There was a lamp-post, equidistant from the Jones house and Glenard Oak Comprehensive, that had begun to appear in Irie’s dreams. Not the lamp-post exactly, but a small, handmade advert which was sellotaped round its girth at eye level. It said:
LOSE WEIGHT TO EARN MONEY
081 555 6752
Now, Irie Jones, aged fifteen, was big. The European proportions of Clara’s figure had skipped a generation, and she was landed instead with Hortense’s substantial Jamaican frame, loaded with pineapples, mangoes and guavas; the girl had weight; big tits, big butt, big hips, big thighs, big teeth. She was thirteen stone and had thirteen pounds in her savings account. She knew she was the target audience (if ever there was one), she knew full well, as she trudged schoolwards, mouth full of doughnut, hugging her spare tyres, that the advert was speaking to her. It was speaking to her. LOSE WEIGHT (it was saying) TO EARN MONEY. You, you, you, Miss Jones, with your strategically placed arms and cardigan, tied around the arse (the endless mystery: how to diminish that swollen enormity, the Jamaican posterior?), with your belly-reducing knickers and breast-reducing bra, with your meticulous lycra corseting – the much lauded nineties answer to whalebone – with your elasticated waists. She knew the advert was talking to her. But she didn’t know quite what it was saying. What were we talking about here? Sponsored slim? The earning capacity of thin people? Or something altogether more Jacobean, the brain-child of some sordid Willesden Shylock, a pound of flesh for a pound of gold: meat for money?
Rapid. Eye. Movement. Sometimes she’d be walking through school in a bikini with the lamp-post enigma written in chalk over her brown bulges, over her various ledges (shelf space for books, cups of tea, baskets or, more to the point, children, bags of fruit, buckets of water), ledges genetically designed with another country in mind, another climate. Other times, the sponsored slim dream: knocking on door after door, butt-naked with a clipboard, drenched in sunlight, trying to encourage old men to pinch-an-inch and pledge-a-pound. Worst times? Tearing off loose, white-flecked flesh and packing it into those old curvaceous Coke bottles; she is carrying them to the cornershop, passing them over a counter; and Millat is the bindi-wearing, V-necked cornershopkeeper, he is adding them up, grudgingly opening the till with blood-stained paws, handing over the cash. A little Caribbean flesh for a little English change.
Irie Jones was obsessed. Occasionally her worried mother cornered her in the hallway before she slunk out of the door, picked at her elaborate corsetry, asked, ‘What’s up with you? What in the Lord’s name are you wearing? How can you breathe? Irie, my love, you’re fine – you’re just built like an honest-to-God Bowden – don’t you know you’re fine?’
But Irie didn’t know she was fine. There was England, a gigantic mirror, and there was Irie, without reflection. A stranger in a stranger land.
Nightmares and daydreams, on the bus, in the bath, in class. Before. After. Before. After. Before. After. The mantra of the make-over junkie, sucking it in, letting it out; unwilling to settle for genetic fate; waiting instead for her transformation from Jamaican hourglass heavy with the sands that gather round Dunn River Falls, to English Rose – oh, you know her – she’s a slender, delicate thing not made for the hot suns, a surfboard rippled by the wave:
Mrs Olive Roody, English teacher and expert doodle-spotter at distances of up to twenty yards, reached over her desk to Irie’s exercise book and tore out the piece of paper in question. Looked dubiously at it. Then inquired with melodious Scottish emphasis, ‘Before and after what?’
‘Er… what?’
‘Before and after what?’
‘Oh. Nothing, Miss.’
‘Nothing? Oh, come now, Ms Jones. No need for modesty. It is obviously more interesting than Sonnet 127.’
‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’
‘Absolutely certain? You don’t wish to delay the class any more? Because… some of the class need to listen to – nae, are even a wee bit interested in – what I have to say. So if you could spare some time from your doooodling-’
No one but no one said ‘doodling’ like Olive Roody.
‘-and join the rest of us, we’ll continue. Well?’
‘Well what?’
‘Can you? Spare the time?’
‘Yes, Mrs Roody.’
‘Oh, good. That’s cheered me up. Sonnet 127, please.’
‘In the old age black was not counted fair,’ continued Francis Stone in the catatonic drone with which students read Elizabethan verse. ‘Or if it were, it bore not beauty’s name.’
Irie put her right hand on her stomach, sucked in and tried to catch Millat’s eye. But Millat was busy showing pretty Nikki Tyler how he could manipulate his tongue into a narrow roll, a flute. Nikki Tyler was showing him how the lobes of her ears were attached to the side of her head rather than loose. Flirtatious remnants of this morning’s science lesson: Inherited characteristics. Part One (a). Loose. Attached. Rolled. Flat. Blue eye. Brown eye. Before. After.
‘Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black, her brows so suited, and they mourners seem… My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun.. .’
Puberty, real full-blown puberty (not the slight mound of a breast, or the shadowy emergence of fuzz), had separated these old friends, Irie Jones and Millat Iqbal. Different sides of the school fence. Irie believed she had been dealt the dodgy cards: mountainous curves, buck teeth and thick metal retainer, impossible Afro hair, and to top it off mole-ish eyesight which in turn required bottle-top spectacles in a light shade of pink. (Even those blue eyes – the eyes Archie had been so excited about – lasted two weeks only. She had been born with them, yes, but one day Clara looked again and there were brown eyes staring up at her, like the transition between a closed bud and an open flower, the exact moment of which the naked, waiting eye can never detect.) And this belief in her ugliness, in her wrongness, had subdued her; she kept her smart-ass comments to herself these days, she kept her right hand on her stomach. She was all wrong.
Whereas Millat was like youth remembered in the nostalgic eyeglass of old age, beauty parodying itself: broken Roman nose, tall, thin; lightly veined, smoothly muscled; chocolate eyes with a reflective green sheen like moonlight bouncing off a dark sea; irresistible smile, big white teeth. In Glenard Oak Comprehensive, black, Pakistani, Greek, Irish – these were races. But those with sex appeal lapped the other runners. They were a species all of their own.
‘If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.. .’
She loved him, of course. But he used to say to her: ‘Thing is, people rely on me. They need me to be Millat. Good old Millat. Wicked Millat. Safe, sweet-as, Millat. They need me to be cool. It’s practically a responsibility.’
And it practically was. Ringo Starr once said of the Beatles that they were never bigger than they were in Liverpool, late 1962. They just got more countries. And that’s how it was for Millat. He was so big in Cricklewood, in Willesden, in West Hampstead, the summer of 1990, that nothing he did later in his life could top it. From his first Raggastani crowd, he had expanded and developed tribes throughout the school, throughout North London. He was simply too big to remain merely the object of Irie’s affection, leader of the Raggastanis, or the son of Samad and Alsana Iqbal. He had to please all of the people all of the time. To the cockney wide-boys in the white jeans and the coloured shirts, he was the joker, the risk-taker, respected lady-killer. To the black kids he was fellow weed-smoker and valued customer. To the Asian kids, hero and spokesman. Social chameleon. And underneath it all, there remained an ever present anger and hurt, the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere. It was this soft underbelly that made him most beloved, most adored by Irie and the nice oboe-playing, long-skirted middle-class girls, most treasured by these hair-flicking and fugue-singing females; he was their dark prince, occasional lover or impossible crush, the subject of sweaty fantasy and ardent dreams…
And he was also their project: what was to be done about Millat? He simply must stop smoking weed. We have to try and stop him walking out of class. They worried about his ‘attitude’ at sleepovers, discussed his education hypothetically with their parents (Just say there was this Indian boy, yeah, who was always getting into.. .), even wrote poems on the subject. Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him. Everybody’s bit of rough, Millat Iqbal.
‘But you’re different,’ Millat Iqbal would say to the martyr Irie Jones, ‘you’re different. We go way back. We’ve got history. You’re a real friend. They don’t really mean anything to me.’
Irie liked to believe that. That they had history, that she was different in a good way.
‘Thy black is fairest in my judgement’s place.. .’
Mrs Roody silenced Francis with a raised finger. ‘Now, what is he saying there? Annalese?’
Annalese Hersh, who had spent the lesson so far plaiting red and yellow thread into her hair, looked up in blank confusion.
‘Anything, Annalese, dear. Any little idea. No matter how small. No matter how paltry.’
Annalese bit her lip. Looked at the book. Looked at Mrs Roody. Looked at the book.
‘Black?… Is?… Good?’
‘Yes… well, I suppose we can add that to last week’s contribution: Hamlet?… Is?… Mad? Anybody else? What about this? For since each hand hath put on nature’s power, Fairing the foul with art’s false borrow’d face. What might that mean I wonder?’
Joshua Chalfen, the only kid in class who volunteered opinions, put his hand up.
‘Yes, Joshua?’
‘Make-up.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Roody, looking close to orgasm. ‘Yes, Joshua, that’s it. What about it?’
‘She’s got a dark complexion which she’s trying to lighten by means of make-up, artifice. The Elizabethans were very keen on a pale skin.’
‘They would’ve loved you, then,’ sneered Millat, for Joshua was pasty, practically anaemic, curly-haired and chubby, ‘you would have been Tom bloody Cruise.’
Laughter. Not because it was funny, but because it was Millat putting a nerd where a nerd should be. In his place.
‘One more word from you Mr Ick-Ball and you are out!’
‘Shakespeare. Sweaty. Bollocks. That’s three. Don’t worry, I’ll let myself out.’
This was the kind of thing Millat did so expertly. The door slammed. The nice girls looked at each other in that way. (He’s just so out of control, so crazy… he really needs some help, some close one-to-one personal help from a good friend…) The boys belly-laughed. The teacher wondered if this was the beginning of a mutiny. Irie covered her stomach with her right hand.
‘Marvellous. Very adult. I suppose Millat Iqbal is some kind of hero.’ Mrs Roody, looking round the gormless faces of 5F, saw for the first time and with dismal clarity that this was exactly what he was.
‘Does anyone else have anything to say about these sonnets? Ms Jones! Will you stop looking mournfully at the door! He’s gone, all right? Unless you’d like to join him?’
‘No, Mrs Roody.’
‘All right, then. Have you anything to say about the sonnets?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘Is she black?’
‘Is who black?’
‘The dark lady.’
‘No, dear, she’s dark. She’s not black in the modern sense. There weren’t any… well, Afro-Carri-bee-yans in England at that time, dear. That’s more a modern phenomenon, as I’m sure you know. But this was the 1600s. I mean I can’t be sure, but it does seem terribly unlikely, unless she was a slave of some kind, and he’s unlikely to have written a series of sonnets to a lord and then a slave, is he?’
Irie reddened. She had thought, just then, that she had seen something like a reflection, but it was receding; so she said, ‘Don’t know, Miss.’
‘Besides, he says very clearly, In nothing art thou black, save in thy deeds… No, dear, she just has a dark complexion, you see, as dark as mine, probably.’
Irie looked at Mrs Roody. She was the colour of strawberry mousse.
‘You see, Joshua is quite right: the preference was for women to be excessively pale in those days. The sonnet is about the debate between her natural colouring and the make-up that was the fashion of the time.’
‘I just thought… like when he says, here: Then will I swear, beauty herself is black… And the curly hair thing, black wires-’
Irie gave up in the face of giggling and shrugged.
‘No, dear, you’re reading it with a modern ear. Never read what is old with a modern ear. In fact, that will serve as today’s principle – can you all write that down please.’
5F wrote that down. And the reflection that Irie had glimpsed slunk back into the familiar darkness. On the way out of class, Irie was passed a note by Annalese Hersh, who shrugged to signify that she was not the author but merely one of many handlers. It said: ‘By William Shakespeare: ODE TO LETITIA AND ALL MY KINKY-HAIRED BIG-ASS BITCHEZ.’
The cryptically named P. K.’s Afro Hair: Design and Management sat between Fairweather Funeral Parlour and Raakshan Dentists, the convenient proximity meaning it was not at all uncommon for a cadaver of African origin to pass through all three establishments on his or her final journey to an open casket. So when you phoned for a hair appointment, and Andrea or Denise or Jackie told you three thirty Jamaican time, naturally it meant come late, but there was also a chance it meant that some stone-cold church-going lady was determined to go to her grave with long fake nails and a weave-on. Strange as it sounds, there are plenty of people who refuse to meet the Lord with an Afro.
Irie, ignorant of all this, turned up for her appointment three thirty on the dot, intent upon transformation, intent upon fighting her genes, a headscarf disguising the bird’s nest of her hair, her right hand carefully placed upon her stomach.
‘You wan’ some ting, pickney?’
Straight hair. Straight straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakeable touchable finger-through-able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe.
‘Three thirty,’ was all Irie managed to convey of this, ‘with Andrea.’
‘Andrea’s next door,’ replied the woman, pulling at a piece of elongated gum and nodding in the direction of Fairweather’s, ‘having fun with the dearly departed. You better come sit down and wait and don’ bodder me. Don’ know how long she’ll be.’
Irie looked lost, standing in the middle of the shop, clutching her chub. The woman took pity, swallowed her gum and looked Irie up and down; she felt more sympathetic as she noted Irie’s cocoa complexion, the light eyes.
‘Jackie.’
‘Irie.’
‘Pale, sir! Freckles an’ every ting. You Mexican?’
‘No.’
‘Arab?’
‘Half Jamaican. Half English.’
‘Half-caste,’ Jackie explained patiently. ‘Your mum white?’
‘Dad.’
Jackie wrinkled her nose. ‘Usually de udder way roun’. How curly is it? Lemme se what’s under dere – ’ She made a grab for Irie’s headscarf. Irie, horrified at the possibility of being laid bare in a room full of people, got there before her and held on tight.
Jackie sucked her teeth. ‘What d’you ’spec us to do wid it if we kyant see it?’
Irie shrugged. Jackie shook her head, amused.
‘You ain’t been in before?’
‘No, never.’
‘What is it you want?’
‘Straight,’ said Irie firmly, thinking of Nikki Tyler. ‘Straight and dark red.’
‘Is dat a fact! You wash your hair recent?’
‘Yesterday,’ said Irie, offended. Jackie slapped her up-side her head.
‘Don’ wash it! If you wan’ it straight, don’ wash it! You ever have ammonia on your head? It’s like the devil’s having a party on your scalp. You crazy? Don’ wash it for two weeks an’ den come back.’
But Irie didn’t have two weeks. She had it all planned; she was going to go round to Millat’s this very evening with her new mane, all tied up in a bun, and she was going to take off her glasses and shake down her hair and he was going to say why Miss Jones, I never would have supposed… why Miss Jones, you’re-
‘I have to do it today. My sister’s getting married.’
‘Well, when Andrea get back she going to burn seven shades of shit out of your hair an’ you’ll be lucky if you don’ walk out of here with a ball ’ed. But den it your funeral. Ear,’ she said thrusting a pile full of magazines into Irie’s hands. ‘Dere,’ she said, pointing to a chair.
P. K.’s was split into two halves, male and female. In the male section, as relentless Ragga came unevenly over a battered stereo, young boys had logos cut into the back of their heads at the hands of slightly older boys, skilful wielders of the electric trimmers. ADIDAS. BADMUTHA. MARTIN. The male section was all laughter, all talk, all play; there was an easiness that sprang from no male haircut ever costing over six pounds or taking more than fifteen minutes. It was a simple enough exchange and there was joy in it: the buzz of the revolving blade by your ear, a rough brush-down with a warm hand, mirrors front and back to admire the transformation. You came in with a picky head, uneven and coarse, disguised underneath a baseball cap, and you left swiftly afterwards a new man, smelling sweetly of coconut oil and with a cut as sharp and clean as a swear word.
In comparison, the female section of P. K.’s was a deathly thing. Here, the impossible desire for straightness and ‘movement’ fought daily with the stubborn determination of the curved African follicle; here ammonia, hot combs, clips, pins and simple fire had all been enlisted in the war and were doing their damnedest to beat each curly hair into submission.
‘Is it straight?’ was the only question you heard as the towels came off and the heads emerged from the drier pulsating with pain. ‘Is it straight, Denise? Tell me is it straight, Jackie?’
To which Jackie or Denise, having none of the obligations of white hairdressers, no need to make tea or kiss arse, flatter or make conversation (for these were not customers they were dealing with but desperate wretched patients), would give a sceptical snort and whip off the puke-green gown. ‘It as straight as it ever going to be!’
Four women sat in front of Irie now, biting their lips, staring intently into a long, dirty mirror, waiting for their straighter selves to materialize. While Irie flicked nervously through American black hair magazines, the four women sat grimacing in pain. Occasionally one said to another, ‘How long?’ To which the proud reply came, ‘Fifteen minutes. How long for you?’ ‘Twenty-two. This shit’s been on my head twenty-two minutes. It better be straight.’
It was a competition in agony. Like rich women in posh restaurants ordering ever smaller salads.
Finally there would come a scream, or a ‘That’s it! Shit, I can’t take it!’ and the head in question was rushed to the sink, where the washing could never be quick enough (you cannot get ammonia out of your hair quick enough) and the quiet weeping began. It was at this point that animosity arose; some people’s hair was ‘kinkier’ than others’, some Afros fought harder, some survived. And the animosity spread from fellow customer to hairdresser, to inflicter of this pain, for it was natural enough to suspect Jackie or Denise of something like sadism: their fingers were too slow as they worked the stuff out, the water seemed to trickle instead of gush, and meanwhile the devil had a high old time burning the crap out of your hairline.
‘Is it straight? Jackie, is it straight?’
The boys arched their heads round the partition wall, Irie looked up from her magazine. There was little to say. They all came out straight or straight enough. But they also came out dead. Dry. Splintered. Stiff. All the spring gone. Like the hair of a cadaver as the moisture seeps away.
Jackie or Denise, knowing full well that the curved African follicle will, in the end, follow its genetic instructions, put a philosophic slant on the bad news. ‘It as straight as it ever going to be. Tree weeks if you lucky.’
Despite the obvious failure of the project, each woman along the line felt that it would be different for her, that when their own unveiling came, straight straight flickable, wind-blowable locks would be theirs. Irie, as full of confidence as the rest, returned to her magazine.
Malika, vibrant young star of the smash hit sitcom Malika’s Life, explains how she achieves her loose and flowing look: ‘I hot wrap it each evening, ensuring that the ends are lightly waxed in African Queen Afro SheenTM, then, in the morning, I put a comb on the stove for approximately – ’
The return of Andrea. The magazine was snatched from her hands, her headscarf unceremoniously removed before she could stop it, and five long and eloquent fingernails began to work their way through her scalp.
‘Ooooh,’ murmured Andrea.
This sign of approval was a rare-enough occurrence for the rest of the shop to come round the partition to have a look.
‘Oooooh,’ said Denise, adding her fingers to Andrea’s. ‘So loose.’
An older lady, wincing with pain underneath a drier, nodded admiringly.
‘Such a loose curl,’ cooed Jackie, ignoring her own scalded patient to reach into Irie’s wool.
‘That’s half-caste hair for you. I wish mine were like that. That’ll relax beautiful.’
Irie screwed up her face. ‘I hate it.’
‘She hates it!’ said Denise to the crowd. ‘It’s light brown in places!’
‘I been dealing with a corpse all morning. Be nice to get my hands into somefing sof’,’ said Andrea, emerging from her reverie. ‘You gonna relax it, darlin’?’
‘Yes. Straight. Straight and red.’
Andrea tied a green gown round Irie’s neck and lowered her into a swivelling chair. ‘Don’t know about red, baby. Can’t dye and relax on the same day. Kill the hair dead. But I can do the relax for you, no problem. Should come out beautiful, darlin’.’
The communication between hairdressers in P. K.’s being poor, no one told Andrea that Irie had washed her hair. Two minutes after having the thick white ammonia gloop spread on to her head, she felt the initial cold sensation change to a terrific fire. There was no dirt there to protect the scalp, and Irie started screaming.
‘I jus’ put it on! You want it straight, don’ you? Stop making that noise!’
‘But it hurts!’
‘Life hurts,’ said Andrea scornfully, ‘beauty hurts.’
Irie bit her tongue for another thirty seconds until blood appeared above her right ear. Then the poor girl blacked out.
She came to with her head over the sink, watching her hair, which was coming out in clumps, shimmy down the plughole.
‘You should have told me,’ Andrea was grumbling. ‘You should have told me that you washed it. It’s got to be dirty first. Now look.’
Now look. Hair that had once come down to her mid vertebrae was only a few inches from her head.
‘See what you’ve done,’ continued Andrea, as Irie wept openly. ‘I’d like to know what Mr Paul King is going to say about this. I better phone him and see if we can fix this up for you for free.’
Mr Paul King, the P. K. in question, owned the place. He was a big white guy, in his mid fifties, who had been an entrepreneur in the building trade until Black Wednesday and his wife’s credit card excesses took away everything but some bricks and mortar. Looking for a new idea, he read in the lifestyle section of his breakfast paper that black women spend five times as much as white women on beauty products and nine times as much on their hair. Taking his wife Sheila as an archetypal white woman, Paul King began to salivate. A little more research in his local library uncovered a multi-million pound industry. Paul King then bought a disused butcher’s on Willesden High Road, head-hunted Andrea from a Harlesden salon, and gave black hairdressing a shot. It was an instant success. He was amazed to discover that women on low income were indeed prepared to spend hundreds of pounds per month on their hair and yet more on nails and accessories. He was vaguely amused when Andrea first explained to him that physical pain was also part of the process. And the best part of it was there was no question of suing – they expected the burns. Perfect business.
‘Go on, Andrea, love, give her a freebie,’ said Paul King, shouting on a brick-shaped mobile over the construction noise of his new salon, opening in Wembley. ‘But don’t make a habit of it.’
Andrea returned to Irie with the good tidings. ‘ ’Sall right, darlin’. This one’s on us.’
‘But what – ’ Irie stared at her Hiroshima reflection. ‘What can you-’
‘Put your scarf back on, turn left out of here and go down the high road until you get to a shop called Roshi’s Haircare. Take this card and tell them P. K.’s sent you. Get eight packets of no. 5 type black hair with a red glow and come back here quick style.’
‘Hair?’ repeated Irie through snot and tears. ‘Fake hair?’
‘Stupid girl. It’s not fake. It’s real. And when it’s on your head it’ll be your real hair. Go!’
Blubbing like a baby, Irie shuffled out of P. K.’s and down the high road, trying to avoid her reflection in the shop windows. Reaching Roshi’s, she did her best to pull herself together, put her right hand over her stomach and pushed through the doors.
It was dark in Roshi’s and smelt strongly of the same scent as P. K.’s: ammonia and coconut oil, pain mixed with pleasure. From the dim glow given off by a flickering strip light, Irie could see there were no shelves to speak of but instead hair products piled like mountains from the floor up, while accessories (combs, bands, nail varnish) were stapled to the walls with the price written in felt-tip alongside. The only display of any recognizable kind was placed just below the ceiling in a loop around the room, taking pride of place like a collection of sacrificial scalps or hunting trophies. Hair. Long tresses stapled a few inches apart. Underneath each a large cardboard sign explaining its pedigree:
2 Metres. Natural Thai. Straight. Chestnut.
1 Metre. Natural Pakistani. Straight with a wave. Black.
5 Metres. Natural Chinese. Straight. Black.
3 Metres. Synthetic hair. Corkscrew curl. Pink.
Irie approached the counter. A hugely fat woman in a sari was waddling to the cash till and back again to hand over twenty-five pounds to an Indian girl whose hair had been shorn haphazardly close to the scalp.
‘And please don’t be looking at me in that manner. Twenty-five is very reasonable price. I tell you I can’t do any more with all these split ends.’
The girl objected in another language, picked up the bag of hair in question from the counter and made as if to leave with it, but the elder woman snatched it away.
‘Please, don’t embarrass yourself further. We both have seen the ends. Twenty-five is all I can give you for it. You won’t get more some other place. Please now,’ she said, looking over the girl’s shoulder to Irie, ‘other customers I have.’
Irie saw hot tears, not unlike her own, spring to the girl’s eyes. She seemed to freeze for a moment, vibrating ever so slightly with anger; then she slammed her hand down on the counter, swept up her twenty-five pounds and headed for the door.
The fat lady shook her chins in contempt after the disappearing girl. ‘Ungrateful, she is.’
Then she unpeeled a sticky label from its brown paper backing and slapped it on the bag of hair. It said: ‘6 Metres. Indian. Straight. Black/red.’
‘Yes, dear. What is it I can do?’
Irie repeated Andrea’s instruction and handed over the card.
‘Eight packets? That is about six metres, no?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Yes, yes, it is. You want it straight or with a wave?’
‘Straight. Dead straight.’
The fat lady did a silent calculation and then picked up the bag of hair that the girl had just left. ‘This is what you’re looking for. I haven’t been able to package it, you understand. But it is absolutely clean. You want?’
Irie looked dubious.
‘Don’t worry about what I said. No split ends. Just silly girl trying to get more than she deserves. Some people got no understanding of simple economics… It hurts her to cut off her hair so a million pounds she expects or something crazy. Beautiful hair, she has. When I was young, oh, mine was beautiful too, eh?’ The fat lady erupted into high-pitched laughter, her busy upper lip making her moustache quiver. The laugh subsided.
‘Tell Andrea that will be thirty-seven fifty. We Indian women have the beautiful hair, hey? Everybody wants it!’
A black woman with children in a twin buggy was waiting behind Irie with a packet of hairpins. She sucked her teeth. ‘You people think you’re all Mr Bigstuff,’ she muttered, half to herself. ‘Some of us are happy with our African hair, thank you very much. I don’t want to buy some poor Indian girl’s hair. And I wish to God I could buy black hair products from black people for once. How we going to make it in this country if we don’t make our own business?’
The skin around the fat lady’s mouth became very tight. She began talking twelve to the dozen, putting Irie’s hair in a bag and writing her out a receipt, addressing all her comments to the woman via Irie, while doing the best to ignore the other woman’s interjections: ‘You don’t like shopping here, then please don’t be shopping here – is forcing you anybody? No, is anybody? It’s amazing: people, the rudeness, I am not a racist, but I can’t understand it, I’m just providing a service, a service. I don’t need abuse, just leave your money on the counter, if I am getting abuse, I’m not serving.’
‘No one’s givin’ you abuse. Jesus Christ!’
‘Is it my fault if they want the hair that is straight – and paler skin sometimes, like Michael Jackson, my fault he is too? They tell me not to sell the Dr Peacock Whitener – local paper, my God, what a fuss! – and then they buy it – take that receipt to Andrea, will you, my dear, please? I’m just trying to make a living in this country like the rest of everybody. There you are, dear, there’s your hair.’
The woman reached around Irie and delivered the right change to the counter with an angry smash. ‘For fuck’s sake!’
‘I can’t help it if that’s what they want – supply, demand. And bad language, I won’t tolerate! Simple economics – mind your step on the way out, dear – and you, no, don’t come back, please, I will call the police, I won’t be threatened, the police, I will call them.’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
Irie held the door open for the double buggy, and took one side to help carry it over the front step. Outside the woman put her hairpins in her pocket. She looked exhausted.
‘I hate that place,’ she said. ‘But I need hairpins.’
‘I need hair,’ said Irie.
The woman shook her head. ‘You’ve got hair,’ she said.
Five and a half hours later, thanks to an arduous operation that involved plaiting somebody else’s hair in small sections to Irie’s own two inches and sealing it with glue, Irie Jones had a full head of long, straight, reddish-black hair.
‘Is it straight?’ she asked, disbelieving the evidence of her own eyes.
‘Straight as hell,’ said Andrea, admiring her handiwork. ‘But honey, you’re going to have to plait it properly if you want it to stay in. Why won’t you let me plait it? It won’t stay in if it’s loose like that.’
‘It will,’ said Irie, bewitched by her own reflection. ‘It’s got to.’
He – Millat – need only see it once, after all, just once. To ensure she reached him in pristine state, she walked all the way to the Iqbal house with her hands on her hair, terrified that the wind would displace it.
Alsana answered the door. ‘Oh, hello. No, he’s not here. Out. Don’t ask me where, he doesn’t tell me a thing. I know where Magid is more of the time.’
Irie walked into the hallway and caught a sneaky glance of herself in the mirror. Still there and all in the right place.
‘Can I wait in here?’
‘Of course. You look different, dearie. Lost weight?’
Irie glowed. ‘New haircut.’
‘Oh yes… you look like a newsreader. Very nice. Now in the living room, please. Niece-of-Shame and her nasty friend are in there, but try not to let that bother you. I’m working in the kitchen and Samad is weeding, so keep the noise down.’
Irie walked into the lounge. ‘Bloody hell!’ screeched Neena at the approaching vision. ‘What the fuck do you look like!’
She looked beautiful. She looked straight, un-kinky. Beautiful.
‘You look like a freak! Fuck me! Maxine, man, check this out. Jesus Christ, Irie. What exactly were you aiming for?’
Wasn’t it obvious? Straight. Straightness. Flickability.
‘I mean, what was the grand plan? The Negro Meryl Streep?’ Neena folded over like a duvet and laughed herself silly.
‘Niece-of-Shame!’ came Alsana’s voice from the kitchen. ‘Sewing requires concentration. Shut it up, Miss Big-Mouth, please!’
Neena’s ‘nasty friend’, otherwise known as Neena’s girlfriend, a sexy and slender girl called Maxine with a beautiful porcelain face, dark eyes and a lot of curly brown hair, gave a pull to Irie’s peculiar bangs. ‘What have you done? You had beautiful hair, man. All curly and wild. It was gorgeous.’
Irie couldn’t say anything for a moment. She had not considered the possibility that she looked anything less than terrific.
‘I just had a haircut. What’s the big deal?’
‘But that’s not your hair, for fuck’s sake, that’s some poor oppressed Pakistani woman who needs the cash for her kids,’ said Neena, giving it a tug and being rewarded with a handful of it. ‘OH SHIT!’
Neena and Maxine had a hysteria relapse.
‘Just get off it, OK?’ Irie retreated to an armchair and tucked her knees up under her chin. Trying to sound offhand, she asked, ‘So… umm… where’s Millat?’
‘Is that what all this is in aid of?’ asked Neena, astonished. ‘My shit-for-brains cousin-gee?’
‘No. Fuck off.’
‘Well, he’s not here. He’s got some new bird. Eastern-bloc gymnast with a stomach like a washboard. Not unattractive, spectacular tits, but tight-assed as hell. Name… name?’
‘Stasia,’ said Maxine, looking up briefly from Top of the Pops. ‘Or some such bollocks.’
Irie sank deeper into the ruined springs of Samad’s favourite chair.
‘Irie, will you take some advice? Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been following that boy around like a lost dog. And in that time he’s snogged everyone, everyone apart from you. He’s even snogged me, and I’m his first cousin, for fuck’s sake.’
‘And me,’ said Maxine, ‘and I’m not that way inclined.’
‘Haven’t you ever wondered why he hasn’t snogged you?’
‘Because I’m ugly. And fat. With an Afro.’
‘No, fuckface, because you’re all he’s got. He needs you. You two have history. You really know him. Look how confused he is. One day he’s Allah this, Allah that. Next minute it’s big busty blondes, Russian gymnasts and a smoke of the sinsemilla. He doesn’t know his arse from his elbow. Just like his father. He doesn’t know who he is. But you know him, at least a little, you’ve known all the sides of him. And he needs that. You’re different.’
Irie rolled her eyes. Sometimes you want to be different. And sometimes you’d give the hair on your head to be the same as everybody else.
‘Look: you’re a smart cookie, Irie. But you’ve been taught all kinds of shit. You’ve got to re-educate yourself. Realize your value, stop the slavish devotion, and get a life, Irie. Get a girl, get a guy, but get a life.’
‘You’re a very sexy girl, Irie,’ said Maxine sweetly.
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Trust her, she’s a raving dyke,’ said Neena, ruffling Maxine’s hair affectionately and giving her a kiss. ‘But the truth is the Barbra Streisand cut you’ve got there ain’t doing shit for you. The Afro was cool, man. It was wicked. It was yours.’
Suddenly Alsana appeared at the doorway with an enormous plate of biscuits and a look of intense suspicion. Maxine blew her a kiss.
‘Biscuits, Irie? Come and have some biscuits. With me. In the kitchen.’
Neena groaned. ‘Don’t panic, Auntie. We’re not enlisting her into the cult of Sappho.’
‘I don’t care what you’re doing. I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t want to know such things.’
‘We’re watching television.’
It was Madonna on the TV screen, working her hands around two conically shaped breasts.
‘Very nice, I’m sure,’ sniped Alsana, glaring at Maxine. ‘Biscuits, Irie?’
‘I’d like some biscuits,’ murmured Maxine with a flutter of her extravagant eyelashes.
‘I am certain,’ said Alsana slowly and pointedly, translating code, ‘I don’t have the kind you like.’
Neena and Maxine fell about all over again.
‘Irie?’ said Alsana, indicating the kitchen with a grimace. Irie followed her out.
‘I’m as liberal as the next person,’ complained Alsana, once they were alone. ‘But why do they always have to be laughing and making a song-and-dance about everything? I cannot believe homosexuality is that much fun. Heterosexuality certainly is not.’
‘I don’t think I want to hear that word in this house again,’ said Samad deadpan, stepping in from the garden and laying his weeding gloves on the table.
‘Which one?’
‘Either. I am trying my level best to run a godly house.’
Samad spotted a figure at his kitchen table, frowned, decided it was indeed Irie Jones and began on the little routine the two of them had going. ‘Hello, Miss Jones. And how is your father?’
Irie shrugged on cue. ‘You see him more than we do. How’s God?’
‘Perfectly fine, thank you. Have you seen my good-for-nothing son recently?’
‘Not recently.’
‘What about my good son?’
‘Not for years.’
‘Will you tell the good-for-nothing he’s a good-for-nothing when you find him?’
‘I’ll do my best, Mr Iqbal.’
‘God bless you.’
‘Gesundheit.’
‘Now, if you will excuse me.’ Samad reached for his prayer mat from the top of the fridge and left the room.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked Irie, noticing that Samad had delivered his lines with less than enthusiasm. ‘He seems, I don’t know, sad.’
Alsana sighed. ‘He is sad. He feels like he has screwed everything up. Of course, he has screwed everything up, but then again, who will cast the first stone, et cetera. He prays and prays. But he will not look straight at the facts: Millat hanging around with God knows what kind of people, always with the white girls, and Magid…’
Irie remembered her first sweetheart encircled by a fuzzy halo of perfection, an illusion born of the disappointments Millat had afforded her over the years.
‘Why, what’s wrong with Magid?’
Alsana frowned and reached up to the top kitchen shelf, where she collected a thin airmail envelope and passed it to Irie. Irie removed the letter and the photograph inside.
The photo was of Magid, now a tall, distinguished-looking young man. His hair was the deep black of his brother’s but it was not brushed forward on his face. It was parted on the left side, slicked down and drawn behind the right ear. He was dressed in a tweed suit and what looked – though one couldn’t be sure, the photo was not good – like a cravat. He held a large sun hat in one hand. In the other he clasped the hand of the eminent Indian writer Sir R. V. Saraswati. Saraswati was dressed all in white, with his broad-rimmed hat on his head and an ostentatious cane in his free hand. The two of them were posed in a somewhat self-congratulatory manner, smiling broadly and looking for all the world as if they were about to pat each other roundly on the back or had just done so. The midday sun was out and bouncing off Dhaka University’s front steps, where the whole scene had been captured.
Alsana inched a smear off the photo with her index finger. ‘You know Saraswati?’
Irie nodded. Compulsory GCSE text: A Stitch in Time by R. V. Saraswati. A bitter-sweet tale of the last days of Empire.
‘Samad hates Saraswati, you understand. Calls him colonial-throwback, English licker-of-behinds.’
Irie picked a paragraph at random from the letter and read aloud.
As you can see, I was lucky enough to meet India’s very finest writer one bright day in March. After winning an essay competition (my title: ‘Bangladesh – To Whom May She Turn?’), I travelled to Dhaka to collect my prize (a certificate and a small cash reward) from the great man himself in a ceremony at the university. I am honoured to say he took a liking to me and we spent a most pleasant afternoon together; a long, intimate tea followed by a stroll through Dhaka’s more appealing prospects. During our lengthy conversations Sir Saraswati commended my mind, and even went so far as to say (and I quote) that I was ‘a first-rate young man’ – a comment I shall treasure! He suggested my future might lie in the law, the university, or even his own profession of the creative pen! I told him the first-mentioned vocation was closest to my heart and that it had long been my intention to make the Asian countries sensible places, where order prevailed, disaster was prepared for, and a young boy was in no danger from a falling vase (!) New laws, new stipulations, are required (I told him) to deal with our unlucky fate, the natural disaster. But then he corrected me: ‘Not fate,’ he said. ‘Too often we Indians, we Bengalis, we Pakistanis, throw up our hands and cry “Fate!” in the face of history. But many of us are uneducated, many of us do not understand the world. We must be more like the English. The English fight fate to the death. They do not listen to history unless it is telling them what they wish to hear. We say “It had to be!” It does not have to be. Nothing does.’ In one afternoon I learnt more from this great man than-
‘He learns nothing!’
Samad marched back into the kitchen in a fury and threw the kettle on the stove. ‘He learns nothing from a man who knows nothing! Where is his beard? Where is his khamise? Where is his humility? If Allah says there will be storm, there will be storm. If he says earthquake, it will be earthquake. Of course it has to be! That is the very reason I sent the child there – to understand that essentially we are weak, that we are not in control. What does Islam mean? What does the word, the very word, mean? I surrender. I surrender to God. I surrender to him. This is not my life, this is his life. This life I call mine is his to do with what he will. Indeed, I shall be tossed and turned on the wave, and there shall be nothing to be done. Nothing! Nature itself is Muslim, because it obeys the laws the creator has ingrained in it.’
‘Don’t you preach in this house, Samad Miah! There are places for that sort of thing. Go to mosque, but don’t do it in the kitchen, people have to be eating in here-’
‘But we, we do not automatically obey. We are tricky, we are the tricky bastards, we humans. We have the evil inside us, the free will. We must learn to obey. That is what I sent the child Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal to discover. Tell me, did I send him to have his mind poisoned by a Rule-Britannia-worshipping Hindu old Queen?’
‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe not.’
‘Don’t, Alsi, I warn you-’
‘Oh, go on, you old pot-boiler!’ Alsana gathered her spare tyres around her like a sumo wrestler. ‘You say we have no control, yet you always try to control everything! Let go, Samad Miah. Let the boy go. He is second generation – he was born here – naturally he will do things differently. You can’t plan everything. After all, what is so awful – so he’s not training to be an alim, but he’s educated, he’s clean!’
‘And is that all you ask of your son? That he be clean?’
‘Maybe, Samad Miah, maybe-’
‘And don’t speak to me of second generation! One generation! Indivisible! Eternal!’
Somewhere in the midst of this argument, Irie slipped out of the kitchen and headed for the front door. She caught an unfortunate glimpse of herself in the scratch and stain of the hall mirror. She looked like the love child of Diana Ross and Engelbert Humperdinck.
‘You have to let them make their own mistakes…’ came Alsana’s voice from the heat of battle, travelling through the cheap wood of the kitchen door and into the hallway, where Irie stood, facing her own reflection, busy tearing out somebody else’s hair with her bare hands.
Like any school, Glenard Oak had a complex geography. Not that it was particularly labyrinthine in design. It had been built in two simple stages, first in 1886 as a workhouse (result: large red monstrosity, Victorian asylum) and then added to in 1963 when it became a school (result: grey monolith, Brave New Council Estate). The two monstrosities were then linked in 1974 by an enormous perspex tubular footbridge. But a bridge was not enough to make the two places one, or to slow down the student body’s determination to splinter and factionalize. The school had learnt to its cost that you cannot unite a thousand children under one Latin tag (school code: Laborare est Orare, To Labour is to Pray); kids are like pissing cats or burrowing moles, marking off land within land, each section with its own rules, beliefs, laws of engagement. Despite every attempt to suppress it, the school contained and sustained patches, hang-outs, disputed territories, satellite states, states of emergency, ghettos, enclaves, islands. There were no maps, but common sense told you, for example, not to fuck with the area between the refuse bins and the craft department. There had been casualties there (notably some poor sod called Keith who had his head placed in a vice), and the scrawny, sinewy kids who patrolled this area were not to be messed with – they were the thin sons of the fat men with vicious tabloids primed in their back pockets like handguns, the fat men who believe in rough justice – a life for a life, hanging’s too good for them.
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 connoisseurs, not fussy about brand, just fags, any fags. They pulled at them like babies at teats, and when they were finally finished they ground them into the mud with wet eyes. They fucking loved it. Fags, fags, fags. Their only interest outside fags was politics, or more precisely, this fucker, the chancellor, who kept on putting up the price of fags. Because there was never enough money and there were never enough fags. You had to become an expert in bumming, cadging, begging, stealing fags. A popular ploy was to blow a week’s pocket money on twenty, give them out to all and sundry, and spend the next month reminding those with fags about that time when you gave them a fag. But this was a high-risk policy. Better to have an utterly forgettable face, better to be able to cadge a fag and come back five minutes after for another without being remembered. Better to cultivate a cipher-like persona, be a little featureless squib called Mart, Jules, Ian. Otherwise you had to rely on charity and fag sharing. One fag could be split in a myriad of ways. It worked like this: someone (whoever had actually bought a pack of fags) lights up. Someone shouts ‘halves’. At the halfway point the fag is passed over. As soon as it reaches the second person we hear ‘thirds’, then ‘saves’ (which is half a third) then ‘butt!’, then, if the day is cold and the need for a fag overwhelming, ‘last toke!’ But last toke is only for the desperate; it is beyond the perforation, beyond the brand name of the cigarette, beyond what could reasonably be described as the butt. Last toke is the yellowing fabric of the roach, containing the stuff that is less than tobacco, the stuff that collects in the lungs like a time-bomb, destroys the immune system and brings permanent, sniffling, nasal flu. The stuff that turns white teeth yellow.
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 tennis rackets on the football ground,
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-tennis/groping championships, step over Joshua Chalfen’s Goblins and Gorgons game (‘Hey, watch your feet! Mind the Cavern of the Dead!’) and furrow through a tight phalanx of fag smokers before she reached Millat at the epicentre of it all, pulling laconically on a cone-shaped joint, listening to a tall guy with a mighty beard.
‘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 running water, inevitable and constant, requiring a force stronger than the sudden appearance of Irie, stronger maybe, than gravity, to stop it. He was dressed in a sharp black suit, a white shirt and a green bow-tie. His breast pocket was embroidered with a small emblem, two hands cupping a flame, and something underneath it, too small to see. Though no older than Millat, his hair-growing capacity was striking, and his beard aged him considerably.
‘… 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-’
Hifan stepped forward, looming over Irie like a bell tower. ‘Good to meet you, sister. I am Hifan.’
‘Great. Millat.’
‘Irie, man, shit. Could you just chill for one minute?’ He passed her the smoke. ‘I’m trying to listen to the guy, yeah? Hifan is the don. Look at the suit… gangster stylee!’ Millat ran a finger down Hifan’s lapel, and Hifan, against his better instinct, beamed with pleasure. ‘Seriously, Hifan, man, you look wicked. Crisp.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Better than that stuff you used to go around in back when we used to hang, eh? Back in them Kilburn days. ’Member when we went to Bradford and-’
Hifan remembered himself. Reassumed his previous face of pious determination. ‘I am afraid I don’t remember the Kilburn days, brother. I did things in ignorance then. That was a different person.’
‘Yeah,’ said Millat sheepishly. ‘ ’Course.’
Millat gave Hifan a joshing punch on the shoulder, in response to which Hifan stood still as a gate post.
‘So: there’s a fucking spiritual war going on – that’s fucking crazy! About time – we need to make our mark in this bloody country. What was the name, again, of your lot?’
‘I am from the Kilburn branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation,’ said Hifan proudly.
Irie inhaled.
‘Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation,’ repeated Millat, impressed. ‘That’s a wicked name. It’s got a wicked kung-fu kick-arse sound to it.’
Irie frowned. ‘KEVIN?’
‘We are aware,’ said Hifan solemnly, pointing to the spot underneath the cupped flame where the initials were minutely embroidered, ‘that we have an acronym problem.’
‘Just a bit.’
‘But the name is Allah’s and it cannot be changed… but to continue with what I was saying: Millat, my friend, you could be the head of the Cricklewood branch-’
‘Mill.’
‘You could have what I have, instead of this terrible confusion you are in, instead of this reliance on a drug specifically imported by governments to subdue the black and Asian community, to lessen our powers.’
‘Yeah,’ said Millat sadly, in mid-roll of a new spliff. ‘I don’t really look at it like that. I guess I should look at it like that.’
‘Mill.’
‘Jones, give it a rest. I’m having a fucking debate. Hifan, what school you at now, mate?’
Hifan shook his head with a smile. ‘I left the English education system some time ago. But my education is far from over. If I can quote to you from the Tabrīzī, hadith number 220: The person who goes in search of knowledge is on active service for God until he returns and the-’
‘Mill,’ whispered Irie, beneath Hifan’s flow of mellifluous sound. ‘Mill.’
‘For fuck’s sake. What? Sorry, Hifan, mate, one minute.’
Irie pulled deeply on her joint and relayed her news. Millat sighed. ‘Irie, they come in one side and we go out the other. No biggie. It’s a regular deal. All right? Now why don’t you go and play with the kiddies? Serious business here.’
‘It was good to meet you, Irie,’ said Hifan, reaching out his hand and looking her up and down. ‘If I might say so, it is refreshing to see a woman who dresses demurely, wearing her hair short. KEVIN believes a woman should not feel the need to pander to the erotic fantasies of Western sexuality.’
‘Er, ye-ah. Thanks.’
Feeling sorry for herself and more than a bit stoned, Irie made her way back through the wall of smoke and stepped through Joshua Chalfen’s Goblins and Gorgons game once more.
‘Hey, we’re trying to play here!’
Irie whipped round, full of swallowed fury. ‘AND?’
Joshua’s friends – a fat kid, a spotty kid and a kid with an abnormally large head – shrank back in fear. But Joshua stood his ground. He played oboe behind Irie’s second viola in the excuse for a school orchestra, and he had often observed her strange hair and broad shoulders and thought he might have half a chance there. She was clever and not entirely un-pretty, and there was something in her that had a strongly nerdy flavour about it, despite that boy she spent her time with. The Indian one. She hung around him, but she wasn’t like him. Joshua Chalfen strongly suspected her of being one of his own. There was something innate in her that he felt he could bring out. She was a nerd-immigrant who had fled the land of the fat, facially challenged and disarmingly clever. She had scaled the mountains of Caldor, swum the River Leviathrax, and braved the chasm Duilwen, in the mad dash away from her true countrymen to another land.
‘I’m just saying. You seem pretty keen to step into the land of Golthon. Do you want to play with us?’
‘No, I don’t want to play with you, you fucking prick. I don’t even know you.’
‘Joshua Chalfen. I was in Manor Primary. And we’re in English together. And we’re in orchestra together.’
‘No, we’re not. I’m in orchestra. You’re in orchestra. In no sense are we there together.’
The goblin, the elder and the dwarf, who appreciated a good play on words, had a snivelly giggle at that one. But insults meant nothing to Joshua. Joshua was the Cyrano de Bergerac of taking insults. He’d taken insults (from the affectionate end, Chalfen the Chubster, Posh Josh, Josh-with-the-Jewfro; from the other, That Hippy Fuck, Curly-haired Cocksucker, Shit-eater), he’d taken never-ending insults all his damn life, and survived, coming out the other side to smug. An insult was but a pebble in his path, only proving the intellectual inferiority of she who threw it. He continued regardless.
‘I like what you’ve done with your hair.’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
‘No, I like short hair on girls. I like that androgyny thing. Seriously.’
‘What is your fucking problem?’
Joshua shrugged. ‘Nothing. The vaguest acquaintance with basic Freudian theory would suggest you are the one with the problem. Where does all that aggression come from? I thought smoking was meant to chill you out. Can I have some?’
Irie had forgotten the burning joint in her hand. ‘Oh, yeah, right. Regular puff-head, are we?’
‘I dabble.’
The dwarf, elder and goblin emitted some snorts and liquid noises.
‘Oh, sure,’ sighed Irie reaching down to pass it to him. ‘Whatever.’
‘Irie!’
It was Millat. He had forgotten to take his joint off Irie and was now running over to retrieve it. Irie, about to hand it over to Joshua, turning around in mid-action, at one and the same time spotted Millat coming towards her and felt a rumble in the ground, a tremor that shook Joshua’s tiny cast-iron goblin army to their knees and then swept them off the board.
‘What the – ’ said Millat.
It was the raid committee. Taking the suggestion of Parent-Governor Archibald Jones, an ex-army man who claimed expertise in the field of ambush, they had resolved to come from both sides (never before tested), their hundred-strong party utilizing the element of surprise, giving no pre-warning bar the sound of their approaching feet; simply boxing the little bastards in, thus cutting off any escape route for the enemy and catching the likes of Millat Iqbal, Irie Jones and Joshua Chalfen in the very act of marijuana consumption.
The headmaster of Glenard Oak was in a continual state of implosion. His hairline had gone out and stayed out like a determined tide, his eye sockets were deep, his lips had been sucked backwards into his mouth, he had no body to speak of, or rather he folded what he had into a small, twisted package, sealing it with a pair of crossed arms and crossed legs. As if to counter this personal, internal collapse, the headmaster had the seating arranged in a large circle, an expansive gesture he hoped would help everybody speak to and see each other, allowing everybody to express their point and make themselves heard so together they could work towards problem solving rather than behaviour chastisement. Some parents worried the headmaster was a bleeding-heart liberal. If you asked Tina, his secretary (not that no one ever did ask Tina a bloody thing, oh no, no fear, only questions like So, what are these three scallywags up for, then?), it was more like a haemorrhage.
‘So,’ said the headmaster to Tina with a doleful smile, ‘what are these three scallywags up for, then?’
Wearily, Tina read out the three counts of ‘mari-jew-ana’ possession. Irie put her hand up to object, but the headmaster silenced her with a gentle smile.
‘I see. That’ll be all, Tina. If you could just leave the door ajar on your way out, yes, that’s it, bit more… fine – don’t want anyone to feel boxed in, as it were. OK. Now. I think the most civilized way to do this,’ said the headmaster laying his hands palm up and flat on his knees to demonstrate he was packing no weapons, ‘so we don’t have everybody talking over each other, is if I say my bit, you each then say your bit, starting with you, Millat, and ending with Joshua, and then once we’ve taken on board all that’s been said, I get to say my final bit and that’s it. Relatively painless. All right? All right.’
‘I need a fag,’ said Millat.
The headmaster rearranged himself. He uncrossed his right leg and slung his skinny left leg over instead, he brought his two forefingers up to his lips in the shape of a church spire, he retracted his head like a turtle.
‘Millat, please.’
‘Have you got a fag-tray?’
‘No, now, Millat come on…’
‘I’ll just go an’ have one at the gates, then.’
In this manner, the whole school held the headmaster to ransom. He couldn’t have a thousand kids lining the Cricklewood streets, smoking fags, bringing down the tone of the school. This was the age of the league table. Of picky parents nosing their way through The Times Educational Supplement, summing up schools in letters and numbers and inspectors’ reports. The headmaster was forced to switch off the fire alarms for terms at a time, hiding his thousand smokers within the school’s confines.
‘Oh… look, just move your chair closer to the window. Come on, come on, don’t make a song and dance about it. That’s it. All right?’
A Lambert amp; Butler hung from Millat’s lips. ‘Light?’
The headmaster rifled about in his own shirt pocket, where a packet of German rolling tobacco and a lighter were buried amidst a lot of tissue paper and biros.
‘There you go.’ Millat lit up, blowing smoke in the headmaster’s direction. The headmaster coughed like an old woman. ‘OK, Millat, you first. Because I expect this of you, at least. Spill the legumes.’
Millat said, ‘I was round there, the back of the science block, on a matter of spiritual growth.’
The headmaster leant forward and tapped the church spire against his lips a few times. ‘You’re going to have to give me a little more to work on, Millat. If there’s some religious connection here, it can only work in your favour, but I need to know about it.’
Millat elaborated, ‘I was talking to my mate. Hifan.’
The headmaster shook his head. ‘I’m not following you, Millat.’
‘He’s a spiritual leader. I was getting some advice.’
‘Spiritual leader? Hifan? Is he in the school? Are we talking cult here, Millat? I need to know if we’re talking cult.’
‘No, it’s not a bloody cult,’ barked Irie exasperated. ‘Can we get on with it? I’ve got viola in ten minutes.’
‘Millat’s speaking, Irie. We’re listening to Millat. And hopefully when we get to you, Millat will give you a bit more respect than you’ve just showed him. OK? We’ve got to have communication. OK, Millat. Go on. What kind of spiritual leader?’
‘Muslim. He was helping me with my faith, yeah? He’s the head of the Cricklewood branch of the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation.’
The headmaster frowned. ‘KEVIN?’
‘They are aware they have an acronym problem,’ explained Irie.
‘So,’ continued the headmaster eagerly, ‘this guy from KEVIN. Was he the one who was supplying the gear?’
‘No,’ said Millat, stubbing his fag out on the windowsill. ‘It was my gear. He was talking to me, and I was smoking it.’
‘Look,’ said Irie, after a few more minutes of circular conversation. ‘It’s very simple. It was Millat’s gear. I smoked it without really thinking, then I gave it to Joshua to hold for a second while I tied my shoelace but he really had nothing to do with it. OK? Can we go now?’
‘Yes, I did!’
Irie turned to Joshua. ‘What?’
‘She’s trying to cover for me. Some of it was my marijuana. I was dealing marijuana. Then the pigs jumped me.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ. Chalfen, you’re nuts.’
Maybe. But in the past two days, Joshua had gained more respect, been patted on the back by more people, and generally lorded it around more than he ever had in his life. Some of the glamour of Millat seemed to have rubbed off on him by association, and as for Irie – well, he’d allowed a ‘vague interest’ to develop, in the past two days, into a full-blown crush. Wipe that. He had a full-blown crush on both of them. There was something compelling about them. More so than Elgin the dwarf or Moloch the sorcerer. He liked being connected with them, however tenuously. He had been plucked by the two of them out of nerddom, accidentally whisked from obscurity into the school spotlight. He wasn’t going back without a struggle.
‘Is this true, Joshua?’
‘Yes… umm, it started small, but now I believe I have a real problem. I don’t want to deal drugs, obviously I don’t, but it’s like a compulsion-’
‘Oh, for God’s sake…’
‘Now, Irie, you have to let Joshua have his say. His say is as valid as your say.’
Millat reached over to the headmaster’s pocket and pulled out his heavy packet of tobacco. He poured the contents out on to the small coffee table.
‘Oi. Chalfen. Ghetto-boy. Measure out an eighth.’
Joshua looked at the stinking mountain of brown. ‘A European eighth or an English eighth?’
‘Could you just do as Millat suggests,’ said the headmaster irritably, leaning forward in his chair to inspect the tobacco. ‘So we can settle this.’
Fingers shaking, Joshua drew a section of tobacco on to his palm and held it up. The headmaster brought Joshua’s hand up under Millat’s nose for inspection.
‘Barely a five-pound draw,’ said Millat scornfully. ‘I wouldn’t buy shit from you.’
‘OK, Joshua,’ said the headmaster, putting the tobacco back in its pouch. ‘I think we can safely say the game’s up. Even I knew that wasn’t anywhere near an eighth. But it does concern me that you felt the need to lie and we’re going to have to schedule a time to talk about that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In the meantime, I’ve talked to your parents, and in line with the school policy move away from behaviour chastisement and towards constructive conduct management, they’ve very generously suggested a two-month programme.’
‘Programme?’
‘Every Tuesday and Thursday, you, Millat, and you, Irie, will go to Joshua’s house and join him in a two-hour after-school study group split between maths and biology, your weaker subjects and his stronger.’
Irie snorted, ‘You’re not serious?’
‘You know, I am serious. I think it’s a really interesting idea. This way Joshua’s strengths can be shared equally amongst you, and the two of you can go to a stable environment, and one with the added advantage of keeping you both off the streets. I’ve talked to your parents and they are happy with the, you know, arrangement. And what’s really exciting is that Joshua’s father is something of an eminent scientist and his mother is a horticulturalist, I believe, so, you know, you’ll really get a lot out of it. You two have a lot of potential, but I feel you’re getting caught up with things that really are damaging to that potential – whether that’s family environment or personal hassles, I don’t know – but this is a really good opportunity to escape those. I hope you’ll see that it’s more than punishment. It’s constructive. It’s people helping people. And I really hope you’ll do this wholeheartedly, you know? This kind of thing is very much in the history, the spirit, the whole ethos of Glenard Oak, ever since Sir Glenard himself.’
The history, spirit and ethos of Glenard Oak, as any Glenardian worth their salt knew, could be traced back to Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard (1842- 1907), whom the school had decided to remember as their kindly Victorian benefactor. The official party line stated that Glenard had donated the money for the original building out of a devoted interest in the social improvement of the disadvantaged. Rather than workhouse, the official PTA booklet described it as a ‘shelter, workplace and educational institute’ used in its time by a mixture of English and Caribbean people. According to the PTA booklet, the founder of Glenard Oak was an educational philanthropist. But then, according to the PTA booklet, ‘post-class aberration consideration period’ was a suitable replacement for the word ‘detention’.
A more thorough investigation in the archives of the local Grange Library would reveal Sir Edmund Flecker Glenard as a successful colonial who had made a pretty sum in Jamaica farming tobacco, or rather overseeing great tracts of land where tobacco was being farmed. At the end of twenty years of this, having acquired far more money than was necessary, Sir Edmund sat back in his impressive leather armchair and asked himself if there were not something he could do. Something to send him into his dotage cushioned by a feeling of goodwill and worthiness. Something for the people. The ones he could see from his window. Out there in the field.
For a few months Sir Edmund was stumped. Then one Sunday, while taking a leisurely late afternoon stroll through Kingston, he heard a familiar sound that struck him differently. Godly singing. Hand-clapping. Weeping and wailing. Noise and heat and ecstatic movement coming from church after church and moving through the thick air of Jamaica like a choir invisible. Now, there was something, thought Sir Edmund. For, unlike many of his ex-patriot peers, who branded the singing caterwauling and accused it of being heathen, Sir Edmund had always been touched by the devotion of Jamaican Christians. He liked the idea of a jolly church, where one could sniff or cough or make a sudden movement without the vicar looking at one queerly. Sir Edmund felt certain that God, in all his wisdom, had never meant church to be a stiff-collared miserable affair as it was in Tunbridge Wells, but rather a joyous thing, a singing and dancing thing, a foot-stamping hand-clapping thing. The Jamaicans understood this. Sometimes it seemed to be the only thing they did understand. Stopping for a moment outside one particularly vibrant church, Sir Edmund took the opportunity to muse upon this conundrum: the remarkable difference between a Jamaican’s devotion to his God in comparison to his devotion towards his employer. It was a subject he’d had cause to consider many times in the past. Only this month, as he sat in his study trying to concentrate on the problem he had set himself, his wardens came to him with news of three strikes, various men found asleep or drugged while at work, and a whole collective of mothers (Bowden women amongst them) complaining about low pay, refusing to work. Now you see, that was the rub of it, right there. You could get a Jamaican to pray any hour of the day or night, they would roll into church for any date of religious note, even the most obscure – but if you took your eye off ’em for one minute in the tobacco fields, then work ground to a halt. When they worshipped they were full of energy, moving like jumping beans, bawling in the aisles… yet when they worked they were sullen and uncooperative. The question so puzzled him he had written a letter on the subject to the Gleaner earlier in the year inviting correspondence, but received no satisfactory replies. The more Edmund thought about it, the more it became clear to him that the situation was quite the opposite in England. One was impressed by the Jamaican’s faith but despairing of his work ethic and education. Vice versa, one admired the Englishman’s work ethic and education but despaired of his poorly kept faith. And now, as Sir Edmund turned to go back to his estate, he realized that he was in a position to influence the situation – nay, more than that – transform it! Sir Edmund, who was a fairly corpulent man, a man who looked as if he might be hiding another man within him, practically skipped all the way home.
The very next day he wrote an electrifying letter to The Times and donated forty thousand pounds to a missionary group on the condition that it went towards a large property in London. Here Jamaicans could work side by side with Englishmen packaging Sir Edmund’s cigarettes and taking general instruction from the Englishmen in the evening. A small chapel was to be built as an annex to the main factory. And on Sundays, continued Sir Edmund, the Jamaicans were to take the Englishmen to church and show them what worship should look like.
The thing was built, and, after hastily promising them streets of gold, Sir Edmund shipped three hundred Jamaicans to North London. Two weeks later, from the other side of the world, the Jamaicans sent Glenard a telegraph confirming their safe arrival and Glenard sent one back suggesting a Latin motto be put underneath the plaque already bearing his name. Laborare est Orare. For a while, things went reasonably well. The Jamaicans were optimistic about England. They put the freezing climate to the back of their minds and were inwardly warmed by Sir Edmund’s sudden enthusiasm and interest in their welfare. But Sir Edmund had always had difficulties retaining enthusiasm and interest. His mind was a small thing with big holes through which passions regularly seeped out, and The Faith of Jamaicans was soon replaced in the inverse sieve of his consciousness by other interests: The Excitability of the Military Hindoo; The Impracticalities of the English Virgin; The Effect of Extreme Heat on the Sexual Proclivities of the Trinidadian. For the next fifteen years, apart from fairly regular cheques sent by Sir Edmund’s clerk, the Glenard Oak factory heard nothing from him. Then, in the 1907 Kingston earthquake, Glenard was crushed to death by a toppled marble madonna while Irie’s grandmother looked on. (These are old secrets. They will come out like wisdom teeth when the time is right.) The date was unfortunate. That very month he had planned to return to British shores to see how his long-neglected experiment was doing. A letter he had written, giving the details of his travelling plans, arrived at Glenard Oak around the same time a worm, having made the two-day passage through his brain, emerged from the poor man’s left ear. But though a vermiculous meal was made of him, Glenard was saved a nasty ordeal, for his experiment was doing badly. The overheads involved in shipping damp, heavy tobacco to England were impractical from the start; when Sir Edmund’s subsidies dried up six months previous, the business went under, the missionary group discreetly disappeared, and the Englishmen left to go to jobs elsewhere. The Jamaicans, unable to get work elsewhere, stayed, counting down the days until the food supplies ran out. They were, by now, entirely sensible of the subjunctive mood, the nine times table, the life and times of William the Conqueror and the nature of an equilateral triangle, but they were hungry. Some died of that hunger, some were jailed for the petty crimes hunger prompts, many crept awkwardly into the East End and the English working class. A few found themselves seventeen years later at the British Empire Exhibition of 1924, dressed up as Jamaicans in the Jamaican exhibit, acting out a horrible simulacrum of their previous existence – tin drums, coral necklaces – for they were English now, more English than the English by virtue of their disappointments. All in all, then, the headmaster was wrong: Glenard could not be said to have passed on any great edifying beacon to future generations. A legacy is not something you can give or take by choice, and there are no certainties in the sticky business of inheritance. Much though it may have dismayed him, Glenard’s influence turned out to be personal, not professional or educational: it ran through people’s blood and the blood of their families; it ran through three generations of immigrants who could feel both abandoned and hungry even when in the bosom of their families in front of a mighty feast; and it even ran through Irie Jones of Jamaica’s Bowden clan, though she didn’t know it (but then somebody should have told her to keep a backward eye on Glenard; Jamaica is a small place, you can walk around it in a day, and everybody who lived there rubbed up against everybody else at one time or another). ‘Do we really have a choice?’ asked Irie.
‘You’ve been honest with me,’ said the headmaster, biting his colourless lip, ‘and I want to be honest with you.’
‘We don’t have a choice.’
‘Honestly, no. It’s really that or two months of post-class aberration consideration periods. I’m afraid we have to please the people, Irie. And if we can’t please all of the people all of the time, we can at least please some of-’
‘Yeah, great.’
‘Joshua’s parents are really fascinating people, Irie. I think this whole experience is going to be really educational for you. Don’t you think so, Joshua?’
Joshua beamed. ‘Oh yes, sir. I really think so.’
‘And you know, the exciting thing is, this could be a kind of guinea-pig project for a whole range of programmes,’ said the headmaster, thinking aloud. ‘Bringing children of disadvantaged or minority backgrounds into contact with kids who might have something to offer them. And there could be an exchange, vice versa. Kids teaching kids basketball, football et cetera. We could get funding.’ At the magic word funding, the headmaster’s sunken eyes began to disappear beneath agitated lids.
‘Shit, man,’ said Millat, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I need a fag.’
‘Halves,’ said Irie, following him out.
‘See you guys on Tuesday!’ said Joshua.