White Teeth

‘Arshad!’ Mo barely restrained himself, stabbed his finger in the direction of the car. ‘My boy, I’m going to ask you just once.’

‘Yes, Abba?’ said Arshad, shifting from foot to foot.

‘What the hell is this? What is this doing here? I got delivery at 6.30. I got fifteen dead bovines turning up here at 6.30. I got to get it in the back. That’s my job. You see? There’s meat coming. So, I am perplexed…’ Mo affected a look of innocent confusion. ‘Because I thought this was clearly marked “Delivery Area”.’ He pointed to an ageing wooden crate which bore the legend NO PARKINGS OF ANY VEHICLE ON ANY DAYS. ‘Well?’

‘I don’t know, Abba.’

‘You’re my son, Arshad. I don’t employ you not to know. I employ him not to know’ – he reached out of the window and slapped Varin, who was negotiating the perilous gutter like a tightrope-walker, giving him a thorough cosh to the back of his head and almost knocking the boy off his perch – ‘I employ you to know things. To compute information. To bring into the light the great darkness of the creator’s unexplainable universe.’

‘Abba?’

‘Find out what it’s doing there and get rid of it.’

Mo disappeared from the window. A minute later Arshad returned with the explanation. ‘Abba.’

Mo’s head sprang back through the window like a malicious cuckoo from a Swiss clock.

‘He’s gassing himself, Abba.’

‘What?’

Arshad shrugged. ‘I shouted through the car window and told the guy to move on and he says, “I am gassing myself, leave me alone.” Like that.’

‘No one gasses himself on my property,’ Mo snapped as he marched downstairs. ‘We are not licensed.’

Once in the street, Mo advanced upon Archie’s car, pulled out the towels that were sealing the gap in the driver’s window, and pushed it down five inches with brute, bullish force.

‘Do you hear that, mister? We’re not licensed for suicides around here. This place halal. Kosher, understand? If you’re going to die round here, my friend, I’m afraid you’ve got to be thoroughly bled first.’

Archie dragged his head off the steering wheel. And in the moment between focusing on the sweaty bulk of a brown-skinned Elvis and realizing that life was still his, he had a kind of epiphany. It occurred to him that, for the first time since his birth, Life had said Yes to Archie Jones. Not simply an ‘OK’ or ‘You-might-as- well-carry-on-since-you’ve-started’, but a resounding affirmative. Life wanted Archie. She had jealously grabbed him from the jaws of death, back to her bosom. Although he was not one of her better specimens, Life wanted Archie and Archie, much to his own surprise, wanted Life.

Frantically, he wound down both his windows and gasped for oxygen from the very depths of his lungs. In between gulps he thanked Mo profusely, tears streaming down his cheeks, his hands clinging on to Mo’s apron.

‘All right, all right,’ said the butcher, freeing himself from Archie’s fingers and brushing himself clean, ‘move along now. I’ve got meat coming. I’m in the business of bleeding. Not counselling. You want Lonely Street. This Cricklewood Lane.’

Archie, still choking on thankyous, reversed, pulled out from the curb, and turned right.

Archie Jones attempted suicide because his wife Ophelia, a violet-eyed Italian with a faint moustache, had recently divorced him. But he had not spent New Year’s morning gagging on the tube of a vacuum cleaner because he loved her. It was rather because he had lived with her for so long and had not loved her. Archie’s marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home and finding they don’t fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them. And then, all of a sudden and after thirty years, the shoes picked themselves up and walked out of the house. She left. Thirty years.

As far as he remembered, just like everybody else they began well. The first spring of 1946, he had stumbled out of the darkness of war and into a Florentine coffee house, where he was served by a waitress truly like the sun: Ophelia Diagilo, dressed all in yellow, spreading warmth and the promise of sex as she passed him a frothy cappuccino. They walked into it blinkered as horses. She was not to know that women never stayed as daylight in Archie’s life; that somewhere in him he didn’t like them, he didn’t trust them, and he was able to love them only if they wore haloes. No one told Archie that lurking in the Diagilo family tree were two hysteric aunts, an uncle who talked to aubergines and a cousin who wore his clothes back to front. So they got married and returned to England, where she realized very quickly her mistake, he drove her very quickly mad, and the halo was packed off to the attic to collect dust with the rest of the bric-a-brac and broken kitchen appliances that Archie promised one day to repair. Amongst that bric-a-brac was a Hoover.

On Boxing Day morning, six days before he parked outside Mo’s halal butchers, Archie had returned to their semi-detached in Hendon in search of that Hoover. It was his fourth trip to the attic in so many days, ferrying out the odds and ends of a marriage to his new flat, and the Hoover was amongst the very last items he reclaimed – one of the most broken things, most ugly things, the things you demand out of sheer bloody-mindedness because you have lost the house. This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love.

‘So you again,’ said the Spanish home-help at the door, SantaMaria or Maria-Santa or something. ‘Meester Jones, what now? Kitchen sink, si?’

‘Hoover,’ said Archie, grimly. ‘Vacuum.’

She cut her eyes at him and spat on the doormat inches from his shoes. ‘Welcome, senor.’

The place had become a haven for people who hated him. Apart from the home-help, he had to contend with Ophelia’s extended Italian family, her mental-health nurse, the woman from the council, and of course Ophelia herself, who was to be found in the kernel of this nuthouse, curled up in a foetal ball on the sofa, making lowing sounds into a bottle of Bailey’s. It took him an hour and a quarter just to get through enemy lines – and for what? A perverse Hoover, discarded months earlier because it was determined to perform the opposite of every vacuum’s objective: spewing out dust instead of sucking it in.

‘Meester Jones, why do you come here when it make you so unhappy? Be reasonable. What can you want with it?’ The home-help was following him up the attic stairs, armed with some kind of cleaning fluid: ‘It’s broken. You don’t need this. See? See?’ She plugged it into a socket and demonstrated the dead switch. Archie took the plug out and silently wound the cord round the Hoover. If it was broken, it was coming with him. All broken things were coming with him. He was going to fix every damn broken thing in this house, if only to show that he was good for something.

‘You good for nothing!’ Santa whoever chased him back down the stairs. ‘Your wife is ill in her head, and this is all you can do!’

Archie hugged the Hoover to his chest and took it into the crowded living room, where, under several pairs of reproachful eyes, he got out his toolbox and started work on it.

‘Look at him,’ said one of the Italian grandmothers, the more glamorous one with the big scarves and fewer moles, ‘he take everything, capisce? He take-a her mind, he take-a the blender, he take-a the old stereo – he take-a everything except the floorboards. It make-a you sick…’

The woman from the council, who even on dry days resembled a long-haired cat soaked to the skin, shook her skinny head in agreement. ‘It’s disgusting, you don’t have to tell me, it’s disgusting… and naturally, we’re the ones left to sort out the mess; it’s muggins here who has to-’

Which was overlapped by the nurse: ‘She can’t stay here alone, can she… now he’s buggered off, poor woman… she needs a proper home, she needs…’

I’m here, Archie felt like saying, I’m right here you