“Look,” she said, without raising her eyes from her screen, “you can’t get silver without doing wings, forget about gold. So what’s your dad going to come and watch you fuck it all up for? No point, is there?”
I looked at my stupid feet, that couldn’t do wings. I sat down and began quietly to cry. This changed nothing and after a minute I found myself pitiful and stopped. I decided to busy myself organizing Barbie’s wardrobe. All her clothes had been stuffed into Ken’s open-top automobile. It was my plan to extract them, flatten them, hang them on their little hangers and place them back in the wardrobe, the kind of game I was never permitted to play at home due to its echoes of domestic oppression. Halfway through this painstaking procedure Tracey’s heart mysteriously softened toward me: she slipped from the bed and joined me cross-legged on the floor. Together we got that tiny white woman’s life in order.
Twelve
We had a favorite video, it was labeled “Saturday Cartoons and Top Hat” and moved weekly from my flat to Tracey’s and back, played so often that tracking now ate the frame, from above and below. Because of this we couldn’t risk forward-winding while playing—it made the tracking worse—so we forward-wound “blind,” guessing at duration by assessing the width of the black tape as it flew from one reel to another. Tracey was an expert forward-winder, she seemed to know in her body exactly when we’d gone past the irrelevant cartoons and when to press stop to reach, for example, the song “Cheek to Cheek.” It strikes me now that if I want to watch this same clip—as I did a few minutes ago, just before writing this—it’s no effort at all, it’s the work of a moment, I type my request in the box and it’s there. Back then there was a craft to it. We were the first generation to have, in our own homes, the means to re-and forward-wind reality: even very small children could press their fingers against those clunky buttons and see what-has-been become what-is or what-will-be. When Tracey was about this process she was absolutely concentrated, she would not press play until she had Fred and Ginger exactly where she wanted them, on the balcony, among the bougainvillea and the Doric columns. At which point she began to read the dance, as I never could, she saw everything, the stray ostrich feathers hitting the floor, the weak muscles in Ginger’s back, the way Fred had to jerk her up from any supine position, spoiling the flow, ruining the line. She noticed the most important thing of all, which is the dance lesson within the performance. With Fred and Ginger you can always see the dance lesson. In a sense the dance lesson is the performance. He’s not looking at her with love, not even fake movie love. He’s looking at her as Miss Isabel looked at us: don’t forget x, please keep in mind y, arm up now, leg down, spin, dip, bow.
“Look at her,” Tracey said, smiling oddly, pressing a finger to Ginger’s face on the screen. “She looks fucking scared.”
It was during one of these viewings that I learned something new and important about Louie. On this occasion the flat was empty, and as it annoyed Tracey’s mother when we watched the same clip multiple times, that afternoon we indulged ourselves. The moment Fred came to a rest and leaned against the balustrade Tracey shuffled forward on all fours and pressed the button down again and off we went, back to what-once-was. We must have watched the same five-minute clip a dozen times. Until suddenly it was enough: Tracey got up and told me to follow. It was dark outside. I wondered when her mother would be home. We walked past the kitchen to the bathroom. It was exactly the same as my bathroom. Same cork floor, same avocado bathroom set. She got down on her knees and pushed the side panel of the bath: it fell in easily. Sitting in a Clarks shoebox just by the pipes was a small gun. Tracey picked up the box and showed it to me. She told me it was her father’s, that he had left it here, and when Michael came to Wembley at Christmas Louie would be his security man as well as one of his dancers, it had to be that way to confuse people, it was all top secret. You tell anyone, she told me, and you are dead. She put the panel back and went to the kitchen to start making her tea. I headed home. I remember feeling intensely envious of the glamour of Tracey’s family life compared to my own, its secretive and explosive nature, and I walked toward my own flat trying to think of some equivalent revelation I could offer to Tracey the next time I saw her, a terrible illness or a new baby, but there was nothing, nothing, nothing!
Thirteen
We stood on the balcony. Tracey held up a cigarette, stolen from my father, and I stood ready to light it for her. Before I could she spat it from her mouth, kicked it behind her and pointed down at my mother, who, as it turned out, was right below us on the communal lawn, smiling up. It was a mid-May Sunday morning, warm and bright. My mother was waving a dramatically large spade, like a Soviet farmer, and wearing a terrific outfit: denim dungarees, thin, light brown crop top, perfect against her skin, Birkenstocks and a square yellow handkerchief folded into a triangle and worn over her head. This was tied at the back of her neck in a jaunty little knot. She was taking it upon herself, she explained, to dig up the communal grass, a rectangle about eight foot by three, with the idea of establishing a vegetable garden that everybody could enjoy. Tracey and I watched her. She dug for a while, pausing regularly to rest her foot on the lip of the shovel and to shout up to us about lettuces, the various strains, the right time for planting them, none of which interested us in the least, and yet everything she said was made somehow more compelling by that outfit. We watched as several other people came out of their flats, to express concern or query her right to do what she was doing, but they were no match for her, and we noticed and admired the way she dispatched the fathers in a few minutes—essentially by looking into their eyes—while with the mothers she met with resistance, yes, with the mothers she had to make a little more effort, drowning them in language until they understood how out of their depth they were and the thin stream of their objections was completely subsumed by the quick-running currents of my mother’s talk. Everything she said sounded so convincing, so impossible to contradict. It was a wave washing over you, unstoppable. Who didn’t like roses? Who was so small-minded they would begrudge an inner-city child the chance to plant a seed? Weren’t we all Africans, originally? Weren’t we people of the land?
It started to rain. My mother, not dressed for rain, returned indoors. The next morning before school we were excited to catch up with this spectacle: my mother, looking like Pam Grier herself, digging a large, illegal hole without permission from the council. But the spade lay exactly where she had left it and the trench filled with water. The hole looked like somebody’s half-dug grave. The next day it rained again and no more digging was done. On the third day a gray sludge began to rise up and spill into the grass.
“Clay,” said my father, digging a finger into it. “She’s got a problem now.”