White Teeth

Across from there: the Benches, three of them in a line. These were for the surreptitious dealing of tiny tiny amounts of drugs. Things like £2.50 of marijuana resin, so small it was likely to be lost in your pencil case and confused with a shredded piece of eraser. Or a quarter of an E, the greatest use of which was soothing particularly persistent period pains. The gullible could also purchase a variety of household goods – jasmine tea, garden grass, aspirin, liquorice, flour – all masquerading as Class A intoxicants to be smoked or swallowed round the back, in the hollow behind the drama department. This concave section of wall, depending where you stood, provided low teacher-visibility for smokers too young to smoke in the smoker’s garden (a concrete garden for those who had reached sixteen and were allowed to smoke themselves silly – are there any schools like this any more?). The drama hollow was to be avoided. These were hard little bastards, twelve, thirteen-year-old chain-smokers; they didn’t give a shit. They really didn’t give a shit – your health, their health, teachers, parents, police – whatever. Smoking was their answer to the universe, their 42, their raison d’être. They were passionate about fags. Not co

Everyone at Glenard Oak was at work; they were Babelians of every conceivable class and colour speaking in tongues, each in their own industrious corner, their busy censer mouths sending the votive offering of tobacco smoke to the many gods above them (Brent Schools Report 1990: 67 different faiths, 123 different languages).

Laborare est Orare:

Nerds by the pond, checking out frog sex,

Posh girls in the music department singing French rounds, speaking pig Latin, going on grape diets, suppressing lesbian instincts,

Fat boys in the PE corridor, wanking,

High-strung girls outside the language block, reading murder casebooks,

Indian kids playing cricket with te

Irie Jones looking for Millat Iqbal,

Scott Breeze and Lisa Rainbow in the toilets, fucking,

Joshua Chalfen, a goblin, an elder and a dwarf, behind the science block playing Goblins and Gorgons,

And everybody, everybody smoking fags, fags, fags, working hard at the begging of them, the lighting of them and the inhaling of them, the collecting of butts and the remaking of them, celebrating their power to bring people together across cultures and faiths, but mostly just smoking them – gis a fag, spare us a fag – chuffing on them like little chimneys till the smoke grows so thick that those who had stoked the chimneys here back in 1886, back in the days of the workhouse, would not have felt out of place.

And through the fog, Irie was looking for Millat. She had tried the basketball court, the smoking garden, the music department, the cafeteria, the toilets of both sexes and the graveyard that backed on to the school. She had to warn him. There was going to be a raid, to catch all illicit smokers of weed or tobacco, a combined effort from the staff and the local constabulary. The seismic rumblings had come from Archie, angel of revelation; she had overheard his telephone conversation and the holy secrets of the Parent-Teacher Association; now Irie was landed with a burden far heavier than the seismologist, landed, rather, with the burden of the prophet, for she knew the day and time of the quake (today, two thirty), she knew its power (possible expulsion), and she knew who was likely to fall victim to its fault line. She had to save him. Clutching her vibrating chub and sweating through three inches of Afro hair, she dashed through the grounds, calling his name, inquiring of others, looking in all the usual places, but he was not with the cockney barrow-boys, the posh girls, the Indian posse or the black kids. She trudged finally to the science block, part of the old workhouse and a much loved blind-spot of the school, its far wall and Eastern corner affording thirty precious yards of grass, where a pupil indulging in illicit acts was entirely hidden from the common view. It was a fine, crisp autumn day, the place was full; Irie had to walk through the popular tonsil-te

‘Mill!’

‘Not right now, Jones.’

‘But Mill!’

‘Please, Jones. This is Hifan. Old friend. I’m trying to listen to him.’

The tall guy, Hifan, had not paused in his speech. He had a deep, soft voice like ru

‘… and so marijuana weakens one’s abilities, one’s power, and takes our best men away from us in this country: men like you, Millat, who have natural leadership skills, who possess within them the ability to take a people by the hand and lift them up. There is an hadith from the Bukhārā, part five, page two: The best people of my community are my contemporaries and supporters. You are my contemporary, Millat, I pray you will also become my supporter; there is a war going on, Millat, a war.’

He continued like this, one word flowing from another, with no punctuation or breath and with the same chocolatey delivery – one could almost climb into his sentences, one could almost fall asleep in them.

‘Mill. Mill. ’Simportant.’

Millat looked drowsy, whether from the hash or Hifan wasn’t clear. Shaking Irie off his sleeve, he attempted an introduction. ‘Irie, Hifan. Him and me used to go about together. Hifan-’