Swing Time

PART SEVEN: Late Days

I didn’t set eyes on Tracey again for eight years. It was an unseasonably warm May evening, the night I went out with Daniel Kramer, a first date. He came to the city quarterly, and was one of Aimee’s favorites in the sense that he did not, by virtue of being handsome, meld entirely with all the other accountants and financial advisers and copyright lawyers she regularly consulted, and so in her mind had been granted things like a name, qualities like a “good aura” and a “New York sense of humor” and a few biographical details she had managed to recall. Originally from Queens. Attended Stuyvesant. Plays tennis. Trying to keep the arrangements as loose as possible, I had suggested to him that we go to Soho and “play it by ear,” but Aimee wanted us to come first to the house for a drink. It wasn’t common at all, this kind of casual, intimate invitation, but Kramer didn’t seem surprised or alarmed to receive it. The twenty minutes we were granted passed with no customer-like behavior. He admired the art — without overdoing it — listening politely as Aimee repeated all the things the dealer who sold the art to her had told her about the art when she bought it, and soon enough we were free, of Aimee, of the oppressive grandeur of that house, skipping down the back stairs, both a little giddy on good champagne, emerging on to the Brompton Road and into a warm, close night, muggy, threatening a storm. He wanted to take the long walk into town — we had vague plans to see what was on at the Curzon — but I was not a tourist and those were my salad days of impossible heels. I was about to look for a taxi when, for “fun,” he stepped off the curb and waved down a passing pedicab.

“She collects a lot of African art,” he said, as we climbed into the leopard-print seats — he was only making conversation, but primed against any hint of a customer, I cut him down: “Well, I don’t really know what you can mean by ‘African art.’”

He looked surprised by my tone but managed a neutral smile. He relied on Aimee’s business and I was an extension of Aimee.

“Most of what you saw,” I began in a tone better suited for a lecture hall, “is actually Augusta Savage. So Harlem. It’s where she lived when she first came to New York — I mean, Aimee. Of course, she’s a great supporter of the arts generally.”

Now Kramer looked bored. I was boring myself. We didn’t speak again until the bike stopped at the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Greek Street. As we pulled up at the curb we were surprised by the existence of a Bangladeshi boy, whose independent reality we had, up to that point, entirely forgotten, but who had undeniably brought us this far, and now turned round on his bike seat, his face soaked with sweat, hardly able to explain, through gasps, how much this form of human toil cost per minute. There was nothing we wanted to see at the cinema. In a slightly tense mood, our clothes sticking to us in the heat, we wandered toward Piccadilly Circus, without knowing which bar we were heading for, or whether we should eat instead, both already considering the evening a failure, looking straight ahead and confronted, every few steps, with the giant playbills of the theaters. It was in front of one of these, a little way down, that I stopped dead. A performance of the musical Showboat, a shot of the “Negro chorus”: head-handkerchiefs, rolled-up trousers, aprons and work skirts, but all done tastefully, carefully, “authentically,” with no hint of Mammy or Uncle Ben about it. And the girl closest to the camera, her mouth open wide in song, with one arm stretched high above her head, clutching a broom — the very picture of kinetic joy — was Tracey. Kramer came up behind me to peer over my shoulder. I pointed a finger at Tracey’s upturned nose, as Tracey herself used to point at a dancer’s face as it passed across our TV screens.

“I know her!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I know her really well.”

He tapped a cigarette out of a packet, lit it and looked the theater up and down.

“Well… you wanna go see it?”

“But you don’t like musicals, do you? Nobody serious does.”

He shrugged. “I’m in London, it’s a show. That’s what you’re meant to do in London, isn’t it? Go see a show?”

He passed me his cigarette, pushed open the heavy doors and headed to the box office. It all of a sudden seemed very romantic and coincidental and well timed and I had a ridiculous girlish narrative running in my head, of a future moment in which I would be explaining to Tracey — backstage somewhere in some sad regional theater, as she pulled on a pair of tired old fishnets — that the very moment I realized I’d met my love, the moment I came into my true happiness, was the same moment I happened to spot her, quite by chance, in that very small role she’d had, back in the day, in the chorus of Showboat, all those years and years ago…

Kramer came back out with two tickets, great seats in the second row. In lieu of dinner I bought myself a huge bag of chocolates, of the kind I rarely got to eat, Aimee considering such things not only nutritionally fatal but clear evidence of moral weakness. Kramer bought two large plastic tumblers of bad red wine and the program. I searched through it but couldn’t find Tracey. She wasn’t where she should be in the alphabetical list of the cast, and I started to worry that I was suffering from some kind of delusion, or had made an embarrassing error. I flicked the pages back and forth, sweat breaking out on my forehead — I must have looked crazy. “You OK?” asked Kramer. I was almost at the end of the program again when Kramer pressed a finger to a page to stop me turning it.

“But isn’t that your girl?”

I looked again: it was. She’d changed her common-sounding, barbarous last name — the name by which I’d always known her — to the Frenchified and, to me, absurd Le Roy. Her first name, too, had been adapted: now it was Tracee. And in the picture her hair was straight and glossy. I laughed out loud.

Kramer looked at me curiously.

“And you’re good friends?”

“I know her very well. I mean, I haven’t seen her in about eight years.”

Kramer frowned: “See, in guy world we’d call that an ‘ex-friend,’ or better still: ‘a stranger.’”

The orchestra started up. I was reading Tracey’s bio, parsing it furiously, in a race against time before the house lights dimmed, as if the visible words were hiding another set, with a far deeper meaning that required decoding and would reveal something essential about Tracey and the way her life was now:

If it was the story of her life it was disappointing. It lacked the ubiquitous accomplishments of all the other bios: no TV, no film, and no mention of where she’d been “trained,” which I took to mean she’d never graduated. Apart from Guys and Dolls, there was no other West End work, only those bleak-sounding “tours.” I imagined small church halls and rowdy schools, empty matinees on the stages of abandoned cinemas, minor local drama festivals. But if some part of all this pleased me, another part, equally large, was incensed at the idea that this bio of Tracee Le Roy could be fairly compared — by any of the people in the theater presently reading it, or by any of the actors in the cast — with any of these other stories. What did Tracee Le Roy have to do with these people? With this girl right next to her in the program, the girl with the endless biography, Emily Wolff-Pratt, who had studied at RADA, and who couldn’t know, as I did, the huge statistical unlikelihood of my friend standing on this stage, or any stage at all — in any role, in any context — and who perhaps had the temerity to think that she, Emily Wolff-Pratt, was a true friend of Tracey’s, just because she saw her every night, just because they danced together, when in fact she hadn’t the slightest idea of who Tracey was or where she had come from, or how much it had cost her to get here. I turned my attention to Tracey’s headshot. Well, I had to admit it: she’d turned out rather well. Her nose didn’t seem so much of an outrage any more, she’d grown into it, and the cruelty I’d always detected in her face was obscured by the megawatt Broadway smile she had in common with every other actor on the page. The surprise wasn’t that she was pretty, or sexy — she had already been in possession of these attributes as a very young teenager. The surprise was how elegant she had become. Her Shirley Temple dimples were gone, along with any hint of the provocative fleshiness she’d carried around as a child. It was almost impossible for me to imagine her voice, as I’d known it, as I remembered it, coming out of this pert-nosed, slick-haired, delicately freckled creature. I smiled down at her. Tracee Le Roy, who are you pretending to be now?

“Here we go!” said Kramer, as the curtain parted. He placed his elbows on his knees, his hands in two childish fists under his chin and made a facetious face: I am agog.

Stage left, a Southern oak, draped in Spanish moss, beautifully rendered. Stage right, the suggestion of a Mississippi town. Center stage, a showboat in harbor, the Cotton Blossom. Tracey — along with four other women — was first on stage, appearing from behind the oak, holding her broom, and behind her came the men with their various hoes and spades. The orchestra played the opening bars of a song. I recognized it as soon as I heard it, the big chorus number, and at once felt a panic, without knowing why, it took a moment, until the music itself prompted the memory. I saw the whole song laid out on the old sheet music, and remembered, too, how I’d felt the first time I saw it. And now the lyrics, shocking to me as a child, formed in my mouth, in perfect time with the orchestra’s preamble, I remembered the Mississippi, where the “niggers” all work, where the white people don’t, and I gripped the armrest and felt an urge to rise up out of my seat — it was like a scene in a dream — with the idea of stopping Tracey before she even started, but as soon as I’d had the thought it was already too late, and over the lyrics I’d thought I knew some new words had been substituted, but of course they had — no one had sung the original words for years and years. “Here we all work… Here we all work…”

I sank back into the seat. I watched Tracey expertly maneuver her broom this way and that, giving it life, so that it seemed almost another human presence on the stage, like the trick Astaire pulls, with that hat rack, in Royal Wedding. At one point she was perfectly aligned with the image from the poster, broom in the air, arm outstretched, kinetic joy. I wanted to pause her there in that position for ever.

The real stars arrived on stage, to begin the drama. In the background Tracey swept the front step of a general store. She was stage left from the main characters, Julie LaVerne and her devoted husband, Steve, two cabaret actors who work together on the Cotton Blossom and are in love. But Julie LaVerne is soon revealed, just before the interval, to be Julie Dozier, that is, not a white woman, as she has always pretended, but really a tragic mulatto, who “passes,” who convinces everybody, including her own husband, until the day she’s found out. At which point the couple are threatened with prison, for their marriage is illegal under the miscegenation laws. Steve cuts Julie’s palm and drinks a little of her blood: the “one drop rule”—they’re both Negroes now. In the dim light, in the middle of this ridiculous melodrama, I checked the bio of the actress playing Julie. She had a Greek last name and was no darker than Kramer.

During the interval I drank a lot, and too quickly, and talked at Kramer relentlessly. I was leaning against the bar, blocking other people’s route to the bar staff, waving my hands around and ranting about the injustice of the casting, of how few roles there were for actors like me and even when such roles did exist you couldn’t get them, somebody always gave them to a white girl, for even a tragic mulatto apparently wasn’t quite fit to play a tragic mulatto, even in this day and—

“Actors like you?”

“What?”

“You said: actors like me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“My point is: that role should be Tracey’s.”

“You just said she can’t sing. From what I’ve seen, it’s pretty much a singing role.”

“She sings fine!”

“Jesus, why are you shouting at me?”

We sat through the second half as silent as we had been in the first but this time the silence had a new texture, chilled with the iciness of mutual contempt. I longed to get out of there. Long stretches of the show passed without any sign of Tracey and held no interest for me. Only toward the end did the chorus reappear, this time as the “Dahomey Dancers,” that is, as Africans, from the Kingdom of Dahomey, they were supposedly performing at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. I watched Tracey in the circle of women — the men danced opposite, in their own circle — swinging her arms, crouching low and singing in a fictional African tongue, while the men stamped their feet and banged their spears in reply: gunga, hungo, bunga, gooba! I thought unavoidably of my mother, and of her line in Dahomey stories: the proud history of the kings; the shape and feel of the cowrie shells, used as money, the Amazon battalion, made up solely of women, taking prisoners of war as slaves for the kingdom, or else simply severing their enemies’ heads and holding them up in their hands. The way other children hear tell of Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks, I heard of this “Black Sparta,” the noble kingdom of Dahomey, fighting to hold off the French to the very end. But it was almost impossible to reconcile these memories with the farce presently happening, both on stage and off, for most of the people I sat among did not know what came next in the show and consequently, I realized, they felt they were watching some kind of shameful minstrel show and were willing the scene to end. On stage, too, the “audience” at the world’s fair backed away from the Dahomey Dancers, though not out of shame but their own sense of fear, that these dancers were perhaps vicious, no different from the rest of their tribe, their spears not props but weapons. I looked over at Kramer; he was squirming. I turned back and watched Tracey. What great fun she was having with the general discomfort, just as she had always enjoyed such moments as a child. She waved her spear and roared, marching with the rest, toward the fearful audience at the fair, and then laughed with the others as their audience ran off stage. Left to their own devices, the Dahomey Dancers cut loose: they sang of how glad and tired they were, glad to see the back of the white folks, and tired, so tired, of being in a “Dahomey show.”

And now the audience — the real audience — understood. They saw that what they were watching was intended to be funny, ironic, that these were American dancers, not Africans — yes, finally they grasped that a trick had been played on them. These folks weren’t from Dahomey at all! They were just good old Negroes, after all, straight from Avenue A, in New York City itself! Kramer chuckled, the music turned to ragtime, and I felt my feet moving beneath me, trying to echo on the plush red carpet the complicated soft-shoe shuffle Tracey was performing right above me on the hard-wood stage. The steps were familiar to me — they would have been to any dancer — and I wished I was up there with her. I was stuck in London, in the year 2005, but Tracey was in Chicago in 1893, and Dahomey a hundred years before that, and anywhere and any time that people have moved their feet like that. I was so jealous I cried.

Show over, I came out of the long queue for the ladies and spotted Kramer before he saw me, he was standing in the lobby, bored and angry, holding my coat over his arm. Outside it had started to lash with rain.

“So, I’m gonna go,” he said, passing me my coat, barely able to look at me. ‘I’m sure you’ll want to go say hello to your ‘friend.’”

He turned his collar up and walked into that horrible evening, umbrella-less, still angry. Nothing offends a man so much as being ignored. But I was impressed: his dislike of me was so clearly stronger than any fear of my influence over his employer. Once he was out of sight I walked around to the side of the theater and found it was just as you always see it in the old movies: the door said “Stage Door” and there was a reasonable crowd of people waiting for the cast to emerge, despite the rain, clutching their little notepads and pens.

With no umbrella, I pressed against the side of the wall, facing out, just covered by a narrow awning. I didn’t know what I planned to say or how I was going to approach her, but I was just beginning to think about it when a car pulled up in the alleyway, driven by Tracey’s mother. She was hardly changed: through the rain-streaked windscreen I could see the same tin hoops in her ears, the triple chin, hair scraped back tight, a cigarette hanging from her mouth. I turned at once to the wall and, as she parked, made my escape. I ran down Shaftesbury Avenue, getting soaked, thinking about what I’d seen in the back of that car: two sleeping young children, strapped in their seats. I wondered whether this, and nothing else, was the true reason the story of Tracey’s life took so little time to read.

You want to believe there are limits to what money can make happen, lines it can’t cross. Lamin in that white suit in the Rainbow Room felt like an example of the opposite lesson. But in fact he didn’t have a visa, not yet. He had a new passport and a date of return. And when it was time to leave I would accompany him back to the village, along with Fern, staying on a week to complete the yearly report for the board of the foundation. After which Fern would remain, and I’d fly to London, to meet the children and supervise their quarterly visit to their fathers. So we were informed by Judy. Until then, a month together in New York.

For the past decade, whenever we were in the city, my base had been the maid’s room, on the ground floor off the kitchen, although occasionally a half-hearted discussion would take place about the possibility of a separate space — a hotel, a rental somewhere — which never led to anything and was soon forgotten. But this time an apartment had been rented for me before I even arrived, a two-bedroom on West 10th Street, high ceilings, fireplaces, the whole second floor of a beautiful brownstone. Emma Lazarus had once lived here: a blue plaque under my window memorialized her huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. My view was of a pink-blush dogwood in full bloom. I mistook all this for an upgrade. Then Lamin appeared and I understood I’d been moved out so he could move in.

“What exactly is going on with you?” Judy asked me, the morning after Jay’s birthday party. No preliminaries, just her strident yell coming at me through my phone as I tried to tell the bodega guy on Mercer to skip the apple in my green juice. “Have you had some kind of argument with Fernando? Because we just can’t have him in the house right now — there’s no room for him at the inn. We’ve got a full inn, as you probably noticed. Our lovebirds want their privacy. The plan was meant to be he’d stay with you for a few weeks, in the apartment, it was all settled — now suddenly he’s resistant.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Because nobody told me. Judy, you didn’t even mention to me that Fern was coming to New York!”

Judy made a sound of impatience: “Look, it was something Aimee wanted me to handle. It had to do with accompanying Lamin over here, she didn’t want it out in the world… It was delicate, and I handled it.”

“Do you handle who I live with too now?”

“Oh, love, I’m sorry—are you paying rent?”

I managed to get her off the phone and called Fern. He was in a taxi somewhere on the West Side Highway. I could hear the foghorn of a cruise ship docking.

“Better I find somewhere else. Yes, it’s better. This afternoon I look at a place in…” I heard papers being sadly shuffled. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Midtown somewhere.”

“Fern, you don’t know this city — and you don’t want to pay rent here, believe me. Take the room. I’ll feel shitty about it if you don’t. I’ll be at Aimee’s day and night — she’s got that show in two weeks, we’ll be up to our ears. I promise you — you’ll hardly see me.”

He closed a window, the river winds stopped rushing in. The quiet was unhelpfully intimate.

“I like to see you.”

“Oh, Fern… Please just take the room!”

That evening the only sign of him was an empty coffee cup in the kitchen and a tall canvas rucksack — the kind a student packs for a year off — leaning in the doorframe of his empty room. As he’d climbed the steps of the ferry with this single bag on his back, Fern’s simplicity, his frugality, had seemed to have something noble in it, I’d aspired to it, but here in Greenwich Village the idea of a forty-five-year-old man with a single rucksack to his name struck me as merely sad and eccentric. I knew he’d crossed Liberia, alone and on foot, aged only twenty-four — it was some kind of homage to Graham Greene — but now all I could think was: Brother, this city will eat you alive. I wrote a pleasant and neutral note of welcome, tucked it under the straps of his bag and went to bed.

I was right about barely seeing him: I had to be at Aimee’s for eight each morning (she woke daily at five, to exercise for two hours in the basement followed by an hour of meditation) and Fern always slept in — or pretended that he did. In Aimee’s townhouse all was frantic planning, rehearsal, anxiety: the new show was in a mid-size venue, she’d be singing live, with a live band, things she hadn’t done in years. To keep out of the line of fire, the meltdowns, the arguments, I stayed as much as I could in the office and avoided rehearsals whenever possible. But I gathered some kind of West African theme was afoot. A set of atumpan drums were delivered to the house, and a long-necked kora, swathes of kente, and — one fine Tuesday morning — a twelve-person dance troupe, African-by-way-of-Brooklyn, who were taken to the basement studio and didn’t emerge till after dinner. They were young, mostly second-generation Senegalese, and Lamin was fascinated by them: he wanted to know their last names and the villages of their parents, chasing down any possible connection of family or location. And Aimee was glued to Lamin: you couldn’t talk to her alone any more, he was there at all times. But which Lamin was it? She thought it very provocative and funny to tell me he still prayed five times a day, in her walk-in closet, which apparently faced Mecca. Personally I wanted to believe in this continuity, in this part of him still beyond her reach, but there were days I barely recognized him. One afternoon I brought a tray of coconut waters down to the studio and found him, in his white shirt and white slacks, demonstrating a move I recognized from the kankurang, a combination of side-stamp, shuffle and dip. Aimee and the other girls watched him carefully and repeated the movements. They were sweating, dressed in crop tops and ripped unitards, and were pressed so closely to him and each other that each movement he made looked like a single wave passing through five bodies. But the truly unrecognizable gesture was the one that swept a bottle of coconut water from my tray, without a thank-you, without the vaguest acknowledgment — you’d have thought he’d been taking drinks from the wobbling trays of serving girls every day of his life. Maybe luxury is the easiest matrix to pass through. Maybe nothing is easier to get used to than money. Though there were times when I saw a haunted quality in him, like he was being stalked by something. Wandering into the dining room toward the end of his visit, I found him still at the breakfast table, talking at Granger, who looked very weary, as if he’d been there a long time. I sat down with them. Lamin’s eyes were fixed somewhere between Granger’s shaved head and the opposite wall. He was whispering again, a perplexing, uninflected speech that ran on like an incantation: “… and right now, our women are sowing the onions in the right-hand beds and then the peas in the left-hand beds, and if the peas are not irrigated in the correct way then when they will come to rake the ground, about two weeks from now, they will have a problem, there will be an orange curl to the leaf, and if it has this curl, then it has the blight and then they will dig up what has been sown and re-sow the beds, making sure I hope to put a layer of this rich soil we get from upriver, you see, when the men go upriver, about a week from now, when we travel up there we get the rich soil…”

“Uh-huh,” Granger was saying, every other sentence. “Uh-huh, Uh-huh.”

Fern made sporadic appearances in our lives, at board meetings or when Aimee required his presence to deal with practical problems related to the school. He looked pained at all times — physically winced whenever we made eye contact — and advertised his misery wherever he went, like a man in a comic with a black cloud above his head. In front of Aimee and the rest of the board he gave a pessimistic update, focused on recent aggressive statements of the President’s, concerning foreign presence in the country. I’d never heard him talk like that before, so fatalistically, it was not really in his character, and I knew I was the true, oblique target of his critique.

That afternoon in the apartment, instead of hiding in my room as usual, I confronted him in the hall. He’d just come back from a run, sweating, bent over, with his hands on his knees, breathing hard, looking up at me from under thick brows. I was very reasonable. He didn’t speak but seemed to take it all in. Without his glasses his eyes looked enormous, like a cartoon baby’s. When I finished he straightened up and bent the other way, pushing the small of his back forward with both hands.

“Well, I apologize if I embarrassed you. You are right: it was unprofessional.”

“Fern — can’t we be friends?”

“Of course. But you also want me to say: ‘I am happy we are friends’?”

“I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

“But this is not one of your musicals. The truth is I am very sad. I wanted something — I wanted you — and I didn’t get at all what I wanted or hoped and now I am sad. I will get over it, I suppose, but for now I am sad. Is it OK for me to be sad? Yes? Well. Now I shower.”

It was very difficult for me, at the time, to understand a person who spoke like that. It was alien to me, as an idea — I hadn’t been raised that way. What response could such a man — the type who gives up all power — possibly expect from a woman like me?

I didn’t go to the show, couldn’t face it. I did not want to stand in the bleachers with Fern, feeling his resentment while watching funhouse versions of the dances we had both seen at their source. I told Aimee I was going and I intended to go but when eight o’clock rolled around I was still in my house sweats, lying half propped up on my bed with my laptop over my groin, and then it was nine o’clock, and then it was ten. I absolutely had to go — my mind kept repeating this fact to me and I was in agreement with it — but my body freeze-framed, felt heavy and immovable. Yes, I must go, that was clear, and just as clear was the fact I was not going anywhere. I got on YouTube, skipped from dancer to dancer: Bojangles up the stairs, Harold and Fayard on a piano, Jeni LeGon in her swishing grass skirt, Michael Jackson at Motown 25. I often ended up at this clip of Jackson, although this time as he moonwalked across the stage, the thing that really interested me was not the crowd’s ecstatic screams or even the surreal fluidity of his movements but the shortness of his trousers. And still the option of going did not seem lost or completely closed until I looked up from my aimless surfing and found eleven forty-five had happened, which signified we were now in the undeniable past tense: I hadn’t gone. Search Aimee, search venue, search Brooklyn dance troupe, image search, AP wire search, blog search. At first simply out of a sense of guilt, but soon enough with the realization that I could reconstruct—140 characters at a time, image by image, blog post by blog post — the experience of having been there, until, by one a.m., nobody could have been there more than me. I was far more there than any of the people who had actually been there, they were restricted to one location and one perspective — to one stream of time — whereas I was everywhere in that room at all moments, viewing the thing from all angles, in a mighty act of collation. I could have stopped there — I had more than enough to give a detailed account of my evening to Aimee in the morning — but I didn’t stop. I was compelled by the process. To observe, in real time, the debates as they form and coalesce, to watch the developing consensus, the highlights or embarrassments identified, their meanings and subtexts accepted or denied. The insults and the jokes, the gossip and rumor, the memes, the Photoshop, the filters, and all the many varieties of critique given free rein here, far from Aimee’s reach or control. Earlier in the week, watching a costume fitting — in which Aimee, Jay and Kara were being dressed up to resemble Asante nobles — I’d hesitantly brought up the matter of appropriation. Judy groaned, Aimee looked at me and then down at her own ghost-pale pixie frame wrapped in so much vibrantly colored cloth, and told me that she was an artist, and artists have to be allowed to love things, to touch them and to use them, because art is not appropriation, that was not the aim of art — the aim of art was love. And when I asked her whether it was possible both to love something and leave it alone, she regarded me strangely, pulled her children into her body and asked: Have you ever been in love?

But now I felt defended, virtually surrounded. No, I didn’t feel like stopping. I kept refreshing and refreshing, waiting for new countries to wake up and see the images and form their own opinions or feed off opinions already voiced. In the wee hours I heard the front door squeak and Fern stumbling into the apartment, surely straight from the after-party. I didn’t move. And it must have been at about four in the morning, while scrolling through the fresh opinions and listening to the birds chirp in the dogwood, that I saw the handle “Tracey LeGon,” the subtitle “Truthteller.” My contact lenses were brittle in my eyes, it hurt to blink, but I wasn’t seeing things. I clicked. She’d posted the same photo I’d seen hundreds of times by then — Aimee, the dancers, Lamin, the children — all lined up at the front of the stage, wearing the adinkra cloth for which I’d seen them fitted: a rich cerulean blue printed with a pattern of black triangles, and in each triangle there was an eye. Tracey had taken this image, expanded it many times, cropped it, so only the triangle and the eye were still visible, and underneath this image she asked the question: LOOK FAMILIAR?

Returning with Lamin, we took the jet, but without Aimee — who was in Paris, being awarded a medal by the French government — and so had to process through the main airport, just like everybody, into an arrival hall packed with returning sons and daughters. The men wore fancy jeans of heavy denim, stiff, patterned shirts with stockbroker collars, branded hooded tops, leather jackets, the latest sneakers. And the women were likewise determined to wear all of their best things at the same time. Hair beautifully done, nails freshly painted. Unlike us, they were all familiar with this hall, and quickly secured the services of the porters, to whom they handed their mammoth suitcases, instructing them to take care — though each bag was wrapped in layers of plastic — before leading these hot and harassed young baggage carriers through the crowds toward the exit, turning back every now and then to bark instructions like mountain climbers with their Sherpas. This way, this way! Smartphones held up above their heads, indicating the route. Looking at Lamin in this context, I realized his traveling outfit must be a deliberate choice: despite all the clothes and rings and chains and shoes Aimee had given him this past month, he was dressed exactly as he had been when he left. Same old white shirt, the chinos and a simple pair of leather sandals, black and worn thin at the heel. It made me think there were things about him I had not understood — maybe many things.

We took a taxi and I sat with Lamin in the backseat. The car had three broken windows and a hole in the lower carriage through which I could see the road rolling beneath. Fern sat in the front, next to the driver: his new policy was to keep a cool distance from me at all times. On the jet he read his books and journals, in the airport he restricted himself to practical matters, get that trolley, join that queue. He was never mean, never said anything cruel, but the effect was isolating.

“Want to stop to eat?” he asked me now, by way of the rearview mirror. “Or you can wait?”

I wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t mind skipping lunch, who could power through, like Fern often did, replicating the practice of the poorest families in the village by eating only once, in the late afternoon. But I was not that kind of person: I couldn’t miss a meal without getting aggravated. We drove for forty minutes and stopped at a roadside café opposite something called the American College Academy. It had bars on its windows and half the letters missing from the sign. Inside the café the menus depicted glistening American-style meals “with fries,” the prices of which Lamin read aloud, shaking his head gravely, as if encountering something deeply sacrilegious or offensive, and after a long conversation with the waitress three plates of chicken yassa arrived for a negotiated “local” rate.

We were bent over our food, eating in silence, when we heard a booming voice coming from the very back of the café: “My boy Lamin! Little brother! It’s Bachir! Over here!”

Fern waved. Lamin did not move: he had spotted this Bachir long ago and had been praying not to be spotted in return. I turned and saw a man sitting alone at the last table near the counter, in the shadows, the only other customer in the place. He was broad and muscular like a rugby player, and wore a dark blue suit with stripes, a tie, a tiepin, loafers without socks and a thick gold chain around his wrist. The suit was straining against his muscles and his face was running with sweat.

“He is not my brother. He is my age mate. He is from the village.”

“But aren’t you going to—”

Bachir was already upon us. Up close, I saw he was wearing a headset, consisting of earpiece and microphone, not unlike the kind Aimee wore on stage, and in his arms carried a laptop, a tablet and a very large phone.

“Gotta find a place to put all this stuff!” But he sat down with us still clasping it all to his chest. “Lamin! Little brother! Long time!”

Lamin nodded at his lunch. Fern and I introduced ourselves and received firm, painful, damp handshakes.

“Me and him grew up together, man! Village life!” Bachir grabbed Lamin’s head and put him in a sweaty headlock. “But then I had to go to the city, baby, know what I’m saying? I was chasing the money, baby! Working with the big banks. Show me the money! Babylon for real! But I’m still a village boy at heart.” He kissed Lamin and released him.

“You sound American,” I said, but that was only one thread of the rich tapestry of his voice. Many different movies and adverts were in there, and a lot of hip-hop, Esmeralda and As the World Turns, the BBC news, CNN, Al Jazeera and something of the reggae that you heard all over the city, from every taxi, market stall, hairdresser. An old Yellowman tune was playing right now, from the tinny speakers above our heads.

“For real, for real…” He rested his very large, square head on his fist in a thoughtful pose. “You know, I’ve not actually been to the US as yet, not as yet. Got a lot going on. It’s all happening. Talking, talking, gotta keep up with technology, gotta keep relevant. Look at this girl: she is ringing my number, baby, night and day, day and night!” He flashed me an image on his tablet, of a beautiful woman with a glossy weave and dramatic lips painted a deep purple. It looked to me to be a commercial image. “These big-city girls, they’re too crazy! Oh, little brother, I need an upriver girl, I want to start a nice family. But these girls don’t even want a family any more! They’re crazy! How old are you, though?”

I told him.

“And no babies? Not even married? No? OK! OK, OK… I feel you, sister, I feel you: Miss Independent, is it? That’s your way, OK. But for us, a woman without children is like a tree without fruit. Like a tree”—he raised his muscular backside half out of his chair in a squat, stretched his arms like branches and his fingers like twigs—“without fruit.” He sat back down and closed his hands back into fists. “Without fruit,” he repeated.

For the first time in many weeks Fern managed a half-smile in my direction.

“I think what he is saying is that you are like a tree—”

“Yes, Fern, I got it, thank you.”

Bachir spotted my flip-phone, my personal phone. He picked it up and turned it over in his palm with exaggerated wonder. His hands were so big it looked a child’s toy.

“This is not yours. Serious? This is yours?! This is what they are using in London? HA HA HA. Oh man, we more fresh over here! Oh, man! Funny, funny. I would not have expected this. Globalization, right? Strange times, strange times!”

“Which bank did you say you work for?” asked Fern.

“Oh, I got a lot going on, man. Development, development. Land here, land there. Building. But I work for the bank here, yes, trading, trading. You know how it is, brother! Government makes life hard sometimes. But show me the money, right? You like Rihanna? You know her? She got her money! Illuminati, right? Living the dream, baby.”

“We must go now to the ferry,” whispered Lamin.

“Yeah, I guess I got a lot of trades these days — complicated business, man — gotta make those moves, moves, moves.” He demonstrated by moving his fingers over his three devices as if primed to use any one of them at any moment for something terrifically urgent. I noticed the screen on the laptop was black and cracked in several places. “See, some people gotta get to that farm life every day, shell those groundnuts, right? But I gotta make my moves. This is the new work‒life balance right here. You know about that? Yes, man! That’s the latest thing! But in this country we have our old-world mindset, right? A lot of people around here are behind the damn times. It takes these people a little while, OK? To get it into their minds.” With his fingers he drew a rectangle in the air: “The Future. Gotta get it into your mind. But listen: for you? Any time! I like your face, man, it’s beautiful, so clear and light. And I could come to London, we could talk business for real! Oh, you’re not in business? Charity? NGO? Missionary? I like the missionaries, man! I had a good friend, he was from South Bend, Indiana — Mikey. We spent a lot of time together. Mikey was cool, man, he was really cool, he was a Seventh-Day Adventist, but we’re all God’s children for sure, for sure…”

“They are here doing some educational work, with our girls,” said Lamin, turning his back on us, trying to get the waitress’s attention.

“Oh, sure, I hear about the changes up there. Big times, big times. Good for the village, right? Development.”

“We hope so,” said Fern.

“But little brother: are you getting a piece of that? Did you guys know little brother here is too good for money? He’s all about the next life. Me, no: I want this life! HA HA HA HA. Money, money, rolling. Ain’t that the truth. Oh man, oh man…”

Lamin stood up: “Good-bye, Bachir.”

“So serious, this one. But he loves me. You would love me, too. My oh my, you’re gonna be thirty-three, girl! We should talk! Time flies. Gotta live your life, right? Next time, in London, girl, in Babylon — let’s talk!”

Walking back to the car, I heard Fern chuckling to himself, cheered by the episode.

“This is what people call ‘a character,’” he said, and when we reached our waiting taxi and turned to get in we found Bachir the character standing in the doorway, still with his earpiece on, holding all his various technologies and waving at us. Seen standing up, his suit looked especially peculiar, the trousers too short at the ankles, like a mashala in pinstripes.

“Bachir lost his job three months ago,” said Lamin quietly, as we got back into the car. “He is in that café every day.”

Yes, everything about that trip felt wrong from the start. Instead of my previous glorious competency, I couldn’t rid myself of a nagging sense of error, of having misread everything, beginning with Hawa, who opened the door of her compound wearing a new scarf, black, that covered her head and stopped halfway down her torso, and a long, shapeless shirt, the kind she had always ridiculed when we saw them in the market. She hugged me as firmly as ever, would only nod at Fern, and seemed annoyed by his presence. We all stood in the yard for a while, Hawa making polite, grating small talk — none of it addressed to Fern — and me hoping for some mention of dinner, which, I soon understood, would not come until Fern left. Finally he got the message: he was tired and would head back to the pink house. And as soon as the door closed behind him the old Hawa returned, grabbed my hand, kissed my face and cried: “Oh, sister — good news — I’m getting married!” I hugged her but felt the familiar smile fasten itself on my face, the same one I wore in London and New York in the face of similar news, and I experienced the same acute sense of betrayal. I was ashamed to feel that way but couldn’t help it, a piece of my heart closed against her. She took my hand and led me into the house.

So much to tell. His name was Bakary, he was a Tablighi, a friend of Musa’s, and she would not lie and say he was handsome, because in fact he was quite the opposite, she wanted me to understand that right away, pulling out her phone as evidence.

“See? He looks like a bullfrog! Honestly I wish he would not wear the black stuff on his eyes or use henna that way, in the beard… and sometimes he even wears the lungi! My grandmothers think he looks like a woman in make-up! But they must be wrong because the Prophet himself wore kohl, it is good for eye infections, and there’s really so much I don’t know that I have to learn. Oh, my grandmothers are weeping day and night, night and day! But Bakary is kind and patient. He says nobody cries for ever — and don’t you think that’s true?”

Hawa’s twin nieces brought in our dinner: rice for Hawa, oven fries for me. I listened in a kind of daze as Hawa told me funny stories about her recent masturat to Mauritania, the furthest she had ever traveled, where she had often fallen asleep in the lecture sessions (“The man who is talking, you can’t see him, because he is not allowed to look at us, so he speaks from behind a curtain, and all us women are sitting on the floor and the lecture is very long, so sometimes we just want to sleep”) and had thought to sew a pocket into the inside of her waistcoat so as to hide her phone and surreptitiously text her Bakary during the duller recitations. But she always concluded these stories with some pious-sounding phrase: “The important thing is the love I bear for my new sisters.” “It is not for me to ask.” “It is in the hands of God.”

“In the end,” she said, as two more young girls brought us our tin mugs of Lipton’s, heavily sweetened, “all that matters is praising God and leaving dunya things behind. I tell you in this compound dunya business is all you ever hear. Who went to market, who has a new watch, who is going ‘back way,’ who has money, who has not, I want this, I want that! But when you are traveling, bringing people the truth of the Prophet, there is no time for any of these dunya things at all.”

I wondered why she was still in the compound if life here now annoyed her so much.

“Well, Bakary is good but he is very poor. As soon as we can we will marry and move, but for now he sleeps in the markaz, close to God, while I am here, close to the chickens and the goats. But we will save a lot of money because my wedding will be very, very small, like the wedding of a mouse, and only Musa and his wife will be there and there will no music or dancing or feasts and I will not even need to get a new dress,” she said with practiced brightness, and I felt so sad suddenly, for if I knew anything at all about Hawa it was how much she loved weddings and wedding dresses and wedding feasts and wedding parties.

“So, you see, a lot of money will be saved there, for sure,” she said, and folded her hands in her lap to formally mark the end of this thought, and I did not contest her. But I could see she wanted to talk, that her pat phrases were like lids dancing on top of bubbling cooking pots, and all I had to do was sit patiently and wait for her to boil over. Without me asking another question she began to speak, first tentatively and then with increasing energy, of her fiancé. What seemed to impress her most about this Bakary was his sensitivity. He was boring and ugly but he was sensitive.

“Boring how?”

“Oh, I should not say ‘boring,’ but I mean, you should see him and Musa together, they listen to these holy tapes all day long, they are very holy tapes, Musa is trying now to learn more Arabic, and I am also learning to appreciate them fully, at the moment they are still very boring for me — but when Bakary listens to them he weeps! He weeps and holds Musa in his arms! Sometimes I go to the market and come back and they are still hugging each other and crying! I never saw a bumster weep! Unless somebody stole his drugs! No, no, Bakary is very sensitive. It is really a heart matter. At first I thought: my mother is a learned woman, she taught me a lot of Arabic, I will be ahead of Bakary in my iman, but that is so wrong! Because it’s not what you read, it’s what you feel. And I have a long way to go before my heart is as full of iman as Bakary’s. I think a sensitive man makes a good husband, don’t you? And our mashala men — I should not call them that, Tablighi is the proper word — but they are so kind to their women! I didn’t know that. My grandmother always said: they are half big, they are crazy, don’t talk to these girly-men, they don’t even have jobs. Oh boy, she’s weeping every day. But she doesn’t understand, she’s so old-fashioned. Bakary is always saying, ‘There is a hadith that goes: “The best man is the one who helps his wife and children and has mercy on them.”’ And that’s how it is. So, if we go on these tours, on masturat, well, to avoid other men seeing us in the market, our men go themselves and do the shopping for us, they buy the vegetables. I laughed when I heard this, I thought: it can’t be true — but it’s true! My grandfather did not even know where the market was! This is what I try to explain to my grandmothers, but they are old-fashioned. They are weeping every day because he is a mashala—I mean, Tablighi. According to me, they are jealous in secret. Oh, I wish I could leave this place right now. When I went to be with my sisters I was so happy! We prayed together. We walked together. After lunch, one of us had to lead the prayer, you know, and one of the sisters said to me: ‘You do it!’ And so I was the Imam for the day, you know? But I wasn’t shy. Many of my sisters are shy, they say, ‘It is not for me to speak,’ but I really found out on this tour that I am not at all a shy person. And everybody listened to me — oh! People even asked me questions afterward. Can you believe it?”

“It doesn’t surprise me at all.”

“My topic was the six fundamentals. This is about how a person should eat? In fact, I am not observing them right now, because you are here, but they are certainly in my mind for the next time.”

This guilty thought led to another: she leaned forward to whisper something to me, her irresistible face set in a half-smile.

“Yesterday I went to the school TV room and we watched Esmeralda. I shouldn’t smile,” she said, and abruptly stopped, “but you especially know how I love Esmeralda, and I’m sure you would agree that nobody can rid themselves of all dunya things all in one go.” She looked down at her shapeless skirt. “Also my clothes will have to change, in the end, not just the skirt, everything from head to toe. But my sisters all agree it is hard at first because you get so hot and people stare, they call you ninja or Osama in the street. But I remembered what you said to me once when you first came here: “Who cares what other people think?” And this is a strong thought that I keep with me, because my reward will be in Heaven, where nobody will call me ninja because certainly those people will be on fire. I still love my Chris Brown, I can’t help it, and even Bakary still loves his Marley songs, I know because I heard him sing one the other day. But we will learn together, we are young. As I told you already, when we were on tour Bakary did all my chores for me, he went to the market for me, even when people laughed at him, he did this. He did my washing. I said to my grandmothers: did my grandfather ever wash even a sock for any of you in forty years?”

“But Hawa, why can’t the men see you in the market?”

She looked bored: I had asked the dullest question once again.

“When men look at women who are not their wife that is the moment Shaytan is waiting to rush in, to fill them with sin. Shaytan is everywhere! But don’t you even know that?”

I couldn’t listen to any more of it and made my excuses. But the only place I could go or knew how to get to in the darkness was the pink house. From some way down the road I could see all the lights were dead, and when I reached the door I found it hanging at an angle from a broken hinge.

“You in there? Can I come in?”

“My door is always open,” replied Fern from the shadows, in a sonorous voice, and we laughed at the same time. I came in, he made me tea, I regurgitated all the news from Hawa.

Fern listened to me rant, his head cast further and further back until his head-torch shone on the ceiling.

“I have to say it does not seem strange to me,” he said when I finished. “She works like a dog in that compound. She hardly leaves it. I imagine she is desperate, like any bright young person, to have her own life. Didn’t you want to get out of your parents’ house, at that age?”

“When I was her age I wanted freedom!”

“And you would consider her less free, I mean, touring Mauritania, preaching, than she is now, shut up at home?” He drew his sandal through the covering of red dust that had accumulated on the plastic flooring. “That’s interesting. It’s an interesting point of view.”

“Oh, you’re just trying to annoy me.”

“No, I never mean to do that.” He looked down at the pattern he had made on the floor. “Sometimes I wonder if people don’t want freedom as much as they want meaning,” he said, speaking slowly. “This is what I mean to say. At least, this has been my experience.”

We would argue if we carried on so I changed the subject and offered him one of the biscuits I had swiped from Hawa’s room. I remembered I had some podcasts saved on my iPod and, with one earbud each, we sat peaceably side by side, nibbling our biscuits and listening to accounts of these American lives, their minor dramas and satisfactions, their pleasures and irritations and tragicomic epiphanies, until it was time for me to go.

The next morning when I woke my first thought was Hawa, Hawa soon married, the babies that would surely follow, and I wanted to speak to someone who shared my sense of disappointment. I got dressed and went looking for Lamin. I found him in the schoolyard, going over a lesson plan under the mango tree. But disappointment was not his reaction to Hawa’s news, or not his first reaction — that was heartbreak. It wasn’t even nine in the morning and I had managed to break someone’s heart.

“But where did you hear this?”

“Hawa!”

He struggled to gain control of his face.

“Sometimes girls say they will marry someone and they do not. It’s common. There was a policeman…” He trailed off.

“I’m sorry, Lamin. I know how you feel about her.”

Lamin laughed stiffly and returned to his lesson plan.

“Oh no, you are mistaken, we are brother and sister. We have always been. I said this to our friend Aimee: this is my little sister. She will remember me saying this, if you ask her. No, I am just sorry for Hawa’s family. They will be very sad.”

The school bell rang. I visited classrooms all morning and for the first time got a feeling for what Fern had achieved here, in our absence, despite Aimee’s interference, and by working, in a sense, around her. The school office had all the new computers she had sent, and more reliable internet, which I could see, from their search histories, had been so far used exclusively by the teachers for two purposes: trawling Facebook and entering the President’s name into Google. Each classroom was scattered with mysterious — to me—3D logic puzzles and small handheld devices on which you could play chess. But these were not the innovations that impressed me. Just behind the main building, Fern had used some of Aimee’s money to create a garden in the yard, which I don’t remember him ever mentioning in our board meetings, and here all kinds of produce were growing, which belonged, he explained, to the parent body collectively, which — along with many other consequences — meant that when first period ended, half the school did not disappear to help their mothers on the farm, instead staying on site and tending to their seedlings. I learned that Fern, at the suggestion of the mothers in the PTA, had invited several teachers from the local majlis into our school, where they were given a room to teach Arabic and Koranic studies, for which they were paid a small fee directly, and this stopped another large portion of the school population disappearing at midday or spending a part of every afternoon doing domestic chores for these majli teachers, as they once had, in lieu of payment. I spent an hour in the new art room, where the youngest girls sat at their tables mixing colors and making hand prints — playing — while the laptops that Aimee had envisioned for them all had, Fern now confessed, disappeared en route to the village, no surprise, given that each one was worth twice any teacher’s yearly wage. All in all the Illuminated Academy for Girls was not that shining, radically new, unprecedented incubator-of-the-future I had heard so much about around Aimee’s dinner tables in New York and London. It was the “Loomy Academy,” as people called it locally, where many small but interesting things were happening, every day, which were then argued over and debated at the end of each week, in the village meetings, which led to further adaptations and changes, few of which I sensed Aimee ever knew or heard about, but to which Fern closely attended, listening to everyone in that strikingly open way of his, making his reams of notes. It was a functioning school, built by Aimee’s money but not contained by it, and whatever small part I had played in its creation, I now felt, like any minor member of the village, my own portion of pride in it. I was enjoying this warm feeling of achievement, walking back from the school garden to the headmaster’s office, when I spotted Lamin and Hawa under the mango tree, standing too close together, arguing.

“I don’t listen to lectures from you,” I heard her say, as I approached, and when she spotted me, she turned and repeated the point: “I don’t take lectures from him. He wants me to be the last person remaining in this place. No.”

Over by the headmaster’s office, thirty yards from us, a circle of curious teachers who had just finished lunch stood in the shade of the doorway, washing their hands from a tin kettle filled with water and watching the debate.

“We won’t speak now,” whispered Lamin, conscious of this audience, but Hawa in full flow was hard to stop.

“You have been gone one month, is it? Do you know how many others have gone from here in this month? Look for Abdulaye. You won’t see him. Ahmed and Hakim? My nephew Joseph? He is seventeen. Gone! My Uncle Godfrey — no one has seen him. I have his children now. He is gone! He didn’t want to stay and rot here. Back way — all of them.”

“Back way is crazy,” murmured Lamin, but then attempted to be bold: “Mashala are crazy, too.”

Hawa took a step toward him: he shrank back into himself. As well as being in love with her, I thought, he is a little afraid of her. I understood that — I was a little afraid of her myself.

“And when I go to teachers’ college in September,” she said, jabbing a finger into his chest, “will you still be here, Lamin? Or do you have somewhere else to be? Will you still be here?” Lamin looked over at me, a panicked, guilty glance, which Hawa took as confirmation: “No, I did not think so.”

A wheedling tone entered Lamin’s whisper.

“Why not just go to your father? He got your brother the visa. He could get you the same, if you asked. It is not impossible.”

I’d had this thought myself, many times, but had never asked Hawa about it directly — she never seemed to want to speak of her father — and now, seeing her face alive with righteous fury, I was very glad I’d never asked. The circle of teachers burst into chatter like the crowd at a boxing match when a hard punch lands.

“There’s no love between me and him, you should know that. He has his new wife, his new life. Some people can be bought, some people can smile in the face of other people they do not love, just to gain advantage. But I am not like you,” she said, the pronoun landing somewhere between Lamin and me, as she turned and walked away from us both, her long skirt swishing in the sand.

That afternoon I asked Lamin to come with me to Barra. He said yes but seemed overcome with humiliation. Our cab ride was silent, as was our ferry trip. I needed to change some money, but when we got to the little holes in the wall — where the men sat on high stools behind shutters, counting out huge towers of grubby notes held together by elastic bands — he left me. Lamin had never left me alone anywhere before, not even when I had most wanted him to, and now I discovered how panicked I was by the idea.

“But where will I meet you? Where are you going?”

“I have some errands to run myself, but I will be around, close by, near the ferry. It is fine, just call me. I will be forty minutes.”

Before I had a chance to argue he was gone. I didn’t believe in his errands: he only wanted to be rid of me for a while. But my money-changing took all of two minutes. I wandered around the market, and then, to avoid people calling out to me, I walked beyond the ferry to an old military fort, once a museum, now abandoned, but you could still climb up its fortifications and see the river and the infuriating way the whole of this town had been built with its back to the water, ignoring the river, in a defensive crouch against it, as if the beautiful view of the opposite bank, of the sea and the leaping dolphins, was offensive somehow or surplus to requirements or simply carried the memory of too much pain. I climbed back down and lingered by the ferry, but I still had twenty minutes so I went to the internet café. It was the usual scene: boy after boy with his headset on, saying, “I love you” or “Yes, my baby girl,” while on the screens white women of a certain age waved and blew kisses, almost always British women — judging from their household interiors — and as I stood at the desk, about to pay my twenty-five dalasi for fifteen minutes, I could watch them all simultaneously coming out of their glass-brick showers, or eating at their breakfast bars, or walking around their rockeries or lounging in a swing chair in the conservatory, or just sitting on a sofa, watching telly, their phones or laptops in hand. There was nothing unusual in any of this, I’d seen it many times before, but this particular afternoon, as I put my money on the desk, a crazed, babbling man ran into the place and began weaving in and out of the computers, brandishing a long, carved stick, and the owner of the café abandoned our transaction to chase him round the terminals. The lunatic was incredibly beautiful and tall, like a Masai, and barefoot, wearing a traditional dashiki embroidered with gold thread, though it was torn and dirty, and on top of his dreaded hair perched a baseball cap from a Minnesota golf course. He tapped the young men on their shoulders, once on each side, like a king performing many knighthoods, until the owner managed to grab his cane from him and started beating him with it. And as he was being beaten, he kept talking, in a comically refined English accent, it reminded me of Chalky’s, from all those years ago. “Good sir, do you not know who I am? Do any of you fools know who I am? You poor, poor fools? Do you not even recognize me?”

I left my money on the counter and headed back out to wait in the sun.

When I got back to London I had dinner with my mother, she’d booked a table at Andrew Edmunds, downstairs—“my treat”—but I felt oppressed by the dark green walls and confused by the surreptitious glances of the other diners, and then she unclenched my right hand from its death grip on a phone and said: “Look at this. Look what she’s doing to you. No nails and bleeding fingers.” I wondered when my mother started eating in Soho, and why she looked so thin, and where Miriam was. Maybe I would have thought a little more deeply about all of these questions if there had been any space in which to seriously consider them, but that evening my mother was on a talking tear, and most of the meal was taken up with a monologue about London gentrification — addressed as much to the nearby tables as to me — stretching from the usual contemporary complaints back through the years until it became an impromptu history lesson. By the time the main course turned up we’d arrived at the early eighteenth century. The very row of townhouses in which we sat — a backbench MP and a pop star’s personal assistant, eating oysters together — was once the accommodation of joiners and sash makers, bricklayers and carpenters, all of whom had paid a monthly rent which, even when adjusted for inflation, would not presently cover the single oyster I was putting in my mouth. “Working people,” she explained, tipping a Loch Ryan down her throat. “Also radicals, Indians, Jews, runaway Caribbean slaves. Pamphleteers and agitators. Robert Wedderburn! The ‘Blackbirds.’ This was their spot too, right under Westminster’s nose… Nothing like that happens round here now — sometimes I wish it would. Give us all something to work with! Or toward! Or even against…” She reached out to the three-hundred-year-old wood paneling beside her head and gave it a wistful stroke. “The truth is most of my colleagues don’t even remember what the real Left is, and believe me they don’t want to remember. Oh, but once upon a time it was a real hotbed around here…” She went on in this vein, for a bit too long, as usual, but in thrilling full flow — nearby diners leaned in to catch the scraps of it — and none of it was barbed or directed at me, all her sharp corners had been filed off. The empty oyster shells were taken away. Out of habit I started in on the skin around my cuticles. As long as she is talking about the past, I thought, well then she isn’t asking me about the present or the future, when I’ll stop working for Aimee or have a baby, and avoiding this two-pronged attack had become my first priority whenever I saw her. But she didn’t ask me about Aimee, she didn’t ask me about anything. I thought: she’s reached the center at last, she’s “in power.” Yes, even if she likes to characterize herself as a “thorn in the party’s side,” the fact is she’s at the center of things, finally, and this must be the difference. She had now what she’d wanted and most needed all of her life: respect. Maybe it didn’t even matter to her any more what I did with my life. She didn’t have to take it as a judgment upon her any longer, or on the way she raised me. And though I noticed she wasn’t drinking, I chalked this up, too, to my new version of my mother: mature, sober, self-confident, no longer on the back foot, a success on her own terms.

It was this train of thought that left me unprepared for what came next. She stopped talking, rested her head in a hand, and said: “Love, I have to ask for your help with something.”

She winced as she said it. I steeled myself against some form of self-dramatization. Terrible to think back now and realize this grimace was most likely a real, involuntary reaction to a genuine physical pain.

“And I wanted to deal with it myself,” she was saying, “not to bother you with it, I know you’re very busy, but I don’t know who else to turn to at this point.”

“Yes — well, what is it?”

I was very involved in trimming the fat off a pork chop. When I at last raised my eyes to my mother’s face she looked as tired as I’d ever seen her.

“It’s your friend — Tracey.”

I put down my cutlery.

“Oh, it’s ridiculous, really, but I got this e-mail, friendly… it came to my surgery. I hadn’t seen her in years… but I thought: Oh, Tracey! It was about one of her children, the eldest boy — he’d been expelled from school, she felt unfairly, and she wanted my help, you see, and so I replied, and at first it really didn’t seem that strange, I get these kinds of letters all the time. But now, you know, I do wonder: was it all just a ploy?”

“Mum, what are you talking about?”

“I did think it was a bit odd, the amount of e-mails she was sending, but… well, you know, she doesn’t work, that’s clear, I don’t know if she’s ever worked, really, and she’s still in that bloody flat… That would drive you crazy by itself. She must have a lot of time on her hands — and right away it was a lot of e-mails, two or three a day. It was her opinion the school unfairly expelled black boys. I did make some inquiries, but it seemed in this case, well… the school felt they had a strong case and I couldn’t take it any further. I wrote to her and she was very angry, and sent some very angry e-mails, and I thought that was the end of it, but — it was the beginning.”

She scratched anxiously at the back of her head-wrap, and I noticed the skin at the top of her neck was raw with irritation.

“But Mum, why would you reply to anything from Tracey?”—I was holding the sides of the table—“I could have told you she’s not stable. I’ve known that for years!”

“Well, firstly she’s my constituent, and I always reply to my constituents. And when I realized she was your Tracey — she’s changed her name, you know — but her e-mails have become very… weird, very peculiar.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“About six months.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about it before!”

“Darling,” she said, and shrugged: “When would I have had the chance?”

She had lost so much weight her magnificent head looked vulnerable on its swan-like neck, and this new delicacy, this suggestion of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had. I lay a hand over hers.

“Odd in what way?”

“I really don’t want to talk about it in here. I’ll send some of the e-mails on to you.”

“Mum, don’t be so dramatic. You can give me an idea.”

“They’re quite abusive,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes, “and I haven’t been feeling very well, and I’m getting a lot of them now, sometimes a dozen in a day, and I know it’s stupid but they’re upsetting me.”

“Why don’t you just let Miriam deal with it? She deals with your communications, doesn’t she?”

She took her hand back and assumed her backbench face, a tight, sad smile, suitable for combating questions about the health service but unnerving to see over a dinner table.

“Well, you’ll find out sooner or later: we’ve split up. I’m still in the flat on Sidmouth Road. I have to stay in the neighborhood, obviously, and I won’t find another deal like that, at least not right away, so I asked her to move out. Of course, it is technically her flat, but she was very understanding about it, you know Miriam. Anyway, it’s not a big deal, there’s no hard feelings, and we’ve kept it out of the papers. So that’s the end of that.”

“Oh, Mum… I’m sorry. Really.”

“Don’t be, don’t be. Some people can’t deal with a woman having a certain amount of power, and that’s just how it is. I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again, I’m sure. Look at Raj!” she said, and it was so long since I’d thought of the Noted Activist by his real name that I realized I’d forgotten it. “Running off with that fool girl as soon as I finished my book! Is it my fault he never finished a book?”

No, I assured her, it was not her fault Raj never finished his book, on “coolie” labor in the West Indies — though he had been working on it for two decades — while my mother began and finished her book, on Mary Seacole, in a year and a half. Yes, the Noted Activist had only himself to blame.

“Men are so ridiculous. But it turns out so are women. Anyway, it’s a good thing in a way… at a certain point I really felt she was trying to interfere in ways that… Well, this obsession of hers with ‘our’ business practices in West Africa, human-rights abuses, and so on — I mean, she was encouraging me to ask questions in the House — in areas I’m not really qualified to speak on — and in the end I think what it was really about, in a funny way, was trying to drive a wedge between me and you…” A less likely motivation for Miriam I could hardly imagine, but I held my tongue. “… And I’m getting older and I don’t have as much energy as I did, and I really want to be focused on my local concerns, my constituents. I’m a local representative and that’s what I want to do. I haven’t got ambitions any further than that. Don’t smile, dear, I really don’t. Not any more. At one point I said to her, to Miriam—‘Look, I’ve got people walking into my surgery every day from Liberia, from Senegal, from the Gambia, from Côte d’Ivoire! My work is global. This is where my work is. These people are coming from all over the world to my constituency, in these terrible little boats, they’re traumatized, they’ve seen people die right in front of them, and they’re coming here. That’s the universe trying to tell me something. I really feel this is the work I was born to do.’ Poor Miriam… she means very well, and God knows she’s well organized, but she lacks perspective sometimes. She wants to save everybody. And that kind of person does not make the best life partner, for sure, though I will always consider her a very effective administrator.” It was impressive — and a bit sad. I wondered if some similarly chilly epigraph existed for me: She was not the best daughter, but she was a perfectly adequate dinner date.

“Do you think,” asked my mother, “do you think she’s unhinged… mentally ill or…”

“Miriam’s one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.”

“No — your friend Tracey.”

“I wish you’d stop calling her that!”

But my mother wasn’t listening to me, she was in her own dream: “You know, somehow… well, she’s on my conscience. Miriam thought I should have just gone to the police about the e-mails in the first place but… I don’t know… when you get older, somehow things from the past… they can weigh on you. I remember when she used to come for counseling at the center… Of course I didn’t see her notes, but I got the sense, speaking to the team there, that there were problems, mental-health issues, even back then. Maybe I was wrong to stop her coming in, but it really wasn’t easy to get her the placement in the first place, and I’m sorry, but at the time I really and truly felt that she had abused my trust, your trust, everybody’s… She was still a child, of course, but it was a crime — and it was a lot of money — I’m sure it all went to her father — but what if they’d blamed you? At that point it was just best to sever all connections, I thought. Well, I’m sure you have lots of judgments about what went on — you always have a lot of judgments — but I wish you would understand that it was not easy raising you, I was not in an easy situation, and on top of everything I was focused on trying to get myself educated, trying to get myself qualified, maybe too much so in your opinion… but I had to make a life for you and for me. I knew your father couldn’t do it. He wasn’t strong enough. No one else was going to do it. We were on our own. And I had a lot of balls in the air, that’s how it felt to me, and—” she reached across the table and grabbed my elbow: “We should have done more — to protect her!”

I felt her fingers pinching me, bony in their grip.

“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky — but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!”

She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell.

“No, Mum… no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us — she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?

“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.”

She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks.

“That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”

The next morning my British mobile rang, a number I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t my mother, or Aimee, or either of the fathers of her children, or the three college friends who still hoped, once or twice a year, to lure me out for a drink before my flight departed. I didn’t know the voice at first, either: I’d never heard Miriam sound so stern or cold.

“But you understand,” she asked me, after a few awkward pleasantries, “that your mother is really ill?”

I lay on Aimee’s plush gray couch, looking out over Kensington Gardens — gray slates, blue sky, green oaks — and found, as Miriam explained the situation, that this view merged with an earlier one: gray cement, blue sky, over the tops of the horse chestnuts, past Willesden Lane, toward the railway. In the next room I could hear the nanny, Estelle, trying to discipline Aimee’s children, in that lilting accent I connected with my earliest moments, with lullabies and bathtime and bedtime stories, thwacks with a wooden spoon. Headlights of passing cars at night, gliding over the ceiling.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

Stage three: it had begun in her spine. Partially successful surgery, back in February (where was I, in February?). Now she was in remission, but the last bout of chemo had left her frail. She should have been resting, allowing herself to recover. It was crazy that she was still going to the House, crazy that she was going out to dinner, crazy that I had let her.

“How could I know? She didn’t tell me.”

I heard Miriam kiss her teeth at me.

“Anyone with any sense just needs to look at the woman to know something is wrong!”

I wept. Miriam patiently listened. My instinct was to get off the phone and call my mother, but when I tried to do this Miriam begged me not to.

“She doesn’t want you to know. She knows you have to travel and whatnot — she doesn’t want to disturb your plans. She’d know I told you. I’m the only person who knows.”

I couldn’t stand this vision of myself as a person my own mother would rather die than disturb. To avoid it, I cast around for dramatic gestures, and without even knowing whether or not it was possible offered up the services of Aimee’s many private doctors in Harley Street. Miriam chucked sadly.

“Private? Don’t you know your mother by now? No, if you want to do something for her, I can tell you what would make the most difference right at this moment. This crazy woman bothering her? I don’t know why it’s obsessing her so much but it needs to stop, it’s all she can think about — and that’s not right at a time like this. She told me that she spoke to you about it?”

“Yes. She was going to forward me the e-mails but she hasn’t.”

“I have them, I’ll do that.”

“Oh, OK… I thought — I mean, she said, at dinner, that you two…”

“Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life once she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business… it just goes.”

A few minutes after I put down the phone the e-mails started to arrive, in little flurries, until I had fifty or more. I sat where I was reading them, stunned by the rage. The force of it made me feel inadequate — as if Tracey had more feeling for my mother than I did — even though it was not love expressed here but hate. Stunned, too, by how well she wrote, never boring, not for a second, her dyslexia and many grammatical errors were no hindrance to her: she had the gift of being interesting. You couldn’t start reading one without wanting to finish it. Her central accusation against my mother was neglect: of her son’s problems at school, of Tracey’s own complaints and e-mails, and of her duty — I mean my mother’s — to push forward the interests of her constituents. If I’m honest, the earliest e-mails did not seem to me unreasonable, but then Tracey broadened her scope. Neglect of state schools in the borough, neglect of black children in those schools, of black people in England, of black working-class people in England, of single mothers, of the children of single mothers, and of Tracey the single child of a single mother, all those years ago. It interested me that she wrote “single mother” here, as if her father had never existed at all. The tone became sweary, abusive. In some of the e-mails she sounded drunk or high. Soon it was a one-way correspondence, a systematic dissection of all the many ways Tracey believed my mother had let her down. You never liked me, you never wanted me around, you always tried to humiliate me, I was never good enough for you, you were scared of being associated with me, you always held yourself apart, you pretended you were for the community but you were only ever for yourself, you told everybody I stole that money but you had no proof and you never defended me. There was a whole tranche of letters that referred only to the estate. Nothing was being done to improve the units the council residents lived in, these units were being left to degenerate — almost all of them now in Tracey’s block — they hadn’t been touched since the early eighties. Meanwhile, the estate across the road — our estate, which the council were now busily selling off — had filled up with young white couples and their babies and looked like a “fucking hotel resort.” And what was my mother going to do about the boys selling crack on the corner of Torbay Road? The closure of the swimming pool? The whorehouses on Willesden Lane?

That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century Bavarian sect had survived its own suppression and was at work in the world today, its members many powerful and famous blacks — in league with elite whites and the Jews — and Tracey was researching all this very deeply and was increasingly convinced that my mother might herself be a tool of these people, minor but dangerous, who had managed to worm her way right into the heart of British government.

Just after midday I read the last e-mail, put my coat on, walked down the road and waited for the 52 bus. I got off at Brondesbury Park, walked the length of Christchurch Avenue, arrived at Tracey’s estate, climbed the stairs and rang her bell. She must have been in the hallway already because she opened the door right away, a new baby of four or five months on her hip, its face turned from me. Behind her I could hear more children, arguing, and a TV at high volume. I don’t know what I expected, but what was in front of me was an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms, house slippers and a black sweatshirt that had one word written on it: OBEY. I looked so much younger.

“It’s you,” she said. She put a protective hand to the back of her baby’s head.

“Tracey, we need to talk.”

“MUM!” cried a voice from inside. “WHO IS IT?”

“Yeah, well, I’m in the middle of making lunch?”

“My mother is dying,” I said — that old childhood habit of exaggeration spontaneously came back to me—“and you’ve got to stop what you’re—”

Just then her two older children stuck their heads round the door to stare at me. The girl looked white, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes. The boy had Tracey’s coloring and a springy Afro but didn’t look especially like her: he must have taken after his father. The baby was far darker than all of us, and when she turned her face toward me I saw she was Tracey’s double and incredibly beautiful. But they all were.

“Can I come in?”

She didn’t answer. She sighed, pushed the door open with her slippered foot and I followed her in.

“Who are you, who are you, who are you?” the little girl asked me and before she got an answer slipped her hand into mine. I saw, as we walked through the lounge, that I had interrupted a screening of South Pacific. This detail moved me, and made it hard to keep in mind the hateful Tracey of the e-mails or the Tracey who had put that letter through my door ten years before. I knew the Tracey who wasted an afternoon on South Pacific and I loved that girl.

“You like it?” her daughter asked me, and when I said I did, she pulled my arm till I sat on the settee between her and her older brother, who was playing on a phone. I had marched down Brondesbury Park full of righteous fury, but now it seemed completely possible that I might just sit on this sofa and pass the afternoon watching South Pacific with a little girl’s hand nestled in mine. I asked her for her name.

“Mariah Mimi Alicia Chantelle!”

“Her name’s Jeni,” said the boy, without looking up. I thought he looked to be eight, and Jeni five or six.

“And what’s your name?” I asked, cringing to hear my mother’s voice in me, talking to all children, whatever their age, as if they were barely sentient.

“My name is Bo!” he said, imitating my intonation, making himself laugh — the laugh was pure Tracey—“And what is your story, Miss Woman? Are you from the Department of Social Care?”

“No, I’m a… friend of your mum’s. We grew up together.”

“Hmmm, maybe,” he said, as if the past were a hypothetical he could take or leave. He reapplied himself to the game he was playing. “Never seen you before, though, so I got my SUSPICIONS.”

“This bit is ‘Happy Talk’!” said Jeni, delighted, pointing at the screen, and I said, “Yes, but I have to talk to your mummy,” although everything in me wanted to stay on the sofa, holding her hot little hand, feeling Bo’s knee resting inadvertently against mine.

“OK, but come back straight after you do your talking!”

She was clattering around the kitchen with her baby daughter on her hip and didn’t pause when I entered.

“Great kids,” I found myself saying, as she piled plates and gathered cutlery. “Sweet — and sharp.”

She opened the oven; it almost scraped the opposite wall.

“What you making?”

She forced the door shut again and with her back to me shifted her baby to her opposite side. Everything was the wrong way round: I was the solicitous, apologetic one, she in a place of righteousness. The flat itself seemed to draw this submissive role out of me. On the stage of Tracey’s life I had no other role to play.

“I really need to talk to you,” I said again.

She turned round. She had a proper face on, as we used to say, but when we caught each other’s eyes we smiled, it was involuntary, a mutual smirk.

“I’m not even laughing, though,” she said, reassuming her face, “and if you’ve come in here just to start one with me you best just leave again ’cos I’m not up for it.”

“I came here to ask you to stop harassing my mother.”

“Is that what she told you!”

“Tracey, I read your e-mails.”

She put the baby over her shoulder and started jiggling it and patting its back over and over.

“Listen, I live in this area,” she said, “unlike you. I see what goes on. They can talk it up in Parliament all they like, but I’m on the ground in here, and your mother’s meant to be repping these streets. She’s on TV every other night, but you see anything different round here? My boy’s got a 130 IQ — all right? He’s been tested. He’s ADHD, his brain goes so fast, and he’s bored every day in that shithole. Yeah, he gets into trouble. Because he’s bored. And all these teachers can think to do with him is expel him!”

“Tracey, I don’t know anything about that — but you can’t just—”

“Oh, stop stressing, make yourself useful. Help me get these plates in.”

She handed me them, put the cutlery on top and directed me back to the living room, where I found myself setting the small, round table for her family, just as I had once set teatime for her dolls.

“Luncheon is served!” she said, in what seemed to be an imitation of my voice. Playfully she slapped both the older children round the back of their heads.

“If it’s lasagne again I’m gonna start crying on my knees,” said Bo, and Tracey said, “It’s lasagne,” and Bo assumed the position and comically beat the floor with his fists.

“Get up, you joker,” said Tracey, and they were all laughing, and I did not know how to continue in my mission.

At the table I sat quietly while they argued and laughed over every little thing, everybody seeming to talk as loudly as possible, swearing freely, and the baby still on Tracey’s knee, being bounced up and down while Tracey fed herself one-handed and bantered with the other two, and perhaps this was how their lunch times always were, but I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that it was also, on Tracey’s part, a form of performance, a way of saying: Look at the fullness of my life. Look at the emptiness of yours.

“Are you still dancing?” I asked suddenly, interrupting them all. “I mean, professionally?”

The table went quiet and Tracey turned to me.

“Do I look like I’m still dancing?” She looked down at herself and around the table and laughed harshly. “I know I was the smart one but… get a fucking clue.”

“I–I never told you, Trace, but I saw you in Showboat.”

She did not look remotely surprised. I wondered whether she had spotted me at the time.

“Yeah, well, that’s all ancient history. Mum got ill, there was no one to look after the kids… it got too hard. I’ve had some health issues myself. Wasn’t for me.”

“What about their dad?”

“What about their dad what?”

“Why can’t he look after them?” I was pointedly using the singular, but Tracey — always alert to euphemism or hypocrisy — was not fooled by it.

“Well, as you can see, I tried vanilla, café au lait and chocolate, and you know what I figured out? On the inside, they’re all the fucking same: men.”

I was rattled by her language, but the kids — their chairs turned toward South Pacific—did not seem to notice or care.

“Maybe the problem is the kind of men you choose.”

Tracey rolled her eyes: “Thank you, Dr. Freud! Hadn’t thought of that! Any other pearls of wisdom for me?”

I kept quiet and ate my lasagne, still partially frozen in the middle, but delicious. It reminded me of her mother and I asked how she was.

“She died, a couple of months ago. Didn’t she, princess? She died.”

“Nanna died. She went to the angels!”

“Yeah. Just us now. We’re OK, though. These fucking social workers keep bothering us, but we’re all right. Four musketeers.”

“We burned Nanna in a big fire!”

Bo turned round: “You’re such a idiot — we didn’t just burn her, did we? Like we just put her on a bonfire or something! She was cre-ma-ted. It’s better than getting stuck in the ground, in some closed-up box. No thank you. That’s how I want mine, too. Nanna was like me, ’cos she hated closed-up spaces. She was claus-tro-phobic. That’s why she always took the stairs.”

Tracey smiled fondly at Bo and reached out for him, which he ducked and avoided.

“She got to see the kids, though,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Even little Bella. So I feel good about that bit.”

She brought Bella up to her lips and kissed her all over her nose. Then looked over to me and gestured toward my womb: “What you waiting for?”

I stuck my nose in the air, realizing too late that it was a borrowed gesture — one I’d been using for years in moments of pride or adamancy — and that it properly belonged to the woman sitting opposite me.

“The right situation,” I said. “The right time.”

She smiled, the old cruelty in her face: “Oh, OK. Good luck with that. Funny, innit,” she said, exaggerating her accent for effect, and turning to the television, not me: “Rich birds with no kids, poor birds with plenty. Sure your mum would have a lot to say about that.”

The kids finished eating. I picked up their plates and took them to the kitchen and sat there for a minute on the high stool, breathing in and out mindfully — as Aimee’s yoga teacher had shown us all how to do — and looking out through the strip of window into the parking bays. There were answers I wanted from her, going a long way back. I was trying to work out how to re-enter the living room in a way that would reset the afternoon in my favor, but before I figured it out Tracey walked in and said: “Thing is, what’s between me and your mum is between me and your mum. I don’t even know why you’ve come round here, honestly.”

“I’m just trying to understand why you would—”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing! There can’t be no understanding between you and me any more! You’re part of a different system now. People like you think you can control everything. But you can’t control me!”

“People like me? What are you talking about? Trace, you’re a grown woman now, you’ve got three beautiful kids, you really need to get a grip on this kind of delusional—”

“You can call it by any fancy name you like, love: there’s a system, and you and your fucking mother are both a part of it.”

I stood up.

“Stop harassing my family, Tracey,” I said, as I walked purposefully out of the kitchen, pursued by Tracey, through the living room toward the front door. “If it carries on, the police will be involved.”

“Yeah, yeah, keep walking, keep walking,” she said and slammed the door behind me.

In early December Aimee returned to check on the progress of her academy, traveling with a smaller group — Granger, Judy, her ditzy e-mail proxy, Mary-Beth, Fern and me — without press and with a specific agenda: she wanted to propose a sexual-health clinic within the grounds of the school itself. Nobody disagreed in principle but it was also very difficult to see how it could possibly be referred to publicly as a sexual-health clinic or how Fern’s discreet reports of the sexual vulnerability of the local girls — which he had gathered slowly, and with a great deal of trust, from a few of the female teachers, who had taken great risks themselves in speaking to him — could be brought out into the light of the village without causing interpersonal chaos and offense and perhaps the end of our whole project. On the flight over we discussed it. I tried, stumblingly, to speak to Aimee about the need for delicacy, and what I knew of the local context, thinking, in my mind, of Hawa, while Fern, more eloquently, discussed an earlier German medical NGO’s interventions in a nearby Mandinka village, where female circumcision was practiced by all, and the German nurses had found oblique approaches won traction where more direct condemnations failed. Aimee frowned at these comparisons and then took up again where she had left off: “Look, it happened to me in Bendigo, it happened to me in New York, it happens everywhere. It’s not about your ‘local context’—this is everywhere. I had a big family, cousins and uncles coming and going — I know what goes on. And I’ll bet you a million dollars you go into any classroom of thirty girls anywhere in this world and there’s going to be one at least who has a secret she can’t tell. I remember. I had nowhere to go. I want these girls to have somewhere to go!”

Beside her own passion and commitment our qualifications and concerns looked petty and narrow, but we managed to wear her down to the word “clinic,” and an emphasis — at least when discussing the clinic with local mothers — on menstrual health, which was its own complication for many girls without the means to pay for sanitary products. But personally I didn’t think Aimee was wrong: I remembered my own classrooms, dance classes, playgrounds, youth groups, birthday parties, hen nights, I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell.

It was a difficult first day. We were glad to be back and there was unexpected pleasure in touring a village no longer so strange or alien to us, seeing familiar faces — in Fern’s case, people who had become intimate friends — and yet we were all also on edge because we knew that Aimee, though she attended to her duties, and smiled in the photographs Granger was tasked with taking, had a mind full of Lamin. Every few minutes she glared at Mary-Beth, who tried to call again but got only voicemail. In some compounds connected to Lamin through blood or friendship we asked for him but nobody seemed to know where he was, they’d seen him yesterday or earlier in the morning, perhaps he’d gone to Barra or Banjul, perhaps to Senegal to see family. By late afternoon Aimee was struggling to hide her irritation. We were meant to be asking people how they felt about the changes in the village, and what more they wanted to see, but Aimee glazed over if people spoke to her for any length of time and we began moving in and out of compounds with too much speed, causing offense. I wanted to linger: I wondered whether this would be our last visit and I felt some urgency to retain everything I saw, to imprint the village in memory, its unbroken light, the greens and the yellows, those white birds with their blood-red beaks, and the people, my people. But somewhere in these streets a young man was hiding from Aimee, a humiliating feeling, and a new one for her, she who had always been the person others ran toward. To avoid reflecting on this, I could see, she was determined to keep moving, and as much as her purposes frustrated my own, I still felt sorry for her. I was twelve years behind her but I, too, felt my age among all those scandalously young girls whom we met in every compound, too beautiful, confronting us both, that hot afternoon, with the one thing no amount of power or money can return to you once it’s gone.

Just before sunset we moved to the very east end of the village, on the border of where it stopped being the village and became the bush once more. There were no compounds here, only corrugated-iron huts, and it was in one of these we met the baby. All very tired, extremely hot, we didn’t notice at first that there was anyone else in the small space other than the woman whose hand Aimee was presently shaking, but as I stepped round to make space for Granger to get inside and out of the sun, I saw a baby laid out on a cloth on the floor, with another girl of about nine, at the baby’s side, stroking the infant’s face. We had seen many babies of course but none as young as this: it was three days old. The woman wrapped her up and passed the tiny package to Aimee, who accepted it into her arms and stood there staring at it, without making any of the usual comments people feel they should make when holding a newborn. Granger and I, feeling awkward, came close and made these comments ourselves: girl or boy, how beautiful, what smallness, such eyes, such lovely thick black tufts of hair. I was saying these things automatically — I’d said them many times before — until I looked at her. Her eyes were huge, wonderfully lashed, black-and-purple, unfocused. No matter how I tried to get her to look at me she wouldn’t. She was a little God refusing me grace, though I was on my knees. Aimee held the baby tighter, turned from me, and placed her own nose on the child’s bud-lips. Granger went outside to get some air. I moved close again to Aimee and craned over the baby. Time passed. The two of us, side by side, unpleasantly close, sweating on each other, but both unwilling to risk moving from the baby’s sightline. The mother was speaking, but I don’t think either of us really heard her. At last Aimee, very reluctantly, turned and placed the baby in my arms. It’s a chemical thing, maybe, like the dopamine that floods through people in love. For me it was a drowning. I have never experienced anything like it before or since.

“You like her? You like her?” said a jovial man, who had appeared from somewhere. “Take her to London! Ha ha! You like her?”

Somehow I passed her back to her mother. At the same time, in some place of alternative futures, I ran straight out of there with the baby in my arms, hailed a taxi to the airport, and flew home.

When the sun fell and nothing more could be done in the way of visiting, we decided to end the day and convene the next morning for the school tour and a village meeting. Aimee and the rest followed Fern to the pink house. I, curious about what had changed since my last visit, headed to Hawa’s. In the absolute darkness I made my way very slowly toward what I thought was the main crossing, reaching out for tree trunks like a blind person, and astonished at every turn by the many adults and children I felt passing by me, who walked quickly and efficiently, without torches, to wherever it was they were going. I made it to the crossing and was steps from Hawa’s door when Lamin appeared beside me. I hugged him and told him Aimee had been looking for him everywhere and expected to see him tomorrow.

“I am just here. I have not been anywhere.”

“Well, I’m going to see Hawa — will you come?”

“You won’t find her. She went two days ago to get married. She is back to visit tomorrow, she would like to see you.”

I wanted to commiserate, but there was no right phrase.

“You must come to the school tour tomorrow,” I repeated. “Aimee looked for you all day.”

He kicked at a stone in the ground.

“Aimee is a very nice lady, she is helping me and I am thankful, but—” He stopped at the line, like a man fluffing a long jump, but then suddenly jumped anyway: “She is an old woman! I am a young man. And a young man wants to have children!”

We stood outside Hawa’s door, looking at each other. We were so close, I felt his breath on my neck. I think I knew then that it would happen between us, that night, or the next, and that it would be a commiseration offered with the body, in the absence of any clearer or more articulate solution. We didn’t kiss, not in that moment, he didn’t even reach for my hand. There was no need. We both understood that it was already decided.

“Well, come in,” he said finally, opening Hawa’s door as if it were that to his own home. “You are here, it is late. You will eat here.”

Standing on the verandah looking out, in more or less exactly the same spot I had last seen him, was Hawa’s brother Babu. We greeted each other very warmly: like everyone I met he considered the fact that I had chosen to return once again as some kind of virtue in itself, or he pretended to find it so. To Lamin he gave only a nod, whether through familiarity or frostiness I couldn’t tell. But when I asked about Hawa his face definitively fell.

“I was there yesterday for the marriage, the only witness. For myself, I don’t care if there are singers or dresses or platters of food — none of it matters to me. But my grandmothers! Oh, she has started a war in this place! I will have to listen to women complaining until the end of my days!”

“Do you think she’s happy?”

He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow.

“Ah, yes — for Americans this is always the most important question!”

Dinner was brought to us, a feast really, and we ate outside, with the grandmothers forming a talkative circle at the other end of the verandah, looking over at us occasionally, but too busy with their own discussion to pay us much mind. We had a solar lamp at our feet that lit us from below: I could see my food and the lower parts of Lamin and Hawa’s brother’s faces, and then beyond there were the usual busy noises of domestic work and children laughing, crying, shouting, and people walking from the various outhouses back and forth across the yard. What you didn’t hear were men’s voices, but now I heard some very close at hand, and Lamin stood up suddenly and pointed at the compound wall, where, either side of the doorway, half a dozen men now sat, their legs facing toward the road. Lamin took a step toward them but Hawa’s brother caught him by the shoulder and sat him back down, approaching instead himself, with two of his grandmothers at his side. I saw one of the young men was smoking and now flicked his cigarette over into our yard, but when Hawa’s brother reached them it turned out to be a quick conversation: he said something, one boy laughed, a grandmother said something, he spoke again, more firmly, and six backsides slipped out of view. The grandmother who had spoken opened the door and watched them walk on, down the road. The moon came out from a cover of clouds and from where I stood I could see at least one of them had a gun on his back.

“They are not from here, they are from the other end of the country,” said Hawa’s brother, rejoining me. He still wore his bloodless conference-room smile, but behind his designer glasses I could see in his eyes how shaken he was. “We see it more and more. They hear the President wants to rule for a billion years. They are running out of patience. They begin listening to other voices. Foreign voices. Or the voice of God, if you believe this can be bought on a Casio tape for twenty-five dalasi in the market. Yes, they are out of patience and I do not blame them. Even our calm Lamin, our patient Lamin — he, too, has run out of patience.”

Lamin reached out for a slice of white bread but did not speak.

“And when do you leave?” asked Babu, of Lamin, his tone so full of judgment, of blame, that I assumed he referred to the back way, but they both chuckled at the panic that must have passed over my face: “No, no, no, he will have his official papers. It is all being arranged, thanks to you people who are here. We are already losing all our brightest young men, and now you take another. It is sad but this is the way things are.”

“You left,” said Lamin sullenly. He pulled a fish-bone from his mouth.

“That was a different time. I was not needed here.”

“I am not needed here.”

Babu did not answer and his sister was not there to fill up the spaces between us with chatter. When we had finished our quiet meal I preempted those many child-maids, gathered the plates together and walked in the direction I’d seen those girls go, toward the last room in the block, which turned out to be a bedroom. I stood in the dim light, unsure what to do next, when one of the half a dozen sleeping children in there raised his head from their single bed, saw the load in my arms and pointed me through a curtain. I found myself outside, in the yard again, but this was the back yard, and here were the grandmothers and some of the older girls, crouched around several tubs of water in which clothes were being washed with large bars of gray soap. A circle of solar lamps illuminated the scene. As I came upon them work paused to observe some live animal theater: a cockerel chasing a hen, overpowering her, putting his claw to her neck, driving her head into the dust, finally mounting her. This operation took only a minute, but throughout the hen looked bored, impatient to get on with her other tasks, so that the cockerel’s brutal sense of his power over her seemed somehow comic. “Big man! Big man!” cried one of the grandmothers, spotting me, pointing at the cockerel. The women laughed, the hen was released: she wandered around in a circle, once, twice, three times, apparently dazed, before returning to the henhouse and her sisters and her chicks. I put the plates where I was told to, on the ground, and came back to find that Lamin had already left. I understood it was a signal. I announced that I, too, was going to bed, but instead lay in my room in my clothes, waiting for the last sounds of human activity to fade. Just before midnight I took my head-torch, made my way quietly through the yard, out of the compound and through the village.

Aimee had thought of this visit as a “fact-finding trip,” but the village committee considered everything a reason for celebration, and the next day, as we finished the school tour and entered the yard we found a drum circle awaiting us under the mango tree, twelve late-middle-aged women with drums between their thighs. Even Fern hadn’t been warned, and Aimee was agitated at this new delay to the schedule, but there was no way to avoid it: this was an ambush. The children streamed out and formed a second, huge circle around their drumming mothers, and we, “the Americans,” were asked to sit in the innermost circle on little chairs taken from the classrooms. The teachers went to get these, and among them, approaching from the very other end of the school, over by Lamin’s maths class, I spotted Lamin and Hawa walking together, carrying four little chairs each. But I did not, when I saw him, feel in any way self-conscious, nor was I ashamed: the events of the night before were so separated from my daytime life that it felt to me that they had happened to someone else, a shadow body who pursued separate aims and could not be forced into the light. I waved to them both — they showed no sign of seeing me. The drumming started. I couldn’t shout over it. I turned back toward the circle and took the seat offered to me, next to Aimee. The women began taking turns in the circle, laying their drum aside to dance in dramatic three-minute bursts, a kind of anti-performance, for despite the brilliance of their footwork, the genius in their hips, they did not turn outwards to their audience but instead remained facing their drumming sisters, their backs to us. As the second woman started, Hawa entered the circle and took the seat next to me that I’d been saving for her, but Lamin only nodded at Aimee before sitting himself on the other side of the circle, as far from her, and I suppose from me, as he could manage. I squeezed Hawa’s hand and offered my congratulations.

“I am very happy. It was not easy for me to be here today but I wanted to see you!”

“Is Bakary with you?”

“No! He thinks I am buying fish in Barra! He does not like dancing like this,” she said and moved her feet a little in echo of the woman stamping away a few yards from us. “But of course I won’t dance myself so no harm is done.”

I squeezed her hand again. There was something wonderful about being near her, she cut every situation to her own dimension, believed she could adapt anything until it suited, even as flexibility fell out of fashion. At the same time a paternalistic — or perhaps I should write here “maternalistic”—impulse surged through me: I kept hold of her hand, too tightly, in the hope, the irrational hope, that it would — like some cheap charm bought off a marabout—confer protection, keep her safe from evil spirits, whose existence in the world I no longer doubted. But when she turned and saw the creases in my forehead, she laughed at me and freed herself, clapping to welcome the arrival of Granger into the circle, who moved round it as if it were a break-dancer’s ring, showing off his heavy-footed moves, to the delight of the drumming mothers. After a suitable minute of reticence, Aimee joined him. To avoid watching her, I looked around the circle at all the adamant, inflexible love, sadly misdirected. I could feel Fern to my right, staring at me. I watched Lamin look up every now and then, his glances directed only at Hawa, her perfect face wrapped up tightly like a present. But in the end I could not evade the image of Aimee, dancing for Lamin, at Lamin, to Lamin. Like someone dancing for a rain that will not fall.

Eight drumming women later, even Mary-Beth had attempted a dance and it was my turn. I had a mother pulling each arm, dragging me up. Aimee had extemporized, Granger had historicized — moonwalk, the robot, the running man — but I still had no ideas about dance, only instincts. I watched them for a minute, the two women, as they danced at me, teasing me, and I listened carefully to the multiple beats, and knew that what they were doing I, too, could do. I stood between them and matched them step for step. The kids went crazy. There were so many voices screaming at me I stopped being able to hear the drums, and the only way I could carry on was to respond to the movements of the women themselves, who never lost the beat, who heard it through everything. Five minutes later I was done and more tired than if I’d run six miles.

I collapsed next to Hawa, and from some fold of her new hijab she produced a small piece of material with which I wiped some of the sweat from my face.

“Why are they saying ‘too bad’? Was I that bad?”

“No! You were so great! They are saying: Toobab—this means—” She traced her hand across the skin of my cheek. “So they are saying: ‘Even though you are a white girl, you dance like you are a black!’ I say it’s true: you and Aimee, both of you — you really dance like you are blacks. It is a big compliment, I would say. I never would have guessed this about you! My, my, you even dance as well as Granger!”

Aimee, overhearing, burst out laughing.

Some days before Christmas, I was sitting in the London house, at the desk in Aimee’s study, finalizing the list for the New Year Party, when I heard Estelle, somewhere upstairs, she was saying: “Dere, dere.” It was a Sunday, the second-floor office was closed. The children had not yet returned from their new boarding school and Judy and Aimee were in Iceland, for two nights, doing promotion. I had not seen or heard of Estelle since the children left and had presumed — if I even thought of her at all — that her services were no longer required. Now I heard that familiar lilt: “Dere, dere.” I ran up a floor and found her in Kara’s old room, in what we used to call the nursery. She stood by the sash windows, looking out on to the park, in her comfy crocs and a black sweater embroidered with gold thread, like tinsel, and a pair of sensible pleated navy trousers. Her back was to me, but when she heard my tread, she turned round, a swaddled baby in her arms. It was so tightly wrapped it looked unreal, like a prop. I approached quickly, reaching out—“You cyan just come up and touch the baby! Your hands got to be clean!”—and it took a great deal of self-control to take a step away from them both and put my hands behind my back.

“Estelle, whose baby is that?”

The baby yawned. Estelle looked down at it adoringly.

“Adopted tree weeks ago, I believe. You didn’t know? Seem to me everybody know! But she just arrive here last night. Her name is Sankofa — don’t arks me what kind of name is that because I could not tell you. Why anybody wan give a lovely little baby like this a name like that I must say I don’t know. I’m going to call her Sandra until somebody make me stop.”

The same purple, dark, unfocused gaze, sliding off me, fascinated by itself. I could hear in Estelle’s voice the delight she already took in the child — far more, it seemed to me, than she had ever taken in Jay and Kara, whom she had practically raised — and I tried to focus on the tale of this “lucky, lucky little girl” in her arms, rescued from the “back of beyond,” placed “in the lap of luxury.” Better not to wonder how it had possibly been managed: an international adoption in less than a month. I reached out again. My hands were shaking.

“If you wan hol’ her so bad, I’m about to wash her right now: come upstairs with me, you can clean your hands.”

We went to Aimee’s gigantic en suite, which had at some point been quietly made ready for a baby: a set of towels with rabbit ears, baby powders and oils, baby sponges and baby soaps, and half a dozen multicolored plastic ducks lined up along the edge of the bath.

“All this nonsense!” Estelle crouched to examine a kooky little device made of terrycloth with a metal frame that hooked to the side of the bath and looked like a sun-chair for a tiny old man. “All this equipment. Only way to wash a baby this small is in the sink.”

I knelt next to Estelle and helped unwrap the tiny package. Froggy limbs splayed, astonished.

“The shock,” explained Estelle, as the baby wailed. “She was warm and tight and now she’s cold and loose.”

I stood by as she lowered Sankofa, outraged and screaming, into a seven-thousand-pound hunk of Victorian porcelain I remembered ordering.

“Dere, dere,” said Estelle, wiping a cloth in the child’s many wrinkled crevices. After a minute or so she cupped Sankofa’s tiny backside in her hand, kissed her on her still-screaming face and told me to lay the swaddling blanket out in a triangle on the heated floor. I sat back on my heels and watched Estelle rub coconut butter all over the baby. To me, who had never so much as held a baby for more than a passing moment, the whole procedure looked masterful.

“Do you have children, Estelle?”

Eighteen, sixteen and fifteen — but her hands were greasy so she directed me to her back pocket and I drew out her phone. I swiped right. Saw, for a moment, the uncluttered image of a tall young man in a high-school graduate’s robe, flanked on both sides by his smiling younger sisters. She told me their names and special talents, their heights and temperaments, and how often or not each one Skyped or replied to her on Facebook. Not often enough. In the ten or so years we had both worked for Aimee, this was the longest and most intimate conversation we’d ever had.

“My mudder take care of dem for me. They go to the very best school in Kingston. Next thing he’ll be heading to the University of the West Indies for engineering. He’s a wonderful young man. The girls they take him like a model. He’s the star. They look up to him so much.”

“I’m Jamaican,” I said, and Estelle nodded and smiled blandly at the baby. I had seen her do this many times, when gently humoring the children, or Aimee herself. Blushing, I corrected myself.

“I mean, my mother’s people are from St. Catherine.”

“Oh, yes. I see. You ever been dere?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Well, you’re still young.” She wrapped the child back up in its cocoon and held it to her breast. “Time’s on your side.”

Christmas came. The baby was presented to me, to all of us, as a fait accompli, a legal adoption, suggested and agreed upon by the parents, and nobody questioned this, or not out loud. No one asked what “agreement” could even mean in a situation of such deep imbalance. Aimee was in the throes of baby love, everyone else seemed happy for her — it was her Christmas miracle. All I had were suspicions and the fact that the whole process had been hidden from me until it was already over.

A few months later I went back to the village for the final time, making inquiries as best I could. Nobody would speak to me about it, or offer anything but happy platitudes. The birth parents were no longer living locally, no one seemed to know exactly where they had moved. If Fernando knew something about it, he wasn’t going to tell me, and Hawa had moved to Serrekunda with her Bakary. Lamin moped around the village, he was in mourning for her — maybe I was, too. Evenings in the compound, without Hawa, were long, dark, lonely and conducted entirely in languages I didn’t know. But though I told myself, as I headed out to Lamin’s place — five or six times in all, and always late in the night — that we two were acting on an uncontrollable physical desire, I think we both knew perfectly well that whatever passion existed between us was directed through the other person toward something else, toward Hawa, or toward the idea of being loved, or simply to prove to ourselves our own mutual independence from Aimee. She was really the person we were aiming at with all our loveless fucking, as much a part of the process as if she were in the room.

Creeping back from Lamin’s to Hawa’s compound, very early one morning, just before five, as the sun came up, I heard the call to prayer and knew I was already too late to pass unwitnessed — a woman pulling a recalcitrant donkey, a group of children waving from a doorway — and so changed direction, to make it look as if I were out for a walk for no particular reason, as everyone knew the Americans sometimes did. Circling back round the mosque, I saw Fernando right in front of me, leaning against the next tree, smoking. I’d never seen him smoke before. I tried smiling casually in greeting but he fell in step with me and grabbed me painfully by the arm. He had beer on his breath. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all.

“What are you doing? Why do you do these things?”

“Fern, are you following me?”

He didn’t answer until we were the other side of the mosque, by the huge termite hill, where we stopped, obscured from view on three sides. He let go of me and started speaking as if we had been in the middle of a long discussion.

“And I have some good news for you: thanks to me, he will be with you very soon on a permanent basis, yes, thanks to me. I am going to the embassy today in fact. I am working very hard behind the scenes to unite the young and not-so-young lovers. All three of them.”

I began a denial but there was no point. Fern was always very hard to lie to.

“It must be a truly strong feeling you have for him, to risk so much. So much. Last time you were here, you know, I suspected it, and the time before — but somehow it is still a shock, to have it confirmed.”

“But I don’t have any feelings for him!”

All the fight went out of his face.

“You imagine this makes me feel better?”

Finally, shame. A suspicious emotion, so ancient. We were always advising the girls in the academy not to feel it, because it was antiquated and unhelpful and led to practices of which we didn’t approve. But I felt it at last.

“Please don’t say anything. Please. I’m leaving tomorrow and that’s it. It just started and it’s already over. Please, Fern — you have to help me.”

“I tried,” he said, and walked off, in the direction of the school.

The rest of the day was torture, and the next, and the flight was torture, the walk through the airport, with my phone a grenade in my back pocket. It didn’t go off. When I walked into the London house everything was as before, only happier. The children were well settled — at least, we didn’t hear from them — the last album was well received. Photographs of Lamin and Aimee together, both looking beautiful — back at Jay’s birthday, from the concert — were in all the gossip rags and were more successful, in their way, than the album itself. And the baby had its debut. The world was not especially curious about logistics, as it turned out, and the papers considered her delightful. It seemed logical to everyone that Aimee should be able to procure a baby as easily as she might order a limited-edition handbag from Japan. Sitting in Aimee’s trailer one day during a video shoot, eating lunch with Mary-Beth, personal assistant number two, I tentatively introduced the topic, hoping to wheedle some information out of her, but I needn’t have been so careful, Mary-Beth was more than happy to tell me, I got the whole story, a contract had been drawn up by one of the entertainment lawyers, a few days after Aimee met the baby, and Mary-Beth had been there to see it signed. She was delighted at this evidence of her own importance and what it suggested about my position in the hierarchy. She took out her phone and flipped through the pictures of Sankofa, her parents and Aimee smiling together, and in among them, I noticed, was a screenshot of the contract itself. When she went to the bathroom and left her phone in front of me I e-mailed the screenshot to myself. A two-page document. A monumental amount of money, in local terms. We spent about the same on household flowers in a year. When I brought this fact to Granger, my last ally, he surprised me by considering it a noble case of “putting your money where your mouth is,” and spoke so tenderly about the baby that everything I had to say sounded monstrous and unfeeling in comparison. I saw that rational conversation wasn’t possible. The baby cast a spell. Granger was just as much in love with Kofi, as we called her, as everybody else who came near her, and God knows she was easy to love, nobody was immune, certainly not me. Aimee was besotted: she could spend an hour or two just sitting with the child on her knee, staring down at her, without doing anything else, and knowing Aimee’s relationship with time, its value and scarcity to her, we all understood what a mighty measure of love this represented. The baby redeemed all kinds of deadening situations — long meetings with the accountants, tedious dress fittings, PR-strategy brainstorm sessions — she changed the color of a day simply by means of her presence in the corner of whichever room, on the knee of Estelle or rocking in a Moses basket on a stand, chuckling, gurgling, crying, untarnished, fresh and new. The first chance we got we’d all crowd around her. Men and women, of all ages and races, but all of us with a certain amount of time racked up in Aimee’s team, from worn old battle-horses like Judy, to middle-rankers like me, to young kids straight out of college. We all worshipped at the altar of the baby. The baby was starting from the beginning, the baby was uncompromised, the baby wasn’t hustling, the baby needn’t fake Aimee’s signature on four thousand headshots heading for South Korea, the baby didn’t have to generate meaning out of the broken shards of this and that, the baby was not nostalgic, the baby had no memories and no regrets, it did not need a chemical skin peel, it did not have a phone, it had no one to e-mail, truly time was on its side. Whatever happened afterward, it wasn’t out of any lack of love for the baby. The baby was surrounded by love. It’s a question of what love gives you the right to do.

In that last month of working for Aimee — just before she fired me, in fact — we did a mini-European tour, starting with a show in Berlin, not a concert, a show of her photographs. These were photos of photos, images appropriated and rephotographed; she had taken the idea from Richard Prince — an old friend from the old days — and added nothing to it except the fact that she, Aimee, was doing it. Still, one of the most respected galleries in Berlin was more than happy to host her “work.” All the photos were of dancers — she thought of herself first and foremost as a dancer and identified deeply with them — but I did all the research and it was Judy who had taken most of the photos, as whenever the time came to go to the studio and rephotograph the photographs there was always something else that had to be done: meet-and-greets in Tokyo, the “designing” of a new perfume, sometimes even the recording of an actual song. We rephotographed Baryshnikov and Nureyev, Pavlova, Fred Astaire, Isadora Duncan, Gregory Hines, Martha Graham, Savion Glover, Michael Jackson. I argued for Jackson. Aimee didn’t want him, he wasn’t her idea of an artist, but catching her in a harried moment I managed to convince her, while Judy lobbied for “a woman of color.” She was worried about under-representation, she often was, which meant really that she was worried about what others might perceive as an under-representation, and whenever we had these conversations I had the eerie sensation of viewing myself as really being one of these things, not a person at all but a sort of object — without which a certain mathematical series of other objects is not complete — or not even an object but a kind of conceptual veil, a moral fig-leaf, protecting such-and-such a person from such-and-such a critique, and rarely thought of except when in this role. It didn’t offend me, especially: I was interested in the experience, it was like being fictional. I thought of Jeni LeGon.

I got my chance during a car ride over the border between Luxembourg — where Aimee had gone to do a little press — and Germany. I took out my phone and googled LeGon and Aimee looked over the images distractedly — she was texting simultaneously on her own phone — while I talked as quickly as I could of LeGon as person, actress, dancer, symbol, trying to keep a hold of her wavering attention, and suddenly she nodded decisively at a picture of LeGon and Bojangles together, of LeGon standing, dancing, in a pose of kinetic joy, and Bojangles kneeling at her feet, pointing at her, and she said, “Yes, that one, I like it, yes, I like the reversal, man on his knees, woman in control.” Once I had that “yes,” I could at least start on the research for what would appear as text in the catalog, and a few days later Judy took the photo, slightly at an angle, missing parts of the frame, for Aimee had asked that they all be rephotographed this way, as if “the photographer was dancing herself.” As far as these things go, it was the most successful piece in the show. And I was glad of the chance to rediscover LeGon. Researching her, often alone, often late at night, in a series of European hotel rooms, I realized how much I had fantasized about her as a child, how fundamentally naïve I had been about almost every aspect of her life. I’d imagined, for example, a whole narrative of friendship and respect between LeGon and the people she worked with, the dancers and the directors, or I’d wanted to believe that friendship and respect could have existed, in the same spirit of childish optimism that makes a little girl want to believe her parents are deeply in love. But Astaire never spoke to LeGon on set, in his mind she not only played a maid, she was in actuality little different from the help, and it was the same with most of the directors, they didn’t really see her and rarely hired her, not for anything except maid parts, and soon enough even these roles dried up, and not until she got to France did she begin to “feel like a person.” When I learned all of this I was in Paris myself, sitting in the sunshine, in front of the Odéon theater, trying to read the information off the sun-blanched screen of my phone, drinking a Campari, checking the time compulsively. I watched the twelve hours Aimee had allotted for Paris disappearing, minute by minute, almost faster than I could experience them, and soon the cab would come, and then an airstrip would fall away beneath me, and onwards we would go, to another twelve hours in another beautiful, unknowable city — Madrid. I thought of all the singers and dancers and trumpet players and sculptors and scribblers who had claimed to feel like people, finally, here, in Paris, no longer shadows but people in their own right, an effect that possibly required more than twelve hours to take effect, and I wondered how these people were able to tell, so precisely, the moment that they began to feel like a person. The umbrella I sat under gave no shade, the ice had melted in my drink. My own shadow was huge and knife-like under the table. It seemed to stretch halfway across the square and to point at the stately white house on the corner, which took up most of the block and outside of which a guide at that moment held up a little flag and began announcing a series of names, some known to me, some new: Thomas Paine, E. M. Cioran, Camille Desmoulins, Sylvia Beach… A small circle of elderly American tourists stood around, nodding, sweating. I looked back at my phone. And so it was in Paris — I tapped this sentence out with my thumb — that LeGon began to feel like a person. Which meant — I did not write this part down — that the person Tracey had imitated so perfectly all those years ago, the girl we’d watch dance with Eddie Cantor, kicking her legs, shaking her head — that was not really a person at all, that was only a shadow. Even her lovely name, which we’d both so envied, even that was unreal, in reality she was the daughter of Hector and Harriet Ligon, migrated from Georgia, descendants of sharecroppers, while the other LeGon, the one we thought we knew — that happy-go-lucky hoofer — she was a fictional being, born of a typo, whom Louella Parsons dreamed up one day when she misspelled “Ligon” in her syndicated gossip column in the LA Examiner.

The grenade went off finally on Labor Day. We were in New York, a few days away from leaving for London, with a plan to meet Lamin there, his British visa finalized. It was foully hot: the rancid sewer air could prompt a smile between two strangers in the street as they passed each other: can you believe we live here? It was like bile, and it was the scent of Mulberry Street that afternoon. I had my hand to my mouth as I walked, a prophetic gesture: by the time I reached the corner of Broome I’d been fired. It was Judy who sent the text — and the dozen like it that followed — all of which were as stuffed with personal invective as they would have been had Aimee written them herself. I was a whore and a traitor, a fucking this and a fucking that. Even Aimee’s personal outrage could be outsourced to a secondary party.

A little light-headed, woozy, I got as far as Crosby and sat down on the front step of Housing Works, on the vintage-clothes side. Every question sprouted more questions: where will I live and what will I do and where are my books and where are my clothes and what is my visa status? I wasn’t so much angry with Fern as annoyed at myself for not better predicting the timing. I should have been waiting for it: didn’t I know exactly how he was feeling? I could reconstruct his experience. Working on Lamin’s visa paperwork, buying Lamin’s air ticket, organizing Lamin’s departure and arrival, his pickups and his drop-offs, enduring the e-mails back and forth between him and Judy at every stage of this planning, devoting all time and energy to somebody else’s existence, to somebody else’s desires and needs and requirements. It’s a shadow life and after a while it gets to you. Nannies, assistants, agents, secretaries, mothers — women are used to it. Men have a lower tolerance. Fern must have sent a hundred e-mails about Lamin these past few weeks. How could he resist sending the one that would blow up my life?

My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own. I stopped looking at it and focused instead on a very tall brother in the window of Housing Works, he had tremendous high-arched eyebrows and was holding up a series of dresses against his thick frame, stepping into a pair of roomy high heels. Spotting me, he smiled, sucked in his stomach, did a little turn and bowed. I don’t know why or how but the sight of him galvanized me. I stood up and hailed a taxi. Some questions were answered quickly. All the stuff I had in New York was in boxes on the sidewalk outside the West 10th Street apartment and the locks had already been changed. My visa status was linked to my employer: I had thirty days to leave the country. Where to stay took longer. I’d never really paid for anything in New York: I lived on Aimee, ate with Aimee, went out with Aimee, and the news my phone brought me of the price of a single night in a Manhattan hotel made me feel like Rip Van Winkle waking from his hundred-year sleep. Sitting on the front steps of West 10th, I tried to think of alternatives, friends, acquaintances, connections. All links were weak and led anyway back to Aimee. I considered an impossibility: walking in an easterly direction down this street till it met, in some sentimental dream, the west end of Sidmouth Road, where my mother would answer the door and lead me to her spare box-room, half buried in books. Where else? Where next? I had no coordinates. Unhailed cabs went by, one after the other, and fancy ladies with their little dogs. This being Manhattan, nobody paused to watch what must have looked like a staged reenactment: a weeping woman, sat on a step, under that Lazarus plaque, huddled by boxes, far from home.

I remembered James and Darryl. I’d met them both back sometime in March, it was on a Sunday night — my night off — I’d traveled uptown alone to see the Alvin Ailey dancers, and in the theater got talking to my seat mates, two gentlemen New Yorkers in their late fifties, a couple, one white and one black. James was English, tall and bald with a lugubrious voice and a very jolly laugh, still dressed for a pleasant pub lunch in some Oxfordshire hamlet — though he had lived here many years — and Darryl was American, with a gray-tipped Afro, mole-ish eyes behind glasses, and trousers with frayed hems and paint spattered on them, like a student artist. He knew so much about what was happening on stage, the history of each piece, of New York ballet in general and Alvin Ailey in particular, that at first I thought he must be a choreographer or an ex-dancer himself. In fact, they were both writers, funny and full of insight, I enjoyed their whispered opinions concerning the uses and limits of “cultural nationalism” in dance, and I, who had no opinions about dance, only wonderment, amused them, too, clapping after every light change and leaping to my feet as soon as the curtain fell. “It’s nice to see Revelations with someone who hasn’t seen it fifty times,” noted Darryl, and afterward they invited me for a drink in the hotel bar next door, and told a long and dramatic story of a house they’d bought, in Harlem, an Edith Wharton — era wreck, which they were doing up with their life savings. Hence the paint. To me it was an obviously heroic effort but one of their neighbors, a woman in her eighties, disapproved, both of James and Darryl, and the fast-paced gentrification of the neighborhood: she liked to shout at them in the street and push religious materials through the letterbox. James did an excellent physical impression of this lady, and I laughed too much and finished a second Martini. It was such a relief to be out with people who did not care about Aimee and did not want anything from me. “And one afternoon,” said Darryl, “I was walking alone, James was somewhere else, and she leaps out of the shadows, grabs my arm and says: But I can help you get away from him. You don’t need a master, you can be free — let me help you! She could have been going door to door, stumping for Barack, but no: her thing was James enslaving me. She was offering me my own personal underground railway. Smuggle me up into Spanish Harlem!” I had seen them occasionally since, on my free Sunday nights in the city. I watched them chip away at plaster to reveal original cornices, and fake porphyry by flicking specks of paint at a dark pink wall. Each time I visited I was moved: how happy they were together, after so many years! I didn’t have many other models of that idea. Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either. I liked them both so much, though I couldn’t really call them more than acquaintances. But I thought of them now. And when I sent a cautious text from the steps of West 10th, the response was immediate, characteristically generous: by dinner time I was at their table, eating better food than I’d ever come close to at Aimee’s. Flavorsome, fat-filled, pan-fried food. A bed had been made for me in one of the several spare rooms and I found they were like fondly prejudiced parents: however I told my tale of woe they refused to consider any part of it my fault. In their view I should be the angry one, all the blame was Aimee’s, none of it was mine, and I went to my beautiful wood-paneled room comforted by this rose-tinted vision.

I wasn’t angry until Judy sent the non-disclosure contract over, the next morning. I looked at a PDF of a piece of paper I must have signed, aged twenty-three, though I couldn’t remember ever doing so. Within its inflexible terms the things that came out of my mouth did not belong to me any longer, not my ideas or opinions or feelings, not even my memories. They were all hers. Everything that had happened in my life in the past decade belonged to her. Rage rose up in me instantaneously: I wanted to burn her house down. But everything you need to burn somebody’s house down these days is already in your hand. It was all in my hand — I didn’t even need to get out of bed. I set up an anonymous account, chose the gossip site she hated most, wrote an e-mail containing everything I knew about little Sankofa, attached the photo of her “adoption certificate,” pressed send. Satisfied, I went down to breakfast, expecting, I suppose, my hero’s welcome. But when I told my friends what I’d done — and what I thought it meant — James’s face turned as grave as the medieval St. Maurice statue in the hall, and Darryl took off his glasses, sat down and blinked at the pinewood dining table. He told me he hoped I understood how much, in a short time, he and James had come to love me — it was because they loved me they could tell me the truth — and that the only thing my e-mail signified was that I was still very young.

They camped outside Aimee’s brownstone. Two days later — to my shame — they were knocking on James and Darryl’s door. But that part was Judy’s doing, a blind item: illicit affair, “vengeful ex-employee”… Judy came from a different era, when blind items stayed blind and you could control the story. They had my name within a few hours, and soon after my location, God knows how. Maybe Tracey is right: maybe we are tracked at all times through our phones. I stayed in bed, while James brought up cups of tea and opened and shut the door to a persistent reporter and Darryl and I watched the tide turn on my laptop in real time as the day went on. Without doing anything different, without taking any action at all, I went from Judy’s tawdry, jealous minion to The People’s bold whistleblower, all in a few hours. Refresh, refresh. Addictive. My mother called and before I could even ask her how she was she said: “Alan showed me on the computer, and I think it was a really brave act. You know, you’ve always been a bit cowardly, I don’t mean cowardly — a bit timid. It’s my fault, I overprotected you, probably, mollycoddled you. This is the first really brave thing I’ve seen you do and I’m very proud!” Who was Alan? Her speech sounded slurry and not quite her own, more fake-posh than I’d ever heard it. I asked in a light way about her health. She gave nothing away — she’d had a little cold, but it had passed — and though I knew for a fact she was lying to me she sounded so adamant it felt like the truth. I promised her I’d come to visit her the moment I was back in England and she said, “Yes, yes, of course you will,” with far less conviction than she’d said everything else.

My next call was from Judy. She asked me if I wanted to get out. She already had a ticket for me, on the red-eye, tonight. At the other end there would be an apartment I could use for a few nights, near Lord’s cricket ground, until the fuss died down. I tried to thank her. She laughed her seal-bark.

“You think I’m doing this for you? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“OK, Judy, I already said I’ll take the ticket.”

“That’s gracious of you, love. After the mountain of shit you’ve created for me.”

“What about Lamin?”

“What about Lamin?”

“He expected to come to England. You can’t just—”

“You’re ridiculous.”

The phone went dead.

After the sun went down, and the last man on the doorstep left, I abandoned my boxes with James and Darryl and got a taxi on Lennox. The driver was of that deepest shade, like Hawa, and had a likely-sounding name, and I was in the state of seeing signs and symbols everywhere. I leaned forward with my year-off enthusiasms and ragbag of local facts and asked him where he was from. He was Senegalese but this didn’t hamper me much: I spoke without pause through the midtown tunnel and out into Jamaica. He beat the steering wheel every now with the hub of his right hand and sighed and laughed.

“So you know how it is, back home! That village life! It’s not easy but that’s the life I miss! But sista, you should have come to see us! You could have just walked down the road!”

“Actually, the friend I was telling you about,” I said, looking up for a moment from my screen, “from Senegal? We just organized to meet in London, I was just messaging him.” I repressed the urge to tell this stranger that I, in my generosity, had paid for Lamin’s ticket.

“Oh, nice, nice. London is better? More nice than here?”

“Different.”

“Twenty-eight years I’ve been here. Here is so stressful, you have to be so angry to survive here, you live off the anger… it’s too much.”

We were pulling into JFK, and when I tried to give him his tip he returned it.

“Thank you for coming to my country,” he said, forgetting I hadn’t.

Now everyone knows who you really are.

By the time I landed, our old girlhood dance was out in the world. I find it interesting that Tracey chose not to send it to me until two whole days later. In her vision of things others would know who I really was before I did — but then perhaps they always do. It reminded me of her way with our earliest tales of ballet dancers in peril, how she would correct and edit me: “No: that part here.” “It’d go better if she died on page two.” Moving and rearranging things to create the greatest impact. Now she had achieved the same effect with my life, placing the beginning of the story at an earlier point so that all that came after read as the twisted consequence of a lifelong obsession. It was more convincing than my version. It drew the strangest reactions from people. Everybody wanted to see the footage and nobody did: it was pulled down wherever it was posted almost as soon as it went up. For some — maybe you — it was borderline child pornography, if not in intention then in effect. Others found it only exploitative, though it is hard to put your finger on who is exploiting whom. Can children exploit themselves? Is it anything more than a couple of girls messing around, simply two girls dancing — two brown girls dancing like adults — copying adult moves innocently, but skillfully, as brown girls often can? And if you think it more than that, then who has the problem, exactly, the girls in the film — or you? Whatever is said or thought about it seems to make the viewer complicit: the best thing is not to see it at all. That is the only possible high ground. Otherwise, this cloud of guilt, which can’t be exactly placed, but still you feel it. Even I, watching the video, had the troubling thought: well, if a girl behaves like that at the age of ten, can she ever be said to be innocent? What won’t she do at fifteen, at twenty-two — at thirty-three? The desire to be on the side of innocence is so strong. It pulsated out of my phone in waves, in all those posts and rants and commentaries. By contrast, the baby was innocent, the baby was guilt-free. Aimee loved the baby, the child’s birth parents loved Aimee, they wanted her to raise their baby. Judy got that message out far and wide. Who was anyone to judge? Who was I?

Now everybody knows who you really are.

The tide turned again, fiercely and with great sympathy in Aimee’s direction. But there were still people on the doorstep of Judy’s rental, despite all her preparations and the doorman’s promises, and on the third day I left with Lamin for my mother’s Sidmouth Road flat, which I knew, in all available records, would be registered in Miriam’s name. There was no one on the doorstep. When I rang the doorbell there was no answer and my mother’s phone went to voicemail. Finally a neighbor let us in. She looked confused — shocked — when I asked where my mother was. This woman, too, would now know who I really was: the kind of daughter who had not yet heard her own mother was in a hospice.

It looked like all the spaces my mother had ever lived in, books and papers everywhere, just as I remembered, but more so: the space for actual living had reduced. Chairs were serving as bookshelves, and all available tables, most of the floor, the work surfaces in the kitchen. It wasn’t chaos, though, there was a logic to it. In the kitchen diaspora fiction and poetry dominated and the bathroom was mostly histories of the Caribbean. There was a wall of slave narratives and commentaries upon them leading from her bedroom down the hall to the boiler. I found the address of the hospice on the fridge, it was written in somebody else’s handwriting. I felt sad and guilty. Who did she ask to write it? Who drove her there? I tried to do a little tidying. Lamin lent a hand, half-heartedly — he was used to women doing for him and soon sat himself down on my mother’s sofa to watch the same heavy old TV set from my childhood, kept half hidden behind an armchair, to make the point that it was never watched. I moved piles of books back and forth, making little headway, and after a while gave up. I sat at my mother’s table with my back to Lamin, opened my laptop and returned to what I’d spent the whole of yesterday doing, searching for myself, reading of myself, and seeking Tracey, too, below the line. She wasn’t hard to find. Generally the fourth or fifth comment, and she always went at it full tilt, every time, no compromise, aggressive, full of conspiracy. She had many aliases. Some were quite subtle: tiny references to moments from our shared history, songs we’d liked, toys we’d had, or numeral recombinations of the year we first met or our dates of birth. I noticed she liked to use the words “sordid” and “shameful,” and the phrase “Where were their mothers?” Whenever I saw that line, or a variation upon it, I knew it was her. I found her everywhere, in the most unlikely places. In other people’s feeds, under newspaper articles, on Facebook walls, abusing anyone who did not agree with her arguments. As I followed her trail, the idiotic daytime shows came and went behind me. If I turned to check on Lamin I found him still as a statue, watching.

“Turn that down a little?”

He’d increased the volume suddenly on a property-makeover show, of the kind my father had once liked to watch.

“The man is speaking about Edgware. I have an uncle in Edgware. And a cousin.”

“Do you?” I said, trying not to sound too hopeful. I waited but he returned to his show. The sun went down. My stomach began to rumble. I didn’t move from my seat, I was too intent on my Tracey hunt, flushing her out of the covert, and checking a secondary window every fifteen minutes or so to see if she’d invaded my inbox. But her methods with me were apparently different than with my mother. That one-line e-mail was all she ever sent me.

At six the news came on. Lamin was very affected by the revelation that the people of Iceland were suddenly, catastrophically poor. How could such a thing happen? A failed harvest? A corrupt President? But it was news to me, too, and not understanding all of what the newsreader said I could offer no interpretation. “Maybe we will hear information also of Sankofa,” Lamin suggested, and I laughed, stood up, and told him they didn’t put that kind of nonsense on the evening news. Twenty minutes later, as I peered into a fridge full of rotting produce, Lamin called me to come back in. It was the closing story on the real news, the British Broadcast news as he called it, and there in the top-right corner was a stock photo of Aimee. We sat on the edge of the sofa. Cut to a strip-lit office space somewhere, with a picture of the frog-faced President-for-life askew on the wall, in front of which the birth parents sat in their country clothes, looking hot and uncomfortable. A woman from an adoption agency sat to their left and translated. I tried to remember if the mother was the same person I’d seen that day in the corrugated-iron hut, but couldn’t be sure. I listened to the agency woman explain the situation to the foreign correspondent who sat opposite them all, he was wearing a version of my old wrinkled uniform of linen and khaki. Everything had been done according to procedure, what had been leaked was not the adoption certificate at all, it was only an intermediary document, clearly not intended for public consumption, the parents were satisfied with the adoption and understood what they had signed.

“We have no problem,” said the mother, in halting English, smiling at the camera.

Lamin put both hands behind his head, sank back into the sofa and offered me a proverb: “Money makes problems go away.”

I switched it off. Silence spread through the house, we had nothing whatsoever to say to each other, the third point on our triangle was gone. Two days ago I had been pleased with my dramatic gesture — fulfilling a duty of care Aimee had neglected — but the gesture itself had obscured the reality of Lamin: Lamin in my bed, Lamin in this living room, Lamin indefinitely in my life. He had no job and no money. None of his hard-won qualifications meant anything here. Each time I left the room — to get tea, to go to the toilet — my first thought upon seeing him again was: what are you doing in my house?

At eight o’clock I ordered Ethiopian takeaway. As we ate I showed him Google Maps and where we were in London in relation to the rest of the city. I showed him Edgware. The various ways you can get to Edgware.

“I’ll be going to see my mother tomorrow, but feel free to hang around here, obviously. Or, you know, go off exploring.”

Anyone watching us that evening would have thought we had met a few hours earlier. I felt shy of him once more, of his proud self-containment and capacity for silence. He was not Aimee’s Lamin any more, but he wasn’t mine either. I had no idea who he was. When it was clear I’d run out of geographical conversation he stood up and, without any discussion, went to the box-room. I went to my mother’s room. We closed our doors.

The hospice was in Hampstead, on a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac, a stone’s throw from the hospital where I was born and a few streets from the Noted Activist. Autumn was pretty here, russet and gold against all that valuable red-brick Victorian real estate, and I had strong associative memories of my mother walking through it on brisk mornings like this one, arm in arm with the Noted Activist, bemoaning the Italian aristocrats and American bankers, the Russian oligarchs and the upscale children’s clothes stores, the basements being dug out of the earth. The end of some long-lost bohemian idea of the place she’d held dear. She was forty-seven then. She was only fifty-seven now. Of all the futures I had imagined for her in these streets somehow the present reality seemed the most improbable. When I was a child she had been immortal. I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. Instead, this quiet street, these gingko trees shedding their golden leaves.

At the desk I gave my name and after a short wait a young male nurse came for me. He warned me that my mother was on morphine and sometimes confused, before leading me to her room. I didn’t notice anything about this nurse, he seemed completely nondescript, but when I got to the room and he opened the door my mother pushed herself up in her bed and cried: “Alan Pennington! So you’ve met the famous Alan Pennington!”

“Mum, it’s me.”

“Oh, I’m Alan,” said the nurse, and I turned round to look again at this young man my mother was smiling at so radiantly. He was short, with sandy-brown hair, small blue eyes, a slightly pudgy face and an unremarkable nose with a few freckles over the bridge. The only thing that made him unusual to me, in the context of all the Nigerian, Polish and Pakistani nurses you heard talking in the corridors, was how English he looked.

“Alan Pennington is famous around here,” said my mother, waving at him. “His kindness is legend.”

Alan Pennington smiled at me, revealing a pair of pointy incisors, like a little dog’s.

“I’ll leave you two alone,” he said.

“How are you, Mum? Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Alan Pennington,” she informed me, after the door had closed behind him, “only works for others. Did you know that? You hear about these people but it’s another thing to meet them. Of course, I’ve worked for others, all my life — but not like this. They’re all like that here. I had a girl from Angola first, Fatima, lovely girl, she was the same… unfortunately she had to move on. Then Alan Pennington came. You see: he is a carer. I never thought about that word very deeply before. Alan Pennington cares.”

“Mum, why do you keep calling him Alan Pennington like that?”

My mother looked at me like I was an idiot.

“Because that’s his name. Alan Pennington is a carer who cares.”

“Yes, Mum, that’s what carers are paid to do.”

“No, no, no, you don’t understand: he cares. The things he does for me! No one should have to do those things for another human being — but he does them for me!”

Tiring of the subject of Alan Pennington, I convinced her to let me read aloud for a while from a slim book she had on her side-table, a little stand-alone edition of Sonny’s Blues, and then lunch arrived on the tray of Alan Pennington.

“But I can’t eat that,” said my mother sadly as Alan lay it across her lap.

“Well, how about I leave it with you for twenty minutes and if you’re absolutely sure you can’t eat it just ring the bell and I’ll come and take it back? How would that be? Does that sound all right?”

I waited for my mother to tear a strip off Alan Pennington — all her life she had hated and dreaded being patronized or spoken to like a child — but now she nodded seriously as if this were a very wise and generous proposal, took Alan’s hands in her own shaking, wraith-like grasp and said: “Thank you, Alan. Please don’t forget to come back.”

“And forget the most beautiful woman in the place?” said Alan, though clearly gay, and my mother, lifelong feminist, erupted in girlish giggles. And they stayed like that, holding each other’s hands, until Alan smiled and released her, off to care for someone else, abandoning my mother and me to each other. I had a rogue thought, I hated having it: I wished that Aimee was here with me. I had been at deathbeds with Aimee, four times, and on each occasion had been impressed and humbled by her way of being with the dying, her honesty, warmth and simplicity, which nobody else in the room ever seemed able to manage, not even family. Death did not scare her. She looked directly at it, engaged with the dying person in their present situation, no matter how extreme, without nostalgia or false optimism, accepted your fear when you were afraid, and your pain if you were feeling it. How many people can do these supposedly straightforward things? I remember a friend of hers, a painter who had lost decades to the severe anorexia that eventually killed her, saying to Aimee, on what turned out to be her deathbed: “God, Aim — didn’t I just waste so much fucking time!” To which Aimee replied: “More than you know.” I remember that stick figure between the bed sheets with her gaping mouth, so shocked she burst out laughing. But it was the truth, no else had dared tell her, and dying people, I found out, are impatient for the truth. I spoke no truth whatsoever to my mother, I just made the usual small talk, read her more of her beloved Baldwin, listened to tales of Alan Pennington, and lifted her beaker of juice so she could suck at it through a straw. She knew I knew she was dying but for whatever reason — bravery, denial or delusion — she made no reference to it in my presence except to say, when I asked her where her phone was and why she hadn’t answered it: “Look, I don’t want to spend the time I have left on that bloody thing.”

I found it in the compartment of her side-table, in a hospital laundry bag, along with a trouser suit, a folder of papers, a guide to parliamentary conduct and her laptop.

“You don’t have to use it,” I said, powering it up and laying it on the table. “But just leave it on so I have a way of contacting you.”

The notification alarm started going off — the phone buzzed and danced across the counter — and my mother looked over at it with a kind of horror.

“No, no, no — I don’t want it! I don’t want it on! Why did you have to do that?”

I picked it up. I could see unopened e-mails, dozens and dozens of them, filling the screen, abusive even in their subject headings, all from the same address. I started reading through them, trying to resist the catalog of pain: child-support woes, rent arrears, skirmishes with social workers. The most recent were the most frantic: she feared her children were about to be taken from her.

“Mum, have you heard from Tracey recently?”

“Where’s Alan Pennington? I’m not going to eat this.”

“My God, you’re so sick right now — you shouldn’t have to be dealing with this!”

“It’s not like Alan not to check in…”

“Mum, have you heard from Tracey?”

“NO! I told you I don’t look at that thing!”

“You haven’t spoken to her?”

She sighed heavily.

“I don’t have many visitors, darling. Miriam comes. Lambert came once. My fellow Members of Parliament do not come. You are here. As Alan Pennington said: ‘You find out who your friends are.’ I sleep mostly. I dream a lot. I dream of Jamaica, I dream of my grandmother. I go back in time…” She closed her eyes. “I did have a dream about your friend, when I first got here, I was on a high dosage of this”—she tugged at a drip in her arm—“Yes, your friend came to visit me. I was asleep and I woke up and she was just standing by the door, not talking. Then I went back to sleep and she was gone.”

When I got back to the flat, emotionally weak, still jet-lagged, I prayed that Lamin would be out and he was. When he didn’t come back for dinner I was relieved. Only the next morning, when I knocked on his door, nudged it open and saw he and his bag were gone did I realize he’d left. When I called I got voicemail. I called every few hours for four days and it was the same. I had been so concentrated upon how I might break the news to him that he must leave, that we had no future together, that I hadn’t imagined, not for a moment, that all the time he was plotting his own escape from me.

Without him, without the TV on, the flat was deadly quiet. It was just me and the computer, and the radio, from which more than once I heard the voice of the Noted Activist, still going strong, full of opinions. But my own story was fading, online and in all other mediums, all that brightly illuminated commentary already burned out, puttering to blackness and ash. At a loss, I spent a day writing e-mails to Tracey. First dignified and righteous, then sarcastic, then angry, then hysterical, until I realized she was having more effect on me with silence than I could manage with all these words. The power she has over me is the same as it has always been, judgment, and it goes beyond words. There is no case I can make that will change the fact that I was her only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that’s been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard. Later I found out Tracey had a long history of sending distressing e-mails. A director at the Tricycle who had not cast her, she thought because of color. The teachers at her son’s school. A nurse at her doctor’s office. But none of this changes the judgment. If she was tormenting my mother as she lay dying, if she was trying to ruin my life, if she was sitting in that claustrophobic little flat, watching my e-mails line up on her phone and simply choosing not to read them — whatever she was doing, I knew it was a form of judgment upon me. I was her sister: I had a sacred duty toward her. Even if only she and I knew it and recognized it, it was still true.

A few times I left the flat for the corner-shop, to buy cigarettes and packets of pasta, but otherwise I saw no one and heard from no one. At night I picked up random books from my mother’s pile, tried to read a little, lost interest and started another. It occurred to me that I was depressed and needed to speak to another human. I sat with my new pay-as-you-go phone in my hand, looking down at the short list of personal names and numbers I’d copied off the old work phone, summarily disconnected, and tried to imagine what form each interaction would take, if and how I could get through it, but every potential conversation felt like a scene from a stage play, in which I’d be playing that person I’d been for so long, who seems to be at lunch with you but is actually turned toward Aimee, working for Aimee, thinking of Aimee, day and night, night and day. I called Fern. The ring was a single long foreign tone and he answered with “Hola.” He was in Madrid.

“Working?”

“Traveling. It will be my year off. Didn’t you know I quit? But I’m so happy to be free!”

I asked him why, expecting a personal attack, directed at Aimee, but his answer had no personal aspect, he was concerned with the “distorting” effect of her money in the village, the collapse of government services in the area, and the foundation’s naïve, complicit dealings with the government. As he spoke I was reminded and ashamed of a profound difference between us. I had always been quick to interpret everything personally, where Fern had seen the larger, structural problems.

“Well, it’s good to hear from you, Fern.”

“No, you didn’t hear from me. I heard from you.”

He left the silence hanging. The longer it went on, the harder it was to think of what to say.

“Why are you calling me?”

I sat listening to him breathe for another few seconds until my phone ran out of credit.

About a week later he e-mailed to say he was in London for a short trip. I hadn’t spoken to anyone but my mother in several days. We met up on the South Bank, in the window of the Film Café, sitting side by side, facing the water, and reminisced a little, but it was awkward, I became bitter so easily, every thought pulled toward darkness, to something painful. All I did was complain, and though I could see I was irritating him I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble,” he said, interrupting me, “and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It’s possible that it’s like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the — what do you call this in English? — skin — film. The thin layer on a bubble.”

The waiter came, we paid avid attention to him. When he left we watched a tourist boat make its way down the Thames.

“Oh! I know what it is I want to tell you,” he said suddenly, slapping the bar and rattling a saucer. “I heard from Lamin! He is fine — he is in Birmingham. He wanted a letter of reference from me. He hopes to study. We e-mailed a little bit. I learn that Lamin is a fatalist. He wrote to me: ‘It was intended for me to come to Birmingham. So I was always coming here.’ Isn’t that funny? No? Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past. It is a theory from philosophy.”

“Sounds like a nightmare.”

Fern looked puzzled again: “Maybe I put it wrong, I’m not a philosopher. To me it means something simple, like to say the future is already there, waiting for you. Why not wait, see what it brings?”

His face was so hopeful it made me laugh. We got some of our old friendly rhythm back, and sat talking for a long time, and I thought it was not impossible that there might be a future in which I could care for him. I was settling into the idea that I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry any longer, I would not be on the next plane. Time was on my side, as much as it is on anyone’s. Everything that afternoon felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happening in the next few days or even the next few hours — a new feeling. I was surprised when I looked up from my second coffee and saw the day fading and the night almost upon us.

Afterward, he wanted to get on the tube, at Waterloo, it was the best stop for me, too, but instead I left him and chose the bridge. Ignoring both barriers, walking straight down the center, over the river, until I reached the other side.