White Teeth

you both I’m even more certain – because the Chalfens-’

‘Know how to bring the right things out in people,’ finished Joshua, ‘they did with me.’

‘Yes,’ said Joyce, relieved her search for the words was over, radiating pride. ‘Yes.’

Joshua pushed his chair back from the table and stood up. ‘Well, we’d better get down to some study. Marcus, could you come up and help us a bit later on the biology? I’m really bad at reducing the reproductive stuff in bite-size chunks.’

‘Sure. I’m working on my FutureMouse, though.’ This was the family joke name for Marcus’s project, and the younger Chalfens sang FutureMouse! after him, imagining an anthropomorphic rodent in red shorts. ‘And I’ve got to play a bit of piano with Jack first. Scott Joplin. Jack’s the left hand, I’m the right. Not quite Art Tatum,’ he said, ruffling Jack’s hair. ‘But we get by.’

Irie tried her hardest to imagine Mr Iqbal playing the right hand of Scott Joplin with his dead grey digits. Or Mr Jones turning anything into bite-size chunks. She felt her cheeks flush with the warm heat of Chalfenist revelation. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn’t drag ancient history around like a chain and ball. So there were men who were not neck-high and sinking in the quagmire of the past.

‘You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you?’ pleaded Joyce. ‘Oscar really wants you to stay. Oscar loves having strangers in the house, he finds it really stimulating. Especially brown strangers! Don’t you, Oscar?’

‘No, I don’t,’ confided Oscar, spitting in Irie’s ear. ‘I hate brown strangers.’

‘He finds brown strangers really stimulating,’ whispered Joyce.

This has been the century of strangers, brown, yellow and white. This has been the century of the great immigrant experiment. It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks. It is only this late in the day, and possibly only in Willesden, that you can find best friends Sita and Sharon, constantly mistaken for each other because Sita is white (her mother liked the name) and Sharon is Pakistani (her mother thought it best – less trouble). Yet, despite all the mixing up, despite the fact that we have finally slipped into each other’s lives with reasonable comfort (like a man returning to his lover’s bed after a midnight walk), despite all this, it is still hard to admit that there is no one more English than the Indian, no one more Indian than the English. There are still young white men who are angry about that; who will roll out at closing time into the poorly lit streets with a kitchen knife wrapped in a tight fist.

But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears – dissolution, disappearance. Even the unflappable Alsana Iqbal would regularly wake up in a puddle of her own sweat after a night visited by visions of Millat (genetically BB; where B stands for Bengali-ness) marrying someone called Sarah (aa where ‘a’ stands for Aryan), resulting in a child called Michael (Ba), who in turn marries somebody called Lucy (aa), leaving Alsana with a legacy of unrecognizable great-grandchildren (Aaaaaaa!), their Bengali-ness thoroughly diluted, genotype hidden by phenotype. It is both the most irrational and natural feeling in the world. In Jamaica it is even in the grammar: there is no choice of personal pronoun, no splits between me or you or they, there is only the pure, homogenous I. When Hortense Bowden, half white herself, got to hearing about Clara’s marriage, she came round to the house, stood on the doorstep, said, ‘Understand: I and I don’t speak from this moment forth,’ turned on her heel and was true to her word. Hortense hadn’t put all that effort into marrying black, into dragging her genes back from the brink, just so her daughter could bring yet more high- coloured children into the world.

Likewise, in the Iqbal house the lines of battle were clearly drawn. When Millat brought an Emily or a Lucy back home, Alsana quietly wept in the kitchen, Samad went into the garden to attack the coriander. The next morning was a waiting game, a furious biting of tongues until the Emily or Lucy left the house and the war of words could begin. But with Irie and Clara the issue was mostly unspoken, for Clara knew she was not in a position to preach. Still, she made no attempt to disguise her disappointment or the aching sadness. From Irie’s bedroom shrine of green-eyed Hollywood idols to the gaggle of white friends who regularly trooped in and out of her bedroom, Clara saw an ocean of pink skins surrounding her daughter and she feared the tide that would take her away.

It was partly for this reason that Irie didn’t mention the Chalfens to her parents. It wasn’t that she intended to mate with the Chalfens… but the instinct was the same. She had a nebulous fifteen-year-old’s passion for them, overwhelming, yet with no real direction or object. She just wanted to, well, kind of, merge with them. She wanted their Englishness. Their Chalfishness. The purity of it. It didn’t occur to her that the Chalfens were, after a fashion, immigrants too (third generation, by way of Germany and Poland, nee Chalfenovsky), or that they might be as needy of her as she was of them. To Irie, the Chalfens were more English than the English. When Irie stepped over the threshold of the Chalfen house, she felt an illicit thrill, like a Jew munching a sausage or a Hindu grabbing a Big Mac. She was crossing borders, sneaking into England; it felt like some terribly mutinous act, wearing somebody else’s uniform or somebody else’s skin.

She just said she had netball on Tuesday evenings and left it at that.

Conversation flowed at the Chalfen house. It seemed to Irie that here nobody prayed or hid their feelings in a toolbox or silently stroked fading photographs wondering what might have been. Conversation was the stuff of life.

‘Hello, Irie! Come in, come in, Joshua’s in the kitchen with Joyce, you’re looking well. Millat not with you?’

‘Coming later. He’s got a date.’

‘Ah, yes. Well, if there are any questions in your exams on oral communication, he’ll fly through them. Joyce! Irie’s here! So how’s the study going? It’s been – what? Four months now? The Chalfen genius rubbing off?’

‘Yeah, not bad, not bad. I never thought I had a scientific bone in my body but… it seems to be working. I don’t know, though. Sometimes my brain hurts.’

‘That’s just the right side of your brain waking up after a long sleep, getting back into the swing of things. I’m really impressed; I told you it was possible to turn a wishy-washy arts student into a science student in no time at all – oh, and I’ve got the FutureMouse pictures. Remind me later, you wanted to see them, no? Joyce, the big brown goddess has arrived!’

‘Marcus, chill out, man… Hi, Joyce. Hi, Josh. Hey, Jack. Oooh, hell-low, Oscar, you cutie.’

‘Hello, Irie! Come here and give me a kiss. Oscar, look, it’s Irie come to see us again! Oh, look at his face… he’s wondering where Millat is, aren’t you, Oscar?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Oh dear, yes he is… look at his little face… he gets very upset when Millat doesn’t turn up. Tell Irie the name of the new monkey, Oscar, the one Daddy gave you.’

‘George.’

‘No, not George – you called it Millat the Monkey, remember? Because monkeys are mischievous and Millat’s just as bad, isn’t he, Oscar?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t care.’

‘Oscar gets terribly upset when Millat doesn’t come.’

‘He’ll be along in a while. He’s on a date.’

‘When isn’t he on a date! All those busty girls! We might get jealous, mightn’t we, Oscar? He spends more time with them than us. But we shouldn’t joke. I suppose it’s a bit difficult for you.’

‘No, I don’t mind, Joyce, really. I’m used to it.’

‘But everybody loves Millat, don’t they, Oscar! It’s so hard not to, isn’t it, Oscar? We love him, don’t we, Oscar?’