Zadie Smith - White Teeth

‘Well, we can’t bloody afford it,’ grumbled Archie, emerging from the eiderdown. ‘We haven’t all got posh jobs in science, now have we?’

‘I don’t care about the money – I’ll get a job, somehow or something, but I do want your permission! Both of you. I don’t want to spend six months away and spend every day thinking you’re angry.’

‘Well, it’s not up to me, love, is it? It’s your mother, really, I…’

‘Yes, Dad. Thanks for stating the bloody obvious.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Archie huffily, turning to the wall. ‘I’ll keep my comments to meself, then…’

‘Oh, Dad , I didn’t mean… Mum? Can you please sit up and speak properly? I’m trying to talk to you? It seems like I’m talking to myself here?’ said Irie with absurd intonations, for this was the year Antipodean soap operas were teaching a generation of English kids to phrase everything as a question. ‘Look, I want your permission, yeah?’

Even in the darkness, Irie could see Clara scowl. ‘Permishon for what ? Koo go and share and ogle at poor black folk? Dr Livingshone, I prejume? Iz dat what you leant from da Shalfenz? Because if thash what you want, you can do dat here. Jush sit and look at me for shix munfs!’

‘It’s nothing to do with that! I just want to see how other people live!’

‘An’ gek youshelf killed in da proshess! Why don’ you go necksh door, dere are uvver people dere. Go shee how dey live!’

Infuriated, Irie grabbed the bed knob and marched round Clara’s side of the bed. ‘Why can’t you just sit up properly and talk to me properly and drop the ridiculous little girl voi-’

In the darkness Irie kicked over a glass and sucked in a sharp breath as the cold water seeped between her toes and into the carpet. Then, as the last of the water ran away, Irie had the strange and horrid sensation that she was being bitten.

‘Ow!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Archie, reaching over to the side lamp and switching it on. ‘What now?’

Irie looked down to where the pain was. In any war, this was too low a blow. The front set of some false teeth, with no mouth attached to them, were bearing down upon her right foot.

‘Fucking hell! What the fuck are they?’

But the question was unnecessary; even as the words formed in her mouth, Irie had already put two and two together. The midnight voice. The perfect daytime straightness and whiteness.

Clara hurriedly stretched to the floor and prised her teeth from Irie’s foot and, as it was too late for disguise now, placed them directly on the bedside table.

‘Shatishfied?’ asked Clara wearily. (It wasn’t that she had deliberately not told her. There just never seemed a good time.)

But Irie was sixteen and everything feels deliberate at that age. To her, this was yet another item in a long list of parental hypocrisies and untruths, this was another example of the Jones/Bowden gift for secret histories, stories you never got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumour you never unravelled, which would be fine if every day was not littered with clues, and suggestions; shrapnel in Archie’s leg… photo of strange white Grandpa Durham… the name ‘Ophelia’ and the word ‘madhouse’… a cycling helmet and an ancient mudguard… smell of fried food from O’Connell’s… faint memory of a late night car journey, waving to a boy on a plane… letters with Swedish stamps, Horst Ibelgaufts, if not delivered return to sender…

Oh what a tangled web we weave. Millat was right: these parents were damaged people, missing hands, missing teeth. These parents were full of information you wanted to know but were too scared to hear. But she didn’t want it any more, she was tired of it. She was sick of never getting the whole truth. She was returning to sender.

‘Well, don’t look so shocked, love,’ said Archie amicably. ‘It’s just some bloody teeth. So now you know. It’s not the end of the world.’

But it was, in a way. She’d had enough. She walked back into her room, packed her schoolwork and essential clothes into a big rucksack and put a heavy coat over her nightie. She thought about the Chalfens for half a second, but she knew already there were no answers there, only more places to escape. Besides, there was only one spare room and Millat had it. Irie knew where she had to go, deep into the heart of it, where only the N17 would take her at this time of night, sitting on the top deck, seats decorated with puke, rumbling through 47 bus stops before it reached its destination. But she got there in the end.

‘Lord a Jesus,’ mumbled Hortense, iron-curlers unmoved, bleary-eyed on the doorstep. ‘Irie Ambrosia Jones, is that you ?’

It was Irie Jones all right. Six years older than the last time they met. Taller, wider, with breasts and no hair and slippers just visible underneath a long duffle coat. And it was Hortense Bowden. Six years older, shorter, wider, with breasts on her belly and no hair (though she took the peculiar step of putting her wig in curlers) and slippers just visible underneath a long, padded baby-pink housecoat. But the real difference was Hortense was eighty-four. Not a littleoldwoman by any means; she was a round robust one, her fat so taut against her skin the epidermis was having a hard time wrinkling. Still, eighty-four is not seventy-seven or sixty-three; at eighty-four there is nothing but death ahead, tedious in its insistence. It was there in her face as Irie had never seen it before. The waiting and the fear and the blessed relief.

Yet though there were differences, walking down the steps and into Hortense’s basement flat, Irie was struck by the shock of sameness. Way-back-when, she had been a fairly regular visitor at her grandmother’s: sneaky visits with Archie while her mother was at college, and always leaving with something unusual, a pickled fish head, chilli dumplings, the lyrics of a stray but persistent psalm. Then at Darcus’s funeral in 1985, ten-year-old Irie had let slip about these social calls and Clara had put a stop to them altogether. They still called each other on the phone, on occasion. And to this day Irie received short letters on exercise paper with a copy of the Watchtower slipped inside. Sometimes Irie looked at her mother’s face and saw her grandmother: those majestic cheekbones, those feline eyes. But they had not been face to face for six years.

As far as the house was concerned, six seconds seemed to have passed. Still dark, still dank, still underground. Still decorated with hundreds of secular figurines (‘Cinderella on her way to the Ball’, ‘Mrs Tiddlytum shows the little squirrels the way to the picnic’), all balanced on their separate doilies and laughing gaily amongst themselves, amused that anyone would pay a hundred and fifty pounds in fifteen instalments for such inferior pieces of china and glass as they. A huge tripartite tapestry, which Irie remembered the sewing of, now hung on the wall above the fireplace, depicting, in its first strip, the Anointed sitting in judgement with Jesus in heaven. The Anointed were all blond and blue-eyed and appeared as serene as Hortense’s cheap wool would allow, and were looking down at the Great Crowd – who were happy-looking, but not as happy as the Anointed – frolicking in eternal paradise on earth. The Great Crowd were in turn looking piteously at the heathens (by far the largest group), dead in their graves, and packed on top of each other like sardines.

The only thing missing was Darcus (whom Irie only faintly remembered as a mixture of smell and texture; naphthalene and damp wool); there was his huge empty chair, still fetid, and there was his television, still on.