White Teeth Read Free Page A

now? It was hard enough convincing anybody the first time.”
    â€œThat is nonsense, Archibald. You have not even met the right one yet. This Ophelia, Archie, she is not the right one. From what you leave me to understand, she is not even for this time—”
    He referred to Ophelia’s madness, which led her to believe, half of the time, that she was the maid of the celebrated fifteenth-century art lover Cosimo de’ Medici.
    â€œShe is born, she lives, simply in the wrong time! This is just not her day! Maybe not her millennium. Modern life has caught that woman completely unawares and up the arse. Her mind is gone. Buggered. And you? You have picked up the wrong life in the cloakroom and you must return it. Besides, she has not blessed you with children . . . and life without children, Archie, what is it for? But there are second chances; oh yes, there are second chances in life. Believe me, I know. You,” he continued, raking in the 10ps with the side of his bad hand, “should never have married her.”
    Bloody hindsight, thought Archie. It’s always 20/20.
    Finally, two days after this discussion, early on New Year’s morning, the pain had reached such a piercing level that Archie was no longer able to cling to Samad’s advice. He had decided instead to mortify his own flesh, to take his own life, to free himself from a path that had taken him down numerous wrong turnings, led him deep into the wilderness, and finally petered out completely, its bread-crumb trail gobbled up by the birds.
    Once the car started to fill with carbon monoxide, he had experienced the obligatory flashback of his life to date. It turned out to be a short, unedifying viewing experience, low on entertainment value, the metaphysical equivalent of the Queen’s Speech. A dull childhood, a bad marriage, a dead-end job—that classic triumvirate—they all flicked by quickly, silently, with little dialogue, feeling pretty much the same as they did the first time round. He was no great believer in destiny, Archie, but on reflection it did seem that a special effort of predestination had ensured his life had been picked out for him like a company Christmas present—early, and the same as everyone else’s.
    There was the war, of course; he had been in the war, only for the last year of it, aged just seventeen, but it hardly counted. Not frontline, nothing like that. He and Samad, old Sam, Sammy-boy, they had a few tales to tell, mind. Archie even had a bit of shrapnel in the leg for anyone who cared to see it—but nobody did. No one wanted to talk about
that
anymore. It was like a clubfoot, or a disfiguring mole. It was like nose hair. People looked away. If someone said to Archie,
What have you done in life, then?
or
What’s your biggest memory?
well, God help him if he mentioned the war; eyes glazed over, fingers tapped, everybody offered to buy the next round. No one really wanted to
know.
    Summer of 1955, Archie went to Fleet Street with his best winkle-pickers on, looking for work as a war correspondent. Poncey-looking bloke with a thin mustache and a thin voice had said,
Any experience, Mr. Jones?
And Archie had explained. All about Samad. All about their Churchill tank. Then this poncey one had leaned over the desk, all smug, all suited, and said,
We would require something other than merely having fought in a war, Mr. Jones. War experience isn’t really relevant.
    And that was it, wasn’t it? There was no relevance in the war—not in 1955, even less now in 1974. Nothing he did
then
mattered
now.
The skills you learned were, in the modern parlance, not relevant,
not transferable.
    Was there anything else, Mr. Jones?
    But of course there bloody wasn’t anything else, the British education system having tripped him up with a snigger many years previously. Still, he had a good eye for the look of a thing, for the shape of a thing, and that’s how he had ended up in