White Teeth

‘So. Let me get this straight. Now you’re telling me that without Pande there’d be no Gandhi. That without your mad grandad there’d be no bloody Independence-’

‘Great-grandad.’

‘No, let me finish, Sam. Is that what you’re seriously asking us’ – Archie clapped an uninterested Clarence and Denzel on the back – ‘to believe? Do you believe it?’ he asked Clarence.

‘Me kyan believe dat!’ said Clarence, having no idea of the topic.

Denzel blew his nose into a napkin. ‘Troof be tol, me nah like to believe any ting. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. Dat my motto.’

‘He was the tickle in the sneeze, Archibald. It is as simple as that. I do believe that.’

There was quiet for a minute. Archibald watched three sugar cubes dissolve in his teacup. Then, rather tentatively, he said, ‘I’ve got my own theory, you know. Separate from the books, I mean.’

Samad bowed. ‘Please enlighten us.’

‘Don’t get angry, now… But just think for a minute. Why is a strict religious man like Pande drinking bhang? Seriously, I know I tease you about it. But why is he?’

‘You know my opinion on that. He isn’t. He didn’t. It was English propaganda.’

‘And he was a good shot…’

‘No doubt about it. A. S. Misra produces a copy of a record stating that Pande trained in a special guard for one year, specially trained in the use of muskets.’

‘OK. So: why does he miss? Why?’

‘It is my belief that the only possible explanation is that the gun was faulty.’

‘Yes… there is that. But, maybe, maybe something else. Maybe he was being bullied into going out there and making a row, you know, goaded, by the other guys. And he didn’t want to kill anyone in the first place, you know. So he pretended to be drunk, so the boys in the barracks room would believe he missed the shot.’

‘That is quite the stupidest theory I have ever heard,’ sighed Samad, as the second hand of Mickey’s egg-stained clock started the thirty-second countdown to midnight. ‘The kind only you could come up with. It’s absurd.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Archibald, these Englishmen, these Captain Hearsays, Havelocks and the rest, were every Indian’s mortal enemy. Why should he spare lives he despised?’

‘Maybe he just couldn’t do it. Maybe he wasn’t the type.’

‘Do you really believe there is a type of man who kills and a type of man who doesn’t?’

‘Maybe Sam, maybe not.’

‘You sound like my wife,’ groaned Samad, mopping up a final piece of egg, ‘let me tell you something, Archibald. A man is a man is a man. His family threatened, his beliefs attacked, his way of life destroyed, his whole world coming to an end – he will kill. Make no mistake. He won’t let the new order roll over him without a struggle. There will be people he will kill.’

‘And there will be people he will save,’ said Archie Jones, with a cryptic look his friend would have thought an impossible feat for those sagging, chubby features. ‘Trust me.’

‘Five! Four! Tree! Two! One! Jamaica Irie!’ said Denzel and Clarence, raising hot Irish coffees to each other in a toast, then immediately resuming round nine of the dominoes.

‘HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR!’ bellowed Mickey, from behind the counter.

Irie 1990, 1907

In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future?

– Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

11 The Miseducation of Irie Jones

There was a lamp-post, equidistant from the Jones house and Glenard Oak Comprehensive, that had begun to appear in Irie’s dreams. Not the lamp-post exactly, but a small, handmade advert which was sellotaped round its girth at eye level. It said:

LOSE WEIGHT TO EARN MONEY

081 555 6752

Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas; the girl had weight; big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth. She was thirteen stone and had thirteen pounds in her savings account. She knew she was the target audience (if ever there was one), she knew full well, as she trudged schoolwards, mouth full of doughnut, hugging her spare tyres, that the advert was speaking to her. It was speaking to her. LOSE WEIGHT (it was saying) TO EARN MONEY. You, you, you, Miss Jones, with your strategically placed arms and cardigan, tied around the arse (the endless mystery: how to diminish that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior?), with your belly-reducing knickers and breast-reducing bra, with your meticulous lycra corseting – the much lauded nineties answer to whalebone – with your elasticated waists. She knew the advert was talking to her. But she didn’t know quite what it was saying. What were we talking about here? Sponsored slim? The earning capacity of thin people? Or something altogether more Jacobean, the brain-child of some sordid Willesden Shylock, a pound of flesh for a pound of gold: meat for money?

Rapid. Eye. Movement. Sometimes she’d be walking through school in a bikini with the lamp-post enigma written in chalk over her brown bulges, over her various ledges (shelf space for books, cups of tea, baskets or, more to the point, children, bags of fruit, buckets of water), ledges genetically designed with another country in mind, another climate. Other times, the sponsored slim dream: knocking on door after door, butt-naked with a clipboard, drenched in sunlight, trying to encourage old men to pinch-an-inch and pledge-a- pound. Worst times? Tearing off loose, white-flecked flesh and packing it into those old curvaceous Coke bottles; she is carrying them to the cornershop, passing them over a counter; and Millat is the bindi-wearing, V-necked cornershopkeeper, he is adding them up, grudgingly opening the till with blood-stained paws, handing over the cash. A little Caribbean flesh for a little English change.

Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, ‘What’s up with you? What in the Lord’s name are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you’re fine – you’re just built like an honest-to-God Bowden – don’t you know you’re fine?’

But Irie didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.

Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. The mantra of the make-over junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling