Swing Time Read online

  My mother was rare: homemade flyers did not scare her. She had a terrific instinct for middle-class mores. She knew, for example, that a car-boot sale—despite its unpromising name—was where you could find a better quality of person, and also their old Penguin paperbacks, sometimes by Orwell, their old china pill-boxes, their cracked Cornish earthenware, their discarded potter’s wheels. Our flat was full of such things. No plastic flowers for us, sparkly with fake dew, and no crystal figurines. This was all part of the plan. Even things I hated—like my mother’s espadrilles—usually turned out to be attractive to the kind of people we were trying to attract, and I learned not to question her methods, even when they filled me with shame. A week before classes were due to begin I heard her doing her posh voice in the galley kitchen, but when she got off the phone she had all the answers: five pounds for ballet shoes—if you went to the shopping center instead of up into town—and the tap shoes could wait till later. Ballet shoes could be used for modern. What was modern? She hadn’t asked. The concerned parent she would play, but never, ever the ignorant one.

  My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I’d hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat’s tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no, only a sad little elastic strap which my father had sewn on himself. I was extremely bitter about it. But perhaps they were, like the espadrilles, deliberately “simple,” in good taste? It was possible to hold on to this idea right up to the moment when, having entered the hall, we were told to change into our dance clothes by the plastic chairs and go over to the opposite wall, to the barre. Almost everybody had the pink satin shoes, not the pale pink, piggy leather I was stuck with, and some—girls whom I knew to be on benefits, or fatherless, or both—had the shoes with long satin ribbons, criss-crossing round their ankles. Tracey, who was standing next to me, with her left foot in her mother’s hand, had both—the deep pink satin and the criss-cross—and also a full tutu, which no one else had even considered as a possibility, no more than turning up to a first swimming lesson in a diving suit. Miss Isabel, meanwhile, was sweet-faced and friendly, but old, perhaps as old as forty-five. It was disappointing. Solidly constructed, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than a ballet dancer and was all over pink and yellow, pink and yellow. Her hair was yellow, not blond, yellow like a canary. Her skin was very pink, raw pink, now that I think of it she probably suffered from rosacea. Her leotard was pink, her tracksuit bottoms were pink, her cover-up ballet cardigan was mohair and pink—yet her shoes were silk and yellow, the same shade as her hair. I was bitter about this, too. Yellow had never been mentioned! Next to her, in the corner, a very old white man in a trilby sat playing an upright piano, “Night and Day,” a song I loved and was proud to recognize. I got the old songs from my father, whose own father had been a keen pub singer, the kind of man—or so my father believed—whose petty criminality represents, at least in part, some thwarted creative instinct. The piano player was called Mr. Booth. I hummed loudly along with him as he played, hoping to be heard, putting a lot of vibrato into my humming. I was a better singer than dancer—I was not a dancer at all—although I took too much pride in my singing, in a manner I knew my mother found obnoxious. Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth.

  Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests. We placed one hand on their shoulders, we placed one foot on their bended knees. My body was presently in the hands of my mother—being hoiked up and tied down, fastened and straightened, brushed off—but my mind was on Tracey, and on the soles of her ballet shoes, upon which I now read “Freed” clearly stamped in the leather. Her natural arches were two hummingbirds in flight, curved in on themselves. My own feet were square and flat, they seemed to grind through the positions. I felt like a toddler placing wooden blocks at a series of right angles to each other. Flutter, flutter, flutter said Isabel, yes that’s lovely Tracey. Compliments made Tracey throw her head back and flare her little pig nose awfully. Aside from that, she was perfection, I was besotted. Her mother seemed equally infatuated, her commitment to those classes the only consistent feature of what we would now call “her parenting.” She came to class more than any other mother, and while there her attention rarely wavered from her daughter’s feet. My own mother’s focus was always elsewhere. She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. She might arrive at the beginning of class with, say, The Black Jacobins in hand, and by the time I came over to ask her to swap my ballet shoes for tap she would already be a hundred pages through. Later, when my father took over, he either slept or “went for a walk,” the parental euphemism for smoking in the churchyard.

  At this early stage Tracey and I were not friends or enemies or even acquaintances: we barely spoke. Yet there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others. Technically, I spoke more to Lily Bingham—who went to my school—and Tracey’s own standby was sad old Danika Babić, with her ripped tights and thick accent, she lived on Tracey’s corridor. But though we giggled and joked with these white girls during class, and although they had every right to assume that they were our focus, our central concern—that we were, to them, the good friends we appeared to be—as soon as it came to break-time and squash and biscuits Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.

  It turned out Tracey was as curious about my family as I was about hers, arguing, with a certain authority, that we had things “the wrong way round.” I listened to her theory one day during break, dipping a biscuit anxiously into my orange squash. “With everyone else it’s the dad,” she said, and because I knew this to be more or less accurate I could think of nothing more to say. “When your dad’s white it means—” she continued, but at that moment Lily Bingham came and stood next to us and I never did learn what it meant when your dad was white. Lily was gangly, a foot taller than everyone else. She had long, perfectly straight blond hair, pink cheeks and a happy, open nature that seemed, both to Tracey and me, the direct consequence of 29 Exeter Road, a whole house, to which I had been recently invited, eagerly reporting back to Tracey—who had never been—a private garden, a giant jam-jar full of “spare change” and a Swatch watch as big as a human man hanging on a bedroom wall. There were, consequently, things you couldn’t discuss in front of Lily Bingham, and now Tracey shut her mouth, stuck her nose in the air and crossed the room to ask her mother for her ballet shoes.

  Three

  What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.

  Oh, it’s very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on—it’s what I’ve always demanded myself—but as a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn’t do it, then it’s really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her—especially in the last, painful years of her life—for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself. When I was young her refusal to submit to me confused and wounded me, especially as I felt none of the usual reasons for refusal applied. I was her only child and she had no job—not back then—and she hardly spoke to the rest of her family. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing but time. Yet still I couldn’t get her complete submission! My earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood. I felt so
rry for my father. He was still a fairly young man, he loved her, he wanted more children—it was their daily argument—but on this issue, as on all things, my mother refused to budge. Her mother had birthed seven children, her grandmother, eleven. She was not going back to all that. She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love. How he loved her! More than she knew or cared to know, she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was. And so when she began, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, to outgrow my father, both intellectually and personally, she naturally expected that he was undergoing the same process at the same time. But he carried on as before. Looking after me, loving her, trying to keep up, reading The Communist Manifesto in his slow and diligent way. “Some people carry the bible,” he told me proudly. “This is my bible.” It sounded impressive—it was meant to impress my mother—but I had already noticed that he seemed to always be reading this book and not much else, he took it to every dance class, and yet never got any further than the first twenty pages. Within the context of the marriage it was a romantic gesture: they’d first encountered each other at a meeting of the SWP, in Dollis Hill. But even this was a form of misunderstanding for my father had gone to meet nice leftist girls in short skirts with no religion while my mother really was there for Karl Marx. My childhood took place in the widening gap. I watched my autodidact mother swiftly, easily, outstrip my father. The shelves in our lounge—which he built—filled up with second-hand books, Open University textbooks, political books, history books, books on race, books on gender, “All the ‘isms,’” as my father liked to call them, whenever a neighbor happened to come by and spot the queer accumulation.

  Saturday was her “day off.” Day off from what? From us. She needed to read up on her isms. After my father took me to dance class we had to keep going somehow, find something to do, stay out of the flat until dinner time. It became our ritual to travel on a series of buses heading south, far south of the river, to my Uncle Lambert’s, my mother’s brother and a confidant of my father’s. He was my mother’s eldest sibling, the only person I ever saw from her side of the family. He had raised my mother and the rest of her brothers and sisters, back on the island, when their mother left for England to work as a cleaner in a retirement home. He knew what my father was dealing with.

  “I take a step toward her,” I heard my father complain, one day, in high summer, “and she takes a step back!”

  “Cyan do nuttin wid er. Always been like dat.”

  I was in the garden, among the tomato plants. It was an allotment, really, nothing was decorative or meant simply to be admired, everything was to be eaten and grew in long, straight lines, tied to sticks of bamboo. At the end of it all was an outhouse, the last I ever saw in England. Uncle Lambert and my father sat on deckchairs by the back door, smoking marijuana. They were old friends—Lambert was the only other person in my parents’ wedding photo—and they had work in common: Lambert was a postman and my father a Delivery Office Manager for Royal Mail. They shared a dry sense of humor and a mutual lack of ambition, of which my mother took a dim view, in both cases. As they smoked and lamented the things you couldn’t do with my mother, I passed my arms through the tomato vines, allowing them to twist around my wrists. Most of Lambert’s plants seemed menacing to me, they were twice my height and everything he planted grew wildly: a thicket of vines and high grass and obscenely swollen, calabash-type gourds. The soil is of a better quality in South London—in North London we have too much clay—but at the time I didn’t know about that and my ideas were confused: I thought that when I visited Lambert I was visiting Jamaica, Lambert’s garden was Jamaica to me, it smelled like Jamaica, and you ate coconut ice there, and even now, in my memory, it is always hot in Lambert’s garden, and I am thirsty and fearful of insects. The garden was long and thin and it faced south, the outhouse abutted the right-hand fence, so you could watch the sun fall behind it, rippling the air as it went. I wanted badly to go to the toilet but had decided to hold on to the urge until we saw North London again—I was scared of that outhouse. The floor was wood and things grew up between the boards, grass blades, and thistles and dandelion clocks that dusted your knee as you hitched yourself up on to the seat. Spiders’ webs connected the corners. It was a garden of abundance and decay: the tomatoes were too ripe, the marijuana too strong, woodlice were hiding under everything. Lambert lived all alone there, and it felt to me like a dying place. Even at that age I thought it odd that my father should travel eight miles to Lambert’s for comfort when Lambert seemed already to have suffered the kind of abandonment my father feared so badly.

  Tiring of walking through the lines of vegetables, I wandered back down the garden, and watched as the two men concealed their joints, poorly, in their fists.

  “You bored?” asked Lambert. I confessed I was.

  “Once dis house full of pick’ney,” said Lambert, “but dem children got children now.”

  The image I had was of children my own age with babies in their arms: it was a fate I connected with South London. I knew my mother left home to escape all that, so that no daughter of hers would ever become a child with a child, for any daughter of hers was to do more than just survive—as my mother had—she was to thrive, learning many unnecessary skills, like tap dancing. My father reached out for me and I crawled on to his lap, covering his growing bald spot with my hand and feeling the thin strands of wet hair he wore combed across it.

  “She shy, eh? You not shy of your Uncle Lambert?”

  Lambert’s eyes were bloodshot, and his freckles were like mine but raised; his face was round and sweet, with light brown eyes that confirmed, supposedly, Chinese blood in the family tree. But I was shy of him. My mother—who never visited Lambert, except at Christmas—was strangely insistent that my father and I do so, though always with the proviso that we remain alert, never allowing ourselves to be “dragged back.” Into what? I wound myself around my father’s body until I was at the back of him and could see the little patch of hair he kept long at the nape of his neck, which he was so determined to maintain. Though he was only in his thirties, I’d never seen my father with a full head of hair, never known him blond, and would never know him gray. It was this fake nut-brown I knew, which came off on your fingers if you touched it, and which I had seen at its true source, a round, shallow tin that sat open on the edge of the bath, with an oily wheel of brown running round the rim, worn down to a bare patch in the middle, just like my father.

  “She needs company,” he fretted. “A book’s no good, is it? A film’s no good. You need the real thing.”

  “Cyan do nuttin wid dat woman. I knew it from time she was small. Her will is a will of iron.”

  It was true. Nothing could be done with her. When we got home she was watching a lecture from the Open University, pad and pencil in her hand, looking beautiful, serene, curled up on the couch with her bare feet under her bottom, but when she turned round I could see she was annoyed, we’d come back too early, she wanted more time, more peace, more quiet, so she could study. We were the vandals in the temple. She was studying Sociology & Politics. We didn’t know why.

  Four

  If Fred Astaire represented the aristocracy, I represented the proletariat, said Gene Kelly, and by this logic Bill “Bojangles” Robinson should really have been my dancer, because Bojangles danced for the Harlem dandy, for the ghetto kid, for the sharecropper—for all the descendants of slaves. But to me a dancer was a man from nowhere, without parents or siblings, without a nation or people, without obligations of any kind, and this was exactly the quality I loved. The rest of it, all the detail, fell away. I ignored the ridiculous plots of those movies: the opera-like comings and goings, the reversals of fortune, the outrageous meet cutes and coincidences, the minstrels, maids and butlers. To me
they were only roads leading to the dance. The story was the price you paid for the rhythm. “Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga choo choo?” Each syllable found its corresponding movement in the legs, the stomach, the backside, the feet. In ballet hour, by contrast, we danced to classical recordings—”white music” as Tracey bluntly called it—which Miss Isabel recorded from the radio on to a series of cassettes. But I could barely recognize it as music, it had no time signature that I could hear, and although Miss Isabel tried to help us, shouting out the beats of each bar, I could never relate these numbers in any way to the sea of melody that came over me from the violins or the crashing thump of a brass section. I still knew more than Tracey: I knew there was something not quite right about her rigid notions—black music, white music—that there must be a world somewhere in which the two combined. In films and photographs I had seen white men sitting at their pianos as black girls stood by them, singing. Oh, I wanted to be like those girls!

  At quarter past eleven, just after ballet, in the middle of our first break, Mr. Booth entered the hall carrying a big black bag, the kind country doctors once carried, and in this bag he kept the sheet music for class. If I was free—which meant, if I could get away from Tracey—I hurried over to him, following him as he slowly approached the piano, and then positioning myself like the girls I’d seen onscreen, I asked him to play “All of Me” or “Autumn in New York” or “42nd Street.” In the tap class he had to play the same half a dozen songs over and over and I had to dance to them, but before class—while the rest of the people in the hall were busy talking, eating, drinking—we had this time to ourselves, and I’d get him to work through a tune with me, singing below the volume of the piano if I was feeling shy, a little louder if not. Sometimes when I sang the parents smoking outside the hall under the cherry trees would come in to listen, and girls who were busy preparing for their own dances—pulling on tights, tying laces—paused in these actions and turned to watch me. I became aware that my voice—as long as I did not deliberately sing underneath the volume of the piano—had something charismatic in it, drawing people in. This was not a technical gift: my range was tiny. It had to do with emotion. Whatever I was feeling I was able to express very clearly, I could “put it over.” I made sad songs very sad, and happy songs joyful. When the time came for our “performance exams” I learned to use my voice as a form of misdirection, the same way some magicians make you look at their mouths when you should be watching their hands. But I couldn’t fool Tracey. I saw her as I walked off the stage, standing in the wings with her arms crossed over her chest and her nose in the air. Even though she always trumped everybody and her mother’s kitchen corkboard heaved with gold medals, she was never satisfied, she wanted gold in “my” category, too—song and dance—though she could hardly sing a note. It was difficult to understand. I really felt that if I could dance like Tracey I would never want for anything else in this world. Other girls had rhythm in their limbs, some had it in their hips or their little backsides but she had rhythm in individual ligaments, probably in individual cells. Every movement was as sharp and precise as any child could hope to make it, her body could align itself with any time signature, no matter how intricate. Maybe you could say she was overly precise sometimes, not especially creative, or lacking in soul. But no one sane could quarrel with her technique. I was—I am—in awe of Tracey’s technique. She knew the right time to do everything.