White Teeth by Zadie Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

weed was required, Ryan would take her to visit a large squat in North London where an eighth came cheap and people too stoned to make out the features on your face acted like your best friends. Here, Ryan would ensconce himself in a hammock, and, after a few joints, progress from his usual monosyllabic state to the entirely catatonic. Clara, who didn’t smoke, sat at his feet, admired him, and tried to keep up with the general conversation around her. She had no tales to tell like the others, not like Merlin, like Clive, like Leo, Petronia, Wan-Si, and the rest. No anecdotes of LSD trips, of police brutality, or marching on Trafalgar Square. But Clara made friends. A resourceful girl, she used what she had to amuse and terrify an assorted company of Hippies, Flakes, Freaks, and Funky Folk: a different kind of extremity; tales of hellfire and damnation, of the devil’s love of feces, his passion for stripping skin, for red-hot-pokering eyeballs and the flaying of genitals—all the elaborate plans of Lucifer, that most exquisite of fallen angels, that were set for January 1, 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 toward 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 good two 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 for whom Clara had wept 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 mailbox), 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 sulfur to pour down upon the sinners, particularly the woman at No. 53. Hortense tried to explain: “Dem dat died widout 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 elevator.
    October 1, 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