Zadie Smith - Swing Time

From where I sat I could see up the side street to the Jazz Café and was struck by what a different crowd was gathered at its doors, not on their way out but on the way in, and not at all drunk, as these were people who loved dancing, who did not need to be drunk to convince their bodies to move. Nothing they wore was torn, or shredded or defaced with Tipp-Ex, everything was flash as flash could be, the women shone and dazzled, and no one sat on the ground, on the contrary all effort had been made to separate the clientele from the ground: the men’s trainers had two inches of air built into them, and the women’s shoes had double that in heel. I wondered what they were queuing for. Maybe a brown girl with a flower in her hair was going to sing for them. I thought of walking up there and seeing for myself but just then I became aware of a commotion, outside the entrance to the Mornington Crescent tube stop, some sort of problem between a man and a woman, they were yelling at each other, and the man had the woman up against the wall, he was shouting at her and had his hand around her throat. The boys I was sitting with did not move, or seem very concerned, they kept playing the guitar or else rolling up their joints. It was two girls who took action — a tough-looking bald girl and perhaps her girlfriend — and I stood up with them both, not shouting like them but following quickly behind. As we got closer, though, the situation became confused, it became less clear whether the “victim” was being hurt or helped — we saw her legs had gone floppy beneath her and that the man was in some sense holding her up — and we all slowed down a little in our approach. The bald girl became less aggressive, more solicitous, and in the same moment I realized the woman was not a woman but a girl and that I knew her: Tracey. I ran up to her. She recognized me but couldn’t speak, she only reached out and smiled sadly. Her nose was bleeding, both nostrils. I smelled something awful and looked down and saw vomit, all over her front and in a pool at the floor. The man let go of her and stepped back. I stepped in, held her and said her name — Tracey, Tracey, Tracey — but her eyes rolled back in her head and I felt her full weight in my arms. This being Camden, every passing pisshead and stoner had a theory: bad E, dehydration, alcohol poisoning, probably done a speedball. You had to keep her standing, or lie her down, or give her some water, or move back and give her some air, and I was beginning to panic when, cutting through this noise, from across the road, came a much louder voice, one with real authority, calling Tracey’s name and mine together. My mother, pulling up in front of the Palace as previously agreed, at twelve thirty a.m, in her little 2CV. I waved at her and she lurched forward again and parked beside us. Confronted with such a fierce-looking and capable adult, everyone else dispersed, and my mother did not even pause to ask what seemed to me to be necessary questions. She separated the two of us, lay Tracey out on the backseat, elevated her head with a couple of the serious books she had with her at all times, even in the middle of the night, and drove us straight to St. Mary’s. I wanted so much to tell Tracey of my balcony adventure, of how, for once, I had been truly reckless. We emerged onto the Edgware Road: she snapped out of it and sat up. But when my mother tried gently to explain what was happening and where we were going, Tracey accused us both of kidnapping her, of trying to control her, we who had always been trying to control her, ever since she was a child, who always thought we knew what was best for her, what was best for everybody, we had even tried to steal her from her own mother, her own father! Her anger grew in proportion to my mother’s icy calm, until, when we pulled into the A&E car park, she was leaning right forward in her seat, spitting on the back of our necks in her fury. My mother would not be baited or diverted. She told me to take the left side of my friend as she took the right and we half dragged, half compelled Tracey into the waiting room, where she became, to our surprise, utterly compliant, whispering “speedball” to the nurse, and then waiting with a handful of tissues pressed to her nostrils until she was seen. My mother went in with her. About fifteen minutes later she came out — I mean, my mother did — and said Tracey would be staying overnight, that her stomach would have to be pumped, and that she’d said — Tracey had — a number of sexually explicit things, in her delirium, to a stressed Indian doctor on his night shift. She was still only fifteen years old. “Something serious happened to that girl!” my mother murmured, kissed her teeth and bent over a desk to sign some papers in loco parentis .

In this context my own mild drunkenness wasn’t worth troubling over. Spotting the vodka bottle in my coat, my mother removed it, without discussion, and dropped it into a hospital bin meant for medical waste. On the way out I caught a reflection of myself in the long mirror on the wall of a disabled toilet that happened to have, at that moment, its door flung wide open. I saw my drab black uniform and absurd dusted face — of course, I’d seen it all before, but not under that stark hospital lighting, and now it was no longer the face of a girl, now a woman stared back. The effect was very different from anything I had seen before by the light of the dim purple bulb in my black-walled room. I was over the threshold: I gave up the gothic life.

They sat opposite each other, it felt very intimate, if you could put out of mind the millions of people looking on. Earlier they had wandered through his peculiar home together, looking at his treasures, his gaudy art, his terrible gilt furniture, talking of this and that, and at one point he sang for her and performed a few of his signature moves. But there was only one thing we wanted to know and finally she seemed to be preparing to ask it, and even my mother, who was pottering around the flat and claimed not to be interested, paused and sat down next to me in front of the television and waited to see what would happen. I reached for the remote control and turned it up. OK, Michael, she said, then let’s go to the thing that is most discussed about you, I think, is the fact that the color of your skin is obviously different than when you were younger, and so I think it has caused a great deal of speculation and controversy as to what you have done or are doing…?

He looked down, began his defense. My mother didn’t believe a word of it, and for the next few minutes I couldn’t hear a thing either of them said, there was only my mother, arguing with the television. So I’m a slave to the rhythm, he said, and smiled, though he looked bewildered, desperate to change the subject, and Oprah let him change it and the conversation moved on. My mother walked out of the room. After a while I got bored myself and switched it off.

I was eighteen. My mother and I never lived together again after that year, and already we were unsure how to relate to each other in our new incarnations: two adult women occupying, for the moment, the same space. Were we mother and daughter still? Friends? Sisters? Flatmates? We had different schedules, didn’t see much of each other, but I worried I’d outstayed my welcome, like a show that goes on too long. Most days I went to the library, tried to revise, while she worked each morning as a volunteer, at a center for troubled youth, and, in the evenings, at a Black and Asian women’s refuge. I don’t say she was not sincere in this work, and good at it too, but it’s also the case that both commitments look impressive on your CV if you happen to be standing for election as a local councilor. I’d never seen her so busy. She seemed to be all over the neighborhood at once, involved in everything, and everybody agreed that divorce suited her, she looked younger than ever: I sometimes had fears that at some point, not many years in the future, we would converge upon the exact same age. I didn’t often get down the street in her ward now without someone coming up to thank me “for all your mother is doing for us” or to ask me to ask her if she had any idea about how to start an after-school club for the newly arrived Somali children or what local space might be appropriate for a cycling-proficiency class. She hadn’t been elected to anything, not yet, but round our way the people had already crowned her.