“You wear the red one,” she said.
We put the record on, we rehearsed. I knew there was something wrong, that it wasn’t like any dance we’d done before, but I felt it was out of my hands. Tracey was, as ever, the choreographer: my only job was to dance as well as I could. When she decided we were ready our audience was invited back into Lily’s brother’s room to sit upon the floor. Lily stood at the back, the heavy recorder on her narrow, pink shoulder, her pale blue eyes full of confusion—even before we had begun to dance—at the sight of two girls dressed in these slinky items of her mother’s that of course she had probably never seen before in her life. She pressed the button that said “Record,” and by doing so put in motion a chain of cause and effect which, more than a quarter of a century later, has come to feel like fate, would be almost impossible not to consider as fate, but which—whatever you think of fate—can certainly and rationally be said to have had one practical consequence: there’s no need for me now to describe the dance itself. But there were things not captured by the camera. As we reached the final chorus—the moment where I am astride Tracey, on that chair—this was also the moment that Lily Bingham’s mother, who had come upstairs to tell us so-and-so’s mother had arrived, opened her son’s bedroom door and saw us. That is why the footage stops as abruptly as it does. She froze at the threshold, still as Lot’s wife. Then she exploded. Tore us apart, stripped us of our costumes, told our audience to return to Lily’s room and stood over us silently as we got back into our stupid dresses. I kept apologizing. Tracey, who normally had nothing but backchat for furious adults, said nothing at all, but she packed contempt into every gesture, she even managed to put her tights on sarcastically. The doorbell rang again. Lily Bingham’s mother went downstairs. We did not know whether to follow. For the next fifteen minutes, as the doorbell rang and rang, we stayed where we were. I did nothing, I just stood there, but Tracey with typical resourcefulness did three things. She took the VHS tape out of the recorder, put the single back in its sleeve and put both items in the pink silk drawstring purse her mother had seen fit to hang on her shoulder.
? ? ?
My mother, always late, for everything, was the last to arrive. She was taken upstairs to find us, like a lawyer coming to speak to her clients through the bars of a prison cell, while Lily’s mother gave a very labored account of our activities, which included the rhetorical question: “Don’t you wonder where children of this age even pick up such ideas?” My mother became defensive: she swore and the two women quarreled briefly. It shocked me. She seemed no different in that moment than all those other mothers confronted with a child’s misbehavior up at the school—even a little of her patois came back—and I wasn’t used to seeing her lose control. She grabbed us by the backs of our dresses and we all three flew downstairs, but Lily’s mother followed us and in the hallway repeated what Tracey had said about Kurshed. It was her trump card. The rest of it could be dismissed, by my mother, as “typical bourgeois morality,” but she couldn’t ignore “Paki.” At the time we were “Black and Asian,” we ticked the Black and Asian box on the medical forms, joined the Black and Asian family support groups and stuck to the Black and Asian section of the library: it was considered a question of solidarity. And yet my mother defended Tracey, she said, “She’s a child, she’s just repeating what she’s heard,” to which Lily’s mother said, quietly: “No doubt.” My mother opened the front door, removed us, slamming the door shut very loudly. The moment we were outside, though, all her fury was for us, only for us, she pulled us like two bags of rubbish back down the road, shouting: “You think you’re one of them? Is that what you think?” I remember exactly the sensation of being dragged along, my toes tracing the pavement, and how completely perplexed I was by the tears in my mother’s eyes, the distortion spoiling her handsome face. I remember everything about Lily Bingham’s tenth birthday and have no memory whatsoever of my own.
When we reached the road that ran between our estate and Tracey’s my mother let go of Tracey’s hand and delivered a brief but devastating lecture on the history of racial epithets. I hung my head and wept in the street. Tracey was unmoved. She lifted her chin and her little piggy nose, waited till it was over, then looked my mother straight in her eyes.
“It’s just a word,” she said.
Two