2 Teething Trouble

But Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum. And it's about time people told the

truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was

once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings. Clara was^ from somewhere.

She had roots. More specifically, she was from Lambeth via Jamaica and she was connected,

through tacit adolescent agreement, to one Ryan Topps. Because before Clara was beautiful she was

ugly. And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting

away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in

the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is

essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable. There was

Clara and Ryan for eight months before Clara and Archie were drawn together from opposite ends

of a staircase. And Clara might never have run into the arms of Archie Jones if she hadn't been

running, quite as fast as she could, away from Ryan Topps.

Poor Ryan Topps. He was a mass of unfortunate physical characteristics. He was very thin and

very tall, red-headed, flatfooted and freckled to such an extent that his skin was rarer than his

freckles. Ryan fancied himself as a bit of a Mod. He wore ill-fitting grey suits with black

polo-necks. He wore Chelsea boots after everyone else had stopped wearing them. While the rest of

the world discovered the joys of the electronic synthesizer, Ryan swore allegiance to the little men

with big guitars: to the Kinks, the Small Faces, the Who. Ryan Topps rode a green Vespa GS

scooter which he polished twice a day with a baby's nappy and kept encased in a custom-built

corrugated-iron shield. To Ryan's way of thinking, a Vespa was not merely a mode of transport but

an ideology, family, friend and lover all rolled into one paragon of late forties engineering.

Ryan Topps, as one might expect, had few friends.

Clara Bowden was gangly, buck-toothed, a Jehovah's Witness, and saw in Ryan a kindred spirit.

A typical teenage female panoptic on she knew everything there was to know about Ryan Topps

long before they ever spoke. She knew the basics: same school (St. Jude's Community School,

Lambeth), same height (six foot one); she knew he was, like her, neither Irish nor Roman Catholic,

which made them two islands floating surrounded by the popish ocean of St. Jude's, enrolled in the

school by the accident of their post codes reviled by teachers and pupils alike. She knew the name

of his bike, she read the tops of his records as they popped up over the brim of his bag. She even

knew things about him he didn't know: for example, she knew he was the Last Man on Earth. Every

school has one, and in St. Jude's, as in other seats of learning, it was the girls who chose this

moniker and dished it out. There were, of course, variations:

Mr. Not for a Million Pounds.

Mr. Not to Save My Mother's Life.

Mr. Not for World Peace.

But, generally, the schoolgirls of St. Jude's kept to the tried and tested formula. Though Ryan

would never be privy to the conversations of the school's female changing rooms, Clara knew. She

knew how the object of her affections was discussed, she kept an ear out, she knew what he

amounted to when you got down to it, down amongst the sweat and the training bras and the sharp

flick of a wet towel.

"Ah, Jaysus, you're not listening. I'm saying, if he was the last man on earth!"

"I still wouldn't."

"Ah, bollocks you would!"

"But listen: the whole bleedin' world has been hit by the bomb, like in Japan, roight? An' all the

good-lookin' men, all the rides like your man Nicky Laird, they're all dead. They've all been burnt

to a crisp. An' all that's left is Ryan Topps and a bunch of cockroaches."

"On me life, I'd rather sleep with the cockroaches."

Ryan's unpopularity at St. Jude's was equalled only by Clara's. On her first day at the school her

mother had explained to her she was about to enter the devil's lair, filled her satchel with two

hundred copies of the Watchtower and instructed her to go and do the Lord's work. Week after

week she shuffled through the school, head hung to the ground, handing out magazines, murmuring,

Only Jehovah saves'; in a school where an overexcitable pustule could send you to Coventry, a

six-foot black missionary in knee socks attempting to convert six hundred Catholics to the church

of the Jehovah's Witnesses equalled social leprosy.

So Ryan was red as a beetroot. And Clara was black as yer boot. Ryan's freckles were a

join-the-dots enthusiast's wet dream. Clara could circumnavigate an apple with her front teeth

before her tongue got anywhere near it. Not even the Catholics would forgive them for it (and

Catholics give out forgiveness at about the same rate politicians give out promises and whores give

out); not even St. Jude, who got saddled way back in theist century with the patronage of hopeless

causes (due to the tonal similarity between Jude and Judas), was prepared to get involved.

At five o'clock each day, as Clara sat in her house attending to the message of the gospels or

composing a leaflet condemning the heathen practice of blood transfusion, Ryan Topps would scoot

by her open window on his way home. The Bowden living room sat just below street level, and had

bars on its window, so all views were partial. Generally, she would see feet, wheels, car exhausts,

swinging umbrellas. Such slight glimpses were often

telling; a lively imagination could squeeze much pathos out of a frayed lace, a darned sock, a

low swinging bag that had seen better days. But nothing affected her more deeply than gazing after

the disappearing tailpipe of Ryan's scooter. Lacking any name for the furtive rumblings that

appeared in her lower abdomen on these occasions, Clara called it the spirit of the Lord. She felt

that somehow she was going to save the heathen Ryan Topps. Clara meant to gather this boy close

to her breast, keep him safe from the temptation that besets us all around, prepare him for the day

of his redemption. (And wasn't there somewhere, lower than her abdomen somewhere down in the

nether region of the unmentionables was there not the half-conceived hope that Ryan Topps might

save her?)

If Hortense Bowden caught her daughter sitting wistfully by the barred window, listening to the

retreating splutter of an engine while the pages of the New Bible flicked over in the breeze, she

koofed her up-side her head and thanked her to remember that only 144,000 of the Witnesses of

Jehovah would sit in the court of the Lord on Judgement Day. Amongst which number of the

Anointed there was no space for nasty-looking so-and-sos on motorcycles.

"But what if we saved '

"Some people," Hortense asserted with a snort, 'have done such a hoi' heap of sinning, it late for

dem to be making eyes at Jehovah. It take effort to be close to Jehovah. It take devotion and

dedication. Blessed are the pure in heart for they alone shall see God. Matthew 5:8. Isn't dat right,

Darcus?"

Darcus Bowden, Clara's father, was an odoriferous, moribund, salivating old man entombed in a

bug-infested armchair from which he had never been seen to remove himself, not even, thanks to a

catheter, to visit the outdoor toilet. Darcus had come over to England fourteen years earlier and

spent the whole of that period in the far corner of the living room, watching tele

vision. The original intention had been that he should come to England and earn enough money

to enable Clara and Hortense to come over, join him and settle down. However, on arrival, a

mysterious illness had debilitated Darcus Bowden. An illness that no doctor could find any physical

symptoms of, but which manifested itself in the most incredible lethargy, creating in Darcus

admittedly, never the most vibrant of men a lifelong affection for the dole, the armchair and British

television. In 1972, enraged by a fourteen-year wait, Hortense decided finally to make the journey

on her own steam. Steam was something Hortense had in abundance. She arrived on the doorstep

with the seventeen-year-old Clara, broke down the door in a fury and so the legend went back in St.

Elizabeth gave Darcus Bowden the tongue-whipping of his life. Some say this onslaught lasted four

hours, some say she quoted every book of the bible by memory and it took a whole day and a

whole night. What is certain is, at the end of it all, Darcus slumped deeper into the recesses of his

chair, looked mournfully at the television with whom he had had such an understanding,

compassionaterelationship so uncomplicated, so much innocent affection and a tear squeezed its

way out of its duct and settled in a crag underneath his eye. Then he said just one word: Hmph.

Hmph was all Darcus said or ever was to say after. Ask Darcus anything; query him on any

subject at any hour of the day and night; interrogate him; chat with him; implore him; declare your

love for him; accuse him or vindicate him and he will give you only one answer.

"I say, isn't dat right, Darcus?"

"Hmph."

"An' it not," exclaimed Hortense, returning to Clara, having received Darcus's grunt of approval,

'dat young man's soul you boddrin' yourself wid! How many times must I tell you you got no time

for bwoys!"

For Time was running out in the Bowden household. This

was 1974, and Hortense was preparing for the End of the World, which, in the house diary, she

had marked carefully in blue biro: i January 1975. This was not a solitary psychosis of the Bowdens.

There were eight million Jehovah's Witnesses waiting with her. Hortense was in large, albeit

eccentric, company. A personal letter had come to Hortense (as secretary of the Lambeth branch of

the Kingdom Halls), with a photocopied signature from William J. Rangeforth of the largest

Kingdom Hall in the USA, Brooklyn, confirming the date. The end of the world had been officially

confirmed with a gold-plated letterhead, and Hortense had risen to the occasion by setting it in an

attractive mahogany frame. She had given it pride of place on a doily on top of the television

between a glass figurine of Cinderella on her way to the Ball and a tea-cosy embroidered with the

Ten Commandments. She had asked Darcus whether he thought it looked nice. He had hmphed his

assent.

The end of the world was nigh. And this was not the Lambeth branch of the church of the

Jehovah's Witnesses was to be assured like the mistakes of 1914 and 1925. They had been promised

the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees, and this time the entrails of sinners

wrapped around the trunks of trees would appear. They had waited so long for the rivers of blood to

overflow the gutters in the high street, and now their thirst would be satiated. The time had come.

This was the right date, this was the only date, all other dates that might have been proffered in the

past were the result of some bad calculations: someone forgot to add, someone forgot to minus,

someone forgot to carry the one. But now was the time. The real thing, i January 1975.

Hortense, for one, was glad to hear it. The first morning of 1925 she had wept like a baby when

she awoke to find instead of hail and brimstone and universal destruction the continuance of daily

life, the regular running of the buses and trains. It had been for nothing, then, all that tossing and

turning the previous night; waiting for

those neighbours, those who failed to listen to your warnings, to sink under a hot and terrible

fire that shall separate their skin from their bones, shall melt the eyes in their sockets, and burn the

babies that suckle at their mothers' breasts ... so many of your neighbours shall die that day that

their bodies, if lined up side by side, will stretch three hundred times round the earth and on their

charred remains shall the true Witnesses of the Lord walk to his side. The Clarion Bell, issue 245

How bitterly she had been disappointed! But the wounds of 1925 had healed, and Hortense was

once again ready to be convinced that apocalypse, just as the right holy Mr. Rangeforth had

explained, was round the corner. The promise of the 1914 generation still stood: This generation

shall not pass, till all these things bejulfilkd (Matthew 24:34). Those who were alive in 1914 would

live to see the Armageddon. It had been promised. Born in 1907, Hortense was getting old now, she

was getting tired and her peers were dying off like flies. 1975 looked like the last chance.

Had not two hundred of the church's best intellectuals spent twenty years examining the bible,

and hadn't this date been their unanimous conclusion? Had they not read between the lines in

Daniel, scanned for the hidden meaning in Revelation, correctly identified the Asian wars (Korea

and Vietnam) as the period spoken of by the angel, 'a time, and times, and half a time'? Hortense

was convinced these were the sign of signs. These were the final days. There were eight months to

the end of the world. Hardly enough time! There were banners to be made, articles to be written

("Will the Lord Forgive the Onanist?"), doorsteps to be trod, bells to be rung. There was Darcus to

think about who could not walk to the fridge without assistance how was he to make it to the

kingdom of the Lord? And in all Clara must lend a hand; there was no time for boys, for Ryan

Topps, for skulking around, for adolescent angst. For Clara was not like other teenagers. She was

the Lord's child, Hortense's miracle baby.

Hortense was all of forty-eight when she heard the Lord's voice while gutting a fish one

morning, Montego Bay, 1955. Straight away she threw down the marlin, caught the trolley car

home and submitted to her least favourite activity in order to conceive the child He had asked for.

Why had the Lord waited so long? Because the Lord wanted to show Hortense a miracle. For

Hortense had been a miracle child herself, born in the middle of the legendary Kingston earthquake,

1907, when everybody else was busy dying miracles ran in the family. Hortense saw it this way: if

she could come into this world in the middle of a ground shaker, as parts of Montego Bay slipped

into the sea, and fires came down from the mountains, then nobody had no excuses about nothing

no how. She liked to say: "Being' barn is de hardest part! Once ya done dat no problems." So now

that Clara was here, old enough to help her with door stepping administration, writing speeches and

all the varied business of the church of the Jehovah's Witnesses, she'd better get on with it. No time

for boys. This child's work was just beginning. Hortense born while Jamaica crumbled did not

accept apocalypse before one's nineteenth birthday as any excuse for tardiness.
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