by Zadie Smith
“She loves it when she sees him on TV,” confided Tracey, once we were alone. “It makes their love stronger. She sees him and she knows he still loves her.”
“Which one was he?” I asked.
“Second row, at the end, on the right,” replied Tracey, without missing a beat.
• • •
I did not try—it wasn’t possible—to integrate these “facts” about Tracey’s father with the very few occasions I actually saw him, the first of which was the most terrible, it was in early November, not long after we had watched Thriller. We were all three in the kitchen, trying to make jacket potatoes stuffed with cheese and bacon, we were going to wrap them in foil and take them with us to Roundwood Park, where we’d watch the fireworks. The kitchens in the flats on Tracey’s estate were even smaller than the kitchens in ours: when you opened the oven door it almost scraped the wall opposite. To have three people in there at the same time, one person—in this case, Tracey—had to sit on the counter. It was her job to scrape the potato out of its jacket, and then my job, standing next to her, to mix the potato with grated cheese and bacon bits snipped with a pair of scissors, and then her mother put it all back in the jacket and returned it to the oven for browning. Despite my mother’s constant implication that Tracey’s mother was slovenly, a magnet for chaos, I found her kitchen both cleaner and more orderly than ours. The food was never healthy and yet it was prepared with seriousness and care, whereas my mother, who aspired to healthy eating, could not spend fifteen minutes in a kitchen without being reduced to a sort of self-pitying mania, and quite often the whole, misguided experiment (to make vegetarian lasagne, to do “something” with okra) became so torturous for everybody that she would manufacture a row and storm off, shouting. We would end up eating Findus Crispy Pancakes again. Round Tracey’s, things were simpler: you began with the clear intention of making Findus Crispy Pancakes or pizza (from frozen) or sausages and chips and it was all delicious and no one shouted about it. These potatoes were a special treat, a Fireworks Night tradition. Outside it was dark, though only five in the afternoon, and all over the estate you could smell gunpowder. Each flat had its private arsenal, and the random bangs and small, localized conflagrations had begun two weeks before, as soon as the sweetshops started selling fireworks. No one waited for official events. Cats were the most frequent victims of this general pyromania, but every now and then some kid went off to Casualty. Because of all the banging—and how used we were to bangs—at first the sound of someone beating on Tracey’s front door didn’t register, but then we heard somebody half yelling and half whispering, and we recognized panic and caution fighting each other. It was a man’s voice, he was saying: “Let me in. Let me in! You there? Open up, woman!”
Tracey and I stared at her mother, who stood staring back at us, holding a tray of perfectly stuffed cheesy potatoes in her hand. Without looking at what she was doing, she tried to lower the tray on to the counter, misjudged, dropped it.
“Louie?” she said.
She grabbed us both, pulled Tracey off the counter, we stepped in potato. She dragged us down the hall and pushed us into Tracey’s room. We were not to move a muscle. She closed the door and left us alone. Tracey went straight to her bed, got in it and began playing Pac-Man. She wouldn’t look at me. It was clear I couldn’t ask her anything, not even if Louie was the name of her father. I stood where her mother had left me and waited. I had never heard such a commotion in Tracey’s house. Whoever Louie was, he had now been let in—or forced his way in—and fuck was every other word, and there were great, crashing thuds as he turned the furniture over, and a terrible feminine wailing, it sounded like a screaming fox. I stood by the door looking at Tracey, who was still tucked up in her Barbie bed, but she did not seem to hear what I heard or even to remember that I was there: she never looked up from her Pac-Man. Ten minutes later, it was over: we heard the front door slam shut. Tracey stayed in her bed and I stood where I had been planted, unable to make any move. After a while there was a light knock on the door, and Tracey’s mother came in, pink with crying, holding a tray of Angel Delight, the same pink as her face. We sat and ate in silence and, later, went to the fireworks.
Nine
There was a kind of carelessness among the mothers we knew, or it looked like carelessness to outsiders but we knew it by another name. To the teachers at the school it probably looked as if they didn’t care enough even to turn up for Parents’ Evening, where, at desk after desk, the teachers sat, staring into space, waiting patiently for these mothers who never came. And I can see that our mothers must have seemed a little careless when, informed by a teacher of some misbehavior in the playground, they would—instead of reprimanding the child—begin shouting at the teacher. But we understood our mothers a little better. We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with quiet, the incessant correcting of their original patois or cockney, the sense that they could never do anything right anyway. A deep anxiety about “being told off”—for who they were, for what they had or hadn’t done, and now for the deeds of their children—this fear never really left our mothers, many of whom had become our mothers when they were not much more than children themselves. And so “Parents’ Evening” was, in their minds, not so distant from “detention.” It remained a place where they might be shamed. The difference was now they were grown and could not be forced to attend.
I say “our mothers,” but of course mine was different: she had the anger but not the shame. She went to Parents’ Evening, always. That year it was for some reason held on Valentine’s Day: the hall was limply decorated with pink paper hearts stapled to the walls, and each desk sported a wilting rose of crinkled tissue paper atop a green pipe-cleaner. I trailed behind her as she made her way round the room, hectoring teachers, ignoring all attempts on their part to discuss my progress, instead giving a series of impromptu lectures about the incompetence of the school administration, the blindness and the stupidity of the local council, the desperate need for “teachers of color”—which I think was the first time I heard the new euphemism “of color.” Those poor teachers clutched the sides of their desks for dear life. At one point, to emphasize a statement, she thumped a fist on a desk, sending the tissue rose and many pencils scattering to the floor: “These children deserve more!” Not me in particular—“these children.” How I remember her doing that, and how wonderful she looked, like a queen! I was proud to be her child, the daughter of the only mother in the neighborhood free of shame. We swept out of the hall together, my mother triumphant, me in a state of awe, neither of us any the wiser as to how I was doing at school.
I do remember one occasion of shame, a few days before Christmas, a late afternoon on a Saturday, after dance class, after Lambert’s, and I was watching a Fred and Ginger routine, “Pick Yourself Up,” at my flat, with Tracey, over and over. Tracey had an ambition to one day re-create that whole routine herself—this seems to me now like looking at the Sistine Chapel and hoping to re-create it on your bedroom ceiling—though she only ever practiced the male part, it never occurred to either of us to learn Ginger’s part in anything. Tracey was standing in the doorway to the living room, tap dancing—there was no carpet over there—and I was kneeling by the VHS, rewinding and pausing as necessary. My mother was in the kitchen on a high stool, studying. My father—and this was unusual—had gone “out,” with no explanation, just “out,” at about four o’clock, with no stated purpose and no errand to run that I knew of. At a certain point I ventured into the kitchen to get two beakers of Ribena. Instead of seeing my mother bent over her books, earplugs in, oblivious to me, I found her gazing out of the window, her face wet with tears. When she saw me she jumped a little in her skin, as if I were a ghost.
“They’re here,” she said, almost to herself. I looked over to where she was looking and
saw my father crossing the estate with two young white people trailing behind him, a boy of about twenty and a girl who looked to be fifteen or sixteen.
“Who’s here?”
“Some people your father wants you to meet.”
And the shame that she felt, I think, was the shame of no control: she could not dominate this situation nor protect me from it as, for once, it had nothing much to do with her. She hurried instead to the living room and told Tracey to leave, but Tracey was deliberately slow collecting up her things: she wanted to get a good look at them. They were a sight. Seen up close the boy had shaggy blond hair and a beard, he wore dirty, ugly, old-looking clothes, his jeans were patched and he had lots of rock-band badges pinned to his frayed canvas rucksack: he seemed to be shamelessly advertising his poverty. The girl was equally peculiar but neater, truly “white as snow,” as in a fairy tale, with a severe black bob cut straight across her forehead and diagonally high at her ears. She was dressed all in black, with a big black pair of Dr. Martens on her feet, and she was petite, with delicate features—excepting a large, indecent bosom which she seemed to be trying to obscure with all this black. Tracey and I stood staring at them. “Time you went home,” said my father, to Tracey, and watching her go I realized how much my ally she was, despite everything, for without her, at that moment, I felt totally undefended. The white teenagers sloped into our small living room. My father asked them to sit, but only the girl did. I was alarmed to see my mother, whom ordinarily I knew to be a completely non-neurotic person, dithering anxiously, stumbling over her words. The boy—his name was John—would not sit down. When my mother tried to encourage him to sit down he wouldn’t look at or reply to her, and then my father said something uncharacteristically sharp, and we all watched as John marched back out of the flat. I ran to the balcony, and saw him down there on the communal grass, not going anywhere—he had to wait for the girl—stamping around in a small circle, crunching the hoar frost underfoot. This left the girl. Her name was Emma. When I came back in my mother told me to sit next to her. “This is your sister,” said my father and went to make a cup of tea. My mother stood by the Christmas tree, pretending to do something useful with the lights. The girl turned to me, and we stared frankly at each other. As far as I could see we had no features in common at all, the whole thing was ridiculous, and I could see that this Emma person thought exactly the same of me. Apart from the comically obvious fact that I was black and she was white, I was big-boned and she was narrow, I was tall for my age and she was short for hers, my eyes were big and brown and hers were narrow and green. But then, at the same moment, I felt we both saw it; the downturned mouth, the sad eyes. I don’t remember thinking logically, I didn’t ask myself, for example, who the mother of this Emma was or how and when she could possibly have known my father. My head wouldn’t go that far round. I only thought: he made one like me and one like her. How can two such different creatures emerge from the same source? My father came back into the room with a tray of tea.
“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.”
