Zadie Smith - Swing Time

The old man drew out a newspaper he’d had tucked into his armpit, unrolled it and showed Louie a certain page, which he studied before bending down to show it to us. We were told to close our eyes and stick our fingers wherever the mood took us, and when we opened our eyes we each had a horse under a finger, I can still remember the name of mine, Theory Test, because five minutes later Louie ran back out through the bookie’s doors, scooped me up off the floor and threw me into the air. A hundred and fifty quid won on a five-pound stake. We were diverted to Woolworths, and each told to choose whatever we wanted. I left Tracey at the videos intended for kids like us — the suburban comedies, action films, space sagas — walking on and bending over the big wire bin, the “bargain bin,” set aside for those who had little money or choice. There were always a lot of musicals in there, nobody wanted them, not even the old ladies, and I was scavenging through, happily enough, when I heard Tracey, who had not moved on from the modern section, asking Louie: “So how many can we have?” The answer was four, though we were to hurry up about it, he was hungry. I snatched four musicals in a blissful panic:

Ali Baba Goes to Town

Broadway Melody of 1936

Swing Time

It’s Always Fair Weather

The only one of Tracey’s purchases I remember is Back to the Future , more expensive than all mine put together. She pressed it to her chest, giving it up only for a moment so that it might be passed to the cashier, and snatching it back again afterward, like an animal snapping at its food.

When we got to the restaurant we sat at the best table, just by the window. Louie showed us a funny way to eat a Big Mac, dismantling its layers and placing fries above and below each burger and then putting it all together again.

“You coming to live with us, then?” Tracey asked.

“Hmmm. Don’t know about that. What she say?”

Tracey stuck her piggy nose in the air: “Don’t care what she says.”

Both her little hands were screwed into tight fists.

“Don’t disrespect your mum. Your mum’s got her own problems.”

He went back up to the counter to get milkshakes. When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn’t like the neighborhood, no, not at all, it was very different, because when you were inside everybody understood that people had better keep to their own kind, and that’s how it was, “like stayed with like,” there was hardly any mixing, not like up at the flats, and it wasn’t the guards or anyone telling you to do it, that’s just the way it was, tribes stick together, and it even goes by shade, he explained, pulling up his sleeve and pointing at his arm, so all of us that was dark like me, well, we’re over here, tight with each other, always — he drew a line on the Formica tabletop — and brown like you two is somewhere over here, and Paki is somewhere else, and Indian is somewhere else. White is split, too: Irish, Scottish, English. And in the English some of them are BNP and some are all right. Everybody goes with their own is the point, and it’s natural. Makes you think.

We sat slurping our milkshakes, thinking.

And you learn all kinds of things, he continued, you learn who the real God of the black man is! Not this blue-eyed, long-haired Jesus individual — no! And let me arks you: how comes I never even really heard of him or his name before I get up in there? Look it up. You learn a lot that you can’t learn in school, because these people won’t tell you nothing, nothing about African kings, nothing about Egyptian queens, nothing about Mohammed, they hide it all, they hide the whole of our history so we feel like we’re nothing, we feel like we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s the whole plan, but the truth is we built the fucking Pyramids! Oh, there’s a devilishness in them, but one day, one day, God willing, this white day will be done. Louie lifted Tracey on to his lap and jiggled her as if she were a much younger child, and then worked her arms from below, like a puppet, so she seemed to be dancing to the music that was playing through the speakers that nestled between the security camera. You still dancing? It was a casual question, I could tell he wasn’t particularly interested in the answer, but Tracey always took her opportunities, no matter how small, and now she told her father, in a great, happy rush of detail, about all her dance medals from that year, and from the previous year, and of what Miss Isabel had said about her pointe work, of what all kinds of people said about her talent, and about her upcoming audition for stage school, on which subject I had already heard about as much as I could stand. My own mother would not allow stage school, not even if I won a full scholarship, of the kind Tracey was betting on. We had been battling over it, my mother and I, ever since I heard that Tracey would be allowed to audition. The thought of having to go to a normal school while Tracey spent her days dancing!

Now see, with me, said Louie, tiring suddenly of his daughter’s talk, with me I didn’t need dance school, matter of fact I used to rule the dance floor! This girl got it all from her daddy. Believe me: I can do all the moves! Arks your mum! Used to even make some money off it, back in the day. You look doubtful!

To prove it, to allay our doubts, he slipped off his stool and kicked his leg up, jerked his head, shifted the line of his shoulders, spun, stopped on a dime and ended on the points of his toes. A group of girls who sat across from us in a booth whistled and cheered, and watching him I felt I understood now what Tracey had meant by placing her father and Michael Jackson in one reality, and I didn’t find that she was a liar, exactly, or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth. They were touched by the same inheritance. And if Louie’s dancing happened not to be famous like Michael’s, well, this was, to Tracey, only a kind of technicality — an accident of time and place — and now, thinking back on his dancing, writing it all down, I think she was exactly right.

Afterward we decided to walk with our huge milkshakes back up the high road, stopping again to speak to a few friends of Louie’s — or perhaps they were simply people who knew enough about him to fear him — including a young Irish builder hanging one-handed off the scaffolding outside the Tricycle Theater, his face burned red from too much work in the sun. He reached down to shake Louie’s hand: “Now, if it isn’t the Playboy of the West Indies!” He was rebuilding the Tricycle’s roof, and Louie was very struck by this, it was the first time he’d heard about the terrible fire of a few months before. He asked the boy how much it would cost to rebuild, how much he and the rest of Moran’s men were getting paid an hour, what cement they were using and who were the wholesalers, and I looked over at Tracey as she filled up with pride at this glimpse of another possible Louie: respectable young entrepreneur, quick with numbers, good with his staff, taking his daughter round his place of work, holding her hand so tightly. I wished it could be like that for her every day.

It didn’t occur to me that there would be any consequences to our little outing but even before I’d got back on to Willesden Lane somebody had told my mother where I’d been and with whom. She caught hold of me as I walked through the door and slapped the milkshake out of my hand, it struck the opposite wall, very pink and thick — unexpectedly dramatic — and for the rest of the time we lived in that place we coexisted with a faint strawberry stain. She started in yelling. What did I think I was doing? Who did I think I was with? I ignored all her rhetorical questions and asked her again why I couldn’t audition like Tracey. “Only a fool gives up an education,” said my mother, and I said, “Well, then, maybe I’m a fool.” I tried to get by her, into my room, my haul of videos behind my back, but she blocked my way and so I told her bluntly that I was not her and did not ever want to be her, that I didn’t care about her books or her clothes or her ideas or any of it, I wanted to dance and live my own life. My father emerged from wherever he’d been hiding. Gesturing at him, I tried to make the point that if it were up to my father I’d be allowed to audition, because my father was a man who believed in me, as Tracey’s father believed in her. My mother sighed. “Of course he’d let you do it,” she said. “He’s not worried — he knows you’ll never get in.”