Swing Time

PART ONE: Early Days

If all the Saturdays of 1982 can be thought of as one day, I met Tracey at ten a.m. on that Saturday, walking through the sandy gravel of a churchyard, each holding our mother’s hand. There were many other girls present but for obvious reasons we noticed each other, the similarities and the differences, as girls will. Our shade of brown was exactly the same — as if one piece of tan material had been cut to make us both — and our freckles gathered in the same areas, we were of the same height. But my face was ponderous and melancholy, with a long, serious nose, and my eyes turned down, as did my mouth. Tracey’s face was perky and round, she looked like a darker Shirley Temple, except her nose was as problematic as mine, I could see that much at once, a ridiculous nose — it went straight up in the air like a little piglet. Cute, but also obscene: her nostrils were on permanent display. On noses you could call it a draw. On hair she won comprehensively. She had spiral curls, they reached to her backside and were gathered into two long plaits, glossy with some kind of oil, tied at their ends with satin yellow bows. Satin yellow bows were a phenomenon unknown to my mother. She pulled my great frizz back in a single cloud, tied with a black band. My mother was a feminist. She wore her hair in a half-inch Afro, her skull was perfectly shaped, she never wore make-up and dressed us both as plainly as possible. Hair is not essential when you look like Nefertiti. She’d no need of make-up or products or jewelry or expensive clothes, and in this way her financial circumstances, her politics and her aesthetic were all perfectly — conveniently — matched. Accessories only cramped her style, including, or so I felt at the time, the horse-faced seven-year-old by her side. Looking across at Tracey I diagnosed the opposite problem: her mother was white, obese, afflicted with acne. She wore her thin blond hair pulled back very tightly in what I knew my mother would call a “Kilburn facelift.” But Tracey’s personal glamour was the solution: she was her own mother’s most striking accessory. The family look, though not to my mother’s taste, I found captivating: logos, tin bangles and hoops, diamanté everything, expensive trainers of the kind my mother refused to recognize as a reality in the world—“Those aren’t shoes.” Despite appearances, though, there was not much to choose between our two families. We were both from the estates, neither of us received benefits. (A matter of pride for my mother, an outrage to Tracey’s: she had tried many times — and failed — to “get on the disability.”) In my mother’s view it was exactly these superficial similarities that lent so much weight to questions of taste. She dressed for a future not yet with us but which she expected to arrive. That’s what her plain white linen trousers were for, her blue-and-white-striped “Breton” T-shirt, her frayed espadrilles, her severe and beautiful African head — everything so plain, so understated, completely out of step with the spirit of the time, and with the place. One day we would “get out of here,” she would complete her studies, become truly radical chic, perhaps even spoken of in the same breath as Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem… Straw-soled shoes were all a part of this bold vision, they pointed subtly at the higher concepts. I was an accessory only in the sense that in my very plainness I signified admirable maternal restraint, it being considered bad taste — in the circles to which my mother aspired — to dress your daughter like a little whore. But Tracey was unashamedly her mother’s aspiration and avatar, her only joy, in those thrilling yellow bows, a frou-frou skirt of many ruffles and a crop top revealing inches of childish nut-brown belly, and as we pressed up against the pair of them in this bottleneck of mothers and daughters entering the church I watched with interest as Tracey’s mother pushed the girl in front of herself — and in front of us — using her own body as a means of obstruction, the flesh on her arms swinging as she beat us back, until she arrived in Miss Isabel’s dance class, a look of great pride and anxiety on her face, ready to place her precious cargo into the temporary care of others. My mother’s attitude, by contrast, was one of weary, semi-ironic servitude, she thought the dance class ridiculous, she had better things to do, and after a few further Saturdays — in which she sat slumped in one of the plastic chairs that lined the left-hand wall, hardly able to contain her contempt for the whole exercise — a change was made and my father took over. I waited for Tracey’s father to take over, but he never did. It turned out — as my mother had guessed at once — that there was no “Tracey’s father,” at least not in the conventional, married sense. This, too, was an example of bad taste.

I want to describe the church now, and Miss Isabel. An unpretentious nineteenth-century building with large sandy stones on the façade, not unlike the cheap cladding you saw in the nastier houses — though it couldn’t have been that — and a satisfying, pointy steeple atop a plain, barn-like interior. It was called St. Christopher’s. It looked just like the church we made with our fingers when we sang:

The stained glass told the story of St. Christopher carrying the baby Jesus on his shoulders across a river. It was poorly done: the saint looked mutilated, one-armed. The original windows had blown out during the war. Opposite St. Christopher’s stood a high-rise estate of poor reputation, and this was where Tracey lived. (Mine was nicer, low-rise, in the next street.) Built in the sixties, it replaced a row of Victorian houses lost in the same bombing that had damaged the church, but here ended the relationship between the two buildings. The church, unable to tempt residents across the road for God, had made a pragmatic decision to diversify into other areas: a toddlers’ playgroup, ESL, driver training. These were popular, and well established, but Saturday-morning dance classes were a new addition and no one knew quite what to make of them. The class itself cost two pounds fifty, but a maternal rumor went round concerning the going rate for ballet shoes, one woman had heard three pounds, another seven, so-and-so swore the only place you could get them was Freed, in Covent Garden, where they’d take ten quid off you as soon as look at you — and then what about “tap” and what about “modern?” Could ballet shoes be worn for modern? What was modern? There was no one you could ask, no one who’d already done it, you were stuck. It was a rare mother whose curiosity extended to calling the number written on the homemade flyers stapled to the local trees. Many girls who might have made fine dancers never made it across that road, for fear of a homemade flyer.

My mother was rare: homemade flyers did not scare her. She had a terrific instinct for middle-class mores. She knew, for example, that a car-boot sale — despite its unpromising name — was where you could find a better quality of person, and also their old Penguin paperbacks, sometimes by Orwell, their old china pill-boxes, their cracked Cornish earthenware, their discarded potter’s wheels. Our flat was full of such things. No plastic flowers for us, sparkly with fake dew, and no crystal figurines. This was all part of the plan. Even things I hated — like my mother’s espadrilles — usually turned out to be attractive to the kind of people we were trying to attract, and I learned not to question her methods, even when they filled me with shame. A week before classes were due to begin I heard her doing her posh voice in the galley kitchen, but when she got off the phone she had all the answers: five pounds for ballet shoes — if you went to the shopping center instead of up into town — and the tap shoes could wait till later. Ballet shoes could be used for modern. What was modern? She hadn’t asked. The concerned parent she would play, but never, ever the ignorant one.

My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I’d hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat’s tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no, only a sad little elastic strap which my father had sewn on himself. I was extremely bitter about it. But perhaps they were, like the espadrilles, deliberately “simple,” in good taste? It was possible to hold on to this idea right up to the moment when, having entered the hall, we were told to change into our dance clothes by the plastic chairs and go over to the opposite wall, to the barre. Almost everybody had the pink satin shoes, not the pale pink, piggy leather I was stuck with, and some — girls whom I knew to be on benefits, or fatherless, or both — had the shoes with long satin ribbons, criss-crossing round their ankles. Tracey, who was standing next to me, with her left foot in her mother’s hand, had both — the deep pink satin and the criss-cross — and also a full tutu, which no one else had even considered as a possibility, no more than turning up to a first swimming lesson in a diving suit. Miss Isabel, meanwhile, was sweet-faced and friendly, but old, perhaps as old as forty-five. It was disappointing. Solidly constructed, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than a ballet dancer and was all over pink and yellow, pink and yellow. Her hair was yellow, not blond, yellow like a canary. Her skin was very pink, raw pink, now that I think of it she probably suffered from rosacea. Her leotard was pink, her tracksuit bottoms were pink, her cover-up ballet cardigan was mohair and pink — yet her shoes were silk and yellow, the same shade as her hair. I was bitter about this, too. Yellow had never been mentioned! Next to her, in the corner, a very old white man in a trilby sat playing an upright piano, “Night and Day,” a song I loved and was proud to recognize. I got the old songs from my father, whose own father had been a keen pub singer, the kind of man — or so my father believed — whose petty criminality represents, at least in part, some thwarted creative instinct. The piano player was called Mr. Booth. I hummed loudly along with him as he played, hoping to be heard, putting a lot of vibrato into my humming. I was a better singer than dancer — I was not a dancer at all — although I took too much pride in my singing, in a manner I knew my mother found obnoxious. Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth.

Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests. We placed one hand on their shoulders, we placed one foot on their bended knees. My body was presently in the hands of my mother — being hoiked up and tied down, fastened and straightened, brushed off — but my mind was on Tracey, and on the soles of her ballet shoes, upon which I now read “Freed” clearly stamped in the leather. Her natural arches were two hummingbirds in flight, curved in on themselves. My own feet were square and flat, they seemed to grind through the positions. I felt like a toddler placing wooden blocks at a series of right angles to each other. Flutter, flutter, flutter said Isabel, yes that’s lovely Tracey. Compliments made Tracey throw her head back and flare her little pig nose awfully. Aside from that, she was perfection, I was besotted. Her mother seemed equally infatuated, her commitment to those classes the only consistent feature of what we would now call “her parenting.” She came to class more than any other mother, and while there her attention rarely wavered from her daughter’s feet. My own mother’s focus was always elsewhere. She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. She might arrive at the beginning of class with, say, The Black Jacobins in hand, and by the time I came over to ask her to swap my ballet shoes for tap she would already be a hundred pages through. Later, when my father took over, he either slept or “went for a walk,” the parental euphemism for smoking in the churchyard.

At this early stage Tracey and I were not friends or enemies or even acquaintances: we barely spoke. Yet there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others. Technically, I spoke more to Lily Bingham — who went to my school — and Tracey’s own standby was sad old Danika Babić, with her ripped tights and thick accent, she lived on Tracey’s corridor. But though we giggled and joked with these white girls during class, and although they had every right to assume that they were our focus, our central concern — that we were, to them, the good friends we appeared to be — as soon as it came to break-time and squash and biscuits Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.

It turned out Tracey was as curious about my family as I was about hers, arguing, with a certain authority, that we had things “the wrong way round.” I listened to her theory one day during break, dipping a biscuit anxiously into my orange squash. “With everyone else it’s the dad,” she said, and because I knew this to be more or less accurate I could think of nothing more to say. “When your dad’s white it means—” she continued, but at that moment Lily Bingham came and stood next to us and I never did learn what it meant when your dad was white. Lily was gangly, a foot taller than everyone else. She had long, perfectly straight blond hair, pink cheeks and a happy, open nature that seemed, both to Tracey and me, the direct consequence of 29 Exeter Road, a whole house, to which I had been recently invited, eagerly reporting back to Tracey — who had never been — a private garden, a giant jam-jar full of “spare change” and a Swatch watch as big as a human man hanging on a bedroom wall. There were, consequently, things you couldn’t discuss in front of Lily Bingham, and now Tracey shut her mouth, stuck her nose in the air and crossed the room to ask her mother for her ballet shoes.

What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.

Oh, it’s very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on — it’s what I’ve always demanded myself — but as a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn’t do it, then it’s really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her — especially in the last, painful years of her life — for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself. When I was young her refusal to submit to me confused and wounded me, especially as I felt none of the usual reasons for refusal applied. I was her only child and she had no job — not back then — and she hardly spoke to the rest of her family. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing but time. Yet still I couldn’t get her complete submission! My earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood. I felt sorry for my father. He was still a fairly young man, he loved her, he wanted more children — it was their daily argument — but on this issue, as on all things, my mother refused to budge. Her mother had birthed seven children, her grandmother, eleven. She was not going back to all that. She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love. How he loved her! More than she knew or cared to know, she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was. And so when she began, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, to outgrow my father, both intellectually and personally, she naturally expected that he was undergoing the same process at the same time. But he carried on as before. Looking after me, loving her, trying to keep up, reading The Communist Manifesto in his slow and diligent way. “Some people carry the bible,” he told me proudly. “This is my bible.” It sounded impressive — it was meant to impress my mother — but I had already noticed that he seemed to always be reading this book and not much else, he took it to every dance class, and yet never got any further than the first twenty pages. Within the context of the marriage it was a romantic gesture: they’d first encountered each other at a meeting of the SWP, in Dollis Hill. But even this was a form of misunderstanding for my father had gone to meet nice leftist girls in short skirts with no religion while my mother really was there for Karl Marx. My childhood took place in the widening gap. I watched my autodidact mother swiftly, easily, outstrip my father. The shelves in our lounge — which he built — filled up with second-hand books, Open University textbooks, political books, history books, books on race, books on gender, “All the ‘isms,’” as my father liked to call them, whenever a neighbor happened to come by and spot the queer accumulation.

Saturday was her “day off.” Day off from what? From us. She needed to read up on her isms. After my father took me to dance class we had to keep going somehow, find something to do, stay out of the flat until dinner time. It became our ritual to travel on a series of buses heading south, far south of the river, to my Uncle Lambert’s, my mother’s brother and a confidant of my father’s. He was my mother’s eldest sibling, the only person I ever saw from her side of the family. He had raised my mother and the rest of her brothers and sisters, back on the island, when their mother left for England to work as a cleaner in a retirement home. He knew what my father was dealing with.

“I take a step toward her,” I heard my father complain, one day, in high summer, “and she takes a step back!”

“Cyan do nuttin wid er. Always been like dat.”

I was in the garden, among the tomato plants. It was an allotment, really, nothing was decorative or meant simply to be admired, everything was to be eaten and grew in long, straight lines, tied to sticks of bamboo. At the end of it all was an outhouse, the last I ever saw in England. Uncle Lambert and my father sat on deckchairs by the back door, smoking marijuana. They were old friends — Lambert was the only other person in my parents’ wedding photo — and they had work in common: Lambert was a postman and my father a Delivery Office Manager for Royal Mail. They shared a dry sense of humor and a mutual lack of ambition, of which my mother took a dim view, in both cases. As they smoked and lamented the things you couldn’t do with my mother, I passed my arms through the tomato vines, allowing them to twist around my wrists. Most of Lambert’s plants seemed menacing to me, they were twice my height and everything he planted grew wildly: a thicket of vines and high grass and obscenely swollen, calabash-type gourds. The soil is of a better quality in South London — in North London we have too much clay — but at the time I didn’t know about that and my ideas were confused: I thought that when I visited Lambert I was visiting Jamaica, Lambert’s garden was Jamaica to me, it smelled like Jamaica, and you ate coconut ice there, and even now, in my memory, it is always hot in Lambert’s garden, and I am thirsty and fearful of insects. The garden was long and thin and it faced south, the outhouse abutted the right-hand fence, so you could watch the sun fall behind it, rippling the air as it went. I wanted badly to go to the toilet but had decided to hold on to the urge until we saw North London again — I was scared of that outhouse. The floor was wood and things grew up between the boards, grass blades, and thistles and dandelion clocks that dusted your knee as you hitched yourself up on to the seat. Spiders’ webs connected the corners. It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything. Lambert lived all alone there, and it felt to me like a dying place. Even at that age I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert’s for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly.

Tiring of walking through the lines of vegetables, I wandered back down the garden, and watched as the two men concealed their joints, poorly, in their fists.

“You bored?” asked Lambert. I confessed I was.

“Once dis house full of pick’ney,” said Lambert, “but dem children got children now.”

The image I had was of children my own age with babies in their arms: it was a fate I connected with South London. I knew my mother left home to escape all that, so that no daughter of hers would ever become a child with a child, for any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive — as my mother had — she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing. My father reached out for me and I crawled on to his lap, covering his growing bald spot with my hand and feeling the thin strands of wet hair he wore combed across it.

“She shy, eh? You not shy of your Uncle Lambert?”

Lambert’s eyes were bloodshot, and his freckles were like mine but raised; his face was round and sweet, with light brown eyes that confirmed, supposedly, Chinese blood in the family tree. But I was shy of him. My mother — who never visited Lambert, except at Christmas — was strangely insistent that my father and I do so, though always with the proviso that we remain alert, never allowing ourselves to be “dragged back.” Into what? I wound myself around my father’s body until I was at the back of him and could see the little patch of hair he kept long at the nape of his neck, which he was so determined to maintain. Though he was only in his thirties, I’d never seen my father with a full head of hair, never known him blond, and would never know him gray. It was this fake nut-brown I knew, which came off on your fingers if you touched it, and which I had seen at its true source, a round, shallow tin that sat open on the edge of the bath, with an oily wheel of brown running round the rim, worn down to a bare patch in the middle, just like my father.

“She needs company,” he fretted. “A book’s no good, is it? A film’s no good. You need the real thing.”

“Cyan do nuttin wid dat woman. I knew it from time she was small. Her will is a will of iron.”

It was true. Nothing could be done with her. When we got home she was watching a lecture from the Open University, pad and pencil in her hand, looking beautiful, serene, curled up on the couch with her bare feet under her bottom, but when she turned round I could see she was annoyed, we’d come back too early, she wanted more time, more peace, more quiet, so she could study. We were the vandals in the temple. She was studying Sociology & Politics. We didn’t know why.

If Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat, said Gene Kelly, and by this logic Bill “Bojangles” Robinson should really have been my dancer, because Bojangles danced for the Harlem dandy, for the ghetto kid, for the sharecropper — for all the descendants of slaves. But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved. The rest of it, all the detail, fell away. I ignored the ridiculous plots of those movies: the opera-like comings and goings, the reversals of fortune, the outrageous meet cutes and coincidences, the minstrels, maids and butlers. To me they were only roads leading to the dance. The story was the price you paid for the rhythm. “Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?” Each syllable found its corresponding movement in the legs, the stomach, the backside, the feet. In ballet hour, by contrast, we danced to classical recordings—”white music” as Tracey bluntly called it — which Miss Isabel recorded from the radio on to a series of cassettes. But I could barely recognize it as music, it had no time signature that I could hear, and although Miss Isabel tried to help us, shouting out the beats of each bar, I could never relate these numbers in any way to the sea of melody that came over me from the violins or the crashing thump of a brass section. I still knew more than Tracey: I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions — black music, white music — that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined. In films and photographs I had seen white men sitting at their pianos as black girls stood by them, singing. Oh, I wanted to be like those girls!

At quarter past eleven, just after ballet, in the middle of our first break, Mr. Booth entered the hall carrying a big black bag, the kind country doctors once carried, and in this bag he kept the sheet music for class. If I was free — which meant, if I could get away from Tracey — I hurried over to him, following him as he slowly approached the piano, and then positioning myself like the girls I’d seen onscreen, I asked him to play “All of Me” or “Autumn in New York” or “42nd Street.” In the tap class he had to play the same half a dozen songs over and over and I had to dance to them, but before class — while the rest of the people in the hall were busy talking, eating, drinking — we had this time to ourselves, and I’d get him to work through a tune with me, singing below the volume of the piano if I was feeling shy, a little louder if not. Sometimes when I sang the parents smoking outside the hall under the cherry trees would come in to listen, and girls who were busy preparing for their own dances — pulling on tights, tying laces — paused in these actions and turned to watch me. I became aware that my voice — as long as I did not deliberately sing underneath the volume of the piano — had something charismatic in it, drawing people in. This was not a technical gift: my range was tiny. It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could “put it over.” I made sad songs very sad, and happy songs joyful. When the time came for our “performance exams” I learned to use my voice as a form of misdirection, the same way some magicians make you look at their mouths when you should be watching their hands. But I couldn’t fool Tracey. I saw her as I walked off the stage, standing in the wings with her arms crossed over her chest and her nose in the air. Even though she always trumped everybody and her mother’s kitchen corkboard heaved with gold medals, she was never satisfied, she wanted gold in “my” category, too — song and dance — though she could hardly sing a note. It was difficult to understand. I really felt that if I could dance like Tracey I would never want for anything else in this world. Other girls had rhythm in their limbs, some had it in their hips or their little backsides but she had rhythm in individual ligaments, probably in individual cells. Every movement was as sharp and precise as any child could hope to make it, her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intricate. Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her technique. I was — I am — in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything.

A Sunday in late summer. I was on the balcony, watching a few girls from our floor skipping Double Dutch down by the bins. I heard my mother calling me. I looked over and saw her entering the estate, hand in hand with Miss Isabel. I waved, and she looked up, smiled and shouted, “Stay there!” I had never seen my mother and Miss Isabel together outside of class, and could tell even from this vantage point that Miss Isabel was being hustled into something. I wanted to go and confer with my father, who was painting a wall in the living room, but I knew my mother, so charming with strangers, had a short temper with her kin, and that “Stay there!” meant exactly that. I watched this odd pair move through the estate and into the stairwell, refracted in the glass blocks as a scatter of yellow and pink and mahogany brown. Meanwhile the girls by the bins switched the direction of their skipping ropes, a new jumper ran bravely into the vicious swinging loop and began a new chant, the one about the monkey who got choked.

Finally my mother came upon me, examined me — she had a coy look on her face — and the first thing she said was: “Take your shoes off.”

“Oh, we needn’t do it right now,” murmured Miss Isabel, but my mother said, “Better to know now than later,” and disappeared into the flat, reappearing a minute later with a large bag of self-raising flour, which she began sprinkling all over the balcony until there was a thin white carpet like first snowfall. I was to walk through this barefoot. I thought of Tracey. I wondered if Miss Isabel visited each girl’s house in turn. What a terrible waste of flour! Miss Isabel crouched down to watch. My mother leaned back against the balcony with her elbows resting upon it, smoking a cigarette. She was at an angle to the balcony, and the cigarette was at an angle to her mouth, and she was wearing a beret, as if wearing a beret were the most natural thing in the world. She was positioned at an angle to me, an ironic angle. I reached the other end of the balcony and looked back at my footprints.

“Ah, well there you are,” said Miss Isabel, but where were we? In the land of flat feet. My teacher slipped off a shoe and pressed her foot down for comparison: in her print you saw only the toes, the ball of the foot and the heel, in mine, the full, flat outline of a human tread. My mother was very interested in this result, but Miss Isabel, seeing my face, said something kind: “A ballet dancer needs an arch, yes, but you can tap with flat feet, you know, of course you can.” I didn’t think it was true, but it was kind and I clung to it and kept taking the class, and so continued to spend time with Tracey, which was, it dawned on me later, exactly the thing my mother had been trying to stop. She’d worked out that because Tracey and I went to different schools, in different neighborhoods, it was only dance class that brought us together, but when the summer came and dance class stopped, it made no difference anyway, we grew closer until, by August, we found ourselves together almost every day. From my balcony I could see into her estate and vice versa, no phone calls had to be made, and no formal arrangements, and although our mothers barely nodded at each other in the street it became a natural thing for us to pass in and out of each other’s building.

We had a different mode of being in each flat. In Tracey’s we played and tested new toys, of which there appeared to be an unending supply. The Argos catalog, from whose pages I was allowed to choose three inexpensive items at Christmas, and one item for my birthday, was, to Tracey, an everyday bible, she read it religiously, circling her choices, often while in my company, with a little red pen she kept for this purpose. Her bedroom was a revelation. It overturned everything I thought I had understood about our shared situation. Her bed was in the shape of a pink Barbie sports car, her curtains were frilled, all her cabinets were white and shiny, and in the middle of the room it looked like someone had simply emptied Santa’s sleigh on to the carpet. You had to wade through toys. Broken toys formed a kind of bedrock, on top of which each new wave of purchases was placed, in archeological layers, corresponding, more or less, to whatever toy adverts were playing on the television at the time. That summer was the summer of the pissing doll. You fed her water and she pissed everywhere. Tracey had several versions of this stunning technology, and was able to draw all kinds of drama from it. Sometimes she would beat the doll for pissing. Sometimes she would sit her, ashamed and naked, in the corner, her plastic legs twisted at right angles to her little, dimpled bum. We two played the poor, incontinent child’s parents, and in the dialog Tracey gave me to say I sometimes heard odd, discomfiting echoes of her own home life, or else of the many soaps she watched, I couldn’t be sure.

“Your turn. Say: ‘You slag — she ain’t even my kid! Is it my fault she pisses ’erself?’ Go on, your turn!”

“You slag — she’s not even my daughter! Is it my fault if she pisses herself?”

“‘Listen, mate, you take her! You take her and see how you do!’ Now say: ‘Fat chance, sunshine!’”

One Saturday, with great trepidation, I mentioned the existence of pissing dolls to my mother, being careful to say “wee” instead of “piss.” She was studying. She looked up from her books with a mixture of incredulity and disgust.

“Tracey has one?”

“Tracey has four.”

“Come here a minute.”

She opened her arms, and I felt my face against the skin of her chest, taut and warm, utterly vital, as if there were a second, graceful young woman inside my mother bursting to get out. She had been growing her hair, it had been recently “done,” plaited into a dramatic conch-shell shape at the back of her head, like a piece of sculpture.

“You know what I’m reading about right now?”

“No.”

“I’m reading about the sankofa. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s a bird, it looks back over itself, like this.” She bent her beautiful head round as far as it could go. “From Africa. It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what’s gone before. Some people never learn.”

My father was in the tiny galley kitchen, silently cooking — he was the chef in our home — and this conversation was really addressed to him, it was he who was meant to hear it. The two of them had begun arguing so much that I was often the only conduit through which information could pass, sometimes abusively—“You explain to your mother” or “You can tell your father from me”—and sometimes like this, with a delicate, an almost beautiful irony.

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t see the connection with pissing dolls. I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, “an intellectual,” because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments. But I did not really understand what this meant, other than that an intellectual was someone who studied with the Open University, liked to wear a beret, frequently used the phrase “the Angel of History,” sighed when the rest of their family wanted to watch Saturday-night telly and stopped to argue with the Trotskyites on the Kilburn High Road when everybody else crossed the road to avoid them. But the main consequence of her transformation, for me, was this new and puzzling indirection in her conversation. She always seemed to be making adult jokes just over my head, to amuse herself, or to annoy my father.

“When you’re with that girl,” explained my mother, “it’s a kind thing to play with her, but she’s been raised in a certain way, and the present is all she has. You’ve been raised in another way — don’t forget that. That silly dance class is her whole world. It’s not her fault — that’s how she’s been raised. But you’re clever. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got flat feet, doesn’t matter because you’re clever and you know where you came from and where you’re going.”

I nodded. I could hear my father banging saucepans expressively.

“You won’t forget what I just said?”

I promised I wouldn’t.

In our flat there were no dolls at all and so Tracey when she came was forced into different habits. Here we wrote, a little frantically, into a series of yellow, lined, A4 pads that my father brought home from work. It was a collaborative project. Tracey, because of her dyslexia — though we didn’t know to call it that at the time — preferred to dictate, while I struggled to keep up with the naturally melodramatic twist and turn of her mind. Almost all our stories concerned a cruel, posh prima ballerina from “Oxford Street” breaking her leg at the last minute, which allowed our plucky heroine — often a lowly costume fitter, or a humble theater-toilet cleaner — to step in and save the day. I noticed that they were always blond, these plucky girls, with hair “like silk” and big blue eyes. Once I tried to write “brown eyes” and Tracey took the pen out of my hand and scratched it out. We wrote on our bellies, flat on the floor of my room, and if my mother happened to come by and see us like this it was the only moment she ever looked at Tracey with anything like fondness. I took advantage of these moments to win further concessions for my friend — Can Tracey stay for tea? Can Tracey stay the night? — though I knew if my mother actually paused to read what we wrote in those yellow pads Tracey would never be allowed into the flat again. In several stories African men “lurked in the shadows” with iron bars to break the knees of lily-white dancers; in one, the prima had a terrible secret: she was “half-caste,” a word I trembled to write down, as I knew from experience how completely it enraged my mother. But if I felt unease about these details it was a small sensation when compared to the pleasure of our collaboration. I was so completely taken with Tracey’s stories, besotted with their endless delay of narrative gratification, which was again perhaps something she had got from the soaps or else extracted from the hard lessons her own life was teaching her. For just as you thought the happy ending had arrived, Tracey found some wonderful new way to destroy or divert it, so that the moment of consummation — which for both of us, I think, meant simply an audience, on their feet, cheering — never seemed to arrive. I wish I had those notepads still. Of all the thousands of words we wrote about ballerinas in various forms of physical danger only one sentence has stayed with me: Tiffany jumped up high to kiss her prince and pointed her toes oh she looked so sexy but that’s when the bullet went right up her thigh.

In the autumn Tracey went off to her single-sex school, in Neasden, where almost all the girls were Indian or Pakistani and wild: I used to see the older ones at the bus stop, uniforms adapted — shirt unbuttoned, skirt hitched up — screaming obscenities at white boys as they passed. A rough school with a lot of fighting. Mine, in Willesden, was milder, more mixed: half black, a quarter white, a quarter South Asian. Of the black half at least a third were “half-caste,” a minority nation within a nation, though the truth is it annoyed me to notice them. I wanted to believe that Tracey and I were sisters and kindred spirits, alone in the world and in special need of each other, but now I could not avoid seeing in front of me all the many kinds of children my mother had spent the summer trying to encourage me toward, girls with similar backgrounds but what my mother called “broader horizons.” There was a girl called Tasha, half Guyanese, half Tamil, whose father was a real Tamil Tiger, which impressed my mother mightily and thus cemented in me the desire never to have anything whatsoever to do with the girl. There was a buck-toothed girl called Irie, always top of the class, whose parents were the same way round as us, but she’d moved out of the estate and now lived up in Willesden Green in a fancy maisonette. There was a girl called Anoushka with a father from St. Lucia and a Russian mother whose uncle was, according to my mother, “the most important revolutionary poet in the Caribbean,” but almost every word of that recommendation was incomprehensible to me. My mind was not on school, or any of the people there. In the playground I pushed drawing pins into the soles of my shoes and sometimes spent the whole half-hour of playtime dancing alone, contentedly friendless. And when we got home — before my mother, and therefore outside of her jurisdiction — I dropped my satchel, left my father cooking dinner and headed straight to Tracey’s, to do our time-steps together on her balcony, followed by a bowl each of Angel Delight, which was “not food” to my mother but in my opinion still delicious. By the time I came home an argument, the two sides of which no longer met, would be in full flow. My father’s concern would be some tiny domestic issue: who’d vacuumed what when, who’d gone, or should have gone, to the launderette. Whereas my mother, in answering him, would stray into quite other topics: the importance of having a revolutionary consciousness, or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people, or the legacy of slavery in the hearts and minds of the young, and so on. She had by now finished her A levels, was enrolled at Middlesex Poly, up in Hendon, and more than ever we could not keep up, we were a disappointment, she had to keep explaining her terms.

At Tracey’s, the only raised voices came from the television. I knew I was meant to pity Tracey for her fatherlessness — the blight marking every other door on our corridor — and to be thankful for my two married parents, but whenever I sat on her huge white leather settee eating her Angel Delight and peacefully watching Easter Parade or The Red Shoes—Tracey’s mother would tolerate only Technicolor musicals — I couldn’t help but notice the placidity of a small, all-female household. In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they had never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home. No one was surprised by Tracey’s father’s failure to foment revolution or do anything else. Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. Whenever her mother bad-mouthed him, Tracey would make sure to take me into her room, or some other private spot, and quickly integrate whatever her mother had just said into her own official story, which was that her father had not abandoned her, no, not at all, he was only very busy because he was one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. Few people could keep up with Michael Jackson as he danced — in fact, almost nobody could, maybe there were only twenty dancers in the whole world who were up to it. Tracey’s father was one such. He hadn’t even had to finish his audition — he was that good they knew right away. This was why he was hardly ever home: he was on an eternal world tour. The next time he would be in town was probably next Christmas, when Michael played Wembley. On a clear day we could see this stadium from Tracey’s balcony. It’s hard for me to say now how much credence I gave this tale — certainly some part of me knew that Michael Jackson, at last free of his family, now danced alone — but just like Tracey I never brought up the subject in her mother’s presence. As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.

I was at Tracey’s, watching Top of the Pops, when the Thriller video came on, it was the first time any of us had seen it. Tracey’s mother got very excited: without actually standing, she danced madly, bopping up and down in the creases of her recliner. “Go on, girls! Let’s be having you! Get moving — come on!” We unstuck ourselves from the sofa and began sliding back and forth across the rug, me poorly, Tracey with a good deal of skill. We spun round, we lifted our right legs, leaving the foot dangling like the foot of a puppet, we jerked our zombie bodies. There was so much new information: the red leather trousers, the red leather jacket, what had once been an Afro now transformed into something greater even than Tracey’s own ringlets! And of course that pretty brown girl in blue, the potential victim. Was she “half-caste” too?

Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.

So read the credits, at the beginning, these were Michael’s own words, but what did they mean? We understood only the seriousness of this word “film.” What we were watching was not a music video at all, it was a work of art that should properly be seen in a cinema, it was really a world event, a clarion call. We were modern! This was modern life! Generally I felt distant from modern life and the music that came with it — my mother had made a sankofa bird of me — but it happened that my father had told me a story about Fred Astaire himself once coming to Michael’s house, coming as a kind of disciple, and he had begged Michael to teach him the moonwalk, and this makes sense to me, even now, for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson. “Don’t stop now, girls — get up!” cried Tracey’s mother, when for a moment we paused to rest against her sofa. “Don’t stop till you get enough! Get moving!” How long that song seemed — longer than life. I felt it would never end, that we were caught in a time loop, and would have to dance in this demonic way for ever, like poor Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes: “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on…” But then it was over. “That was fucking priceless,” sighed Tracey’s mother, forgetting herself, and we bowed and curtsied and ran to Tracey’s room.

“She loves it when she sees him on TV,” confided Tracey, once we were alone. “It makes their love stronger. She sees him and she knows he still loves her.”

“Which one was he?” I asked.

“Second row, at the end, on the right,” replied Tracey, without missing a beat.

I did not try — it wasn’t possible — to integrate these “facts” about Tracey’s father with the very few occasions I actually saw him, the first of which was the most terrible, it was in early November, not long after we had watched Thriller. We were all three in the kitchen, trying to make jacket potatoes stuffed with cheese and bacon, we were going to wrap them in foil and take them with us to Roundwood Park, where we’d watch the fireworks. The kitchens in the flats on Tracey’s estate were even smaller than the kitchens in ours: when you opened the oven door it almost scraped the wall opposite. To have three people in there at the same time, one person — in this case, Tracey — had to sit on the counter. It was her job to scrape the potato out of its jacket, and then my job, standing next to her, to mix the potato with grated cheese and bacon bits snipped with a pair of scissors, and then her mother put it all back in the jacket and returned it to the oven for browning. Despite my mother’s constant implication that Tracey’s mother was slovenly, a magnet for chaos, I found her kitchen both cleaner and more orderly than ours. The food was never healthy and yet it was prepared with seriousness and care, whereas my mother, who aspired to healthy eating, could not spend fifteen minutes in a kitchen without being reduced to a sort of self-pitying mania, and quite often the whole, misguided experiment (to make vegetarian lasagne, to do “something” with okra) became so torturous for everybody that she would manufacture a row and storm off, shouting. We would end up eating Findus Crispy Pancakes again. Round Tracey’s, things were simpler: you began with the clear intention of making Findus Crispy Pancakes or pizza (from frozen) or sausages and chips and it was all delicious and no one shouted about it. These potatoes were a special treat, a Fireworks Night tradition. Outside it was dark, though only five in the afternoon, and all over the estate you could smell gunpowder. Each flat had its private arsenal, and the random bangs and small, localized conflagrations had begun two weeks before, as soon as the sweetshops started selling fireworks. No one waited for official events. Cats were the most frequent victims of this general pyromania, but every now and then some kid went off to Casualty. Because of all the banging — and how used we were to bangs — at first the sound of someone beating on Tracey’s front door didn’t register, but then we heard somebody half yelling and half whispering, and we recognized panic and caution fighting each other. It was a man’s voice, he was saying: “Let me in. Let me in! You there? Open up, woman!”

Tracey and I stared at her mother, who stood staring back at us, holding a tray of perfectly stuffed cheesy potatoes in her hand. Without looking at what she was doing, she tried to lower the tray on to the counter, misjudged, dropped it.

“Louie?” she said.

She grabbed us both, pulled Tracey off the counter, we stepped in potato. She dragged us down the hall and pushed us into Tracey’s room. We were not to move a muscle. She closed the door and left us alone. Tracey went straight to her bed, got in it and began playing Pac-Man. She wouldn’t look at me. It was clear I couldn’t ask her anything, not even if Louie was the name of her father. I stood where her mother had left me and waited. I had never heard such a commotion in Tracey’s house. Whoever Louie was, he had now been let in — or forced his way in — and fuck was every other word, and there were great, crashing thuds as he turned the furniture over, and a terrible feminine wailing, it sounded like a screaming fox. I stood by the door looking at Tracey, who was still tucked up in her Barbie bed, but she did not seem to hear what I heard or even to remember that I was there: she never looked up from her Pac-Man. Ten minutes later, it was over: we heard the front door slam shut. Tracey stayed in her bed and I stood where I had been planted, unable to make any move. After a while there was a light knock on the door, and Tracey’s mother came in, pink with crying, holding a tray of Angel Delight, the same pink as her face. We sat and ate in silence and, later, went to the fireworks.

There was a kind of carelessness among the mothers we knew, or it looked like carelessness to outsiders but we knew it by another name. To the teachers at the school it probably looked as if they didn’t care enough even to turn up for Parents’ Evening, where, at desk after desk, the teachers sat, staring into space, waiting patiently for these mothers who never came. And I can see that our mothers must have seemed a little careless when, informed by a teacher of some misbehavior in the playground, they would — instead of reprimanding the child — begin shouting at the teacher. But we understood our mothers a little better. We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A deep anxiety about “being told off”—for who they were, for what they had or hadn’t done, and now for the deeds of their children — this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves. And so “Parents’ Evening” was, in their minds, not so distant from “detention.” It remained a place where they might be shamed. The difference was now they were grown and could not be forced to attend.

I say “our mothers,” but of course mine was different: she had the anger but not the shame. She went to Parents’ Evening, always. That year it was for some reason held on Valentine’s Day: the hall was limply decorated with pink paper hearts stapled to the walls, and each desk sported a wilting rose of crinkled tissue paper atop a green pipe-cleaner. I trailed behind her as she made her way round the room, hectoring teachers, ignoring all attempts on their part to discuss my progress, instead giving a series of impromptu lectures about the incompetence of the school administration, the blindness and the stupidity of the local council, the desperate need for “teachers of color”—which I think was the first time I heard the new euphemism “of color.” Those poor teachers clutched the sides of their desks for dear life. At one point, to emphasize a statement, she thumped a fist on a desk, sending the tissue rose and many pencils scattering to the floor: “These children deserve more!” Not me in particular—“these children.” How I remember her doing that, and how wonderful she looked, like a queen! I was proud to be her child, the daughter of the only mother in the neighborhood free of shame. We swept out of the hall together, my mother triumphant, me in a state of awe, neither of us any the wiser as to how I was doing at school.

I do remember one occasion of shame, a few days before Christmas, a late afternoon on a Saturday, after dance class, after Lambert’s, and I was watching a Fred and Ginger routine, “Pick Yourself Up,” at my flat, with Tracey, over and over. Tracey had an ambition to one day re-create that whole routine herself — this seems to me now like looking at the Sistine Chapel and hoping to re-create it on your bedroom ceiling — though she only ever practiced the male part, it never occurred to either of us to learn Ginger’s part in anything. Tracey was standing in the doorway to the living room, tap dancing — there was no carpet over there — and I was kneeling by the VHS, rewinding and pausing as necessary. My mother was in the kitchen on a high stool, studying. My father — and this was unusual — had gone “out,” with no explanation, just “out,” at about four o’clock, with no stated purpose and no errand to run that I knew of. At a certain point I ventured into the kitchen to get two beakers of Ribena. Instead of seeing my mother bent over her books, earplugs in, oblivious to me, I found her gazing out of the window, her face wet with tears. When she saw me she jumped a little in her skin, as if I were a ghost.

“They’re here,” she said, almost to herself. I looked over to where she was looking and saw my father crossing the estate with two young white people trailing behind him, a boy of about twenty and a girl who looked to be fifteen or sixteen.

“Who’s here?”

“Some people your father wants you to meet.”

And the shame that she felt, I think, was the shame of no control: she could not dominate this situation nor protect me from it as, for once, it had nothing much to do with her. She hurried instead to the living room and told Tracey to leave, but Tracey was deliberately slow collecting up her things: she wanted to get a good look at them. They were a sight. Seen up close the boy had shaggy blond hair and a beard, he wore dirty, ugly, old-looking clothes, his jeans were patched and he had lots of rock-band badges pinned to his frayed canvas rucksack: he seemed to be shamelessly advertising his poverty. The girl was equally peculiar but neater, truly “white as snow,” as in a fairy tale, with a severe black bob cut straight across her forehead and diagonally high at her ears. She was dressed all in black, with a big black pair of Dr. Martens on her feet, and she was petite, with delicate features — excepting a large, indecent bosom which she seemed to be trying to obscure with all this black. Tracey and I stood staring at them. “Time you went home,” said my father, to Tracey, and watching her go I realized how much my ally she was, despite everything, for without her, at that moment, I felt totally undefended. The white teenagers sloped into our small living room. My father asked them to sit, but only the girl did. I was alarmed to see my mother, whom ordinarily I knew to be a completely non-neurotic person, dithering anxiously, stumbling over her words. The boy — his name was John — would not sit down. When my mother tried to encourage him to sit down he wouldn’t look at or reply to her, and then my father said something uncharacteristically sharp, and we all watched as John marched back out of the flat. I ran to the balcony, and saw him down there on the communal grass, not going anywhere — he had to wait for the girl — stamping around in a small circle, crunching the hoar frost underfoot. This left the girl. Her name was Emma. When I came back in my mother told me to sit next to her. “This is your sister,” said my father and went to make a cup of tea. My mother stood by the Christmas tree, pretending to do something useful with the lights. The girl turned to me, and we stared frankly at each other. As far as I could see we had no features in common at all, the whole thing was ridiculous, and I could see that this Emma person thought exactly the same of me. Apart from the comically obvious fact that I was black and she was white, I was big-boned and she was narrow, I was tall for my age and she was short for hers, my eyes were big and brown and hers were narrow and green. But then, at the same moment, I felt we both saw it; the downturned mouth, the sad eyes. I don’t remember thinking logically, I didn’t ask myself, for example, who the mother of this Emma was or how and when she could possibly have known my father. My head wouldn’t go that far round. I only thought: he made one like me and one like her. How can two such different creatures emerge from the same source? My father came back into the room with a tray of tea.

“Well, this is all a bit of a surprise, isn’t it?” he said, handing Emma a mug. “For all of us. It’s a long time since I’ve seen… But you see your mum suddenly decided… Well, she’s a woman of sudden whims, isn’t she?” My sister looked blankly at my father, and he at once gave up whatever he was trying to say and downgraded to small talk. “Now, I’m told Emma does a bit of ballet. That’s something you two have in common. At the Royal Ballet for a little while — full scholarship — but she had to stop.”

Dancing on stage, did he mean? In Covent Garden? As a principal? Or in the “corpse,” as Tracey called it? But no—“scholarship” sounded like a school matter. Was there, then, a “Royal Ballet School”? But if such a place existed why hadn’t I been sent to it? And if this Emma had been sent there, who paid for it? Why did she have to stop? Because her chest was so large? Or did a bullet go right up her thigh?

“Maybe you’ll dance together one day!” said my mother into the silence, which was the kind of maternal inanity in which she very rarely indulged. Emma looked up at my mother fearfully — it was the first time she had dared look at her directly — and whatever she saw there had the power to freshly horrify: she burst into tears. My mother left the room. My father said to me: “Go out for a bit. Go on. Put your coat on.”

I slipped off the sofa, grabbed my duffel coat off the hook and let myself out. I went down the walkway, trying to put what little I knew of my father’s past together with this new reality. He was from Whitechapel, a large East End family, not as big as my mother’s but not far off, and his father had been a minor criminal of some kind, in and out of jail, and this, my mother once explained to me, was why my father put so much effort into my childhood: cooking, taking me to school and to dance class, packing my lunches and so on, all unusual activities for a father, at the time. I was compensation — retribution — for his own childhood. I knew too that he had himself been, at one point, “no good.” Once we were watching TV and something about the Kray twins came on and my father said casually, “Oh, well, everybody knew them, you couldn’t help knowing them, at that time.” His many siblings were “no good,” the East End in general was “no good,” and this all helped consolidate my idea of our own corner of London as a little, clear-aired peak above a general quagmire, into which you might be dragged back into real poverty and crime from several directions. But no one had ever mentioned a son or a daughter.

I took the stairs down to the communal area and stood resting against a concrete pillar, watching my “brother” kick up little scraps of half-frozen turf. With his long hair and beard and that long face he looked like adult Jesus to me, whom I knew solely from a cross on the wall at Miss Isabel’s dance class. Unlike my reaction to the girl — simply that some kind of fraud was under way — looking at the boy I found I could not deny his essential rightness. It was right that he should be my father’s son, anyone looking at him would see the sense of it. What didn’t make sense was me. Something coldly objective took me over: that same instinct that allowed me to separate my voice from my throat as an object of consideration, of study, came to me now, and I looked at this boy and thought: yes, he is right and I am wrong, isn’t it interesting? I could have, I suppose, thought of myself as the true child and the boy as the counterfeit, but I didn’t do that.

He turned round and spotted me. Something in his face told me I was being pitied, and I was moved when, with effortful kindness, he began a game of hide and seek around the concrete pillars. Every time his shaggy blond head popped out from behind a block I had that out-of-body sensation: here is my father’s son, looking just like my father’s son, isn’t that interesting? As we played we heard raised voices from upstairs. I tried to ignore them, but my new playmate stopped running and stood under the balcony and listened. At a certain point the anger flashed back into his eyes and he said to me: “Let me tell you something: he don’t care about no one. He’s not what he seems. He’s fucked up in the head. Marrying that bloody spade!”

And then the girl came running down the stairs. No one ran after her, not my father or my mother. She was still crying and she came to the boy and they hugged and, still hugging, walked across the grass and out of the estate. Snow was lightly falling. I watched them go. I didn’t see them again until my father died and they were never spoken of during my childhood. For a long time I thought the whole thing was a hallucination, or perhaps something I’d lifted from a bad film. When Tracey asked me about it I told her the truth, although with some elaboration: I claimed that a building we walked past daily, on Willesden Lane, the one with the shabby blue awning, was the Royal Ballet School, and that my cruel white posh sister went there, and was very successful but refused even to wave to me from the window, can you believe it? As she listened I witnessed a great struggle in her face to believe it, mostly expressed by her nostrils. Of course Tracey very likely had been inside that building herself, and would have known perfectly well what it really was: a down-at-heel event space where a lot of cheap local weddings were held, and sometimes the bingo. A few weeks later, as I was sitting in the back of my mother’s ridiculous car — a tiny, white, ostentatiously French 2CV with a CND sticker placed next to the tax disk — I spotted a hard-faced bride, half swallowed by tulle and ringlets, standing outside my Royal Ballet, smoking a fag, but I did not let this vision penetrate my fantasy. By then I had come to share my friend’s insusceptibility to reality. And now — as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time — neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist. I could have my evil ballerina if she could have her backing dancer. Maybe I never got out of this habit of elaboration. Twenty years later over a difficult lunch I revisited the story of my ghostly siblings with my mother, who sighed, lit a cigarette and said: “Trust you to add snow.”

Long before it became her career my mother had a political mind: it was in her nature to think of people collectively. Even as a child I noticed it, and felt instinctively that there was something chilly and unfeeling in her ability to analyze so precisely the people she lived among: her friends, her community, her own family. We were all, at one and the same time, people she knew and loved but also objects of study, living embodiments of all she seemed to be learning up at Middlesex Poly. She held herself apart, always. She never submitted, for example, to the neighborhood cult of “sharpness”—the passion for shiny shell-suits and sparkling fake gems, for whole days spent in the hair salon, children in fifty-quid trainers, settees paid for over several years on hire purchase — although neither would she ever entirely condemn it. People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor. But though she was serene and anthropological about these matters in her college essays — or while lecturing me and my father across the dinner table — I knew in her real life she was often exasperated. She didn’t pick me up from school any more — my father did that now — because the scene there aggravated her too much, in particular the way, each afternoon, time collapsed, and all those mothers became kids again, kids who had come to collect their kids, and all of these kids together turned from school with relief, free finally to speak with each other in their own way, and to laugh and joke and eat ice cream from the waiting ice-cream van, and to make what they considered to be a natural amount of noise. My mother didn’t fit into all of that any longer. She still cared for the group — intellectually, politically — but she was no longer one of them.

Every now and then she did get caught up in it, usually by some error of timing, and found herself trapped in a conversation with a mother, often Tracey’s, on Willesden Lane. On these occasions she could turn callous, making a point of mentioning each new academic achievement of mine — or inventing some — although she knew that all Tracey’s mother could offer in return was more of Miss Isabel’s praise, which was, to my mother, an entirely worthless commodity. My mother was proud of trying harder than Tracey’s mother, than all the mothers, of having got me into a half-decent state school instead of one of the several terrible ones. She was in a competition of caring, and yet her fellow contestants, like Tracey’s mother, were so ill-equipped when placed beside her that it was a fatally lopsided battle. I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?

One morning in early spring, my father and I ran into Tracey under our block, by the garages. She seemed agitated and though she said she was only cutting through our estate on the way to her own I felt certain she’d been waiting for me. She looked cold: I wondered whether she had been to school at all. I knew she sometimes bunked off, with the approval of her mother. (My mother had been shocked to see them both, one school-day afternoon, coming out of What She Wants on the high road, laughing, carrying a load of shopping bags.) I watched my father greet Tracey warmly. Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable — it appealed to his work ethic — and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was the pain of having to give him back.

“Exams coming up, aren’t they?” he asked her now. “And how’s all that going?”

Tracey stuck her nose proudly in the air: “I’m doing all six categories.”

“’Course you are.”

“For modern, though, I ain’t doing it by myself, I’m pairing. Ballet’s my strongest, then tap, then modern, then song and dance. I’m going for three golds at least, but if it was two golds and four silvers I’d be well happy with that.”

“And so you should be.”

She put her little hands on her hips. “You coming to watch us then or what?”

“Oh, I’ll be there! With bells on! Cheering my girls on.”

Tracey loved to boast to my father, she unfurled in his presence, sometimes even blushed, and the monosyllabic no and yes answers she tended to give to all other adults, including my mother, disappeared, to be replaced by this running babble, as if she thought that any pause in the flow might run the risk of losing my father’s attention altogether.

“Got some news,” she said casually, turning to me, and now I understood why we’d run into her. “My mum’s sorted it.”

“Sorted what?” I asked.

“I’m leaving my school,” she said. “I’m coming to yours.”

Later, at home, I told my mother this news, and she, too, was surprised, and, I suspected, a little displeased, at this proof of Tracey’s mother’s exertion on her daughter’s behalf more than anything else. She kissed her teeth: “I really didn’t think she had it in her.”

It took Tracey moving to my classroom for me to understand what my classroom really was. I had thought it was a room full of children. In fact it was a social experiment. The dinner lady’s daughter shared a desk with the son of an art critic, a boy whose father was presently in prison shared a desk with the son of a policeman. The child of the postal officer shared a desk with the child of one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. One of Tracey’s first acts as my new desk mate was to articulate these subtle differences by way of a simple, compelling analogy: Cabbage Patch Kids versus Garbage Pail Kids. Each child was categorized as one or the other and she made it clear that any friendship I had formed before her arrival was now — in as far as it may have attempted to cross this divide — null and void, worthless, for the truth was it had never truly existed in the first place. There could be no real friendship between Cabbage Patch and Garbage Pail, not right now, not in England. She emptied our desk of my beloved Cabbage Patch Kid card collection and replaced them with her Garbage Pail Kid cards, which — like almost everything Tracey did in school — at once became the new craze. Even children who were, in Tracey’s eyes, Cabbage Patch types themselves began to collect the Garbage Pail Kids, even Lily Bingham collected them, and we all competed with each other to own the most repulsive cards: the Garbage Pail Kid with snot streaming down his face, or the one pictured on the toilet. Her other striking innovation was her refusal to sit down. She would only stand at her desk, bending forward to work. Our teacher — a kind and energetic man called Mr. Sherman — battled her for a week but Tracey’s will, like my mother’s, was made of iron, and in the end she was allowed to stand as she pleased. I don’t think Tracey had any special passion for standing up, it was a point of principle. The principle could have been anything, really, but the point was she would win it. It was clear that Mr. Sherman, having lost this argument, felt he must come down hard in some other area and one morning, as we were all excitedly swapping Garbage Pail Kids instead of listening to whatever he was saying, he suddenly went completely out of his mind, screaming like a lunatic, going from desk to desk seizing the cards, sometimes from inside the desk and sometimes from our hands, until he had a huge pile of them on his desk which he then shuffled into a tower laid on its side and brushed into a drawer, locking it ostentatiously with a little key. Tracey said nothing, but her piggy nose flared and I thought: oh dear, doesn’t Mr. Sherman realize she’ll never forgive him?

That same afternoon, after school, we walked home together. She wouldn’t talk to me, she was still in her fury, but when I tried to turn into my estate she grabbed my wrist and led me across the road to hers. All the way up in the lift we were silent. It seemed to me something momentous was about to happen. I could feel her rage like an aura around her, it almost vibrated. When we got to her front door I saw that the knocker — a brass lion of Judah with its mouth open, bought on the high road from one of the stalls that sold Africana — had been damaged and now hung by a single nail, and I wondered if her father had been round again. I followed Tracey to her room. Once the door was closed she turned on me, glaring, as if I myself were Mr. Sherman, asking me sharply what I wanted to do, now that we were here? I had no idea: never before had I been canvassed for ideas of what to do, she was the one with all the ideas, there had never been any planning by me before today.

“Well, what’s the point of coming round if you don’t fucking know?”

She flopped down on to her bed, picked up Pac-Man and started playing. I felt my face getting hot. I meekly suggested practicing our triple time-steps but this made Tracey groan.

“Don’t need to. I’m on to wings.”

“But I can’t do wings yet!”

“Look,” she said, without raising her eyes from her screen, “you can’t get silver without doing wings, forget about gold. So what’s your dad going to come and watch you fuck it all up for? No point, is there?”

I looked at my stupid feet, that couldn’t do wings. I sat down and began quietly to cry. This changed nothing and after a minute I found myself pitiful and stopped. I decided to busy myself organizing Barbie’s wardrobe. All her clothes had been stuffed into Ken’s open-top automobile. It was my plan to extract them, flatten them, hang them on their little hangers and place them back in the wardrobe, the kind of game I was never permitted to play at home due to its echoes of domestic oppression. Halfway through this painstaking procedure Tracey’s heart mysteriously softened toward me: she slipped from the bed and joined me cross-legged on the floor. Together we got that tiny white woman’s life in order.

We had a favorite video, it was labeled “Saturday Cartoons and Top Hat” and moved weekly from my flat to Tracey’s and back, played so often that tracking now ate the frame, from above and below. Because of this we couldn’t risk forward-winding while playing — it made the tracking worse — so we forward-wound “blind,” guessing at duration by assessing the width of the black tape as it flew from one reel to another. Tracey was an expert forward-winder, she seemed to know in her body exactly when we’d gone past the irrelevant cartoons and when to press stop to reach, for example, the song “Cheek to Cheek.” It strikes me now that if I want to watch this same clip — as I did a few minutes ago, just before writing this — it’s no effort at all, it’s the work of a moment, I type my request in the box and it’s there. Back then there was a craft to it. We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re- and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be. When Tracey was about this process she was absolutely concentrated, she would not press play until she had Fred and Ginger exactly where she wanted them, on the balcony, among the bougainvillea and the Doric columns. At which point she began to read the dance, as I never could, she saw everything, the stray ostrich feathers hitting the floor, the weak muscles in Ginger’s back, the way Fred had to jerk her up from any supine position, spoiling the flow, ruining the line. She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. With Fred and Ginger you can always see the dance lesson. In a sense the dance lesson is the performance. He’s not looking at her with love, not even fake movie love. He’s looking at her as Miss Isabel looked at us: don’t forget x, please keep in mind y, arm up now, leg down, spin, dip, bow.

“Look at her,” Tracey said, smiling oddly, pressing a finger to Ginger’s face on the screen. “She looks fucking scared.”

It was during one of these viewings that I learned something new and important about Louie. On this occasion the flat was empty, and as it annoyed Tracey’s mother when we watched the same clip multiple times, that afternoon we indulged ourselves. The moment Fred came to a rest and leaned against the balustrade Tracey shuffled forward on all fours and pressed the button down again and off we went, back to what-once-was. We must have watched the same five-minute clip a dozen times. Until suddenly it was enough: Tracey got up and told me to follow. It was dark outside. I wondered when her mother would be home. We walked past the kitchen to the bathroom. It was exactly the same as my bathroom. Same cork floor, same avocado bathroom set. She got down on her knees and pushed the side panel of the bath: it fell in easily. Sitting in a Clarks shoebox just by the pipes was a small gun. Tracey picked up the box and showed it to me. She told me it was her father’s, that he had left it here, and when Michael came to Wembley at Christmas Louie would be his security man as well as one of his dancers, it had to be that way to confuse people, it was all top secret. You tell anyone, she told me, and you are dead. She put the panel back and went to the kitchen to start making her tea. I headed home. I remember feeling intensely envious of the glamour of Tracey’s family life compared to my own, its secretive and explosive nature, and I walked toward my own flat trying to think of some equivalent revelation I could offer to Tracey the next time I saw her, a terrible illness or a new baby, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing!

We stood on the balcony. Tracey held up a cigarette, stolen from my father, and I stood ready to light it for her. Before I could she spat it from her mouth, kicked it behind her and pointed down at my mother, who, as it turned out, was right below us on the communal lawn, smiling up. It was a mid-May Sunday morning, warm and bright. My mother was waving a dramatically large spade, like a Soviet farmer, and wearing a terrific outfit: denim dungarees, thin, light brown crop top, perfect against her skin, Birkenstocks and a square yellow handkerchief folded into a triangle and worn over her head. This was tied at the back of her neck in a jaunty little knot. She was taking it upon herself, she explained, to dig up the communal grass, a rectangle about eight foot by three, with the idea of establishing a vegetable garden that everybody could enjoy. Tracey and I watched her. She dug for a while, pausing regularly to rest her foot on the lip of the shovel and to shout up to us about lettuces, the various strains, the right time for planting them, none of which interested us in the least, and yet everything she said was made somehow more compelling by that outfit. We watched as several other people came out of their flats, to express concern or query her right to do what she was doing, but they were no match for her, and we noticed and admired the way she dispatched the fathers in a few minutes — essentially by looking into their eyes — while with the mothers she met with resistance, yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother’s talk. Everything she said sounded so convincing, so impossible to contradict. It was a wave washing over you, unstoppable. Who didn’t like roses? Who was so small-minded they would begrudge an inner-city child the chance to plant a seed? Weren’t we all Africans, originally? Weren’t we people of the land?

It started to rain. My mother, not dressed for rain, returned indoors. The next morning before school we were excited to catch up with this spectacle: my mother, looking like Pam Grier herself, digging a large, illegal hole without permission from the council. But the spade lay exactly where she had left it and the trench filled with water. The hole looked like somebody’s half-dug grave. The next day it rained again and no more digging was done. On the third day a gray sludge began to rise up and spill into the grass.

“Clay,” said my father, digging a finger into it. “She’s got a problem now.”

But he was wrong: it was his problem. Someone had told my mother that clay is only a layer of the earth, and if you dig deep enough you can get past it, and then all you have to do is go to the garden center and get some compost and pour it into your large, illegal hole… We peered down into the hole my father was now digging: under the clay was more clay. My mother came downstairs and peered in, too, and claimed to be “very excited” about the clay. She never again mentioned vegetables, and if anyone else tried to mention them she seamlessly adopted the new party line, which was that the hole had never been about lettuces, the hole had always been a search for clay. Which had now been found. In fact, she had two potter’s wheels, just sitting upstairs! What a wonderful resource for the children!

The wheels were small and very heavy, she had bought them because she “liked the look of them,” one freezing February when the lift doors malfunctioned: my father braced his knees, squared his arms and lugged the bloody things up three flights of stairs. They were very basic, brutal in some way, a peasant’s tool, and they had never been put to any use in our flat besides propping open the door to the living room. Now we would use them, we had to use them: if we didn’t, my mother had dug a large hole in the communal gardens for no reason at all. Tracey and I were told to collect children. We managed to convince only three kids from the estate: to make up numbers we added Lily Bingham. My father scooped clay into carrier bags and carted it up to the flat. My mother put a trestle table on the balcony and dropped a large lump of clay in front of each of us. It was a messy process, we probably would have been better off doing it in the bathroom or the kitchen, but the balcony allowed for an element of display: from up there my mother’s new concept in parenting could be seen by all. She was essentially asking the whole estate a question. What if we didn’t plonk our children in front of the telly each day, to watch the cartoons and the soap operas? What if we gave them, instead, a lump of clay, and poured water over it, and showed them how to spin it round until a shape formed between their hands? What kind of a society would that be? We watched the clay being spun between her palms. It looked like a penis — a long, brown penis — though it was only when Tracey whispered this idea into my ear that I allowed myself even to acknowledge the thought I was already having. “It’s a vase,” claimed my mother, and then added, as clarification: “For a single flower.” I was impressed. I looked around at the other children. Had their mothers ever thought to dig a vase out of the earth? Or grow a single flower to be placed inside it? But Tracey was not taking it at all seriously, she was still beside herself at the idea of a clay penis, and now she set me off, and my mother frowned at us both and, turning her attention to Lily Bingham, asked her what she would like to make, a vase or a mug. Under her breath, Tracey suggested, again, the obscene third option.

She was laughing at my mother — it was liberating. I had never imagined my mother could or should be a figure of fun, and yet Tracey found everything about her ridiculous: the way she spoke to us with respect, as if we were adults, giving us choices about things Tracey felt we had no business at all in choosing, and the license she gave us generally, allowing us to make all this unnecessary mess on her balcony — when everyone knew a real mother hated mess — and then having the cheek to call it “arts,” the cheek to call it “crafts.” When Tracey’s turn came round and my mother asked her what she would like to make on the wheel, a vase or a mug, Tracey stopped laughing and scowled.

“I see,” said my mother. “Well, what would you like to make?”

Tracey shrugged.

“Doesn’t have to be useful,” my mother pressed. “Art means not having to be useful! In West Africa, for example, a hundred years ago, there were some village women, they were making these strangely shaped pots, impractical pots, and the anthropologists couldn’t understand what they were doing, but that was because they, the scientists, were expecting a quote unquote ‘primitive’ people to make only useful things, when actually they were making the pots just for their beauty — no different from a sculptor — not to collect water, not to hold grain, just for their beauty, and to say: we were here, at this moment in time, and this is what we made. Well, you could do that, couldn’t you? Yes, you could make something ornamental. That’s your freedom! Take it! Who knows? You might be the next Augusta Savage!”

I was used to my mother’s speechifying — I tended to tune out whenever it was happening — and I was familiar, too, with the way she would drop whatever she happened to be studying that week into ordinary conversation, but I’m sure Tracey had never heard anything like it before in her life. She didn’t know what an anthropologist was, or what a sculptor did, or who Augusta Savage was, or even what the word “ornamental” meant. She thought my mother was trying to make a fool of her. How could she know my mother found it impossible to speak in a natural way to children?

When Tracey got home each day after school her flat was almost always empty. Who knew where her mother was? “Down the high road,” said my mother — this meant “drinking”—but I walked past the Sir Colin Campbell every day and never saw her in there. The times I did spot her she was usually in the street bending someone’s ear, often crying and dabbing at her eyes with a hanky, or else sitting at the bus stop on the other side of the estate wall, smoking, staring into space. Anything but sit in that tiny flat — and I didn’t blame her. Tracey by contrast very much liked to be home, she never wanted to go to the playground or to be in the streets. She kept a key in her pencil case, let herself in, went straight to the sofa and began watching the Australian soaps until the British ones started, a process which began at four p.m. and ended when the credits ran on Coronation Street. Somewhere in between she either got her own tea or her mother arrived with takeaway and joined her on the sofa. I dreamed of freedom like hers. When I got home either my mother or my father wanted to know “what had happened at school today,” they were very insistent about it, I wouldn’t be let alone until I told them something and so, naturally, I began lying to them. I thought of them at this point as two children, more innocent than me, whom it was my responsibility to protect from the kind of uncomfortable facts that they would either over-think (my mother) or over-feel (my father). That summer the problem became acute because the true answer to “How was school today?” was “There is a mania in the playground for grabbing vaginas.” Three boys from Tracey’s estate had initiated the game, but now everyone was playing, the Irish kids, the Greek kids, even Paul Barron, the completely Anglo-Saxon son of a policeman. It was like tag, but a girl was never “It,” only boys were “It,” girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top. You could tell the popularity of a girl by who got chased longest and hardest. Tracey with her hysterical giggle — and deliberately slow run — was, as usual, number one. I, wanting to be popular, also sometimes ran slowly, and the awkward truth is I wanted to be caught — I liked the electricity that ran from my vagina to my ear even in anticipation of the hot little hand — but it is also true that when the hand actually appeared some reflex in me, some ingrained concept of self-preservation, inherited from my mother, always squeezed my legs together, and I tried to fight the hand, which was in the end always impossible. All I did was make myself even more unpopular by struggling for those first moments.

As to whether you wanted one boy or another boy to chase you, no, this wasn’t anybody’s concern. There was no hierarchy of desire because desire was a very weak, practically non-existent, element of the game. The important thing was that you were seen to be the kind of girl worth chasing. It was a game not of sex but of status — of power. We did not desire or dread the boys in themselves, we only desired and dreaded being wanted or not being wanted. An exception to this was the boy with terrible eczema, whom we all truly and sincerely dreaded, Tracey as much as anyone, because he left, in your knickers, little flecks of dead gray skin. When our game mutated from playground prank to classroom risk, the boy with eczema became my daily nightmare. Now the game went like this: a boy dropped a pencil on the floor, always at a moment when Mr. Sherman had his back to us and his eyes on the board. The boy crawled under the table to retrieve the pencil, came up to a girl’s crotch, pulled her knickers aside and stuck his fingers in, leaving them there for as long as he thought he could get away with. The random element was now gone: only the original three boys played and they only visited those girls who were both close to their own desks and whom they assumed would not complain. Tracey was one of these girls, as was I, and a girl from my corridor called Sasha Richards. The white girls — who had generally been included in the playground mania — were now mysteriously no longer included: it was as if they had never been involved in the first place. The boy with eczema sat one desk away from me. I hated those scaly fingers, I was horrified and disgusted by them, and yet, at the same time, could not help but take pleasure in that delightful and uncontrollable electricity rushing from my knickers to my ear. Of course, it wasn’t possible to describe such things to my parents. In fact this is the first time I have presented them in any way to anyone — even to myself.

Strange now to think that we were all only nine years old at the time. But I still look back on that period with a certain measure of gratitude for what I have come to see as my relative luck. It was the season of sex, yes, but it was also, in all the vital ways, without sex itself — and isn’t that one useful definition of a happy girlhood? I didn’t know or appreciate this aspect of my luck until well into adulthood, when I began to find, in more cases than I would have guessed, that among my women friends, irrespective of background, their own childhood sex seasons had been exploited and destroyed by the misdeeds of uncles and fathers, cousins, friends, strangers. I think of Aimee: abused at seven, raped at seventeen. And beyond personal luck, there is geographical and historical luck. What happened to the girls on the plantations — or in the Victorian workhouses? The closest I came to anything like that was the music store room and I did not come very close at all, and I have historical luck to thank for that, surely, but also Tracey, as it was she who came to my rescue, in her own peculiar way. It was a Friday at the end of the day, not long before school broke up for the year, and I’d gone to the store room to borrow some sheet music, it was for the song “We All Laughed,” which Astaire sang so simply and so well, and I meant to give it to Mr. Booth on Saturday morning, to help us sing it as a duet. Another piece of my luck was that Mr. Sherman, my class teacher, was also the school’s music teacher, and as keen on the old songs as I was: he had a filing cabinet full of Gershwin scores and Porter scores, and so on, kept here in the music cupboard, and on Fridays I was allowed to borrow what I wanted, to be returned on Monday. The space was typical of such schools at the time: chaotic, too small, windowless, many ceiling tiles missing. Old violin and cello cases were stacked up against one wall, and there were plastic tubs of descant recorders, full of saliva, their mouthpieces as chewed as dog toys. There were two pianos, one broken and covered in a dust sheet, one very out of tune, and many sets of African drums, for they were relatively cheap and anyone could play them. The overhead light didn’t work. You had to work out what you wanted while the door was still open, pinpoint its location, and then, if the item was not in arm’s reach, let the door shut and carry on in darkness. Mr. Sherman had told me he’d left the folder I needed on top of the gray filing cabinet in the far-left-hand corner, and I spotted the cabinet and let the door ease shut. The darkness was complete. I had the folder in my hand and my back to the door. A thin streak of light sliced the room for a few moments and disappeared. I turned — I felt hands on me. One pair of hands I recognized immediately — the boy with eczema — the other I soon understood belonged to this boy’s best friend, a lanky, uncoordinated child called Jordan who was mentally slow, easily led and sometimes dangerously impulsive, a set of symptoms which had, back then, no particular diagnosis, or none that Jordan and his mother were ever given. Jordan was in my class, but I never called him Jordan, I called him Spaz, everybody did, but if it was meant as an insult he had long ago defused it by answering to it cheerfully as if it were his name. His status in our class was peculiar: despite his condition, whatever it was, he was tall and handsome. While we looked like children, he looked like an adolescent, his arms had muscle in them and his hair was sharp, shaved on the sides in a real barber’s shop. He was no good at classwork, had no real friends, but he was a useful and passive sidekick for boys with nefarious plans, and was more often than not the focus of the teachers’ attention, the smallest interruption from him had a disproportionate effect, and this was interesting for the rest of us. Tracey could — did — tell a teacher to “fuck off” without even being sent to stand in the hall, but Jordan passed most of his time in that hall, for what seemed, to the rest of us, small infractions — talking back, or not removing a baseball cap — and after a while of this we began to understand that the teachers, especially the white women, were scared of him. We respected that: it seemed like a special thing, an achievement, to make a grown woman fear you, though you were only nine years old and mentally disabled. Personally I was on good terms with him: he had sometimes put his fingers in my knickers but I was never convinced he knew why he was doing it, and on the walk home, if we happened to fall in step, I sometimes sang for him — the theme tune to “Top Cat,” a cartoon with which he was obsessed — and this soothed and made him happy. He would walk along, head inclined toward me, making a low, gurgling sound like a contented baby. I did not think of him as an aggressor, yet here he was in the music cupboard, touching me everywhere, giggling in a manic way, following and imitating the more calculated laugh of the boy with eczema, and it was clear that this wasn’t the playground game or the classroom game, it was a new and perhaps dangerous escalation. The boy with eczema was laughing, and I was meant to laugh, everything was meant to be a kind of joke, but each time I tried to keep some item of clothing up, they pulled it down and I was meant to laugh at that, too. Then the laughing stopped and something urgent took over, they worked in silence, and I went silent myself. At that moment the thin streak of light reappeared. Tracey was at the door: I saw her in silhouette, framed in the light. She closed the door behind her. She didn’t say anything right away. She just stood with us in the dark, silent, not doing anything. The boys’ hands slowed down: it was the child’s version of sexual absurdity — familiar to adults — when something that appeared so urgent and all-consuming a moment before now suddenly seems (often in conjunction with a light going on) small and pointless, even tragic. I looked over at Tracey, still burned into my retina in relief form: I saw her outline, the retroussé nose, the perfectly divided plaits with their satin bows. At last she took a step back, opened the door wide and held it open.

“Paul Barron’s waiting for you at the gate,” she said. I stared at her and she said it again, this time irritably, like I was wasting her time. I pulled down my skirt and hurried past. We both knew it was not possible that Paul Barron was waiting for me at the gate, his mother picked him up every day in a Volkswagen, his dad was a policeman, he had a permanently trembling upper lip and big, wet, blue eyes like a puppy. I had not spoken two words to Paul Barron my whole life. Tracey claimed he’d put his fingers in her knickers, but I had seen him play that game and noticed that he ran around the playground without aim, looking for a tree to hide behind. I strongly suspected him of not wanting to catch anybody. But his was the right name at the right moment. I could be messed with as long as I was considered a part of that element in the school which expected and deserved no better, but Paul Barron was a part of the other world, he couldn’t be messed with, and this fictional connection with him, even for a moment, formed some kind of protection. I ran down the hill to the gate and found my father waiting for me there. We got ice creams from the van and walked home together. At the traffic lights I heard a lot of noise and looked across and saw Tracey and the boy with eczema and the one we called Spaz laughing and fighting and messing with each other, swearing freely and seeming to enjoy the public tutting and disapproval that now rose up and enveloped them like a cloud of midges from the queue at the bus stop, from the shopkeepers standing in their doorways, from mothers, from fathers. My own father, short-sighted, peered across the road in the direction of the disturbance: “That’s not Tracey, is it?”