Long before it became her career my mother had a political mind: it was in her nature to think of people collectively. Even as a child I noticed it, and felt instinctively that there was something chilly and unfeeling in her ability to analyze so precisely the people she lived among: her friends, her community, her own family. We were all, at one and the same time, people she knew and loved but also objects of study, living embodiments of all she seemed to be learning up at Middlesex Poly. She held herself apart, always. She never submitted, for example, to the neighborhood cult of “sharpness”—the passion for shiny shell-suits and sparkling fake gems, for whole days spent in the hair salon, children in fifty-quid trainers, settees paid for over several years on hire purchase—although neither would she ever entirely condemn it. People are not poor because they’ve made bad choices, my mother liked to say, they make bad choices because they’re poor. But though she was serene and anthropological about these matters in her college essays—or while lecturing me and my father across the dinner table—I knew in her real life she was often exasperated. She didn’t pick me up from school any more—my father did that now—because the scene there aggravated her too much, in particular the way, each afternoon, time collapsed, and all those mothers became kids again, kids who had come to collect their kids, and all of these kids together turned from school with relief, free finally to speak with each other in their own way, and to laugh and joke and eat ice cream from the waiting ice-cream van, and to make what they considered to be a natural amount of noise. My mother didn’t fit into all of that any longer. She still cared for the group—intellectually, politically—but she was no longer one of them.
Every now and then she did get caught up in it, usually by some error of timing, and found herself trapped in a conversation with a mother, often Tracey’s, on Willesden Lane. On these occasions she could turn callous, making a point of mentioning each new academic achievement of mine—or inventing some—although she knew that all Tracey’s mother could offer in return was more of Miss Isabel’s praise, which was, to my mother, an entirely worthless commodity. My mother was proud of trying harder than Tracey’s mother, than all the mothers, of having got me into a half-decent state school instead of one of the several terrible ones. She was in a competition of caring, and yet her fellow contestants, like Tracey’s mother, were so ill-equipped when placed beside her that it was a fatally lopsided battle. I often wondered: is it some kind of a trade-off? Do others have to lose so we can win?
? ? ?
One morning in early spring, my father and I ran into Tracey under our block, by the garages. She seemed agitated and though she said she was only cutting through our estate on the way to her own I felt certain she’d been waiting for me. She looked cold: I wondered whether she had been to school at all. I knew she sometimes bunked off, with the approval of her mother. (My mother had been shocked to see them both, one school-day afternoon, coming out of What She Wants on the high road, laughing, carrying a load of shopping bags.) I watched my father greet Tracey warmly. Unlike my mother, he had no anxiety in connection with her, he found her single-minded dedication to her dancing sweet, and also, I think, admirable—it appealed to his work ethic—and it was very clear that Tracey adored my father, was even a little in love with him. She was so painfully grateful for the way he talked to her like a father, although sometimes he went too far in this direction, not understanding that what came after borrowing a father for a few minutes was the pain of having to give him back.
“Exams coming up, aren’t they?” he asked her now. “And how’s all that going?”
Tracey stuck her nose proudly in the air: “I’m doing all six categories.”
“’Course you are.”
“For modern, though, I ain’t doing it by myself, I’m pairing. Ballet’s my strongest, then tap, then modern, then song and dance. I’m going for three golds at least, but if it was two golds and four silvers I’d be well happy with that.”
“And so you should be.”
She put her little hands on her hips. “You coming to watch us then or what?”
“Oh, I’ll be there! With bells on! Cheering my girls on.”
Tracey loved to boast to my father, she unfurled in his presence, sometimes even blushed, and the monosyllabic no and yes answers she tended to give to all other adults, including my mother, disappeared, to be replaced by this running babble, as if she thought that any pause in the flow might run the risk of losing my father’s attention altogether.
“Got some news,” she said casually, turning to me, and now I understood why we’d run into her. “My mum’s sorted it.”
“Sorted what?” I asked.
“I’m leaving my school,” she said. “I’m coming to yours.”
Later, at home, I told my mother this news, and she, too, was surprised, and, I suspected, a little displeased, at this proof of Tracey’s mother’s exertion on her daughter’s behalf more than anything else. She kissed her teeth: “I really didn’t think she had it in her.”
Eleven
It took Tracey moving to my classroom for me to understand what my classroom really was. I had thought it was a room full of children. In fact it was a social experiment. The dinner lady’s daughter shared a desk with the son of an art critic, a boy whose father was presently in prison shared a desk with the son of a policeman. The child of the postal officer shared a desk with the child of one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. One of Tracey’s first acts as my new desk mate was to articulate these subtle differences by way of a simple, compelling analogy: Cabbage Patch Kids versus Garbage Pail Kids. Each child was categorized as one or the other and she made it clear that any friendship I had formed before her arrival was now—in as far as it may have attempted to cross this divide—null and void, worthless, for the truth was it had never truly existed in the first place. There could be no real friendship between Cabbage Patch and Garbage Pail, not right now, not in England. She emptied our desk of my beloved Cabbage Patch Kid card collection and replaced them with her Garbage Pail Kid cards, which—like almost everything Tracey did in school—at once became the new craze. Even children who were, in Tracey’s eyes, Cabbage Patch types themselves began to collect the Garbage Pail Kids, even Lily Bingham collected them, and we all competed with each other to own the most repulsive cards: the Garbage Pail Kid with snot streaming down his face, or the one pictured on the toilet. Her other striking innovation was her refusal to sit down. She would only stand at her desk, bending forward to work. Our teacher—a kind and energetic man called Mr. Sherman—battled her for a week but Tracey’s will, like my mother’s, was made of iron, and in the end she was allowed to stand as she pleased. I don’t think Tracey had any special passion for standing up, it was a point of principle. The principle could have been anything, really, but the point was she would win it. It was clear that Mr. Sherman, having lost this argument, felt he must come down hard in some other area and one morning, as we were all excitedly swapping Garbage Pail Kids instead of listening to whatever he was saying, he suddenly went completely out of his mind, screaming like a lunatic, going from desk to desk seizing the cards, sometimes from inside the desk and sometimes from our hands, until he had a huge pile of them on his desk which he then shuffled into a tower laid on its side and brushed into a drawer, locking it ostentatiously with a little key. Tracey said nothing, but her piggy nose flared and I thought: oh dear, doesn’t Mr. Sherman realize she’ll never forgive him?
? ? ?
That same afternoon, after school, we walked home together. She wouldn’t talk to me, she was still in her fury, but when I tried to turn into my estate she grabbed my wrist and led me across the road to hers. All the way up in the lift we were silent. It seemed to me something momentous was about to happen. I could feel her rage like an aura around her, it almost vibrated. When we got to her front door I saw that the knocker—a brass lion of Judah with its mouth open, bought on the high road from one of the stalls that sold Africana—had been damaged and now hung by a single nail, and I wondered if her father had been round again. I followed Tracey to her room. Once the door was closed she turned on me, glaring, as if I myself were Mr. Sherman, asking me sharply what I wanted to do, now that we were here? I had no idea: never before had I been canvassed for ideas of what to do, she was the one with all the ideas, there had never been any planning by me before today.
“Well, what’s the point of coming round if you don’t fucking know?”
She flopped down on to her bed, picked up Pac-Man and started playing. I felt my face getting hot. I meekly suggested practicing our triple time-steps but this made Tracey groan.
“Don’t need to. I’m on to wings.”
“But I can’t do wings yet!”