Swing Time Read online

  “No, no, no—I don’t want it! I don’t want it on! Why did you have to do that?”

  I picked it up. I could see unopened e-mails, dozens and dozens of them, filling the screen, abusive even in their subject headings, all from the same address. I started reading through them, trying to resist the catalog of pain: child-support woes, rent arrears, skirmishes with social workers. The most recent were the most frantic: she feared her children were about to be taken from her.

  “Mum, have you heard from Tracey recently?”

  “Where’s Alan Pennington? I’m not going to eat this.”

  “My God, you’re so sick right now—you shouldn’t have to be dealing with this!”

  “It’s not like Alan not to check in . . .”

  “Mum, have you heard from Tracey?”

  “NO! I told you I don’t look at that thing!”

  “You haven’t spoken to her?”

  She sighed heavily.

  “I don’t have many visitors, darling. Miriam comes. Lambert came once. My fellow Members of Parliament do not come. You are here. As Alan Pennington said: ‘You find out who your friends are.’ I sleep mostly. I dream a lot. I dream of Jamaica, I dream of my grandmother. I go back in time . . .” She closed her eyes. “I did have a dream about your friend, when I first got here, I was on a high dosage of this”—she tugged at a drip in her arm—“Yes, your friend came to visit me. I was asleep and I woke up and she was just standing by the door, not talking. Then I went back to sleep and she was gone.”

  • • •

  When I got back to the flat, emotionally weak, still jet-lagged, I prayed that Lamin would be out and he was. When he didn’t come back for dinner I was relieved. Only the next morning, when I knocked on his door, nudged it open and saw he and his bag were gone did I realize he’d left. When I called I got voicemail. I called every few hours for four days and it was the same. I had been so concentrated upon how I might break the news to him that he must leave, that we had no future together, that I hadn’t imagined, not for a moment, that all the time he was plotting his own escape from me.

  Without him, without the TV on, the flat was deadly quiet. It was just me and the computer, and the radio, from which more than once I heard the voice of the Noted Activist, still going strong, full of opinions. But my own story was fading, online and in all other mediums, all that brightly illuminated commentary already burned out, puttering to blackness and ash. At a loss, I spent a day writing e-mails to Tracey. First dignified and righteous, then sarcastic, then angry, then hysterical, until I realized she was having more effect on me with silence than I could manage with all these words. The power she has over me is the same as it has always been, judgment, and it goes beyond words. There is no case I can make that will change the fact that I was her only witness, the only person who knows all that she has in her, all that’s been ignored and wasted, and yet I still left her back there, in the ranks of the unwitnessed, where you have to scream to get heard. Later I found out Tracey had a long history of sending distressing e-mails. A director at the Tricycle who had not cast her, she thought because of color. The teachers at her son’s school. A nurse at her doctor’s office. But none of this changes the judgment. If she was tormenting my mother as she lay dying, if she was trying to ruin my life, if she was sitting in that claustrophobic little flat, watching my e-mails line up on her phone and simply choosing not to read them—whatever she was doing, I knew it was a form of judgment upon me. I was her sister: I had a sacred duty toward her. Even if only she and I knew it and recognized it, it was still true.

  A few times I left the flat for the corner-shop, to buy cigarettes and packets of pasta, but otherwise I saw no one and heard from no one. At night I picked up random books from my mother’s pile, tried to read a little, lost interest and started another. It occurred to me that I was depressed and needed to speak to another human. I sat with my new pay-as-you-go phone in my hand, looking down at the short list of personal names and numbers I’d copied off the old work phone, summarily disconnected, and tried to imagine what form each interaction would take, if and how I could get through it, but every potential conversation felt like a scene from a stage play, in which I’d be playing that person I’d been for so long, who seems to be at lunch with you but is actually turned toward Aimee, working for Aimee, thinking of Aimee, day and night, night and day. I called Fern. The ring was a single long foreign tone and he answered with “Hola.” He was in Madrid.

  “Working?”

  “Traveling. It will be my year off. Didn’t you know I quit? But I’m so happy to be free!”

  I asked him why, expecting a personal attack, directed at Aimee, but his answer had no personal aspect, he was concerned with the “distorting” effect of her money in the village, the collapse of government services in the area, and the foundation’s naïve, complicit dealings with the government. As he spoke I was reminded and ashamed of a profound difference between us. I had always been quick to interpret everything personally, where Fern had seen the larger, structural problems.

  “Well, it’s good to hear from you, Fern.”

  “No, you didn’t hear from me. I heard from you.”

  He left the silence hanging. The longer it went on, the harder it was to think of what to say.

  “Why are you calling me?”

  I sat listening to him breathe for another few seconds until my phone ran out of credit.

  • • •

  About a week later he e-mailed to say he was in London for a short trip. I hadn’t spoken to anyone but my mother in several days. We met up on the South Bank, in the window of the Film Café, sitting side by side, facing the water, and reminisced a little, but it was awkward, I became bitter so easily, every thought pulled toward darkness, to something painful. All I did was complain, and though I could see I was irritating him I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  “Well, we can say that Aimee lives in her bubble,” he said, interrupting me, “and so does your friend and, by the way, so do you. It’s possible that it’s like this for everyone. The size of the bubble is different, this is all. And perhaps the thickness of the—what do you call this in English?—skin—film. The thin layer on a bubble.”

  The waiter came, we paid avid attention to him. When he left we watched a tourist boat make its way down the Thames.

  “Oh! I know what it is I want to tell you,” he said suddenly, slapping the bar and rattling a saucer. “I heard from Lamin! He is fine—he is in Birmingham. He wanted a letter of reference from me. He hopes to study. We e-mailed a little bit. I learn that Lamin is a fatalist. He wrote to me: ‘It was intended for me to come to Birmingham. So I was always coming here.’ Isn’t that funny? No? Well, maybe I use the wrong word in English. I mean that for Lamin the future is as certain as the past. It is a theory from philosophy.”

  “Sounds like a nightmare.”

  Fern looked puzzled again: “Maybe I put it wrong, I’m not a philosopher. To me it means something simple, like to say the future is already there, waiting for you. Why not wait, see what it brings?”

  His face was so hopeful it made me laugh. We got some of our old friendly rhythm back, and sat talking for a long time, and I thought it was not impossible that there might be a future in which I could care for him. I was settling into the idea that I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry any longer, I would not be on the next plane. Time was on my side, as much as it is on anyone’s. Everything that afternoon felt wide open to me, a kind of shock, I didn’t know what was happening in the next few days or even the next few hours—a new feeling. I was surprised when I looked up from my second coffee and saw the day fading and the night almost upon us.

  Afterward, he wanted to get on the tube, at Waterloo, it was the best stop for me, too, but instead I left him and chose the bridge. Ignoring both barriers, walking straight down the center, over the river, until I reached the other side.
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  Epilogue

  The last time I saw my mother alive we talked about Tracey. That isn’t strong enough: Tracey was really the only thing that allowed us to speak at all. My mother was mostly too tired to speak or be spoken to, and for the first time in her life books held no attraction. I sang to her instead, which she seemed to like—as long as I stuck to the old Motown classics. We watched TV together, something we’d never done before, and I made small talk with Alan Pennington, who came in every now and then to check on my mother’s fierce hiccups and her stools and the progression of her delusions. He brought lunch, which she could no longer look at never mind eat, but on that last day we had together, when Alan left the room, she opened her eyes and told me in a calm, authoritative voice, as if remarking on something that was a plain and objective fact—like the weather outside or what was sitting on her plate—that the time had come to “do something” about Tracey’s family. At first I thought she was lost in the past, she often was in those last days, but soon I understood she was speaking of the children, Tracey’s children, although in speaking of them she moved freely between their reality, as she imagined it, the history of our own little family, and a deeper history: it was the last speech she ever gave. She works too hard, said my mother, and the children don’t see her, and now they want to take my children away, but your father was very good, very good, and often I think: was I a good mother? Was I? And now they want to take my children away from me . . . But I was just a student, I am studying, because you have to learn to survive, and I was a mother and I have to learn, because you knew that any one of us they caught reading or writing faced jail or a whipping or worse, and anyone caught teaching us to read or write got the same, jailed or whipped, it was the law at that time, it was very strict, and in that way we were taken out of our time and place, and then stopped from even knowing our time and place—and you can’t do anything worse to a people than that. But I don’t know if Tracey was a good mother, though I certainly tried my best to raise them all, but I know for sure your father was very good, very good . . .

  I told her she was good. The rest didn’t matter. I told her everybody had tried their best within the limits of being themselves. I don’t know if she heard me.

  I was gathering my things when I heard Alan Pennington coming down the hall, singing in his flat, off-tune way, one of my mother’s favorite Otis tracks, about being born by the river, and running ever since. “Heard you do that one yesterday,” he said to me, appearing in the doorway, chipper as ever. “Lovely voice, you have. Your mum’s very proud of you, you know, she’s always talking about you.”

  He smiled at my mother. But she was beyond Alan Pennington.

  “It’s clear as day,” she murmured, closing her eyes as I got up to leave. “They should be with you. The best possible place for those children is with you.”

  • • •

  For the rest of that afternoon I entertained the fantasy, not seriously, I don’t think, it was only a Technicolor dreamsong playing in my head: a ready-made family, suddenly in the here and now, filling my life. The next day, I took a morning walk around the barren perimeter of Tiverton Rec, the wind whipping through the caged fence, carrying away sticks thrown wide for dogs, and found myself walking on, in the opposite direction from the flat and past the station that would have taken me to the hospice. My mother died at twelve minutes past ten, just as I turned into Willesden Lane.

  Tracey’s tower came into view, above the horse chestnuts, and with it reality. These were not my children, would never be my children. I almost turned back, like someone who has woken abruptly from a sleepwalk, except for an idea, new to me, that there might be something else I could offer, something simpler, more honest, between my mother’s idea of salvation and nothing at all. Impatient, I left the path and crossed diagonally through the grass, heading for the covered walkway. I was about to enter the stairwell when I heard music, stopped and looked up. She was right above me, on her balcony, in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my early readers: Josh Appignanesi, Daniel Kehlmann, Tamsin Shaw, Michal Shavit, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Gemma Seiff, Darryl Pinckney, Ben Bailey-Smith, Yvonne Bailey-Smith and, in particular, Devorah Baum, for encouragement when it was most needed.

  Special thanks to Nick Laird, who read first and saw what had to be done with time, just in time.

  Thanks to my editors and agent: Simon Prosser, Ann Godoff and Georgia Garrett.

  Thanks to Nick Parnes, Hannah Parnes and Brandy Jolliff, for reminding me what work was like in the nineties.

  Thanks to Eleanor Wachtel, for introducing me to the matchless Jeni LeGon.

  Thank you to Steven Barclay, for a little space in Paris when it was most needed.

  I am indebted to Dr. Marloes Janson, whose engrossing, thoughtful and inspiring anthropological study Islam, Youth, and Modernity in the Gambia: The Tablighi Jama‘at proved invaluable, bringing context where I had impressions, possible answers when I had questions, and providing many of the cultural underpinnings of this story, as well as helping create the feel and texture of certain scenes in the novel. A note on geography: North London, in these pages, is a state of mind. Some streets may not appear as they do in Google Maps.

  • • •

  Nick, Kit, Hal—love and gratitude.

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