White Teeth by Zadie Smith Page A

path!”
    â€œOnly the few—that’s wot it says—only the few. They’ll all get it—that’s what it says in Dyoot-er-ronomee—they’ll all get what’s comin’ and only the few—”
    Somewhere in the middle of Ryan Topps’s enlightening biblical exegesis, his former false idol, the Vespa GS, cracked right into a four-hundred-year-old oak tree. Nature triumphed over the presumptions of engineering. The tree survived; the bike died; Ryan was hurled one way; Clara the other.
    The principles of Christianity and Sod’s Law (also known as Murphy’s Law) are the same:
Everything happens to me, for me.
So if a man drops a piece of toast and it lands butter-side down, this unlucky event is interpreted as being proof of an essential truth about bad luck: that the toast fell as it did just to prove to
you,
Mr. Unlucky, that there is a defining force in the universe and it is bad luck. It’s not random. It could never have fallen on the right side, so the argument goes, because that’s Sod’s Law. In short, Sod’s Law happens to you to prove to you that there is Sod’s Law. Yet, unlike gravity, it is a law that does not exist whatever happens: when the toast lands on the
right
side, Sod’s Law mysteriously disappears. Likewise, when Clara fell, knocking the teeth out of the top of her mouth, while Ryan stood up without a scratch, Ryan knew it was because God had chosen Ryan as one of the saved and Clara as one of the unsaved. Not because one was wearing a helmet and the other wasn’t. And had it happened the other way round, had gravity reclaimed Ryan’s teeth and sent them rolling down Primrose Hill like tiny enamel snowballs, well . . . you can bet your life that God, in Ryan’s mind, would have done a vanishing act.
    As it was, this was the final sign Ryan needed. When New Year’s Eve rolled around, he was there in the living room, sitting in the middle of a circle of candles with Hortense, ardently praying for Clara’s soul while Darcus pissed into his tube and watched
The Generation Game
on BBC One. Clara, meanwhile, had put on a pair of yellow flares and a red halterneck top and gone to a party. She suggested its theme, helped to paint the banner and hang it from the window; she danced and smoked with the rest of them and felt herself, without undue modesty, to be quite the belle of the squat. But as midnight inevitably came and went without the horsemen of the apocalypse making an appearance, Clara surprised herself by falling into a melancholy. For ridding oneself of faith is like boiling seawater to retrieve the salt—something is gained but something is lost. Though her friends—Merlin, Wan-Si, et al.—clapped her on the back and congratulated her for exorcising those fervid dreams of perdition and redemption, Clara quietly mourned the warmer touch she had waited for these nineteen years, the all-enveloping bear hug of the Savior, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end; the man who was meant to take her away from all this, from the listless reality of life in a ground-floor flat in Lambeth. What now for Clara? Ryan would find another fad; Darcus need only turn to another channel; for Hortense another date would of course materialize, along with more leaflets, ever more faith. But Clara was not like Hortense.
    Yet a residue, left over from the evaporation of Clara’s faith, remained. She still wished for a savior. She still wished for a man to whisk her away, to choose her above others so that she might
walk in white with Him: for
[she]
was worthy.
Revelation 3:4.
    Perhaps it is not so inexplicable then, that when Clara Bowden met Archie Jones at the bottom of some stairs the next morning she saw more in him than simply a rather short, rather chubby, middle-aged white man in a badly tailored suit. Clara saw Archie through the gray-green eyes of loss; her world had just disappeared,