A stack of posters, not photocopied but drawn, each one, by hand, announcing a talk—“The History of Dance”—were placed around the estate, where, like all public notices, they were soon defaced in creative and obscene ways, one piece of graffiti spawning a response, and then a response to the response. I was tacking one up in a walkway on Tracey’s estate when I felt a pair of hands on my shoulders—a short, hard squeeze—turned around and there she was. She looked at the poster but didn’t mention it. She reached for my new glasses, put them on her own face and laughed at her reflection in a warped piece of sheet mirror stuck up next to the noticeboard. Laughed again when she offered me a fag and I dropped it, and then again at the ratty espadrilles I was wearing, stolen from my mother’s wardrobe. I felt like some old diary she’d found in a drawer: a reminder of a more innocent and foolish time in her life. We walked together across the yard and sat on the grass verge at the back of her estate, facing St. Christopher’s. She nodded at the door and said: “That weren’t real dancing, though. I’m on a whole other level now.” I didn’t doubt it. I asked how her revision was going and learned that at her kind of school there were no exams, all of that had finished at fifteen. Where I was in chains, she was free! Now everything depended on an “end of school revue” that “most of the big agents come to,” and to which I was also grudgingly invited (“I could try and ask for you”), and this was where the best of the dancers got picked up, found representation and began auditioning for the autumn run of West End shows or the regional traveling troupes. She preened about it. I thought she had become more boastful generally, especially on the subject of her father. He was building a huge family home for her, so she claimed, in Kingston, and soon she’d move there with him, and from there it was just a hop, skip and a jump to New York, where she’d have the chance to perform on Broadway, where they really appreciated dancers, not like here. Yes, she’d work in New York but live in Jamaica, in the sun with Louie, and finally be rid of what I remember she called “this miserable fucking country”—as if it were only an accident that she had ever lived here in the first place.
But a few days later I saw Louie, in a completely different context, it was in Kentish Town. I was on a bus, on the top deck, I spotted him in the street, with his arm around a very pregnant woman, the kind we used to call a “home girl,” with big gold earrings in the shape of pyramids, wearing a lot of chains and with her hair greased and frozen in a pattern of kiss-curls and spikes. They were laughing and joking together, and kissing every now and then. She was pushing a buggy with a child in it, of about two years old, and holding the hand of a seven-or eight-year-old. My first thought was not “Who are these children?” But: “What’s Louie doing in Kentish Town? Why’s he walking down Kentish Town High Street like he lives there?” I really couldn’t think beyond a one-mile radius. Only when they were out of sight did I consider all the occasions Tracey had lied or bluffed about his absence—she stopped crying about it when she was very young—without ever guessing how close by he likely was the whole time. Not at the school concert or the birthday or the show or the sports day or even simply in the house, for dinner, because he was tending, supposedly, to an eternally sick mother in south Kilburn, or dancing with Michael Jackson, or thousands of miles away in Jamaica, building Tracey’s dream home. But that one-sided conversation on the grassy verge had confirmed for me that we could no longer speak of intimate things. Instead, when I got home, I told my mother what I’d seen. She was in the middle of trying to cook dinner, always a stressful moment of the day, and she became annoyed with me, with a speed and heat out of all proportion. I couldn’t understand it, I knew she hated Louie—so why defend him? Slamming pots about, speaking passionately of Jamaica, and not present-day Jamaica but Jamaica in the 1800s, the 1700s, and beyond—present-day Kentish Town was pushed aside as an irrelevance—telling me about breeders and bucks, of children torn from their mother’s arms, of repetition and return, through the centuries, and the many missing men in her bloodline, including her own father, all of them ghost men, never seen close up or clearly. I drew back from her as she ranted, until I was pressed up against the warmth of the oven door. I didn’t know what to do with all the sadness. A hundred and fifty years! Do you have any idea how long a hundred and fifty years is in the family of man? She clicked her fingers, and I thought of Miss Isabel, counting children in for the beats of a dance. That long, she said.
? ? ?
A week later somebody set a fire in the old bike shed, the night before I was due to speak, reducing it to a black box of carbon. We toured it with the firemen. It smelled terribly of all the plastic chairs that had been piled up against the walls and were now melted and melded together. I was relieved, it felt like an act of God, although all signs pointed closer to home, and soon enough Louie’s boys reclaimed their space. The day after the fire, when my mother and I were out and about together, a few well-meaning people crossed the street to offer their sympathies or try to engage her on the subject, but she pursed her lips and stared at them as if they had said something coarse or personal. Brute force outraged her, I think, because it was outside her beloved realm of language, and in response to it she really had nothing to say. Despite her revolutionary stylings I don’t think my mother would have been very useful in a real revolution, not once the talking and the meetings were over and the actual violence began. There was a sense in which she couldn’t quite believe in violence, as if it were, in her view, too stupid to be real. I knew—from Lambert only—that her own childhood had been full of violence, emotional and physical, but she rarely referred to it other than calling it “that nonsense,” or sometimes “those ridiculous people,” because when she ascended to the life of the mind everything that was not the life of the mind stopped existing for her. Louie as a sociological phenomenon or a political symptom or a historical example or simply a person raised in the same grinding rural poverty she’d known herself—a person whom she recognized, and I believe intimately understood—that Louie my mother could deal with. But the look of utter forsakenness on her face as the firemen led her to a far corner of the shed to show her the spot where the fire had been started, by someone she knew personally, had tried to reason with, but who, despite this, had chosen to violently destroy what she’d lovingly created—this look is something I’ve never forgotten. Louie did not even need to do it personally, and equally did not have to hide that he had ordered it done. On the contrary he wanted it known: it was a show of power. At first I thought this fire had destroyed something essential in my mother. But a few weeks later she regrouped, convincing the vicar to let her move her community meetings to the back room of the church. The incident even turned out to be useful, in a way, for her campaign: it was the visual, literal confirmation of the “urban nihilism” of which she had often spoken and partly built her campaign around. Not long after, she became our local councilor. And here the second act of her life, the political act—which I’m sure she considered the true act of her life—began.
Three