Zadie Smith - White Teeth

‘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

Irie : It was a such a good film. The end was great!

Hortense Bowden (tearfully): And dem dat expeck such an end to dis world will be sorely disappointed, for He will come trailin’ terror and Lo de generation dat witness de events of 1914 shall now witness de turd part of de trees burn, and the turd part of de sea become as blood, and de turd part of de…

And then there was Hortense’s horror of weather reports. Whoever it was, however benign, honey-voiced and inoffensively dressed, she cursed them bitterly for the five minutes they stood there, and then, out of what appeared to be sheer perversity, proceeded to take the opposite of whatever advice had been proffered (light jacket and no umbrella for rain, full cagoule and rain hat for sun). It was several weeks before Irie understood that weathermen were the secular antithesis of Hortense’s life work, which was, essentially, a kind of supercosmic attempt to second-guess the Lord with one almighty biblical exegesis of a weather report. Next to that weathermen were nothing but upstarts… And tomorrow, coming in from the east, we can expect a great furnace to rise up and envelop the area with flames that give no light, but rather darkness visible… while I’m afraid the northern regions are advised to wrap up warm against thick-ribbed ice, and there’s a fair likelihood that the coast will be beaten with perpetual storms of whirlwind and dire hail which on firm land thaws not … Michael Fish and his ilk were stabbers-in-the-dark, trusting to the tomfoolery of the Met Office, making a mockery of that precise science, eschatology, that Hortense had spent over fifty years in the study of.

‘Any news, Mr Topps?’ (This question almost invariably asked over breakfast; and girlishly, breathlessly, like a child asking after Santa.)

‘No, Mrs B. We are still completing our studies. You must let my colleagues and myself deliberate thoroughly. In this life there are them that are teachers and then there are them that are pupils. There are eight million Witnesses of Jehovah waiting for our decision, waiting for the Judgement Day. But you must learn to leave such fings to them that ’ave the direct line, Mrs B., the direct line.’