White Teeth (43 page)

But if you are to rule a land that is not yours, you get used to ignoring exceptions; Swettenham told him frankly there were no spaces on his boats for black whores or livestock. Durham, hurt and vengeful, inferred that Swettenham had no power of his own, that the arrival of American ships was proof of that, and then, as a parting shot, mentioned the two American soldiers he had seen on British soil without permission, presumptuous upstarts on land they didn't own.
Does the baby go out with the bathwater,
demanded Durham, face red as a pillar-box, resorting back to the religion of possession that was his birthright,
is this not still our country? Is our authority so easily toppled by a few rumbles in the ground?

The rest is that terrible thing: history. As Swettenham ordered the American boats to return to Cuba, Marlene came running back with Ambrosia's reply. One sentence torn from Job:
I will fetch my knowledge from afar.
(Hortense kept the Bible it was ripped from and liked to say that from that day forth no Bowden woman took lessons from anyone but the Lord.) Marlene handed the sentence to Durham, and ran off into the parade ground happy as a clam, in search of her mother and father who were injured and weak, on their last legs and waiting for the boats like thousands of others. She wanted to tell them the good news, what Ambrosia had told her:
It soon come, it soon come.
The boats? Marlene had asked, and Ambrosia had nodded, though she was too busy with prayer, too ecstatic to hear the question.
It soon come, it soon come,
she said, repeating what she had learned from Revelation; what Durham and then Glenard and then Mrs. Brenton had taught her in their different ways; what the fire and earth-cracks and thunder attested to.
It soon come,
she told Marlene, who took her word for gospel. A little English education can be a dangerous thing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

More English Than the English

In the great tradition of English education, Marcus and
Magid became pen pals.
How
they became pen pals was a matter of fierce debate (Alsana
blamed Millat, Millat claimed Irie had slipped Marcus the
address, Irie said Joyce had sneaked a peek in her address
book—the Joyce explanation was correct), but either way
they were, and from March '91 onward letters passed
between them with a frequency belied only by the chronic
inadequacies of the Bengali postal system. Their combined
output was incredible. Within two months they had filled a
volume at least as thick as Keats's and by four were fast
approaching the length and quantity of the true epistophiles,
St. Paul, Clarissa, Disgruntled from Tunbridge Wells. Because
Marcus made copies of all his own letters, Irie had to
rearrange her filing system to provide a drawer solely devoted
to their correspondence. She split the filing system in two,
choosing to file by author primarily, then chronologically,
rather than let simple dates rule the roost. Because this was
all about people. People making a connection across continents,
across seas. She made two stickers to separate the wads of
material. The first said:
From Marcus to Magid.
The second said:
From Magid to Marcus.

An unpleasant mixture of jealousy and animosity led Irie to
abuse her secretarial role. She pinched small collections of
letters that wouldn't be missed, took them home, slipped
them from their sheaths, and then, after close readings that
would have shamed F. R. Leavis, carefully returned them to
their file. What she found in those brightly stamped airmail
envelopes brought her no joy. Her mentor had a new
protégé. Marcus and Magid. Magid and Marcus. It even
sounded
better. The way Watson and Crick sounded better than Watson,
Crick, and Wilkins.

John Donne said
more than kisses, letters mingle souls
and so they do; Irie was alarmed to find such a commingling as
this, such a successful merging of two people from ink and
paper despite the distance between them. No love letters could
have been more ardent. No passion more fully returned, right
from the very start. The first few letters were filled with the
boundless joy of mutual recognition: tedious for the sneaky
mailroom boys of Dhaka, bewildering to Irie, fascinating to the
writers themselves:

It is as if I had always known you; if I were a Hindu I
would suspect we met in some former life.
—Magid.

You think like me. You're precise. I like that.
—Marcus.

You put it so well and speak my thoughts better than I ever
could. In my desire to study the law, in my longing to improve
the lot of my poor country—which is victim to every
passing whim of God, every hurricane and flood—in these
aims, what instinct is fundamental? What is the root, the dream
that ties these ambitions together? To make sense of the world.
To eliminate the random.
—Magid.

And then there was the mutual admiration. That lasted a
good few months:

What you are working on, Marcus—these remarkable
mice—it is nothing less than revolutionary. When you
delve into the mysteries of inherited characteristics, surely
you go straight to the soul of the human condition as
dramatically and fundamentally as any poet, except you are
armed with something essential the poet does not have: the
truth. I am in awe of visionary ideas and visionaries. I am in
awe of such a man as Marcus Chalfen. I call it an honor to be
able to call him friend. I thank you from the bottom of my
heart for taking such an inexplicable and glorious interest in
my family's welfare.
—Magid.

 

It is incredible to me, the bloody fuss people make about
an idea like cloning. Cloning, when it happens (and I can tell
you it will be sooner rather than later) is simply delayed
twinning, and never in my life have I come across a couple of
twins who prove more decidedly the argument against genetic
determinism than Millat and yourself. In every area in which he
lacks, you excel—I wish I could turn that sentence around
for a vice-versa effect, but the hard truth is he excels in
nothing apart from charming the elastic waistband off my
wife's panties.
—Marcus.

And finally, there were the plans for the future, plans
made blindly and with amorous speed, like the English nerd who
married a 266-pound Mormon from Minnesota because she sounded
sexy on the chat line:

 

You must get to England as soon as possible, early
'93 at the very latest. I'll stump up some of the
cash myself if I have to. Then we can enroll you in the local
school, get the exams over and done with and send you off
posthaste to whichever of the dreaming spires tickles your
fancy (though obviously there's only one real choice) and
while you're at it you can hurry up and get older, get to
the bar and provide me with the kind of lawyer I need to fight
in my corner. My FutureMouse
^©
needs a staunch defender. Hurry up, old chap. I haven't
got all millennium.
—Marcus.

The last letter, not the last letter they wrote but the
last one Irie could stomach, included this final paragraph from
Marcus:

Well, things are the same round here except that my files
are in excellent order, thanks to Irie. You'll like
her: she's a bright girl and she has the most
tremendous breasts . . . Sadly, I don't hold out much
hope for her aspirations in the field of “hard
science,” more specifically in my own biotechnology,
which she appears to have her heart set on . . . she's
sharp in a way, but it's the menial work, the hard
grafting, that she's good at—she'd make a
lab assistant maybe, but she hasn't any head for the
concepts, no head at all. She could try medicine, I suppose,
but even there you need a little bit more chutzpah than
she's got . . . so it might have to be dentistry for
our Irie (she could fix her own teeth at least), an honest
profession no doubt, but one I hope you'll be avoiding
. . .

In the end, Irie wasn't offended. She had the
sniffles for a while, but they soon passed. She was like her
mother, like her father—a great reinventor of herself, a
great make-doer. Can't be a war correspondent? Be a
cyclist. Can't be a cyclist? Fold paper. Can't sit
next to Jesus with the 144,000? Join the Great Crowd.
Can't stand the Great Crowd? Marry Archie. Irie
wasn't so upset. She just thought, right: dentistry.
I'll be a dentist. Dentistry. Right.

And meanwhile Joyce was below deck trying to sort out
Millat's problems with white women. Which were numerous.
All women, of every shade, from midnight-black to albino, were
Millat's. They slipped him phone numbers, they gave him
blow jobs in public places, they crossed crowded bars to buy
him a drink, they pulled him into taxis, they followed him
home. Whatever it was—the Roman nose, the eyes like a
dark sea, the skin like chocolate, the hair like curtains of
black silk, or maybe just his pure, simple stink—it sure
as hell worked. Now, don't be jealous. There's no
point. There have always been and always will be people who
simply exude sex (who breathe it, who
sweat
it). A few examples from thin air: the young Brando, Madonna,
Cleopatra, Pam Grier, Valentino, a girl called Tamara who lives
opposite the London Hippodrome, right slap in the middle of
town; Imran Khan, Michelangelo's
David.
You can't fight that kind of marvelous indiscriminate
power, for it is not always symmetry or beauty per se that does
it (Tamara's nose is ever so slightly bent), and there
are no means by which you can gain it. Surely the oldest
American sentence is relevant here, pertinent to matters
economic, politic, and romantic:
you either got it or you don't.
And Millat had it. In spades. He had the choice of the known
world, of every luscious female from a size 8 to a 28, Thai or
Tongan, from Zanzibar to Zurich, his vistas of available and
willing pussy extending in every direction as far as the eye
could see. One might reasonably expect a man with such a
natural gift to dip into the tun-dishes of a great variety of
women, to experiment far and wide. And yet Millat Iqbal's
main squeezes were almost all exclusively size 10 white
Protestant women aged fifteen to twenty-eight, living in and
around the immediate vicinity of West Hampstead.

Initially this neither bothered Millat nor felt unusual to
him. His school was full of girls who fitted the general
description. By the law of averages—as he was the only
guy worth shagging in Glenard Oak—he was going to end up
shagging a large proportion of them. And with Karina Cain, the
present amour, things were really quite pleasant. He was only
cheating on her with three other women (Alexandra Andrusier,
Polly Houghton, Rosie Dew), and this was a personal record.
Besides which, Karina Cain was different. It wasn't just
sex with Karina Cain. He liked her and she liked him, and she
had a great sense of humor, which felt like a miracle, and she
looked after him when he was down and he looked after her too,
in his own way, bringing her flowers and stuff. It was both the
law of averages, and a lucky, random thing that had made him
happier than he usually was. So that was that.

Except KEVIN didn't see it that way. One evening,
after Karina had dropped him off at a KEVIN meeting in her
mother's Renault, Brother Hifan and Brother Tyrone
crossed Kilburn Town Hall like two man-mountains, determined to
deliver themselves at the feet of Muhammed. They loomed
large.

“Hey, Hifan, my speed, Tyrone, my man, why the long
faces?”

But Brothers Hifan and Tyrone wouldn't tell him why
the long faces. Instead they gave him a leaflet. It was called:
Who Is Truly Free? The Sisters of KEVIN or the Sisters of
Soho?
Millat thanked them cordially for it. Then he stuffed it in the
bottom of his bag.

How was that?
they asked him the following week.
Was it a good read, Brother Millat?
Truth was, Brother Millat hadn't got round to reading it
(and to be honest, he preferred leaflets called things like
The Big American Devil: How the United States Mafia Rules
the World
or
Science Versus the Creator: No Contest
), but he could see it seemed to matter to Brother Tyrone and
Brother Hifan, so he said he had. They looked pleased and gave
him another one. This one was called:
Lycra Liberation? Rape and the Western World.

“Is light broaching your darkness, Brother
Millat?” asked Brother Tyrone eagerly, at the following
Wednesday's meeting. “Are things becoming
clearer?”

“Clearer” didn't seem to Millat to be
exactly the right adjective. Earlier in the week he had set
aside some time, read both leaflets, and felt peculiar ever
since. In three short days Karina Cain, a darling of a girl, a
truly good sort who never really irritated him (on the
contrary, who made him feel happy! Chuffed!), had irritated him
more than she had managed in the whole year they'd been
shagging. And no ordinary irritation. A deep unsettleable
unsolvable irritation, like an itch on a phantom limb. And it
was not clear to him why.

“Yeah, man, Tyrone,” said Millat with a nod and
a wide grin. “Crystal, mate, crystal.”

Brother Tyrone nodded back. Millat was pleased to see he
looked pleased. It was like being in the real-life Mafia or a
Bond movie or something. Them both in their black and white
suits, nodding at each other.
I understand we understand each other.

“This is Sister Aeyisha,” said Brother Tyrone,
straightening Millat's green bow tie and pushing him
toward a tiny, beautiful black girl, with almond eyes and high
cheekbones. “She's an African goddess.”

“Really?” said Millat, impressed.
“Whereabouts you from?”

“Clapham North,” said Sister Aeyisha, with a
shy smile.

Millat clapped his hands together and stamped his foot.
“Oh, man, you
must
know the Redback Café?”

Sister Aeyisha the African goddess lit up. “
Yeah,
man, that was my place from way back when! You go
there?”

“All the time! Wicked place. Well, maybe I'll
see you round them gates sometime. It was nice to meet you,
Sister. Brother Tyrone, I've got to chip, man, my
gal's waiting for me.”

Brother Tyrone looked disappointed. Just before Millat
left, he pressed another leaflet into his hand and continued
holding his hand until the paper got damp between their two
palms.

“You could be a great leader of men, Millat,”
said Brother Tyrone (why did everybody keep telling him that?),
looking first at him, then at Karina Cain, the curve of her
breasts peeping over the car door, beeping her car horn in the
street. “But at the moment you are half the man. We need
the whole man.”

“Yeah, wicked, thanks, you too, Brother,” said
Millat, looking briefly at the leaflet, and pushing open the
doors. “Later.”

“What's that?” asked Karina Cain,
reaching over to open the passenger door and spotting the
slightly soggy paper in his hand.

Instinctively, Millat put the leaflet straight in his
pocket. Which was weird. He usually showed Karina everything.
Now just her asking him grated somehow. And what was she
wearing? Same top she always wore. Except wasn't it
shorter? Weren't the nipples clearer, more
deliberate?

He said, “Nothing.” Grumpily. But it
wasn't nothing. It was the final leaflet in the KEVIN
series on Western women.
The Right to Bare: The Naked Truth About Western
Sexuality.