by Zadie Smith
“No, I’m a . . . friend of your mum’s. We grew up together.”
“Hmmm, maybe,” he said, as if the past were a hypothetical he could take or leave. He reapplied himself to the game he was playing. “Never seen you before, though, so I got my SUSPICIONS.”
“This bit is ‘Happy Talk’!” said Jeni, delighted, pointing at the screen, and I said, “Yes, but I have to talk to your mummy,” although everything in me wanted to stay on the sofa, holding her hot little hand, feeling Bo’s knee resting inadvertently against mine.
“OK, but come back straight after you do your talking!”
• • •
She was clattering around the kitchen with her baby daughter on her hip and didn’t pause when I entered.
“Great kids,” I found myself saying, as she piled plates and gathered cutlery. “Sweet—and sharp.”
She opened the oven; it almost scraped the opposite wall.
“What you making?”
She forced the door shut again and with her back to me shifted her baby to her opposite side. Everything was the wrong way round: I was the solicitous, apologetic one, she in a place of righteousness. The flat itself seemed to draw this submissive role out of me. On the stage of Tracey’s life I had no other role to play.
“I really need to talk to you,” I said again.
She turned round. She had a proper face on, as we used to say, but when we caught each other’s eyes we smiled, it was involuntary, a mutual smirk.
“I’m not even laughing, though,” she said, reassuming her face, “and if you’ve come in here just to start one with me you best just leave again ’cos I’m not up for it.”
“I came here to ask you to stop harassing my mother.”
“Is that what she told you!”
“Tracey, I read your e-mails.”
She put the baby over her shoulder and started jiggling it and patting its back over and over.
“Listen, I live in this area,” she said, “unlike you. I see what goes on. They can talk it up in Parliament all they like, but I’m on the ground in here, and your mother’s meant to be repping these streets. She’s on TV every other night, but you see anything different round here? My boy’s got a 130 IQ—all right? He’s been tested. He’s ADHD, his brain goes so fast, and he’s bored every day in that shithole. Yeah, he gets into trouble. Because he’s bored. And all these teachers can think to do with him is expel him!”
“Tracey, I don’t know anything about that—but you can’t just—”
“Oh, stop stressing, make yourself useful. Help me get these plates in.”
She handed me them, put the cutlery on top and directed me back to the living room, where I found myself setting the small, round table for her family, just as I had once set teatime for her dolls.
“Luncheon is served!” she said, in what seemed to be an imitation of my voice. Playfully she slapped both the older children round the back of their heads.
“If it’s lasagne again I’m gonna start crying on my knees,” said Bo, and Tracey said, “It’s lasagne,” and Bo assumed the position and comically beat the floor with his fists.
“Get up, you joker,” said Tracey, and they were all laughing, and I did not know how to continue in my mission.
At the table I sat quietly while they argued and laughed over every little thing, everybody seeming to talk as loudly as possible, swearing freely, and the baby still on Tracey’s knee, being bounced up and down while Tracey fed herself one-handed and bantered with the other two, and perhaps this was how their lunch times always were, but I couldn’t rid myself of the suspicion that it was also, on Tracey’s part, a form of performance, a way of saying: Look at the fullness of my life. Look at the emptiness of yours.
“Are you still dancing?” I asked suddenly, interrupting them all. “I mean, professionally?”
The table went quiet and Tracey turned to me.
“Do I look like I’m still dancing?” She looked down at herself and around the table and laughed harshly. “I know I was the smart one but . . . get a fucking clue.”
“I—I never told you, Trace, but I saw you in Showboat.”
She did not look remotely surprised. I wondered whether she had spotted me at the time.
“Yeah, well, that’s all ancient history. Mum got ill, there was no one to look after the kids . . . it got too hard. I’ve had some health issues myself. Wasn’t for me.”
“What about their dad?”
“What about their dad what?”
“Why can’t he look after them?” I was pointedly using the singular, but Tracey—always alert to euphemism or hypocrisy—was not fooled by it.
“Well, as you can see, I tried vanilla, café au lait and chocolate, and you know what I figured out? On the inside, they’re all the fucking same: men.”
I was rattled by her language, but the kids—their chairs turned toward South Pacific—did not seem to notice or care.
“Maybe the problem is the kind of men you choose.”
Tracey rolled her eyes: “Thank you, Dr. Freud! Hadn’t thought of that! Any other pearls of wisdom for me?”
I kept quiet and ate my lasagne, still partially frozen in the middle, but delicious. It reminded me of her mother and I asked how she was.
“She died, a couple of months ago. Didn’t she, princess? She died.”
“Nanna died. She went to the angels!”
“Yeah. Just us now. We’re OK, though. These fucking social workers keep bothering us, but we’re all right. Four musketeers.”
“We burned Nanna in a big fire!”
Bo turned round: “You’re such a idiot—we didn’t just burn her, did we? Like we just put her on a bonfire or something! She was cre-ma-ted. It’s better than getting stuck in the ground, in some closed-up box. No thank you. That’s how I want mine, too. Nanna was like me, ’cos she hated closed-up spaces. She was claus-tro-phobic. That’s why she always took the stairs.”
Tracey smiled fondly at Bo and reached out for him, which he ducked and avoided.
“She got to see the kids, though,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Even little Bella. So I feel good about that bit.”
She brought Bella up to her lips and kissed her all over her nose. Then looked over to me and gestured toward my womb: “What you waiting for?”
I stuck my nose in the air, realizing too late that it was a borrowed gesture—one I’d been using for years in moments of pride or adamancy—and that it properly belonged to the woman sitting opposite me.
“The right situation,” I said. “The right time.”
She smiled, the old cruelty in her face: “Oh, OK. Good luck with that. Funny, innit,” she said, exaggerating her accent for effect, and turning to the television, not me: “Rich birds with no kids, poor birds with plenty. Sure your mum would have a lot to say about that.”
The kids finished eating. I picked up their plates and took them to the kitchen and sat there for a minute on the high stool, breathing in and out mindfully—as Aimee’s yoga teacher had shown us all how to do—and looking out through the strip of window into the parking bays. There were answers I wanted from her, going a long way back. I was trying to work out how to re-enter the living room in a way that would reset the afternoon in my favor, but before I figured it out Tracey walked in and said: “Thing is, what’s between me and your mum is between me and your mum. I don’t even know why you’ve come round here, honestly.”
“I’m just trying to understand why you would—”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing! There can’t be no understanding between you and me any more! You’re part of a different system now. People like you think you can control everything. But you can’t control me!”
“People like me? What are you talking about? Trace, you’re a grown woman now, you’ve got three beautiful kids, you really need to get a g
rip on this kind of delusional—”
“You can call it by any fancy name you like, love: there’s a system, and you and your fucking mother are both a part of it.”
I stood up.
“Stop harassing my family, Tracey,” I said, as I walked purposefully out of the kitchen, pursued by Tracey, through the living room toward the front door. “If it carries on, the police will be involved.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep walking, keep walking,” she said and slammed the door behind me.
Six
In early December Aimee returned to check on the progress of her academy, traveling with a smaller group—Granger, Judy, her ditzy e-mail proxy, Mary-Beth, Fern and me—without press and with a specific agenda: she wanted to propose a sexual-health clinic within the grounds of the school itself. Nobody disagreed in principle but it was also very difficult to see how it could possibly be referred to publicly as a sexual-health clinic or how Fern’s discreet reports of the sexual vulnerability of the local girls—which he had gathered slowly, and with a great deal of trust, from a few of the female teachers, who had taken great risks themselves in speaking to him—could be brought out into the light of the village without causing interpersonal chaos and offense and perhaps the end of our whole project. On the flight over we discussed it. I tried, stumblingly, to speak to Aimee about the need for delicacy, and what I knew of the local context, thinking, in my mind, of Hawa, while Fern, more eloquently, discussed an earlier German medical NGO’s interventions in a nearby Mandinka village, where female circumcision was practiced by all, and the German nurses had found oblique approaches won traction where more direct condemnations failed. Aimee frowned at these comparisons and then took up again where she had left off: “Look, it happened to me in Bendigo, it happened to me in New York, it happens everywhere. It’s not about your ‘local context’—this is everywhere. I had a big family, cousins and uncles coming and going—I know what goes on. And I’ll bet you a million dollars you go into any classroom of thirty girls anywhere in this world and there’s going to be one at least who has a secret she can’t tell. I remember. I had nowhere to go. I want these girls to have somewhere to go!”
Beside her own passion and commitment our qualifications and concerns looked petty and narrow, but we managed to wear her down to the word “clinic,” and an emphasis—at least when discussing the clinic with local mothers—on menstrual health, which was its own complication for many girls without the means to pay for sanitary products. But personally I didn’t think Aimee was wrong: I remembered my own classrooms, dance classes, playgrounds, youth groups, birthday parties, hen nights, I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell.
It was a difficult first day. We were glad to be back and there was unexpected pleasure in touring a village no longer so strange or alien to us, seeing familiar faces—in Fern’s case, people who had become intimate friends—and yet we were all also on edge because we knew that Aimee, though she attended to her duties, and smiled in the photographs Granger was tasked with taking, had a mind full of Lamin. Every few minutes she glared at Mary-Beth, who tried to call again but got only voicemail. In some compounds connected to Lamin through blood or friendship we asked for him but nobody seemed to know where he was, they’d seen him yesterday or earlier in the morning, perhaps he’d gone to Barra or Banjul, perhaps to Senegal to see family. By late afternoon Aimee was struggling to hide her irritation. We were meant to be asking people how they felt about the changes in the village, and what more they wanted to see, but Aimee glazed over if people spoke to her for any length of time and we began moving in and out of compounds with too much speed, causing offense. I wanted to linger: I wondered whether this would be our last visit and I felt some urgency to retain everything I saw, to imprint the village in memory, its unbroken light, the greens and the yellows, those white birds with their blood-red beaks, and the people, my people. But somewhere in these streets a young man was hiding from Aimee, a humiliating feeling, and a new one for her, she who had always been the person others ran toward. To avoid reflecting on this, I could see, she was determined to keep moving, and as much as her purposes frustrated my own, I still felt sorry for her. I was twelve years behind her but I, too, felt my age among all those scandalously young girls whom we met in every compound, too beautiful, confronting us both, that hot afternoon, with the one thing no amount of power or money can return to you once it’s gone.
Just before sunset we moved to the very east end of the village, on the border of where it stopped being the village and became the bush once more. There were no compounds here, only corrugated-iron huts, and it was in one of these we met the baby. All very tired, extremely hot, we didn’t notice at first that there was anyone else in the small space other than the woman whose hand Aimee was presently shaking, but as I stepped round to make space for Granger to get inside and out of the sun, I saw a baby laid out on a cloth on the floor, with another girl of about nine, at the baby’s side, stroking the infant’s face. We had seen many babies of course but none as young as this: it was three days old. The woman wrapped her up and passed the tiny package to Aimee, who accepted it into her arms and stood there staring at it, without making any of the usual comments people feel they should make when holding a newborn. Granger and I, feeling awkward, came close and made these comments ourselves: girl or boy, how beautiful, what smallness, such eyes, such lovely thick black tufts of hair. I was saying these things automatically—I’d said them many times before—until I looked at her. Her eyes were huge, wonderfully lashed, black-and-purple, unfocused. No matter how I tried to get her to look at me she wouldn’t. She was a little God refusing me grace, though I was on my knees. Aimee held the baby tighter, turned from me, and placed her own nose on the child’s bud-lips. Granger went outside to get some air. I moved close again to Aimee and craned over the baby. Time passed. The two of us, side by side, unpleasantly close, sweating on each other, but both unwilling to risk moving from the baby’s sightline. The mother was speaking, but I don’t think either of us really heard her. At last Aimee, very reluctantly, turned and placed the baby in my arms. It’s a chemical thing, maybe, like the dopamine that floods through people in love. For me it was a drowning. I have never experienced anything like it before or since.
“You like her? You like her?” said a jovial man, who had appeared from somewhere. “Take her to London! Ha ha! You like her?”
Somehow I passed her back to her mother. At the same time, in some place of alternative futures, I ran straight out of there with the baby in my arms, hailed a taxi to the airport, and flew home.
• • •
When the sun fell and nothing more could be done in the way of visiting, we decided to end the day and convene the next morning for the school tour and a village meeting. Aimee and the rest followed Fern to the pink house. I, curious about what had changed since my last visit, headed to Hawa’s. In the absolute darkness I made my way very slowly toward what I thought was the main crossing, reaching out for tree trunks like a blind person, and astonished at every turn by the many adults and children I felt passing by me, who walked quickly and efficiently, without torches, to wherever it was they were going. I made it to the crossing and was steps from Hawa’s door when Lamin appeared beside me. I hugged him and told him Aimee had been looking for him everywhere and expected to see him tomorrow.
“I am just here. I have not been anywhere.”
“Well, I’m going to see Hawa—will you come?”
“You won’t find her. She went two days ago to get married. She is back to visit tomorrow, she wou
ld like to see you.”
I wanted to commiserate, but there was no right phrase.
“You must come to the school tour tomorrow,” I repeated. “Aimee looked for you all day.”
He kicked at a stone in the ground.
“Aimee is a very nice lady, she is helping me and I am thankful, but—” He stopped at the line, like a man fluffing a long jump, but then suddenly jumped anyway: “She is an old woman! I am a young man. And a young man wants to have children!”
We stood outside Hawa’s door, looking at each other. We were so close, I felt his breath on my neck. I think I knew then that it would happen between us, that night, or the next, and that it would be a commiseration offered with the body, in the absence of any clearer or more articulate solution. We didn’t kiss, not in that moment, he didn’t even reach for my hand. There was no need. We both understood that it was already decided.
“Well, come in,” he said finally, opening Hawa’s door as if it were that to his own home. “You are here, it is late. You will eat here.”
Standing on the verandah looking out, in more or less exactly the same spot I had last seen him, was Hawa’s brother Babu. We greeted each other very warmly: like everyone I met he considered the fact that I had chosen to return once again as some kind of virtue in itself, or he pretended to find it so. To Lamin he gave only a nod, whether through familiarity or frostiness I couldn’t tell. But when I asked about Hawa his face definitively fell.
“I was there yesterday for the marriage, the only witness. For myself, I don’t care if there are singers or dresses or platters of food—none of it matters to me. But my grandmothers! Oh, she has started a war in this place! I will have to listen to women complaining until the end of my days!”
“Do you think she’s happy?”
He smiled as if I had been caught out somehow.
“Ah, yes—for Americans this is always the most important question!”
