White Teeth

Zinat Mahal: a mouth as large as the Blackwall Tunnel and Samad was relying upon it.

‘Thank you, Zinat,’ said Samad, looking deliberately disingenuous. ‘As for a reason… I am not sure that I should say.’

‘Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me.’

Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radiowaves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.

‘Well, the truth is…’

‘By Allah, get on with it!’ cried Zinat, who was now almost on the other side of the counter, such was her delight in gossip. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘Well… I am off to see a man in Park Royal about life insurance. I want my Alsana well provided for after my death – but!’ he said, waggling a finger at his sparkling, jewel-covered interrogator who wore too much eyeshadow, ‘I don’t want her to know! Thoughts of death are abhorrent to her, Zinat.’

‘Do you hear that, Hakim? Some men worry about the future of their wives! Go on – get out of here, don’t let me keep you, cousin. And don’t worry,’ she called after him, simultaneously reaching for the phone with her long curling fingernails, ‘I won’t say one word to Alsi.’

Alibi done, three minutes were left for Samad to consider what an old man brings a young girl; something an old brown man brings a young white girl at the crossroads of four black streets; something suitable…

‘A coconut?’

Poppy Burt-Jones took the hairy object into her hands and looked up at Samad with a perplexed smile.

‘It is a mixed-up thing,’ began Samad nervously. ‘With juice like a fruit but hard like a nut. Brown and old on the outside, white and fresh on the inside. But the mix is not, I think, bad. We use it sometimes,’ he added, not knowing what else to say, ‘in curry.’

Poppy smiled; a terrific smile which accentuated every natural beauty of that face and had in it, Samad thought, something better than this, something with no shame in it, something better and purer than what they were doing.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said.

Out in the street and five minutes from the address on their school sheets, Irie still felt the irritable hot sting of shame and wanted a rematch.

‘Tax that,’ she said, pointing to a rather beat-up motorbike leaning by Kensal Rise tube. ‘Tax that, and that,’ indicating two BMXs beside it.

Millat and Magid jumped into action. The practice of ‘taxing’ something, whereby one lays claims, like a newly arrived colonizer, to items in a street that do not belong to you, was well known and beloved to both of them.

‘Cha, man! Believe, I don’t want to tax dat crap,’ said Millat with the Jamaican accent that all kids, whatever their nationality, used to express scorn. ‘I tax dat,’ he said, pointing out an admittedly impressive small, shiny, red MG about to turn the corner. ‘And dat!’ he cried, getting there just before Magid as a BMW whizzed past. ‘Man, you know I tax that,’ he said to Magid, who offered no dispute. ‘Blatantly.’

Irie, a little dejected by this turn of events, turned her eyes from the road to the floor, where she was suddenly struck by a flash of inspiration.

‘I tax those!’

Magid and Millat stopped and looked in awe at the perfectly white Nikes that were now in Irie’s possession (with one red tick, one blue; so beautiful, as Millat later remarked, it made you want to kill yourself), though to the naked eye they appeared to be walking towards Queens Park attached to a tall natty-dread black kid.

Millat nodded grudgingly. ‘Respect to that. I wish I’d seed dem.’

‘Tax!’ said Magid suddenly, pushing his grubby finger up against some shop glass in the direction of a four-foot-long chemistry set with an ageing TV personality’s face on the front.

He thumped the window. ‘Wow! I tax that!’

A brief silence ensued.

‘You tax that?’ asked Millat, incredulous. ‘That? You tax a chemistry set?’

Before poor Magid knew where he was, two palms had made a ferocious slap on his forehead, and were doing much rubbing for good measure. Magid gave Irie an et tu Brute type of pleading look, in the full knowledge that it was useless. There is no honesty amongst almost-ten-year-olds.

‘Shame! Shame! Know your name!’

‘But Mr J. P. Hamilton,’ moaned Magid from under the heat of shame. ‘We’re here now. His house is just there. It’s a quiet street, you can’t make all this noise. He’s old.’

‘But if he’s old, he’ll be deaf,’ reasoned Millat. ‘And if you’re deaf you can’t hear.’

‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s hard for old people. You don’t understand.’

‘He’s probably too old to take the stuff out of the bags,’ said Irie. ‘We should take them out and carry them in our hands.’

This was agreed upon, and some time was taken arranging all the foodstuffs in the hands and crevices of the body, so that they might ‘surprise’ Mr J. P. Hamilton with the extent of their charity when he answered the door. Mr J. P. Hamilton, confronted on his doorstep by three dark-skinned children clutching a myriad of projectiles, was duly surprised. As old as they had imagined but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle: tufts of feather-like hair protruded from ear drums, shirt cuffs and the neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland – a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain.

And twinkling like a magpie, from the blue scattering in his eyes undimmed by the white and red surround, to the gleam of a signet ring, four argent medals perched just above his heart, and the silver rim of a Senior Service packet peeping over the breast pocket.

‘Please,’ came the voice from the bird-man, a voice that even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era. ‘I must ask that you remove yourselves from my doorstep. I have no money whatsoever; so be your intention robbing or selling I’m afraid you will be disappointed.’

Magid stepped forward, trying to place himself in the old man’s eyeline, for the left eye, blue as Rayleigh scattering, had looked beyond them, while the right was so compacted beneath wrinkles it hardly opened. ‘Mr Hamilton, don’t you remember, the school sent us, these are-’

He said, ‘Goodbye, now,’ as if he were bidding farewell to an elderly aunt embarking on a train journey, then once more ‘Goodbye’, and through two panels of cheap stained-glass on the closed door the children watched the lengthy figure of Mr Hamilton, blurred as if by heat, walking slowly away from them down a corridor until the brown flecks of him merged with the brown flecks of the household furnishings and the former all but disappeared.

Millat pulled his Tomytronic down around his neck, frowned, and purposefully slammed his little fist into the doorbell, holding it down.

‘Maybe,’ suggested Irie, ‘he doesn’t want the stuff.’

Millat released the doorbell briefly. ‘He’s got to want it. He asked for it,’ he growled, pushing the bell back down with his full force. ‘ ’SGod’s harvest, innit? Mr Hamilton! Mr J. P. Hamilton!’

And then that slow process of disappearance began to rewind as he reconstituted himself via the atoms of a staircase and a dresser until he was large as life once more, curled around the door.