White Teeth

suckle at their mothers’ breasts… so many of your neighbours shall die that day that their bodies, if lined up side by side, will stretch three hundred times round the earth and on their charred remains shall the true Witnesses of the Lord walk to his side.

– The Clarion Bell, issue 245

How bitterly she had been disappointed! But the wounds of 1925 had healed, and Hortense was once again ready to be convinced that apocalypse, just as the right holy Mr Rangeforth had explained, was round the corner. The promise of the 1914 generation still stood: This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled (Matthew 24:34). Those who were alive in 1914 would live to see the Armageddon. It had been promised. Born in 1907, Hortense was getting old now, she was getting tired and her peers were dying off like flies. 1975 looked like the last chance.

Had not two hundred of the church’s best intellectuals spent twenty years examining the bible, and hadn’t this date been their unanimous conclusion? Had they not read between the lines in Daniel, scanned for the hidden meaning in Revelation, correctly identified the Asian wars (Korea and Vietnam) as the period spoken of by the angel, ‘a time, and times, and half a time’? Hortense was convinced these were the sign of signs. These were the final days. There were eight months to the end of the world. Hardly enough time! There were banners to be made, articles to be written (‘Will the Lord Forgive the Onanist?’), doorsteps to be trod, bells to be rung. There was Darcus to think about – who could not walk to the fridge without assistance – how was he to make it to the kingdom of the Lord? And in all Clara must lend a hand; there was no time for boys, for Ryan Topps, for skulking around, for adolescent angst. For Clara was not like other teenagers. She was the Lord’s child, Hortense’s miracle baby. Hortense was all of forty-eight when she heard the Lord’s voice while gutting a fish one morning, Montego Bay, 1955. Straight away she threw down the marlin, caught the trolley car home and submitted to her least favourite activity in order to conceive the child He had asked for. Why had the Lord waited so long? Because the Lord wanted to show Hortense a miracle. For Hortense had been a miracle child herself, born in the middle of the legendary Kingston earthquake, 1907, when everybody else was busy dying – miracles ran in the family. Hortense saw it this way: if she could come into this world in the middle of a ground shaker, as parts of Montego Bay slipped into the sea, and fires came down from the mountains, then nobody had no excuses about nothing no how. She liked to say: ‘Bein’ barn is de hardest part! Once ya done dat – no problems.’ So now that Clara was here, old enough to help her with doorstepping, administration, writing speeches and all the varied business of the church of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she’d better get on with it. No time for boys. This child’s work was just beginning. Hortense – born while Jamaica crumbled – did not accept apocalypse before one’s nineteenth birthday as any excuse for tardiness.

Yet strangely, and possibly because of Jehovah’s well-documented penchant for moving in a mysterious manner, it was in performing the business of the Lord that Clara eventually met Ryan Topps face to face. The youth group of the Lambeth Kingdom Hall had been sent doorstepping on a Sunday morning, Separating the sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31- 46), and Clara, detesting the young Witness men with their bad ties and softly spoken voices, had set off alone with her own suitcase to ring bells along Creighton Road. The first few doors she received the usual pained faces: nice women shooing her away as politely as possible, making sure they didn’t get too close, scared they might catch religion like an infection. As she got into the poorer end of the street, the reaction became more aggressive; shouts came from windows or behind closed doors.

‘If that’s the bloody Jehovah’s Witnesses, tell ’em to piss off!’

Or, more imaginatively, ‘Sorry, love, don’t you know what day it is? It’s Sunday, innit? I’m knackered. I’ve spent all week creating the land and oceans. It’s me day of rest.’

At No. 75 she spent an hour with a fourteen-year-old physics whizz called Colin who wanted to intellectually disprove the existence of God while looking up her skirt. Then she rang No. 87. And Ryan Topps answered.

‘Yeah?’

He stood there in all his red-headed, black polo-necked glory, his lip curled in a snarl.

‘I… I…’

She tried desperately to forget what she was wearing: a white shirt complete with throat- ruffle, plaid knee-length skirt and sash that proudly stated NEARER MY GOD TO THEE.

‘You want sommink?’ said Ryan, taking a fierce drag of a dying cigarette. ‘Or sommink?’

Clara tried her widest, buck-toothed smile and went on to auto-pilot. ‘Marnin’ to you, sir. I am from de Lambet Kingdom Hall, where we, de Witnesses of Jehovah, are waitin’ for de Lord to come and grace us wid his holy presence once more; as he did briefly – bot sadly, invisibly – in de year of our farder, 1914. We believe dat when he makes himself known he will be bringing wid ’im de tree-fold fires of hell in Armageddon, dat day when precious few will be saved. Are you int’rested in-’

‘Wot?’

Clara, close to tears at the shame of it, tried again. ‘Are you int’rested in de teachins of Jehovah?’

‘You wot?’

‘In Jehovah – in de teachins of d’Lord. You see, it like a staircase.’ Clara’s last resort was always her mother’s metaphor of the holy steps. ‘I see dat you walkin’ down and der’s a missin’ step comin’. I’m just tellin’ you: watch your step! Me jus wan’ share heaven wid you. Me nah wan’ fe see you bruk-up your legs.’

Ryan Topps leant against the door frame and looked at her for a long time through his red fringe. Clara felt she was closing in on herself, like a telescope. It was only moments, surely, before she disappeared entirely.

‘I ’ave some materials of readin’ for your perusal – ’ She fumbled with the lock of the suitcase, flipped the catch with her thumb but neglected to hold the other side of the case. Fifty copies of the Watchtower spilled over the doorstep.

‘Bwoy, me kyant do nuttin’ right today-’

She fell to the ground in a rush to pick them up and scraped the skin off her left knee. ‘Ow!’

‘Your name’s Clara,’ said Ryan slowly. ‘You’re from my school, ain’t ya?’

‘Yes, man,’ said Clara, so jubilant he remembered her name that she forgot the pain. ‘St Jude’s.’

‘I know wot it’s called.’

Clara went as red as black people get and looked at the floor.

‘Hopeless causes. Saint of,’ said Ryan, picking something surreptitiously from his nose and flicking it into a flowerpot. ‘IRA. The lot of ’em.’

Ryan surveyed the long figure of Clara once more, spending an inordinate amount of time on two sizeable breasts, the outline of their raised nipples just discernible through white polyester.

‘You best come in,’ he said finally, lowering his gaze to inspect the bleeding knee. ‘Put somefin’ on that.’

That very afternoon there were furtive fumblings on Ryan’s couch (which went a good deal further than one might expect of a Christian girl) and the devil won another easy hand in God’s poker game. Things were tweaked, and pushed and pulled; and by the time the bell rang for end of school Monday Ryan Topps and Clara Bowden (much to their school’s collective disgust) were more or less an item; as the St Jude’s phraseology went, they were ‘dealing’ with each other. Was it everything that Clara, in all her sweaty adolescent invention, had imagined?

Well, ‘dealing’ with Ryan turned out to consist of three major pastimes (in order of importance): admiring Ryan’s scooter, admiring Ryan’s records, admiring Ryan. But though other girls might have balked at dates that took place in Ryan’s garage and consisted entirely of watching him pore over the engine of a scooter, eulogizing its intricacies and complexities, to Clara there was nothing more thrilling. She learnt quickly that Ryan was a man of painfully few words and that the rare conversations they had would only ever concern