by Zadie Smith
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.
Finally my mother came upon me, examined me—she had a coy look on her face—and the first thing she said was: “Take your shoes off.”
“Oh, we needn’t do it right now,” murmured Miss Isabel, but my mother said, “Better to know now than later,” and disappeared into the flat, reappearing a minute later with a large bag of self-raising flour, which she began sprinkling all over the balcony until there was a thin white carpet like first snowfall. I was to walk through this barefoot. I thought of Tracey. I wondered if Miss Isabel visited each girl’s house in turn. What a terrible waste of flour! Miss Isabel crouched down to watch. My mother leaned back against the balcony with her elbows resting upon it, smoking a cigarette. She was at an angle to the balcony, and the cigarette was at an angle to her mouth, and she was wearing a beret, as if wearing a beret were the most natural thing in the world. She was positioned at an angle to me, an ironic angle. I reached the other end of the balcony and looked back at my footprints.
“Ah, well there you are,” said Miss Isabel, but where were we? In the land of flat feet. My teacher slipped off a shoe and pressed her foot down for comparison: in her print you saw only the toes, the ball of the foot and the heel, in mine, the full, flat outline of a human tread. My mother was very interested in this result, but Miss Isabel, seeing my face, said something kind: “A ballet dancer needs an arch, yes, but you can tap with flat feet, you know, of course you can.” I didn’t think it was true, but it was kind and I clung to it and kept taking the class, and so continued to spend time with Tracey, which was, it dawned on me later, exactly the thing my mother had been trying to stop. She’d worked out that because Tracey and I went to different schools, in different neighborhoods, it was only dance class that brought us together, but when the summer came and dance class stopped, it made no difference anyway, we grew closer until, by August, we found ourselves together almost every day. From my balcony I could see into her estate and vice versa, no phone calls had to be made, and no formal arrangements, and although our mothers barely nodded at each other in the street it became a natural thing for us to pass in and out of each other’s building.
Six
We had a different mode of being in each flat. In Tracey’s we played and tested new toys, of which there appeared to be an unending supply. The Argos catalog, from whose pages I was allowed to choose three inexpensive items at Christmas, and one item for my birthday, was, to Tracey, an everyday bible, she read it religiously, circling her choices, often while in my company, with a little red pen she kept for this purpose. Her bedroom was a revelation. It overturned everything I thought I had understood about our shared situation. Her bed was in the shape of a pink Barbie sports car, her curtains were frilled, all her cabinets were white and shiny, and in the middle of the room it looked like someone had simply emptied Santa’s sleigh on to the carpet. You had to wade through toys. Broken toys formed a kind of bedrock, on top of which each new wave of purchases was placed, in archeological layers, corresponding, more or less, to whatever toy adverts were playing on the television at the time. That summer was the summer of the pissing doll. You fed her water and she pissed everywhere. Tracey had several versions of this stunning technology, and was able to draw all kinds of drama from it. Sometimes she would beat the doll for pissing. Sometimes she would sit her, ashamed and naked, in the corner, her plastic legs twisted at right angles to her little, dimpled bum. We two played the poor, incontinent child’s parents, and in the dialog Tracey gave me to say I sometimes heard odd, discomfiting echoes of her own home life, or else of the many soaps she watched, I couldn’t be sure.
“Your turn. Say: ‘You slag—she ain’t even my kid! Is it my fault she pisses ’erself?’ Go on, your turn!”
“You slag—she’s not even my daughter! Is it my fault if she pisses herself?”
“‘Listen, mate, you take her! You take her and see how you do!’ Now say: ‘Fat chance, sunshine!’”
One Saturday, with great trepidation, I mentioned the existence of pissing dolls to my mother, being careful to say “wee” instead of “piss.” She was studying. She looked up from her books with a mixture of incredulity and disgust.
“Tracey has one?”
“Tracey has four.”
“Come here a minute.”
She opened her arms, and I felt my face against the skin of her chest, taut and warm, utterly vital, as if there were a second, graceful young woman inside my mother bursting to get out. She had been growing her hair, it had been recently “done,” plaited into a dramatic conch-shell shape at the back of her head, like a piece of sculpture.
“You know what I’m reading about right now?”
“No.”
“I’m reading about the sankofa. You know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s a bird, it looks back over itself, like this.” She bent her beautiful head round as far as it could go. “From Africa. It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what’s gone before. Some people never learn.”
My father was in the tiny galley kitchen, silently cooking—he was the chef in our home—and this conversation was really addressed to him, it was he who was meant to hear it. The two of them had begun arguing so much that I was often the only conduit through which information could pass, sometimes abusively—“You explain to your mother” or “You can tell your father from me”—and sometimes like this, with a delicate, an almost beautiful irony.
“Oh,” I said. I didn’t see the connection with pissing dolls. I knew my mother was in the process of becoming, or trying to become, “an intellectual,” because my father often threw this term at her as a form of insult during their arguments. But I did not really understand what this meant, other than that an intellectual was someone who studied with the Open University, liked to wear a beret, frequently used the phrase “the Angel of History,” sighed when the rest of their family wanted to watch Saturday-night telly and stopped to argue with the Trotskyites on the Kilburn High Road when everybody else crossed the road to avoid them. But the main consequence of her transformation, for me, was this new and puzzling indirection in her conversation. She always seemed to be making adult jokes just over my head, to amuse herself, or to annoy my father.
“When you’re with that girl,” explained my mother, “it’s a kind thing to play with her, but she’s been raised in a certain way, and the present is all she has. You’ve been raised in another way—don’t forget that. That silly dance class is her whole world. It’s not her fault—that’s how she’s been raised. But you’re clever. Doesn’t matter if you’ve got flat feet, doesn’t matter because you’re clever and you know where you came from and where you’re going.”
I nodded. I could hear my father banging saucepans expressively.
“You won’t forget what I just said?”
I promised I wouldn’t.
In our flat there were no dolls at all and so Tracey when she came was forced into different habits. Here we wrote, a little
frantically, into a series of yellow, lined, A4 pads that my father brought home from work. It was a collaborative project. Tracey, because of her dyslexia—though we didn’t know to call it that at the time—preferred to dictate, while I struggled to keep up with the naturally melodramatic twist and turn of her mind. Almost all our stories concerned a cruel, posh prima ballerina from “Oxford Street” breaking her leg at the last minute, which allowed our plucky heroine—often a lowly costume fitter, or a humble theater-toilet cleaner—to step in and save the day. I noticed that they were always blond, these plucky girls, with hair “like silk” and big blue eyes. Once I tried to write “brown eyes” and Tracey took the pen out of my hand and scratched it out. We wrote on our bellies, flat on the floor of my room, and if my mother happened to come by and see us like this it was the only moment she ever looked at Tracey with anything like fondness. I took advantage of these moments to win further concessions for my friend—Can Tracey stay for tea? Can Tracey stay the night?—though I knew if my mother actually paused to read what we wrote in those yellow pads Tracey would never be allowed into the flat again. In several stories African men “lurked in the shadows” with iron bars to break the knees of lily-white dancers; in one, the prima had a terrible secret: she was “half-caste,” a word I trembled to write down, as I knew from experience how completely it enraged my mother. But if I felt unease about these details it was a small sensation when compared to the pleasure of our collaboration. I was so completely taken with Tracey’s stories, besotted with their endless delay of narrative gratification, which was again perhaps something she had got from the soaps or else extracted from the hard lessons her own life was teaching her. For just as you thought the happy ending had arrived, Tracey found some wonderful new way to destroy or divert it, so that the moment of consummation—which for both of us, I think, meant simply an audience, on their feet, cheering—never seemed to arrive. I wish I had those notepads still. Of all the thousands of words we wrote about ballerinas in various forms of physical danger only one sentence has stayed with me: Tiffany jumped up high to kiss her prince and pointed her toes oh she looked so sexy but that’s when the bullet went right up her thigh.
Seven
In the autumn Tracey went off to her single-sex school, in Neasden, where almost all the girls were Indian or Pakistani and wild: I used to see the older ones at the bus stop, uniforms adapted—shirt unbuttoned, skirt hitched up—screaming obscenities at white boys as they passed. A rough school with a lot of fighting. Mine, in Willesden, was milder, more mixed: half black, a quarter white, a quarter South Asian. Of the black half at least a third were “half-caste,” a minority nation within a nation, though the truth is it annoyed me to notice them. I wanted to believe that Tracey and I were sisters and kindred spirits, alone in the world and in special need of each other, but now I could not avoid seeing in front of me all the many kinds of children my mother had spent the summer trying to encourage me toward, girls with similar backgrounds but what my mother called “broader horizons.” There was a girl called Tasha, half Guyanese, half Tamil, whose father was a real Tamil Tiger, which impressed my mother mightily and thus cemented in me the desire never to have anything whatsoever to do with the girl. There was a buck-toothed girl called Irie, always top of the class, whose parents were the same way round as us, but she’d moved out of the estate and now lived up in Willesden Green in a fancy maisonette. There was a girl called Anoushka with a father from St. Lucia and a Russian mother whose uncle was, according to my mother, “the most important revolutionary poet in the Caribbean,” but almost every word of that recommendation was incomprehensible to me. My mind was not on school, or any of the people there. In the playground I pushed drawing pins into the soles of my shoes and sometimes spent the whole half-hour of playtime dancing alone, contentedly friendless. And when we got home—before my mother, and therefore outside of her jurisdiction—I dropped my satchel, left my father cooking dinner and headed straight to Tracey’s, to do our time-steps together on her balcony, followed by a bowl each of Angel Delight, which was “not food” to my mother but in my opinion still delicious. By the time I came home an argument, the two sides of which no longer met, would be in full flow. My father’s concern would be some tiny domestic issue: who’d vacuumed what when, who’d gone, or should have gone, to the launderette. Whereas my mother, in answering him, would stray into quite other topics: the importance of having a revolutionary consciousness, or the relative insignificance of sexual love when placed beside the struggles of the people, or the legacy of slavery in the hearts and minds of the young, and so on. She had by now finished her A levels, was enrolled at Middlesex Poly, up in Hendon, and more than ever we could not keep up, we were a disappointment, she had to keep explaining her terms.
At Tracey’s, the only raised voices came from the television. I knew I was meant to pity Tracey for her fatherlessness—the blight marking every other door on our corridor—and to be thankful for my two married parents, but whenever I sat on her huge white leather settee eating her Angel Delight and peacefully watching Easter Parade or The Red Shoes—Tracey’s mother would tolerate only Technicolor musicals—I couldn’t help but notice the placidity of a small, all-female household. In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they had never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home. No one was surprised by Tracey’s father’s failure to foment revolution or do anything else. Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. Whenever her mother bad-mouthed him, Tracey would make sure to take me into her room, or some other private spot, and quickly integrate whatever her mother had just said into her own official story, which was that her father had not abandoned her, no, not at all, he was only very busy because he was one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. Few people could keep up with Michael Jackson as he danced—in fact, almost nobody could, maybe there were only twenty dancers in the whole world who were up to it. Tracey’s father was one such. He hadn’t even had to finish his audition—he was that good they knew right away. This was why he was hardly ever home: he was on an eternal world tour. The next time he would be in town was probably next Christmas, when Michael played Wembley. On a clear day we could see this stadium from Tracey’s balcony. It’s hard for me to say now how much credence I gave this tale—certainly some part of me knew that Michael Jackson, at last free of his family, now danced alone—but just like Tracey I never brought up the subject in her mother’s presence. As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.
Eight
I was at Tracey’s, watching Top of the Pops, when the Thriller video came on, it was the first time any of us had seen it. Tracey’s mother got very excited: without actually standing, she danced madly, bopping up and down in the creases of her recliner. “Go on, girls! Let’s be having you! Get moving—come on!” We unstuck ourselves from the sofa and began sliding back and forth across the rug, me poorly, Tracey with a good deal of skill. We spun round, we lifted our right legs, leaving the foot dangling like the foot of a puppet, we jerked our zombie bodies. There was so much new information: the red leather trousers, the red leather jacket, what had once been an Afro now transformed into something greater even than Tracey’s own ringlets! And of course that pretty brown girl in blue, the potential victim. Was she “half-caste” too?
Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
So read the credits, at the beginning, these were Michael’s own words, but what did they mean? We understood only the seriousness of this word “film.” What we were watching was not a music video at all, it was a work of art that should properly be seen in a cinema, it was really a world event, a clarion call. We were modern! This was modern life! Generally I felt distant from
modern life and the music that came with it—my mother had made a sankofa bird of me—but it happened that my father had told me a story about Fred Astaire himself once coming to Michael’s house, coming as a kind of disciple, and he had begged Michael to teach him the moonwalk, and this makes sense to me, even now, for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson. “Don’t stop now, girls—get up!” cried Tracey’s mother, when for a moment we paused to rest against her sofa. “Don’t stop till you get enough! Get moving!” How long that song seemed—longer than life. I felt it would never end, that we were caught in a time loop, and would have to dance in this demonic way for ever, like poor Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes: “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on . . .” But then it was over. “That was fucking priceless,” sighed Tracey’s mother, forgetting herself, and we bowed and curtsied and ran to Tracey’s room.
