White Teeth Read Free Page B

the job at Morgan
Hero,
twenty years and counting in a printing firm in the Euston Road, designing the way all kinds of things should be
folded—
envelopes, direct mail, brochures, leaflets—not much of an achievement, maybe, but you’ll find things need folds, they need to overlap, otherwise life would be like a broadsheet: flapping in the wind and down the street so you lose the important sections. Not that Archie had much time for the broadsheets. If they couldn’t be bothered to fold them properly, why should he bother to read them (that’s what he wanted to know)?
    What else? Well, Archie hadn’t always folded paper. Once upon a time he had been a track cyclist. What Archie liked about track cycling was the way you went round and round. Round and round. Giving you chance after chance to get a bit better at it, to make a faster lap, to do it
right.
Except the thing about Archie was he
never did
get any better. 62.8 seconds. Which is a pretty good time, world-class standard, even. But for three years he got precisely 62.8 seconds on every single lap. The other cyclists used to take breaks to watch him do it. Lean their bikes against the incline and time him with the second hand of their wristwatches. 62.8 every time. That kind of inability to improve is really very rare. That kind of consistency is miraculous, in a way.
    Archie liked track cycling, he was consistently good at it and it provided him with the only truly great memory he had. In 1948, Archie Jones had participated in the Olympics in London, sharing thirteenth place (62.8 seconds) with a Swedish gynecologist called Horst Ibelgaufts. Unfortunately this fact had been omitted from the Olympic records by a sloppy secretary who returned one morning after a coffee break with something else on her mind and missed his name as she transcribed one list to another piece of paper. Madam Posterity stuck Archie down the arm of the sofa and forgot about him. His only proof that the event had taken place at all were the periodic letters and notes he had received over the years from Ibelgaufts himself. Notes like:
    Â 
    May 17, 1957
    Dear Archibald,
    I enclose a picture of my good wife and I in our garden in front of a rather unpleasant construction site. Though it may not look like Arcadia, it is here that I am building a crude velodrome—nothing like the one you and I raced in, but sufficient for my needs. It will be on a far smaller scale, but you see it is for the children we are yet to have. I see them pedaling around it in my dreams and wake up with a glorious smile upon my face! Once it is completed, we insist that you visit us. Who more worthy to christen the track of your earnest competitor,
    Â Â Horst Ibelgaufts?
    And the postcard that lay on the dashboard this very day, the day of his Almost Death:
    Â 
    December 28, 1974
    Dear Archibald,
    I am taking up the harp. A New Year’s resolution, if you like. Late in the day, I realize, but you’re never too old to teach the old dog in you new tricks, don’t you feel? I tell you, it’s a heavy instrument to lay against your shoulder, but the sound of it is quite angelic and my wife thinks me quite sensitive because of it. Which is more than she could say for my old cycling obsession! But then, cycling was only ever understood by old boys like you, Archie, and of course the author of this little note, your old contender,
    Â Â Horst Ibelgaufts
    Â 
    He had not met Horst since the race, but he remembered him affectionately as an enormous man with strawberry-blond hair, orange freckles, and misaligned nostrils, who dressed like an international playboy and seemed too large for his bike. After the race, Horst had got Archie horribly drunk and procured two Soho whores who seemed to know Horst well (“I make many business trips to your fair capital, Archibald,” Horst had explained). The last Archie had ever seen of Horst was an unwanted glimpse of his humongous pink