Zadie Smith - White Teeth

‘There’s room for one more chap this century,’ Magid told him (this guy was a master in flattery), ‘Freud, Einstein, Crick and Watson… There is an empty seat, Marcus. The bus is not quite full capacity. Ding! Ding! Room for one more …’

And you can’t beat that for an offer. You can’t fight it. Marcus and Magid. Magid and Marcus. Nothing else mattered. The two of them were oblivious to the upset they caused Irie, or to the widespread displacement, the strange seismic ripples, that their friendship had set off in everyone else. Marcus had pulled out , like Mountbatten from India, or a satiated teenage boy from his latest mate. He abrogated responsibility, for everything and everybody – Chalfens, Iqbals and Joneses – everything and everyone bar Magid and his mice. All others were fanatics. And Irie bit her tongue because Magid was good, and Magid was kind, and Magid walked through the house in white. But like all manifestations of the Second Coming, all saints, saviours and gurus, Magid Iqbal was also, in Neena’s eloquent words, a first-class, one hundred per cent, bona fide, total and utter pain in the arse . A typical conversation:

‘Irie, I am confused.’

‘Not right now, Magid, I’m on the phone.’

‘I don’t wish to take from your valuable time, but it is a matter of some urgency. I am confused.’

‘Magid, could you just-’

‘You see. Joyce very kindly bought me these jeans. They are called Levis.’

‘Look, could I call you back? Right… OK… Bye. What , Magid? That was an important call. What is it?’

‘So you see I have these beautiful American Levi jeans, white jeans, that Joyce’s sister brought back from a holiday in Chicago, the Windy City they call it, though I don’t believe there is anything particularly unusual about its climate, considering its proximity to Canada. My Chicago jeans. Such a thoughtful gift! I was overwhelmed to receive them. But then I was confused by this label in the inner lining that states that the jeans are apparently “shrink-to-fit”. I asked myself, what can this mean: “shrink-to-fit”?’

‘They shrink until they fit, Magid. That would be my guess.’

‘But Joyce was percipient enough to buy them in precisely the right size, you see? A 32, 34.’

‘All right, Magid, I don’t want to see them. I believe you. So don’t shrink them.’

‘That was my original conclusion, also. But it appears there is no separate procedure for shrinking them. If one washes the jeans, they will simply shrink.’

‘Fascinating.’

‘And you appreciate at some juncture the jeans will require washing?’

‘What’s your point, Magid.’

‘Well, do they shrink by some pre-calculated amount, and if so, by how much? If the amount was not correct, they would open themselves up to a great deal of litigation, no? It is no good if they shrink-to-fit, after all, if they do not shrink-to-fit me . There is another possibility, as Jack suggested, that they shrink to the contours of the body. Yet how can such a thing be possible?’

‘Well, why don’t you get in the fucking bath with the fucking jeans on and see what happens?’

But you couldn’t upset Magid with words. He turned the other cheek. Sometimes hundreds of times a day, like a lollipop lady on ecstasy. He had this way of smiling at you, neither wounded nor angry, and then inclining his head (to the exact same angle his father did when taking an order of curried prawns) in a gesture of total forgiveness. He had absolute empathy for everybody, Magid. And it was an unbelievable pain in the arse.

‘Umm, I didn’t mean to… Oh shit. Sorry. Look… I don’t know… you’re just so… have you heard from Millat?’

‘My brother shuns me,’ said Magid, that same expression of universal calm and forgiveness unchanged. ‘He marks me like Cain because I am a non-believer. At least not in his god or any others with a name. Because of this, he refuses to meet me, even to talk on the telephone.’

‘Oh, you know, he’ll probably come round. He always was a stubborn bastard.’

‘Of course, yes, you love him,’ continued Magid, not giving Irie a chance to protest. ‘So you know his habits, his manners. You will understand, then, how fiercely he takes my conversion. I have converted to Life. I see his god in the millionth position of pi , in the arguments of the Phaedrus, in a perfect paradox. But that is not enough for Millat.’

Irie looked him square in the face. There was something in there she had been unable to put her finger on these four months, because it was obscured by his youth, his looks, his clean clothes and his personal hygiene. Now she saw it clearly. He was touched by it – the same as Mad Mary, the Indian with the white face and the blue lips, and the guy who carried his wig around on a piece of string. The same as those people who walk the Willesden streets with no intention of buying Black Label beer, or stealing a stereo, collecting the dole or pissing in an alleyway. The ones with a wholly different business. Prophecy . And Magid had it in his face. He wanted to tell you and tell you and tell you.

‘Millat demands complete surrender.’

‘Sounds typical.’

‘He wants me to join Keepers of the Eternal and-’

‘Yeah, KEVIN, I know them. So you have spoken to him.’

‘I don’t need to speak to him to know what he thinks. He is my twin. I don’t wish to see him. I don’t need to. Do you understand the nature of twins? Do you understand the meaning of the word cleave ? Or rather, the double meaning that-’

‘Magid. No offence, but I’ve got work to do.’

Magid gave a little bow. ‘Naturally. You will excuse me, I have to go and submit my Chicago jeans to the experiment you proposed.’

Irie gritted her teeth, picked up the phone and redialled the number she had cut off. It was a journalist (it was always journalists these days), and she had something to read to him. She’d had a crash course in media relations since her exams, and dealing with them/it had taught her there was no point in trying to deal with each one separately. To give some unique point of view to the FT and then to the Mirror and then to the Daily Mail was impossible. It was their job, not yours, to get the angle, to write their separate book of the huge media bible. Each to their own. Reporters were factional, fanatical, obsessively defending their own turf, propounding the same thing day after day. So it had always been. Who would have guessed that Luke and John would take such different angles on the scoop of the century, the death of the Lord? It just went to prove that you couldn’t trust these guys. Irie’s job, then, was to give the information as it stood, every time, verbatim from a piece of paper written by Marcus and Magid, stapled to the wall.

‘All right,’ said the journo. ‘Tape’s running.’

And here Irie stumbled at the first hurdle of PR: believing in what you sell. It wasn’t that she lacked the moral faith. It was more fundamental than that. She didn’t believe in it as a physical fact . She didn’t believe it existed. FutureMouse© was now such an enormous, spectacular, cartoon of an idea (in every paper’s column, agonized over by journos – Should it get a patent ? Eulogized by hacks – Greatest achievement of the century ?), one expected the damn mouse to stand up and speak by itself. Irie took a deep breath. Though she had repeated the words many times, they still seemed fantastical, absurd – fiction on the wings of fantasy – with more of a dash of Surrey T. Banks in them:

PRESS RELEASE: 15 OCTOBER 1992

Subject: Launch of FutureMouse ©