Swing Time Read online

  “Fuck all of you sons of bitches!” Hysteria.

  As it happened, I hadn’t been following Shelton, had never heard of him really before Anwar pointed him out, but now I did follow him, along with Anwar I became his number-one fan. I bought little American flags to work on the days of his games and made sure to send out, on these occasions, all the other delivery boys except Anwar. Together we cheered Shelton, danced around the place at each successful point, and as he won one match and then another, we began to feel like we, with our dancing and whooping, were the ones propelling him forward, and that without us he’d be done for. At times Bahram behaved as if he believed this, too, as if we were performing some ancient African voodoo rite. Yes, somehow we put a spell on Bahram just as much as Shelton, and as the days of the tournament passed and Shelton still refused to be knocked out I saw Bahram’s many other pressing worries—the business, his difficult wife, the stressful search for suitors for his daughters—all slip away, until his sole preoccupation was ensuring we did not cheer for Bryan Shelton, and that Shelton himself did not get to the Wimbledon final.

  One morning, halfway through the tournament, I was standing, bored, at the counter when I saw Anwar on his bike, riding up the pavement toward us at great speed, then break haphazardly, leap off and rush up to my counter with his fist in his mouth and a smile he could barely control. He slapped a copy of the Daily Mirror in front of me, pointed to a column in the sports pages, and said: “Arab!” We couldn’t believe it. His name was Karim Alami. He was from Morocco, and he was seeded even lower than Shelton. Their match was to start at two. Bahram arrived at one. There was a great feeling of anxiety and anticipation in the place, delivery boys who were not meant to come till five came early, and the Congolese cleaner began working through the back of the kitchen at unprecedented speed in the hope she would reach front-of-house—and therefore the television—by the time the game began. That match went five rounds. Shelton started strong and at various points in the first set Bahram was reduced to standing on a chair and screaming. When the first set ended six‒three to Shelton, Bahram jumped off his chair and walked straight out of the building. We looked at each other: was this victory? Five minutes later he sloped back in with a packet of Gauloises in hand, retrieved from his car, and began chain-smoking with his head down. But in the second set things began to look a little better for Karim, and Bahram sat up straight as straight, then stood, and began pacing in a circular way around the small space, offering his own commentary, which had as much to do with eugenics as backhands and lobs and double faults, and as we reached a tiebreak, he became increasingly fluent in his lecture, waving his cigarette around in his hand, ever more confident in his English. The black man, he informed us, he is instinct, he is moving body, he is strong, and he is music, yes, of course, and he is rhythm, everybody know this, and he is speed, and this is beautiful, maybe, yes, but let me tell you tennis is game of the mind—the mind! The black man can be good strength, good muscle, he can hit ball hard, but Karim he is like me: he think one, two step in front. He have Arab mind. Arab mind is complicated machine, delicate. We invent mathematics. We invent astronomy. Subtle people. Two steps ahead. Your Bryan now he is lost.

  But he was not lost: he took the set seven‒five, and Anwar took the broom away from the Congolese cleaner—whose name I did not know, whose name no one ever thought to ask—and made her dance with him, to some hi-life he had going on the transistor radio he carried everywhere. In the next set Shelton collapsed, one‒six. Bahram was exultant. Wherever you go in world, he told Anwar, you people at bottom! Sometimes at top White man, Jew, Arab, Chinese, Japan—depends. But your people always they lose. By the time the fourth set started we had stopped pretending to be a pizza place. The phone rang and no one answered, the oven was empty, and everybody was crammed into the small space at the front. I sat on the counter with Anwar, our nervous legs kicking the cheap MDF panels until they rattled. We watched these two players—in truth, almost perfectly matched—battling toward an elongated, excruciating tiebreak that Shelton then lost, six‒seven. Anwar burst into bitter tears.

  “But Anwar, little friend: he have one more set,” explained the kindly Bosnian chef, and Anwar was as grateful as the man sitting in an electric chair who’s just spotted the governor through the Plexiglas, running down the hall. The final set was quick: six‒two. Game, set, match—Shelton. Anwar turned his radio up full blast and every kind of dance burst forth from me, winding, stomping, shuffling—I even did the shim-sham. Bahram accused us all of having sex with our mothers and stormed out. About an hour later he returned. It was the early-evening rush when mothers decide they can’t face cooking dinner and all-day tokers suddenly realize they haven’t eaten since breakfast. I was harried on the phone, trying as usual to parse many different kinds of pidgin English, both on the phones and among our own delivery crew, when Bahram walked up to me and put the evening paper in my face. He pointed to a picture of Shelton, his arm swung high in preparation for one of his forceful serves, ball in the air before him, paused at the moment of connection. I cupped the phone receiver with a hand.

  “What? I’m working.”

  “Look close. Not black. Brown. Like you.”

  “I’m working.”

  “Probably he is half-half, like you. So: this explains.”

  I looked not at Shelton but at Bahram, very closely. He smiled.

  “Half-winner,” he said.

  I put the phone down, took my apron off and walked out.

  • • •

  I don’t know how Tracey found out I was back working at Bahram’s. I didn’t want anyone to know, I could hardly face the truth of it myself. Probably she simply spotted me through the glass. When she walked in, one steamy afternoon in late August, she caused a sensation, in her skin-tight leggings and navel-skimming crop top. I noticed her clothes had not changed with the times, that they had no need of change. She did not struggle, as I did—as most women I knew did—to find ways to dress her body in the symbols, shapes and signs of the age. It was as if she were above all of that, timeless. She was always dressed for a dance rehearsal and always looked wonderful that way. Anwar and the rest of the boys, waiting outside on their bikes, took a good long time over the front view and then repositioned themselves to get what Italians call the B-side. When she leaned over the counter to speak to me I saw one of them cover his eyes, as if in physical pain.

  “Good to see you. How was the seaside?”

  She smirked, confirming the sense I already had that my college life had been some kind of local joke, a poor attempt at playing a role outside of my range, one that had not come off.

  “See your mum about. She’s everywhere these days.”

  “Yes. I’m glad to be back, I think. You look great. Are you working?”

  “Oh, I’m doing all sorts. Got big news. When do you get off?”

  “I just started.”

  “So what about tomorrow?”

  Bahram sidled up to us and in his most courtly manner inquired whether Tracey happened to be Persian.

  • • •

  We met up the following evening, in a local pub that we had always known as Irish but which was now neither Irish nor anything else. The old booths had gone and been replaced by a great many sofas and wingback chairs, from different historical eras, covered in clashing prints, and scattered around the place, like a stage set recently dismantled. Purple flock wallpaper was plastered above the chimney breast and many poorly stuffed woodland creatures, arrested in the act of leaping or crouching, were encased in glass bell jars and had been placed on high shelves, looking over mine and Tracey’s reunion with their wonky glass eyes. I broke the gaze of a petrified squirrel to greet Tracey, who was returning from the bar with two white wines in her hands and a powerful look of disgust on her face.

  “Seven quid? What fuckery is this?”

  “We could go somewhere else.”

&
nbsp; She screwed up her nose: “No. That’s what they want. We were born here. Drink slowly.”

  We never could drink slowly. We kept going, on Tracey’s credit card, reminiscing and laughing—laughing harder than I had in all three years of college—taking each other back to Miss Isabel’s yellow shoes, to my mother’s clay pit, to The History of Dance, through all of it, even things I never thought we would ever be able to laugh at together. Louie dancing with Michael Jackson, my own Royal Ballet delusion. Feeling bold, I asked after her father.

  She stopped laughing.

  “Still over there. Got a whole bunch of ‘out the house’ children now, so I’m told . . .”

  Her ever-expressive face turned pensive and then took on that look of utter icy coldness I remembered so well from childhood. I considered telling her about what I had seen, years before, in Kentish Town, but that coldness stopped up the sentence in my mouth.

  “What about your old man? Haven’t seen him for time.”

  “Believe it or not, I think he’s still in love with my mother.”

  “That’s nice,” she said, but that look stayed on her face. She was staring past me, at the squirrel. “That’s nice,” she said once again.

  I could see we had got to the end of reminiscence, that it was properly time to venture into the present day. I could guess how easily Tracey’s news would outstrip whatever I had to offer. And so it did: she had a part on the West End stage. It was in a revival of one of our favorite shows, Guys and Dolls, and she was playing “Hot Box Girl Number One,” which I remembered was not a huge role—in the film she had no name of her own and spoke only four or five lines—but all the same she was present a lot, singing and dancing in the Hot Box club, or else trailing Adelaide, whose best friend she’s meant to be. Tracey would get to do “Take Back Your Mink”—a song we did as children, brandishing a mangy-looking pair of feather boas—and she’d wear lace corsets and real satin gowns and have her hair set and curled. “We’re in proper dress rehearsal now. They use flat irons on me every night, it’s killing me.” She touched her hairline and underneath the wax that had been used to slick it down I saw that indeed it was already frayed and patchy.

  She’d got her boast out of the way. In its aftermath, though, she struck me as vulnerable and defensive and I had the sense that I had not reacted quite as she’d wanted. Perhaps she had really imagined that a twenty-one-year-old college graduate would hear her good news and collapse weeping on the floor. She picked up her wine and drained it. She asked, at last, about my life. I took a deep breath and repeated the sorts of things I said to my mother: only a stopgap, waiting to hear of other opportunities, staying at my dad’s temporarily, rent being high, no relationship, but then relationships were so complicated, not what I needed right now, and I wanted time to work on my own—

  “Right, right, right, but you can’t keep working for pizza cunt, can you? You need a plan.”

  I nodded and waited. Relief came over me, familiar, though I had not felt it for a long time, and I connected it to being taken in hand by Tracey, to having decisions removed from me and replaced instead by her will, her intentions. Hadn’t Tracey always known what games to play, what stories to tell, what beat to choose, what move to make to it?

  “Look, I know you’re a big woman now,” she said, confidingly, leaning back in her chair, with her feet pointed below, creating a beautiful vertical line from her knees to her toes. “It’s none of my business. But if you need something, they’re looking for stagehands right now. You could try for it. I could put a good word in. It’s just four months but it’s better than fuck all.”

  “I don’t know anything about theater. I’ve got no experience.”

  “Oh my gosh,” said Tracey, shaking her head at me, standing up to get another round in. “Just lie!”

  Six

  I assumed my questioning of Lamin had got back to Aimee, because on the day of my departure from the Coco Ocean hotel the front desk called up to my room to tell me they had a message for me, and when I opened the white envelope I found this note: Jet unavailable. You’ll have to fly commercial. Save receipts. Judy.

  I was being punished. At first I thought it was funny that Aimee’s idea of punishment was flying commercial, but when I got to the airport I was surprised by how much I had in fact forgotten: the waiting, the queuing, the submitting to irrational instructions. Every aspect of it, the presence of so many other people, the brusqueness of the staff, even the immutable flight time on the screens in the waiting room—it all felt like an affront. My seat was next to two truck drivers from Huddersfield, they were in their sixties and had traveled together. They loved it here, they’d come “every year, if they could afford it.” After lunch they started in on some little bottles of Baileys and compared notes on their “girls.” They both wore wedding rings, half embedded in their fat, hairy fingers. I had my earphones in by then: they probably thought I couldn’t hear them. “My one said to me she were twenty, but her cousin—he’s a waiter there, too—he told me she were seventeen. Wise beyond her years, though.” He had hardened egg yolk down his T-shirt. His friend had yellowed teeth and bloody gums. They had seven days of holiday in any calendar year. The man with the yellow teeth had worked double shifts for three months simply to afford this long weekend with his girl in Banjul. I had murderous fantasies—of taking my serrated plastic knife, drawing it across each of their throats—but the longer I listened, the sadder the whole thing seemed. “I said to her, don’t you want to come to England? And she basically says to me: ‘No fear, love.’ She wants us to build a house in Wassu, wherever the fuck that is. They’re no fools, these girls. Realistic. Pound goes a lot bloody further out there than it does back home. It’s like the missus moaning about she wants to go to Spain. I said to her, ‘You’re living in the past, love. You know how much Spain is these days?’” One kind of weakness feeding on another.

  • • •

  A few days later I was back at work. I kept waiting for a formal meeting or a debrief but it was as if I hadn’t made the visit at all. Nobody mentioned my trip and in itself that was not so unusual, many other things were going on at the time—a new album, a new tour—but in the subtle way of the best bullies Judy and Aimee strove to freeze me out of all important decisions while simultaneously ensuring that nothing they said or did could be explicitly interpreted as punishment or retribution. We were preparing for our autumn transition to New York—a period in which Aimee and I were usually glued to each other—but now I hardly saw her, and for two weeks I was given the kind of grunt-work more appropriate to the housekeepers. I was on the phone to freight companies. I was cataloging shoes. I accompanied the children to their yoga class. I cornered Judy about it early one Saturday morning. Aimee was in the basement, working out, the children were watching their one hour of weekly television. I trawled the house and found Judy sitting in the library with her feet up on the baize desk, painting her toenails a terrible fuchsia, a white foam wedge stuck between each long toe. She didn’t look up until I’d finished speaking.

  “Yeah, well, hate to break it to you, love, but Aimee doesn’t give a flying fuck what you think of her private life.”

  “I’m trying to look out for her interests. That’s my job as a friend.”

  “No, love, not accurate. Your job is: personal assistant.”

  “I’ve been here nine years.”

  “And I’ve been here twenty-nine.” She swung her feet round and placed them in a black box on the floor that glowed purple. “I’ve seen a lot of these assistants come and go. But Christ, none of them has been as delusional as you.”

  “Isn’t it true? Isn’t she trying to get him a visa?”

  “I’m not discussing that with you.”

  “Judy, I spent today mainly working for the dog. I have a degree. Don’t tell me I’m not being punished.”

  Judy pulled her fringe back with both hands.


  “First of all, don’t be so bloody melodramatic. What you are doing is working. Whatever you may think, chook, your job is not and has never been ‘best mate.’ You’re her assistant. You always have been. But recently you seem to have forgotten that—and it’s about time you were reminded. So that’s our first issue. Number two: if she wants to bring him over here, if she wants to marry him, or dance with him on top of Big fucking Ben, that is no concern of yours. You’re very far out of your area.” Judy sighed and looked down at her toes. “And the funny part of it is, she’s not even pissed off with you about the boy. It’s not even about the bloody boy.”

  “What, then?”

  “You spoken to your mum recently?”

  This question made me violently blush. How long had it been? A month? Two? Parliament was in session, she was busy, and if she wanted me she knew where I was. I was going through these justifications in my head for a long moment before it occurred to me to wonder why Judy was interested.

  “Well, maybe you should. She’s making life difficult for us right now and I don’t really know why. Would help if you could find out.”

  “My mother?”

  “I mean, there’s a million issues in this little shithole of an island you call a country—literally a million. She wants to talk about ‘Dictatorships in West Africa’?” said Judy, using finger quotes. “British complicity with dictatorships in West Africa. She’s on the TV, she’s writing the op-eds, she’s standing up in bloody Prime Minister’s Question Tea Hour or whatever the fuck it is you people call it. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about it. Fine. Well, that’s not my problem—what DfID does, what the IMF does—that’s out of my area. Aimee, however, is my area—and yours. We’re in partnership with this crazy bloody President, and if you go and ask your beloved Fern he’ll tell you what a tightrope we’re walking right now. Believe me, love, if his Highness-for-life the all-mighty King of Kings doesn’t want us in his country? We are out of there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. The school gets fucked, everybody gets fucked. Now, I know you have a degree. You’ve told me, many, many times. Is it in International Development? No, I didn’t think so. And I’m sure your big-mouth mother out there on the back benches probably thinks she’s being helpful, too, God knows, but you know what she’s actually doing? Hurting the people she claims to want to help, and pissing on those of us who are trying to make some kind of difference out there. Biting the hand. Seems to run in the family.”