White Teeth

But the Doctor collapsed once more, like a jack-in-the-box. ‘No… no… we are not fortune-tellers. I could never have predicted my life would end up in the hands of a child… Corinthians I, chapter thirteen, verse eight: Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. But when will it come? For myself, I became tired of waiting. It is such a terrible thing, to know only in part. A terrible thing not to have perfection, human perfection, when it is so readily available.’ The Doctor lifted himself up, and tried to reach out to Archie just as Archie backed away. ‘If only we were brave enough to make the decisions that must be made… between those worth saving and the rest… Is it a crime to want-’

‘Please, please,’ said Archie, ashamed to find himself crying, not red tears like the Doctor’s, but thick and translucent and salty. ‘Stay there. Please stop talking. Please.’

‘And then I think of the perverse German, Friedrich. Imagine the world with no begi

‘Stay where you fucking are!’

‘Imagine this war over and over a million times…’

‘No thanks,’ said Archie, choking on snot. ‘ ’Sbad enough the first time.’

‘It is not a serious proposition. It is a test. Only those who are sufficiently strong and well disposed to life to affirm it – even if it will just keep on repeating – have what it takes to endure the worst blackness. I could see the things I have done repeated infinitely. I am one of the confident ones. But you are not one of them…’

‘Please, just stop talking, please, so I can-’

‘The decision you make, Archie,’ said Dr Sick, betraying a knowledge that he had possessed from the start, the boy’s name, which he had been waiting to employ when it would have the most power, ‘could you see it repeated again and again, through eternity? Could you?’

‘I’ve got a coin!’ yelled Archie, screamed it with joy, because he had just remembered it. ‘I’ve got a coin!’

Dr Sick looked confused, and stopped his stumbling steps forward.

‘Ha! I have a coin, you bastard. Ha! So balls to you!’

Then another step. His hands reaching out, palms up, i

‘Stay back. Stay where you are. Right. This is what we’re going to do. Enough talking. I’m going to put my gun down here… slowly… here.’

Archie crouched and placed it on the floor, roughly between the two of them. ‘That’s so you can trust me. I’ll stand by my word. And now I’m going to throw this coin. And if it’s heads, I’m going to kill you.’

‘But – ’ said Dr Sick. And for the first time Archie saw something like real fear in his eyes, the same fear that Archie felt so thoroughly he could hardly speak.

‘And if it’s tails, I won’t. No, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not much of a thinker, when you get down to it. That’s the best I can offer. All right, here goes.’

The coin rose and flipped as a coin would rise and flip every time in a perfect world, flashing its light and then revealing its dark enough times to mesmerize a man. Then, at some point in its triumphant ascension, it began to arc, and the arc went wrong, and Archibald realized that it was not coming back to him at all but going behind him, a fair way behind him, and he turned round to watch it fall in the dirt. He was bending to pick it up when a shot rang out, and he felt a blistering pain in his right thigh. He looked down. Blood. The bullet had passed straight through, just missing the bone, but leaving a shard of the cap embedded deep in the flesh. The pain was excruciating and strangely distant at the same time. Archie turned back round to see Dr Sick, half bent over, the gun hanging weakly in his right hand.

‘For fuckssake, why did you do that?’ said Archie furious, grabbing the gun off the Doctor, easily and forcefully. ‘It’s tails. See? It’s tails. Look. Tails. It was tails.’

So Archie is there, there in the trajectory of the bullet, about to do something unusual, even for TV: save the same man twice and with no more reason or rhyme than the first time. And it’s a messy business, this saving people lark. Everybody in the room watches in horror as he takes it in the thigh, right in the femur, spins round with some melodrama and falls right through the mouse’s glass box. Shards of glass all over the gaff. What a performance. If it were TV you would hear the saxophone around now; the credits would be rolling.

But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the begi

And is it young professional women aged eighteen to thirty-two who would like a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea (for Irie and Joshua become lovers in the end; you can only avoid your fate for so long), while Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid and feels free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings? And could it be that it is largely the criminal class and the elderly who find themselves wanting to make bets on the wi

But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that. It’s never been like that.

It would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown rebel mouse. Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie.