White Teeth Read Free

a strange methodical finality, shoving the nozzle into the most difficult corners. Solemnly he flipped a coin (heads, life, tails, death) and felt nothing in particular when he found himself staring at the dancing lion. Quietly he detached the Hoover tube, put it in a suitcase, and left the house for the last time.
    But dying’s no easy trick. And suicide can’t be put on a list of Things to Do in between cleaning the grill pan and leveling the sofa leg with a brick. It is the decision not to do, to un-do; a kiss blown at oblivion. No matter what anyone says, suicide takes guts. It’s for heroes and martyrs, truly vainglorious men. Archie was none of these. He was a man whose significance in the Greater Scheme of Things could be figured along familiar ratios:
    Pebble: Beach.
    Raindrop: Ocean.
    Needle: Haystack.
    So for a few days he ignored the decision of the coin and just drove around with the Hoover tube. At nights he looked out through the windshield into the monstropolous sky and had the old realization of his universal proportions, feeling what it was to be tiny and rootless. He thought about the dent he might make on the world if he disappeared, and it seemed negligible, too small to calculate. He squandered spare minutes wondering whether “Hoover” had become a generic term for vacuum cleaners or whether it was, as others have argued, just a brand name. And all the time the Hoover tube lay like a great flaccid cock on his back seat, mocking his quiet fear, laughing at his pigeon-steps as he approached the executioner, sneering at his impotent indecision.
    Then, on December 29, he went to see his old friend Samad Miah Iqbal. An unlikely compadre possibly, but still the oldest friend he had—a Bengali Muslim he had fought alongside back when the fighting had to be done, who reminded him of that war; that war that reminded some people of fatty bacon and painted-on stockings, but recalled in Archie gunshots and card games and the taste of a sharp, foreign alcohol.
    â€œArchie, my dear friend,” Samad had said, in his warm, hearty tones. “You must forget all this wife trouble. Try a new life. That is what you need. Now, enough of all this: I will match your five bob and raise you five.”
    They were sitting in their new haunt, O’Connell’s Poolroom, playing poker with only three hands, two of Archie’s and one of Samad’s—Samad’s right hand being a broken thing, gray-skinned and unmoving, dead in every way bar the blood that ran through it. The place they sat in, where they met each evening for dinner, was half café, half gambling den, owned by an Iraqi family, the many members of which shared a bad skin condition.
    â€œLook at me. Marrying Alsana has given me this new lease on living, you understand? She opens up for me the new possibilities. She’s so young, so vital—like a breath of fresh air. You come to me for advice? Here it is. Don’t live this old life—it’s a sick life, Archibald. It does you no good. No good whatsoever.”
    Samad had looked at him with a great sympathy, for he felt very tenderly for Archie. Their wartime friendship had been severed by thirty years of separation across continents, but in the spring of 1973 Samad had come to England, a middle-aged man seeking a new life with his twenty-year-old new bride, the diminutive, moon-faced Alsana Begum, with her shrewd eyes. In a fit of nostalgia, and because he was the only man Samad knew on this little island, Samad had sought Archie out, moved into the same London borough. And slowly but surely a kind of friendship was being rekindled between the two men.
    â€œYou play like a faggot,” said Samad, laying down the winning queens back to back. He flicked them with the thumb of his left hand in one elegant move, making them fall to the table in a fan shape.
    â€œI’m old,” said Archie, throwing his cards in, “I’m old. Who’d have me