White Teeth

grandpickney. I only have de Lord, all dem years. Mr Topps de first human man who look pon me and take pity an’ care. Your mudder was a fool to let ’im go, true sir!’

Irie gave it one last try. ‘What? What does that mean?’

‘Oh, nuttin, nuttin, dear Lord… I and I talking all over de place dis marnin… Oh Mr Topps, dere you are. We not going to be late now, are we?’

Mr Topps, who had just re-entered the room, was fully adorned in leather from head to toe, a huge motorcycle helmet on his head, a small red light attached to his left ankle and a small white light strapped to his right. He flipped up the visor.

‘No, we’re all right, by the grace of God. Where’s your helmet, Mrs B.?’

‘Oh, I’ve started keepin’ it in the oven. Keeps it warm and toasty on de col’ marnins. Irie Ambrosia, fetch it for me please.’

Sure enough, on the middle shelf preheated to gas mark 2 sat Hortense’s helmet. Irie scooped it out and carefully fitted it over her grandmother’s plasticated carnations.

‘You ride a motorbike,’ said Irie, by way of conversation.

But Mr Topps seemed defensive. ‘A GS Vespa. Nuffink fancy. I did fink about givin’ it away at one point. It represented a life I’d raaver forget, if you get my meaning. A motorbike is a sexual magnet, an’ God forgive me, but I misused it in that fashion. I was all set on gettin’ rid of it. But then Mrs B. convinced me that what wiv all my public speaking, I need somefing quick to get around on. An’ Mrs B. don’t want to be messin’ about with buses and trains at her age, do you Mrs B.?’

‘No, indeed. He got me dis little buggy-’

‘Sidecar,’ corrected Ryan tetchily. ‘It’s called a sidecar. Minetto Motorcycle-combination, 1973 model.’

‘Yes, of course, a sidecar, an’ it is comfortable as a bed. We go everywhere in it, Mr Topps an’ I.’

Hortense took down her overcoat from a hook on the door, and reached in the pockets for two Velcro reflector bands which she strapped round each arm.

‘Now, Irie, I’ve got a great deal of bizness to be gettin’ on with today, so you’re going to have to cook for yourself, because I kyan tell what time we’ll be home. But don’ worry. Me soon come.’

‘No problem.’

Hortense sucked her teeth. ‘No problem. Dat’s what her name mean in patois: Irie, no problem. Now, what kind of a name is datto…?’

Mr Topps didn’t answer. He was already out on the pavement, revving up the Vespa.

‘First I have to keep her from those Chalfens,’ growls Clara over the phone, her voice a resonant tremolando of anger and fear. ‘And now you people again.’

On the other end, her mother takes the washing out of the machine and listens silently through the cordless that is tucked between ear and weary shoulder, biding her time.

‘Hortense, I don’t want you filling her head with a whole load of nonsense. You hear me? Your mother was fool to it, and then you were fool to it, but the buck stopped with me and it ain’t going no further. If Irie comes home spouting any of that claptrap, you can forget about the Second Comin’ ’cos you’ll be dead by the time it arrives.’

Big words. But how fragile is Clara’s atheism! Like one of those tiny glass doves Hortense keeps in the lounge cabinet – a breath would knock it over. Talking of which, Clara still holds hers when passing churches the same way adolescent vegetarians scurry by butchers; she avoids Kilburn on a Saturday for fear of streetside preachers on their upturned apple crates. Hortense senses Clara’s terror. Coolly cramming in another load of whites and measuring out the liquid with a thrifty woman’s eye, she is short and decided: ‘Don’ you worry about Irie Ambrosia. She in a good place now. She’ll tell you herself.’ As if she had ascended with the heavenly host rather than entombed herself below ground in the borough of Lambeth with Ryan Topps.

Clara hears her daughter getting on the extension; an initial crackle and then a voice as clear as a carillon. ‘Look, I’m not coming home, all right, so don’t bother. I’ll be back when I’m back, just don’t worry about me.’ And there should be nothing to worry about and there is nothing to worry about, except maybe that outside in the streets it is cold packed on cold, even the dogshit has crystallized, there is the first suggestion of ice on the windscreens and Clara has been in that house through the winters. She knows what it means. Oh, wonderfully bright at 6 a.m., yes, wonderfully clear for an hour. But the shorter the days, the longer the nights, the darker the house, the easier it is, the easier it is, the easier it is, to mistake a shadow for the writing on the wall, the sound of overland footsteps for the distant crack of thunder, and the midnight chime of a New Year clock for the bell that tolls the end of the world.

But Clara needn’t have feared. Irie’s atheism was robust. It was Chalfenist in its confidence, and she approached her stay with Hortense with detached amusement. She was intrigued by the Bowden household. It was a place of endgames and aftertimes, fullstops and finales; where to count on the arrival of tomorrow was an indulgence, and every service in the house, from the milkman to the electricity, was paid for on a strictly daily basis so as not to spend money on utilities or goods that would be wasted should God turn up in all his holy vengeance the very next day. Bowdenism gave a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘hand-to-mouth’. This was living in the eternal instant, ceaselessly teetering on the precipice of total annihilation; there are people who take a great deal of drugs simply to experience something comparable to 84-year-old Hortense Bowden’s day-to- day existence. So you’ve seen dwarfs rip open their bellies and show you their insides, you’ve been a television switched off without warning, you’ve experienced the whole world as one Krishna consciousness, free of individual ego, floating through the infinite cosmos of the soul? Big fucking deal. That’s all bullshit next to St John’s trip when Christ laid the twenty-two chapters of Revelation on him. It must have been a hell of a shock for the apostle (after that thorough spin-job, the New Testament, all those sweet words and sublime sentiments) to discover Old Testament vengeance lurking round the corner after all. As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. That must have been some eye-opener.

Revelation is where all crazy people end up. It’s the last stop on the nutso express. And Bowdenism, which was the Witnesses plus Revelation and then some, was as left field as they come. Par exemple: Hortense Bowden interpreted Revelation 3:15 – I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth – as a literal mandate. She understood ‘lukewarm’ to be an evil property in and of itself. She kept a microwave on hand at all times (her sole concession to modern technology – for a long time it was a toss-up between pleasing the Lord and laying oneself open to the United States mind-ray control programme as operated through high-frequency radiowaves) in order to heat every meal to an impossible temperature; she kept whole buckets of ice to chill every glass of water ‘colder than cold’. She wore two pairs of knickers at all times like a wary potential traffic-victim; when Irie asked why, she sheepishly revealed that upon hearing the first signs of the Lord (approaching thunder, bellowing voice, Wagner’s Ring Cycle), she intended to whip off the one closest to her and replace it with the outer pair, so that Jesus would find her fresh and odourless and ready for heaven. She kept a tub of black paint in the hallway so when the time came she might daub the neighbours’ doors with the sign of the Beast, saving the Lord all that trouble of weeding out the baddies, separating sheep from goats. And you couldn’t form any sentence in that house which included the words ‘end’, ‘finished’, ‘done’, etc., for these were like so many triggers setting off both Hortense and Ryan with the usual ghoulish relish:

Irie: I finished the washing-up.

Ryan Topps (shaking his head solemnly at the truth of it): As one day we all shall be finished, Irie, my dear; be zealous therefore, and repent.

Or