After the sun went down, and the last man on the doorstep left, I abandoned my boxes with James and Darryl and got a taxi on Lennox. The driver was of that deepest shade, like Hawa, and had a likely-sounding name, and I was in the state of seeing signs and symbols everywhere. I leaned forward with my year-off enthusiasms and ragbag of local facts and asked him where he was from. He was Senegalese but this didn’t hamper me much: I spoke without pause through the midtown tunnel and out into Jamaica. He beat the steering wheel every now with the hub of his right hand and sighed and laughed.
“So you know how it is, back home! That village life! It’s not easy but that’s the life I miss! But sista, you should have come to see us! You could have just walked down the road!”
“Actually, the friend I was telling you about,” I said, looking up for a moment from my screen, “from Senegal? We just organized to meet in London, I was just messaging him.” I repressed the urge to tell this stranger that I, in my generosity, had paid for Lamin’s ticket.
“Oh, nice, nice. London is better? More nice than here?”
“Different.”
“Twenty-eight years I’ve been here. Here is so stressful, you have to be so angry to survive here, you live off the anger . . . it’s too much.”
We were pulling into JFK, and when I tried to give him his tip he returned it.
“Thank you for coming to my country,” he said, forgetting I hadn’t.
Eleven
Now everyone knows who you really are.
By the time I landed, our old girlhood dance was out in the world. I find it interesting that Tracey chose not to send it to me until two whole days later. In her vision of things others would know who I really was before I did—but then perhaps they always do. It reminded me of her way with our earliest tales of ballet dancers in peril, how she would correct and edit me: “No: that part here.” “It’d go better if she died on page two.” Moving and rearranging things to create the greatest impact. Now she had achieved the same effect with my life, placing the beginning of the story at an earlier point so that all that came after read as the twisted consequence of a lifelong obsession. It was more convincing than my version. It drew the strangest reactions from people. Everybody wanted to see the footage and nobody did: it was pulled down wherever it was posted almost as soon as it went up. For some—maybe you—it was borderline child pornography, if not in intention then in effect. Others found it only exploitative, though it is hard to put your finger on who is exploiting whom. Can children exploit themselves? Is it anything more than a couple of girls messing around, simply two girls dancing—two brown girls dancing like adults—copying adult moves innocently, but skillfully, as brown girls often can? And if you think it more than that, then who has the problem, exactly, the girls in the film—or you? Whatever is said or thought about it seems to make the viewer complicit: the best thing is not to see it at all. That is the only possible high ground. Otherwise, this cloud of guilt, which can’t be exactly placed, but still you feel it. Even I, watching the video, had the troubling thought: well, if a girl behaves like that at the age of ten, can she ever be said to be innocent? What won’t she do at fifteen, at twenty-two—at thirty-three? The desire to be on the side of innocence is so strong. It pulsated out of my phone in waves, in all those posts and rants and commentaries. By contrast, the baby was innocent, the baby was guilt-free. Aimee loved the baby, the child’s birth parents loved Aimee, they wanted her to raise their baby. Judy got that message out far and wide. Who was anyone to judge? Who was I?
Now everybody knows who you really are.
The tide turned again, fiercely and with great sympathy in Aimee’s direction. But there were still people on the doorstep of Judy’s rental, despite all her preparations and the doorman’s promises, and on the third day I left with Lamin for my mother’s Sidmouth Road flat, which I knew, in all available records, would be registered in Miriam’s name. There was no one on the doorstep. When I rang the doorbell there was no answer and my mother’s phone went to voicemail. Finally a neighbor let us in. She looked confused—shocked—when I asked where my mother was. This woman, too, would now know who I really was: the kind of daughter who had not yet heard her own mother was in a hospice.
It looked like all the spaces my mother had ever lived in, books and papers everywhere, just as I remembered, but more so: the space for actual living had reduced. Chairs were serving as bookshelves, and all available tables, most of the floor, the work surfaces in the kitchen. It wasn’t chaos, though, there was a logic to it. In the kitchen diaspora fiction and poetry dominated and the bathroom was mostly histories of the Caribbean. There was a wall of slave narratives and commentaries upon them leading from her bedroom down the hall to the boiler. I found the address of the hospice on the fridge, it was written in somebody else’s handwriting. I felt sad and guilty. Who did she ask to write it? Who drove her there? I tried to do a little tidying. Lamin lent a hand, half-heartedly—he was used to women doing for him and soon sat himself down on my mother’s sofa to watch the same heavy old TV set from my childhood, kept half hidden behind an armchair, to make the point that it was never watched. I moved piles of books back and forth, making little headway, and after a while gave up. I sat at my mother’s table with my back to Lamin, opened my laptop and returned to what I’d spent the whole of yesterday doing, searching for myself, reading of myself, and seeking Tracey, too, below the line. She wasn’t hard to find. Generally the fourth or fifth comment, and she always went at it full tilt, every time, no compromise, aggressive, full of conspiracy. She had many aliases. Some were quite subtle: tiny references to moments from our shared history, songs we’d liked, toys we’d had, or numeral recombinations of the year we first met or our dates of birth. I noticed she liked to use the words “sordid” and “shameful,” and the phrase “Where were their mothers?” Whenever I saw that line, or a variation upon it, I knew it was her. I found her everywhere, in the most unlikely places. In other people’s feeds, under newspaper articles, on Facebook walls, abusing anyone who did not agree with her arguments. As I followed her trail, the idiotic daytime shows came and went behind me. If I turned to check on Lamin I found him still as a statue, watching.
“Turn that down a little?”
He’d increased the volume suddenly on a property-makeover show, of the kind my father had once liked to watch.
“The man is speaking about Edgware. I have an uncle in Edgware. And a cousin.”
“Do you?” I said, trying not to sound too hopeful. I waited but he returned to his show. The sun went down. My stomach began to rumble. I didn’t move from my seat, I was too intent on my Tracey hunt, flushing her out of the covert, and checking a secondary window every fifteen minutes or so to see if she’d invaded my inbox. But her methods with me were apparently different than with my mother. That one-line e-mail was all she ever sent me.