“Once dis house full of pick’ney,” said Lambert, “but dem children got children now.”
The image I had was of children my own age with babies in their arms: it was a fate I connected with South London. I knew my mother left home to escape all that, so that no daughter of hers would ever become a child with a child, for any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive—as my mother had—she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing. My father reached out for me and I crawled on to his lap, covering his growing bald spot with my hand and feeling the thin strands of wet hair he wore combed across it.
“She shy, eh? You not shy of your Uncle Lambert?”
Lambert’s eyes were bloodshot, and his freckles were like mine but raised; his face was round and sweet, with light brown eyes that confirmed, supposedly, Chinese blood in the family tree. But I was shy of him. My mother—who never visited Lambert, except at Christmas—was strangely insistent that my father and I do so, though always with the proviso that we remain alert, never allowing ourselves to be “dragged back.” Into what? I wound myself around my father’s body until I was at the back of him and could see the little patch of hair he kept long at the nape of his neck, which he was so determined to maintain. Though he was only in his thirties, I’d never seen my father with a full head of hair, never known him blond, and would never know him gray. It was this fake nut-brown I knew, which came off on your fingers if you touched it, and which I had seen at its true source, a round, shallow tin that sat open on the edge of the bath, with an oily wheel of brown running round the rim, worn down to a bare patch in the middle, just like my father.
“She needs company,” he fretted. “A book’s no good, is it? A film’s no good. You need the real thing.”
“Cyan do nuttin wid dat woman. I knew it from time she was small. Her will is a will of iron.”
It was true. Nothing could be done with her. When we got home she was watching a lecture from the Open University, pad and pencil in her hand, looking beautiful, serene, curled up on the couch with her bare feet under her bottom, but when she turned round I could see she was annoyed, we’d come back too early, she wanted more time, more peace, more quiet, so she could study. We were the vandals in the temple. She was studying Sociology & Politics. We didn’t know why.
Four
If Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat, said Gene Kelly, and by this logic Bill “Bojangles” Robinson should really have been my dancer, because Bojangles danced for the Harlem dandy, for the ghetto kid, for the sharecropper—for all the descendants of slaves. But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved. The rest of it, all the detail, fell away. I ignored the ridiculous plots of those movies: the opera-like comings and goings, the reversals of fortune, the outrageous meet cutes and coincidences, the minstrels, maids and butlers. To me they were only roads leading to the dance. The story was the price you paid for the rhythm. “Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?” Each syllable found its corresponding movement in the legs, the stomach, the backside, the feet. In ballet hour, by contrast, we danced to classical recordings—”white music” as Tracey bluntly called it—which Miss Isabel recorded from the radio on to a series of cassettes. But I could barely recognize it as music, it had no time signature that I could hear, and although Miss Isabel tried to help us, shouting out the beats of each bar, I could never relate these numbers in any way to the sea of melody that came over me from the violins or the crashing thump of a brass section. I still knew more than Tracey: I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined. In films and photographs I had seen white men sitting at their pianos as black girls stood by them, singing. Oh, I wanted to be like those girls!
At quarter past eleven, just after ballet, in the middle of our first break, Mr. Booth entered the hall carrying a big black bag, the kind country doctors once carried, and in this bag he kept the sheet music for class. If I was free—which meant, if I could get away from Tracey—I hurried over to him, following him as he slowly approached the piano, and then positioning myself like the girls I’d seen onscreen, I asked him to play “All of Me” or “Autumn in New York” or “42nd Street.” In the tap class he had to play the same half a dozen songs over and over and I had to dance to them, but before class—while the rest of the people in the hall were busy talking, eating, drinking—we had this time to ourselves, and I’d get him to work through a tune with me, singing below the volume of the piano if I was feeling shy, a little louder if not. Sometimes when I sang the parents smoking outside the hall under the cherry trees would come in to listen, and girls who were busy preparing for their own dances—pulling on tights, tying laces—paused in these actions and turned to watch me. I became aware that my voice—as long as I did not deliberately sing underneath the volume of the piano—had something charismatic in it, drawing people in. This was not a technical gift: my range was tiny. It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could “put it over.” I made sad songs very sad, and happy songs joyful. When the time came for our “performance exams” I learned to use my voice as a form of misdirection, the same way some magicians make you look at their mouths when you should be watching their hands. But I couldn’t fool Tracey. I saw her as I walked off the stage, standing in the wings with her arms crossed over her chest and her nose in the air. Even though she always trumped everybody and her mother’s kitchen corkboard heaved with gold medals, she was never satisfied, she wanted gold in “my” category, too—song and dance—though she could hardly sing a note. It was difficult to understand. I really felt that if I could dance like Tracey I would never want for anything else in this world. Other girls had rhythm in their limbs, some had it in their hips or their little backsides but she had rhythm in individual ligaments, probably in individual cells. Every movement was as sharp and precise as any child could hope to make it, her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intricate. Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her technique. I was—I am—in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything.
Five
A Sunday in late summer. I was on the balcony, watching a few girls from our floor skipping Double Dutch down by the bins. I heard my mother calling me. I looked over and saw her entering the estate, hand in hand with Miss Isabel. I waved, and she looked up, smiled and shouted, “Stay there!” I had never seen my mother and Miss Isabel together outside of class, and could tell even from this vantage point that Miss Isabel was being hustled into something. I wanted to go and confer with my father, who was painting a wall in the living room, but I knew my mother, so charming with strangers, had a short temper with her kin, and that “Stay there!” meant exactly that. I watched this odd pair move through the estate and into the stairwell, refracted in the glass blocks as a scatter of yellow and pink and mahogany brown. Meanwhile the girls by the bins switched the direction of their skipping ropes, a new jumper ran bravely into the vicious swinging loop and began a new chant, the one about the monkey who got choked.