So Archie is there, there in the trajectory of the bullet, about to do something unusual, even for TV: save the same man twice and with no more reason or rhyme than the first time. And it’s a messy business, this saving people lark. Everybody in the room watches in horror as he takes it in the thigh, right in the femur, spins round with some melodrama and falls right through the mouse’s glass box. Shards of glass all over the gaff. What a performance. If it were TV you would hear the saxophone around now; the credits would be rolling.
But first the endgames. Because it seems no matter what you think of them, they must be played, even if, like the independence of India or Jamaica, like the signing of peace treaties or the docking of passenger boats, the end is simply the beginning of an even longer story. The same focus group who picked out the colour of this room, the carpet, the font for the posters, the height of the table, would no doubt tick the box that asks to see all these things played to their finish… and there is surely a demographic pattern to all those who wish to see the eyewitness statements that identified Magid as many times as Millat, the confusing transcripts, the videotape of uncooperating victim and families, a court case so impossible the judge gave in and issued four hundred hours community service to both twins, which they served, naturally, as gardeners in Joyce’s new project, a huge millennial park by the banks of the Thames…
And is it young professional women aged eighteen to thirty-two who would like a snapshot seven years hence of Irie, Joshua and Hortense sitting by a Caribbean sea (for Irie and Joshua become lovers in the end; you can only avoid your fate for so long), while Irie’s fatherless little girl writes affectionate postcards to Bad Uncle Millat and Good Uncle Magid and feels free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of paternal strings? And could it be that it is largely the criminal class and the elderly who find themselves wanting to make bets on the winner of a blackjack game, the one played by Alsana and Samad, Archie and Clara, in O’Connell’s, 31 December 1999, that historic night when Abdul-Mickey finally opened his doors to women?
But surely to tell these tall tales and others like them would be to speed the myth, the wicked lie, that the past is always tense and the future, perfect. And as Archie knows, it’s not like that. It’s never been like that.
It would make an interesting survey (what kind would be your decision) to examine the present and divide the onlookers into two groups: those whose eyes fell upon a bleeding man, slumped across a table, and those who watched the getaway of a small brown rebel mouse. Archie, for one, watched the mouse. He watched it stand very still for a second with a smug look as if it expected nothing less. He watched it scurry away, over his hand. He watched it dash along the table, and through the hands of those who wished to pin it down. He watched it leap off the end and disappear through an air vent. Go on my son! thought Archie.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to both Lisa and Joshua Appignanesi for contriving between them to get me a room of my own when it was most required. Thanks are due to Tristan Hughes and Yvonne Bailey-Smith for providing two happy homes for this book and its author. I am also indebted to the bright ideas and sharp eyes of the following people: Paul Hilder, friend and sounding-board; Nicholas Laird, fellow idiot savant; Donna Poppy, meticulous in everything; Simon Prosser, as judicious an editor as one could hope for; and finally my agent, Georgia Garrett, from whom nothing escapes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975 and continues to live in the area. She is the author of two novels. Her first book, White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ First Book Award. Her second novel, The Autograph Man, is also available as an ePenguin ebook.
The publisher is grateful for permission to reproduce the following extracts:
‘As Time Goes By’, words and music by Herman Hupfeld, copyright 1931 by T. B. Harms Company, all rights assigned to Warner Chappell Music Inc., all rights reserved, lyric reproduced by kind permission of Redwood Music Ltd (Carlin), London NW1 8BD, covering the Commonwealth of Nations including Canada, Australasia and Hong Kong, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Africa and Spain only;
Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster, Penguin Books, Twentieth-Century Classics edition;
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Penguin Books, Twentieth-Century Classics edition;
‘My Back Pages’ by Bob Dylan, copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc., copyright renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music, all rights reserved, international copyright secured, reprinted by permission;
(p. 228) the Koran, Sura 109 and (p. 501) Sura 52.44, translation by N. J. Dawood, first published by Penguin Books 1956;
(p. 501) the Koran, Sura 52.44 and (p. 501) Sura 52.49 translation by J. M. Rodwell, first published 1861, Orion Publishing Group, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2E 9EA;
and (p. 502) the Koran, Sura 52.49, translation by Mohammed Marmaduke Pickthall, first published 1930, UBSPD, 5 Ansari Road, New Delhi 110002.