Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

  I was relieved to leave Lamin and head to Hawa’s session, a general class. There I had decided to look for the Traceys, that is, for the brightest, the quickest, the most willful, the lethally bored, the troublesome, the girls whose eyes burned like lasers straight through the government-issued English sentences—dead sentences, sentences devoid of content or meaning—that were being laboriously transcribed in chalk up on to the board by Hawa before being equally laboriously translated back into Wolof and thus explained. I had expected to find only a few Traceys in each class, but it soon became clear that there were more of Tracey’s tribe in those hot rooms than anyone else. Some of these girls’ uniforms were so worn they were now little more than rags, others had open sores on their feet or eyes weeping pus, and when I watched the school fees being paid into the teachers’ hands each morning in coins, many did not have their coin to give. And yet they had not given up, these many Traceys. They were not satisfied with singing their lines back to Hawa, who herself, only a few years earlier, must have sat in these seats, singing these same lines, clinging to her textbook then as she did now. Watching all that fire with so little kindling, it was of course easy to despair. But each time the conversation was freed from its pointless English shackles and allowed to fall back into the local tongues I would see it again, the clear sparks of intelligence—like flames licking through a grille meant to smother them—and taking the same form natural intelligence takes in classrooms around the world: backchat, humor, argument. It was Hawa’s unfortunate duty to silence all of this, all natural inquiry and curiosity, and drag the class back to the government textbook in hand, to write The pot is on the fire or The spoon is in the bowl with a piece of broken chalk on the board, and have them repeat it, and then to have them write this down, copying it exactly, including Hawa’s own frequent errors. After watching this painful process for a few days I realized that she never once tested them on these written lines without the answer being already front of them, or having just been repeated, and one especially hot afternoon I felt I had to resolve the question for myself. I asked Hawa to sit where I sat, on a broken stool, so I could stand up before the class and ask them to write in their books: The pot is on the fire. They looked up at the empty board, and then expectantly at Hawa, awaiting the translation. I wouldn’t let her speak. Two long minutes followed, as children stared blankly at their half-ruined exercise books, re-covered many times over in old wrapping paper. Then I went around the room, collecting the books to show to Hawa. Some part of me enjoyed doing this. Three girls in forty had written the sentence correctly in English. The rest had one word or two, almost all of the boys had no written letters at all, just vague markings reminiscent of English vowels and consonants, the shadows of letters but not letters themselves. Hawa nodded at each book, betraying no emotion, and then, when I had finished, stood up and continued her class.

  • • •

  When the bell rang for lunch I ran across the yard to find Carrapichano, who was sitting under the mango tree, making notes in a pad, and told him in an excitable hurry all the events of the morning, and the implications as I saw them, imagining how slow my own progress might have been if my teachers had taught our curriculum in, say, Mandarin, though I spoke Mandarin nowhere else, heard no Mandarin, had parents who spoke no Mandarin . . .

  Carrapichano put his pen down and stared at me.

  “I see. And what is it you think you just achieved?”

  At first I thought he hadn’t understood me, so restated my case from the top, but he cut me off, stamping a foot in the sand.

  “All you did was humiliate a teacher. In front of her class.”

  His voice was quiet but his face very red. He took off his glasses and glared at me, and looked so gravely handsome it lent a certain weight to his position, as if those who are right are always more beautiful.

  “But—it’s—I mean, I’m not saying it’s a question of ability, it’s a ‘structural issue’—you always say that yourself—and I’m just saying maybe we could have an English lesson, OK, of course, but let’s teach them in their own languages in their own country, and then they can—they could, I mean, you know, take English tests home, as homework or something.”

  Fernando laughed bitterly and swore in Portuguese.

  “Homework! Have you been to their homes? Do you see books on their shelves? Or shelves? Desks?” He stood up and started shouting: “What do you think these children do when they get home? Study? Do you think they have time to study?”

  He had not moved toward me but I found myself backing away from him, until I was up against the trunk of the mango tree.

  “What are you doing here? What experience do you have in this work? This is adult work! You behave like a teenager. But you’re not a teenager any more, are you? Isn’t it time you grew up?”

  I burst into tears. Somewhere a bell rang. I heard Fernando sigh with what sounded like sympathy, and I had a wild hope, for a moment, that he was about to put his arm around me. With my head in my hands I heard hundreds of kids burst from their classrooms and run through the yard, laughing and shouting, on their way to their next lessons, or out of the gates to help their mothers on the farm, and then Carrapichano kicking the leg of his chair, toppling it and walking back across the yard to class.

  Twelve

  The end of my own middle passage came in midwinter, the perfect time to be a Goth: you’re in tune with the misery all around you, like that clock that’s right twice a day. I was on the way to my father’s, the bus doors wouldn’t open for the height of snow already in front of them, I had to force them apart with my black leather gloves and step down into a drift, protected from the intense cold by steel-capped black DMs and layerings of black jersey and black denim, by the heat of bird’s-nest Afro hair, the fug of hardly ever washing. I had become an animal perfectly adapted to its environment. I rang my father’s doorbell: a young girl answered the door. Perhaps she was twenty. Her hair was in very basic twists, she had a sweet teardrop of a face and flawless skin that shone like the peel of an aubergine. She looked fearful, smiled nervously, turned around, and called my father’s name, but with such a thick accent it was hardly his name at all. She disappeared and was replaced by my father and after that she didn’t come out of his bedroom for the rest of my visit. As we walked through the dilapidated communal hallway, past the curling wallpaper, rusted mail boxes, filthy carpet, he quietly explained to me, as if he were a missionary and a little bashful to reveal the true extent of his charity, that he had found this girl in King’s Cross station. “She was barefoot! She’d nowhere to go, nowhere at all. You see, she’s from Senegal. Her name is Mercy. You should have rung to say you were coming.”

  I ate dinner as usual, watched an old movie—The Green Pastures—and when it came time to go, and still nothing more about Mercy had been said by either of us, I saw him look back over his shoulder at his bedroom door, but Mercy did not reappear, and after a while I left. I didn’t tell my mother or anyone at school. The only person I felt would understand was Tracey, and I hadn’t seen her in months.

  • • •

  I’d noticed that other people had this adolescent gift for “spiraling out of control,” of “going off the rails,” but whatever catch inside of themselves they managed to release in times of sadness or trauma I wasn’t able to find in myself. Instead, self-consciously, like an athlete deciding on a new training regime, I decided to go off the rails. But no one took me very seriously, least of all my mother, for she considered me a fundamentally reliable teenager. When other local mothers stopped her in the street, as they often did, to ask advice about their wayward sons and daughters, she would listen to them sympathetically but without any concern on her part, sometimes bringing the conversation to a close by putting a hand to my shoulder and saying something like: “Well, we’re very lucky, we don’t have those sorts of problems, not yet.” This narrative was so cemented in her mind that any attempt I made to stra
y from it she simply couldn’t see: she was attached to a shadow-me and followed this instead. And wasn’t she right? I was not really like my new friends, not especially self-destructive or reckless. I hoarded (unnecessary) condoms, was terrified of needles, too afraid of blood generally to contemplate cutting myself, always stopped drinking before truly incapacitated, had a very healthy appetite, and when I went clubbing would sneak away from my crew—or conspire to lose them—at around a quarter past midnight, so that I could meet my mother, whose rule it was to pick me up at exactly half past the hour every Friday night, outside the stage door of the Camden Palace. I’d get into her car and bitch spectacularly about this arrangement while always, secretly, feeling grateful it existed. The night we rescued Tracey was like that, a Camden Palace night. Normally, my circle went to an indie night there, which I could just about tolerate, but this time we had gone for some reason to a hardcore show, shredded guitars distorting the huge speakers, a raging noise, and at a certain point I realized I wasn’t going to make it till midnight—even though I’d battled with my mother for exactly this dispensation. Around eleven thirty I said I was heading to the bathroom and stumbled through that old theater, once a vaudeville place, found a spot in one of the empty booths on the first floor and set about getting drunk on the little bottle of cheap vodka I carried around in a pocket of my black trench coat. I knelt on the threadbare velvet where the chairs had been ripped out and looked down into the mosh pit. I got a sad sort of satisfaction from the thought that I was very likely the only soul in the place at that moment who knew that Chaplin had played here, and Gracie Fields, not to mention all the long-forgotten dog acts, family acts, lady hoofers, acrobats, minstrels. I looked down at all those disaffected suburban white kids dressed in black, hurling themselves at each other, and imagined in their place G. H. Elliott, “The Chocolate-Colored Coon,” dressed head to toe in white, singing of the silvery moon. Behind me I heard the curtain swish: a boy walked into my booth. He was a white boy, very skinny, no older than me, and clearly high on something, with deep-pitted acne and a lot of dyed black hair falling over his cratered forehead. But his eyes were a beautiful blue. And we were of the same ersatz tribe: we wore the same uniform, the black denim, black cotton, black jersey, black leather. I don’t think we even spoke to each other. He just came forward and I faced him, already on my knees, and reached up for his fly. We undressed as minimally as possible, lay back on that ashtray of a carpet and became attached at the groin for a minute or so, while the rest of our bodies remained apart, each swaddled in its layers of black. It was the only time in my life that sex occurred without its shadow, without the shadow of ideas about sex or fantasies regarding it of the kind that can only accumulate over time. On that balcony all was still exploratory, experimental, and technical in the sense of figuring out exactly what went where. I’d never seen any pornography. That was still possible then.

  It seemed wrong for Goths to kiss so we bit gently at each other’s necks like little vampires. Afterward he sat up and said in a much posher voice than I’d expected: “But we didn’t use anything.” Was it his first time, too? I told him it didn’t matter, in a voice which probably surprised him just as much, and then asked him for a cigarette, which he gave me in the form of a pinch of tobacco, a Rizla and a square of cardboard. We agreed to go down to the bar and get a snakebite together, but on the staircase I lost him in a crowd surging upward, and suddenly desperate for air and space I made my way instead to the exit and out into Camden at the witching hour. Everyone was barrelling around half-lit, falling out of the pubs, in their torn denim and check or black-on-black, some sitting on the floor in circles, singing, playing guitars, others being told by a man to see another man, further down the road, who had the drugs that the first man was meant to have. I felt at once brutally sober, lonely, and wished my mother would appear. I joined a ring of strangers on the ground, who looked to be from my tribe, and rolled that fag.

  From where I sat I could see up the side street to the Jazz Café and was struck by what a different crowd was gathered at its doors, not on their way out but on the way in, and not at all drunk, as these were people who loved dancing, who did not need to be drunk to convince their bodies to move. Nothing they wore was torn, or shredded or defaced with Tipp-Ex, everything was flash as flash could be, the women shone and dazzled, and no one sat on the ground, on the contrary all effort had been made to separate the clientele from the ground: the men’s trainers had two inches of air built into them, and the women’s shoes had double that in heel. I wondered what they were queuing for. Maybe a brown girl with a flower in her hair was going to sing for them. I thought of walking up there and seeing for myself but just then I became aware of a commotion, outside the entrance to the Mornington Crescent tube stop, some sort of problem between a man and a woman, they were yelling at each other, and the man had the woman up against the wall, he was shouting at her and had his hand around her throat. The boys I was sitting with did not move, or seem very concerned, they kept playing the guitar or else rolling up their joints. It was two girls who took action—a tough-looking bald girl and perhaps her girlfriend—and I stood up with them both, not shouting like them but following quickly behind. As we got closer, though, the situation became confused, it became less clear whether the “victim” was being hurt or helped—we saw her legs had gone floppy beneath her and that the man was in some sense holding her up—and we all slowed down a little in our approach. The bald girl became less aggressive, more solicitous, and in the same moment I realized the woman was not a woman but a girl and that I knew her: Tracey. I ran up to her. She recognized me but couldn’t speak, she only reached out and smiled sadly. Her nose was bleeding, both nostrils. I smelled something awful and looked down and saw vomit, all over her front and in a pool at the floor. The man let go of her and stepped back. I stepped in, held her and said her name—Tracey, Tracey, Tracey—but her eyes rolled back in her head and I felt her full weight in my arms. This being Camden, every passing pisshead and stoner had a theory: bad E, dehydration, alcohol poisoning, probably done a speedball. You had to keep her standing, or lie her down, or give her some water, or move back and give her some air, and I was beginning to panic when, cutting through this noise, from across the road, came a much louder voice, one with real authority, calling Tracey’s name and mine together. My mother, pulling up in front of the Palace as previously agreed, at twelve thirty a.m, in her little 2CV. I waved at her and she lurched forward again and parked beside us. Confronted with such a fierce-looking and capable adult, everyone else dispersed, and my mother did not even pause to ask what seemed to me to be necessary questions. She separated the two of us, lay Tracey out on the backseat, elevated her head with a couple of the serious books she had with her at all times, even in the middle of the night, and drove us straight to St. Mary’s. I wanted so much to tell Tracey of my balcony adventure, of how, for once, I had been truly reckless. We emerged onto the Edgware Road: she snapped out of it and sat up. But when my mother tried gently to explain what was happening and where we were going, Tracey accused us both of kidnapping her, of trying to control her, we who had always been trying to control her, ever since she was a child, who always thought we knew what was best for her, what was best for everybody, we had even tried to steal her from her own mother, her own father! Her anger grew in proportion to my mother’s icy calm, until, when we pulled into the A&E car park, she was leaning right forward in her seat, spitting on the back of our necks in her fury. My mother would not be baited or diverted. She told me to take the left side of my friend as she took the right and we half dragged, half compelled Tracey into the waiting room, where she became, to our surprise, utterly compliant, whispering “speedball” to the nurse, and then waiting with a handful of tissues pressed to her nostrils until she was seen. My mother went in with her. About fifteen minutes later she came out—I mean, my mother did—and said Tracey would be staying overnight, that her stomach would have to be pumped, and that she’d sa
id—Tracey had—a number of sexually explicit things, in her delirium, to a stressed Indian doctor on his night shift. She was still only fifteen years old. “Something serious happened to that girl!” my mother murmured, kissed her teeth and bent over a desk to sign some papers in loco parentis.

  In this context my own mild drunkenness wasn’t worth troubling over. Spotting the vodka bottle in my coat, my mother removed it, without discussion, and dropped it into a hospital bin meant for medical waste. On the way out I caught a reflection of myself in the long mirror on the wall of a disabled toilet that happened to have, at that moment, its door flung wide open. I saw my drab black uniform and absurd dusted face—of course, I’d seen it all before, but not under that stark hospital lighting, and now it was no longer the face of a girl, now a woman stared back. The effect was very different from anything I had seen before by the light of the dim purple bulb in my black-walled room. I was over the threshold: I gave up the gothic life.

  PART FIVE

  Night and Day

  One

  They sat opposite each other, it felt very intimate, if you could put out of mind the millions of people looking on. Earlier they had wandered through his peculiar home together, looking at his treasures, his gaudy art, his terrible gilt furniture, talking of this and that, and at one point he sang for her and performed a few of his signature moves. But there was only one thing we wanted to know and finally she seemed to be preparing to ask it, and even my mother, who was pottering around the flat and claimed not to be interested, paused and sat down next to me in front of the television and waited to see what would happen. I reached for the remote control and turned it up. OK, Michael, she said, then let’s go to the thing that is most discussed about you, I think, is the fact that the color of your skin is obviously different than when you were younger, and so I think it has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy as to what you have done or are doing . . . ?