White Teeth

midwinter?

Joyce Chalfen: Well, first I must say your neighbours sound very nosy. I’d tell them to mind their own beeswax if I were you (laughter from audience). But to be serious, I think this whole trend for round-the-clock bloom is actually very unhealthy for the garden and the gardener and particularly the soil, I really do… I think the winter should be a time of rest, subdued colours, you know – and then when the late spring does finally arrive the neighbours get a hell of a shock! Boom! There it is, this wonderful explosion of growth. I think the deep winter is really a time for nurturing the soil, turning it over, allowing it a rest and plotting its future all the better to surprise the nosy people next door. I always think of a garden’s soil like a woman’s body – moving in cycles, you know, fertile at some times and not others, and that’s really quite natural. But if you really are determined, then Lenten roses – Helleborus corsicus – do remarkably well in cold, calcareous soil, even if they’re quite in the-

Irie switched Joyce off. It was quite therapeutic switching Joyce off. This was not entirely personal. It just seemed tiring and unnecessary all of a sudden, that struggle to force something out of the recalcitrant English soil. Why bother when there was now this other place? (For Jamaica appeared to Irie as if it were newly made. Like Columbus himself, just by discovering it she had brought it into existence.) This well- wooded and watered place. Where things sprang from the soil riotously and without supervision, and a young white captain could meet a young black girl with no complications, both of them fresh and untainted and without past or dictated future – a place where things simply were. No fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs – this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page.

But every time Irie felt herself closer to it, to the perfect blankness of the past, something of the present would ring the Bowden doorbell and intrude. Mothering Sunday brought a surprise visit from Joshua, angry on the doorstep, at least a stone and a half lighter, and much scruffier than usual. Before Irie had a chance to express either concern or shock, he had flounced into the lounge and slammed the door. ‘I’m sick of it! Sick to the back fucking teeth with it!’

The vibration of the door knocked Capt. Durham from his perch on Irie’s windowsill, and she carefully re-erected him.

‘Yeah, nice to see you too, man. Why don’t you sit down and slow down. Sick of what?’

‘Them. They sicken me. They go on about rights and freedoms, and then they eat fifty chickens every fucking week! Hypocrites!’

Irie couldn’t immediately see the connection. She took out a fag in preparation for a long story. To her surprise Joshua took one too, and they went to kneel on the window seat, blowing smoke through the grate up into the street.

‘Do you know how battery chickens live?’

Irie didn’t. Joshua explained. Cooped up for most of their poor chicken lives in total chicken darkness, packed together like chicken sardines in their chicken shit and fed the worst type of chicken grain.

And this, according to Joshua, was apparently nothing on how pigs and cows and sheep spent their time. ‘It’s a fucking crime. But try telling Marcus that. Try getting him to give up his Sunday hog-fest. He’s so fucking ill informed. Have you ever noticed that? He knows this enormous amount about one thing, but there’s this whole other world that… Oh, before I forget – you should take a leaflet.’

Irie never thought she would see the day when Joshua Chalfen handed her a leaflet. But here it was in her palm. It was called: Meat is Murder: The Facts and the Fiction, a publication from the FATE organization.

‘It stands for Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation. They’re like the hardcore end of Greenpeace or whatever. Read it – they’re not just hippy freaks, they’re coming from a solid scientific and academic background and they’re working from an anarchist perspective. I feel like I’ve really found my niche, you know? It’s a really incredible group. Dedicated to direct action. The deputy’s an ex-Oxford fellow.’

‘Mmmm. How’s Millat?’

Joshua shook off the question. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Barmy. Going barmy. And Joyce is still pandering to his every whim. Just don’t ask me. They all sicken me. Everything’s changed.’ Josh ran his fingers anxiously through his hair, which just reached his shoulders now in what Willesdeners affectionately call a Jew-fro Mullet. ‘I just can’t tell you how everything’s changed. I’m having these real… moments of clarity.’

Irie nodded. She was sympathetic to moments of clarity. Her seventeenth year was proving chock-a-block with them. And she wasn’t surprised by Joshua’s metamorphosis. Four months in the life of a seventeen-year-old is the stuff of swings and roundabouts; Stones fans into Beatles fans, Tories into Liberal Democrats and back again, vinyl junkies to CD freaks. Never again in your life do you possess the capacity for such total personality overhaul.

‘I knew you’d understand. I wish I’d talked to you before, but I just can’t bear to be in the house these days and when I do see you Millat always seems to be in the way. It’s really good to see you.’

‘You too. You look different.’

Josh gestured dismissively at his clothes, which were distinctly less nerdy than they had been.

‘I guess you can’t wear your father’s old corduroy for ever.’

‘I guess not.’

Joshua clapped his hands together. ‘Well, I’ve booked my ticket for Glastonbury and I might not come back. I met these people from FATE and I’m going with them.’

‘It’s March. Not till the summer, surely.’

‘Joely and Crispin – that’s these people I met – say we might go up there early. You know, camp out for a bit.’

‘And school?’

‘If you can bunk, I can bunk… it’s not as if I’m going to fall behind. I’ve still got a Chalfen head on my shoulders, I’ll just come back for the exams and then fuck off again. Irie, you’ve just got to meet these people. They’re just… incredible. He’s a Dadaist. And she’s an anarchist. A real one. Not like Marcus. I told her about Marcus and his bloody FutureMouse. She thinks he’s a dangerous individual. Quite possibly psychopathic.’

Irie thought about this. ‘Mmm. I’d be surprised.’

Without stubbing out his fag, he threw it up on to the pavement. ‘And I’m giving up all meat. I’m a pescatarian at the moment, but that’s just half measures. I’m becoming a fucking vegetarian.’

Irie shrugged, not certain what the right response should be.

‘There’s a lot to be said for the old motto, you know?’

‘Old motto?’

‘Fight fire with fire. It’s only by really fucking extreme behaviour that you can get through to somebody like Marcus. He doesn’t even know how out there he is. There’s no point being reasonable with him because he thinks he owns reasonableness. How do you deal with people like that? Oh, and I’m giving up leather – wearing it – and all other animal by-products. Gelatin and stuff.’

After a while of watching the feet go by – leathers, sneakers, heels – Irie said, ‘That’ll show ’em.’