White Teeth by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page B

man?’
    ‘Mmm, yes, Mrs Bowden.’
    ‘Well, don’ look so shock. You’d tink I was gwan eat ’im up or someting, eh Ryan?’ said Hortense, glowing in a manner Clara had never seen before.
    ‘Yeah, right,’ smirked Ryan. And together, Ryan Topps and Clara’s mother began to laugh.
    Is there anything more likely to take the shine off an affair than when the lover strikes up a convivial relationship with the lovee’s mother? As the nights got darker and shorter and it became harder to pick Ryan out of the crowd who milled outside the school gates each day at three thirty, a dejected Clara would make the long walk home only to find her lover once more in the kitchen, chatting happily with Hortense, devouring the Bowden household’s cornucopia of goodies: ackee and saltfish, beef jerky, chicken-rice-and-peas, ginger cake and coconut ices.
    These conversations, lively as they sounded when Clara turned the key in the door, always fell silent as she approached the kitchen. Like children caught out, they would become sullen, then awkward, then Ryan would make his excuses and leave. There was also a look, she noticed, that they had begun to give her, a look of sympathy, of condescension; and not only that — they began to comment on her clothing, which had become steadily more youthful, more colourful; and Ryan — what was happening to Ryan? — shed his polo-neck, avoided her in school,
bought a tie
.
    Of course, like the mother of a drug addict or the neighbour of a serial killer, Clara was the last to know. She had once known everything about Ryan — before Ryan himself knew it — she had been a Ryan
expert
. Now she was reduced to overhearing the Irish girls assert that Clara Bowden and Ryan Topps were not dealing with each other — definitively, definitely
not
dealing with each other — oh no,
not any more
.
    If Clara realized what was happening, she wouldn’t allow herself to believe it. On the occasion she spotted Ryan at the kitchen table, surrounded by leaflets — and Hortense hurriedly gathering them up and shoving them into her apron pocket — Clara
willed
herself to forget it. Later that month, when Clara persuaded a doleful Ryan to go through the motions with her in the disabled toilet, she squinted so she couldn’t see what she didn’t
want
to see. But it was there, underneath his jumper, there as he leant back on the sink was the glint of silver, its gleam hardly visible in the dismal light — it couldn’t be, but it
was
— the silver glint of a tiny silver cross.
    It couldn’t be,
but it was
. That is how people describe a miracle. Somehow the opposites of Hortense and Ryan had met at their logical extremes, their mutual predilection for the pain and death of others meeting like perspective points on some morbid horizon. Suddenly the saved and the unsaved had come a miraculous full circle. Hortense and Ryan were now trying to save
her
.
     
     
    ‘Get on the bike.’
    Clara had just stepped out of school into the dusk and it was Ryan, his scooter coming to a sharp halt at her feet.
    ‘Claz, get on the bike.’
    ‘Go ask my mudder if she wan’ get on de bike!’
    ‘Please,’ said Ryan, proffering the spare scooter helmet. ‘ ’Simportant. Need to talk to you. Ain’t much time left.’
    ‘Why?’ snapped Clara, rocking petulantly on her platform heels. ‘You goin’ someplace?’
    ‘You and me both,’ murmured Ryan. ‘The right place, ’opefully.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Please, Claz.’
    ‘
No
.’
    ‘
Please
. ’Simportant. Life or death.’
    ‘Man . . . all right. But me nah wearin’ dat ting’ — she passed back the helmet and got astride the scooter — ‘not mussin’ up me hair.’
    Ryan drove her across London and up to Hampstead Heath, the very top of Parliament Hill, where, looking down from that peak on to the sickly orange fluorescence of the city, carefully, tortuously, and in language that was not his own, he put forward his case. The bottom line of which was