White Teeth

‘I don’t think,’ said Clara quietly, after Millat had stormed up to his room, ‘that we should discourage the kids from having an opinion. It’s good that they’re free-thinkers.’

Samad sneered, ‘And you would know… what? You do a great deal of free-thinking? In the house all day, watching the television?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘With respect: the world is complex, Clara. If there’s one thing these children need to understand it is that one needs rules to survive it, not fancy.’

‘He’s right, you know,’ said Archie earnestly, ashing a fag in an empty curry bowl. ‘Emotional matters – then yes, that’s your department-’

‘Oh – women’s work!’ squealed Alsana, through a mouth full of curry. ‘Thank you so much, Archibald.’

Archie struggled to continue. ‘But you can’t beat experience, can you? I mean, you two, you’re young women still, in a way. Whereas we, I mean, we are, like, wells of experience the children can use, you know, when they feel the need. We’re like encyclopedias. You just can’t offer them what we can. In all fairness.’

Alsana put her palm on Archie’s forehead and stroked it lightly. ‘You fool. Don’t you know you’re left behind like carriage and horses, like candlewax? Don’t you know to them you’re old and smelly like yesterday’s fishnchip paper? I’ll be agreeing with your daughter on one matter of importance.’ Alsana stood up, following Clara, who had left at this final insult and marched tearfully into the kitchen. ‘You two gentlemen talk a great deal of the youknowwhat.’

Left alone, Archie and Samad acknowledged the desertion of both families by a mutual rolling of eyes, wry smiles. They sat quietly for a moment while Archie’s thumb flicked adeptly through An Historic Occasion, A Costume Drama Set in Jersey, Two Men Trying to Build a Raft in Thirty Seconds, A Studio Debate on Abortion, and back once more to An Historic Occasion.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Click.

‘Home? Pub? O’Connell’s?’

Archie was about to reach into his pocket for a shiny ten pence when he realized there was no need.

‘O’Connell’s?’ said Archie.

‘O’Connell’s’ said Samad.

10 The Root Canals of Mangal Pande

Finally, O’Connell’s. Inevitably, O’Connell’s. Simply because you could be without family in O’Connell’s, without possessions or status, without past glory or future hope – you could walk through that door with nothing and be exactly the same as everybody else in there. It could be 1989 outside, or 1999, or 2009, and you could still be sitting at the counter in the V-neck you wore to your wedding in 1975, 1945, 1935. Nothing changes here, things are only retold, remembered. That’s why old men love it.

It’s all about time. Not just its stillness but the pure, brazen amount of it. Quantity rather than Quality. This is hard to explain. If only there was some equation… something like:

Something to rationalize, to explain, why one would keep returning, like Freud’s grandson with his fort-da game, to the same miserable scenario. But time is what it comes down to. After you’ve spent a certain amount, invested so much of it in one place, your credit rating booms and you feel like breaking the chronological bank. You feel like staying in the place until it pays you back all the time you gave it – even if it never will.

And with the time spent, comes the knowledge, comes the history. It was at O’Connell’s that Samad had suggested Archie’s remarriage, 1974. Underneath table six in a pool of his own vomit, Archie celebrated the birth of Irie, 1975. There is a stain on the corner of the pinball machine where Samad first spilt civilian blood, with a hefty right hook to a racist drunk, 1980. Archie was downstairs the night he watched his fiftieth birthday float up through fathoms of whisky to meet him like an old shipwreck, 1977. And this is where they both came, New Year’s Eve, 1989 (neither the Iqbal nor Jones families having expressed a desire to enter the 90s in their company), happy to take advantage of Mickey’s special New Year fry-up: ?2.85 for three eggs, beans, two rounds of toast, mushrooms and a generous slice of seasonal turkey.

The seasonal turkey was a bonus. For Archie and Samad, it was really all about being the witness, being the expert. They came here because they knew this place. They knew it inside and out. And if you can’t explain to your kid why glass will shatter at certain impacts but not others, if you can’t understand how a balance can be struck between democratic secularism and religious belief within the same state, or you can’t recall the circumstances in which Germany was divided, then it feels good – no, it feels great – to know at least one particular place, one particular period, from first-hand experience, eyewitness reports; to be the authority, to have time on your side, for once, for once. No better historians, no better experts in the world than Archie and Samad when it came to The Post-War Reconstruction and Growth of O’Connell’s Pool House.

1952 Ali (Mickey’s father), and his three brothers arrive at Dover with thirty old pounds and their father’s gold pocket-watch. All suffer from disfiguring skin condition.

1954- 1963 Marriages; odd-jobs of all varieties; births of Abdul-Mickey, the five other Abduls and their cousins.

1968 After working for three years as delivery boys in a Yugoslavian dry- cleaning outfit, Ali and his brothers have a small lump sum with which they set up a cab service called Ali’s Cab Service.

1971 Cab venture a great success. But Ali is dissatisfied. He decides what he really wants to do is ‘serve food, make people happy, have some face to face conversations once in a while’. He buys the disused Irish pool house next to the defunct railway station on the Finchley Road and sets about renovating it.

1972 In the Finchley Road only Irish establishments do any real business. So despite his Middle Eastern background and the fact that he is opening a cafe and not a pool house, Ali decides to keep the original Irish name. He paints all the fittings orange and green, hangs pictures of racehorses and registers his business name as ‘Andrew O’Connell Yusuf’. Out of respect, his brothers encourage him to hang fragments of the Quran on the wall, so that the hybrid business will be ‘kindly looked upon’.

13 May 1973 O’Connell’s opens for business.

2 November 1974 Samad and Archie stumble upon O’Connell’s on their way home and pop in for a fry-up.

1975 Ali decides to carpet the walls to limit food stains.

May 1977 Samad wins fifteen bob on fruit machine.

1979 Ali has a fatal heart attack due to cholesterol build-up around the heart. Ali’s remaining family decide his death is a result of the unholy consumption of pork products. Pig is banned