Swing Time Read online

  Judy let out a loud, single laugh, like a seal barking. I tried to say something else, but the lift doors opened and Aimee strode out.

  To get to our various appointments we had to walk the halls, and they were lined with people, like the Mall during Diana’s funeral. Nobody seemed to be working. Whenever we stopped in a studio people lost their cool almost immediately, irrespective of their position in the company. I watched a Managing Director tell Aimee that a ballad of hers was the first dance at his wedding. I listened, excruciated, as Zoe launched into a rambling account of the personal resonance “Move with Me” had for her, how it had helped her become a woman, and understand the power of women, and not be afraid to be a woman, and so on. As we got away, finally, along another hall and into another lift, to make our way down to the basement—where Aimee had, to Zoe’s delight, agreed to record a brief interview—I worked up the courage to mention, in the world-weary way of twenty-two-year-olds, how dull I imagined it must be for her to hear people saying these sorts of things to her, day and night, night and day.

  “As a matter of fact, Little Miss Green Goddess, I love it.”

  “Oh, OK, I just thought—”

  “You just thought I had contempt for my own people.”

  “No! I just—I—”

  “You know, just because you’re not one of my people doesn’t mean they’re not good people. Everybody’s got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?” She took a second, slow, assessing look at me, up and down. “Oh, right. This we already know.”

  “You mean—musically?” I asked, and made the mistake of glancing over at Melanie Wu, in whose face I understood that the conversation should have ended many minutes earlier, should never have started.

  Aimee sighed: “Sure.”

  “Well . . . a lot of things . . . I guess I like a lot of the older stuff, like Billie Holiday? Or Sarah Vaughan. Bessie Smith. Nina. Real singers. I mean, not that—I mean, I feel like—”

  “Um, correct me if I’m wrong,” said Judy, her own broad Aussie brogue untouched by the intervening decades. “The interview’s not actually happening in this lift? Thank you.”

  We got out at the basement. I was mortified and tried to walk ahead of them all, but Aimee skipped in front of Judy and linked arms with me. I felt my heart rise in my throat, as the old songs tell you it can. I looked down—she’s only five foot two—and for the first time confronted that face close up, somehow both male and female, the eyes with their icy, gray, cat-like beauty, left for the rest of the world to color in. The palest Australian I ever saw. Sometimes, without her make-up on, she did not look like she was from a warm planet at all, and she took steps to keep it that way, protecting herself from the sun at all times. There was something alien about her, a person who belongs to a tribe of one. Almost without knowing it, I smiled. She smiled back.

  “You were saying?” she said.

  “Oh! I . . . I guess I feel like voices are—they’re sort of like—”

  She sighed again, miming a glance at a non-existent watch.

  “I think voices are like clothes,” I said firmly, as if it were an idea I’d been thinking about for years rather than something I was at that moment pulling from the air. “So if you see a photo of 1968 you know it’s ’68 from what the people are wearing, and if you hear Janis sing, you know it’s ’68. Her voice is a sign of the times. It’s like history or . . . something.”

  Aimee lifted one devastating eyebrow: “I see.” She let go of my arm. “But my voice,” she said, with equal conviction, “my voice is this time. If it sounds to you like a computer, well, I’m sorry, but that’s just because it’s right on time. You might not like it, you might be living in the past, but I’m fucking singing this time, right now.”

  “But I do like it!”

  She made that funny adolescent pout again.

  “Just not as much as Tribe. Or Lady-Fucking-Day.”

  Judy jogged up to us: “Excuse me, do you know what studio we’re heading to, or do I have to—”

  “Hey, Jude! I’m talking to the youth here!”

  We’d reached the studio. I opened the door for them.

  “Look, can I just say I think I really got off on the wrong—really, Miss—I mean, Aimee—I was ten when you first dropped—I bought the single. It’s mental for me that I’m meeting you. I’m one of your people!”

  She smiled at me again: there was a kind of flirtation in the way she spoke to me, as there was in the way she spoke to everybody. She held my chin gently in her hand.

  “Don’t believe you,” she said, took my fake nose ring out in one swift movement, and handed it to me.

  Four

  Now, there is Aimee, on Tracey’s wall—clear as day. She shared the space with Michael and Janet Jackson, Prince, Madonna, James Brown. Over the course of the summer she made her room into a kind of shrine to these people, her favorite dancers, decorated with many huge, glossy posters of them, all caught in mid-movement, so that her walls read like hieroglyphics, indecipherable to me but still clearly some form of message, constructed from gestures, bent elbows and legs, splayed fingers, pelvic thrusts. Disliking publicity shots, she chose stills from concerts we couldn’t afford to attend, the kind in which you could see the sweat on a dancer’s face. These, she argued, were “real.” My room was likewise a shrine to dance but I was stuck in fantasy, I went to the library and took out old seventies biographies of the great MGM and RKO idols, ripped out their corny headshots and stuck them up on my walls with Blu-tack. In this way I discovered the Nicholas Brothers, Fayard and Harold: a photo of them in mid-air, doing the splits, marked the entrance to my room, they were leaping over the doorway. I learned that they were self-taught, and though they danced like gods had no formal training at all. I took a kind of proprietorial pride in them, as if they were my brothers, as if we were family. I tried hard to interest Tracey—which of my brothers would she marry? which would she kiss?—but she couldn’t sit through even the briefest clip of black-and-white film any longer, everything about it bored her. It wasn’t “real”—too much had been subtracted, too much artificially shaped. She wanted to see a dancer on stage, sweating, real, not done up in top hat and tails. But elegance attracted me. I liked the way it hid pain.

  One night I dreamed of the Cotton Club: Cab Calloway was there, and Harold and Fayard, and I stood on a podium with a lily behind my ear. In my dream we were all elegant and none of us knew pain, we had never graced the sad pages of the history books my mother bought for me, never been called ugly or stupid, never entered theaters by the back door, drunk from separate water fountains or taken our seats at the back of any bus. None of our people ever swung by their necks from a tree, or found themselves suddenly thrown overboard, shackled, in dark water—no, in my dream we were golden! No one was more beautiful or elegant than us, we were a blessed people, wherever you happened to find us, in Nairobi, Paris, Berlin, London, or tonight, in Harlem. But when the orchestra started up, and as my audience sat at their little tables with drinks in their hands, happy in themselves, waiting for me, their sister, to sing, I opened my mouth and no sound came out. I woke up to find I had wet the bed. I was eleven.

  My mother tried to help, in her way. Look closer at that Cotton Club, she said, there is the Harlem Renaissance. Look: here are Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson. Look closer at Gone with the Wind: here is the NAACP. But at the time my mother’s political and literary ideas did not interest me as much as arms and legs, as rhythm and song, as the red silk of Mammy’s underskirt or the unhinged pitch of Prissy’s voice. The kind of information I was looking for, which I felt I needed to shore myself up, I dug out instead from an old, stolen library book—The History of Dance. I read about steps passed down over centuries, through generations. A different kind of history from my mother’s, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt. And it seemed very important, at the time, that Tracey should feel it too,
all that I was feeling, and at the same moment that I felt it, even if it no longer interested her. I ran all the way to her house, burst into her room and said, you know when you jump down into the splits (she was the only girl in Miss Isabel’s dance class who could do this), you know how you jump into a split and you said your dad can do it, too, and you got it from your dad, and he got it from Michael Jackson, and Jackson got it from Prince and maybe James Brown, well, they all got it from the Nicholas Brothers, the Nicholas Brothers are the originals, they’re the very first, and so even if you don’t know it or say you don’t care, you’re still dancing like them, you’re still getting it from them. She was smoking one of her mother’s cigarettes out of her bedroom window. She looked much older than me doing that, more like forty-five than eleven, she could even blow smoke out of those flaring nostrils, and as I spoke aloud this supposedly momentous thing I had come to tell her I felt the words turning to ash in my mouth. I didn’t even know what I was saying or what I meant by it, really. To stop the smoke from filling the room, she kept her back to me, but when I had finished making my point, if that’s what it was, she turned to me and said, very coolly, as if we were perfect strangers, “Don’t you ever talk about my father again.”

  Five

  “This isn’t working.”

  It was only about a month after I’d started working for her—for Aimee—and as soon as it was said aloud I saw she was right, it wasn’t working, and the problem lay with me. I was young and inexperienced, and didn’t seem able to find my way back to that impression I’d had, on the very first day we’d met, that she might be a human woman like any other. Instead my gut reaction had been overlaid by the reactions of others—ex-colleagues, old schoolfriends, my own parents—and each had their effect, every gasp or incredulous laugh, so that now each morning when I arrived at Aimee’s house in Knightsbridge or her Chelsea offices I had to battle a very powerful sense of the surreal. What was I doing here? I often stuttered as I spoke, or forgot basic facts she’d told me. I would lose the thread of conversations during conference calls, too distracted by another voice inside me that never stopped saying: she’s not real, none of this is real, it’s all your childish fantasy. It was a surprise at the end of a day to close the heavy black door of her Georgian townhouse and find myself not in a dream city after all but in London and only a few steps from the Piccadilly Line. I sat down next to all the other commuters as they read their city paper, often picking one up myself, but with the sense of having traveled further: not just from the center back to the suburbs but from another world back into theirs, the world that seemed to me, aged twenty-two, to exist at the center of the center—the one they were all so busy reading about.

  “It’s not working because you’re not comfortable,” Aimee informed me, from a big, gray couch that sat opposite an identical couch on which I sat. “You need to be comfortable in yourself to work for me. You’re not.”

  I closed the notebook in my lap, lowered my head and felt almost relieved: so I could go back to my real job—if they’d still have me—and reality. But instead of firing me, Aimee threw a cushion playfully at my head: “Well, what can we do about that?”

  I tried to laugh and admitted I didn’t know. She tilted her head toward the window. On her face I saw that look of constant dissatisfaction, of impatience, which later I would get used to, the ebb and flow of her restlessness became the shape of my working day. But in those early days it was all still new to me, and I interpreted it only as boredom, specifically boredom and disappointment with me, and not knowing what to do about it, looked from vase to vase around that huge room—she packed every space with flowers—and at the further beauty outside, at the sun glinting off the slate-gray roofs of Knightsbridge, and tried to think of something interesting to say. I didn’t understand yet that the beauty was part of the boredom. The walls were hung with many dark Victorian oils, portraits of the gentry in front of their grand houses, but there was nothing from her own century, and nothing recognizably Australian, nothing personal. This was meant to be Aimee’s London home and yet it didn’t have a thing to do with her. The furniture was of plush, generalized good taste, like any upscale European hotel. The only real clue that Aimee lived here at all was a bronze near the windowsill, about as big as a plate and the same shape as one, at the center of which you could see the petals and leaves of something that at first seemed to be a lily on its pad but was actually the full cast of a vagina: vulva, labia, clitoris—the works. I didn’t dare ask whose.

  “But where do you feel the most comfortable?” she asked, turning back to me. I saw a new idea painted on her face like fresh lipstick.

  “You mean a place?”

  “In this city. A place.”

  “I’ve never thought about it.”

  She stood up: “Well, think about it and let’s go there.”

  The Heath was the first place that came to mind. But Aimee’s London, like those little maps you pick up at the airport, was a city centered around St. James’s, bordered to the north by Regent’s Park, stretching as far as Kensington to the west—with occasional forays into the wilds of Ladbroke Grove—and only as far east as the Barbican. She knew no more of what might lie at the southern end of Hungerford Bridge than at the end of a rainbow.

  “It’s a big sort of park,” I explained. “Near where I grew up.”

  “OK! Well, let’s go there.”

  We cycled through town, winding round buses and racing the occasional courier, three of us in a line: her security detail first—his name was Granger—then Aimee, then me. The idea of Aimee cycling through London infuriated Judy but Aimee loved to do it, she called it her freedom in the city, and maybe at one traffic light in twenty the adjacent driver would lean forward on the wheel, put down his window, having noticed something familiar about the blue-gray, feline eyes, that dainty triangular chin . . . But by that point the lights would change and we’d be gone. When she rode she was in urban camouflage anyway—black sports bra, black vest and a grungy pair of black cycling shorts, worn at the crotch—and only Granger seemed likely to catch anybody’s attention: a six-foot-four, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man wobbling on a titanium-framed racer, stopping every now and then to take an A‒Z out of his pocket and furiously study it. He was from Harlem, originally—“where we got a grid”—and the inability of Londoners to likewise number their streets was something he couldn’t forgive, he’d written off the whole city on account of it. For him, London was a sprawl of bad food and bad weather in which his one task—to keep Aimee safe—was made more difficult than it needed to be. At Swiss Cottage he waved us on to a traffic island and peeled his bomber jacket off to reveal a pair of massive biceps.

  “I’m telling you right now I got no idea where this place is at,” he said, slapping his handlebar with his map. “You get halfway down some tiny little street—Christchurch Close, Hingleberry fucking Corner—and then this thing’s telling me: turn to page 53. Motherfucker, I’m on a bike.”

  “Chin up, Granger,” said Aimee, in a terrible British accent, and pulled his big head down on to her shoulder for a moment, squeezing it fondly. Granger freed himself and glared at the sun: “Since when is it this hot?”

  “Well, it’s summer. England can sometimes get hot in summer. Should’ve worn shorts.”

  “I don’t wear shorts.”

  “I don’t think this is a very productive conversation. We’re on a traffic island.”

  “I’m done. We heading back,” said Granger, he sounded very final about it, and I was surprised to hear anyone speak to Aimee this way.

  “We are not going back.”

  “Then you best take this,” said Granger, dropping the A‒Z in the basket at the front of Aimee’s bike, “’Cos I can’t use it.”

  “I know the way from here,” I offered, mortified to be the cause of the problem. “It’s really not far.”

  “We need a vehicle,” Granger
insisted, without looking at me. We almost never looked at each other. Sometimes I thought of us as two sleeper agents, mistakenly assigned to the same mark and wary of eye contact, in case the one blew the other’s cover.

  “I hear there’s some cute boys up in there,” said Aimee in a sing-song voice—this was meant to be an imitation of Granger—“They’re hid-ing in the tree-ees.” She put her foot to the pedal, pushed off, swerving into the traffic.

  “I don’t mix play with work,” said Granger sniffily, getting back astride his dainty bike with dignity. “I am a professional person.”

  We set off back up the hill, monstrously steep, huffing and puffing and following Aimee’s laughter.

  • • •

  I can always find the Heath—all my life I’ve taken paths that lead me back, whether I wanted it or not, to the Heath—but I’ve never consciously sought and found Kenwood. I only ever stumble upon it. It was the same this time: I was leading Granger and Aimee up the lanes, past the ponds, over a hill, trying to think where might be the prettiest, quietest and yet most interesting place to stop with a too-easily bored superstar, when I saw the little cast-iron gate and behind the trees, the white chimneys.

  “No cycles,” said Aimee, reading a sign, and Granger, seeing what was coming, began again to protest, but was overruled.

  “We’ll be, like, an hour,” she said, getting off her bike and passing it to him. “Maybe two. I’ll call you. Have you got that thing?”

  Granger folded his arms across his massive chest.

  “Yeah, but I ain’t giving it to you. Not without me being there. No way. Forget about it.”

  As I got off my bike, though, I saw Aimee put out her adamant little hand to receive a small something wrapped in cling-film, closing her palm around it, which something turned out to be a joint—for me. Long and American in design, with no tobacco in it at all. We settled under the magnolia, right in front of Kenwood House, and I leaned against the trunk and smoked while Aimee lay flat in the grass with her black baseball cap low over eyes, her face turned up toward me.