11The Miseducation of Irie Jones -2

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 pounds 50 pence 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'etre. 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:

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 P E corridor, wan king

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 epic entre 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 Me, 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 Bukhari, 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 Me off his sleeve, he attempted an introduction. The , Hifan. Him and me used to go about together. Hifan -'

Hifan stepped forward, looming over Me like a bell tower. "Good to meet you, sister. I am Hifan."

"Great. Millat."

The, 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 sty lee 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.

Me 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 TabrizI, hadith number 220: The person who goes in search of knowledge is on active service for God until he returns and the ' "Mill," whispered trie, 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. The, 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, Me," 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

The MisediicdRdn oj utejt;:^

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."

TheI'

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, pkase."

"Have you got a fag-tray?"

"No, now, Millat come on .. ."

Till 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 Crickle wood 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 & 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. O K? 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. O K? 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 nerd dom 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 under304

stand. 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. Ldborare 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 Me 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 Me.

"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, Me. 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, Me. I think this whole experience is going to be 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 vf or A 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 Me, following him out.

"See you guys on Tuesday!" said Joshua.

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