Zadie Smith - White Teeth

Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee’s mother? As the nights got darker and shorter and it became harder to pick Ryan out of the crowd who milled outside the school gates each day at three thirty, a dejected Clara would make the long walk home only to find her lover once more in the kitchen, chatting happily with Hortense, devouring the Bowden household’s cornucopia of goodies: ackee and saltfish, beef jerky, chicken-rice-and-peas, ginger cake and coconut ices.

These conversations, lively as they sounded when Clara turned the key in the door, always fell silent as she approached the kitchen. Like children caught out, they would become sullen, then awkward, then Ryan would make his excuses and leave. There was also a look, she noticed, that they had begun to give her, a look of sympathy, of condescension; and not only that – they began to comment on her clothing, which had become steadily more youthful, more colourful; and Ryan – what was happening to Ryan? – shed his polo-neck, avoided her in school, bought a tie .

Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbour of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. She had once known everything about Ryan – before Ryan himself knew it – she had been a Ryan expert . Now she was reduced to overhearing the Irish girls assert that Clara Bowden and Ryan Topps were not dealing with each other – definitively, definitely not dealing with each other – oh no, not any more .

If Clara realized what was happening, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe it. On the occasion she spotted Ryan at the kitchen table, surrounded by leaflets – and Hortense hurriedly gathering them up and shoving them into her apron pocket – Clara willed herself to forget it. Later that month, when Clara persuaded a doleful Ryan to go through the motions with her in the disabled toilet, she squinted so she couldn’t see what she didn’t want to see. But it was there, underneath his jumper, there as he leant back on the sink was the glint of silver, its gleam hardly visible in the dismal light – it couldn’t be, but it was – the silver glint of a tiny silver cross.

It couldn’t be, but it was . That is how people describe a miracle. Somehow the opposites of Hortense and Ryan had met at their logical extremes, their mutual predilection for the pain and death of others meeting like perspective points on some morbid horizon. Suddenly the saved and the unsaved had come a miraculous full circle. Hortense and Ryan were now trying to save her .

‘Get on the bike.’

Clara had just stepped out of school into the dusk and it was Ryan, his scooter coming to a sharp halt at her feet.

‘Claz, get on the bike.’

‘Go ask my mudder if she wan’ get on de bike!’

‘Please,’ said Ryan, proffering the spare scooter helmet. ‘ ’Simportant. Need to talk to you. Ain’t much time left.’

‘Why?’ snapped Clara, rocking petulantly on her platform heels. ‘You goin’ someplace?’

‘You and me both,’ murmured Ryan. ‘The right place, ’opefully.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Claz.’

‘ No .’

‘ Please . ’Simportant. Life or death.’

‘Man… all right. But me nah wearin’ dat ting’ – she passed back the helmet and got astride the scooter – ‘not mussin’ up me hair.’

Ryan drove her across London and up to Hampstead Heath, the very top of Parliament Hill, where, looking down from that peak on to the sickly orange fluorescence of the city, carefully, tortuously, and in language that was not his own, he put forward his case. The bottom line of which was this: there was only a month until the end of the world.

‘And the fing is, herself and myself, we’re just-’

‘We!’

‘Your mum – your mum and myself,’ mumbled Ryan, ‘we’re worried. ’Bout you. There ain’t that many wot will survive the last days. You been wiv a bad crowd, Claz-’

‘ Man ,’ said Clara, shaking her head and sucking her teeth, ‘I don’ believe dis biznezz. Dem were your friends.’

‘No, no, they ain’t. Not no more. The weed – the weed is evil. And all that lot – Wan-Si, Petronia.’

‘Dey my friends!’

‘They ain’t nice girls, Clara. They should be with their families, not dressing like they do and doing things with them men in that house. You yourself shouldn’t be doin’ that, neither. And dressing like, like, like-’

‘Like what?’

‘Like a whore!’ said Ryan, the word exploding from him like it was a relief to be rid of it. ‘Like a loose woman!’

‘Oh bwoy, I heard everyting now… take me home, man.’

‘They’re going to get theirs,’ said Ryan, nodding to himself, his arm stretched and gesturing over London from Chiswick to Archway. ‘There’s still time for you. Who do you want to be with, Claz? Who d’ya want to be with? With the 144,000, in heaven, ruling with Christ? Or do you want to be one of the Great Crowd, living in earthly paradise, which is all right but… Or are you going to be one of them who get it in the neck, torture and death. Eh? I’m just separating the sheep from the goats, Claz, the sheep from the goats. That’s Matthew. And I think you yourself are a sheep, innit?’

‘Lemme tell you someting,’ said Clara, walking back over to the scooter and taking the back seat, ‘I’m a goat. I like bein’ a goat. I wanna be a goat. An’ I’d rather be sizzling in de rains of sulphur wid my friends than sittin’ in heaven, bored to tears, wid Darcus, my mudder and you!’

‘Shouldn’ta said that, Claz,’ said Ryan solemnly, putting his helmet on. ‘I really wish you ’adn’t said that. For your sake. He can hear us.’

‘An’ I’m tired of hearin’ you. Take me home.’

‘It’s the truth! He can hear us!’ he shouted, turning backwards, yelling above the exhaust-pipe noise as they revved up and scooted downhill. ‘He can see it all! He watches over us!’

‘Watch over where you goin’,’ Clara yelled back, as they sent a cluster of Hasidic Jews running in all directions. ‘Watch de path!’

‘Only the few – that’s wot it says – only the few. They’ll all get it – that’s what it says in Dyoot-er-ronomee – they’ll all get what’s comin’ and only the few-’

Somewhere in the middle of Ryan Topps’s enlightening biblical exegesis, his former false idol, the Vespa GS, cracked right into a 400-year-old oak tree. Nature triumphed over the presumptions of engineering. The tree survived; the bike died; Ryan was hurled one way; Clara the other.

The principles of Christianity and Sod’s Law (also known as Murphy’s Law) are the same: Everything happens to me, for me . So if a man drops a piece of toast and it lands butter-side down, this unlucky event is interpreted as being proof of an essential truth about bad luck: that the toast fell as it did just to prove to you , Mr Unlucky, that there is a defining force in the universe and it is bad luck. It’s not random. It could never have fallen on the right side, so the argument goes, because that’s Sod’s Law. In short, Sod’s Law happens to you to prove to you that there is Sod’s Law. Yet, unlike gravity, it is a law that does not exist whatever happens: when the toast lands on the right side, Sod’s Law mysteriously disappears. Likewise, when Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved. Not because one was wearing a helmet and the other wasn’t. And had it happened the other way round, had gravity reclaimed Ryan’s teeth and sent them rolling down Primrose Hill like tiny enamel snowballs, well… you can bet your life that God, in Ryan’s mind, would have done a vanishing act.