Swing Time Read online

  My next call was from Judy. She asked me if I wanted to get out. She already had a ticket for me, on the red-eye, tonight. At the other end there would be an apartment I could use for a few nights, near Lord’s cricket ground, until the fuss died down. I tried to thank her. She laughed her seal-bark.

  “You think I’m doing this for you? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “OK, Judy, I already said I’ll take the ticket.”

  “That’s gracious of you, love. After the mountain of shit you’ve created for me.”

  “What about Lamin?”

  “What about Lamin?”

  “He expected to come to England. You can’t just—”

  “You’re ridiculous.”

  The phone went dead.

  • • •

  After the sun went down, and the last man on the doorstep left, I abandoned my boxes with James and Darryl and got a taxi on Lennox. The driver was of that deepest shade, like Hawa, and had a likely-sounding name, and I was in the state of seeing signs and symbols everywhere. I leaned forward with my year-off enthusiasms and ragbag of local facts and asked him where he was from. He was Senegalese but this didn’t hamper me much: I spoke without pause through the midtown tunnel and out into Jamaica. He beat the steering wheel every now with the hub of his right hand and sighed and laughed.

  “So you know how it is, back home! That village life! It’s not easy but that’s the life I miss! But sista, you should have come to see us! You could have just walked down the road!”

  “Actually, the friend I was telling you about,” I said, looking up for a moment from my screen, “from Senegal? We just organized to meet in London, I was just messaging him.” I repressed the urge to tell this stranger that I, in my generosity, had paid for Lamin’s ticket.

  “Oh, nice, nice. London is better? More nice than here?”

  “Different.”

  “Twenty-eight years I’ve been here. Here is so stressful, you have to be so angry to survive here, you live off the anger . . . it’s too much.”

  We were pulling into JFK, and when I tried to give him his tip he returned it.

  “Thank you for coming to my country,” he said, forgetting I hadn’t.

  Eleven

  Now everyone knows who you really are.

  By the time I landed, our old girlhood dance was out in the world. I find it interesting that Tracey chose not to send it to me until two whole days later. In her vision of things others would know who I really was before I did—but then perhaps they always do. It reminded me of her way with our earliest tales of ballet dancers in peril, how she would correct and edit me: “No: that part here.” “It’d go better if she died on page two.” Moving and rearranging things to create the greatest impact. Now she had achieved the same effect with my life, placing the beginning of the story at an earlier point so that all that came after read as the twisted consequence of a lifelong obsession. It was more convincing than my version. It drew the strangest reactions from people. Everybody wanted to see the footage and nobody did: it was pulled down wherever it was posted almost as soon as it went up. For some—maybe you—it was borderline child pornography, if not in intention then in effect. Others found it only exploitative, though it is hard to put your finger on who is exploiting whom. Can children exploit themselves? Is it anything more than a couple of girls messing around, simply two girls dancing—two brown girls dancing like adults—copying adult moves innocently, but skillfully, as brown girls often can? And if you think it more than that, then who has the problem, exactly, the girls in the film—or you? Whatever is said or thought about it seems to make the viewer complicit: the best thing is not to see it at all. That is the only possible high ground. Otherwise, this cloud of guilt, which can’t be exactly placed, but still you feel it. Even I, watching the video, had the troubling thought: well, if a girl behaves like that at the age of ten, can she ever be said to be innocent? What won’t she do at fifteen, at twenty-two—at thirty-three? The desire to be on the side of innocence is so strong. It pulsated out of my phone in waves, in all those posts and rants and commentaries. By contrast, the baby was innocent, the baby was guilt-free. Aimee loved the baby, the child’s birth parents loved Aimee, they wanted her to raise their baby. Judy got that message out far and wide. Who was anyone to judge? Who was I?

  Now everybody knows who you really are.

  The tide turned again, fiercely and with great sympathy in Aimee’s direction. But there were still people on the doorstep of Judy’s rental, despite all her preparations and the doorman’s promises, and on the third day I left with Lamin for my mother’s Sidmouth Road flat, which I knew, in all available records, would be registered in Miriam’s name. There was no one on the doorstep. When I rang the doorbell there was no answer and my mother’s phone went to voicemail. Finally a neighbor let us in. She looked confused—shocked—when I asked where my mother was. This woman, too, would now know who I really was: the kind of daughter who had not yet heard her own mother was in a hospice.

  It looked like all the spaces my mother had ever lived in, books and papers everywhere, just as I remembered, but more so: the space for actual living had reduced. Chairs were serving as bookshelves, and all available tables, most of the floor, the work surfaces in the kitchen. It wasn’t chaos, though, there was a logic to it. In the kitchen diaspora fiction and poetry dominated and the bathroom was mostly histories of the Caribbean. There was a wall of slave narratives and commentaries upon them leading from her bedroom down the hall to the boiler. I found the address of the hospice on the fridge, it was written in somebody else’s handwriting. I felt sad and guilty. Who did she ask to write it? Who drove her there? I tried to do a little tidying. Lamin lent a hand, half-heartedly—he was used to women doing for him and soon sat himself down on my mother’s sofa to watch the same heavy old TV set from my childhood, kept half hidden behind an armchair, to make the point that it was never watched. I moved piles of books back and forth, making little headway, and after a while gave up. I sat at my mother’s table with my back to Lamin, opened my laptop and returned to what I’d spent the whole of yesterday doing, searching for myself, reading of myself, and seeking Tracey, too, below the line. She wasn’t hard to find. Generally the fourth or fifth comment, and she always went at it full tilt, every time, no compromise, aggressive, full of conspiracy. She had many aliases. Some were quite subtle: tiny references to moments from our shared history, songs we’d liked, toys we’d had, or numeral recombinations of the year we first met or our dates of birth. I noticed she liked to use the words “sordid” and “shameful,” and the phrase “Where were their mothers?” Whenever I saw that line, or a variation upon it, I knew it was her. I found her everywhere, in the most unlikely places. In other people’s feeds, under newspaper articles, on Facebook walls, abusing anyone who did not agree with her arguments. As I followed her trail, the idiotic daytime shows came and went behind me. If I turned to check on Lamin I found him still as a statue, watching.

  “Turn that down a little?”

  He’d increased the volume suddenly on a property-makeover show, of the kind my father had once liked to watch.

  “The man is speaking about Edgware. I have an uncle in Edgware. And a cousin.”

  “Do you?” I said, trying not to sound too hopeful. I waited but he returned to his show. The sun went down. My stomach began to rumble. I didn’t move from my seat, I was too intent on my Tracey hunt, flushing her out of the covert, and checking a secondary window every fifteen minutes or so to see if she’d invaded my inbox. But her methods with me were apparently different than with my mother. That one-line e-mail was all she ever sent me.

  • • •

  At six the news came on. Lamin was very affected by the revelation that the people of Iceland were suddenly, catastrophically poor. How could such a thing happen? A failed harvest? A corrupt President? But it was news to me, too, and not understanding a
ll of what the newsreader said I could offer no interpretation. “Maybe we will hear information also of Sankofa,” Lamin suggested, and I laughed, stood up, and told him they didn’t put that kind of nonsense on the evening news. Twenty minutes later, as I peered into a fridge full of rotting produce, Lamin called me to come back in. It was the closing story on the real news, the British Broadcast news as he called it, and there in the top-right corner was a stock photo of Aimee. We sat on the edge of the sofa. Cut to a strip-lit office space somewhere, with a picture of the frog-faced President-for-life askew on the wall, in front of which the birth parents sat in their country clothes, looking hot and uncomfortable. A woman from an adoption agency sat to their left and translated. I tried to remember if the mother was the same person I’d seen that day in the corrugated-iron hut, but couldn’t be sure. I listened to the agency woman explain the situation to the foreign correspondent who sat opposite them all, he was wearing a version of my old wrinkled uniform of linen and khaki. Everything had been done according to procedure, what had been leaked was not the adoption certificate at all, it was only an intermediary document, clearly not intended for public consumption, the parents were satisfied with the adoption and understood what they had signed.

  “We have no problem,” said the mother, in halting English, smiling at the camera.

  Lamin put both hands behind his head, sank back into the sofa and offered me a proverb: “Money makes problems go away.”

  I switched it off. Silence spread through the house, we had nothing whatsoever to say to each other, the third point on our triangle was gone. Two days ago I had been pleased with my dramatic gesture—fulfilling a duty of care Aimee had neglected—but the gesture itself had obscured the reality of Lamin: Lamin in my bed, Lamin in this living room, Lamin indefinitely in my life. He had no job and no money. None of his hard-won qualifications meant anything here. Each time I left the room—to get tea, to go to the toilet—my first thought upon seeing him again was: what are you doing in my house?

  At eight o’clock I ordered Ethiopian takeaway. As we ate I showed him Google Maps and where we were in London in relation to the rest of the city. I showed him Edgware. The various ways you can get to Edgware.

  “I’ll be going to see my mother tomorrow, but feel free to hang around here, obviously. Or, you know, go off exploring.”

  Anyone watching us that evening would have thought we had met a few hours earlier. I felt shy of him once more, of his proud self-containment and capacity for silence. He was not Aimee’s Lamin any more, but he wasn’t mine either. I had no idea who he was. When it was clear I’d run out of geographical conversation he stood up and, without any discussion, went to the box-room. I went to my mother’s room. We closed our doors.

  • • •

  The hospice was in Hampstead, on a quiet, tree-lined cul-de-sac, a stone’s throw from the hospital where I was born and a few streets from the Noted Activist. Autumn was pretty here, russet and gold against all that valuable red-brick Victorian real estate, and I had strong associative memories of my mother walking through it on brisk mornings like this one, arm in arm with the Noted Activist, bemoaning the Italian aristocrats and American bankers, the Russian oligarchs and the upscale children’s clothes stores, the basements being dug out of the earth. The end of some long-lost bohemian idea of the place she’d held dear. She was forty-seven then. She was only fifty-seven now. Of all the futures I had imagined for her in these streets somehow the present reality seemed the most improbable. When I was a child she had been immortal. I couldn’t imagine her leaving this world without ripping its fabric. Instead, this quiet street, these gingko trees shedding their golden leaves.

  At the desk I gave my name and after a short wait a young male nurse came for me. He warned me that my mother was on morphine and sometimes confused, before leading me to her room. I didn’t notice anything about this nurse, he seemed completely nondescript, but when I got to the room and he opened the door my mother pushed herself up in her bed and cried: “Alan Pennington! So you’ve met the famous Alan Pennington!”

  “Mum, it’s me.”

  “Oh, I’m Alan,” said the nurse, and I turned round to look again at this young man my mother was smiling at so radiantly. He was short, with sandy-brown hair, small blue eyes, a slightly pudgy face and an unremarkable nose with a few freckles over the bridge. The only thing that made him unusual to me, in the context of all the Nigerian, Polish and Pakistani nurses you heard talking in the corridors, was how English he looked.

  “Alan Pennington is famous around here,” said my mother, waving at him. “His kindness is legend.”

  Alan Pennington smiled at me, revealing a pair of pointy incisors, like a little dog’s.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” he said.

  • • •

  “How are you, Mum? Are you in a lot of pain?”

  “Alan Pennington,” she informed me, after the door had closed behind him, “only works for others. Did you know that? You hear about these people but it’s another thing to meet them. Of course, I’ve worked for others, all my life—but not like this. They’re all like that here. I had a girl from Angola first, Fatima, lovely girl, she was the same . . . unfortunately she had to move on. Then Alan Pennington came. You see: he is a carer. I never thought about that word very deeply before. Alan Pennington cares.”

  “Mum, why do you keep calling him Alan Pennington like that?”

  My mother looked at me like I was an idiot.

  “Because that’s his name. Alan Pennington is a carer who cares.”

  “Yes, Mum, that’s what carers are paid to do.”

  “No, no, no, you don’t understand: he cares. The things he does for me! No one should have to do those things for another human being—but he does them for me!”

  Tiring of the subject of Alan Pennington, I convinced her to let me read aloud for a while from a slim book she had on her side-table, a little stand-alone edition of Sonny’s Blues, and then lunch arrived on the tray of Alan Pennington.

  “But I can’t eat that,” said my mother sadly as Alan lay it across her lap.

  “Well, how about I leave it with you for twenty minutes and if you’re absolutely sure you can’t eat it just ring the bell and I’ll come and take it back? How would that be? Does that sound all right?”

  I waited for my mother to tear a strip off Alan Pennington—all her life she had hated and dreaded being patronized or spoken to like a child—but now she nodded seriously as if this were a very wise and generous proposal, took Alan’s hands in her own shaking, wraith-like grasp and said: “Thank you, Alan. Please don’t forget to come back.”

  “And forget the most beautiful woman in the place?” said Alan, though clearly gay, and my mother, lifelong feminist, erupted in girlish giggles. And they stayed like that, holding each other’s hands, until Alan smiled and released her, off to care for someone else, abandoning my mother and me to each other. I had a rogue thought, I hated having it: I wished that Aimee was here with me. I had been at deathbeds with Aimee, four times, and on each occasion had been impressed and humbled by her way of being with the dying, her honesty, warmth and simplicity, which nobody else in the room ever seemed able to manage, not even family. Death did not scare her. She looked directly at it, engaged with the dying person in their present situation, no matter how extreme, without nostalgia or false optimism, accepted your fear when you were afraid, and your pain if you were feeling it. How many people can do these supposedly straightforward things? I remember a friend of hers, a painter who had lost decades to the severe anorexia that eventually killed her, saying to Aimee, on what turned out to be her deathbed: “God, Aim—didn’t I just waste so much fucking time!” To which Aimee replied: “More than you know.” I remember that stick figure between the bed sheets with her gaping mouth, so shocked she burst out laughing. But it was the truth, no else had dared tell her, and dying people, I found out, are
impatient for the truth. I spoke no truth whatsoever to my mother, I just made the usual small talk, read her more of her beloved Baldwin, listened to tales of Alan Pennington, and lifted her beaker of juice so she could suck at it through a straw. She knew I knew she was dying but for whatever reason—bravery, denial or delusion—she made no reference to it in my presence except to say, when I asked her where her phone was and why she hadn’t answered it: “Look, I don’t want to spend the time I have left on that bloody thing.”

  I found it in the compartment of her side-table, in a hospital laundry bag, along with a trouser suit, a folder of papers, a guide to parliamentary conduct and her laptop.

  “You don’t have to use it,” I said, powering it up and laying it on the table. “But just leave it on so I have a way of contacting you.”

  The notification alarm started going off—the phone buzzed and danced across the counter—and my mother looked over at it with a kind of horror.