White Teeth by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

that were set for 1 January 1975.
     
     
    Naturally, the thing called Ryan Topps began to push the End of the World further and further into the back-rooms of Clara’s consciousness. So many other things were presenting themselves to her, so much new in life! If it were possible, she felt like one of the Anointed right now, right here in Lambeth. The more blessed she felt on earth, the more rarely she turned her thoughts towards heaven. In the end, it was the epic feat of long division that Clara simply couldn’t figure. So many unsaved. Out of eight million Jehovah’s Witnesses, only 144,000 men could join Christ in heaven. The good women and good-enough men would gain paradise on earth — not a bad booby prize all things considered — but that still left a few million who failed to make the grade. Add that to the heathens; to the Jews, Catholics, Muslims; to the poor jungle men in the Amazon whom Clara had wept for as a child; so many unsaved. The Witnesses prided themselves on the absence of hell in their theology — the punishment was torture, unimaginable torture on the final day, and then the grave was the grave. But to Clara, this seemed worse — the thought of the Great Crowd, enjoying themselves in earthly paradise, while the tortured, mutilated skeletons of the lost lay just under the topsoil.
    On the one side stood all the mammoth quantities of people on the globe, unacquainted with the teachings of the
Watchtower
(some with no access to a postbox), unable to contact the Lambeth Kingdom Hall and receive helpful reading material about the road to redemption. On the other side, Hortense, her hair all wrapped up in iron rollers, tossing and turning in her sheets, gleefully awaiting the rains of sulphur to pour down upon the sinners, particularly the woman at No. 53. Hortense tried to explain: ‘Dem dat died widout de knowing de Lord, will be
resurrected
and dem will have anudder chance.’ But to Clara, it was still an inequitable equation. Unbalanceable books. Faith is hard to achieve, easy to lose. She became more and more reluctant to leave the impress of her knees in the red cushions in the Kingdom Hall. She would not wear sashes, carry banners or give out leaflets. She would not tell anyone about missing steps. She discovered dope, forgot the staircase and began taking the lift.
     
     
    1 October 1974. A detention. Held back forty-five minutes after school (for claiming, in a music lesson, that Roger Daltrey was a greater musician than Johann Sebastian Bach) and as a result, Clara missed her four o’clock meeting with Ryan on the corner of Leenan Street. It was freezing cold and getting dark by the time she got out; she ran through piles of putrefying autumn leaves, searched the length and breadth of Leenan, but there was no sign. It was with dread that she approached her own front door, offering up to God a multitude of silent contracts (
I’ll never have sex, I’ll never smoke another joint, I’ll never wear another skirt above the knee
) if only he could assure her that Ryan Topps had not rung her mother’s doorbell looking for shelter from the wind.
    ‘Clara! Come out of de cold.’
    It was the voice Hortense put on when she had company — an over-compensation of all the consonants — the voice she used for pastors and white women.
    Clara closed the front door behind her, and walked in a kind of terror through the living room, past the framed hologram of Jesus who wept (and then didn’t), and into the kitchen.
    ‘Dear Lord, she look like someting de cat dragged in, hmm?’
    ‘Mmm,’ said Ryan, who was happily shovelling a plate of ackee and saltfish into his mouth on the other side of the tiny kitchen table.
    Clara stuttered, her buck teeth cutting shapes into her bottom lip. ‘What are you doing
here
?’
    ‘Ha!’ cried Hortense, almost triumphant. ‘You tink you can hide your friends from me for ever? De bwoy was cold, I let ’im in, we been havin’ a nice chat, haven’t we young