Swing Time

PART TWO: Early and Late

I was still a child when my path first crossed with Aimee’s — but how can I call it fate? Everybody’s path crossed with hers at the same moment, as soon as she emerged she was uncontained by space and time, with not one path to cross but all paths — they were all hers, like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, all ways were her way — and of course millions of people felt as I did. Whenever they listened to her records they felt they were meeting her — they still do. Her first single came out the week of my tenth birthday. She was twenty-two at the time. By the end of that same year, she once told me, she could no longer walk down the street, not in Melbourne, Paris, New York, London, Tokyo. Once, when we were flying over London together en route to Rome, having a casual conversation about London as a city, its virtues and drawbacks, she admitted she had never been on the tube, not even once, and could not really imagine it as an experience. I suggested that tube systems were basically the same all over the world, but she said that the last time she had been on a train of any description was when she’d left Australia for New York, twenty years earlier. She was only six months out of her sleepy hometown at that point, she became an underground star in Melbourne so very quickly, and it took only six more months in New York to remove the qualifier. An indisputable star ever since, a fact that is for her devoid of sadness or any trace of neurosis or self-pity, and this is one of the striking things about Aimee: she has no tragic side. She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra.

I bought that debut single as a present for Lily Bingham, for her tenth-birthday party, which happened to be a few days before my own. Both Tracey and I were invited to her party, we were handed the little homemade paper invitations by Lily herself, one Saturday morning at dance class, quite unexpectedly. I was very happy, but Tracey, maybe suspecting she’d been included out of politeness, took the invite with a sour look on her face and passed it straight to her mother, who was anxious enough about it to stop my mother in the street a few days later and pepper her with questions. Was it the kind of thing where you dropped your kid off? Or was she, as the mum, expected to come into the house? The invitation said a trip to the cinema — but who’d pay for this ticket? The guest or the host? Did you have to take a gift? What kind of gift were we getting? Would my mother do her a favor and take us both? It was as if the party was taking place in some bewildering foreign land, rather than a three-minute walk away, in a house on the other side of the park. My mother, with maximum condescension, said she’d take us both, and stay if staying was required. For the gift she suggested a record, a pop single, it could be from both of us, cheap but sure to be appreciated: she would take us down the high road to Woolworths to find something suitable. But we were prepared. We knew exactly what record we wanted to buy, the name of the song and the singer, and we knew my mother — who had never read a tabloid and listened only to the reggae stations — would be ignorant of Aimee’s reputation. Our only concern was the cover: we hadn’t seen it, didn’t know what to expect. Given the lyrics — and the performance we had watched, open-mouthed, on Top of the Pops—we felt that almost anything was possible. She might be completely naked on the cover of her single, she might be on top of a man — or a woman — doing sex, she might be holding her middle finger up, as she had, for a moment, on a live children’s TV show only the weekend before. It might be a photograph of Aimee executing one of her stunning, provocative dance moves, for love of which we had temporarily abandoned Fred Astaire, for the moment we wanted only to dance like Aimee, and imitated her whenever we had the privacy and opportunity, practicing the fluid roll of her mid-section — like a wave of desire passing through a body — and the way she jerked her narrow, boyish hips and lifted her small breasts from her ribcage, a subtle manipulation of muscles we did not yet have, under breasts we had not yet grown. When we got to Woolworths we rushed ahead of my mother and went straight to the record racks. Where was she? We looked for the white-blond pixie cut, the startling eyes, such a pale blue they seem gray, and that elfin face, androgynous, with its little pointed chin, half Peter Pan, half Alice. But we found no representation of Aimee, naked or otherwise: only her name and the title of the song along the left-hand side of the sleeve, while the rest of the space was taken up with the puzzling — to us — image of a pyramid with an eye hovering above it, which eye was contained in the point of a triangle. The sleeve was a dirty green color, and written above and below the pyramid were some words in a language we couldn’t read. Confused, relieved, we brought it to my mother, who held it up close to her face — she was also a little short-sighted, though too vain for glasses — frowned and asked if it was “a song about money.” I was very careful answering. I knew my mother to be far more prudish about money than about sex.

“It’s not about anything. It’s just a song.”

“You think your friend will like it?”

“She’ll like it,” said Tracey. “Everybody loves it. Can we have a copy, too?”

Still frowning, my mother sighed, went to pick a second copy out of the rack, walked over to the counter and paid for the pair.

It was the kind of party where the parents left — my mother, always nosy about middle-class interiors, was disappointed — but it didn’t seem to be organized like the parties we knew, there was no dancing or party games, and Lily’s mother wasn’t dressed up at all, she looked almost homeless, her hair hardly brushed. We left my mother at the door after an awkward exchange—“Don’t you girls look glamorous!” cried Lily’s mother, upon seeing us — after which we were added to the pile of children in the living room, all girls, none of them in the kind of pink-and-diamanté ruffled confection Tracey had on, but neither were they in a faux-Victorian, white-collared, black velvet dress like the one my mother had believed would be “perfect” and which she had “discovered” for me in the local charity shop. The other girls were in dungarees and jolly-looking jumpers, or simple cotton pinafores in primary colors, and when we entered the room they all stopped what they were doing and turned to stare. “Don’t they look nice?” said Lily’s mother, again, and walked out, leaving us to it. We were the only black girls and aside from Lily knew nobody there. At once Tracey became hostile. On the walk there we had argued over who was to give Lily our mutual present — naturally Tracey had won — but now she dropped the gift-wrapped single on the sofa without even mentioning it, and when she heard what film we were going to see—The Jungle Book—she denounced it as “babyish” and “just a cartoon” full of “stupid little animals” in a voice that seemed to me suddenly very loud, very distinct, with too many dropped “t”s.

Lily’s mother reappeared. We piled into a long, blue car, which had several rows of seats, like a little bus, and when these seats had been filled, Tracey, me and two other girls were told to sit in the space at the back, in the boot, which was lined with a filthy tartan rug covered in dog hair. My mother had given me a five-pound note in case either of us was expected to pay for anything, and I was anxious about losing it: I kept taking it out of my coat pocket, flattening it against my knee and then folding it up into quarters again. Tracey meanwhile was entertaining the other two girls by showing them what we usually did when we sat in the back of the school bus that took us, once a week, up to Paddington Rec for PE: she got up on her knees — as far as the space allowed — placed two fingers in a V sign either side of her mouth, and thrust her tongue in and out at the mortified male driver in the car behind. When we stopped, five minutes later, on Willesden Lane, I was thankful that the journey was over but disheartened at the destination. I’d imagined we were heading to one of the grand cinemas in the center of town, but we were parked in front of our own little local Odeon, just off the Kilburn High Road. Tracey was pleased: this was home territory. While Lily’s mother was distracted at the ticket booth Tracey showed everyone how to steal pick-and-mix without paying for it, and then, once we were in the dark theater, how to sit balanced on a flipped-up seat so that nobody behind you could see the screen, how to kick the seat in front of you until the person turned round. “That’s enough, now,” Lily’s mother kept mumbling, but she couldn’t establish any authority, her own sense of embarrassment seemed to stop her. She did not want us to make noise, but at the same time she couldn’t bear to make the necessary noise it would take to stop us making noise, and as soon as Tracey had understood this — and understood, too, that Lily’s mother had no intention of smacking her or swearing at her or dragging her out of the cinema by her ear as our mothers would have done — well, then she felt herself to be quite free. She kept up her commentary throughout, ridiculing the plot and the songs and describing the many ways the narrative would violently diverge from both Kipling’s and Disney’s vision if she herself were in the place of any or all of the characters. “If I was that snake I’d just open my jaw and yam that fool up in one bite!” or “If I was that monkey I’d kill that boy soon as he turned up in my place!” The other party guests were thrilled by these interventions, and I laughed the loudest.

Afterward, in the car, Lily’s mother tried to start a civilized conversation about the merits of the movie. A few girls said nice things, and then Tracey, again sitting in the very back — I had disloyally moved to the second row — piped up.

“Whassisname — Mowgli? He looks like Kurshed, don’t he? In our class. Don’t he?”

“Yeah, he does,” I called back. “He looks just like this boy Kurshed in our class.”

Lily’s mother took an exaggerated interest, she turned her head right round as we paused at a traffic light.

“Perhaps his parents are from India.”

“Nah,” said Tracey casually, looking away, out of the window. “Kurshed’s a Paki.”

We drove back to the house in silence.

There was cake, though it was poorly decorated and homemade, and we sang “Happy Birthday,” but then we still had half an hour before our parents were to pick us up and Lily’s mother, not having planned for this, looked worried and asked what we’d like to do. Through the kitchen doors I could see a long, green space, overgrown with vines and bushes, and I longed to go out there, but this was ruled out: too cold. “Why don’t you all run upstairs and explore — have an adventure?” I could see how struck Tracey was by this. Adults told us to “stay out of trouble” and to “go and find something to do” or “go and make yourself useful” but we were not accustomed to being told — instructed! — to have an adventure. It was a sentence from a different world. Lily — always gracious, always friendly, always kind — took all her guests to her room and showed us her toys, old and new, whatever we fancied, without any sign of bad temper or possessiveness. Even I, who had been to her house only once before, managed to feel more possessive about Lily’s things than Lily herself. I went around showing Tracey the many delights of Lily’s room as if they were my own, regulating how long she could hold this or that item, explaining to her the provenance of the things on the walls. I showed her the huge Swatch watch — and told her that she mustn’t touch it — and pointed out a poster advertising a bullfight, purchased while the Binghams were on a recent holiday in Spain; under the image of the matador, instead of the matador’s name, was printed, in huge, curlicue red letters: Lily Bingham. I wanted Tracey to be as amazed by this as I had been the first time I saw it but instead she shrugged, turned from me and said to Lily: “Got a player? We’ll put on a show.”

Tracey was very good at imaginative games, better than me, and the game she preferred to all others was “Putting on a Show.” We played it often, always with just the two of us, but now she began to enlist these half-dozen girls in “our” game: one was sent downstairs to get the gift-wrapped single that would be our soundtrack, others were put to work making tickets for the upcoming show, and then a poster to advertise it, others collected pillows and cushions from various rooms to use as seats, and Tracey showed them where to clear an area for the “stage.” The show was to be in Lily’s teenage brother’s room, where the record player was kept. He wasn’t home and we treated his room as if we had a natural right to it. But when almost everything was organized Tracey abruptly informed her workers that the show would, after all, feature only her and me — everyone else was to be in the audience. When some of the girls dared to question this policy Tracey in turn questioned them aggressively. Did they go to dance class? Had they any gold medals? As many as she? A few of the girls began to cry. Tracey changed her tune, a little: so-and-so could do “lighting,” so-and-so could do “props” and “costumes” or introduce the performance, and Lily Bingham could film it all on her father’s camcorder. Tracey spoke to them as if they were babies and I was surprised how quickly they were mollified. They took their silly made-up jobs and seemed happy. Then everyone was banished to Lily’s room while we “rehearsed.” It was at this moment that I was shown the “costumes”: two lacy camisoles taken from Mrs. Bingham’s underwear drawer. Before I could speak Tracey was pulling my dress up over my head.

“You wear the red one,” she said.

We put the record on, we rehearsed. I knew there was something wrong, that it wasn’t like any dance we’d done before, but I felt it was out of my hands. Tracey was, as ever, the choreographer: my only job was to dance as well as I could. When she decided we were ready our audience was invited back into Lily’s brother’s room to sit upon the floor. Lily stood at the back, the heavy recorder on her narrow, pink shoulder, her pale blue eyes full of confusion — even before we had begun to dance — at the sight of two girls dressed in these slinky items of her mother’s that of course she had probably never seen before in her life. She pressed the button that said “Record,” and by doing so put in motion a chain of cause and effect which, more than a quarter of a century later, has come to feel like fate, would be almost impossible not to consider as fate, but which — whatever you think of fate — can certainly and rationally be said to have had one practical consequence: there’s no need for me now to describe the dance itself. But there were things not captured by the camera. As we reached the final chorus — the moment where I am astride Tracey, on that chair — this was also the moment that Lily Bingham’s mother, who had come upstairs to tell us so-and-so’s mother had arrived, opened her son’s bedroom door and saw us. That is why the footage stops as abruptly as it does. She froze at the threshold, still as Lot’s wife. Then she exploded. Tore us apart, stripped us of our costumes, told our audience to return to Lily’s room and stood over us silently as we got back into our stupid dresses. I kept apologizing. Tracey, who normally had nothing but backchat for furious adults, said nothing at all, but she packed contempt into every gesture, she even managed to put her tights on sarcastically. The doorbell rang again. Lily Bingham’s mother went downstairs. We did not know whether to follow. For the next fifteen minutes, as the doorbell rang and rang, we stayed where we were. I did nothing, I just stood there, but Tracey with typical resourcefulness did three things. She took the VHS tape out of the recorder, put the single back in its sleeve and put both items in the pink silk drawstring purse her mother had seen fit to hang on her shoulder.

My mother, always late, for everything, was the last to arrive. She was taken upstairs to find us, like a lawyer coming to speak to her clients through the bars of a prison cell, while Lily’s mother gave a very labored account of our activities, which included the rhetorical question: “Don’t you wonder where children of this age even pick up such ideas?” My mother became defensive: she swore and the two women quarreled briefly. It shocked me. She seemed no different in that moment than all those other mothers confronted with a child’s misbehavior up at the school — even a little of her patois came back — and I wasn’t used to seeing her lose control. She grabbed us by the backs of our dresses and we all three flew downstairs, but Lily’s mother followed us and in the hallway repeated what Tracey had said about Kurshed. It was her trump card. The rest of it could be dismissed, by my mother, as “typical bourgeois morality,” but she couldn’t ignore “Paki.” At the time we were “Black and Asian,” we ticked the Black and Asian box on the medical forms, joined the Black and Asian family support groups and stuck to the Black and Asian section of the library: it was considered a question of solidarity. And yet my mother defended Tracey, she said, “She’s a child, she’s just repeating what she’s heard,” to which Lily’s mother said, quietly: “No doubt.” My mother opened the front door, removed us, slamming the door shut very loudly. The moment we were outside, though, all her fury was for us, only for us, she pulled us like two bags of rubbish back down the road, shouting: “You think you’re one of them? Is that what you think?” I remember exactly the sensation of being dragged along, my toes tracing the pavement, and how completely perplexed I was by the tears in my mother’s eyes, the distortion spoiling her handsome face. I remember everything about Lily Bingham’s tenth birthday and have no memory whatsoever of my own.

When we reached the road that ran between our estate and Tracey’s my mother let go of Tracey’s hand and delivered a brief but devastating lecture on the history of racial epithets. I hung my head and wept in the street. Tracey was unmoved. She lifted her chin and her little piggy nose, waited till it was over, then looked my mother straight in her eyes.

“It’s just a word,” she said.

The day we learned that Aimee was to come, one day soon, into our Camden offices on Hawley Lane, everybody was affected by the news, no one was completely immune. A little whoop went around the conference room, and even the most hardened YTV hacks lifted their coffee to their lips, looked over at the fetid canal and smiled to remember an earlier version of themselves, dancing to Aimee’s early, dirty, downtown disco — as kids in their living rooms — or breaking up with a college sweetheart to one of her soupy nineties ballads. There was respect in that place for a real pop star, no matter our personal musical preferences, and for Aimee there was a special regard: her fate and the channel’s were linked from the start. She was a video artist right down to the bone. You could hear Michael Jackson’s songs without bringing to mind the images that accompanied them (which is probably only to say that his music had a real life) but Aimee’s music was contained by and seemed sometimes to only truly exist within the world of her videos, and whenever you heard those songs — in a shop, in a taxi, even if it was just the beats reverberating through some passing kid’s headphones — you were sent back primarily to a visual memory, to the movement of her hand or legs or ribcage or groin, the color of her hair at the time, her clothes, those wintry eyes. For this reason Aimee — and all her imitators — were, for better or worse, the foundation of our business model. We knew American YTV had been built, in part, around her legend, like a shrine to a pixie god, and the fact that she should even deign now to enter our own, British, far lowlier place of worship was considered a great coup, it put everybody on our version of high alert. My section head, Zoe, convened a separate meeting just for our team, because in a sense Aimee was coming to us, in Talent and Artist Relations, to record an acceptance speech for an award she wouldn’t be able to pick up in person in Zurich the following month. And there would surely be many indents to shoot for various emerging markets (“I’m Aimee, and you’re watching YTV Japan!”) and perhaps, if she could be convinced, an interview for YTV News, maybe even a live performance, recorded in the basement, for the Dance Time Charts. My job was to gather all such requests as they came in — from our European offices in Spain and France and Germany and in the Nordic countries, from Australia, from wherever else — and present them in a single document to be faxed to Aimee’s people in New York, before her arrival, still four weeks away. And then, as the meeting wound down, something wonderful happened: Zoe slid off the desk she sat on, in her leather trousers and tube top — under which you could see a glimpse of a rock-hard brown stomach with a gem-like piercing at the belly button — shook out her lion’s mane of half-Caribbean curls, turned to me in an offhand manner as if it were nothing at all, and said: “You’ll need to collect her downstairs on the day and bring her to Studio B12, stay with her, get her whatever she needs.”

I walked out of that conference room like Audrey Hepburn floating upstairs in My Fair Lady, on a cloud of swelling music, ready to dance the length of our open-plan office, spin and spin and spin out of the door and all the way home. I was twenty-two years old. And yet not especially surprised: it felt as if everything I’d seen and experienced over the past year had been moving in this direction. There was a crazed buoyancy to YTV in those dying days of the nineties, an atmosphere of wild success built on wobbly foundations, somehow symbolized by the building we occupied: three floors and the basement of the old “WAKE UP BRITAIN” TV studios in Camden (we still had a huge rising sun, egg-yolk yellow and now completely irrelevant, built into our façade). VH1 was wedged on top of us. Our external tubular heating system, painted in garish primary colors, looked like a poor man’s Pompidou. Inside was sleek and modern, dimly lit and darkly furnished, lair of a James Bond nemesis. The place had once been a second-hand-car salesroom — before either music TV or breakfast TV — and the interior darkness seemed calculated to disguise the jerry-rigged nature of the construction. The air vents were so poorly finished rats crawled up from Regent’s Canal and nested in there, leaving their feces. In the summer — when the ventilation was switched on — whole floors of people came down with summer flu. When you turned on the fancy light dimmers, more often than not the knob would come off in your hand.

It was a company that set great store on appearances. Twenty-something receptionists became assistant producers, just because they seemed “fun” and “up for it.” My thirty-one-year-old boss had gone from production intern to Head of Talent in only four and a half years. During my own eight-month stint I was promoted twice. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed — if digital hadn’t killed the video stars. At the time I felt lucky: I had no particular career plans, yet my career advanced anyway. Drinking played a role. At Hawley Lane drinking was mandatory: going out for drinks, holding one’s drink, drinking others under the table, never declining a drink, even if on antibiotics, even if ill. Keen, at that point in my life, to avoid evenings alone with my father, I went to all office drinks and office parties, and I could hold my alcohol, I’d been perfecting that very British skill since the age of thirteen. The big difference at YTV was that we drank for free. Money sloshed around the company. “Freebie” and “open bar”: two of our most repeated office nouns. Compared to the jobs I’d had before — even compared to college — it felt like being in an extended period of playtime, in which we were forever expecting the arrival of adults, who never appeared.

One of my earliest tasks was to collate the guest lists for our departmental parties, of which there was about one a month. They tended to be in expensive venues in the center of town, and there were always loads of freebies: T-shirts, trainers, MiniDisc players, stacks of CDs. Officially sponsored by one vodka company or another, unofficially by Colombian drug cartels. In and out of the bathroom stalls we trooped. Next morning walks-of-shame, nosebleeds, holding your high heels in your hands. I also filed the company’s mini-cab receipts. People booked mini-cabs back from one-night stands or to airports to go on holiday. They booked them in the wee hours at weekends to and from all-night off-licenses or house parties. I once booked a cab to my Uncle Lambert’s. An executive became office-wide famous for booking a cab to Manchester, having woken up late and missed the train. After I left I heard there was a clampdown, but that year the annual bill for transport was over a hundred thousand pounds. I once asked Zoe to explain the logic behind it all and was told that VHS tape — which employees were often carrying upon their person — could be “corrupted” if taken on the tube. But most of our people didn’t even know this was their official alibi, free travel was something they took for granted, as a sort of right that came with being “in the media,” and which they felt to be the least they deserved. Certainly when compared to what old college friends — who had chosen, instead, banking or lawyering — were finding each Christmas in their bonus envelopes.

At least the bankers and lawyers worked all hours. We had nothing but time. My own calls were usually done and dusted by eleven thirty — bearing in mind I arrived at my desk around ten. Oh, time felt different then! When I took my hour and a half for lunch that’s all I did with it: lunch. No e-mail in our offices, not quite yet, and I had no mobile phone. I went through the loading-bay exit, straight out to the canal, and walked along the water’s edge, a plastic-wrapped, quintessentially British sandwich in my hand, taking in the day, the open-air drug deals and the fat mallards quacking for tourist bread crumbs, the decorated houseboats, and the sad young Goths hanging their feet over the bridge, bunking off school, shadows of myself from a decade before. Often I went as far as the zoo. There I’d sit on the grassy bank and look up at Snowdon’s aviary, around which a flock of African birds flew, bone-white with blood-red beaks. I never knew their names until I saw them on their own continent, where they anyway had a different name. After lunch I strolled back, sometimes with a book in hand, in no particular hurry, and what’s astonishing to me now is that I found none of this unusual or a special piece of luck. I, too, thought of free time as my God-given right. Yes, compared to the excesses of my colleagues, I considered myself hard-working, serious, with a sense of proportion the others lacked, the product of my background. Too junior to go on any of their multiple “company bonding trips,” I was the one who booked their flights — to Vienna, to Budapest, to New York — and privately marveled at the price of a business-class seat, at the very existence of business class, never able to decide, as I filed away these “expenses,” if this sort of thing had always been going on, all around me, during my childhood (but invisible to me, at a level above my awareness) or if I had come of age at an especially buoyant moment in the history of England, a period in which money had new meaning and uses and the “freebie” had become a form of social principle, unheard of in my neighborhood and yet normal elsewhere. “Freebism”: the practice of giving free things to people who have no need of them. I thought of all the kids from school who could have done my present job easily — who knew so much more than me about music, who were genuinely cool, truly “street,” as I was everywhere wrongly assumed to be — but who were as likely to turn up at these offices as go to the moon. I wondered: why me?

In the great piles of glossy magazines, also freebies, left around the office, we now read that Britannia was cool — or some version of it that struck even me as intensely uncool — and after a while began to understand that it must be on precisely this optimistic wave that the company surfed. Optimism infused with nostalgia: the boys in our office looked like rebooted Mods — with Kinks haircuts from thirty years earlier — and the girls were Julie Christie bottle-blondes in short skirts with smudgy black eyes. Everybody rode a Vespa to work, everybody’s cubicle seemed to feature a picture of Michael Caine in Alfie or The Italian Job. It was nostalgia for an era and a culture that had meant nothing to me in the first place, and perhaps because of this I was, in the eyes of my colleagues, cool, by virtue of not being like them. New American hip-hop was brought solemnly to my desk by middle-aged executives who assumed I must have some very learned opinions about it and, in fact, the little I knew did seem a lot in this context. Even the task of chaperoning Aimee that day was given to me, I’m sure, because I was assumed to be too cool to care. My disapproval of most things was always already assumed: “Oh, no, don’t bother asking her, she wouldn’t like it.” Said ironically, as everything was back then, but with a cold streak of defensive pride.

My most unexpected asset was my boss, Zoe. She had also begun as an intern, but with no trust fund or moneyed parents like the rest, nor even, as I had myself, a rent-free parental crash pad. She’d lived in a filthy Chalk Farm squat, remained unpaid for over a year, and yet came in every morning at nine — punctuality was considered, at YTV, an almost inconceivable virtue — where she proceeded to “work her arse off.” A foster-care kid originally, in and out of the group homes of Westminster, she was familiar to me from other kids I’d known who’d gone through that system. She had that same wild thirst for whatever was on offer, and a disassociated, hypermanic persona — traits you sometimes find in war reporters, or in soldiers themselves. Rightfully she should have been fearful of life. Instead she was recklessly bold. The opposite of me. Yet in the context of the office, Zoe and I were viewed as interchangeable. Her politics, like mine, were always already assumed, although in her case the office had it quite wrong: she was an ardent Thatcherite, the kind who feels that having pulled herself up by her own bootstraps everybody else better follow her example and do the same. For some reason she “saw herself in me.” I admired her grit, but did not see myself in her. I had been to university, after all, and she hadn’t; she was a cokehead, I wasn’t; she dressed like the Spice Girl she resembled, instead of the executive she actually was; made unfunny sexual jokes, slept with the youngest, poshest, floppiest-haired, whitest, indie-boy interns; I prudishly disapproved. She liked me anyway. When she was drunk or high she liked to remind me that we were sisters, two brown girls with a duty toward each other. Just before Christmas she sent me to our European Music Awards, in Salzburg, where one of my tasks was accompanying Whitney Houston to a soundcheck. I don’t remember the song she sang — I never really liked her songs — but standing in that empty concert hall, listening to her sing without backing music, with no support of any kind, I found that the sheer beauty of the voice, its monumental dose of soul, the pain implicit within it, bypassed all my conscious opinions, my critical intelligence or sense of the sentimental, or whatever it is that people are referring to when they talk about their own “good taste,” going instead straight into my spine, where it convulsed a muscle and undid me. Way back by the EXIT sign I burst into tears. By the time I’d got to Hawley Lane this story had done the rounds, although it did me no harm, quite the opposite — it was taken to mean I was a true believer.

It seems funny now, pathetic almost — and maybe only technology can achieve this comic revenge on our memories — but when we had an artist coming in and needed to make a dossier on them, to give to interviewers and advertisers and so on, we would go down to a little library in the basement and pull out a four-volume encyclopedia called The Biography of Rock. Everything in Aimee’s entry, major or minor, I already knew — Bendigo-born, allergic to walnuts — excepting one detail: her favorite color was green. I made my notes, by hand, collated all relevant requests, stood in the copy room by a noisy fax machine and slowly fed the documents into it, thinking of someone in New York — a dream city to me — waiting by a similar contraption as my document came through to them, at the exact same time I sent it, which felt so very modern in the doing of it, a triumph over distance and time. And then of course to meet her I would need new clothes, perhaps new hair, a fresh way of speaking and walking, a whole new attitude to life. What to wear? The only place I ever shopped back then was Camden Market, and from inside that warren of Doc Martens and hippy shawls I was very pleased to draw out a huge pair of bright green cargo pants of a silky parachute material, a close-fitting green crop top — which had, as an added bonus, The Low End Theory album cover art on the front of it picked out in black, green and red glitter — and a pair of space-age Air Jordans, also green. I finished with a fake nose ring. Nostalgic and futuristic, hip-hop and indie, rrriot girl and violent femme. Women often believe clothes will solve a problem, one way or another, but by the Tuesday before she was due to arrive I understood nothing I wore was going to help me, I was too nervous, couldn’t work or concentrate on anything. I sat in front of my giant gray monitor listening to the whirr of the modem, anticipating Thursday and typing, in my distraction, Tracey’s full name into the little white box, over and over again. It’s what I did at work when I was bored or anxious though it never really relieved either condition. I had done it many times by then, firing up Netscape, waiting for our interminably slow dial-up, and always finding the same three little islands of information: Tracey’s Equity listing, her personal web page, and a chat room she frequented, under the alias Truthteller_LeGon. The Equity listing was static, it never changed. It mentioned her stint the previous year in the chorus of Guys and Dolls, but no other shows were ever added, no fresh news appeared. Her page changed all the time. Sometimes I would check it twice in a day and find the song different or that the exploding pink firework graphic had been replaced by flashing rainbow hearts. It was on this page, a month earlier, that she had mentioned the chat room, with a hyperlinked note — Sometimes truth is hard to hear!!! — and this single reference was all I’d needed: the door was open and I began to wander through it a few times a week. I don’t think anyone else who followed that link — no one but me — would have known that the “truth teller” in that bizarre conversation was Tracey herself. But then no one, as far as I could see, was reading her page anyway. There was a sad, austere purity to this: the songs she chose no one heard, the words she wrote — banal aphorisms, usually (“The Arc of the Moral Universe is Long but It Bends toward Justice”) — no one but me ever read. Only in that chat room did she seem to be in the world, though it was such a bizarre world, filled only with the echoing voices of people who had apparently already agreed with each other. From what I could tell she spent a frightening amount of time in there, especially late at night, and by now I’d read through all her threads, both current and archived, until I was able to follow the logic of it all — better to say I was no longer shocked by it — and could trace and appreciate the line of argument. I became less inclined to tell my colleagues stories about my crazy ex-friend Tracey, her surreal chat-room adventures, her apocalyptic obsessions. I hadn’t forgiven her — or forgotten — but using her in this way became somehow distasteful to me.

One of the oddest things about it was the fact that the man whose spell she appeared to be under, the guru himself, had once been a breakfast-TV reporter, had worked in the very building I sat in now, and when we were kids I can remember often sitting with Tracey, watching him, bowls of cereal in our laps, waiting for his boring grown-up show to be over and for our Saturday-morning cartoons to begin. Once, during my first winter break from university, I went to buy some textbooks in a chain bookshop on the Finchley Road, and while wandering around the film section saw him in person, presenting one of his books in a far-off corner of that mammoth shop. He sat at a plain white desk, dressed all in white, with his prematurely white head of hair, facing a sizable audience. Two girls who worked there stood near me and from behind shelving they peeked out at the peculiar gathering. They were laughing at him. But I was struck not so much by what he was saying as by the odd composition of his audience. There were a few middle-aged white women, dressed in their cozily patterned Christmas jumpers, looking no different from the housewives who would have liked him ten years earlier, but by far the greater part of his crowd was young black men, of about my own age, holding well-worn copies of his books on their knee and listening with an absolute focus and determination to an elaborate conspiracy theory. For the world was run by lizards in human form: the Rockefellers were lizards, and the Kennedys, and almost everybody at Goldman Sachs, and William Hearst had been a lizard, and Ronald Reagan and Napoleon — it was a global lizard plot. Eventually the shop-girls tired of their sniggering and wandered off. I stayed till the end, deeply troubled by what I’d seen, not knowing what to make of it. Only later, when I started reading Tracey’s threads — which were, if you could put aside their insane first premise, striking in their detail and perverse erudition, linking many diverse historical periods and political ideas and facts, combining them all into a sort of theory of everything, which even in its comic wrongness required a certain depth of study and a persistent attention — yes, only then did I feel that I better understood why all those serious-looking young men had gathered in the bookshop that day. It became possible to read between the lines. Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?

“Er, what the fuck is that?”

I turned round in my swivel chair and found Zoe at my shoulder, examining a flashing graphic of a lizard wearing, on top of his lizard head, the Crown Jewels. I minimized the page.

“Album graphics. Bad.”

“Listen, Thursday morning — you’re on, they’ve confirmed. Are you ready? Got everything you need?”

“Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”

“Oh, I know it will be. But if you need some Dutch courage,” said Zoe, tapping her nose, “let me know.”

It didn’t come to that. Difficult to piece back together exactly what it did come to. My memory of it and Aimee’s have never had much overlap. I’ve heard her say that she hired me because she felt “we had an immediate connection” that day or, sometimes, because I struck her as being so capable. I think it was because I was inadvertently rude to her, a thing few people were at that time in her life, and in my rudeness must have lodged myself in her brain. A fortnight later, when she found herself in sudden need of a new, young assistant, there I was, lodged in there. She emerged anyway from a car with blacked-out windows in mid-argument with her then assistant, Melanie Wu. Her manager, Judy Ryan, walked two steps behind them both, shouting into a phone. The first thing I ever heard Aimee say was a put-down: “Everything coming out of your mouth right now is totally worthless to me.” I noticed she did not have an Australian accent, not any more, but neither was it quite American or quite British, it was global: it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined. Of course now lots of people speak in this way but Aimee’s version was the first time I heard it. “You’re the opposite of helpful,” she said now, to which Melanie replied: “I can totally see that.” A moment later this poor girl found herself in front of me, looked down at my chest, seeking a name tag, and when she looked back up I could see she was broken, struggling not to cry. “So we’re on schedule,” she said, firmly as could be managed, “and it would be great if we could stay on schedule?”

We four stood in the lift, silent. I was determined to speak, but before I managed it Aimee turned to me and pouted at my top, like a pretty teenage boy in a sulk.

“Interesting choice,” she said, to Judy. “Wearing another artist’s shirt when you’re meeting an artist? Professional.”

I looked down at myself and blushed.

“Oh! No! Miss — I mean, Mrs. — Ms. Aimee. I wasn’t trying to make any—”

Judy let out a loud, single laugh, like a seal barking. I tried to say something else, but the lift doors opened and Aimee strode out.

To get to our various appointments we had to walk the halls, and they were lined with people, like the Mall during Diana’s funeral. Nobody seemed to be working. Whenever we stopped in a studio people lost their cool almost immediately, irrespective of their position in the company. I watched a Managing Director tell Aimee that a ballad of hers was the first dance at his wedding. I listened, excruciated, as Zoe launched into a rambling account of the personal resonance “Move with Me” had for her, how it had helped her become a woman, and understand the power of women, and not be afraid to be a woman, and so on. As we got away, finally, along another hall and into another lift, to make our way down to the basement — where Aimee had, to Zoe’s delight, agreed to record a brief interview — I worked up the courage to mention, in the world-weary way of twenty-two-year-olds, how dull I imagined it must be for her to hear people saying these sorts of things to her, day and night, night and day.

“As a matter of fact, Little Miss Green Goddess, I love it.”

“Oh, OK, I just thought—”

“You just thought I had contempt for my own people.”

“No! I just — I—”

“You know, just because you’re not one of my people doesn’t mean they’re not good people. Everybody’s got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?” She took a second, slow, assessing look at me, up and down. “Oh, right. This we already know.”

“You mean — musically?” I asked, and made the mistake of glancing over at Melanie Wu, in whose face I understood that the conversation should have ended many minutes earlier, should never have started.

Aimee sighed: “Sure.”

“Well… a lot of things… I guess I like a lot of the older stuff, like Billie Holiday? Or Sarah Vaughan. Bessie Smith. Nina. Real singers. I mean, not that — I mean, I feel like—”

“Um, correct me if I’m wrong,” said Judy, her own broad Aussie brogue untouched by the intervening decades. “The interview’s not actually happening in this lift? Thank you.”

We got out at the basement. I was mortified and tried to walk ahead of them all, but Aimee skipped in front of Judy and linked arms with me. I felt my heart rise in my throat, as the old songs tell you it can. I looked down — she’s only five foot two — and for the first time confronted that face close up, somehow both male and female, the eyes with their icy, gray, cat-like beauty, left for the rest of the world to color in. The palest Australian I ever saw. Sometimes, without her make-up on, she did not look like she was from a warm planet at all, and she took steps to keep it that way, protecting herself from the sun at all times. There was something alien about her, a person who belongs to a tribe of one. Almost without knowing it, I smiled. She smiled back.

“You were saying?” she said.

“Oh! I… I guess I feel like voices are — they’re sort of like—”

She sighed again, miming a glance at a non-existent watch.

“I think voices are like clothes,” I said firmly, as if it were an idea I’d been thinking about for years rather than something I was at that moment pulling from the air. “So if you see a photo of 1968 you know it’s ’68 from what the people are wearing, and if you hear Janis sing, you know it’s ’68. Her voice is a sign of the times. It’s like history or… something.”

Aimee lifted one devastating eyebrow: “I see.” She let go of my arm. “But my voice,” she said, with equal conviction, “my voice is this time. If it sounds to you like a computer, well, I’m sorry, but that’s just because it’s right on time. You might not like it, you might be living in the past, but I’m fucking singing this time, right now.”

“But I do like it!”

She made that funny adolescent pout again.

“Just not as much as Tribe. Or Lady-Fucking-Day.”

Judy jogged up to us: “Excuse me, do you know what studio we’re heading to, or do I have to—”

“Hey, Jude! I’m talking to the youth here!”

We’d reached the studio. I opened the door for them.

“Look, can I just say I think I really got off on the wrong — really, Miss — I mean, Aimee — I was ten when you first dropped — I bought the single. It’s mental for me that I’m meeting you. I’m one of your people!”

She smiled at me again: there was a kind of flirtation in the way she spoke to me, as there was in the way she spoke to everybody. She held my chin gently in her hand.

“Don’t believe you,” she said, took my fake nose ring out in one swift movement, and handed it to me.

Now, there is Aimee, on Tracey’s wall — clear as day. She shared the space with Michael and Janet Jackson, Prince, Madonna, James Brown. Over the course of the summer she made her room into a kind of shrine to these people, her favorite dancers, decorated with many huge, glossy posters of them, all caught in mid-movement, so that her walls read like hieroglyphics, indecipherable to me but still clearly some form of message, constructed from gestures, bent elbows and legs, splayed fingers, pelvic thrusts. Disliking publicity shots, she chose stills from concerts we couldn’t afford to attend, the kind in which you could see the sweat on a dancer’s face. These, she argued, were “real.” My room was likewise a shrine to dance but I was stuck in fantasy, I went to the library and took out old seventies biographies of the great MGM and RKO idols, ripped out their corny headshots and stuck them up on my walls with Blu-tack. In this way I discovered the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold: a photo of them in mid-air, doing the splits, marked the entrance to my room, they were leaping over the doorway. I learned that they were self-taught, and though they danced like gods had no formal training at all. I took a kind of proprietorial pride in them, as if they were my brothers, as if we were family. I tried hard to interest Tracey — which of my brothers would she marry? which would she kiss? — but she couldn’t sit through even the briefest clip of black-and-white film any longer, everything about it bored her. It wasn’t “real”—too much had been subtracted, too much artificially shaped. She wanted to see a dancer on stage, sweating, real, not done up in top hat and tails. But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

One night I dreamed of the Cotton Club: Cab Calloway was there, and Harold and Fayard, and I stood on a podium with a lily behind my ear. In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me, never been called ugly or stupid, never entered theaters by the back door, drunk from separate water fountains or taken our seats at the back of any bus. None of our people ever swung by their necks from a tree, or found themselves suddenly thrown overboard, shackled, in dark water — no, in my dream we were golden! No one was more beautiful or elegant than us, we were a blessed people, wherever you happened to find us, in Nairobi, Paris, Berlin, London, or tonight, in Harlem. But when the orchestra started up, and as my audience sat at their little tables with drinks in their hands, happy in themselves, waiting for me, their sister, to sing, I opened my mouth and no sound came out. I woke up to find I had wet the bed. I was eleven.

My mother tried to help, in her way. Look closer at that Cotton Club, she said, there is the Harlem Renaissance. Look: here are Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. Look closer at Gone with the Wind: here is the NAACP. But at the time my mother’s political and literary ideas did not interest me as much as arms and legs, as rhythm and song, as the red silk of Mammy’s underskirt or the unhinged pitch of Prissy’s voice. The kind of information I was looking for, which I felt I needed to shore myself up, I dug out instead from an old, stolen library book—The History of Dance. I read about steps passed down over centuries, through generations. A different kind of history from my mother’s, the kind that is barely written down — that is felt. And it seemed very important, at the time, that Tracey should feel it too, all that I was feeling, and at the same moment that I felt it, even if it no longer interested her. I ran all the way to her house, burst into her room and said, you know when you jump down into the splits (she was the only girl in Miss Isabel’s dance class who could do this), you know how you jump into a split and you said your dad can do it, too, and you got it from your dad, and he got it from Michael Jackson, and Jackson got it from Prince and maybe James Brown, well, they all got it from the Nicholas Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers are the originals, they’re the very first, and so even if you don’t know it or say you don’t care, you’re still dancing like them, you’re still getting it from them. She was smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes out of her bedroom window. She looked much older than me doing that, more like forty-five than eleven, she could even blow smoke out of those flaring nostrils, and as I spoke aloud this supposedly momentous thing I had come to tell her I felt the words turning to ash in my mouth. I didn’t even know what I was saying or what I meant by it, really. To stop the smoke from filling the room, she kept her back to me, but when I had finished making my point, if that’s what it was, she turned to me and said, very coolly, as if we were perfect strangers, “Don’t you ever talk about my father again.”

“This isn’t working.”

It was only about a month after I’d started working for her — for Aimee — and as soon as it was said aloud I saw she was right, it wasn’t working, and the problem lay with me. I was young and inexperienced, and didn’t seem able to find my way back to that impression I’d had, on the very first day we’d met, that she might be a human woman like any other. Instead my gut reaction had been overlaid by the reactions of others — ex-colleagues, old schoolfriends, my own parents — and each had their effect, every gasp or incredulous laugh, so that now each morning when I arrived at Aimee’s house in Knightsbridge or her Chelsea offices I had to battle a very powerful sense of the surreal. What was I doing here? I often stuttered as I spoke, or forgot basic facts she’d told me. I would lose the thread of conversations during conference calls, too distracted by another voice inside me that never stopped saying: she’s not real, none of this is real, it’s all your childish fantasy. It was a surprise at the end of a day to close the heavy black door of her Georgian townhouse and find myself not in a dream city after all but in London and only a few steps from the Piccadilly Line. I sat down next to all the other commuters as they read their city paper, often picking one up myself, but with the sense of having traveled further: not just from the center back to the suburbs but from another world back into theirs, the world that seemed to me, aged twenty-two, to exist at the center of the center — the one they were all so busy reading about.

“It’s not working because you’re not comfortable,” Aimee informed me, from a big, gray couch that sat opposite an identical couch on which I sat. “You need to be comfortable in yourself to work for me. You’re not.”

I closed the notebook in my lap, lowered my head and felt almost relieved: so I could go back to my real job — if they’d still have me — and reality. But instead of firing me, Aimee threw a cushion playfully at my head: “Well, what can we do about that?”

I tried to laugh and admitted I didn’t know. She tilted her head toward the window. On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day. But in those early days it was all still new to me, and I interpreted it only as boredom, specifically boredom and disappointment with me, and not knowing what to do about it, looked from vase to vase around that huge room — she packed every space with flowers — and at the further beauty outside, at the sun glinting off the slate-gray roofs of Knightsbridge, and tried to think of something interesting to say. I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. The walls were hung with many dark Victorian oils, portraits of the gentry in front of their grand houses, but there was nothing from her own century, and nothing recognizably Australian, nothing personal. This was meant to be Aimee’s London home and yet it didn’t have a thing to do with her. The furniture was of plush, generalized good taste, like any upscale European hotel. The only real clue that Aimee lived here at all was a bronze near the windowsill, about as big as a plate and the same shape as one, at the center of which you could see the petals and leaves of something that at first seemed to be a lily on its pad but was actually the full cast of a vagina: vulva, labia, clitoris — the works. I didn’t dare ask whose.

“But where do you feel the most comfortable?” she asked, turning back to me. I saw a new idea painted on her face like fresh lipstick.

“You mean a place?”

“In this city. A place.”

“I’ve never thought about it.”

She stood up: “Well, think about it and let’s go there.”

The Heath was the first place that came to mind. But Aimee’s London, like those little maps you pick up at the airport, was a city centered around St. James’s, bordered to the north by Regent’s Park, stretching as far as Kensington to the west — with occasional forays into the wilds of Ladbroke Grove — and only as far east as the Barbican. She knew no more of what might lie at the southern end of Hungerford Bridge than at the end of a rainbow.

“It’s a big sort of park,” I explained. “Near where I grew up.”

“OK! Well, let’s go there.”

We cycled through town, winding round buses and racing the occasional courier, three of us in a line: her security detail first — his name was Granger — then Aimee, then me. The idea of Aimee cycling through London infuriated Judy but Aimee loved to do it, she called it her freedom in the city, and maybe at one traffic light in twenty the adjacent driver would lean forward on the wheel, put down his window, having noticed something familiar about the blue-gray, feline eyes, that dainty triangular chin… But by that point the lights would change and we’d be gone. When she rode she was in urban camouflage anyway — black sports bra, black vest and a grungy pair of black cycling shorts, worn at the crotch — and only Granger seemed likely to catch anybody’s attention: a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man wobbling on a titanium-framed racer, stopping every now and then to take an A‒Z out of his pocket and furiously study it. He was from Harlem, originally—“where we got a grid”—and the inability of Londoners to likewise number their streets was something he couldn’t forgive, he’d written off the whole city on account of it. For him, London was a sprawl of bad food and bad weather in which his one task — to keep Aimee safe — was made more difficult than it needed to be. At Swiss Cottage he waved us on to a traffic island and peeled his bomber jacket off to reveal a pair of massive biceps.

“I’m telling you right now I got no idea where this place is at,” he said, slapping his handlebar with his map. “You get halfway down some tiny little street — Christchurch Close, Hingleberry fucking Corner — and then this thing’s telling me: turn to page 53. Motherfucker, I’m on a bike.”

“Chin up, Granger,” said Aimee, in a terrible British accent, and pulled his big head down on to her shoulder for a moment, squeezing it fondly. Granger freed himself and glared at the sun: “Since when is it this hot?”

“Well, it’s summer. England can sometimes get hot in summer. Should’ve worn shorts.”

“I don’t wear shorts.”

“I don’t think this is a very productive conversation. We’re on a traffic island.”

“I’m done. We heading back,” said Granger, he sounded very final about it, and I was surprised to hear anyone speak to Aimee this way.

“We are not going back.”

“Then you best take this,” said Granger, dropping the A‒Z in the basket at the front of Aimee’s bike, “’Cos I can’t use it.”

“I know the way from here,” I offered, mortified to be the cause of the problem. “It’s really not far.”

“We need a vehicle,” Granger insisted, without looking at me. We almost never looked at each other. Sometimes I thought of us as two sleeper agents, mistakenly assigned to the same mark and wary of eye contact, in case the one blew the other’s cover.

“I hear there’s some cute boys up in there,” said Aimee in a sing-song voice — this was meant to be an imitation of Granger—“They’re hid-ing in the tree-ees.” She put her foot to the pedal, pushed off, swerving into the traffic.

“I don’t mix play with work,” said Granger sniffily, getting back astride his dainty bike with dignity. “I am a professional person.”

We set off back up the hill, monstrously steep, huffing and puffing and following Aimee’s laughter.

I can always find the Heath — all my life I’ve taken paths that lead me back, whether I wanted it or not, to the Heath — but I’ve never consciously sought and found Kenwood. I only ever stumble upon it. It was the same this time: I was leading Granger and Aimee up the lanes, past the ponds, over a hill, trying to think where might be the prettiest, quietest and yet most interesting place to stop with a too-easily bored superstar, when I saw the little cast-iron gate and behind the trees, the white chimneys.

“No cycles,” said Aimee, reading a sign, and Granger, seeing what was coming, began again to protest, but was overruled.

“We’ll be, like, an hour,” she said, getting off her bike and passing it to him. “Maybe two. I’ll call you. Have you got that thing?”

Granger folded his arms across his massive chest.

“Yeah, but I ain’t giving it to you. Not without me being there. No way. Forget about it.”

As I got off my bike, though, I saw Aimee put out her adamant little hand to receive a small something wrapped in cling-film, closing her palm around it, which something turned out to be a joint — for me. Long and American in design, with no tobacco in it at all. We settled under the magnolia, right in front of Kenwood House, and I leaned against the trunk and smoked while Aimee lay flat in the grass with her black baseball cap low over eyes, her face turned up toward me.

“Feel better?”

“But… aren’t you going to have any?”

“I don’t smoke. Obviously.”

She was sweating like she did on stage, and now grabbed at her vest, lifting it up and down to create a tunnel of air, so that I received a glimpse of that pale strip of midriff that once so mesmerized the world.

“I’ve got a coldish Coke in my bag?”

“I don’t drink that shit and neither should you.”

She got up on her elbows to take me in more fully.

“You don’t look all that comfortable to me.”

She sighed and rolled over on to her stomach to face the milling summer crowds going down to the old stables for scones and tea or through the doors of the great house for art and history.

“I have a question,” I said, knowing I was stoned and that she wasn’t but finding it hard to keep in mind the second half of that proposition. “You do this with all your assistants?”

She considered: “No, not this exactly. People are different. I always do something. I can’t have somebody in my face twenty-four-seven who is going to act shy around me. No time. And I don’t have the luxury of getting to know you in some slow, delicate way or being politely English about it, saying please and thank you whenever I want you to do something — if you work for me, you just have to jump to it. I’ve been doing this a while, and I’ve figured out that a few intense hours at the beginning save a lot of time and misunderstandings and bullshit later on. You’re getting off easy, believe me. I had a bath with Melanie.”

I attempted a goofy extended joke, hoping to hear her laugh again, but instead she squinted at me.

“Another thing you should understand is that it’s not that I don’t get your British irony, I just don’t like it. I find it adolescent. Ninety-nine percent of the time when I meet British people my feeling is: grow up!” Her mind turned back to Melanie in that bath: “Wanted to know if her nipples were too long. Paranoid.”

“Were they?”

“Were who what?”

“Her nipples. Long.”

“They’re fucking like fingers.”

I spat some of my Coke on to the grass.

“You’re funny.”

“I come from a long line of funny people. God knows why the British think they’re the only people allowed to be funny in this world.”

“I’m not that British.”

“Oh, babe, you’re as British as they come.”

She reached into her pocket for her phone and began going through her texts. Long before it became a general condition Aimee lived in her phone. She was a pioneer in this as in so many things.

“Granger, Granger, Granger, Granger. Doesn’t know what to do with himself if he doesn’t have anything to do with himself. He’s like me. We’ve got the same mania. He reminds me of how tiring I can be. To others.” Her thumb wavered over her brand-new BlackBerry. “With you I’m hoping for: cool, calm, collected. Could do with some of that around here. Jesus Christ, he’s sent me like fifteen texts already. He just needs to hold the bikes. Says he’s near the — what in hell is the ‘men’s pond’?”

I told her, in detail. She made a skeptical face.

“If I know Granger there’s no way he’s swimming in fresh water, he won’t even swim in Miami. Big believer in chlorine. No, he can just hold the bikes.” She poked a finger in my belly. “Are we done here? Got another one of those if you need it. This is a one-time deal — take advantage. One time per assistant. Rest of the time you work when I work. Which is always.”

“I am so relaxed right now.”

“Good! But is there anything else to do around here besides this?”

Which is how we came to be wandering around inside Kenwood House, followed, for a while, by an eagle-eyed six-year-old girl whose distracted mother refused to listen to her excellent hunch. I trailed red-eyed behind my new employer, noticing for the first time her very particular way of looking at paintings, how for example she ignored all men, not as painters, but as subjects, walking past a Rembrandt self-portrait without pausing, ignoring all the earls and dukes, and dismissing, with a single line—“Get a haircut!”—a merchant seaman with my father’s laughing eyes. Landscapes, too, were nothing to her. She loved dogs, animals, fruit, fabrics, and flowers especially. Over the years I learned to expect that the bunch of anemones we had just seen in the Prado or the peonies from the National Gallery would reappear, a week or so later, in vases all over whichever house or hotel we happened to be in at the time. Many small, painted dogs, too, leaped from canvases into her life. Kenwood was the source of Colette, an incontinent Joshua Reynolds spaniel bought in Paris a few months later, whom I then had to walk twice a day for a year. But more than any of these she loved the pictures of the women: their faces, their fripperies, their hairstyles, their corsetry, their little, pointy shoes.

“Oh my God, it’s Judy!”

Aimee was across the red damask room, in front of a life-size portrait, laughing. I came up behind and peered at the Van Dyck in question. No doubt about it: there was Judy Ryan, in all her horrible glory, but four hundred years ago, wearing an unflattering black-and-white tent of lace and satin, and with her right hand — half maternal, half menacing — resting on the shoulder of a young, unnamed page. Her bloodhound eyes, terrible fringe, the long, chinless face — it was all there. We laughed so much it seemed to me that something changed between us, some formality or fear fell away, so that when, a few minutes later, Aimee claimed to be charmed by something called The Infant Academy I felt free enough at least to disagree.

“It’s a bit sentimental, isn’t it? And weird…”

“I like it! I like the weirdness. Naked babies painting naked pictures of each other. I’m a sucker for babies right now.” She looked wistfully at a boy child with a coy smirk on his cherubic face. “He reminds me of my baby. You really don’t like it?”

I didn’t know at the time that Aimee was pregnant with Kara, her second child. She probably didn’t know it herself. To me it was obvious the whole picture was ridiculous, and the pink-cheeked infants especially repulsive, but when I looked at her face I saw she was serious. And what are babies, I can remember thinking, if they can do this to women? Do they have the power to reprogram their mothers? To make their mothers into the kinds of women their younger selves would not even recognize? The idea frightened me. I restricted myself to praising her son Jay’s beauty in comparison to these cherubim, not very convincingly or coherently, thanks to the weed, and Aimee turned to me, frowning.

“You don’t want kids, that it? Or you think you don’t want them.”

“Oh, I know I don’t want them.”

She patted me on the top of my head, as if there were not twelve years between us but forty.

“You’re, what? Twenty-three? Things change. I was exactly the same.”

“No, I’ve always known. Since I was little. I’m not the mothering type. Never wanted them, never will. I saw what it did to my mother.”

“What did it do to her?”

To be asked so directly forced me to actually consider the answer.

“She was a young mum, then a single mum. There were things she wanted to be but she couldn’t, not then — she was trapped. She had to fight for any time for herself.”

Aimee put her hand on her hips and assumed a pedantic look.

“Well, I’m a single mom. And I can assure you my baby doesn’t stop me doing a damn thing. He’s like my fucking inspiration right now if you really want to know. It’s a balance, for sure, but you’ve just got to want it enough.”

I thought of the Jamaican nanny, Estelle, who let me into Aimee’s house each morning and then disappeared to the nursery. That there might be any practical divergence between my mother’s situation and her own did not seem to occur to Aimee, and this was one of my earliest lessons in her way of viewing the differences between people, which were never structural or economic but always essentially differences of personality. I looked at the color in her cheeks and where my hands were — out in front of me, like a politician making a point — and realized that our discussion had become rapidly and strangely heated, without either of us really wanting it to, as if the very word “baby” was a kind of accelerant. I put my hands back by my sides and smiled.

“It’s just not for me.”

We headed back through the galleries, looking for the exit, falling in step with a tour guide, he was telling a tale I’d known since childhood, about a brown girl — the daughter of a Caribbean slave and her British master — brought to England and raised in this big white house by well-to-do relatives, one of whom happened to be the Lord Chief Justice. A favorite anecdote of my mother’s. Except my mother did not tell it like the tour guide, she did not believe that a great-uncle’s compassion for his brown great-niece had the power to end slavery in England. I picked up one of the leaflets stacked on a side-table and read that the girl’s father and mother had “met in the Caribbean,” as if they’d been strolling through a beach resort at cocktail hour. Amused, I turned to show it to Aimee but she was in the next room, listening intently to the guide, hovering at the edges of the tour group as if she were part of it. She was always moved by stories that proved “the power of love”—and what difference did it make to me if she was? But I couldn’t help myself, I began channeling my mother, commenting ironically on the commentary, until the guide became irritated and directed his group outside. When we, too, headed for the exit, I took over Aimee’s tour, leading her through a low tunnel of ivy bent into an arbor and describing the Zong as if that great ship were floating right there in the lake right before us. It was an easy image to conjure up, I knew it intimately, it had sailed so many times through my childhood nightmares. On its way to Jamaica, but far off course due to an error in navigation, low on drinking water, filled with thirsty slaves (“Oh?” said Aimee, pulling a briar rose from its bush) and captained by a man who, fearing the slaves would not survive the rest of the journey — but not wanting a financial loss on his first voyage — gathered a hundred and thirty-three men, women and children and threw them overboard, shackled to each other: spoiled cargo on which insurance could later be collected. The famously compassionate great-uncle oversaw that case, too — I told Aimee, as my mother had told me — and he ruled against the captain, but only on the principle that the captain had made a mistake. He, and not the insurers, must take the loss. Those thrashing bodies were still cargo, you could still jettison cargo to protect the rest of your cargo. You just wouldn’t be reimbursed for it. Aimee nodded, tucked the rose she had plucked between her left ear and her baseball cap and knelt suddenly to pat a passing pack of small dogs that were dragging behind them a single walker.

“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” I heard her tell a dachshund, and then, straightening up and facing me again: “If my dad hadn’t died young? No way I’d be here. It’s the pain. Jews, gays, women, blacks — the bloody Irish. That’s our secret fucking strength.” I thought of my mother — who had no patience for sentimental readings of history — and cringed. We left the dogs and walked on. The sky was cloudless, the Heath filled with flowers and foliage, the ponds were golden pools of light, but I couldn’t rid myself of this feeling of discomfort and imbalance, and when I tried to trace its source I found myself back before that unnamed page in the gallery, a little gold ring in his ear, who looked beseechingly up at Judy’s doppelgänger as we’d laughed at her. She did not look back at him, she never could, she’d been painted in such a way as to make that impossible. But hadn’t I also avoided his eye, as I avoided Granger’s eye and he avoided mine? I could see this little Moor now with absolute clarity. It was as if he were standing on the path before me.

Aimee insisted we end that peculiar afternoon by swimming in the ladies’ pond. Granger waited once more at the gates, three bikes at his feet, angrily turning the pages of his pocket Penguin Machiavelli. A haze of pollen hovered just above the water, it seemed to be caught in the thick, drowsy air, though the water was frigid. I went in cringingly, in my knickers and T-shirt, inching myself down the ladder while two broad-beamed English women in sturdy Speedos and swim caps bobbed nearby, offering unsolicited encouragement to all who were in the process of joining them. (“Really rather nice once you’re in.” “Just keep kicking your legs till you feel them.” “If Woolf swam here, so can you!”) Women to the right and left of me, some three times my age, slipped right off the deck into the water, but I couldn’t get any deeper than my waist and, stalling for time, turned round and pretended instead to be admiring the scene: white-haired ladies moving in a stately circle through the foul-smelling duckweed. A pretty dragonfly dressed in Aimee’s favorite shade of green flitted by. I watched it land on the deck, just by my hand, and close its iridescent wings. Where was Aimee? I had a moment of paralyzing, weed-inflected paranoia: had she got in before me, while I was fretting about my underwear? Already drowned? Tomorrow would I find myself at an inquest, explaining to the world why I let a heavily insured, universally beloved Australian swim unaccompanied in an ice-cold North London pond? A banshee wail pierced the civilized scene: I turned back and saw Aimee, naked, running from the changing room toward me, launching herself in a dive over my head and over the ladder, arms out, back perfectly arched, as if lifted from below by an invisible principal dancer, before hitting the water clean and true.

I didn’t know that Tracey’s father had gone to prison. It was my mother who told me, a few months after the fact: “I see he’s gone in again.” She didn’t have to say more, or tell me to spend less time with Tracey, it was happening naturally anyway. A cooling-off: one of those things that can happen between girls. At first I was distraught, thinking it permanent, but in fact it was only a hiatus, one of many we would have, lasting a couple of months, sometimes longer, but always ending — not coincidentally — with her father getting out again, or else returning from Jamaica, where he often had to flee, when things got hot for him in the neighborhood. It was as if, when he was “in,” or away, Tracey went into standby mode, pausing herself like a video-tape. Although in class we no longer shared a desk (we had been separated after Lily’s party, my mother went up to the school and requested it) I had a clear view of her each day and when there was “trouble at home” I sensed it at once, it revealed itself in everything she did, or didn’t do. She made life as difficult as possible for our teacher, not with explicit bad behavior like the rest of us, not by swearing or fighting, but by an absolute withdrawal of her presence. Her body was there, nothing else. She wouldn’t answer questions or ask them, didn’t involve herself in any activities or copy anything down, or even open her exercise book, and I understood, at such times, that for Tracey time had stopped. If Mr. Sherman started shouting she sat impassive at her desk, her eyes angled to a point above his head, her noise upturned, and nothing he could say — no threat and no degree of volume — had any effect. As I’d predicted, she never did forget those Garbage Pail Kids cards. And being sent to the headmistress’s office held no fear for her: she stood up in the coat she had anyway never taken off and walked out of the room as if it made no difference where she went or what happened to her. When she was in this state of mind I took the opportunity to do those things that, when I was with Tracey, I felt inhibited from doing. I spent more time with Lily Bingham, for example, taking pleasure in her good humor and gentle way of being: she still played with dolls, knew nothing of sex, loved drawing and making things out of cardboard and glue. In other words she was still a child, as I sometimes wished I could be. In her games nobody died or was afraid or took revenge or feared being uncovered as a fraud, and there was absolutely no black and no white, for, as she solemnly explained to me one day as we played, she herself was “color blind” and saw only what was in a person’s heart. She had a little cardboard theater of the Russian Ballet, bought in Covent Garden, and for her a perfect afternoon involved maneuvering the cardboard prince around the stage, letting him meet a cardboard princess and fall in love with her, while a scratchy copy of Swan Lake, her father’s, played in the background. She loved ballet, though she was a poor dancer herself, too bandy-legged to have any real hopes, and she knew all the French words for everything, and the tragic life stories of Diaghilev and Pavlova. Tap dancing didn’t interest her. When I showed her my well-worn copy of Stormy Weather she reacted in a way I hadn’t anticipated, she was offended by it — hurt, even. Why was everybody black? It was unkind, she said, to have only black people in a film, it wasn’t fair. Maybe in America you could do that, but not here, in England, where everybody was equal anyway and there was no need to “go on about it.” And we wouldn’t like it, she said, if someone said to us that only black people could come to Isabel’s dance class, that wouldn’t be nice or fair to us, would it? We’d be sad about that. Or that only black people could come into our school. We wouldn’t like that, would we? I said nothing. I put Stormy Weather back in my rucksack and went home, walking beneath a Willesden sunset of petroleum colors and quick-shunting clouds, going over and over this curious lecture in my mind, wondering what she could have meant by the word “we”?

When things were frosty between Tracey and me I found Saturdays hard, and relied on Mr. Booth for conversation and advice. I brought new information to him — which I got from the library — and he added to what I had or explained things I didn’t understand. Mr. Booth hadn’t known, for example, that it was not really “Fred Astaire” but “Frederick Austerlitz,” but he understood what “Austerlitz” meant, he explained it was a name that must have come not from America but from Europe, probably German or Austrian, possibly Jewish. To me Astaire was America — if he had been on the flag I would not have been surprised — but now I learned that he’d spent a lot of time in London, in fact, and that he had become famous here, dancing with his sister, and if I’d been born sixty years earlier I could have gone to the Shaftesbury Theater and seen him myself. And what’s more, said Mr. Booth, his sister was a far better dancer than him, everybody said so, she was the star and he was the also-ran, can’t sing, can’t act, balding, can dance, a little, ha ha ha, well he showed them, didn’t he? Listening to Mr. Booth, I wondered if it were possible for me, too, to become a person who revealed themselves later in life, much later, so that one day — a long time from now — it would be Tracey sitting in the front row of the Shaftesbury Theater, watching me dance, our positions reversed completely, my own superiority finally recognized by the world. And in later years, said Mr. Booth, taking my library book out of my hands and reading from it, in later years his daily routine was little changed from the life he had always led. He woke up at five a.m. and breakfasted on a single boiled egg that kept his weight at a constant hundred and thirty-four pounds. Addicted to television serials such as The Guiding Light and As the World Turns, he would telephone his housekeeper if he could not watch the soap operas, to find out what had happened. Mr. Booth closed the book, smiled and said: “What an odd fish!”

When I complained to Mr. Booth of Astaire’s one imperfection — that he couldn’t, in my opinion, sing — I was wrong-footed by how strongly he disagreed, usually we agreed about everything, and were always laughing together, but now he picked out the notes to “All of Me” in a minimal sort of way on the piano and said: “But singing isn’t just about belting it out, is it? It’s not just who has the most wobble or the highest note, no, it’s about phrasing, and being delicate, and getting just the right feeling from a song, the soul of it, so that something real happens inside you when a man opens his mouth to sing, and don’t you want to feel something real rather than just having your poor earholes bashed in?”

He stopped talking and played “All of Me” in full, and I sang along with him, consciously trying to deliver each phrase in the same manner that Astaire does in Silk Stockings—cutting some lines short, half speaking others — though it didn’t feel natural to me. Together Mr. Booth and I considered what it would be like to love the east, west, north and south of somebody, to gain complete control of them, even if they loved, in return, only a small percentage of us. Usually I performed with one hand on the piano, facing out, because that’s how the girls did it in the movies, and that way I could keep an eye on the clock over the church door and know when the last child had filed in and therefore when it was time to stop, but on this occasion the desire to try to sing in harmony with that delicate melody — to match Mr. Booth’s way of playing it, not just to “belt it out” but to create a real feeling — made me instinctively turn inwards, halfway through the verse, and when I did I saw that Mr. Booth was crying, very softly, but certainly crying. I stopped singing. “And he’s trying to make her dance,” he said. “Fred wants Cyd to dance, but she won’t, will she? She’s what you’d call an intellectual, from Russia, and she don’t want to dance, and she says to him: ‘The trouble with dancing is You go, go, go, but you don’t get anywhere!’ And Fred says: ‘You’re telling me!’ Lovely. Lovely! Now look, dear, it’s time for class. You’d best get your shoes on.”

As we tied our laces and prepared to get back in line, Tracey said to her mother, within my hearing: “See? She loves all them weird old songs.” It had the tone of an accusation. I knew that Tracey loved pop music, but I didn’t think the melodies were as pretty, and now I tried to say so. Tracey shrugged, stopping me in my tracks. Her shrugs had a power over me. They could end any topic. She turned back to her mother and said, “Likes old buggers, too.”

Her mother’s reaction shocked me: she looked over and smirked. At that moment my father was outside, in the churchyard, in his usual spot under the cherry trees; I could see him with his pouch of tobacco in one hand and the cigarette paper in the other, he didn’t bother to disguise these things from me any longer. But there was not a world in which I could make a cruel comment to another child and have my father — or mother — smirk, or side with me in any way. It struck me that Tracey and her mother were on the same side, and I thought there was something unnatural about this and that they seemed to know it, for in certain contexts they hid it. I felt sure that if my father had been present Tracey’s mother would not have dared to smirk.

“Best keep away from strange old men,” she said, pointing at me. But when I protested that Mr. Booth was not strange to us, that he was our dear old piano player and we loved him, Tracey’s mother seemed bored as I talked, crossed her arms over her huge chest and looked straight ahead.

“Mum thinks he’s a nonce,” explained Tracey.

I walked out of that lesson gripping my father’s hand, but I didn’t tell him what had happened. I didn’t think of asking either of my parents for help in any matter, not any more, if anything I thought only of protecting them. I went elsewhere for guidance. Books had begun to enter my life. Not good books, not yet, still those old showbiz biographies that I read in the absence of sacred texts, as if they were sacred texts, taking a form of comfort from them, though they were hack work done for quick money, barely given a second thought by their authors, surely, but to me, important. I kept certain pages folded and read lines over and over, like a Victorian lady reading her psalms. He isn’t doing that right—that was a very important one. It was what Astaire claimed he was thinking whenever he watched himself onscreen, and I noted that third-person pronoun. This is what I understood by it: that for Astaire the person in the film was not especially connected with him. And I took this to heart, or rather, it echoed a feeling I already had, mainly that it was important to treat oneself as a kind of stranger, to remain unattached and unprejudiced in your own case. I thought you needed to think like that to achieve anything in this world. Yes, I thought that was a very elegant attitude. And I became fixated, too, upon Katharine Hepburn’s famous Fred and Ginger theory: He gives her class, she gives him sex. Was this a general rule? Did all friendships — all relations — involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? Did it extend to peoples and nations or was it a thing that happened only between individuals? What did my father give my mother — and vice versa? What did Mr. Booth and I give each other? What did I give Tracey? What did Tracey give me?