

‘Mr Hero?’

Kelvin shrugged. ‘I could have lied to you, Archie, I could have told you that we’d made a mistake with the bookings, and there just wasn’t room for you; I could have fished around in my arse and pulled out a juicy one – but you’re a big boy, Archie. You’d phone the restaurant, you’re not a