White Teeth (59 page)

“As I see it, what we have to impress upon people is this idea of setting a precedent. You know, the ‘What next?' kind of argument—and I understand Kenny's POV, that that's way too simplistic a take on it—but I have to argue, I think it's necessary, and we'll put it to a vote in a minute. Is that all right, Kenny? If I can just get on . . . right? Right. Where was I . . . precedent. Because, if it can be argued that the animal under experimentation is owned by any group of people, i.e., it is not a cat but effectively an
invention
with catlike qualities, then that very cleverly and very dangerously short-circuits the work of animal rights groups and that leads to a pretty fucking
scary
vision of the future. Umm . . . I want to bring Crispin in here, to talk a little more about that.”

Of course the cunt of it was, Joely was married to Crispin. And the double-cunt of it was, theirs was a marriage of true love, total spiritual bonding, and dedicated political union. Fan-fucking-tastic. Even worse, among the members of FATE, Joely and Crispin's marriage served as a kind of cosmogony, an originating myth that explained succinctly what people could and should be, how the group began and how it should proceed in the future. Though Joely and Crispin didn't encourage ideas of leadership or any kind of icon worship, it had happened anyway, they were
worshiped.
And they were indivisible. When Joshua first joined the group, he had tried to sniff out a little information on the couple, get the lowdown on his chances. Were they wobbly? Had the harsh nature of their business driven them apart? Fat chance. He was told the whole depressing fable by two seasoned FATE activists over some pints in the Spotted Dog: a psychotic ex–postal worker called Kenny who as a child had witnessed his father kill his puppy, and Paddy, a sensitive lifetime dole collector and pigeon-fancier.

“Everyone begins wanting to shag Joely,” Kenny had explained, sympathetically, “but you get over it. You realize the best thing you can do for her is dedicate yourself to the struggle. And then the second thing you realize, is that Crispin's just this
incredible
dude—”

“Yeah, yeah, get on with it.”

Kenny got on with it.

It seemed Joely and Crispin met and fell in love at the University of Leeds the winter of 1982, two young student radicals, with Che Guevara on their walls, idealism in their hearts, and a mutual passion for all the creatures that fly, trot, crawl, and slime across the earth. At the time, they were both active members of a great variety of far-left groups, but political infighting, back-stabbing, and endless factionalizing soon disillusioned them as far as the fate of
Homo erectus
was concerned. At some point they grew tired of speaking up for this species of ours, which will so often organize a coup, bitch behind your back, choose another representative, and throw it all in your face. Instead they turned their attention to our mute animal friends. Joely and Crispin upgraded their vegetarianism to veganism, dropped out of college, got married, and formed Fighting Animal Torture and Exploitation in 1985. Crispin's magnetic personality and Joely's natural charm attracted other political drifters, and soon they had become a commune of twenty-five (plus ten cats, fourteen dogs, a garden full of wild rabbits, a sheep, two pigs, and a family of foxes) living and working from a Brixton bedsit that backed on to a large expanse of unused allotment. They were pioneers in many senses. Recycling before it became the fashion, making a tropical biosphere of their sweaty bathroom, and dedicating themselves to organic food production. Politically they were equally circumspect. From the very beginning their extremist credentials were impeccable, FATE being to the RSPCA what Stalinism is to the Liberal Democrats. For three years FATE conducted a terror campaign against animal testers, torturers, and exploiters, sending death threats to personnel at makeup firms, breaking into labs, kidnaping technicians, and chaining themselves to hospital gates. They also ruined fox hunts, filmed battery chickens, burned down farms, fire-bombed food outlets, and smashed up circus tents. Their brief being so broad and so fanatical (any animal in any level of discomfort), they were kept seriously busy, and life for FATE members was difficult, dangerous, and punctuated by frequent imprisonment. Through all of this, Joely and Crispin's relationship grew stronger and served as an example to them all, a beacon in the storm, the ideal example of love between activists (“yada yada yada. Get on with it”). Then in 1987 Crispin went to jail for three years for his part in fire-bombing a Welsh laboratory and releasing 40 cats, 350 rabbits, and 1,000 rats from their captivity. Before being taken down to Wormwood Scrubs, Crispin generously informed Joely that she had his permission to go to other FATE members if she was in need of sexual satisfaction while he was gone. (“And did she?” asked Joshua. “Did she
fuck,
” replied Kenny sadly.)

During Crispin's captivity, Joely devoted herself to transforming FATE from a small gang of high-strung friends to a viable underground political force. She began to put less emphasis on terror tactics and, after reading Guy Debord, grew interested in situationism as a political tactic, which she understood to mean the increased use of large banners, costumes, videos, and gruesome reenactments. By the time Crispin emerged from jail, FATE had grown fourfold, and Crispin's legend (lover, fighter, rebel, hero) had grown with it, fueled by Joely's passionate interpretation of his life and works and a carefully chosen photo of him circa 1980 in which he looked a bit like Nick Drake. But though his image had been airbrushed, Crispin appeared to have lost none of his radicalism. His first act as a free citizen was to mastermind the release of several hundred voles, an event that received widespread newspaper coverage, though Crispin delegated responsibility for the actual act to Kenny, who was sent down for four months of high security (“greatest moment of my life”). And then in the summer of '91, Joely persuaded Crispin to go to California with her to join the other groups fighting the patent on transgenic animals. Though courtrooms weren't Crispin's scene (“Crispin's a frontline dude”), he succeeded in sufficiently disrupting proceedings to officially warrant a mistrial. The couple flew back to England, elated but with funds perilously low, to find they had been turfed out of their Brixton pad and—

Well, Joshua could take the narrative from here. He met them a week later, wandering up and down the Willesden High Road, looking for a suitable squat. They looked lost, and Joshua, emboldened by the summer vibe and Joely's beauty, went to talk to them. They ended up going for a pint. They drank, as everybody in Willesden drank, in the aforementioned Spotted Dog, a famous Willesden landmark, described in 1792 as “being a well accostomed Publick house” (
Willesden Past,
by Len Snow), which became a favorite resort for mid-Victorian Londoners wishing a day out “in the country,” then the meeting point for the horse-drawn carriages; later still, a watering hole for local Irish builders. By 1992 it had transformed again, this time into the focal point of the huge Australian immigrant population of Willesden, who, for the last five years, had been leaving their silky beaches and emerald seas and inexplicably arriving in nw2. The afternoon Joshua walked in with Joely and Crispin, this community was in a state of high excitement. After a complaint of a terrible smell above Sister Mary's Palm Readers on the High Road, the upper flat had been raided by health officers and found to be sheltering sixteen squatting Aussies who had dug a huge hole in the floor and roasted a pig in there, apparently trying to re-create the effect of a South Seas underground kiln. Thrown out on the street, they were presently bemoaning their fate to the publican, a huge bearded Scotsman who had little sympathy for his Antipodean clientele (“Is there some fuckin' sign in fuckin' Sydney that says come to fuckin' Willesden?”). Overhearing the story, Joshua surmised the flat must now be empty and took Joely and Crispin to look at it, his mind already ticking over
. . . if I can get her to live nearby . . .

It was a beautiful, crumbling Victorian building, with a small balcony, a roof garden, and a large hole in the floor. He advised them to lie low for a month and then move in. They did, and Joshua saw more and more of them. A month later he experienced a “conversion” after hours of talk with Joely (hours of examining her breasts underneath those threadbare T-shirts), which felt, at the time, as if somebody had taken his little closed Chalfenist head, stuck two cartoon sticks of dynamite through each ear, and just blown a big mutherfucking hole in his consciousness. It became clear to him in a blinding flash that he loved Joely, that his parents were assholes, that he himself was an asshole, and that the largest community of earth, the animal kingdom, was oppressed, imprisoned, and murdered on a daily basis with the full knowledge and support of every government in the world. How much of the last realization was predicated and reliant upon the first was difficult to say, but he had given up Chalfenism and had no interest in taking things apart to see how they fitted together. Instead he gave up all meat, ran off to Glastonbury, got a tattoo, became the kind of guy who could measure an eighth with his eyes closed (so fuck
you,
Millat), and generally had a ball . . . until finally his conscience pricked him. He revealed himself to be the son of Marcus Chalfen. This horrified Joely (
and,
Joshua liked to think, slightly
aroused
her—sleeping with the enemy and all that). Joshua was sent away, while FATE had a two-day summit meeting along the lines of:
but he's the very thing we're . . . Ah, but we could use . . .

It was a protracted process, with votes and subclauses and objections and provisos, but in the end it couldn't really come down to anything more sophisticated than:
whose side are you on?
Joshua said
yours,
and Joely welcomed him with open arms, pressing his head to her exquisite bosom. He was paraded at meetings, given the role of secretary, and was generally the jewel in their crown:
the convert from the other side.

Since then, and for six months, Joshua had indulged his growing contempt for his father, seen plenty of his great love, and set about a long-term plan of insinuating himself between the famous couple (he needed somewhere to stay anyway; the Joneses' hospitality was growing thin). He
ingratiated
himself with Crispin, deliberately ignoring Crispin's suspicion of him. Joshua acted like his best mate, did all the shit jobs for him (photocopying, postering, leafleting), kipped on his floor, celebrated Crispin's seventh wedding anniversary, and presented him with a handmade guitar plectrum for his birthday; while all the time hating him
intensely,
coveting his wife as no man's wife has ever been coveted before, and dreaming up plots for his downfall with a green-eyed jealousy that would make Iago blush.

All this had distracted Joshua from the fact that FATE were busy plotting his own father's downfall. He had approved it in principle when Magid returned, when his rage was hottest and the idea itself seemed hazy—just some big talk to impress new members. Now the thirty-first was three weeks away, and Joshua had so far failed to question himself in any coherent way, in any
Chalfenist
fashion, regarding the consequences of what was about to happen. He wasn't even clear precisely what
was
going to happen—there had been no final decision; and now as they argued it, the core members of FATE cross-legged and spaced out around the great hole in the floor, now as he
should
have been listening to these fundamental decisions, he had lost the thread of his attention down Joely's T-shirt, down along the athletic dip and curve of her torso, down further to her tie-dyed pants, down—

“Josh, mate, could you just read me the minutes for a couple of minutes ago, if you get my drift?”

“Huh?”

Crispin sighed and tutted. Joely reached down from her tabletop and kissed Crispin on the ear.
Cunt.

“The minutes, Josh. After the stuff Joely was saying about protest strategy. We'd moved on to the hard part. I want to hear what Paddy was saying a few minutes ago about Punishment versus Release.”

Joshua looked at his blank clipboard and placed it over his detumescent erection.

“Umm . . . I guess I missed that.”

“Er, well that was actually really fucking
important,
Josh. You've got to keep up. I mean, what's the
point
of doing all this talking—”

Cunt, cunt,
cunt.

“He's doing his
best,
” Joely interceded, reaching down from her tabletop once more, this time to ruffle Joshua's Jewfro. “This is probably quite hard for Joshi, you know? I mean this is quite
personal
to him.” She always called him
Joshi
like that. Joshi and Joely. Joely and Joshi.

Crispin frowned. “Well, you know, I've said
many times
if Joshua doesn't want to be personally involved in this job, because of personal
sympathies,
if he wants
out,
then—”

“I'm
in,
” snapped Josh, barely restraining the aggression. “I've no intention of wimping
out.
”

“That's why Joshi's our
hero,
” said Joely, with an enormous, supportive smile. “Mark my words, he'll be the last man standing.”

Ah,
Joely!

“All right, well, let's get on. Try to keep minutes from now on, all right? OK. Paddy, can you just repeat what you were saying, so everyone can take it in, because I think what you said perfectly sums up the key decision we have to make now.”

Paddy's head shot up and he fumbled through his notes. “Umm, well basically
. . . basically,
it's a question of . . . of what our real
aims
are. If it's to punish the perpetrators and educate the public . . . then, well, that involves one sort of approach—an attack directly on, umm, the person in question,” said Paddy, flashing a nervous glance at Joshua. “But if our interest is the animal itself, as I think it should be, then it's a question of an anticampaign, and if that doesn't succeed, then the forceful release of the animal.”