Zadie Smith - White Teeth

The children sat silently. And then Irie began to cry, ever so quietly.

Mr Hamilton continued, ‘Those are the split decisions you make in war. See a flash of white and bang! as it were… Dark as buggery. Terrible times. All these beautiful boys lying dead there, right in front of me, right at my feet. Stomachs open, you know, with their guts on my shoes. Like the end of the bloody world. Beautiful men, enlisted by the Krauts, black as the ace of spades; poor fools didn’t even know why they were there, what people they were fighting for, who they were shooting at. The decision of the gun. So quick, children. So brutal. Biscuit?’

‘I want to go home,’ whispered Irie.

‘My dad was in the war. He played for England,’ piped up Millat, red-faced and furious.

‘Well, boy, do you mean the football team or the army?’

‘The British army. He drove a tank. A Mr Churchill. With her dad,’ explained Magid.

‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ said Mr Hamilton, genteel as ever. ‘There were certainly no wogs as I remember – though you’re probably not allowed to say that these days are you? But no… no Pakistanis… what would we have fed them? No, no,’ he grumbled, assessing the question as if he were being given the opportunity to rewrite history here and now. ‘Quite out of the question. I could not possibly have stomached that rich food. No Pakistanis. The Pakistanis would have been in the Pakistani army, you see, whatever that was. As for the poor Brits, they had enough on their hands with us old Queens…’

Mr Hamilton laughed softly to himself, turned his head and silently admired the roaming branches of a cherry tree that dominated one whole corner of his garden. After a long pause he turned back and tears were visible in his eyes again – fast, sharp tears as if he had been slapped in the face. ‘Now, you young men shouldn’t tell fibs should you? Fibs will rot your teeth.’

‘It’s not a lie, Mr J. P. Hamilton, he really was,’ said Magid, always the peace-maker, always the negotiator. ‘He was shot in the hand. He has medals. He was a hero.’

‘And when your teeth rot-’

‘It’s the truth!’ shouted Millat, kicking over the tea-tray that sat on the floor between them. ‘You stupid fucking old man.’

‘And when your teeth rot,’ continued Mr Hamilton, smiling at the ceiling, ‘aaah, there’s no return. They won’t look at you like they used to. The pretty ones won’t give you a second glance, not for love or money. But while you’re still young, the important matter is the third molars. They are more commonly referred to as the wisdom teeth, I believe. You simply must deal with the third molars before anything else. That was my downfall. You won’t have them yet, but my great-grandchildren are just feeling them now. The problem with third molars is one is never sure whether one’s mouth will be quite large enough to accommodate them. They are the only part of the body that a man must grow into. He must be a big enough man for these teeth, do you see? Because if not – oh dear me, they grow crooked or any which way, or refuse to grow at all. They stay locked up there with the bone – an impaction, I believe, is the term – and terrible, terrible infection ensues. Have them out early, that’s what I tell my granddaughter Jocelyn in regard to her sons. You simply must. You can’t fight against it. I wish I had. I wish I’d given up early and hedged my bets, as it were. Because they’re your father’s teeth, you see, wisdom teeth are passed down by the father, I’m certain of it. So you must be big enough for them. God knows, I wasn’t big enough for mine… Have them out and brush three times a day, if my advice means anything.’

By the time Mr J. P. Hamilton looked down to see whether his advice meant anything, his three dun-coloured visitors had already disappeared, taking with them the bag of apples (apples he had been contemplating asking Jocelyn to put through the food processor); tripping over themselves, running to get to a green space, to get to one of the lungs of the city, some place where free breathing was possible.

Now, the children knew the city. And they knew the city breeds the Mad. They knew Mr White-Face, an Indian who walks the streets of Willesden with his face painted white, his lips painted blue, wearing a pair of tights and some hiking boots; they knew Mr Newspaper, a tall skinny man in an ankle-length raincoat who sits in Brent libraries removing the day’s newspapers from his briefcase and methodically tearing them into strips; they knew Mad Mary, a black voodoo woman with a red face whose territory stretches from Kilburn to Oxford Street but who performs her spells from a bin in West Hampstead; they knew Mr Toupee, who has no eyebrows and wears a toupee not on his head but on a string around his neck. But these people announced their madness – they were better, less scary than Mr J. P. Hamilton – they flaunted their insanity, they weren’t half mad and half not, curled around a door frame. They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana , it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalk-faced, blue-lipped or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street – the great majority of modern-day seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at . What the fuck are we looking at. As a kind of pre-emptive defence mechanism, Londoners have learnt not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question ‘What you looking at?’ and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer – ‘Nothing’ – might be avoided. But as the prey evolves (and we are prey to the Mad who are pursuing us, desperate to impart their own brand of truth to the hapless commuter) so does the hunter, and the true professionals begin to tire of that old catchphrase ‘What you looking at?’ and move into more exotic territory. Take Mad Mary. Oh, the principle’s still the same, it’s still all about eye contact and the danger of making it, but now she’s making eye contact from a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred yards away, and if she catches you doing the same she roars down the street, dreads and feathers and cape afloat, Hoodoo stick in hand, until she gets to where you are, spits on you, and begins. Samad knew all of this – they’d had dealings before, he and red-faced Mad Mary; he’d even suffered the misfortune of having her sit next to him on a bus. Any other day and Samad would have given her as good as he got. But today he was feeling guilty and vulnerable, today he was holding Poppy’s hand as the sun crept away; he could not face Mad Mary and her vicious truth-telling, her ugly madness – which of course was precisely why she was stalking him, quite deliberately stalking him down Church Road.

‘For your own safety, don’t look,’ said Samad. ‘Just keep on walking in a straight line. I had no idea she travelled this far into Harlesden.’

Poppy snatched the quickest glance at the multicoloured streaming flash galloping down the high street on an imaginary horse.