Swing Time

PART SIX: Day and Night

That autumn, after clearing, I got into my second-choice university, to study media, half a mile from the flat gray English Channel, a scene I remembered from childhood holidays. The sea was fringed by a pebble beach of many sad brown stones, every now and then a large, pale blue one, pieces of white shell, knuckles of coral, bright shards easy to mistake for something precious that turned out to be only glass or broken crockery. My parochial city attitude I took with me, along with a pot plant and several pairs of trainers, sure that every soul on the street would be astounded to see the likes of me. But the likes of me were not so uncommon. From London and Manchester, from Liverpool and Bristol, in our big jeans and bomber jackets, with our little twists or shaved heads or tight-pulled buns slick with Dax, with our proud collection of caps. Those first weeks we gravitated toward each other, walking in a defensive gang together along the seafront, readied for insults, but the locals were never as interested in us as we were in ourselves. The salty air cracked our lips, there was never anywhere to get your hair done, but “You up at the college?” was a genuine polite inquiry, not an attack on our right to be there. And there were other, unexpected advantages. Here I had a “maintenance grant,” covering food and rent, and weekends were cheap — there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. We spent our spare time together, in each other’s rooms, asking after each other’s pasts, with a delicacy that felt right to people whose family trees could be traced back only a branch or two before being sunk in obscurity. There was one exception, a boy, a Ghanaian: he came from a long line of doctors and lawyers and was daily agonized not to find himself at Oxford. But for the rest of us, who were only ever one remove, or occasionally two, distant from father machinists and mother cleaners, from grandmother orderlies and grandfather bus drivers, we still felt we had done the miraculous thing, that we were the “first in our line to go,” and this in itself was enough. If the institution was almost as fresh as we were, that, too, came to feel like an advantage. There was no grand academic past here, we didn’t have to doff our caps to anyone. Our subjects were relatively new — Media Studies, Gender Studies — and so were our rooms, and the young faculty. It was our place to invent. I thought of Tracey escaping early into that community of dancers, of how jealous I’d been, but now on the contrary I felt a little sorry for her, her world seemed childish to me, just a way of playing with the body, whereas I could walk down the hall and attend a lecture called something like “Thinking the Black Body: A Dialectic,” or dance happily in my new friends’ rooms, late into the night, and not to the old show tunes but to the new music, to Gang Starr or Nas. When I danced now I didn’t have to obey any ancient rules of position or style: I moved as I pleased, as the beats themselves compelled me to move. Poor Tracey: the early-morning starts, anxiety on the scales, her aching insteps, the offering up of her young body to the judgment of other people! I was very free compared to her. Here we stayed up late, ate as we pleased, smoked weed. We listened to the golden age of hip-hop, unaware at the time that we were living through a golden age. I got schooled on lyrics by those who knew more than me and took these informal lessons as seriously as anything I heard in the lecture halls. It was the spirit of the times: we applied high theory to shampoo ads, philosophy to NWA videos. In our little circle to be “conscious” was the thing, and after years of forcing my hair straight with the hot-comb I now let it frizz and curl, and took to wearing a small map of Africa around my neck, the larger countries made out in a patchwork leather of black and red, green and gold. I wrote long, emotional essays on the phenomenon of the “Uncle Tom.”

When my mother came down to stay for three nights, near the end of that first term, I thought she’d be very impressed by all this. But I’d forgotten that I was not quite like the others, not really the “first in our line to go.” In this steeplechase my mother was one leap ahead of me and I’d forgotten that what was enough for others was never enough for her. Walking along the beach together on that final morning of her stay, she started a sentence which I could see myself somehow escaped her, going far beyond whatever she had intended, but still she said it, she compared her just-completed degree to the one I was starting, called my college a “trumped-up hotel,” not a university at all, nothing but a student-loan trap for kids who didn’t know any better, whose parents were uneducated themselves, and I became infuriated, we argued horribly. I told her not to bother visiting again, and she didn’t.

I expected to feel desolate — as if I had cut through the only cord that connected me to the world — but this feeling didn’t arrive. I had, for the first time in my life, a lover, and was so completely occupied with him that I found I could bear the loss of anything and everything else. He was a conscious young man called Rakim — he had renamed himself after the rapper — and his face, long like mine, was of a deeper honey-brown shade, with two very fierce, very dark eyes dropped into it, a prominent nose, and a gently feminine, unexpected overbite, like Huey P. Newton himself. He wore skinny dreadlocks to his shoulders, Converse All Stars in all weather, little round Lennon glasses. I thought he was the most beautiful man in the world. He thought so, too. He considered himself a “Five Percenter,” that is, a God in himself — as all the male sons of Africa were Gods — and when he first explained this concept to me my initial thought was how nice it must be to think of yourself as a living God, how relaxing! But no, as it turned out, it was a heavy duty: it was not easy to be burdened with truth while so many people lived in ignorance, eighty-five percent of people, to be exact. But worse than the ignorant were the malicious, the ten percent who knew all that Rakim claimed to know but who worked to actively disguise and subvert the truth, the better to keep the eighty-five in ignorance and wield advantage over them. (In this group of perverse deceivers Rakim included all the churches, the Nation of Islam itself, the media, the “establishment.”) He had a cool vintage Panthers poster on his wall, in which the big cat looked about to leap out at you, and he spoke often of the violent life of the big American cities, of the sufferings of our people in New York and Chicago, in Baltimore and LA, places I had never visited and could barely imagine. Sometimes I had the impression that this ghetto life — though it was three thousand miles away — was more real to him than the quiet, pleasant seascape in which we actually lived.

There were times when the stress of being a Poor Righteous Teacher could overwhelm. He pulled down the shades in his room, waked and baked, missed lectures, begged me not to leave him alone, spent hours studying the Supreme Alphabet and the Supreme Mathematics, which to me looked like only note book after note book filled with letters and numbers in incomprehensible combinations. At other times he appeared well suited to the task of global enlightenment. Serene and knowledgeable, sitting cross-legged like a guru upon the floor, pouring out hibiscus tea for our little circle, “dropping science,” bopping his head gently to his namesake on the stereo. I had never before met a boy like this. The boys I’d known had had no passions, not really, they couldn’t afford them: it was the act of not caring that was important to them. They were in a lifelong contest with each other — and with the world — exactly to demonstrate who cared less, who among them gave less of a fuck. It was a form of defense against loss, which seemed to them inevitable anyway. Rakim was different: all his passions were on the surface, he couldn’t hide them, he didn’t try to — that’s what I loved about him. I didn’t notice at first how hard it was for him to laugh. Laughter did not feel appropriate for a God in human form — much less for the girlfriend of a God — and I should probably have read a warning in that. Instead I followed him devotedly, to the strangest places. Numerology! He was besotted with numerology. He showed me how to render my name in numbers, and then how to manipulate these numbers in a particular way, in accordance with the Supreme Mathematics, until they meant: “The struggle to triumph over the division within.” I didn’t understand all of what he said — we were most often stoned during these conversations — but the division he claimed he could see inside of me I understood very well, nothing was easier for me to grasp than the idea that I was born half right and half wrong, yes, as long as I did not think of my actual father and the love I bore him I could tap this feeling in myself very easily.

Such ideas had nothing to do with, and no place in, Rakim’s actual schoolwork: his degree was in Business Studies and Hospitality. But they dominated our time together and little by little I began to feel myself under a cloud of constant correction. Nothing I did was right. He was repelled by the media that I was supposed to be studying — the minstrels and the dancing mammies, the hoofers and the chorus girls — he saw no worth in any of it, even if my purpose was critique, the whole subject for him was empty, a product of “Jewish Hollywood,” whom he included, en masse, in that deceitful ten percent. If I tried to talk to him about something I was writing — especially in front of our friends — he would make a point of diminishing or ridiculing it. Too stoned in company once, I made the mistake of trying to explain what I found beautiful about the origins of tap dancing — the Irish crew and the African slaves, beating out time with their feet on the wooden decks of those ships, exchanging steps, creating a hybrid form — but Rakim, also stoned and in a cruel mood, stood up, rolled his eyes, stuck his lips out, shook his hands like a minstrel, and said: Oh massa, I’s so happy on this here slave ship I be dancing for joy. Cut his eyes at me, sat back down. Our friends looked at the floor. The mortification was intense: for months afterward just the thought of it could bring the heat back to my cheeks. But at the time I didn’t blame him for behaving in this way, or feel I loved him any less: my instinct was always to find the fault in myself. My biggest flaw at the time, in his view and my own, was my femininity, which was of the wrong kind. Woman, in Rakim’s schema, was intended to be the “earth,” she grounded man, who was himself pure idea, who “dropped science,” and I was, in his judgment, far from where I should be, at the roots of things. I did not grow plants or cook food, never spoke of babies or domestic matters, and competed with Rakim when and where I should have been supportive. Romance was beyond me: it required a form of personal mystery I couldn’t manufacture and disliked in others. I couldn’t pretend that my legs do not grow hair or that my body does not excrete a variety of foul substances or that my feet aren’t flat as pancakes. I could not flirt and saw no purpose in flirting. I did not mind dressing up for strangers — when out at college parties or if we went up to London for the clubs — but in our rooms, within our intimacy, I could not be a girl, nor could I be anybody’s baby, I could only be a female human, and the sex I understood was of the kind that occurs between friends and equals, bracketing conversation, like a shelf of books between bookends. These deep faults Rakim traced back to the blood of my father, running through me like a poison. But it was also my own doing, my own mind, too busy in itself. A city mind, he called it, the kind that can never know peace, because it has nothing natural to meditate upon, only concrete and images, and images of images—“simulacra,” as we said back then. The cities had corrupted me, making me mannish. Didn’t I know that the cities had been built by the ten percent? That they were a deliberate tool of oppression? An unnatural habitat for the African soul? His evidence for this theory was sometimes complex — suppressed government conspiracies, scrawled diagrams of architectural plans, obscure quotations ascribed to presidents and civic leaders which I had to take on faith — and at other times simple and damning. Did I know the names of the trees? The names of the flowers? No? But how could an African live this way? Whereas he knew them all, though this was due to the fact — which he didn’t care to broadcast — that he was a son of rural England, raised first in Yorkshire and then in Dorset, in remote villages, and always the only one of his kind on his street, the only one of his kind in his school, a fact I found more exotic than all his radicalism, all his mysticism. I loved that he knew the names of the counties and how they connected to each other, the names of rivers and where and how exactly they ran into the sea, could tell a mulberry from a blackberry, a copse from a coppice. Never in my life had I gone walking with no purpose, but now I did, accompanying him on his walks, along the stark seafront, down abandoned piers, and sometimes deep into the town, down its little cobbled lanes, crossing parkland, weaving through cemeteries and along A-roads, so far along that we would come upon fields finally and lie down in them. On these long walks he did not forget his preoccupations. He used them to frame what we saw, in ways that could surprise me. The Georgian grandeur of a crescent of houses facing the sea, their façades white as sugar — these were, he explained, also paid for by sugar, built by a plantation owner from our own ancestral island, the island neither of us had ever visited. And the little churchyard in which we sometimes gathered at night, to smoke and drink and lie on the grass, this was where Sarah Forbes Bonetta was married, a story he retold with such verve you’d have thought he’d married the woman himself. I lay down with him on the scrubby grass of the cemetery and listened. A little seven-year-old West African girl, high born but caught up in intertribal war, kidnapped by Dahomey raiders. She witnessed the murder of her family, but was later “rescued”—a word Rakim placed in finger quotes — by an English captain who convinced the King of Dahomey to give her as a present to Queen Victoria. “A present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” This captain named her Bonetta, after his own ship, and by the time they’d reached England he’d realized how smart a little girl she was, how unusually quick and alert, as bright as any white girl, and when the Queen met her she could see all of this, too, deciding to raise Sarah as her god-daughter, marrying her off, many years later, when she came of age, to a rich Yoruba merchant. In this church, said Rakim, it happened in this church right here. I got up on my elbows in the grass and looked over at the church, so unassuming, its simple crenellations and solid red door. “And there were eight black bridesmaids in a procession,” he said, tracing their journey from the gate to the church door with the tip of a glowing joint. “Imagine it! Eight black and eight white, and the African men walked with the white girls and the white men with the African girls.” Even in the darkness I could see it all. The twelve gray horses pulling the carriage, and the magnificent ivory lace of the gown, and the great crowd gathered to see the spectacle, spilling out of the church, on to the lawn, and back all the way to the lych-gate, standing on the low stone walls and hanging in the trees, just to catch a look at her.

I think of how Rakim gathered his information back then: in the public libraries, in the college archive, doggedly reading old newspapers, examining microfiche, following footnotes. And then I think of him now, in the age of the internet, and how perfectly happy he must be, or else how consumed, to the point of raving madness. Now I can find out myself in a moment the name of that captain and can learn in the same click what he thought of the girl he gifted to a queen. Since her arrival in the country, she has made considerable progress in the study of the English language and manifests great musical talent and intelligence of no common order. Her hair is short, black, and curling, strongly indicative of her African birth; while her features are pleasing and handsome, and her manners and conduct most mild and affectionate to all about her. I know now that her Yoruba name was Aina, meaning “difficult birth,” a name you give to a child who is born with her umbilical cord tied round her neck. I can see a photo of Aina in her high-necked Victorian corsetry, with her face closed, her body perfectly still. I remember that Rakim had a refrain, always proudly declaimed, with his overbite pulled back over his teeth: “We have our own kings! We have our own queens!” I would nod along for the sake of peace but in truth some part of me always rebelled. Why did he think it so important for me to know that Beethoven dedicated a sonata to a mulatto violinist, or that Shakespeare’s dark lady really was dark, or that Queen Victoria had deigned to raise a child of Africa, “bright as any white girl?” I did not want to rely on each European fact having its African shadow, as if without the scaffolding of the European fact everything African might turn to dust in my hands. It gave me no pleasure to see that sweet-faced girl dressed like one of Victoria’s own children, frozen in a formal photograph, with a new kind of cord round her neck. I always wanted life — movement.

One slow Sunday Rakim blew some smoke out of his mouth and started talking about going to see a “real film.” It was French, playing at the college film society that same day, and over the course of the morning we had steadily torn apart a flyer for it, using the glossy card to make many little roaches for our joints. But you could still make out the face of a brown girl in a blue headscarf who, Rakim now claimed, had something of my features, or I had hers. She was staring directly at me with what was left of her right eye. We dragged ourselves across campus to the media room and sat in the uncomfortable fold-up chairs. The film started. But with the fog in my head it was quite hard to understand what I was watching, it seemed to be made out of many little pieces, like a stained-glass window, and I did not know which parts were important or on what scenes Rakim felt I should focus, although maybe everyone in the room felt the same, maybe it’s part of the effect of that film that each viewer should see something different in it. I can’t say what Rakim saw. I saw tribes. Many different tribes, from every corner of the world, operating under the internal rules of their groups and then edited together in a complex pattern that appeared to have, in the moment, its own weird logic. I saw Japanese girls in traditional costume, dancing in formation, making strangely hip-hop movements on their elevated geta. Cape Verdeans waiting with perfect, timeless patience for a boat that may or may not come. I saw white-blond children walking down an otherwise deserted Icelandic road, in a town painted black by volcanic ash. I heard a dubbed and disembodied woman’s voice speak over these images, she was contrasting African time to the time of Europe and time as it is experienced in Asia. She said that a hundred years ago mankind was confronted with the question of space, but that the problem of the twentieth century was the simultaneous existence of different notions of time. I looked over at Rakim: he was making notes in the darkness, hopelessly stoned. It got to the point where the images themselves were too much for him, he could only listen to the woman’s voice and make his notes, faster and faster as the film went on, until he’d written half the script out in his pad.

For me the film had no beginning or end, and this was not an unpleasant sensation, just a mysterious one, as if time itself had expanded to make space for this infinite parade of tribes. On and on it went, refusing to end, there were parts I admit I slept through, only to awaken sharply when my chin hit my chest, at which point I would look up and find myself confronted with a bizarre image — a temple consecrated to cats, Jimmy Stewart chasing Kim Novak up a spiral staircase — images made all the more alien because I hadn’t followed what came before and would not see what came after. And in one of these lucid gaps between waking up and falling asleep I heard once more that same disembodied voice speak of the essential indestructibility of women, and of men’s relation to it. For it is the job of men, she said, to stop women from realizing their own indestructibility, and for as long as possible. Each time I woke with a start I could feel Rakim’s impatience with me, his need to correct me, and I began to fear the closing credits, I could imagine the exact intensity and length of the argument that would follow them, in that dangerous moment when we were out of the cinema, back in his room and far from witnesses. I never wanted that film to end.

A few days later I dumped Rakim, in a cowardly way, in the form of a letter, slipped under his door. In it I blamed myself and said I hoped we could be friends, but he sent me one back, in livid red ink, informing me he knew that I was in the ten percent, and that from now on he would be on his guard against me. He was as good as his word. For the rest of my college life he would turn on his heel if he saw me coming, cross the street if he spotted me in town, leave any lecture room I entered. Two years later, at graduation, a white woman hurried across the hall and grabbed my mother’s sleeve, and said, “I thought it was you — you’re an inspiration to our young people, you really are — but I’m so glad to meet you! And this is my son.” My mother turned around with her face already fixed in an expression I knew rather well by then — gentle condescension mixed with pride, the same face she often had now when on television, whenever she was called upon to “speak for those who had no voice.” She put out her hand to greet this white woman’s son, who would not at first come out from behind his mother and when he did looked at the ground, his skinny dreads obscuring his face, though I knew him at once by his Converse All Stars, poking out from beneath his graduation gown.

On my fifth visit, I went alone. Strode straight through the airport, out into the heat, feeling a glorious competency. To my left, to my right, were the lost and the wary: beach-bound tourists, evangelicals in their oversized T-shirts and all the serious young German anthropologists. No representative led me to my vehicle. I was not waiting for “the rest of my party.” I had my coins ready for the cripples in the car park, my cab fare already tucked in the back of my jeans, my half a dozen phrases. Nakam! Jamun gam? Jama rek! Khakis and crumpled white linen long gone. Black jeans, a black silk shirt and big gold swinging hoops in my ears. I believed I’d mastered local time. I knew now how long it took to get to the ferry and at what time of day, so that when my cab pulled up to the gangway hundreds of other people had already done my waiting for me, all I had to do was get out of the car and walk right on board. The ship lurched from the shore. On the top deck the sway pitched me forward, through two layers of people up to the barrier, and happy to be there, like someone just then pushed into their lover’s arms. I looked down at all the life and movement below: jostling people, squawking chickens, dolphins leaping in the foam, narrowboats reeling in our wake, half-starved dogs running along the shoreline. Here and there I spotted what I knew now to be the Tablighi, their short trousers flapping around their ankles, because if they were longer they would get dirty, and the prayers of the dirty don’t get answered, so you end up burning your feet in hell. But beyond their dress it was really their stillness that marked them out. Amid all that activity they looked paused, either reading from their prayer books or sitting in silence, often with their kohl-rimmed eyes closed and a blissful smile nestled in their henna-stained beards, so peaceful compared to the rest of us. Dreaming of their pure and modern iman maybe: of small, nuclear families worshipping Allah in discreet apartments, of praise without magic, of direct access to God without local intermediaries, of sterilized hospital circumcisions, babies born without any celebratory dancing, women who did not think to pair a hot-pink hijab with a lime-green Lycra minidress. I wondered how hard it must be to maintain this dream, right now, on this ferry, as the unruly everyday faith unfolded all around them.

I settled on to a bench. On my left sat one of these spiritual young men, his eyes closed, clutching a folded prayer mat to his chest. On my other side, a glamorous girl with two sets of eyebrows — one pair painted strangely above her own — who sat joggling a small bag of cashews in her hands. I considered all the months that separated my first ferry trip from this one. The Illuminated Academy for Girls — which, for convenience’s sake, and to save everyone the shame of saying it, we abbreviated, behind Aimee’s back, to IAG — had survived its first year. Thrived, if you counted success in column inches. For the rest of us it had been a periodic ordeal, intense whenever the visits rolled round or some crisis brought the embattled headmaster into our meeting rooms in London or New York, via fraught video-conference. Oddly distant at all other times. I often had cause to recall Granger, in Heathrow, the night of our first return, hugging me round my shoulders as we queued for Customs: “None of this looks real to me now! Something’s changed. Can’t be the same after seeing what I’ve seen!” But in a few days he was exactly the same, we all were: we left taps running, abandoned plastic bottles after a few sips, bought a single pair of jeans for the same sum as a trainee teacher’s yearly wage. If London was unreal, if New York was unreal, they were powerful stage shows: as soon as we were back inside them they not only seemed real but the only possible reality, and decisions made about the village from these locations always appeared to have a certain plausibility while we were making them, and only later, when one or other of us arrived back here, and crossed this river, did the potential absurdity of whatever it was become clear. Four months ago, for example, it had seemed important, in New York, to teach the theory of evolution to these children — and their teachers — many of whom had never so much as heard of the name Darwin. It seemed far less of a priority in the village itself, when we reached it in the middle of the rainy season to find a third of the kids off with malaria, half a classroom ceiling fallen in, the toilet contract unfulfilled and the solar-panel-powered electricity circuits rusted and corrupted. But our biggest problem, as Fern had predicted, was not our pedagogical illusions, exactly, but the wavering nature of Aimee’s attention. Her new thing was technology. She had begun to spend a lot of social time with the brilliant young people of Silicon Valley, and liked to consider herself one of their tribe, “basically a nerd.” She’d become very responsive to their vision of a world transformed — saved — by technology. In the first flush of this new interest she did not abandon IAG or poverty reduction as much as patch the fresh preoccupation on to the old ones, with sometimes alarming results (“We’re going to give each one of these damn girls a laptop: that’s going to be their exercise book, that’s their library, their teacher, their everything!”). Which Fern then had to massage back into some semblance of reality. He stayed “on the ground” not for mere weeks but for whole seasons, partly out of affection for the village and his own commitment to his role there but also, I knew, to avoid working any more closely with Aimee than his preferred distance of four thousand miles. He saw what no one else saw. He noted the growing resentment of the boys, who had been left to fester in the old school, which — though Aimee sporadically rained a little money on it — was now little more than a ghost town, in which children sat around waiting for teachers unpaid so long they’d stopped coming to work. The government seemed to have withdrawn from the village generally: many other previously well-running, or reasonably well-running, services now languished cruelly. The clinic had not reopened, a huge pot-hole in the road just outside the village had been left to crater and spread. An Italian environmental scientist’s reports of dangerous levels of pesticides in the groundwater well were ignored no matter how many times Fern tried to alert the relevant ministries. Perhaps this kind of thing would have happened anyway. But it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the village was being punished for its connection with Aimee, or deliberately neglected in the expectation that Aimee’s money would flow into the gap.

One problem you could not find written down in any of the reports but Fern and I were both acutely aware of it, although we experienced it from opposite ends. Neither of us bothered discussing it with Aimee any more. (“But what if I love him?” was her only response, when we combined forces, by way of conference call, in an attempted intervention.) Instead we worked around her, swapping information like two PIs on the same case. I probably was the one who noticed it first, in London. I kept walking in on sweet nothings being passed back and forth, at her desktop, on her phone, always closed up or shut down the moment I entered whichever room. Then she stopped being shy. When he passed the AIDS test she’d made him take she was so glad she told me about it. I got used to seeing Lamin’s disembodied head in a corner, smiling at me, streaming at us live from, I presumed, the only internet café in Barra. He was there at breakfast with the kids in the mornings, and waved good-bye to them when their tutors arrived. He’d appear for dinner, like another guest at the table. He began to be included in meetings, the ridiculous “creative” kind (“Lam, what do you think about this corset?”) but also in serious meetings with accountants, the business manager, the PRs. From Fern’s end the situation was less queasily romantic, more concrete: Lamin’s compound got a new front door, then a toilet, then interior dividing walls, then a new roof of tile. This did not go unnoticed. A flat-screen TV had caused the latest trouble. “The Al Kalo called a meeting about it on Tuesday,” Fern informed me, when I called him to tell him the jet was taking off. “Lamin was away in Dakar, visiting family. Mostly the young people came. Everybody was very upset. It came down to a long discussion about how and when Lamin joined the Illuminati…”

I was in the process of texting Fern, to give him my latest location, when I heard a commotion the other side of the engine room, and looked up and saw bodies parting, moving toward the stairs, to avoid a skinny, flailing man who now came into view, shouting, waving his bony arms, in some form of severe distress. I turned to the man to my left: his face remained placid, eyes closed. The lady to my right raised both pairs of her brows and said: “Drunk man, oh my.” Two soldiers appeared and were on top of him in a moment, they took him by each of his wild arms and tried to force him down on to a spot on the bench a little way along from us, but each time his narrow buttocks connected with the seat he sprang up as if the wood were on fire, and so the plan changed, now they dragged him toward the entrance of the engine room, directly opposite me, and tried to force him through the little door and down the dark steps to where he could no longer be seen. I knew by then he was epileptic — I could see the foam gathering at the corners of his mouth — and at first I thought this was what they didn’t understand. As they twisted him out of his T-shirt I kept shouting, “Epileptic! He’s epileptic!” Until four eyebrows explained: “Sister, they know this.” They knew this but had no gentle arsenal of movements. They were the kind of soldiers instructed in brutality only. The more the man convulsed, the more he foamed, the more he infuriated them, and after a brief struggle in the doorway, where he momentarily convulsed in such a way that his limbs locked rigid like a toddler who refuses to be moved, they kicked him down the stairs, reached behind themselves and closed the door. We heard struggle, and terrible screams, dull connecting punches. Then silence. “What are you doing to that poor man?” cried four eyebrows, beside me, but when the door reopened, she lowered her eyes and returned to her cashews, and I didn’t say any of the things I thought I was going to say, and the crowd parted and the soldiers walked down the stairs unmolested. We were the weak and they were the strong, and whatever force is meant to mediate between the weak and the strong was not present, not on the ferry, not in the country. Only when the soldiers were out of sight did the Tablighi who was sitting next to me — with two other nearby men — enter the engine room and retrieve the epileptic and bring him out into the light. The Tablighi lay him tenderly across his lap: it looked like the pietà. He had two bleeding split eyes but was alive and calm. A portion of bench was cleared for him, and for the rest of the crossing he lay there, shirtless, gently moaning, until we docked, when he stood up like any other commuter, climbed down the stairs and merged into the hordes heading for Barra.

How happy I was to see Hawa, genuinely happy! It was lunch time when I kicked open the door, and also cashew season: everyone was arranged in circles of five or six, crouched around large bowls of the fire-blackened nuts that had to now be removed from their burned shells and placed in a series of luridly tie-dyed buckets. Even very small children could do this so it was all hands on deck, even for incompetents, like Fern, who was being laughed at by Hawa for his relatively tiny mound of shells.

“Look at you! You look like Miss Beyoncé herself! Well, I hope your nails are not too fancy, my lady, because now you have to come and show this poor Fern man how it’s done. Even Mohammed has a bigger pile — and he’s three!” I abandoned my single rucksack at the door — I had also learned to pack — and went to hug Hawa around her strong, narrow back. “Still no baby?” she whispered in my ear, and I whispered the same back, and we hugged yet more tightly and laughed into each other’s necks. It was very surprising to me that Hawa and I should have found a bond in this, across continents and cultures, but that’s how it was. For just as, in London and New York, Aimee’s world — and therefore mine — had erupted into babies, her own and the babies of her friends, dealing with them and talking about them, so that nothing seemed to exist except birth, and not just in the private realm, but also all newspapers, the television, stray songs on the radio seemed, to me, obsessed with the subject of fertility in general and of the fertility of women like me in particular, just so Hawa was coming under pressure in the village, as the time passed and people cottoned on to the fact that the policeman in Banjul was only a decoy, and Hawa herself a new kind of girl, perhaps uncircumcised, certainly unmarried, with no children, and no immediate plans for having any. “Still no baby?” had become our shorthand and catchphrase for all this, our mutual situation, and it seemed the funniest thing in the world whenever we exchanged the phrase with each other, we giggled and groaned over it, and only occasionally did it occur to me — and only when I was back in my own world — that I was thirty-two and Hawa ten years younger.

Fern stood up from his cashew disaster and wiped the ash off his hands on to his trousers: “She returns!”

Lunch was brought to us right away. We ate in a corner of the yard, our plates on our knees, both hungry enough to ignore the fact that nobody else got a lunch break from cashew-crushing.

“You look very well,” said Fern, beaming at me. “Very happy.”

The tin door at the back of the compound was wide open, giving on to a view of Hawa’s family’s land. Several acres of purple-tinged cashew trees, pale yellow bush and scorched black hillocks of ash that marked where Hawa and her grandmothers burned, once a month, huge pyres of household waste and plastic. It was somehow lush and barren simultaneously, and beautiful to me in this mix. I saw that Fern was right: this was a place in which I was happy. Aged thirty-two and one quarter I was finally having my year off.

“But what is a ‘year off’?”

“Oh, it’s when you’re young and you spend a year in some distant country, learning its ways, communing with the… community. We could never afford one.”

“Your family?”

“Well, yes, but — I was thinking specifically of me and my mate Tracey. We just used to watch people go on them and then slag them off when they got back.”

I laughed to myself at the memory.

“‘Slag off’? What is this?”

“Oh, we used to call them ‘poverty tourists’… You know, those kinds of students who’d come back with their stupid year-off ethnic trousers and African ‘hand-carved’ overpriced statuary made in some factory in Kenya… We used to think they were so idiotic.”

But maybe Fern himself had been one of these optimistic young hippy travelers. He sighed and lifted his finished bowl from the floor to rescue it from a curious goat.

“What cynical young people you were… you and your mate Tracey.”

The cashew-shelling was going to continue into the night. To avoid helping, I suggested a walk to the well, on the thin excuse of collecting water for a morning shower, and Fern, usually so conscientious, surprised me by saying he would come. Along the way, he told a story about visiting Musa, Hawa’s cousin, to check on the health of a new baby. When he had reached the place, a small, very basic dwelling Musa had built himself on the edge of the village, he found Musa alone. His wife and children had gone to see her mother.

“He invited me in, he was a little lonely, I think. I noticed he had a small old TV with VHS attached. I was surprised, he is always so frugal, like all mashala, but he said a Peace Corps woman who was going back to the States had left it to him. He was very keen to let me know he never watched Nollywood movies on it or any of the telenovelas or anything like that, not any more. Only ‘pure films.’ Did I want to see one? I said sure. We sit down, and in a minute I realize it’s one of these training videos from Afghanistan, boys dressed all in black doing backflips with Kalashnikovs… I said to him, ‘Musa? Do you understand what is being said in this video?’ Because a speech in Arabic was droning on and on — you can imagine — and I could tell he didn’t understand a word. And he says to me, so dreamy: ‘I love the way they leap!’ I think to him it was like a beautiful dance video. A radical Islamic dance video! He told me: ‘The way they move, it makes me want to be more pure inside.’ Poor Musa. Anyway, I thought you would find this funny. Because I know you are interested in dance,’ he added, when I didn’t laugh.

The first e-mail I ever received came from my mother. She sent it from a computer lab in the basement of University College London, where she had just taken part in a public debate, and I received it on a computer in my own college library. The content was a single Langston Hughes poem: she made me recite it in full when I called her later that evening, to prove it had arrived. While night comes on gently, Dark like me—Ours was the first graduating class to receive e-mail addresses, and my mother, always curious about new things, acquired a battered old Compaq, to which she attached a doddering modem. Together we entered this new space that now opened up between people, a connection with no precise beginning or end, that was always potentially open, and my mother was one of the first people I knew to understand this and exploit it fully. Most e-mails sent in the mid-nineties tended to be long and letter-like: they began and ended with traditional greetings — the ones we’d all previously used on paper — and they were keen to describe the surrounding scene, as if the new medium had made of everybody a writer. (“I’m typing this just by the window, looking out to blue-gray sea, where three gulls are diving into the water.”) But my mother never e-mailed that way, she got the hang of it at once, and when I was only a few weeks out of college, but still by that blue-gray sea, she began sending me multiple two- or three-line messages a day, mostly unpunctuated, and always with the sense of something written at great speed. They all had the same subject: when was I planning on coming back? She didn’t mean to the old estate, she had moved on from there the year before. Now she lived in a pretty ground-floor flat in Hampstead with the man my father and I had taken to calling “the Noted Activist,” after my mother’s habitual parenthetical (“I’m writing a paper with him, he’s a noted activist, you’ve probably heard of him?” “He’s just a wonderful, wonderful man, we’re very close, and of course he’s a noted activist”). The Noted Activist was a handsome Tobagonian, of Indian heritage, with a little Prussian beard, and a lot of sweeping black hair dramatically arranged on top of his head the better to highlight a single gray streak. My mother had met him at an anti-nuclear conference two years before. She had gone on marches with him, written papers on him — and then with him — before moving on to drinking with him, dining with him, sleeping with him and now moving in with him. Together they were often photographed, standing between the lions in Trafalgar Square, giving speeches one after the other — like Sartre and de Beauvoir, only far better-looking — and now, whenever the Noted Activist was called upon to speak for those who have no voice, while on demonstrations, or at conferences, my mother was more often than not by his side, in her new role as “local councilor and grass-roots activist.” They’d been together a year. In that time my mother had become somewhat well known. One of the people a line producer on a radio show might call and ask to weigh in on whatever left-leaning debate was happening that day. Not the first name on that list, perhaps, but if the President of the Students’ Union, the editor of the New Left Review and the spokesperson for the Anti-Racist Alliance happened all to be busy, my mother and the Noted Activist could be counted on for their near-constant availability.

I did try to be happy for her. I knew it was what she’d always wanted. But it’s hard, when you’re at a loose end yourself, to be happy for others, and besides I felt bad for my father, and sorrier for myself. The thought of moving back in with my mother seemed to cancel out what little I had achieved in the previous three years. But I couldn’t survive on my student loan much longer. Despondent, packing up my room, flicking through my now pointless essays, I looked out to sea and felt I was waking from a dream, that this was all that college had been for me, a dream, placed at too far a distance from reality, or at least from my reality. My rented mortar board was barely returned before kids who had seemed not so different from me began announcing that they were leaving for London, right away, sometimes heading to my neighborhood, or others like it, which they discussed in derring-do terms, as if these were wild frontiers to be conquered. They left with deposits in hand, to lay down for flats or even houses, they took unpaid internships, or applied for jobs where the interviewer happened to be their own father’s old university pal. I had no plans, no deposit and no one who might die and leave me money: what relatives we had were all poorer than us. Hadn’t we been the middle-class ones, in aspiration and practice? And perhaps for my mother this dream was the truth, and just by dreaming it she felt she had brought it to pass. But I was awake now, and clear-eyed: some facts were immutable, unavoidable. Whichever way I looked at it, for example, the eighty-nine pounds currently in my current account was all the money I had on this earth. I made meals of baked beans on toast, sent out two dozen application letters, waited.

Alone in a town that everyone else had already left, I had too much time to brood. I began to look at my mother from a new, sour angle. A feminist who had always been supported by men — first my father and now the Noted Activist — and who, though she continually harangued me about the “nobility of labor,” had never, as far as I knew, actually been gainfully employed. She worked “for the people”—there was no wage. I worried that the same was true, more or less, for the Noted Activist, who seemed to have written many pamphlets but no books, and had no official university position. To put all her eggs in the basket of such a man, to give up our flat — the only security we’d ever known — to go and live with him up in Hampstead, in exactly the kind of bourgeois fantasy she’d always bad-mouthed, struck me as being both in bad faith and extremely reckless. I went down to the seafront each night to use a dodgy phone box that thought two-pence coins were tens and had many ill-tempered conversations with her about it. But I was the only one in an ill temper, my mother was in love and happy, full of affection for me, although this only made her more difficult to pin down on practical details. Any attempt to delve into the precise financial situation of the Noted Activist, for example, got me fudged answers or a change of subject. The only thing she was always happy to discuss was his three-bedroom flat, the one she wanted me to move into, bought for twenty thousand pounds in 1969 with the money from a dead uncle’s will and now worth “well over a million.” This was a fact which, despite her Marxist tendencies, evidently gave her a huge sense of pleasure and well-being.

“But Mum: he’s not going to sell it, is he? So it’s irrelevant. It’s not worth anything with you two lovebirds living in it.”

“Look, why don’t you just get on the train and come for dinner? When you meet him you’ll love him — everybody loves this man. You’ll have a lot to talk about. He met Malcolm X! He’s a noted activist…”

But like a lot of people whose vocation it is to change the world he proved to be, in person, outrageously petty. Our first meeting was dominated not by political or philosophical discussion but by a long rant against his next-door neighbor, a fellow Caribbean who, unlike our host, was wealthy, multiply published, tenured in an American university, owned the whole building and was presently constructing “some kind of fucking pergola” at the end of his garden. This would slightly obscure the Noted Activist’s vista of the Heath, and after dinner, as the June sun finally went down, we took a bottle of Wray & Nephew and, in an act of solidarity, stepped into the garden to glare at the half-built thing. My mother and the Noted Activist sat at their little cast-iron table and slowly rolled and smoked a very poorly constructed spliff. I drank too much rum. At a certain point the mood turned meditative and we all gazed over at the ponds, and beyond the ponds to the Heath itself, as the Victorian lamplights came on and the scene emptied of all but ducks and adventurous men. The lights turned the grass a purgatorial orange.

“Imagine two island kids like us, two barefoot kids from nothing, ending up here…” murmured my mother, and they held each other’s hands and pressed their foreheads together, and I felt, looking at them, that even if they were absurd, how much more absurd was I, a grown woman resentful of another grown woman who had done, after all, so much for me, so much for herself and yes, for her people, and all, as she rightly said, from nothing at all. Was I feeling sorry for myself because I had no dowry? And when I looked up from the joint I was rolling it seemed my mother had read my mind. But don’t you realize how incredibly lucky you are, she said, to be alive, at this moment? People like us, we can’t be nostalgic. We’ve no home in the past. Nostalgia is a luxury. For our people, the time is now!

I lit my joint, poured myself another finger of rum and listened with my head bowed while the ducks quacked and my mother speechified, until it got late and her lover put a hand softly to her cheek and I saw it was time to get the last train.

In late July I moved back to London, not to my mother’s, but to my father’s. I offered to sleep in the living room, but he wouldn’t have it, he said if I slept there the noise of him leaving for his rounds each morning would wake me, and I quickly accepted this logic and let him fold himself into the sofa. In return I felt I’d really better find a job: my father truly did believe in the nobility of labor, he’d staked his life on it, and he made me ashamed to be idle. Sometimes, unable to go back to sleep after hearing him creep out of the door, I would sit up in bed and think about all this work, both my father’s and his people’s, going back many generations. Labor without education, labor usually without craft or skill, some of it honest and some of it crooked, but all of it leading somehow to my own present state of laziness. When I was quite young, eight or nine, my father had showed me his father’s birth certificate, and the professions of his grandparents stated upon it — rag boiler and rag cutter — and this, I was meant to understand, was the proof that his tribe had always been defined by their labor, whether they wanted to be or not. The importance of labor was a view he held as strongly as my mother held her belief that the definitions that really mattered were culture and color. Our people, our people. I thought of how readily we’d all used the phrase, a few weeks earlier, on that beautiful June night at the Noted Activist’s, sitting drinking rum, admiring families of fat ducks, their heads turned inwards, their bills nestled into the feathers of their own bodies, roosting along the bank of the pond. Our people! Our people! And now, lying in the funk of my father’s bed, turning the phrase over in my mind — for lack of anything better to do — it reminded me of the overlapping quack and babble of those birds, repeating over and over the same curious message, delivered from their own bills into their own feathers: “I am a duck!” “I am a duck!”

Stepping out of a bush taxi — after several months’ absence — I spotted Fern standing by the side of the road, apparently waiting for me, right on time, as if there were a bus stop and a timetable. I was happy to see him. But he proved to be not in the mood for greetings or pleasantries, falling in step with me and immediately launching into a low-voiced debriefing, so that before I’d even reached Hawa’s door I, too, was burdened with the rumor presently gripping the village: that Aimee was in the process of organizing a visa, that Lamin would soon move permanently to New York. “Well, is it the case?” I told him the truth: I didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. I’d had an exhausting time in London, holding Aimee’s hand through a difficult winter, personally and professionally, and I was feeling as a consequence particularly averse to her brand of personal drama. The album she’d spent a grim British January and February recording — which should have been released about now — had instead been abandoned, the consequence of a brief, ugly affair with her young producer, who then took his songs with him. Only a few years earlier a break-up like this would have been only a minor setback to Aimee, hardly worth half a day in bed watching old episodes of long-forgotten Aussie soaps—The Flying Doctors, The Sullivans—something she did in moments of extreme vulnerability. But I had noticed a change in her, her personal armor was no longer what it once was. Leaving, and being left — these operations now affected her far more deeply, they were no longer water off a duck’s back to her, she was actually wounded, and took no meetings with anyone except Judy for almost a month, barely leaving the house and asking me several times to sleep in her room, just by her bed, on the floor, as she did not want to be alone. During this period of purdah I had assumed, for better or worse, that nobody was closer to her than me. Listening to Fern, my first feeling was that I had been betrayed, but the more I considered it I saw that this was not quite right: it was not deceit but a form of mental separation. I was comfort and company for her in a stalled moment, while, in another compartment of her heart, she was busily planning for the future, with Lamin — and Judy was her co-conspirator in that. Instead of being annoyed at Aimee I found myself frustrated by Fern: he was trying to get me involved, but I didn’t want any part of it, it was inconvenient for me, I had my trip already all planned out, and the more Fern spoke the further I saw the itinerary plotted in my head slipping away from me. A visit to Kunta Kinteh Island, a few afternoons at the beach, two nights in one of the fancy hotels in town. Aimee gave me almost no annual leave, I had to be resourceful, stealing holidays where I could.

“OK, but why not take Lamin with you? He’ll talk to you. With me he is like a clam.”

“To the hotel? Fern — no. Terrible idea.”

“On your trip then. You cannot go out there by yourself anyway, you’ll never find it.”

I gave in. When I told Lamin he was happy, not about visiting the island itself, I suspected, but because of the opportunity to escape the classroom and spend an afternoon negotiating with his friend Lolu, a cab driver, over the round-trip price. Lolu’s Afro had been cut into a Mohican, tinged orange, and he wore a thick belt with a big silver buckle that read BOY TOY. They appeared to negotiate all the way there, a two-hour journey filled with laughter and debate in the front seat, Lolu’s deafening reggae music, many phone calls. I sat in the back, with little more Wolof than I’d had before, watching the bush go by, spotting the odd silver-gray monkey and ever more isolated settlements of people, you couldn’t even call them villages, just two or three huts together, and then nothing again for another ten miles. I remember in particular two barefoot girl children walking by the road, hand in hand, they looked like best friends. They waved at me and I waved back. There was nothing and no one around them, they were out on the edge of the world, or of the world I knew, and watching them I realized it was very hard, almost impossible, for me to imagine what time felt like for them, out here. I could remember being their age, of course, holding hands with Tracey, and how we had considered ourselves “eighties kids,” more savvy than our parents, far more modern. We thought we were products of a particular moment, because as well as our old musicals we liked things like Ghostbusters and Dallas and lollipop flutes. We felt we had our place in time. What person on the earth doesn’t feel this way? Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship. I knew it couldn’t possibly be the case but I had no other way to think of them.

The road ended finally at the river. We got out and walked up to a thirty-foot concrete statue of a stick man who stood facing the river. He had the whole of planet Earth for a head and was yanking his stick arms free from slavery’s chains. A lone nineteenth-century cannon, the red-brick shell of an original trading post, a small “slavery museum built in 1992” and a desolate café completed what a desperate guide with few teeth described as “the Welcome Center.” Behind us a village of broken-down shacks, poorer by many orders of magnitude than the one we had come from, stubbornly faced the old trading post, as if hoping it might reopen. A crowd of children sat watching our arrival but when I waved to them our guide told me off: “They are not allowed to come any closer. They beg for money. They bother you tourists. The government has chosen us as official guides so that you are not bothered by them.” About a mile across the river I could see the island itself, a small, rocky outcrop with the picturesque ruins of barracks upon it. All I wanted was a minute’s quiet to contemplate where I was and what, if anything, it meant. Here and there, between the triangle of café, slave statue and watching children, I could see and hear groups of tourists — a solemn Black-British family, some enthusiastic African-American teenagers, a couple of white Dutch women, both already freely weeping — who were all trying to do the same, and likewise enduring a recited lecture from one of the official government guides in their ragged blue T-shirts, or having menus thrust into their hands from the café, or haggling with boatmen eager to take them across to see the prison cells of their ancestors. I saw I was lucky to have Lamin: while he engaged in his favorite activity — intense, whispered financial negotiation, with several parties at once — I was free to wander over to the cannon, to sit astride it and look out over the water. I tried to put myself in a meditative frame of mind. To picture the ships in the water, the human property walking up the gangplanks, the brave few who took their chances and leaped into the water, in a doomed attempt to swim to shore. But every image had a cartoon thinness to it, and felt no closer to reality than the mural on the side of the museum that showed a strapping, naked Mandinka family in neck chains being chased out of the bush by an evil Dutchman, as if they’d been trapped like prey by a hunter rather than sold like grain by their chief. All paths lead back there, my mother had always told me, but now that I was here, in this storied corner of the continent, I experienced it not as an exceptional place but as an example of a general rule. Power had preyed on weakness here: all kinds of power — local, racial, tribal, royal, national, global, economic — on all kinds of weakness, stopping at nothing, not even at the smallest girl child. But power does that everywhere. The world is saturated in blood. Every tribe has their blood-soaked legacy: here was mine. I waited for whatever cathartic feeling people hope to experience in such places, but I couldn’t make myself believe the pain of my tribe was uniquely gathered here, in this place, the pain was too obviously everywhere, this just happened to be where they’d placed the monument. I gave up and went in search of Lamin. He was leaning against the statue, on his new phone, a fancy-looking BlackBerry, with a dozy look on his face, a big, foolish smile, and when he saw me coming he shut it off without saying good-bye.

“Who was that?”

“And so if you are ready,” whispered Lamin, wedging the huge thing into his back pocket, “this man will now take us across.”

We shared a narrowboat with the Black-British family. They tried to strike up a conversation with the guide concerning how far it was from the island to the mainland and whether any man, never mind one in chains, could conceivably swim through these fast-moving currents. The guide listened to them talk but looked so tired, the whites of his eyes obscured by the sheer number of broken blood vessels, and did not seem overly interested in hypotheticals. He repeated his mantra: “If a man reached the shore, he was given his freedom.” On the island we shuffled around the ruin and then queued to enter the “last resort,” a small underground room, ten by four, where “the most rebellious men, like Kunta, were held.” Imagine! Everybody kept saying this to each other, and I did try to imagine being brought down here but knew instinctively I was not the rebellious type, not likely to be one of Kunta’s tribe. Few people are. My mother I could certainly imagine down here, and Tracey, too. And Aimee — she was in her way another of the breed. But not me. Unsure what to do with myself I reached out to grasp an iron hoop in the wall to which these “most rebellious” had been chained at the neck. “Makes you want to cry, dunnit?” said the mother of the British family, and I felt it really should, but when I looked away from her in preparation, upward to the tiny window, I found the government guide laid out on his belly, his three-toothed mouth blocking almost all of the available light.

“You will now feel the pain,” he explained through the bars, “and you will need a minute alone. I will meet you outside after you have felt the pain.”

On the boat back I asked Lamin what it was he and Aimee had to talk about so often. He was sitting on the thwart of the boat and straightened his back, lifted his chin.

“She thinks I am a good dancer.”

“Does she?”

“I have taught her many moves she didn’t know. On the computer. I demonstrate our local steps. She says she will use them in her performances.”

“I see. And does she ever talk about you coming to America? Or England?”

“It is all in the hands of God,” he said, casting an anxious eye over the other passengers.

“Yes. And the Foreign Office.”

Lolu, who had been waiting patiently in his cab, drove up to the shoreline as we approached, and opened the car door, apparently intending to take me straight from the water to the car, another two-hour ride, without lunch.

“But Lamin, I have to eat!”

I noticed he’d been clutching the café’s laminated menu throughout our visit to the island and now he showed it to me, the vital, clinching piece of evidence in a courtroom drama.

“This is too much money for lunch! Hawa will make us lunch back home.”

“I’ll pay for lunch. It’s, like, three pounds a head. I promise you, Lamin, it’s not too much for me.”

An argument ensued between Lamin and Lolu which, I was pleased to see, Lamin appeared to lose. Lolu put his hands on his buckle like a triumphant cowboy, closed the door of his car and rolled it back up the hill.

“It’s too much,” said Lamin again, sighing hugely, but I followed Lolu and Lamin followed me.

We sat at one of the picnic tables and ate fish in foil with rice. I listened to the talk at the neighboring tables, strange, uneven conversations that could not decide what they were: the heavy reflections of visitors to a historical trauma or the light cocktail chatter of people on their beach holiday. A tall, sun-ravaged white woman, in her seventies at least, sat alone at a table at the back, surrounded by piles of folded printed cloth, drums and statues, T-shirts that said NEVER AGAIN, other local merchandise. No one came near her stall or looked likely to buy anything, and after a while she stood up and began passing from table to table, welcoming guests, asking them where they were staying, where they were from. I was hoping we would have finished eating before she reached our table, but Lamin was a painfully slow eater and she caught us, and when she heard that I was not from any hotel, and not an aid worker and not a missionary, she took a special interest and sat down with us, too close to Lolu, who hunched over his fish and wouldn’t look at her.

“Which village did you say?” she asked, although I hadn’t, but now Lamin told her before I had an opportunity to be vague. The penny dropped.

“Oh, but you’re involved with the school! Of course. Well, I know people say the most awful things about that woman but I really love her, I admire her, honestly. I’m actually an American, too, originally,” she said, and I wondered how she thought anyone could be uncertain on this point. “Normally I don’t care for Americans, in general, but she’s the kind with a passport, if you know what I mean. I really find her so curious and passionate, and it’s a great thing for the country, all the publicity she brings. Oh, Australian? Well, either way she’s a woman after my own heart! An adventuress! Although of course I came here for love, not charity. The charity came afterward, in my case.”

She touched her heart, which was half exposed, in a multicolored spaghetti-strap dress with a frighteningly deep décolletage. Her breasts were long, red and crêpy. I was absolutely determined not to ask her whose love she had come here for, nor to what good deeds this act had ultimately led, but sensing my resistance, she decided, with an old woman’s prerogative, to tell me anyway.

“I was just like these people, just here on holiday. I didn’t mean to fall in love! With a boy half my age.” She winked at me. “And that was twenty years ago! But it was much, much more than a holiday romance, you see: together we built all this.” She looked around proudly at this great monument to love: a tin-roofed café with four tables and three items on the menu. “I’m not a rich woman, I was really just a humble yoga teacher. But these people in Berkeley, you only have to say to them: ‘Look, this is the situation, these people are in desperate need,’ and I can tell you, you’d be surprised, these people really just go for it, they really do. Just about everybody wanted to pitch in. When you explain what a dollar does here? When you explain how far that dollar’s gonna go? Oh, people can’t believe it! Now, sadly, my own children, from my first marriage? They have not been so supportive. Yes, sometimes it’s the strangers that sustain you. But I always say to the people here, “Don’t believe everything you hear, please! Because not all Americans are bad news, not at all.” There’s a big difference between the folks in Berkeley and the folks in Fort Worth, if you catch my meaning. I was born in Texas, to Christian folks, and when I was young America was a pretty hard place for me, because I was a free spirit and I just couldn’t find my place. But I guess it suits me a little more now.”

“But you live here, with your husband?” asked Lamin.

She smiled but did not seem overly enthralled by the question.

“In the summers. The winters I spend in Berkeley.”

“And he goes then with you?” asked Lamin. I had the sense he was conducting subtle research.

“No, no. He stays here. He has a lot to do here, all year round. He’s the big man round here and I guess you could say I’m the big woman back there! So it works very well. For us.”

I thought of that layer of girlish illusion Aimee’s new-mother friends all appeared to have lost, a kind of light in their eyes that had gone out, notwithstanding even their own celebrity and wealth, and then I looked into the wide, blue, half-crazed eyes of this woman and saw a total excavation. It hardly seemed possible someone could have had so many layers stripped from her and still be able to play her part.

After graduation, from the base of my father’s flat, I applied for every entry-level media job I could think of, leaving my begging letters on the kitchen counter each night for him to post in the morning, but a month passed, and nothing. I knew my father’s relationship to these letters was complicated — good news for me meant bad news for him, meant me moving out — and sometimes I had paranoid fantasies that he never posted them at all, just deposited them in the bin at the end of our street. I considered what my mother had always said about his lack of ambition — against which accusation I had always angrily defended him — and was forced to admit that I could see now what she was getting at. Nothing made him jollier than my Uncle Lambert’s occasional Sunday visits, when we would all three plant ourselves in deckchairs on the ivy-covered flat roof of my father’s downstairs neighbors and smoke weed, eat the homemade fish dumplings that were Lambert’s excuse for being two to three hours late, listen to the World Service and watch the Jubilee Line trains rise up, every eight to ten minutes, from the bowels of the earth.

“Now this is the life, love, wouldn’t you say? No more: do this, don’t do that. Just us all friends together — equals. Eh, Lambert? When you get to be friends with your own kid? This is the life, isn’t it?”

Was it? I didn’t remember him ever taking on the parental power dynamic he claimed now to be sloughing off, he’d never said, “Do this, don’t do that.” Love and latitude — that was all he’d ever offered me. And where did it lead? Was I going to enter early stoned retirement with Lambert? Not knowing what else to do, I went back to a terrible job, one I’d had the first summer of college, in a pizza place in Kensal Rise. It was run by a ridiculous Iranian called Bahram, very tall and thin, who considered himself, despite his surroundings, to be a man of quality. He liked to wear a long, chic, camel-colored coat, no matter the weather, often hanging it from his shoulders like an Italian baron, and he called his dump a “restaurant,” though the premises were the size of a small family bathroom, occupying a corner plot of scrubland wedged between the bus terminal and the railway. No one ever came in to eat, they ordered delivery or took their food home. I used to stand at the counter and watch the mice dart across the linoleum. There was a single table at which theoretically a customer was free to dine, but in reality Bahram occupied this table all day long and half the night: he had troubles at home, a wife and three difficult, unmarried daughters, and we suspected he preferred our company to this family, or at least preferred shouting at us to arguing with them. At work his day was not strenuous. He passed it commenting on whatever was on the TV in the top-left corner of the place, or else verbally abusing us, his staff, from this sitting position. He was in a rage all the time about everything. A flamboyant, comic rage that expressed itself in a constant obscene teasing of everyone around him — racial, sexual, political, religious teasing — and which almost every day resulted in a lost customer or employee or friend, and so came to seem to me not so much offensive as poignantly self-defeating. Anyway it was the only entertainment on offer. But the first time I walked in there, aged nineteen, I was not abused, no, I was greeted in what I later understood to be Farsi, and so effusively that I really felt I got a sense of what he was saying. How young I was, and lovely, and clearly smart — was it true I was in college? But how proud my mother must be! He stood up and held me by the chin, turning my face one way and then the other, smiling. But when I replied in English he frowned and looked closely, critically, at the red bandanna covering my hair — I’d thought it would be welcome in a place of food production — and a few moments later, after we had established that despite my Persian nose I was not Persian, not even a little bit, nor Egyptian, nor Moroccan, nor an Arab of any kind, I made the mistake of speaking the name of my mother’s island, and all friendliness vanished: I was directed to the counter, where my job was to answer the phone, take orders to the kitchen and organize the delivery boys. My most important task was attending to a beloved project of his: the Banned Customers List. He had taken the trouble to write this list out on a long roll of paper and stuck it up on the wall behind my counter, sometimes with Polaroids attached. “Mostly your people,” he pointed out to me casually, on my second day.

“They don’t pay, or they fight, or they drug dealers. Don’t give me face! How you be offended? You know! Is truth!” I couldn’t afford to be offended. I was determined to last those three summer months, long enough to put something toward a deposit so I could start renting the moment I graduated. But the tennis was on, and this made everything impossible. A Somali delivery boy and I were following it avidly, and Bahram, who would normally also follow the tennis — he considered sport the purest manifestation of his sociological theories — was this year in a fury about it, and in a fury with us for enjoying it, and each time he caught us watching it he became more enraged, his sense of order having been deeply disturbed by the failure of Bryan Shelton to drop out in the first round.

“Why you follow him? Huh? Huh? ’Cos he’s one of you?”

He was jabbing his finger into the narrow chest of the Somali delivery boy, Anwar, who had a great luminosity of spirit, a notable capacity for joy — despite nothing in his life seeming to provide just cause for it — and whose response now was to clap his hands and grin from ear to ear.

“Yeah, man! We for Bryan!”

“You are idiot, this we know,” said Bahram, and then turned to me, behind the counter: “But you are smart, and this makes you more idiot.” When I said nothing he came right up to me and slammed his fists on the counter: “This man Shelton — he won’t win. He can’t.”

“He win! He win!” cried Anwar.

Bahram picked up the remote and turned down the TV so he could get himself heard all the way to the back, even as far as the Congolese woman scrubbing the sides of the pizza oven.

“Tennis not black game. You must understand: every people have their game.”

“What’s your game?” I asked, genuinely curious, and Bahram pulled himself up very tall and proud in his seat: “Polo.” The kitchen exploded in laughter.

“Fuck all of you sons of bitches!” Hysteria.

As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton, had never heard of him really before Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I bought little American flags to work on the days of his games and made sure to send out, on these occasions, all the other delivery boys except Anwar. Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries — the business, his difficult wife, the stressful search for suitors for his daughters — all slip away, until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.

One morning, halfway through the tournament, I was standing, bored, at the counter when I saw Anwar on his bike, riding up the pavement toward us at great speed, then break haphazardly, leap off and rush up to my counter with his fist in his mouth and a smile he could barely control. He slapped a copy of the Daily Mirror in front of me, pointed to a column in the sports pages, and said: “Arab!” We couldn’t believe it. His name was Karim Alami. He was from Morocco, and he was seeded even lower than Shelton. Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one. There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house — and therefore the television — by the time the game began. That match went five rounds. Shelton started strong and at various points in the first set Bahram was reduced to standing on a chair and screaming. When the first set ended six‒three to Shelton, Bahram jumped off his chair and walked straight out of the building. We looked at each other: was this victory? Five minutes later he sloped back in with a packet of Gauloises in hand, retrieved from his car, and began chain-smoking with his head down. But in the second set things began to look a little better for Karim, and Bahram sat up straight as straight, then stood, and began pacing in a circular way around the small space, offering his own commentary, which had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults, and as we reached a tiebreak, he became increasingly fluent in his lecture, waving his cigarette around in his hand, ever more confident in his English. The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind — the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.

But he was not lost: he took the set seven‒five, and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner — whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask — and made her dance with him, to some hi-life he had going on the transistor radio he carried everywhere. In the next set Shelton collapsed, one‒six. Bahram was exultant. Wherever you go in world, he told Anwar, you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan — depends. But your people always they lose. By the time the fourth set started we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players — in truth, almost perfectly matched — battling toward an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, six‒seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.

“But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall. The final set was quick: six‒two. Game, set, match — Shelton. Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling — I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out. About an hour later he returned. It was the early-evening rush when mothers decide they can’t face cooking dinner and all-day tokers suddenly realize they haven’t eaten since breakfast. I was harried on the phone, trying as usual to parse many different kinds of pidgin English, both on the phones and among our own delivery crew, when Bahram walked up to me and put the evening paper in my face. He pointed to a picture of Shelton, his arm swung high in preparation for one of his forceful serves, ball in the air before him, paused at the moment of connection. I cupped the phone receiver with a hand.

“What? I’m working.”

“Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.”

“I’m working.”

“Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.”

I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.

“Half-winner,” he said.

I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.

I don’t know how Tracey found out I was back working at Bahram’s. I didn’t want anyone to know, I could hardly face the truth of it myself. Probably she simply spotted me through the glass. When she walked in, one steamy afternoon in late August, she caused a sensation, in her skin-tight leggings and navel-skimming crop top. I noticed her clothes had not changed with the times, that they had no need of change. She did not struggle, as I did — as most women I knew did — to find ways to dress her body in the symbols, shapes and signs of the age. It was as if she were above all of that, timeless. She was always dressed for a dance rehearsal and always looked wonderful that way. Anwar and the rest of the boys, waiting outside on their bikes, took a good long time over the front view and then repositioned themselves to get what Italians call the B-side. When she leaned over the counter to speak to me I saw one of them cover his eyes, as if in physical pain.

“Good to see you. How was the seaside?”

She smirked, confirming the sense I already had that my college life had been some kind of local joke, a poor attempt at playing a role outside of my range, one that had not come off.

“See your mum about. She’s everywhere these days.”

“Yes. I’m glad to be back, I think. You look great. Are you working?”

“Oh, I’m doing all sorts. Got big news. When do you get off?”

“I just started.”

“So what about tomorrow?”

Bahram sidled up to us and in his most courtly manner inquired whether Tracey happened to be Persian.

We met up the following evening, in a local pub that we had always known as Irish but which was now neither Irish nor anything else. The old booths had gone and been replaced by a great many sofas and wingback chairs, from different historical eras, covered in clashing prints, and scattered around the place, like a stage set recently dismantled. Purple flock wallpaper was plastered above the chimney breast and many poorly stuffed woodland creatures, arrested in the act of leaping or crouching, were encased in glass bell jars and had been placed on high shelves, looking over mine and Tracey’s reunion with their wonky glass eyes. I broke the gaze of a petrified squirrel to greet Tracey, who was returning from the bar with two white wines in her hands and a powerful look of disgust on her face.

“Seven quid? What fuckery is this?”

“We could go somewhere else.”

She screwed up her nose: “No. That’s what they want. We were born here. Drink slowly.”

We never could drink slowly. We kept going, on Tracey’s credit card, reminiscing and laughing — laughing harder than I had in all three years of college — taking each other back to Miss Isabel’s yellow shoes, to my mother’s clay pit, to The History of Dance, through all of it, even things I never thought we would ever be able to laugh at together. Louie dancing with Michael Jackson, my own Royal Ballet delusion. Feeling bold, I asked after her father.

She stopped laughing.

“Still over there. Got a whole bunch of ‘out the house’ children now, so I’m told…”

Her ever-expressive face turned pensive and then took on that look of utter icy coldness I remembered so well from childhood. I considered telling her about what I had seen, years before, in Kentish Town, but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth.

“What about your old man? Haven’t seen him for time.”

“Believe it or not, I think he’s still in love with my mother.”

“That’s nice,” she said, but that look stayed on her face. She was staring past me, at the squirrel. “That’s nice,” she said once again.

I could see we had got to the end of reminiscence, that it was properly time to venture into the present day. I could guess how easily Tracey’s news would outstrip whatever I had to offer. And so it did: she had a part on the West End stage. It was in a revival of one of our favorite shows, Guys and Dolls, and she was playing “Hot Box Girl Number One,” which I remembered was not a huge role — in the film she had no name of her own and spoke only four or five lines — but all the same she was present a lot, singing and dancing in the Hot Box club, or else trailing Adelaide, whose best friend she’s meant to be. Tracey would get to do “Take Back Your Mink”—a song we did as children, brandishing a mangy-looking pair of feather boas — and she’d wear lace corsets and real satin gowns and have her hair set and curled. “We’re in proper dress rehearsal now. They use flat irons on me every night, it’s killing me.” She touched her hairline and underneath the wax that had been used to slick it down I saw that indeed it was already frayed and patchy.

She’d got her boast out of the way. In its aftermath, though, she struck me as vulnerable and defensive and I had the sense that I had not reacted quite as she’d wanted. Perhaps she had really imagined that a twenty-one-year-old college graduate would hear her good news and collapse weeping on the floor. She picked up her wine and drained it. She asked, at last, about my life. I took a deep breath and repeated the sorts of things I said to my mother: only a stopgap, waiting to hear of other opportunities, staying at my dad’s temporarily, rent being high, no relationship, but then relationships were so complicated, not what I needed right now, and I wanted time to work on my own—

“Right, right, right, but you can’t keep working for pizza cunt, can you? You need a plan.”

I nodded and waited. Relief came over me, familiar, though I had not felt it for a long time, and I connected it to being taken in hand by Tracey, to having decisions removed from me and replaced instead by her will, her intentions. Hadn’t Tracey always known what games to play, what stories to tell, what beat to choose, what move to make to it?

“Look, I know you’re a big woman now,” she said, confidingly, leaning back in her chair, with her feet pointed below, creating a beautiful vertical line from her knees to her toes. “It’s none of my business. But if you need something, they’re looking for stagehands right now. You could try for it. I could put a good word in. It’s just four months but it’s better than fuck all.”

“I don’t know anything about theater. I’ve got no experience.”

“Oh my gosh,” said Tracey, shaking her head at me, standing up to get another round in. “Just lie!”

I assumed my questioning of Lamin had got back to Aimee, because on the day of my departure from the Coco Ocean hotel the front desk called up to my room to tell me they had a message for me, and when I opened the white envelope I found this note: Jet unavailable. You’ll have to fly commercial. Save receipts. Judy.

I was being punished. At first I thought it was funny that Aimee’s idea of punishment was flying commercial, but when I got to the airport I was surprised by how much I had in fact forgotten: the waiting, the queuing, the submitting to irrational instructions. Every aspect of it, the presence of so many other people, the brusqueness of the staff, even the immutable flight time on the screens in the waiting room — it all felt like an affront. My seat was next to two truck drivers from Huddersfield, they were in their sixties and had traveled together. They loved it here, they’d come “every year, if they could afford it.” After lunch they started in on some little bottles of Baileys and compared notes on their “girls.” They both wore wedding rings, half embedded in their fat, hairy fingers. I had my earphones in by then: they probably thought I couldn’t hear them. “My one said to me she were twenty, but her cousin — he’s a waiter there, too — he told me she were seventeen. Wise beyond her years, though.” He had hardened egg yolk down his T-shirt. His friend had yellowed teeth and bloody gums. They had seven days of holiday in any calendar year. The man with the yellow teeth had worked double shifts for three months simply to afford this long weekend with his girl in Banjul. I had murderous fantasies — of taking my serrated plastic knife, drawing it across each of their throats — but the longer I listened, the sadder the whole thing seemed. “I said to her, don’t you want to come to England? And she basically says to me: ‘No fear, love.’ She wants us to build a house in Wassu, wherever the fuck that is. They’re no fools, these girls. Realistic. Pound goes a lot bloody further out there than it does back home. It’s like the missus moaning about she wants to go to Spain. I said to her, ‘You’re living in the past, love. You know how much Spain is these days?’” One kind of weakness feeding on another.

A few days later I was back at work. I kept waiting for a formal meeting or a debrief but it was as if I hadn’t made the visit at all. Nobody mentioned my trip and in itself that was not so unusual, many other things were going on at the time — a new album, a new tour — but in the subtle way of the best bullies Judy and Aimee strove to freeze me out of all important decisions while simultaneously ensuring that nothing they said or did could be explicitly interpreted as punishment or retribution. We were preparing for our autumn transition to New York — a period in which Aimee and I were usually glued to each other — but now I hardly saw her, and for two weeks I was given the kind of grunt-work more appropriate to the housekeepers. I was on the phone to freight companies. I was cataloging shoes. I accompanied the children to their yoga class. I cornered Judy about it early one Saturday morning. Aimee was in the basement, working out, the children were watching their one hour of weekly television. I trawled the house and found Judy sitting in the library with her feet up on the baize desk, painting her toenails a terrible fuchsia, a white foam wedge stuck between each long toe. She didn’t look up until I’d finished speaking.

“Yeah, well, hate to break it to you, love, but Aimee doesn’t give a flying fuck what you think of her private life.”

“I’m trying to look out for her interests. That’s my job as a friend.”

“No, love, not accurate. Your job is: personal assistant.”

“I’ve been here nine years.”

“And I’ve been here twenty-nine.” She swung her feet round and placed them in a black box on the floor that glowed purple. “I’ve seen a lot of these assistants come and go. But Christ, none of them has been as delusional as you.”

“Isn’t it true? Isn’t she trying to get him a visa?”

“I’m not discussing that with you.”

“Judy, I spent today mainly working for the dog. I have a degree. Don’t tell me I’m not being punished.”

Judy pulled her fringe back with both hands.

“First of all, don’t be so bloody melodramatic. What you are doing is working. Whatever you may think, chook, your job is not and has never been ‘best mate.’ You’re her assistant. You always have been. But recently you seem to have forgotten that — and it’s about time you were reminded. So that’s our first issue. Number two: if she wants to bring him over here, if she wants to marry him, or dance with him on top of Big fucking Ben, that is no concern of yours. You’re very far out of your area.” Judy sighed and looked down at her toes. “And the funny part of it is, she’s not even pissed off with you about the boy. It’s not even about the bloody boy.”

“What, then?”

“You spoken to your mum recently?”

This question made me violently blush. How long had it been? A month? Two? Parliament was in session, she was busy, and if she wanted me she knew where I was. I was going through these justifications in my head for a long moment before it occurred to me to wonder why Judy was interested.

“Well, maybe you should. She’s making life difficult for us right now and I don’t really know why. Would help if you could find out.”

“My mother?”

“I mean, there’s a million issues in this little shithole of an island you call a country — literally a million. She wants to talk about ‘Dictatorships in West Africa’?” said Judy, using finger quotes. “British complicity with dictatorships in West Africa. She’s on the TV, she’s writing the op-eds, she’s standing up in bloody Prime Minister’s Question Tea Hour or whatever the fuck it is you people call it. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about it. Fine. Well, that’s not my problem — what DfID does, what the IMF does — that’s out of my area. Aimee, however, is my area — and yours. We’re in partnership with this crazy bloody President, and if you go and ask your beloved Fern he’ll tell you what a tightrope we’re walking right now. Believe me, love, if his Highness-for-life the all-mighty King of Kings doesn’t want us in his country? We are out of there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. The school gets fucked, everybody gets fucked. Now, I know you have a degree. You’ve told me, many, many times. Is it in International Development? No, I didn’t think so. And I’m sure your big-mouth mother out there on the back benches probably thinks she’s being helpful, too, God knows, but you know what she’s actually doing? Hurting the people she claims to want to help, and pissing on those of us who are trying to make some kind of difference out there. Biting the hand. Seems to run in the family.”

I sat down on the chaise longue.

“Jesus, don’t you ever read the papers?” asked Judy.

Three days after that conversation we flew to New York. I left messages with my mother, texted her, e-mailed her, but she didn’t call me till the end of the following week, and with the extraordinary timing of mothers chose two thirty p.m. on a Sunday, just as Jay’s cake came out of the kitchens and streamers fell from the ceiling of the Rainbow Room, and two hundred guests sang “Happy Birthday,” accompanied by violinists from the string section of the New York Philharmonic.

“What’s all that noise? Where are you?”

I opened the sliding doors to the terrace and shut them behind me.

“It’s Jay’s birthday. He’s nine today. I’m at the top of the Rockefeller.”

“Look, I don’t want to have an argument with you on the phone,” said my mother, sounding very much like she wanted to have an argument on the phone. “I’ve read your e-mails, I understand your position. But I hope you understand that I don’t work for that woman — or for you, actually. I work for the British people, and if I’ve developed an interest in that region, if I’ve become increasingly concerned—”

“Yes, but Mum, can’t you become increasingly concerned about something else?”

“Doesn’t it matter to you who your partners are in this project? I know you, darling, and I know you’re not a mercenary, I know you have ideals — I raised you, for God’s sake, so I know. I’ve been into it very deeply, Miriam, too, and we’ve come to the conclusion that at this point the human-rights issue is really becoming untenable — I wish it wasn’t, for your sake, but there it is. Darling, don’t you want to know—”

“Mum, sorry — I’ll call you back — I have to go.”

Fern, in an ill-fitting, clearly rented suit, a little too short at the ankles, was walking toward me, waving goofily, and I don’t think I realized how far out of the loop I had fallen until that moment. To me he was a cut-out figure pasted in the wrong photograph, in the wrong moment. He smiled, pulled open the sliding doors, his head cocked to the side like a terrier: “Ah, but you look really beautiful.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me you were coming? Why didn’t you?”

He drew a hand through curls half tamed by cheap hair gel, and looked sheepish, a schoolboy caught out in a minor misdemeanor.

“Well, I was on confidential business. It’s ridiculous, but all the same I couldn’t tell you, I’m sorry. They wanted it kept quiet.”

I looked over to where he was pointing and saw Lamin. He sat at the central table in a white suit, like the groom at a wedding, with Judy and Aimee either side of him.

“Jesus Christ.”

“No, no, I don’t think it was him. Not unless he works for the State Department.” He took a step forward and put his hands on the barrier wall. “But what a view this is!”

The whole city lay before us. I set my back to it, turning to study Fern instead, to check on his reality, and then to watch Lamin accept a slice of cake from a passing waiter. I tried to account for the panic I felt. It was more than simply being kept in the dark, it was a rejection of the way I ordered my own reality. For in my mind, at that time — as perhaps it is for most young people — I was at the center of things, the only person in the world with true freedom. I moved from here to there, observing life as it presented itself to me, but everybody else in these scenes, all the subsidiary characters, belonged only in the compartments in which I had placed them: Fern eternally in the pink house, Lamin confined to the dusty paths of the village. What were they doing here, now, in my New York? I didn’t know how to talk to either of them in the Rainbow Room, wasn’t sure what our relation should be, or what, in this context, I owed or was due. I tried to imagine how Lamin was feeling right now, on the other side of the matrix at last, and if he had someone to guide him through this bewildering new world, someone to help explain to him the obscene amounts of money that had here been expended on things like helium balloons and steamed squid buns and four hundred peonies. But it was Aimee at his side, not me, and she had no such concerns, I could see that from here, this was her world and he had simply been invited into it as she would have invited anyone else, as a privilege and a gift, the same way queens once unself-consciously offered their patronage. In her mind it was all fate, always meant to be, and therefore fundamentally uncomplicated. That’s what I and Judy and Fern and all of us were being paid for really: to keep life uncomplicated — for her. We waded through the tangled weeds so she might float over the surface.

“Anyway, I was glad to come. I wanted to see you.” Fern reached over and brushed my right shoulder with his hand, and in the moment I thought he was only removing some dust, my mind was elsewhere, I was stuck on this image of me caught in the weeds and Aimee floating serenely over my head. Then his other hand went to my other shoulder: still I did not understand. Like everybody else at that party, except perhaps Fern himself, I could not take my eyes off Lamin and Aimee.

“My God, look at this!”

Fern glanced over briefly to where I was pointing and caught Lamin and Aimee as they exchanged a brief kiss. He nodded: “Ah, so they do not hide any more!”

“Jesus Christ. Is she going to marry him? Is she going to adopt him?”

“Who cares? I don’t want to talk about her.”

Suddenly Fern grabbed both my hands in his hands, and when I turned back I found that he was staring at me with comic intensity.

“Fern, what are you doing?”

“You pretend to be cynical”—he kept seeking my eyes as I tried equally hard to avoid his—“but I think you are just afraid.”

In his accent it sounded like a line from one of the Mexican telenovelas we used to watch with half the village, each Friday afternoon, in the school’s TV room. I couldn’t help it — I laughed. His eyebrows came together in a sad line.

“Please don’t laugh at me.” He looked down at himself, and I looked, too: I think it was the first time I’d ever seen him out of cargo shorts. “The truth is I don’t know how to dress in New York.”

I eased my hands from his.

“Fern, I don’t know what you think this is. You really don’t know me.”

“Well, you are hard to know well. But I want to know you. That is what it’s like, being in love. You want to know someone, better.”

It seemed to me that the situation was so awkward that he should just disappear at this point — just as such scenes in the telenovelas cut to a commercial — because otherwise I didn’t see how we were going to get through the next two minutes. He didn’t move. Instead he grabbed two passing flutes of champagne from a waiter’s tray and drank his down in one go.

“You have nothing to say to me? I am offering you my heart!”

“Oh my God — Fern — please! Stop talking like that! I don’t want your heart! I don’t want to be responsible for anybody else’s heart. For anybody else’s anything!”

He looked confused: “A peculiar idea. Once you’re alive in this world, you’re responsible.”

“For myself.” Now I drank down a whole flute. “I just want to be responsible for myself.”

“Sometimes in this life you have to take risks on other people. Look at Aimee.”

“Look at Aimee?”

“Why not? You have to admire her. She’s not ashamed. She loves this young man. It will probably mean a lot of trouble for her.”

“You mean: for us. It’ll mean a lot of trouble for us.”

“But she doesn’t care what people think.”

“That’s because as usual she has no idea what she’s getting into. The whole thing is absurd.”

They were leaning on each other, watching the magician, an engaging gentleman in a Savile Row suit and a bow-tie who’d been at Jay’s eighth birthday, too. He was doing the trick of the Chinese rings. Light poured into the Rainbow Room and the rings slipped in and out of each other despite their apparent solidity. Lamin looked mesmerized — everybody did. I could hear, very faintly, Chinese prayer music, and understood, in the abstract, that this must be part of the effect. I could see what everyone was feeling, but I was not with them and could not feel it.

“You are jealous?”

“I wish I could fool myself the way she can. I’m jealous of anyone that oblivious. A little ignorance never stopped her. Nothing stops her.”

Fern emptied his glass and placed it awkwardly on the ground.

“I should not have spoken. I believe I have misinterpreted the situation.”

His love language had been very silly but now that he returned to his more usual administrative language I felt sorry. He turned and went back indoors. The magician finished. I watched Aimee get up and approach the little, rounded stage. Jay was called up, or at least arrived at her side, and then Kara, and then Lamin. The whole party surrounded them in an adoring crescent shape. I seemed to be the only person still outside, looking in. With one arm she was hugging Jay and Kara, with the other she held up Lamin’s left hand in triumphal pose. Everybody clapped and cheered, a muffled roar through the double-glazed glass. She held this position: a room full of cameras flashed. From where I stood it was a pose that collapsed many periods in her life into one: mother and lover, big sister, best friend, superstar and diplomat, billionaire and street kid, foolish girl and woman of substance. But why should she get to take everything, have everything, do everything, be everyone, in all places, at all times?

The thing I remember most vividly is the warmth of her body as she ran off stage and into the wings, into my arms, where I stood ready with a pencil skirt to replace her satin dress, or a black cat’s tail to be pinned on her behind — once she had shimmied out of the pencil skirt — and clean tissues to wipe the sweat that always sprung from the bridge of her freckled nose. There were of course many other guys and dolls to whom I had to hand guns or canes, or fix a tiepin, straighten a seam or set a brooch just so, but it’s Tracey I remember, holding on to my elbow for balance with one hand and stepping lightly into a pair of bright green capri pants which I then zipped up the side, taking care not to catch her skin, before kneeling down to tie the bows on her stack-heeled white taps. She was always serious and silent during these quick changes. She never giggled or fidgeted like the other Hot Box Girls, nor was she in any way self-doubting or in need of reassurance, as I soon learned was typical of chorus girls but alien to Tracey’s nature. As I dressed or undressed her she remained fixated upon whatever was happening on stage. If she could watch the show, she would. If she was stuck backstage in a changing room and listening to it over the monitors, she was so focused on what she was hearing that you couldn’t engage her in conversation. It didn’t matter how many times she saw that show, she never tired of it, she was always impatient to get back inside it. Everything backstage bored her. Her real life was out there, in that fiction, under the lights, and this confused me because I knew, as no one else in the cast did, that she was having a secret affair with one of the stars, a married man. He played Brother Arvide Abernathy, the kindly older gentleman who carries a bass drum in the Salvation Army band. They didn’t need to spray any gray in his hair, he was almost three times Tracey’s age and had plenty already, a salt-and-pepper Afro that contributed to that air theatrical critics like to call “distinguished.” In real life he was Kenyan-born and raised, followed by a stint at RADA, followed by another at the Royal Shakespeare Company: he had a very plummy Shakespearean speaking voice, which most people laughed at, behind his back, but that I liked to hear, especially on stage, it was so luxuriant, verbal velvet. Theirs was an affair conducted in little pockets of time, with no freedom to expand. On stage they had almost no scenes together — their characters came from two different worlds, a house of prayer and a den of sin — while off stage everything was clandestine and harried. But I was glad to take on the role of intermediary, scouting out empty dressing rooms, keeping watch, lying for them when lying was required — it gave me something concrete to do with my time instead of wondering, as I did most nights, what on earth I was doing there.

Observing their affair was interesting to me too for it was curiously constructed. Every time the poor man caught sight of Tracey he looked as if he might die of love for her, and yet she was never very kindly to him, as far as I could see, and I often heard her call him an old fool, or tease him about his white wife, or make cruel jokes about his aging libido. Once, I interrupted them by mistake, walking into a dressing room I didn’t realize they were in, and found a singular scene: he was on his knees on the floor, fully dressed but head bowed and frankly weeping, and she was sitting on a stool, her back to him, facing the mirror, applying some lipstick. “Please don’t,” I heard her say as I slammed the door shut. “And get up. Get up off your fucking knees…” Later she told me he was offering to leave his wife. What was strangest to me about her ambivalence toward him was how severely it disturbed the hierarchies of the theatrical world she occupied, in which every soul in the production had a precise value and a corresponding power, and all relations conformed strictly to a certain schema. Socially, practically, sexually, a female star was worth all twenty chorus girls, for example, and Hot Box Girl Number One was worth about three chorus girls and all the understudies, while a male speaking part of any kind was equal to all the women on stage put together — except perhaps the female lead — and a male star could print his own currency, when he entered a room it re-formed around him, when he chose a chorus girl she submitted to him at once, when he suggested a change the director sat up in his seat and listened. This system was so solid it was unaffected by revolutions elsewhere. Directors had begun, for example, to cast across and against the old class and color lines — there were black King Henrys and cockney Richard IIIs and Kenyan Arvide Abernathys sounding just like Larry Olivier — but the old onstage hierarchies of rank remained firm as ever. In my first week, lost backstage and confused about the location of the prop cupboard, I stopped a pretty Indian girl in a corset who happened to be running by and tried to ask her for directions. “Don’t ask me,” she said, without slowing down, “I’m nobody…” Tracey’s affair struck me as a form of revenge upon all that: like watching a house cat capture a lion, tame him, treat him like a dog.

I was the only person the two lovers could socialize with after hours. They couldn’t go to the Coach and Horses with the rest of the crew, but they had the same urge to drown a post-show adrenalin high in alcohol, so they went instead to the Colony Room, where nobody else from the show went, but where he had been a member for years. Often I was invited to go with them. Here everyone called him “Chalky,” and they knew his drink — whisky and ginger ale — and it was always sitting on the bar waiting for him when he arrived on the dot of ten forty-five. He loved that, and the stupid nickname, because it was a posh English habit to give stupid nicknames, and he was devoted to all things posh and English. I noticed he hardly ever talked of Kenya or Africa. One night I tried to ask him about his home but he became irritable: “Look, you kids, you grow up here, you think where I come from it’s all starving children and Live Aid or whatever the hell you think it is. Well, my father was a professor of economics, my mother is a government minister, I grew up in a very beautiful compound, thank you very much, with servants, a cook, a gardener…” He went on like this for a while and then returned to his preferred subject, the glory days of Soho. I felt embarrassed but also that he had deliberately misunderstood me: of course I knew his world existed — that kind of world exists everywhere. That wasn’t what I’d wanted to know.

His real allegiance was to the bar itself, which affection he struggled to translate to two girls who had barely heard of Francis Bacon and saw only a narrow, smoke-stained room, the lurid green walls and the crazed clutter—“Art shit,” Tracey called it — that took over every surface. To annoy her lover, Tracey liked to make a show of her ignorance, but though she tried to disguise it I suspected she was often interested in the long, digressive, drunken stories he told, about artists, actors and writers he had known, their lives and works, who they’d fucked and what they’d drunk or taken and how they’d died. When he went to the toilet or out to buy fags I sometimes caught her deep in contemplation of one nearby painting or another, following the movement, I thought, of the brush, looking intently, with that sharpness she brought to all things. And when Chalky staggered back in and resumed his subject, she’d roll her eyes but she was listening, I could tell. Chalky had known Bacon only a little, enough to raise a drink with, and they’d had a good friend in common, a young actor called Paul, a man of “great beauty, great personal charm,” the son of Ghanaians, who’d lived with his boyfriend, and Bacon, for a while, in a platonic triangle, down in Battersea. “And the thing you have to understand,” said Chalky (after a certain number of whiskies there were always these things we had to understand), “the thing you have to understand is that here, in Soho, at that time, there was no black, there was no white. Nothing so banal. It wasn’t like Brixton, no, here we were brothers, in art, in love”—he gave Tracey a squeeze—“in everything. Then Paul got that part in A Taste of Honey—we came here to celebrate it — and everyone was talking about it, and we felt like we were the center of the whole thing, swinging London, bohemian London, literary London, theatrical London, that this was our country, too, now. It was beautiful! I tell you, if London began and ended on Dean Street, all would be… happiness.”

Tracey wriggled off his lap back on to her own stool. “You’re a fucking pisshead,” she muttered, and the barman, overhearing what she’d said, laughed and told her: “’Fraid that’s a condition of membership round here, love…” Chalky turned to Tracey and kissed her sloppily: “Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry…” “Look what I’m dealing with!” cried Tracey, pulling him off her. Chalky had a fondness for dirge-like Shakespearean ballads, it drove Tracey up the green walls, in part because she was jealous of his beautiful voice but also because when Chalky started singing of willow trees and faithless shrews it was a reliable sign that he’d soon have to be half carried down that steep and rickety staircase, heaved into a cab and sent back to his white wife, his fare prepaid with money Tracey had lifted from his wallet, usually taking a bit more than was strictly required. But she was pragmatic, she only ended the night when she’d learned something. I believe she was trying to pick up what she’d missed this past three years and I’d gained: a free education.

The show was very well reviewed and in November, backstage, five minutes before curtain, we were gathered together and told, by the producers, that our run was to be extended, past its Christmas deadline and into the spring. The cast was delighted, and that night they took their delight out with them on stage. I stood in the wings, happy for them, too, but with my own secret news tucked up inside me, which I hadn’t yet told the management or Tracey. One of my applications had come through, finally: a production-assistant position, a paid internship, at the newly launched British version of YTV. The previous week I’d gone for an interview, hit it off with my interviewer, who told me, a little unprofessionally, I thought, given the queue of girls outside, that I had the job, there and then. It was only thirteen grand, but if I stayed at my father’s it was more than enough. I was happy and yet hesitant to tell Tracey, without really asking myself what was at the root of my hesitancy. The Hot Box Girls dashed past me, fresh from Make-up, and on to the stage, dressed as cats, with Adelaide front and center and Hot Box Girl Number One just to her left. They puffed up their chests provocatively, licked their paws, got a hold of their tails — one of which I had pinned on Tracey ten minutes before — crouched like kittens about to pounce, and started to sing, of mean “poppas” who, holding you too tightly, make you want to roam, and other, gentle strangers, who make you feel at home… It was always a riotous number, but that night it was a real sensation. From where I stood, with a clear view of the front row, I could see the undisguised lust in the eyes of the men, and how many of those eyes were drawn specifically to Tracey when they should have rightfully been on the woman playing Adelaide. Everyone else was eclipsed by the litheness of Tracey’s legs in that leotard, the pure vitality of her movements, truly cat-like, ultra-feminine in a mode I envied and could not hope to create in my own body no matter how many tails you stuck on me. There were thirteen women dancing in that number but only Tracey’s movements really mattered, and when she ran off stage with the rest and I told her how wonderfully she’d danced, she did not, like the other girls, second-guess me or ask for any repetition of the praise, she only said, “Yes, I know,” bent over, stripped and handed me her balled-up tights.

That night the cast celebrated at the Coach and Horses. Tracey and Chalky went with them and so did I, but we were used to the drunken and intimate intensity of the Colony Room — also to our own seats, and to hearing ourselves speak — and after about ten minutes of standing, screaming at the top of our voices and not getting served, Tracey wanted to leave. I thought she meant back to the Colony Room, with Chalky, to do as we usually did, so she and her lover could drink too much and go over their impossible situation: his wish to tell his wife, her determination that he would not, the complication of his children — who were around our age — and the possibility, dreaded by Chalky but unlikely I thought, that the papers might find out and make some kind of story of it. But when he went to the bathroom Tracey pulled me outside and said, “I don’t want to do him tonight”—I remember that “do”— “Let’s just go back to yours and get caned.”

It was about eleven thirty when we got to Kilburn. Tracey had rolled one on the train and now we smoked walking down the street, remembering the times we’d performed this same action down the same road aged twenty, fifteen, thirteen, twelve…

As we walked I told her my news. It sounded very glamorous, YTV, three letters from a world that had preoccupied us as teenagers, and I felt almost embarrassed to bring it up, obscenely lucky, as if I were about to be on the channel rather than filing its British post and brewing its British tea. Tracey stopped walking and took the joint from me.

“But you’re not going to leave right now? In the middle of a run?”

I shrugged and confessed: “Tuesday. Are you really fucked off?”

She didn’t reply. We walked in silence for a bit and then she said: “You planning on moving out as well or what?”

I wasn’t. I’d found I liked living with my father, and being near — but not in the same space as — my mother. To my own surprise I was in no hurry to leave. And I remember making a lot of this to Tracey, of how much I “loved” the old neighborhood, wanting to impress her, I suppose, prove how firmly my feet were still on the local ground, notwithstanding any change in my fortunes, I still lived with my father as she lived with her mother. She listened, smiled in a tight sort of way, lifted her nose into the air and kept her counsel. A few minutes later we reached my father’s and I realized I didn’t have my key. I often forgot it, but didn’t like to ring the bell — in case he was already asleep, knowing he had to be up early — so would go down the side return and let myself in the back kitchen, which was usually open. But at that moment I was finishing the joint and didn’t want to risk my father seeing me — we had recently promised each other we’d stop smoking. So I sent Tracey. A minute later she came back and said the kitchen was locked and we’d better go to hers.

The next day was a Saturday. Tracey left early for the matinee, but I didn’t work Saturdays. I went back to my father’s flat and spent the afternoon with him. I didn’t see the letter that day though it might already have been on the mat. I found it on Sunday morning: it had been pushed through my door and was addressed to me, handwritten, with a little food stain on the corner of one page, and I think of it as the last truly personal written letter I ever received, for even though Tracey had no computer, not yet, the revolution was happening all around us and soon enough the only paper addressed to me would come from banks, utilities or the government, with a little plastic window to warn me of the contents. This letter came with no warning — I hadn’t seen Tracey’s handwriting in years — and I opened it as I sat at my father’s table with my father sitting opposite me. “Who’s that from then?” he asked, and for a few lines I still didn’t know myself. Two minutes later the only question remaining was whether it was fact or fiction. It had to be fiction: to believe otherwise was to make everything in my present life impossible as well as destroying much of the life I had led up to this point. It was to allow Tracey to place a bomb under me and blow me to smithereens. I read it again, to make sure I had understood. She began by speaking of her duty, and of it being a horrible duty, and that she had asked and asked herself (“asked” spelled wrong) what to do and had felt she had no choice (“choice” spelled wrong.) She described Friday night as I, too, remembered it: walking up the street to my father’s, smoking a joint, up to the point where she went down the side return to let herself in via the kitchen, unsuccessfully. But here the timeline broke in two, into her reality and mine, or her fiction — as far as I was concerned — and my fact. In her version she walked round the back of my father’s flat, stood in the small gravel courtyard, and then, because the kitchen seemed to be locked, took two steps to the left and brought her nose right up to the back window, to my father’s bedroom window, the one in which I slept, cupped her hands upon the glass and looked in. There she saw my father, naked, on top of something, moving up and down, and at first she had naturally thought it was a woman, and if it had been a woman, or so she assured me, then she never would have mentioned it, it was none of her business or mine, but the fact was it was not a woman at all, it was a doll, human-sized, but inflated, and of very dark complexion—“like a golliwog,” she wrote — with a crescent of synthetic lamb’s-wool hair and a huge pair of bright red lips, red as blood. “You all right, love?” asked my father, across the table, as I held that comic, tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, hideous letter shaking in my hand. I said I was fine, took Tracey’s letter to the back courtyard, took out a lighter and set it on fire.