White Teeth (65 page)

Five-inch letters, between one leg of the bench and the other. IQBAL. It wasn’t clear, and the colour of it was a murky rust, but it was there. The story of it was old.

A few months after his father arrived in England, he had sat on this bench nursing a bleeding thumb, the top sliced off by a careless, doddering stroke from one of the older waiters. When it first happened, in the restaurant, Samad couldn’t feel it because it was his dead hand. So he just wrapped it in a handkerchief to stem the flow and continued work. But the material had become soaked in blood, he was putting the customers off their food and eventually Ardashir sent him home. Samad took his open thumb out of the restaurant, past theatreland and down St Martin’s Lane. When he reached the square he stuck it in the fountain and watched his red insides spill out into the blue water. But he was making a mess and people were looking. He resolved instead to sit on the bench, gripping it at the root until it stopped. The blood kept on coming. After a while, he gave up holding his thumb upright and let it hang down to the floor like halal meat, hoping it would quicken the bleeding process. Then, with his head between his legs, and his thumb leaking on to the pavement, a primitive impulse had come over him. Slowly, with the dribbling blood, he wrote IQBAL from one chair leg to the next. Then, in an attempt to make it more permanent, he had gone over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone.

‘A great shame washed over me the moment I finished,’ he explained to his sons years later. ‘I ran from it into the night; I tried to run from myself. I knew I had been depressed in this country . . . but this was different. I ended up clinging on to the railings in Piccadilly Circus, kneeling and praying, weeping and praying, interrupting the buskers. Because I knew what it meant, this deed. It meant
I wanted to write my name on the world
. It meant
I presumed
. Like the Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wives, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are
becoming like them
. That’s what it meant.’

No, thought Millat, the first time he heard this, no, that’s not what it meant. It just meant
you’re nothing
. And looking at it now, Millat felt nothing but contempt. All his life he wanted a Godfather, and all he got was Samad. A faulty, broken, stupid, one-handed waiter of a man who had spent eighteen years in a strange land and made no more mark than this.
It just means you’re nothing
, repeated Millat, working his way through the premature vomit (girls drinking doubles since three o’clock) over to Havelock, to look Havelock in his stony eye.
It means you’re nothing and he’s something
. And that’s it. That’s why Pande hung from a tree while Havelock the executioner sat on a chaise longue in Delhi. Pande was no one and Havelock was someone. No need for library books and debates and reconstructions.
Don’t you see, Abba
? whispered Millat.
That’s it. That’s the long, long history of us and them. That’s how it was. But no more
.

Because Millat was here to finish it. To revenge it. To turn that history around. He liked to think he had a different attitude, a second generation attitude. If Marcus Chalfen was going to write his name all over the world, Millat was going to write it BIGGER. There would be no misspelling
his
name in the history books. There’d be no forgetting the dates and times. Where Pande misfooted he would step sure. Where Pande chose A, Millat would choose B.

Yes, Millat was stoned. And it may be absurd to us that one Iqbal can believe the breadcrumbs laid down by another Iqbal, generations before him, have not yet blown away in the breeze. But it really doesn’t matter what we believe. It seems it won’t stop the man who thinks this life is guided by the life he thinks he had before, or the gypsy who swears by the queens in her tarot pack. And it’s hard to change the mind of the high-strung woman who lays responsibility for all her actions at the feet of her mother, or the lonely guy who sits in a fold-up chair on a hill in the dead of night waiting for the little green men. Amidst the strange landscapes that have replaced our belief in the efficacy of the stars, Millat’s is not such odd terrain. He believes the decisions that are made, come back. He believes we live in circles. His is a simple, neat fatalism. What goes around comes around.

‘Ding, ding,’ said Millat out loud, tapping Havelock’s foot, before turning on his heel to make his hazy way to Chandos Street. ‘Round two.’

December 31st 1992
He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow
Eccles. ch. 1, v. 18

When Ryan Topps was asked to assemble the Lambeth Kingdom Hall’s
Thought for the Day
desk calendar for 1992, he took especial care to avoid the mistakes of his predecessors. Too often in the past, Ryan noted, when the assembler came to choose quotations for entirely fatuous, secular days, he let sentiment get the better of him, so that on Valentine’s Day 1991 we find
there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear
, I John 4:18, as if John were thinking of the paltry feeling that prompts people to send each other Milk Tray and cheap teddy bears rather than the love of Jesus Christ, which nothing surpasseth. Ryan took very much the opposite approach. On a day like New Year’s Eve, for example, when everybody was running around making their New Year resolutions, assessing their past year and plotting their success for the next, he felt it necessary to bring them to earth with a bump. He wanted to offer a little reminder that the world is cruel and pointless, all human endeavour ultimately meaningless, and no advancement in this world worth making besides gaining God’s favour and an entry ticket into the better half of the after-life. And having completed the calendar the previous year and forgotten much of what he’d done, he was pleasantly surprised — when he ripped off the 30th and looked at the crisp white page of the 31st — at just how effective the reminder was. No thought could have been more apt for the day ahead. No warning more propitious. He ripped it from the calendar, squeezed it into the tight leather of his trousers and told Mrs B. to get in the side car.

‘
He who would valiant be, ’gainst all disaster
!’ sang Mrs B. as they zipped along Lambeth Bridge, heading for Trafalgar Square. ‘
Let ’im in constancy, follow de master
! ’

Ryan made sure to signal a good minute before turning left so that the Kingdom ladies in the minibus behind wouldn’t get confused. He made a quick mental inventory of the things he’d put in the van: songbooks, instruments, banners,
Watchtower
leaflets. All present and correct. They had no actual tickets, but they would make their protest outside, in the cold, suffering like true Christians. Praise be to God! What a glorious day! All portents were good. He even had a dream last night that Marcus Chalfen was the devil himself and they were standing nose to nose. Ryan had said:
Myself and yourself are at war. There can be only one winner
. Then he had quoted the same piece of scripture at him (he couldn’t recall precisely what it was now, but it was something from Revelation) over and over and over again, until the devil/Marcus had become smaller and smaller, grown ears and a long forked tail, and finally scurried away, a tiny satanic mouse. As in this vision, so it would be in life. Ryan would remain unbending, unmoving, absolutely constant, and, in the end, the sinner would repent.

That was how Ryan approached all theological, practical and personal conflicts. He didn’t move, not an inch. But then, that had always been his talent; he had a mono-intelligence, an ability to hold on to a single idea with phenomenal tenacity, and he never found anything that suited it as well as the church of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Ryan thought in black and white. The problem with his antecedent passions — scootering and pop music — was there were always shades of grey (though possibly the two closest things in secular life to a Witness preacher are boys who send letters to the
New Musical Express
and those enthusiasts who pen articles for
Scooters Today
). There were always the difficult questions of whether one should dilute one’s appreciation of the Kinks with a little Small Faces, or whether Italy or Germany were the best manufacturers of spare engine parts. That life seemed so alien to him now he hardly remembered living it. He pitied those who suffered under the weight of such doubts and dilemmas. He pitied Parliament as he and Mrs B. scooted past it; he pitied it because the laws made in there were provisional where his were eternal . . .

‘
There’s no discouragement, shall make ’im once relent, his first avowed intent, to be a Pilgrim
! ’ trilled Mrs B. ‘
Who so besets him round, with dismal stories . . . do but themselves confound, his strength the more is . . 
.’

He relished it. He relished standing nose to nose with evil and saying, ‘You yourself: prove it to me. Go on,
prove it
.’ He felt he needed no arguments like the Muslims or the Jews. No convoluted proofs or defences. Just his faith. And nothing rational can fight faith. If
Star Wars
(secretly Ryan’s favourite film. The Good! The Evil! The Force! So
simple
. So
true
) is truly the sum of all archaic myths and the purest allegory of life (as Ryan believed it was), then faith, unadulterated, ignorant faith, is the biggest fuck-off light sabre in the universe.
Go on, prove it
. He did that every Sunday on the doorsteps and he would do precisely the same to Marcus Chalfen.
Prove to me that you are right. Prove to me that you are more right than God
. Nothing on earth would do it. Because Ryan didn’t believe in or care about anything on earth.

‘We almost there?’

Ryan squeezed Mrs B.’s frail hand and sped across the Strand, then wound his way round the back of the National Gallery.

‘
No foe shall stay his might, though he with giants fight, he will make good his right, to be a Pilgrim
! ’

Well said Mrs B.! The right to be a pilgrim! Who does not presume and yet inherits the earth! The right to be right, to teach others, to be just at all times because God has ordained that you will be, the right to go into strange lands and alien places and talk to the ignorant, confident that you speak nothing but the truth. The right to be always
right
. So much better than the rights he once held dear: the right to liberty, freedom of expression, sexual freedom, the right to smoke pot, the right to party, the right to ride a scooter sixty-five miles an hour on a main road without a helmet. So much more than all those, Ryan could claim. He exercised a right so rare, at this the fag-end of the century, as to be practically obsolete. The most fundamental right of all. The right to be the good guy.

On: 31/12/1992
London Transport Buses
Route 98
From: Willesden Lane
To: Trafalgar Square
At: 17:35
Fare: Adult Single £0.70
Retain Ticket for Inspection

Cor
(thought Archie)
they don’t make ’em like they used to
. That’s not to say they make them any
worse
. They just make them very, very
different
. So much
information
. The minute you tore one from the perforation you felt stuffed and pinned down by some all-seeing taxidermist, you felt freeze-framed in time, you felt
caught
. Didn’t use to be, Archie remembered. Many years ago he had a cousin, Bill, who worked the old 32 route through Oxford Street. Good sort, Bill. Smile and a nice word for everyone. Used to tear off a ticket from one of those chug-chug big-handled mechanical things (and where have they gone? Where’s the smudgy ink?) on the sly, like; no money passed over;
there you go, Arch
. That was Bill, always helping you out. Anyway, those tickets, the old ones, they didn’t tell you where you were
going
, much less where you came from. He couldn’t remember seeing any dates on them either, and there was certainly no mention of time. It was all different now, of course. All this information. Archie wondered why that was. He tapped Samad on the shoulder. He was sitting directly ahead of him, in the front-most seat of the top deck. Samad turned round, looked at the ticket he was being shown, listened to the question and gave Archie a funny look.

‘What is it,
precisely
, that you want to know?’

He looked a bit testy. Everyone was a little testy right now. There’d been a bit of a ding-dong earlier in the afternoon. Neena had demanded that they all go to the mouse thing, seeing as how Irie was involved and Magid was involved and the least they could do was go and support family because whatever they thought of it a lot of work had gone into it and young people need affirmation from their parents and she was going to go even if they weren’t and it was a pretty poor show if family couldn’t turn up for their big day and . . . well, it went on and on. And then the emotional fall-out. Irie burst into tears (What was wrong with Irie? She was always a bit weepy these days), Clara accused Neena of emotional blackmail, Alsana said she’d go if Samad went, and Samad said he’d spent New Year’s Eve at O’Connell’s for eighteen years and he wasn’t going to stop now. Archie, for his part, said he was buggered if he was going to listen to this racket all evening — he’d rather sit on a quiet hill by himself. They’d all looked at him queerly when he said that. Little did they know he was taking prophetic advice he’d received from Ibelgaufts the day before: