? ? ?
Up ahead, in the next car, I could see Aimee leaning out of the passenger seat with her arm over the door, happily engaged with every wave or whistle or scream of delight from the street, which were, I felt pretty certain, not responses to Aimee herself but to this shiny cavalcade of SUVs rolling through rural areas in which not one in two hundred owned a car. In the village, out of curiosity, I often commandeered the phones of the young teachers, put my earphones in and listened to the thirty or so songs they tended to play on rotation, some of which came free with their minutes, others—especially beloved—they had spent precious credit to download. Hip-hop, R&B, soca, reggae, ragga, grime, dub-step, hi-life—ringtone scraps of the whole glorious musical diaspora could be heard, but rarely any white artists, and never Aimee. Now I watched her smile and wink at the many soldiers, who, relieved of their usual activity, stood aimlessly at the sides of the road, guns by their side, watching us pass. And wherever there was music, wherever kids were dancing, Aimee would clap her hands to get their attention and imitate their moves as best she could while still sitting down. This element of roadside rolling chaos that so affected and disturbed me, like a zoetrope unfurled and filled with every form of human drama—women feeding children, carrying them, talking to them, kissing them, hitting them, men talking, fighting, eating, working, praying, animals living and dying, wandering down the street bleeding from their necks, boys running, walking, dancing, pissing, shitting, girls whispering, laughing, frowning, sitting, sleeping—all of this delighted Aimee, she leaned so far out of that window I thought she might fall right through her beloved matrix and into it. But then she was always happiest in ungovernable crowds. Until her insurance company stopped her doing it she often crowd-surfed, and it never frightened her, as it did me, to be suddenly swarmed by people in an airport or the lobby of a hotel. Meanwhile the only thing I could see through my tinted window did not appear to surprise or alarm her, and when I made some reference to it in the few minutes we were together, standing on the gangway, watching our cars roll on to the spookily empty ferry and her children run delightedly up the cast-iron steps, to the upper deck, she turned to me and snapped: “Jesus Christ, if you’re gonna be shocked by every fucking sign of poverty you see here, this is going to be a mighty long trip. You’re in Africa!”
Just as if I’d asked why it was light outside and been told: “It’s daytime!”
Seven
All we had was her name, we found it in the credits. Jeni LeGon. We had no idea where she’d come from, if she was alive or dead, if she’d made any other films, we had only these four minutes from Ali Baba—well, I had them. If Tracey wanted to watch them she had to come round, which she began to do, every now and then, like Narcissus bending over a pool of water. I understood it wouldn’t take her long to learn the whole routine—excepting the impossible lean—but I wasn’t going to give her the video to take home, I knew better than that, I knew when I had collateral. And I had begun to spot LeGon here and there, bit parts in movies I’d seen many times. There she was as a maid to Ann Miller, wrestling with a baby pug, and as a tragic mulatto, dying in the arms of Cab Calloway, and once more a maid, helping Betty Hutton get dressed. These discoveries, widely spaced, sometimes many months apart, became a reason to call Tracey, and even if her mother answered Tracey would come round right away, with no hesitation or excuses. She sat inches from the television screen, ready to point out this or that moment of action or expression, an emotion passing over Jeni’s face, a variation in one step or another, and interpreting everything she saw with that sharpness of insight I felt I lacked, that I considered, at this point, Tracey’s possession alone. A gift for seeing that seemed to have its only outlet and expression here, in my living room, in front of my television, and which no teacher ever saw, and no exam ever managed to successfully register or even note, and of which, perhaps, these memories are the only true witness and record.
? ? ?
One thing she failed to notice, and I didn’t want to tell her: my parents had broken up. I only knew it myself because my mother told me it was so. They still lived in the same flat and slept in the same room. Where else could they go? Real divorces were for people who had lawyers and new places to live. There was also the question of my mother’s capabilities. We all three knew that in divorces the father left, but my father could not leave, there was no question of that. Who, in his absence, would tape up my knee when I fell, or remember when my medicine was to be taken, or calmly comb the nits out of my hair? Who would come to me when I had my night terrors? Who would wash my stinking, yellow sheets the next morning? I don’t mean that my mother didn’t love me but she was not a domestic person: her life was in her mind. The fundamental skill of all mothers—the management of time—was beyond her. She measured time in pages. Half an hour, to her, meant ten pages read, or fourteen, depending on the size of the type, and when you think of time in this way there isn’t time left for anything else, there’s no time to go to the park or get ice cream, no time to put a child to bed, no time to listen to the teary recounting of a nightmare. No, my father could not leave.