White Teeth

to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather round Dunn River Falls, to English Rose – oh, you know her – she’s a slender, delicate thing not made for the hot suns, a surfboard rippled by the wave:

Mrs Olive Roody, English teacher and expert doodle-spotter at distances of up to twenty yards, reached over her desk to Irie’s exercise book and tore out the piece of paper in question. Looked dubiously at it. Then inquired with melodious Scottish emphasis, ‘Before and after what?’

‘Er… what?’

‘Before and after what?’

‘Oh. Nothing, Miss.’

‘Nothing? Oh, come now, Ms Jones. No need for modesty. It is obviously more interesting than Sonnet 127.’

‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

‘Absolutely certain? You don’t wish to delay the class any more? Because… some of the class need to listen to – nae, are even a wee bit interested in – what I have to say. So if you could spare some time from your doooodling-’

No one but no one said ‘doodling’ like Olive Roody.

‘-and join the rest of us, we’ll continue. Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Can you? Spare the time?’

‘Yes, Mrs Roody.’

‘Oh, good. That’s cheered me up. Sonnet 127, please.’

‘In the old age black was not counted fair,’ continued Francis Stone in the catatonic drone with which students read Elizabethan verse. ‘Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.’

Irie put her right hand on her stomach, sucked in and tried to catch Millat’s eye. But Millat was busy showing pretty Nikki Tyler how he could manipulate his tongue into a narrow roll, a flute. Nikki Tyler was showing him how the lobes of her ears were attached to the side of her head rather than loose. Flirtatious remnants of this morning’s science lesson: Inherited characteristics. Part One (a). Loose. Attached. Rolled. Flat. Blue eye. Brown eye. Before. After.

‘Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black, her brows so suited, and they mourners seem… My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.. .’

Puberty, real full-blown puberty (not the slight mound of a breast, or the shadowy emergence of fuzz), had separated these old friends, Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal. Different sides of the school fence. Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight which in turn required bottle-top spectacles in a light shade of pink. (Even those blue eyes – the eyes Archie had been so excited about – lasted two weeks only. She had been born with them, yes, but one day Clara looked again and there were brown eyes staring up at her, like the transition between a closed bud and an open flower, the exact moment of which the naked, waiting eye can never detect.) And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept her smart- ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all wrong.

Whereas Millat was like youth remembered in the nostalgic eyeglass of old age, beauty parodying itself: broken Roman nose, tall, thin; lightly veined, smoothly muscled; chocolate eyes with a reflective green sheen like moonlight bouncing off a dark sea; irresistible smile, big white teeth. In Glenard Oak Comprehensive, black, Pakistani, Greek, Irish – these were races. But those with sex appeal lapped the other runners. They were a species all of their own.

‘If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.. .’

She loved him, of course. But he used to say to her: ‘Thing is, people rely on me. They need me to be Millat. Good old Millat. Wicked Millat. Safe, sweet-as, Millat. They need me to be cool. It’s practically a responsibility.’

And it practically was. Ringo Starr once said of the Beatles that they were never bigger than they were in Liverpool, late 1962. They just got more countries. And that’s how it was for Millat. He was so big in Cricklewood, in Willesden, in West Hampstead, the summer of 1990, that nothing he did later in his life could top it. From his first Raggastani crowd, he had expanded and developed tribes throughout the school, throughout North London. He was simply too big to remain merely the object of Irie’s affection, leader of the Raggastanis, or the son of Samad and Alsana Iqbal. He had to please all of the people all of the time. To the cockney wide-boys in the white jeans and the coloured shirts, he was the joker, the risk-taker, respected lady-killer. To the black kids he was fellow weed-smoker and valued customer. To the Asian kids, hero and spokesman. Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It was this soft underbelly that made him most beloved, most adored by Irie and the nice oboe-playing, long-skirted middle-class girls, most treasured by these hair-flicking and fugue-singing females; he was their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams…

And he was also their project: what was to be done about Millat? He simply must stop smoking weed. We have to try and stop him walking out of class. They worried about his ‘attitude’ at sleepovers, discussed his education hypothetically with their parents (Just say there was this Indian boy, yeah, who was always getting into.. .), even wrote poems on the subject. Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. Everybody’s bit of rough, Millat Iqbal.

‘But you’re different,’ Millat Iqbal would say to the martyr Irie Jones, ‘you’re different. We go way back. We’ve got history. You’re a real friend. They don’t really mean anything to me.’

Irie liked to believe that. That they had history, that she was different in a good way.

‘Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.. .’

Mrs Roody silenced Francis with a raised finger. ‘Now, what is he saying there? Annalese?’

Annalese Hersh, who had spent the lesson so far plaiting red and yellow thread into her hair, looked up in blank confusion.

‘Anything, Annalese, dear. Any little idea. No matter how small. No matter how paltry.’

Annalese bit her lip. Looked at the book. Looked at Mrs Roody. Looked at the book.

‘Black?… Is?… Good?’

‘Yes… well, I suppose we can add that to last week’s contribution: Hamlet?… Is?… Mad? Anybody else? What about this? For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face. What might that mean I wonder?’

Joshua Chalfen, the only kid in class who volunteered opinions, put his hand up.

‘Yes, Joshua?’

‘Make-up.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Roody, looking close to orgasm. ‘Yes, Joshua, that’s it. What about it?’

‘She’s got a dark complexion which she’s trying to lighten by means of make-up, artifice. The Elizabethans were very keen on a pale skin.’

‘They would’ve loved you, then,’ sneered Millat, for Joshua was pasty, practically anaemic, curly-haired and chubby, ‘you would have been Tom bloody Cruise.’

Laughter. Not because it was funny, but because it was Millat putting a nerd where a nerd