Zadie Smith - Swing Time

I felt her fingers pinching me, bony in their grip.

“You were lucky, you had this wonderful father. She didn’t have that. You don’t know how that feels because you’re lucky, really you were born lucky — but I know. And she was a part of our family, practically!”

She was pleading with me. The tears that had been gathering now fell.

“No, Mum… no, she wasn’t. You’re misremembering: you never liked her. Who knows what went on in that family or what she needed protecting from, if anything? No one ever told us — she certainly never did. Every family on that corridor had secrets.” I looked at her and thought: do you want to know ours?

“Mum, you just said it yourself: you can’t save everybody.”

She nodded several times and brought a napkin to her damp cheeks.

“That’s true,” she said. “Very true. But at the same time, can’t you always do more?”

The next morning my British mobile rang, a number I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t my mother, or Aimee, or either of the fathers of her children, or the three college friends who still hoped, once or twice a year, to lure me out for a drink before my flight departed. I didn’t know the voice at first, either: I’d never heard Miriam sound so stern or cold.

“But you understand,” she asked me, after a few awkward pleasantries, “that your mother is really ill?”

I lay on Aimee’s plush gray couch, looking out over Kensington Gardens — gray slates, blue sky, green oaks — and found, as Miriam explained the situation, that this view merged with an earlier one: gray cement, blue sky, over the tops of the horse chestnuts, past Willesden Lane, toward the railway. In the next room I could hear the nanny, Estelle, trying to discipline Aimee’s children, in that lilting accent I connected with my earliest moments, with lullabies and bathtime and bedtime stories, thwacks with a wooden spoon. Headlights of passing cars at night, gliding over the ceiling.

“Hello? Are you still there?”

Stage three: it had begun in her spine. Partially successful surgery, back in February (where was I, in February?). Now she was in remission, but the last bout of chemo had left her frail. She should have been resting, allowing herself to recover. It was crazy that she was still going to the House, crazy that she was going out to dinner, crazy that I had let her.

“How could I know? She didn’t tell me.”

I heard Miriam kiss her teeth at me.

“Anyone with any sense just needs to look at the woman to know something is wrong!”

I wept. Miriam patiently listened. My instinct was to get off the phone and call my mother, but when I tried to do this Miriam begged me not to.

“She doesn’t want you to know. She knows you have to travel and whatnot — she doesn’t want to disturb your plans. She’d know I told you. I’m the only person who knows.”

I couldn’t stand this vision of myself as a person my own mother would rather die than disturb. To avoid it, I cast around for dramatic gestures, and without even knowing whether or not it was possible offered up the services of Aimee’s many private doctors in Harley Street. Miriam chucked sadly.

“Private? Don’t you know your mother by now? No, if you want to do something for her, I can tell you what would make the most difference right at this moment. This crazy woman bothering her? I don’t know why it’s obsessing her so much but it needs to stop, it’s all she can think about — and that’s not right at a time like this. She told me that she spoke to you about it?”

“Yes. She was going to forward me the e-mails but she hasn’t.”

“I have them, I’ll do that.”

“Oh, OK… I thought — I mean, she said, at dinner, that you two…”

“Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life once she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business… it just goes.”

A few minutes after I put down the phone the e-mails started to arrive, in little flurries, until I had fifty or more. I sat where I was reading them, stunned by the rage. The force of it made me feel inadequate — as if Tracey had more feeling for my mother than I did — even though it was not love expressed here but hate. Stunned, too, by how well she wrote, never boring, not for a second, her dyslexia and many grammatical errors were no hindrance to her: she had the gift of being interesting. You couldn’t start reading one without wanting to finish it. Her central accusation against my mother was neglect: of her son’s problems at school, of Tracey’s own complaints and e-mails, and of her duty — I mean my mother’s — to push forward the interests of her constituents. If I’m honest, the earliest e-mails did not seem to me unreasonable, but then Tracey broadened her scope. Neglect of state schools in the borough, neglect of black children in those schools, of black people in England, of black working-class people in England, of single mothers, of the children of single mothers, and of Tracey the single child of a single mother, all those years ago. It interested me that she wrote “single mother” here, as if her father had never existed at all. The tone became sweary, abusive. In some of the e-mails she sounded drunk or high. Soon it was a one-way correspondence, a systematic dissection of all the many ways Tracey believed my mother had let her down. You never liked me, you never wanted me around, you always tried to humiliate me, I was never good enough for you, you were scared of being associated with me, you always held yourself apart, you pretended you were for the community but you were only ever for yourself, you told everybody I stole that money but you had no proof and you never defended me. There was a whole tranche of letters that referred only to the estate. Nothing was being done to improve the units the council residents lived in, these units were being left to degenerate — almost all of them now in Tracey’s block — they hadn’t been touched since the early eighties. Meanwhile, the estate across the road — our estate, which the council were now busily selling off — had filled up with young white couples and their babies and looked like a “fucking hotel resort.” And what was my mother going to do about the boys selling crack on the corner of Torbay Road? The closure of the swimming pool? The whorehouses on Willesden Lane?

That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century Bavarian sect had survived its own suppression and was at work in the world today, its members many powerful and famous blacks — in league with elite whites and the Jews — and Tracey was researching all this very deeply and was increasingly convinced that my mother might herself be a tool of these people, minor but dangerous, who had managed to worm her way right into the heart of British government.

Just after midday I read the last e-mail, put my coat on, walked down the road and waited for the 52 bus. I got off at Brondesbury Park, walked the length of Christchurch Avenue, arrived at Tracey’s estate, climbed the stairs and rang her bell. She must have been in the hallway already because she opened the door right away, a new baby of four or five months on her hip, its face turned from me. Behind her I could hear more children, arguing, and a TV at high volume. I don’t know what I expected, but what was in front of me was an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms, house slippers and a black sweatshirt that had one word written on it: OBEY. I looked so much younger.