White Teeth (36 page)

“Is this true, Joshua?”

“Yes . . . umm, it started small, but now I believe I have a real problem. I don't
want
to deal drugs, obviously I don't, but it's like a
compulsion—
”

“Oh, for
God's
sake . . .”

“Now, Irie, you have to let Joshua have his say. His say is as valid as your say.”

Millat reached over to the headmaster's pocket and pulled out his heavy packet of tobacco. He poured the contents out onto the small coffee table.

“Oi. Chalfen. Ghetto-boy. Measure out an eighth.”

Joshua looked at the stinking mountain of brown. “A European eighth or an English eighth?”

“Could you just do as Millat suggests,” said the headmaster irritably, leaning forward in his chair to inspect the tobacco. “So we can settle this.”

Fingers shaking, Joshua drew a section of tobacco onto his palm and held it up. The headmaster brought Joshua's hand up under Millat's nose for inspection.

“Barely a five-pound draw,” said Millat scornfully. “I wouldn't buy shit from you.”

“OK, Joshua,” said the headmaster, putting the tobacco back in its pouch. “I think we can safely say the game's up. Even
I
knew that wasn't anywhere near an eighth. But it does concern me that you felt the need to lie and we're going to have to schedule a time to talk about that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In the meantime, I've talked to your parents, and in line with the school policy move
away
from behavior chastisement and
toward
constructive conduct management, they've very generously suggested a two-month program.”

“Program?”

“Every Tuesday and Thursday, you, Millat, and you, Irie, will go to Joshua's house and join him in a two-hour after-school study group split between math and biology, your weaker subjects and his stronger.”

Irie snorted. “You're not serious?”

“You know, I
am
serious. I think it's a really interesting idea. This way Joshua's strengths can be shared equally among you, and the two of you can go to a stable environment, and one with the added advantage of keeping you both off the streets. I've talked to your parents and they are happy with the, you know,
arrangement.
And what's really exciting is that Joshua's father is something of an eminent scientist and his mother is a horticulturalist, I believe, so, you know, you'll really get a lot out of it. You two have a lot of potential, but I feel you're getting caught up with things that really are damaging to that potential—whether that's family environment or personal hassles, I don't know—but this is a really good opportunity to escape those. I hope you'll see that it's more than punishment. It's constructive. It's people helping people. And I really hope you'll do this wholeheartedly, you know? This kind of thing is very much in the history, the spirit, the whole
ethos
of Glenard Oak, ever since Sir Glenard himself.”

The history, spirit, and ethos of Glenard Oak, as any Glenardian worth their salt knew, could be traced back to Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard (1842–1907), whom the school had decided to remember as its kindly Victorian benefactor. The official party line stated that Glenard had donated the money for the original building out of a devoted interest in the social improvement of the disadvantaged. Rather than
workhouse,
the official PTA booklet described it as a “shelter, workplace, and educational institute” used in its time by a mixture of English and Caribbean people. According to the PTA booklet, the founder of Glenard Oak was an educational philanthropist. But then, according to the PTA booklet, “post-class aberration consideration period” was a suitable replacement for the word
detention.

A more thorough investigation in the archives of the local Grange Library would reveal Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard as a successful colonial who had made a pretty sum in Jamaica, farming tobacco, or rather overseeing great tracts of land where tobacco was being farmed. At the end of twenty years of this, having acquired far more money than was necessary, Sir Edmund sat back in his impressive leather armchair and asked himself if there were not something he could
do.
Something to send him into his dotage cushioned by a feeling of goodwill and worthiness. Something for the people. The ones he could see from his window. Out there in the field.

For a few months Sir Edmund was stumped. Then, one Sunday, while taking a leisurely late afternoon stroll through Kingston, he heard a familiar sound that struck him differently. Godly singing. Hand-clapping. Weeping and wailing. Noise and heat and ecstatic movement coming from church after church and moving through the thick air of Jamaica like a choir invisible. Now,
there
was something, thought Sir Edmund. For, unlike many of his expatriate peers, who branded the singing caterwauling and accused it of being heathen, Sir Edmund had always been touched by the devotion of Jamaican Christians. He liked the idea of a jolly church, where one could sniff or cough or make a sudden movement without the vicar looking at one queerly. Sir Edmund felt certain that God, in all his wisdom, had never meant church to be a stiff-collared, miserable affair as it was in Tunbridge Wells, but rather a joyous thing, a singing and dancing thing, a foot-stamping hand-clapping thing. The Jamaicans understood this. Sometimes it seemed to be the only thing they
did
understand. Stopping for a moment outside one particularly vibrant church, Sir Edmund took the opportunity to muse upon this conundrum: the remarkable difference between a Jamaican's devotion to his God in comparison to his devotion toward his employer. It was a subject he'd had cause to consider many times in the past. Only this month, as he sat in his study trying to concentrate on the problem he had set himself, his wardens came to him with news of three strikes, various men found asleep or drugged while at work, and a whole collective of mothers (Bowden women among them) complaining about low pay, refusing to work. Now you see, that was the rub of it, right there. You could get a Jamaican to pray any hour of the day or night, they would roll into church for any date of religious note, even the most obscure—but if you took your eye off 'em for one minute in the tobacco fields, then work ground to a halt. When they worshiped they were full of energy, moving like jumping beans, bawling in the aisles . . . yet when they worked they were sullen and uncooperative. The question so puzzled him he had written a letter on the subject to the
Gleaner
earlier in the year inviting correspondence, but received no satisfactory replies. The more Sir Edmund thought about it, the more it became clear to him that the situation was quite the opposite in England. One was impressed by the Jamaican's faith but despairing of his work ethic and education. Vice versa, one admired the Englishman's work ethic and education but despaired of his poorly kept faith. And now, as Sir Edmund turned to go back to his estate, he realized that he was in a position to influence the situation—nay, more than that—transform it! Sir Edmund, who was a fairly corpulent man, a man who looked as if he might be hiding another man within him, practically skipped all the way home.

The very next day he wrote an electrifying letter to
The Times
and donated forty thousand pounds to a missionary group on the condition that it went toward a large property in London. Here Jamaicans could work side by side with Englishmen, packaging Sir Edmund's cigarettes and taking general instruction from the Englishmen in the evening. A small chapel was to be built as an annex to the main factory. And on Sundays, continued Sir Edmund, the Jamaicans were to take the Englishmen to church and show them what worship should look like.

The thing was built, and, after hastily promising them streets of gold, Sir Edmund shipped three hundred Jamaicans to North London. Two weeks later, from the other side of the world, the Jamaicans sent Glenard a telegraph confirming their safe arrival and Glenard sent one back suggesting a Latin motto be put underneath the plaque already bearing his name.
Laborare est Orare.
For a while, things went reasonably well. The Jamaicans were optimistic about England. They put the freezing climate to the back of their minds and were inwardly warmed by Sir Edmund's sudden enthusiasm and interest in their welfare. But Sir Edmund had always had difficulties retaining enthusiasm and interest. His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out, and
The Faith of Jamaicans
was soon replaced in the inverse sieve of his consciousness by other interests:
The Excitability of the Military Hindoo; The Impracticalities of the English Virgin; The Effect of Extreme Heat on the Sexual Proclivities of the Trinidadian.
For the next fifteen years, apart from fairly regular checks sent by Sir Edmund's clerk, the Glenard Oak factory heard nothing from him. Then, in the 1907 Kingston earthquake, Glenard was crushed to death by a toppled marble madonna while Irie's grandmother looked on. (These are old secrets. They will come out like wisdom teeth when the time is right.) The date was unfortunate. That very month he had planned to return to British shores to see how his long-neglected experiment was doing. A letter he had written, giving the details of his traveling plans, arrived at Glenard Oak around the same time a worm, having made the two-day passage through his brain, emerged from the poor man's left ear. But though a vermiculous meal was made of him, Glenard was saved a nasty ordeal, for his experiment was doing badly. The overheads involved in shipping damp, heavy tobacco to England were impractical from the start; when Sir Edmund's subsidies dried up six months previous, the business went under, the missionary group discreetly disappeared, and the Englishmen left to go to jobs elsewhere. The Jamaicans, unable to get work elsewhere, stayed, counting down the days until the food supplies ran out. They were, by now, entirely sensible of the subjunctive mood, the nine times table, the life and times of William the Conqueror, and the nature of an equilateral triangle, but they were hungry. Some died of that hunger, some were jailed for the petty crimes hunger prompts, many crept awkwardly into the East End and the English working class. A few found themselves seventeen years later at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, dressed up as Jamaicans in the Jamaican exhibit, acting out a horrible simulacrum of their previous existence—tin drums, coral necklaces—for they were English now, more English than the English by virtue of their disappointments. All in all, then, the headmaster was wrong: Glenard could not be said to have passed on any great edifying beacon to future generations. A legacy is not something you can give or take by choice, and there are no certainties in the sticky business of inheritance. Much though it may have dismayed him, Glenard's influence turned out to be personal, not professional or educational: it ran through people's blood and the blood of their families; it ran through three generations of immigrants who could feel both abandoned and hungry even when in the bosom of their families in front of a mighty feast; and it even ran through Irie Jones of Jamaica's Bowden clan, though she didn't know it (but then somebody should have told her to keep a backward eye on Glenard; Jamaica is a small place, you can walk around it in a day, and everybody who lived there rubbed up against everybody else at one time or another).

“Do we
really
have a choice?” asked Irie.

“You've been honest with me,” said the headmaster, biting his colorless lip, “and I want to be honest with you.”

“We don't have a choice.”

“Honestly, no. It's really that or two months of post-class aberration consideration periods. I'm afraid we have to please the people, Irie. And if we can't please all of the people all of the time, we can at least please some of—”

“Yeah, great.”

“Joshua's parents are really fascinating people, Irie. I think this whole experience is going to be really educational for you. Don't you think so, Joshua?”

Joshua beamed. “Oh yes, sir. I really think so.”

“And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guinea-pig project for a whole range of programs,” said the headmaster, thinking aloud. “Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football, et cetera. We could get
funding.
” At the magic word
funding,
the headmaster's sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids.

“Shit, man,” said Millat, shaking his head in disbelief. “I need a fag.”

“Halves,” said Irie, following him out.

“See you guys on Tuesday!” said Joshua.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Canines: The Ripping Teeth

If it is not too far-fetched a comparison, the sexual and cultural revolution we have experienced these past two decades is not a million miles away from the horticultural revolution that has taken place in our herbaceous borders and sunken beds. Where once we were satisfied with our biennials, poorly colored flowers thrusting weakly out of the earth and blooming a few times a year (if we were lucky), now we are demanding both variety and continuity in our flowers, the passionate colors of exotic blooms 365 days a year. Where once gardeners swore by the reliability of the self-pollinating plant, in which pollen is transferred from the stamen to the stigma of the same flower (autogamy), now we are more adventurous, positively singing the praises of cross-pollination, where pollen is transferred from one flower to another on the same plant (geitonogamy), or to a flower of another plant of the same species (xenogamy). The birds and the bees, the thick haze of pollen—these are all to be encouraged! Yes, self-pollination is the simpler and more certain of the two fertilization processes, especially for many species that colonize by copiously repeating the same parental strain. But a species cloning such uniform offspring runs the risk of having its entire population wiped out by a single evolutionary event. In the garden, as in the social and political arena, change should be the only constant. Our parents and our parents' petunias have learned this lesson the hard way. The March of History is unsentimental, tramping over a generation and its annuals with ruthless determination.

 

The fact is, cross-pollination produces more varied offspring, which are better able to cope with a changed environment. It is said cross-pollinating plants also tend to produce more and better-quality seeds. If my one-year-old son is anything to go by (a cross-pollination between a lapsed-Catholic horticulturalist feminist and an intellectual Jew!), then I can certainly vouch for the truth of this. Sisters, the bottom line is this: if we are to continue wearing flowers in our hair into the next decade, they must be hardy and ever at hand, something only the truly mothering gardener can ensure. If we wish to provide happy playgrounds for our children, and corners of contemplation for our husbands, we need to create gardens of diversity and interest. Mother Earth is great and plentiful, but even she requires the occasional helping hand!

—Joyce Chalfen, from
The New Flower Power,
pub. 1976, Caterpillar Press

Joyce Chalfen wrote
The New Flower Power
in a poky attic room overlooking her own rambling garden during the blistering summer of '76. It was an ingenuous beginning for a strange little book—more about relationships than flowers—that went on to sell well and steadily through the late seventies (not a coffee-table essential by any means, but a close look at any baby-boomer's bookshelves will reveal it lying dusty and neglected near those other familiars, Dr. Spock, Shirley Conran, a battered Women's Press copy of
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
by Alice Walker). The popularity of
The New Flower Power
surprised no one more than Joyce. It had practically written itself, taking only three months, most of which she spent dressed in a tiny T-shirt and a pair of briefs in an attempt to beat the heat, breast-feeding Joshua intermittently, almost absentmindedly, and thinking to herself, between easy-flowing paragraphs, that this was
exactly
the life she had hoped for. This was the future she dared to envisage when she first saw Marcus's intelligent little eyes giving her big white legs the once-over as she crossed the quad of his Oxbridge college, miniskirted, seven years earlier. She was one of those people who knew
immediately,
at first sight, even as her future spouse opened his mouth to say an initial, nervous hello.

A very happy marriage. That summer of '76, what with the heat and the flies and the endless melodies of ice-cream vans, things happened in a haze—sometimes Joyce had to pinch herself to make sure this was real. Marcus's office was down the hall on the right; twice a day she'd pace down the corridor, Joshua on one substantial hip, nudging open the door with the other, just to check he was still there,
that he really existed,
and, leaning lustily over the desk, she'd grab a kiss from her favorite genius, hard at work on his peculiar helixes, his letters and numbers. She liked to pull him away from all that and show him the latest remarkable thing that Joshua had done or learned; sounds, letter recognition, coordinated movement, imitation:
just like you,
she'd say to Marcus,
good genes,
he'd say to her, patting her behind and luxurious thighs, weighing each breast in his hand, patting her small belly, generally admiring his English Pear, his earth goddess . . . and then she'd be satisfied, padding back to her office like a big cat with a cub in its jaws, covered in a light layer of happy sweat. In an aimless, happy way, she could hear herself murmuring, an oral version of the toilet-door doodles of adolescents: Joyce and Marcus, Marcus and Joyce.

Marcus was also writing a book that summer of '76. Not so much a book (in Joyce's sense) as a study. It was called
Chimeric Mice: An Evaluation and Practical Exploration of the Work of Brinster (1974) Concerning the Embryonic Fusion of Mouse Strains at the Eight-cell Stage of Development.
Joyce had studied biology in college, but she didn't attempt to touch the many-paged manuscript that was growing like a molehill at her husband's feet. Joyce knew her limitations. She had no great desire to read Marcus's books. It was enough just to know they were being written, somehow. It was enough to know the man she had married was writing them. Her husband didn't just make money, he didn't just make things, or sell things that other people had made, he
created
beings. He went to the edges of his God's imagination and made mice Yahweh could not conceive of: mice with rabbit genes, mice with webbed feet (or so Joyce imagined, she didn't ask), mice who year after year expressed more and more eloquently Marcus's designs: from the hit-or-miss process of selective breeding, to the chimeric fusion of embryos, and then the rapid developments that lay beyond Joyce's ken and in Marcus's future—DNA microinjection, retrovirus-mediated transgenesis (for which he came within an inch of the Nobel, 1987), embryonic stem cell–mediated gene transfer—all processes by which Marcus manipulated ova, regulated the over- or under-expression of a gene, planting instruc-tions and imperatives in the germ line to be realized in physical characteristics. Creating mice whose very bodies did exactly what Marcus told them. And always with humanity in mind—a cure for cancer, cerebral palsy, Parkinson's—always with the firm belief in the
perfectibility
of all life, in the possibility of making it more efficient, more logical (for illness was, to Marcus, nothing more than bad logic on the part of the genome, just as capitalism was nothing more than bad logic on the part of the social animal), more effective, more
Chalfenist
in the way it proceeded. He expressed contempt equally toward the animal-rights maniacs—horrible people Joyce had to shoo from the door with a curtain pole when a few extremists caught wind of Marcus's dealings in mice—or the hippies or the tree people or anyone who failed to grasp the simple fact that social and scientific progress were brothers-in-arms. It was the Chalfen way, handed down the family for generations; they had a congenital inability to suffer fools gladly or otherwise. If you were arguing with a Chalfen, trying to put a case for these strange French men who think truth is a function of language, or that history is interpretive and science metaphorical, the Chalfen in question would hear you out quietly, then wave his hand, dismissive, feeling no need to dignify such bunkum with a retort. Truth was truth to a Chalfen. And Genius was genius.
Marcus created beings.
And Joyce was his wife, industrious in creating smaller versions of Marcus.

Fifteen years later and Joyce would still challenge anyone to show her a happier marriage than hers. Three more children had followed Joshua: Benjamin (fourteen), Jack (twelve), and Oscar (six), bouncy, curly-haired boys, all articulate and amusing.
The Inner Life of Houseplants
(1984) and a college chair for Marcus had seen them through the eighties' boom and bust, financing an extra bathroom, a conservatory, and life's pleasures: old cheese, good wine, winters in Florence. Now there were two new works-in-progress:
The Secret Passions of the Climbing Rose
and
Transgenic Mice: A Study of the Inherent Limitations of DNA Microinjection (Gordon and Ruddle, 1981
)
in Comparison with Embryonic Stem (ES) Cell–mediated Gene Transfer (Gossler et al., 1986)
. Marcus was also working on a “pop science” book, against his better judgment, a collaboration with a novelist that he hoped would finance at least the first two children well into their university years. Joshua was a star math pupil, Benjamin wanted to be a geneticist just like his father, Jack's passion was psychiatry, and Oscar could checkmate his father's king in fifteen moves. And all this despite the fact that the Chalfens had sent their kids to Glenard Oak, daring to take the ideological gamble their peers guiltily avoided, those nervous liberals who shrugged their shoulders and coughed up the cash for a private education. And not only were they bright children, they were happy, not hot-housed in any way. Their only after-school activity (they despised sports) was the individual therapy five times a week at the hands of an old-fashioned Freudian called Marjorie who did Joyce and Marcus (separately) on weekends. It might appear extreme to non-Chalfens, but Marcus had been brought up with a strong respect for therapy (in his family therapy had long supplanted Judaism) and there was no arguing with the result. Every Chalfen proclaimed themselves mentally healthy and emotionally stable. The children had their oedipal complexes early and in the right order, they were all fiercely heterosexual, they adored their mother and admired their father, and, unusually, this feeling only increased as they reached adolescence. Rows were rare, playful, and only ever over political or intellectual topics (the importance of anarchy, the need for higher taxes, the problem of South Africa, the soul/body dichotomy), upon which they all agreed anyway.

The Chalfens had no friends. They interacted mainly with the Chalfen extended family (the
good genes
that were so often referred to: two scientists, one mathematician, three psychiatrists, and a young cousin working for the Labour Party). Under sufferance and on public holidays, they visited Joyce's long-rejected lineage, the Connor clan,
Daily Mail
letter-writers who even now could not disguise their distaste for Joyce's Israelite love-match. Bottom line: the Chalfens didn't need other people. They referred to themselves as nouns, verbs, and occasionally adjectives:
It's the Chalfen way, And then he came out with a real Chalfenism, He's Chalfening again, We need to be a bit more Chalfenist about this.
Joyce challenged anyone to show her a happier family, a more Chalfenist family than theirs.

And yet, and yet . . . Joyce pined for the golden age when she was the linchpin of the Chalfen family. When people couldn't eat without her. When people couldn't dress without her assistance. Now even Oscar could make himself a snack. Sometimes there seemed nothing to improve, nothing to cultivate; recently she found herself pruning the dead sections from her rambling rose, wishing she could find some fault of Joshua's worthy of attention, some secret trauma of Jack's or Benjamin's, a perversion in Oscar. But they were all perfect. Sometimes, when the Chalfens sat round their Sunday dinner, tearing apart a chicken until there was nothing left but a tattered ribcage, gobbling silently, speaking only to retrieve the salt or the pepper—the boredom was
palpable.
The century was drawing to a close and the Chalfens were bored. Like clones of each other, their dinner table was an exercise in mirrored perfection, Chalfenism and all its principles reflecting itself infinitely, bouncing from Oscar to Joyce, Joyce to Joshua, Joshua to Marcus, Marcus to Benjamin, Benjamin to Jack ad nauseam across the meat and veg. They were still the same remarkable family they always had been. But having cut all ties with their Oxbridge peers—judges, TV execs, advertisers, lawyers, actors, and other frivolous professions Chalfenism sneered at—there was no one left to admire Chalfenism itself. Its gorgeous logic, its compassion, its intellect. They were like wild-eyed passengers of the
Mayflower
with no rock in sight. Pilgrims and prophets with no strange land. They were bored, and none more than Joyce.

To fill long days left alone in the house (Marcus commuted to his college), Joyce's boredom often drove her to flick through the Chalfens' enormous supply of delivered magazines (
New Marxism, Living Marxism, New Scientist, Oxfam Report, Third World Action, Anarchist's Journal
) and feel a yearning for the bald Romanians or beautiful pot-bellied Ethiopians—yes, she knew it was
awful,
but there it was—children crying out from glossy paper,
needing
her. She needed to be needed. She'd be the first to admit it. She
hated
it, for example, when one after the other her children, pop-eyed addicts of breast milk, finally kicked the habit. She usually stretched it to two or three years, and, in the case of Joshua, four, but though the supply never ended, the demand did. She lived in dread of the inevitable moment when they moved from soft drugs to hard, the switch from calcium to the sugared delights of Ribena. It was when she finished breast-feeding Oscar that she threw herself back into gardening, back into the warm mulch where tiny things relied on her.

Then one fine day Millat Iqbal and Irie Jones walked reluctantly into her life. She was in the back garden at the time, tearfully examining her “Garter Knight” delphiniums (heliotrope and cobalt-blue with a jet-black center, like a bullet hole in the sky) for signs of thrip—a nasty pest that had already butchered her bocconia. The doorbell rang. Tilting her head back, Joyce waited till she could hear the slippered feet of Marcus running down the stairs from his study and then, satisfied that he would answer it, delved back into the thick. With raised eyebrow she inspected the mouthy double blooms which stood to attention along the delphinium's eight-foot spine.
Thrip,
she said to herself out loud, acknowledging the dog-eared mutation on every other flower;
thrip,
she repeated, not without pleasure, for it would need seeing to now, and might even give rise to a book or at least a chapter;
thrip.
Joyce knew a thing or two about thrip: