White Teeth

White-Face, an Indian who walks the streets of Willesden with his face painted white, his lips painted blue, wearing a pair of tights and some hiking boots; they knew Mr Newspaper, a tall skinny man in an ankle-length raincoat who sits in Brent libraries removing the day’s newspapers from his briefcase and methodically tearing them into strips; they knew Mad Mary, a black voodoo woman with a red face whose territory stretches from Kilburn to Oxford Street but who performs her spells from a bin in West Hampstead; they knew Mr Toupee, who has no eyebrows and wears a toupee not on his head but on a string around his neck. But these people announced their madness – they were better, less scary than Mr J. P. Hamilton – they flaunted their insanity, they weren’t half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalk-faced, blue-lipped or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street – the great majority of modern-day seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck are we looking at. As a kind of pre-emptive defence mechanism, Londoners have learnt not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question ‘What you looking at?’ and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer – ‘Nothing’ – might be avoided. But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase ‘What you looking at?’ and move into more exotic territory. Take Mad Mary. Oh, the principle’s still the same, it’s still all about eye contact and the danger of making it, but now she’s making eye contact from a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred yards away, and if she catches you doing the same she roars down the street, dreads and feathers and cape afloat, Hoodoo stick in hand, until she gets to where you are, spits on you, and begins. Samad knew all of this – they’d had dealings before, he and red-faced Mad Mary; he’d even suffered the misfortune of having her sit next to him on a bus. Any other day and Samad would have given her as good as he got. But today he was feeling guilty and vulnerable, today he was holding Poppy’s hand as the sun crept away; he could not face Mad Mary and her vicious truth-telling, her ugly madness – which of course was precisely why she was stalking him, quite deliberately stalking him down Church Road.

‘For your own safety, don’t look,’ said Samad. ‘Just keep on walking in a straight line. I had no idea she travelled this far into Harlesden.’

Poppy snatched the quickest glance at the multicoloured streaming flash galloping down the high street on an imaginary horse.

She laughed. ‘Who is that?’

Samad quickened the pace. ‘She is Mad Mary. And she is not remotely funny. She is dangerous.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Just because she’s homeless and has mental health… difficulties, doesn’t mean she wants to hurt anyone. Poor woman, can you imagine what must have happened in her life to make her like that?’

Samad sighed. ‘First of all, she is not homeless. She has stolen every wheelie bin in West Hampstead and has built quite a significant structure out of them in Fortune Green. And secondly she is not a “poor woman”. Everyone is terrified of her, from the council downwards, she receives free food from every cornershop in North London ever since she cursed the Ramchandra place and business collapsed within the month.’ Samad’s portly figure was working up quite a sweat now, as he shifted another gear in response to Mad Mary doing the same on the other side of the street.

Breathless, he whispered, ‘And she doesn’t like white people.’

Poppy’s eyes widened. ‘Really?’ she said, as if such an idea had never occurred to her, and turned round to make the fatal mistake of looking. In a second, Mad Mary was upon them.

A thick globule of spit hit Samad directly between his eyes, on the bridge of his nose. He wiped it away, pulled Poppy to him and tried to sidestep Mad Mary by ducking into the courtyard of St Andrew’s Church, but the Hoodoo stick slammed down in front of them both, marking a line in the pebbles and dust that could not be crossed over.

She spoke slowly, and with such a menacing scowl that the left side of her face seemed paralysed. ‘You… lookin’… at… some… ting?’

Poppy managed a squeak, ‘No!’

Mad Mary whacked Poppy’s calf with the Hoodoo stick and turned to Samad. ‘You, sir! You… lookin’… at… some… ting?’

Samad shook his head.

Suddenly she was screaming. ‘BLACK MAN! DEM BLOCK YOU EVERYWHERE YOU TURN!’

‘Please,’ stuttered Poppy, clearly terrified. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’

‘BLACK MAN!’ (She liked to speak in rhyming couplets.) ‘DE BITCH SHE WISH TO SEE YOU BURN!’

‘We are minding our own business – ’ began Samad, but he was stopped by a second projectile of phlegm, this time hitting him on the cheek.

‘Tru hill and gully, dem follow you dem follow you, Tru hill and gully, de devil swallow you ’im swallow you.’ This was delivered in a kind of singing stage-whisper, accompanied by a dance from side to side, arms outstretched and Hoodoo stick resting firmly underneath Poppy Burt-Jones’s chin.

‘What ’as dem ever done for us body bot kill us and enslave us? What ’as dem done for our minds bot hurt us an’ enrage us? What’s de pollution?’

Mad Mary lifted Poppy’s chin with her stick and asked again, ‘WHAT’S DE POLLUTION?’

Poppy was weeping. ‘Please… I don’t know what you want me to-’

Mad Mary sucked her teeth and turned her attention once more to Samad. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION?’

‘I don’t know.’

Mad Mary slapped him around the ankles with her stick. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION, BLACK MAN?’

Mad Mary was a beautiful, a striking woman: a noble forehead, a prominent nose, ageless midnight skin and a long neck that Queens can only dream about. But it was her alarming eyes, which shot out an anger on the brink of total collapse, that Samad was concentrated on, because he saw that they were speaking to him and him alone. Poppy had nothing to do with this. Mad Mary was looking at him with recognition. Mad Mary had spotted a fellow traveller. She had spotted the madman in him (which is to say, the prophet); he felt sure she had spotted the angry man, the masturbating man, the man stranded in the desert far from his sons, the foreign man in a foreign land caught between borders… the man who, if you push him far enough, will suddenly see sense. Why else had she picked him from a street full of people? Simply because she recognized him. Simply because they were from the same place, he and Mad Mary, which is to say: far away.

‘Satyagraha,’ said Samad, surprising himself with his own calmness.

Mad Mary, unused to having her interrogations answered, looked at him in astonishment. ‘WHAT’S DE SOLUTION?’

‘Satyagraha. It is Sanskrit for “truth and firmness”. Gandhi-gee’s word. You see, he did not like “passive resistance” or “civil disobedience”.’

Mad Mary was beginning to twitch and swear compulsively under her breath, but Samad sensed that in some way this was Mad Mary listening, this was Mad Mary’s mind trying to process words other than her own.

‘Those words weren’t big enough for him. He wanted to show what we call weakness to be a