White Teeth (55 page)

“Bloody hell,” said Archibald, visibly chuffed. “What are the chances of that, eh?”

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer
quantity
of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the
place
be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left in North London. But Joyce did her best with what she had. First she went to Clara. In Clara's present seat of learning, a red-brick university, south-west by the Thames, there was a room she used for study on Friday afternoons. A thoughtful teacher had loaned her the key. Always empty between three and six. Contents: one blackboard, several tables, some chairs, two Anglepoise lamps, an overhead projector, a filing cabinet, a computer. Nothing older than twelve years, Clara could guarantee that. The university itself was only twelve years old. Built on empty wasteland—no Indian burial grounds, no Roman viaducts, no interred alien spacecraft, no foundations of a long-gone church. Just earth. As neutral a place as anywhere. Clara gave Joyce the key and Joyce gave it to Irie.

“But why me? I'm not involved.”

“Exactly, dear. And I'm too involved. But you are perfect. Because you know him but you don't
know
him,” said Joyce cryptically. She passed Irie her long winter coat, some gloves, and a hat of Marcus's with a ludicrous bobble on the top. “And because you love him, though he doesn't love you.”

“Yeah, thanks, Joyce. Thanks for reminding me.”

“Love is the reason, Irie.”

“No, Joyce, love's not the fucking reason.” Irie was standing on the Chalfen doorstep, watching her own substantial breath in the freezing night air. “It's a four-letter word that sells life insurance and hair conditioner. It's fucking
cold
out here. You owe me one.”

“Everybody owes everybody,” agreed Joyce and closed the door.

Irie stepped out into streets she'd known her whole life, along a route she'd walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the
purest definition
of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you first jumped in a pile of dead leaves. She was walking it right now. With every fresh crunch came the memory of previous crunches. She was permeated by familiar smells: wet woodchip and gravel around the base of the tree, newly laid turd underneath the cover of soggy leaves. She was moved by these sensations. Despite opting for a life of dentistry, she had not yet lost all of the poetry in her soul, that is, she could still have the odd Proustian moment, note layers upon layers, though she often experienced them in periodontal terms. She got a twinge—as happens with a sensitive tooth, or in a “phantom tooth,” when the nerve is exposed—she felt a
twinge
walking past the garage where she and Millat, aged thirteen, had passed one hundred and fifty pennies over the counter, stolen from an Iqbal jam jar, in a desperate attempt to buy a packet of fags. She felt an
ache
(like a severe malocclusion, the pressure of one tooth upon another) when she passed the park where they had cycled as children, where they smoked their first joint, where he had kissed her once in the middle of a storm. Irie wished she could give herself over to these past-present fictions: wallow in them, make them sweeter, longer, particularly the kiss. But she had in her hand a cold key, and surrounding her lives that were stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueler than fiction, and with consequences fiction can never have. She didn't
want
to be involved in the long story of those lives, but she
was,
and she found herself dragged forward by the hair to their denouement, through the High Road
—Mali's Kebabs, Mr. Cheungs, Raj's, Malkovich Bakeries—
she could reel them off blindfold; and then down under pigeon-shit bridge and that long wide road that drops into Gladstone Park as if it's falling into a green ocean. You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times before, and rang the doorbell. Past tense, future imperfect.

Upstairs, in his bedroom, Millat had spent the past fifteen minutes trying to get his head around Brother Hifan's written instructions concerning the act of prostration (leaflet:
Correct Worship
):

 

SAJDA:
prostration. In the sajda, fingers must be closed, pointing toward the qibla in line with the ears, and the head must be between hands. It is fard to put the forehead on something clean, such as a stone, some earth, wood, cloth, and it is said (by savants) that it is wajib to put the nose down, too. It is not permissible to put only the nose on the ground without a good excuse. It is makruh to put only the forehead on the ground. In the sajda you must say Subhana rabbiyal-ala at least thrice. The Shiis say that it is better to make the sajda on a brick made from the clay of Karbala. It is either fard or wajib to put two feet or at least one toe of each foot on the ground. There are also some savants who say that it is sunnat. That is, if two feet are not put on the ground, namaz will either not be accepted or it will become makruh. If, during the sajda, the forehead, nose, or feet are raised from the ground for a short while, it will cause no harm. In the sajda, it is sunnat to bend the toes and turn them toward the qibla. It is written in Radd-ul-mukhtar that those who say

That's as far as he got, and there were three more pages. He was in a cold sweat from trying to recall all that was halal or haraam, fard or sunnat, makruh-tahrima (prohibited with much stress) or makruh-tanzihi (prohibited, but to a lesser degree). At a loss, he had ripped off his T-shirt, tied a series of belts at angles over his spectacular upper body, stood in front of the mirror, and practiced a different, easier routine, one he knew in intimate detail:

 

You l
ookin' at me? You lookin' at me?

Well, who the fuck else are you looking at, huh?

I can't see anybody else in here.

You loo
kin' at me?

He was in the swing of it, revealing his invisible sliding guns and knives to the wardrobe door, when Irie walked in.

“Yes,” said Irie, as he stood there sheepish. “I'm looking at you.”

Quickly and quietly she explained to him about the neutral place, about the room, about the date, about the time. She made her own personal plea for compromise, peace, and caution (everybody was doing it) and then she came up close and put the cold key in his warm hand. Almost without meaning to, she touched his chest. Just at the point between two belts where his heart, constricted by the leather, beat so hard she felt it in her ear. Lacking experience in this field, it was natural that Irie should mistake the palpitations that come with blood restriction for smoldering passion. As for Millat, it had been a very long time since anybody had touched him or he had touched anybody. Add to that the touch of memory, the touch of ten years of love unreturned, the touch of a long, long history—the result was inevitable.

Before long their arms were involved, their legs were involved, their lips were involved, and they were tumbling onto the floor, involved at the groin (hard to get more involved than that), making love on a prayer mat. But then as suddenly and feverishly as it had begun it was over; they released each other in horror for different reasons, Irie springing back into a naked huddle by the door, embarrassed and ashamed because she could see how much he regretted it; and Millat grabbing his prayer mat and pointing it toward the Kaba, ensuring the mat was no higher than floor level, resting on no books or shoes, his fingers closed and pointing to the quibla in line with his ears, ensuring both forehead and nose touched the floor, with two feet firmly on the ground but ensuring the toes were not bent, prostrating himself in the direction of the Kaba, but not
for
the Kaba, but for Allahu ta'ala alone. He made sure he did all these things perfectly, while Irie wept and dressed and left. He made sure he did all these things perfectly because he believed he was being watched by the great camera in the sky. He made sure he did all these things perfectly because they were fard and “he who wants to change worships becomes a disbeliever” (leaflet:
The Straight Path
).

Hell hath no fury
et cetera, et cetera.
Irie walked hot-faced from the Iqbal house and headed straight for the Chalfens with revenge on her mind. But not against Millat. Rather in
defense
of Millat, for she had always been his defender, his blacky-white knight. You see, Millat did not love her. And she thought Millat didn't love her because he couldn't. She thought he was so damaged, he couldn't love anybody anymore. She wanted to find whoever had
damaged
him like this, damaged him so terribly; she wanted to find whoever had made him
unable to love her.

It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, “Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't
deal
with love. He was too fucked up to know
how
to love me.” Now, how did that happen? What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking,
malfunctioning
in some way? And particularly if they replace us with a god, or a weeping madonna, or the face of Christ in a ciabatta roll—then we call them crazy. Deluded. Regressive. We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us, more worthy of worship. Greetings cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Millat didn't love Irie, and Irie was sure there must be somebody she could blame for that. Her brain started ticking over. What was the root cause? Millat's feelings of inadequacy. What was the root cause of Millat's feelings of inadequacy? Magid. He had been born second because of Magid. He was the lesser son because of Magid.

Joyce opened the door to her and Irie marched straight upstairs, maliciously determined to make Magid the second son for once, this time by twenty-five minutes. She grabbed him, kissed him, and made love to him angrily and furiously, without conversation or affection. She rolled him around, tugged at his hair, dug what fingernails she had into his back, and when he came she was gratified to note it was with a little sigh as if something had been taken from him. But she was wrong to think this a victory. It was simply because he knew immediately where she had been, why she was here, and it saddened him. For a long time they lay in silence together, naked, the autumn light disappearing from the room with every minute that passed.

“It seems to me,” said Magid finally, as the moon became clearer than the sun, “that you have tried to love a man as if he were an island and you were shipwrecked and you could mark the land with an
X.
It seems to me it is too late in the day for all that.”

Then he gave her a kiss on the forehead that felt like a baptism and she wept like a baby.

3:00 p.m., November 5, 1992. The brothers meet (at
last
) in a blank room after a gap of eight years and find that their genes, those prophets of the future, have reached different conclusions. Millat is astounded by the differences. The nose, the line of the jaw, the eyes, the hair. His brother is a stranger to him and he tells him so.

“Only because you wish me to be,” says Magid with a crafty look.

But Millat is blunt, not interested in riddles, and in a single shot asks and answers his own question. “So you're going through with it, yeah?”

Magid shrugs. “It is not mine to stop or start, brother, but yes, I intend to help where I can. It is a great project.”

“It is an abomination” (leaflet:
The Sanctity of Creation
).

Millat pulls out a chair from one of the desks and sits on it backward, like a crab in a trap, legs and arms splayed either side.

“I see it rather as correcting the Creator's mistakes.”

“The Creator doesn't make mistakes.”

“So you mean to continue?”

“You're damn right.”

“And so do I.”

“Well, that's it, then, isn't it? It's already been decided. KEVIN will do whatever is necessary to stop you and your kind. And that's the fucking end of it.”

But contrary to Millat's understanding, this is no movie and there is no fucking end to it, just as there is no fucking beginning to it. The brothers begin to argue. It escalates in moments, and they make a mockery of that idea, a neutral place; instead they cover the room with history—past, present, and future history (for there is such a thing)—they take what was blank and smear it with the stinking shit of the past like excitable, excremental children. They cover this neutral room in themselves. Every gripe, the earliest memories, every debated principle, every contested belief.

Millat arranges the chairs to demonstrate the vision of the solar system which is so clearly and remarkably described in the Qur
n, centuries before Western science (leaflet:
The Qur
n and the Cosmos
); Magid draws Pande's parade ground on one blackboard with a detailed reconstruction of the possible path of bullets, and on the other board a diagram depicting a restriction enzyme cutting neatly through a sequence of nucleotides; Millat uses the computer as television, a chalk eraser as the picture of Magid-and-goat, then single-handedly impersonates every dribbling babba, great-aunt, and cousin's accountant who came that year for the blasphemous business of worshiping an icon; Magid utilizes the overhead projector to illuminate an article he has written, taking his brother point by point through his argument, defending the patents of genetically altered organisms; Millat uses the filing cabinet as a substitute for another one he despised, fills it with imaginary letters between a scientist Jew and an unbelieving Muslim; Magid puts three chairs together and shines two Anglepoise lamps and now there are two brothers in a car, shivering and huddled together until a few minutes later they are separated forever and a paper plane takes off.