“Well, this is all a bit of a surprise, isn’t it?” he said, handing Emma a mug. “For all of us. It’s a long time since I’ve seen . . . But you see your mum suddenly decided . . . Well, she’s a woman of sudden whims, isn’t she?” My sister looked blankly at my father, and he at once gave up whatever he was trying to say and downgraded to small talk. “Now, I’m told Emma does a bit of ballet. That’s something you two have in common. At the Royal Ballet for a little while—full scholarship—but she had to stop.”
Dancing on stage, did he mean? In Covent Garden? As a principal? Or in the “corpse,” as Tracey called it? But no—“scholarship” sounded like a school matter. Was there, then, a “Royal Ballet School”? But if such a place existed why hadn’t I been sent to it? And if this Emma had been sent there, who paid for it? Why did she have to stop? Because her chest was so large? Or did a bullet go right up her thigh?
“Maybe you’ll dance together one day!” said my mother into the silence, which was the kind of maternal inanity in which she very rarely indulged. Emma looked up at my mother fearfully—it was the first time she had dared look at her directly—and whatever she saw there had the power to freshly horrify: she burst into tears. My mother left the room. My father said to me: “Go out for a bit. Go on. Put your coat on.”
I slipped off the sofa, grabbed my duffel coat off the hook and let myself out. I went down the walkway, trying to put what little I knew of my father’s past together with this new reality. He was from Whitechapel, a large East End family, not as big as my mother’s but not far off, and his father had been a minor criminal of some kind, in and out of jail, and this, my mother once explained to me, was why my father put so much effort into my childhood: cooking, taking me to school and to dance class, packing my lunches and so on, all unusual activities for a father, at the time. I was compensation—retribution—for his own childhood. I knew too that he had himself been, at one point, “no good.” Once we were watching TV and something about the Kray twins came on and my father said casually, “Oh, well, everybody knew them, you couldn’t help knowing them, at that time.” His many siblings were “no good,” the East End in general was “no good,” and this all helped consolidate my idea of our own corner of London as a little, clear-aired peak above a general quagmire, into which you might be dragged back into real poverty and crime from several directions. But no one had ever mentioned a son or a daughter.
I took the stairs down to the communal area and stood resting against a concrete pillar, watching my “brother” kick up little scraps of half-frozen turf. With his long hair and beard and that long face he looked like adult Jesus to me, whom I knew solely from a cross on the wall at Miss Isabel’s dance class. Unlike my reaction to the girl—simply that some kind of fraud was under way—looking at the boy I found I could not deny his essential rightness. It was right that he should be my father’s son, anyone looking at him would see the sense of it. What didn’t make sense was me. Something coldly objective took me over: that same instinct that allowed me to separate my voice from my throat as an object of consideration, of study, came to me now, and I looked at this boy and thought: yes, he is right and I am wrong, isn’t it interesting? I could have, I suppose, thought of myself as the true child and the boy as the counterfeit, but I didn’t do that.
He turned round and spotted me. Something in his face told me I was being pitied, and I was moved when, with effortful kindness, he began a game of hide and seek around the concrete pillars. Every time his shaggy blond head popped out from behind a block I had that out-of-body sensation: here is my father’s son, looking just like my father’s son, isn’t that interesting? As we played we heard raised voices from upstairs. I tried to ignore them, but my new playmate stopped running and stood under the balcony and listened. At a certain point the anger flashed back into his eyes and he said to me: “Let me tell you something: he don’t care about no one. He’s not what he seems. He’s fucked up in the head. Marrying that bloody spade!”
And then the girl came running down the stairs. No one ran after her, not my father or my mother. She was still crying and she came to the boy and they hugged and, still hugging, walked across the grass and out of the estate. Snow was lightly falling. I watched them go. I didn’t see them again until my father died and they were never spoken of during my childhood. For a long time I thought the whole thing was a hallucination, or perhaps something I’d lifted from a bad film. When Tracey asked me about it I told her the truth, although with some elaboration: I claimed that a building we walked past daily, on Willesden Lane, the one with the shabby blue awning, was the Royal Ballet School, and that my cruel white posh sister went there, and was very successful but refused even to wave to me from the window, can you believe it? As she listened I witnessed a great struggle in her face to believe it, mostly expressed by her nostrils. Of course Tracey very likely had been inside that building herself, and would have known perfectly well what it really was: a down-at-heel event space where a lot of cheap local weddings were held, and sometimes the bingo. A few weeks later, as I was sitting in the back of my mother’s ridiculous car—a tiny, white, ostentatiously French 2CV with a CND sticker placed next to the tax disk—I spotted a hard-faced bride, half swallowed by tulle and ringlets, standing outside my Royal Ballet, smoking a fag, but I did not let this vision penetrate my fantasy. By then I had come to share my friend’s insusceptibility to reality. And now—as if we were both trying to get on a see-saw at the same time—neither of us pressed too hard and a delicate equilibrium was allowed to persist. I could have my evil ballerina if she could have her backing dancer. Maybe I never got out of this habit of elaboration. Twenty years later over a difficult lunch I revisited the story of my ghostly siblings with my mother, who sighed, lit a cigarette and said: “Trust you to add snow.”
Ten