White Teeth

Neena sighed, fiddled with a button on her top, and then, seeing the tears forming in her auntie’s eyes, conceded a silent nod.

‘Millat and Irie often go round there for dinner,’ said Clara quietly. ‘And Alsana, well, your auntie and I were wondering… if once you could go with them – you look young, and you seem young, and you could go and-’

‘Report back,’ finished Neena, rolling her eyes. ‘Infiltrate the enemy. That poor family – they’ve no idea who they’re messing with, have they? They’re under surveillance and they don’t even know it. It’s like the bloody Thirty-nine Steps.’

‘Niece-of-Shame: yes or no?’

Neena groaned. ‘Yes, Auntie. Yes, if I must.’

‘Much appreciated,’ said Alsana, finishing her tea.

Now, it wasn’t that Joyce was a homophobe. She liked gay men. And they liked her. She had even inadvertently amassed a little gay fan club in university, a group of men who saw her as a kind of Barbra Streisand/Bette Davis/Joan Baez hybrid and met once a month to cook her dinner and admire her dress sense. So Joyce couldn’t be homophobic. But gay women… something confused Joyce about gay women. It wasn’t that she disliked them. She just couldn’t comprehend them. Joyce understood why men would love men; she had devoted her life to loving men, so she knew how it felt. But the idea of women loving women was so far from Joyce’s cognitive understanding of the world that she couldn’t process it. The idea of them. She just didn’t get it. God knows, she’d made the effort. During the seventies she dutifully read The Well of Loneliness and Our Bodies Ourselves (which had a small chapter); more recently she had read and watched Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but none of it did her any good. She wasn’t offended by it. She just couldn’t see the point. So when Neena turned up for dinner, arm in arm with Maxine, Joyce just sat staring at the two of them over the starter (pulses on rye bread), utterly fixated. She was rendered dumbstruck for the first twenty minutes, leaving the rest of the family to go through the Chalfen routine minus her own vital bit-part. It was a little like being hypnotized or sitting in a dense cloud, and through the mist she heard snippets of dinner conversation continuing without her.

‘So, always the first Chalfen question: what do you do?’

‘Shoes. I make shoes.’

‘Ah. Mmm. Not the material of sparkling conversation, I fear. What about the beautiful lady?’

‘I’m a beautiful lady of leisure. I wear the shoes she makes.’

‘Ah. Not in college, then?’

‘No, I didn’t bother with college. Is that OK?’

Neena was equally defensive. ‘And before you ask, neither did I.’

‘Well, I didn’t mean to embarrass you-’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Because it’s no real surprise… I know you’re not the most academic family in the world.’

Joyce knew things were going badly, but she couldn’t find her tongue to smooth it out. A million dangerous double entendres were sitting at the back of her throat, and, if she opened her mouth even a slit (!), she feared one of them was going to come out. Marcus, who was always oblivious to causing offence, chundled on happily. ‘You two are terrible temptations for a man.’

‘Are we.’

‘Oh, dykes always are. And I’m sure certain gentlemen would have half a chance – though you’d probably take beauty over intellect, I suspect, so there go my chances.’

‘You seem awfully certain of your intellect, Mr Chalfen.’

‘Shouldn’t I be? I am terribly clever, you know.’

Joyce just kept looking at them, thinking: Who relies on whom? Who teaches whom? Who improves whom? Who pollinates and who nurtures?

‘Well, it’s great to have another Iqbal round the table, isn’t it, Josh?’

‘I’m a Begum, not an Iqbal,’ said Neena.

‘I can’t help thinking,’ said Marcus, unheeding, ‘that a Chalfen man and an Iqbal woman would be a hell of a mix. Like Fred and Ginger. You’d give us sex and we’d give you sensibility or something. Hey? You’d keep a Chalfen on his toes – you’re as fiery as an Iqbal. Indian passion. Funny thing about your family: first generation are all loony tunes, but the second generation have got heads just about straight on their shoulders.’

‘Umm, look: no one calls my family loony, OK? Even if they are. I’ll call them loony.’

‘Now, you see, try to use the language properly. You can say “no one calls my family loony”, but that’s not a correct statement. Because people do and will. By all means say, “I don’t want people to, etc.” It’s a small thing, but we can all understand each other better when we don’t abuse terms and phrases.’

Then, just as Marcus was reaching into the oven to pull out the main course (chicken hotpot), Joyce’s mouth opened and for some inexplicable reason this came out: ‘Do you use each other’s breasts as pillows?’

Neena’s fork, which was heading for her mouth, stopped just as it reached the tip of her nose. Millat choked on a piece of cucumber. Irie struggled to bring her lower jaw back into alliance with the upper. Maxine began to giggle.

But Joyce wasn’t going to go purple. Joyce was descended from the kind of bloody-minded women who continued through the African swamps even after the bag-carrying natives had dropped their load and turned back, even when the white men were leaning on their guns and shaking their heads. She was cut of the same cloth as the frontier ladies who, armed with only a bible, a shotgun and a net curtain, coolly took out the brown men moving forwards from the horizon towards the plains. Joyce didn’t know the meaning of backing down. She was going to stand her ground.

‘It’s just, in a lot of Indian poetry, they talk about using breasts for pillows, downy breasts, pillow breasts. I just – just – just wondered, if white sleeps on brown, or, as one might expect, brown sleeps on white? Extending the – the – the – pillow metaphor, you see, I was just wondering which… way…’

The silence was long, broad and malingering. Neena shook her head in disgust and dropped her cutlery on to her plate with a clatter. Maxine tapped her fingers on the tablecloth, marking out a nervous ‘William Tell’. Josh looked like he might cry.

Finally, Marcus threw his head back, clapped his hands and let out an enormous Chalfen guffaw. ‘I’ve been wanting to ask that all night. Well done, Mother Chalfen!’

And so for the first time in her life Neena had to admit that her auntie was absolutely right. ‘You wanted a report, so here’s a full report: crazy, nutso, raisins short of a fruitcake, rubber walls, screaming- mad basket-cases. Every bloody one of them.’

Alsana nodded, open-mouthed, and asked Neena to repeat for the third time the bit during dessert when Joyce, serving up a trifle, had inquired whether it was difficult for Muslim women to bake while wearing those long black sheets – didn’t the arm bits get covered in cake mixture? Wasn’t there a danger of setting yourself alight on the gas hobs?

‘Bouncing off the walls,’ concluded Neena.

But, as is the way with these things, once confirmation had arrived nobody knew quite what to do with the information. Irie and Millat were sixteen and never tired of telling their respective mothers that they were now of the legal age for various activities and could do whatever, whenever. Short of putting locks on the doors and bars on the windows, Clara and Alsana were powerless. If anything, things got worse. Irie spent more time than ever immersing herself in Chalfenism. Clara noticed her wincing at her own father’s conversation, and frowning at the middle-brow tabloid Clara curled up with in bed. Millat disappeared from home for weeks at a time, returning with money that was not his and an accent that modulated wildly between the rounded tones of the