by Zadie Smith
“Yes—well, what is it?”
I was very involved in trimming the fat off a pork chop. When I at last raised my eyes to my mother’s face she looked as tired as I’d ever seen her.
“It’s your friend—Tracey.”
I put down my cutlery.
“Oh, it’s ridiculous, really, but I got this e-mail, friendly . . . it came to my surgery. I hadn’t seen her in years . . . but I thought: Oh, Tracey! It was about one of her children, the eldest boy—he’d been expelled from school, she felt unfairly, and she wanted my help, you see, and so I replied, and at first it really didn’t seem that strange, I get these kinds of letters all the time. But now, you know, I do wonder: was it all just a ploy?”
“Mum, what are you talking about?”
“I did think it was a bit odd, the amount of e-mails she was sending, but . . . well, you know, she doesn’t work, that’s clear, I don’t know if she’s ever worked, really, and she’s still in that bloody flat . . . That would drive you crazy by itself. She must have a lot of time on her hands—and right away it was a lot of e-mails, two or three a day. It was her opinion the school unfairly expelled black boys. I did make some inquiries, but it seemed in this case, well . . . the school felt they had a strong case and I couldn’t take it any further. I wrote to her and she was very angry, and sent some very angry e-mails, and I thought that was the end of it, but—it was the beginning.”
She scratched anxiously at the back of her head-wrap, and I noticed the skin at the top of her neck was raw with irritation.
“But Mum, why would you reply to anything from Tracey?”—I was holding the sides of the table—“I could have told you she’s not stable. I’ve known that for years!”
“Well, firstly she’s my constituent, and I always reply to my constituents. And when I realized she was your Tracey—she’s changed her name, you know—but her e-mails have become very . . . weird, very peculiar.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“About six months.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about it before!”
“Darling,” she said, and shrugged: “When would I have had the chance?”
She had lost so much weight her magnificent head looked vulnerable on its swan-like neck, and this new delicacy, this suggestion of mortal time working on her just as it works on everybody, spoke to me more loudly than any of the old accusations of daughterly neglect ever had. I lay a hand over hers.
“Odd in what way?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it in here. I’ll send some of the e-mails on to you.”
“Mum, don’t be so dramatic. You can give me an idea.”
“They’re quite abusive,” she said, tears gathering in her eyes, “and I haven’t been feeling very well, and I’m getting a lot of them now, sometimes a dozen in a day, and I know it’s stupid but they’re upsetting me.”
“Why don’t you just let Miriam deal with it? She deals with your communications, doesn’t she?”
She took her hand back and assumed her backbench face, a tight, sad smile, suitable for combating questions about the health service but unnerving to see over a dinner table.
“Well, you’ll find out sooner or later: we’ve split up. I’m still in the flat on Sidmouth Road. I have to stay in the neighborhood, obviously, and I won’t find another deal like that, at least not right away, so I asked her to move out. Of course, it is technically her flat, but she was very understanding about it, you know Miriam. Anyway, it’s not a big deal, there’s no hard feelings, and we’ve kept it out of the papers. So that’s the end of that.”
“Oh, Mum . . . I’m sorry. Really.”
“Don’t be, don’t be. Some people can’t deal with a woman having a certain amount of power, and that’s just how it is. I’ve seen it before and I’ll see it again, I’m sure. Look at Raj!” she said, and it was so long since I’d thought of the Noted Activist by his real name that I realized I’d forgotten it. “Running off with that fool girl as soon as I finished my book! Is it my fault he never finished a book?”
No, I assured her, it was not her fault Raj never finished his book, on “coolie” labor in the West Indies—though he had been working on it for two decades—while my mother began and finished her book, on Mary Seacole, in a year and a half. Yes, the Noted Activist had only himself to blame.
“Men are so ridiculous. But it turns out so are women. Anyway, it’s a good thing in a way . . . at a certain point I really felt she was trying to interfere in ways that . . . Well, this obsession of hers with ‘our’ business practices in West Africa, human-rights abuses, and so on—I mean, she was encouraging me to ask questions in the House—in areas I’m not really qualified to speak on—and in the end I think what it was really about, in a funny way, was trying to drive a wedge between me and you . . .” A less likely motivation for Miriam I could hardly imagine, but I held my tongue. “. . . And I’m getting older and I don’t have as much energy as I did, and I really want to be focused on my local concerns, my constituents. I’m a local representative and that’s what I want to do. I haven’t got ambitions any further than that. Don’t smile, dear, I really don’t. Not any more. At one point I said to her, to Miriam—‘Look, I’ve got people walking into my surgery every day from Liberia, from Senegal, from the Gambia, from Côte d’Ivoire! My work is global. This is where my work is. These people are coming from all over the world to my constituency, in these terrible little boats, they’re traumatized, they’ve seen people die right in front of them, and they’re coming here. That’s the universe trying to tell me something. I really feel this is the work I was born to do.’ Poor Miriam . . . she means very well, and God knows she’s well organized, but she lacks perspective sometimes. She wants to save everybody. And that kind of person does not make the best life partner, for sure, though I will always consider her a very effective administrator.” It was impressive—and a bit sad. I wondered if some similarly chilly epigraph existed for me: She was not the best daughter, but she was a perfectly adequate dinner date.
“Do you think,” asked my mother, “do you think she’s unhinged . . . mentally ill or . . .”
“Miriam’s one of the sanest people I’ve ever met.”
“No—your friend Tracey.”
“I wish you’d stop calling her that!”
But my mother wasn’t listening to me, she was in her own dream: “You know, somehow . . . well, she’s on my conscience. Miriam thought I should have just gone to the police about the e-mails in the first place but . . . I don’t know . . . when you get older, somehow things from the past . . . they can weigh on you. I remember when she used to come for counseling at the center . . . Of course I didn’t see her notes, but I got the sense, speaking to the team there, that there were problems, mental-health issues, even back then. Maybe I was wrong to stop her coming in, but it really wasn’t easy to get her the placement in the first place, and I’m sorry, but at the time I really and truly felt that she had abused my trust, your trust, everybody’s . . . She was still a child, of course, but it was a crime—and it was a lot of money—I’m sure it all went to her father—but what if they’d blamed you? At that point it was just best to sever all connections, I thought. Well, I’m sure you have lots of judgments about what went on—you always have a lot of judgments—but I wish you would understand that it was not easy raising you, I was not in an easy situation, and on top of everything I was focused on trying to get myself educated, trying to get myself qualified, maybe too much so in your opinion . . . but I had to make a life for you and for me. I knew your father couldn’t do it. He wasn’t strong enough. No one else was going to do it. We were on our own. And I had a lot of balls in the air, that’s how it felt to me, and—” she reached across the table and grabbed my elbow: “We should have done more—to protect her!”
I felt her fingers pinching me, bony in their grip.
“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky—but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!”
She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell.
“No, Mum . . . no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us—she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?
“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.”
She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks.
“That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”
Five
The next morning my British mobile rang, a number I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t my mother, or Aimee, or either of the fathers of her children, or the three college friends who still hoped, once or twice a year, to lure me out for a drink before my flight departed. I didn’t know the voice at first, either: I’d never heard Miriam sound so stern or cold.
“But you understand,” she asked me, after a few awkward pleasantries, “that your mother is really ill?”
I lay on Aimee’s plush gray couch, looking out over Kensington Gardens—gray slates, blue sky, green oaks—and found, as Miriam explained the situation, that this view merged with an earlier one: gray cement, blue sky, over the tops of the horse chestnuts, past Willesden Lane, toward the railway. In the next room I could hear the nanny, Estelle, trying to discipline Aimee’s children, in that lilting accent I connected with my earliest moments, with lullabies and bathtime and bedtime stories, thwacks with a wooden spoon. Headlights of passing cars at night, gliding over the ceiling.
“Hello? Are you still there?”
Stage three: it had begun in her spine. Partially successful surgery, back in February (where was I, in February?). Now she was in remission, but the last bout of chemo had left her frail. She should have been resting, allowing herself to recover. It was crazy that she was still going to the House, crazy that she was going out to dinner, crazy that I had let her.
“How could I know? She didn’t tell me.”
I heard Miriam kiss her teeth at me.
“Anyone with any sense just needs to look at the woman to know something is wrong!”
I wept. Miriam patiently listened. My instinct was to get off the phone and call my mother, but when I tried to do this Miriam begged me not to.
“She doesn’t want you to know. She knows you have to travel and whatnot—she doesn’t want to disturb your plans. She’d know I told you. I’m the only person who knows.”
I couldn’t stand this vision of myself as a person my own mother would rather die than disturb. To avoid it, I cast around for dramatic gestures, and without even knowing whether or not it was possible offered up the services of Aimee’s many private doctors in Harley Street. Miriam chucked sadly.
“Private? Don’t you know your mother by now? No, if you want to do something for her, I can tell you what would make the most difference right at this moment. This crazy woman bothering her? I don’t know why it’s obsessing her so much but it needs to stop, it’s all she can think about—and that’s not right at a time like this. She told me that she spoke to you about it?”
“Yes. She was going to forward me the e-mails but she hasn’t.”
“I have them, I’ll do that.”
“Oh, OK . . . I thought—I mean, she said, at dinner, that you two . . .”
“Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life once she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business . . . it just goes.”
• • •
A few minutes after I put down the phone the e-mails started to arrive, in little flurries, until I had fifty or more. I sat where I was reading them, stunned by the rage. The force of it made me feel inadequate—as if Tracey had more feeling for my mother than I did—even though it was not love expressed here but hate. Stunned, too, by how well she wrote, never boring, not for a second, her dyslexia and many grammatical errors were no hindrance to her: she had the gift of being interesting. You couldn’t start reading one without wanting to finish it. Her central accusation against my mother was neglect: of her son’s problems at school, of Tracey’s own complaints and e-mails, and of her duty—I mean my mother’s—to push forward the interests of her constituents. If I’m honest, the earliest e-mails did not seem to me unreasonable, but then Tracey broadened her scope. Neglect of state schools in the borough, neglect of black children in those schools, of black people in England, of black working-class people in England, of single mothers, of the children of single mothers, and of Tracey the single child of a single mother, all those years ago. It interested me that she wrote “single mother” here, as if her father had never existed at all. The tone became sweary, abusive. In some of the e-mails she sounded drunk or high. Soon it was a one-way correspondence, a systematic dissection of all the many ways Tracey believed my mother had let her down. You never liked me, you never wanted me around, you always tried to humiliate me, I was never good enough for you, you were scared of being associated with me, you always held yourself apart, you pretended you were for the community but you were only ever for yourself, you told everybody I stole that money but you had no proof and you never defended me. There was a whole tranche of letters that referred only to the estate. Nothing was being done to improve the units the council residents lived in, these units were being left to degenerate—almost all of them now in Tracey’s block—they hadn’t been touched since the early eighties. Meanwhile, the estate across the road—our estate, which the council were now busily selling off—had filled up with young white couples and their babies and looked like a “fucking hotel resort.” And what was my mother going to do about the boys selling crack on the corner of Torbay Road? The closure of the swimming pool? The whorehouses on Willesden Lane?
That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century Bavarian sect had survived its own suppression and was at work in the world today, its members many powerful and famous blacks—in league with elite whites and the Jews—and Tracey was researching all this very deeply and was increasingly convinced that my mother might herself be a tool of these people, minor but dangerous, who had managed to worm her way right into the heart of British government.
• • •
Just after midday I read the last e-mail, put my coat on, walked down the road and waited for the 52 bus. I got off at Brondesbury Park, walked the length of Christchurch Avenue, arrived at Tracey’s estate, climbed the stairs and rang her bell. She must have been in the hallway already because she opened the door right away, a new baby of four or five months on her hip, its face turned from me. Behind her I could hear more children, arguing, and a TV at high volume. I don’t know what I expected, but what was in front of me was an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms, house slippers and a black sweatshirt that had one word written on it: OBEY. I looked so much younger.
“It’s you,” she said. She put a protective hand to the back of her baby’s head.
“Tracey, we need to talk.”
“MUM!” cried a voice from inside. “WHO IS IT?”
“Yeah, well, I’m in the middle of making lunch?”
“My mother is dying,”
I said—that old childhood habit of exaggeration spontaneously came back to me—“and you’ve got to stop what you’re—”
Just then her two older children stuck their heads round the door to stare at me. The girl looked white, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes. The boy had Tracey’s coloring and a springy Afro but didn’t look especially like her: he must have taken after his father. The baby was far darker than all of us, and when she turned her face toward me I saw she was Tracey’s double and incredibly beautiful. But they all were.
“Can I come in?”
She didn’t answer. She sighed, pushed the door open with her slippered foot and I followed her in.
“Who are you, who are you, who are you?” the little girl asked me and before she got an answer slipped her hand into mine. I saw, as we walked through the lounge, that I had interrupted a screening of South Pacific. This detail moved me, and made it hard to keep in mind the hateful Tracey of the e-mails or the Tracey who had put that letter through my door ten years before. I knew the Tracey who wasted an afternoon on South Pacific and I loved that girl.
“You like it?” her daughter asked me, and when I said I did, she pulled my arm till I sat on the settee between her and her older brother, who was playing on a phone. I had marched down Brondesbury Park full of righteous fury, but now it seemed completely possible that I might just sit on this sofa and pass the afternoon watching South Pacific with a little girl’s hand nestled in mine. I asked her for her name.
“Mariah Mimi Alicia Chantelle!”
“Her name’s Jeni,” said the boy, without looking up. I thought he looked to be eight, and Jeni five or six.
“And what’s your name?” I asked, cringing to hear my mother’s voice in me, talking to all children, whatever their age, as if they were barely sentient.
“My name is Bo!” he said, imitating my intonation, making himself laugh—the laugh was pure Tracey—“And what is your story, Miss Woman? Are you from the Department of Social Care?”
