White Teeth

‘Mr Soldier,’ said one chestnut-hued sparrow-weight boy in careful English, ‘bubblegum please thankyou.’

Archie reached into his pocket and pulled out five thin pink strips. The boy distributed them snootily amongst his friends. They began chewing wildly, eyes bursting from their heads with the effort. Then, as the flavour subsided, they stood in silent, awed contemplation of their benefactor. After a few minutes the same scrawny boy was sent up as the People’s Representative once more.

‘Mr Soldier.’ He held out his hand. ‘Bubblegum please thankyou.’

‘No more,’ said Archie, going through an elaborate sign language. ‘I’ve got no more.’

‘Please, thankyou. Please?’ repeated the boy urgently.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ snapped Samad. ‘We have to fix the radio and get this thing moving. Let’s get on with it, OK?’

‘Bubblegum, mister, Mr Soldier, bubblegum.’ It became a chant, almost; the children mixing up the few words they had learnt, placing them in any order.

‘Please?’ The boy stretched out his arm in such a strenuous manner that it pushed him on to the very tips of his toes.

Suddenly he opened his palm, and then smiled coquettishly, preparing to bargain. There in his open fist four green notes were screwed into a bundle like a handful of grass.

‘Dollars, mister!’

‘Where did you get this?’ asked Samad, making a snatch for it. The boy seized back his hand. He moved constantly from one foot to another – the impish dance that children learn from war. The simplest version of being on your guard.

‘First bubblegum, mister.’

‘Tell me where you got this. I warn you not to play the fool with me.’

Samad made a grab for the boy and caught him by the arm of his shirt. He tried desperately to wriggle free. The boy’s friends began to slink off, deserting their quickly sinking champion.

‘Did you kill a man for this?’

A vein in Samad’s forehead was fighting passionately to escape his skin. He wished to defend a country that wasn’t his and revenge the killing of men who would not have acknowledged him in a civilian street. Archie was amazed. It was his country; in his small, cold-blooded, average way he was one of the many essential vertebrae in its backbone, yet he could feel nothing comparable for it.

‘No, mister, no, no. From him. Him.’

He stretched his free arm and pointed to a large derelict house that sat like a fat brooding hen on the horizon.

‘Did someone in that house kill our men?’ barked Samad.

‘What you say, mister?’ squeaked the boy.

‘Who is there?’

‘He is doctor. He is there. But sick. Can’t move. Dr Sick.’

A few remaining children excitedly confirmed the name. Dr Sick, mister, Dr Sick.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

The boy, now enjoying the attention, theatrically mimed a man crying.

‘English? Like us? German? French? Bulgarian? Greek?’ Samad released the boy, tired from the misplaced energy.

‘He no one. He Dr Sick, only,’ said the boy dismissively. ‘Bubblegum?’

A few days later and still no help had arrived. The strain of having to be continually at war in such a pleasant village began to pull at Archie and Samad, and bit by bit they relaxed more and more into a kind of civilian life. Every evening they ate dinner in the old man Gozan’s kitchen-cafe. Watery soup cost five cigarettes each. Any kind of fish cost a low-ranking bronze medal. As Archie was now wearing one of Dickinson-Smith’s uniforms, his own having fallen apart, he had a few of the dead man’s medals to spare and with them purchased other niceties and necessities: coffee, soap, chocolate. For some pork Archie handed over a fag-card of Dorothy Lamour that had been pressed against his arse in his back pocket ever since he joined up.

‘Go on, Sam – we’ll use them as tokens, like food stamps; we can buy them back when we have the means, if you like.’

‘I’m a Muslim,’ said Samad, pushing a plate of pork away. ‘And my Rita Hayworth leaves me only with my own soul.’

‘Why don’t you eat it?’ said Archie, guzzling his two chops down like a madman. ‘Strange business, if you ask me.’

‘I don’t eat it for the same reason you as an Englishman will never truly satisfy a woman.’

‘Why’s that?’ said Archie, pausing from his feast.

‘It’s in our cultures, my friend.’ He thought for a minute. ‘Maybe deeper. Maybe in our bones.’

After dinner, they would make a pretence of scouring the village for the killers, rushing through the town, searching the same three disreputable bars and looking in the back bedrooms of pretty women’s houses, but after a time this too was abandoned and they sat instead smoking cheap cigars outside the tank, enjoying the lingering crimson sunsets and chatting about their previous incarnations as newspaper boy (Archie) and biology student (Samad). They knocked around ideas that Archie did not entirely understand, and Samad offered secrets into the cool night that he had never spoken out loud. Long, comfortable silences passed between them like those between women who have known each other for years. They looked out on to stars that lit up unknown country, but neither man clung particularly to home. In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis physical proximity and survives because the Englishman assumes the physical proximity will not continue.

A week and a half since the radio had been repaired and there was still no reply to the aid signals they sent bouncing along the airwaves in search of ears to hear them. (By now, the village knew the war was over, but they felt disinclined to reveal the fact to their two visitors, whose daily bartering had proved such a boost to the local economy.) In the stretches of empty time Archie would lever up sections of the wheel track with an iron pole, while Samad investigated the problem. Across continents, both men’s families presumed them dead.

‘Is there a woman that you have back in Brighton City?’ asked Samad, anchoring his head between the lion jaws of track and tank.

Archie was not a good-looking boy. He was dashing if you took a photo and put your thumb over his nose and mouth, but otherwise he was quite unremarkable. Girls would be attracted to his large, sad Sinatra blue eyes, but then be put off by the Bing Crosby ears and the nose that ended in a natural onion-bulb swelling like W. C. Fields’s.

‘A few,’ he said nonchalantly. ‘You know, here and there. You?’

‘A young lady has already been picked out for me. A Miss Begum – daughter of Mr and Mrs Begum. The “in-laws”, as you say. Dear God, those two are so far up the rectums of the establishment in Bengal that even the Lord Governor sits snivelling waiting for his mullah to come in carrying a dinner invitation from them!’

Samad laughed loudly and waited for company, but Archie, not understanding a word, stayed poker-faced as usual.

‘Oh, they are the best people,’ continued Samad, only slightly dispirited. ‘The very best people. Extremely good blood… and as an added bonus, there is a propensity amongst their women – traditionally, throughout the ages, you understand – for really enormous melons.’

Samad performed the necessary mime, and then returned his attention to realigning each tooth of track with its appropriate groove.

‘And?’ asked Archie.