“They go all the time—” confided Hawa, “our grandmothers. My grandmother got me this.” She held up her wrist and I admired a beautiful silver bracelet with a small charm hanging from it.
“Please show me where it says that to respect your elders is a sin?” demanded Lamin. “You cannot show it to me. Now he wants to take his new son to the ‘modern’ hospital instead of to the bush. That is his choice. But why can’t the boy have a coming-out ceremony? Musa will break his grandmother’s heart again with this, I promise you. But am I going to be told this and that by a ghetto boy who knows no Arabic? Aadoo, Shaytan—this is the only Arabic he knows! He went to a Catholic mission school! I can recite every hadith, every hadith. No, no.”
It was the longest, most sustained, most impassioned speech I had ever heard from Lamin, and even he seemed surprised by it, stopping for a second and wiping the sweat from his forehead with a white, folded handkerchief he kept for the purpose in his back pocket.
“I say people will always have their differences—” began Hawa, but Lamin interrupted her again: “And then he says to me”—Lamin pointed to his broken watch—“‘This life is nothing compared to eternity—this life you are in is only the half-second before midnight. I am not living for this half-second but for what comes after.’ But he thinks because he prays with his arms folded across his chest he is better than me? No. I said to him: ‘I read Arabic, Musa, do you?’ Believe me, Musa is a man in confusion.”
“Lamin . . .” said Hawa, “I think you are a bit unfair, Musa only wants to perform jihad, and there is nothing wrong with—”
My face must have done something startling: Hawa pointed at my nose and burst out laughing.
“Look at her! Oh, man! She thinks my cousin wants to go shoot up people—oh no, that’s funny—a mashala doesn’t even have a toothbrush, forget a gun—ha ha ha!”
Lamin, less amused, pointed to his own chest, and returned to whispers: “No more reggae, no more hanging out in the ghetto, no more smoking of marijuana. She means this. Musa used to have dreadlocks—you know what are these? OK, so dreadlocks down to here! But now he is in this spiritual jihad, inside. She means this.”
“I wish I was so pure!” announced Hawa, sighing sweetly. “Oh, oh . . . it’s good to be pure—probably!”
“Well, of course it is,” said Lamin, frowning. “We all try to perform jihad, every day in our own way, as much as we are able. But you don’t need to cut your trousers and insult your grandmother. Musa dresses like an Indian. We don’t need this foreign imam here—we have our own!”
We had come to the school gate. Hawa twisted her long skirt, dislodged by the walk, until it sat straight again on her hips.
“Why are his trousers like that?”
“Oh, you mean short?” said Hawa dully, with that gift she had for always making me feel I’d asked the most obvious question of all. “So his feet don’t burn in hell!”
? ? ?
That night, under an exquisitely clear sky, I helped Fern and a team of local volunteers lay out three hundred chairs and erect white canopies to go over them, to send flags up poles and paint “WELCOME, AIMEE” on a wall. Aimee herself, Judy, Granger and the PR girl were all asleep in the hotel in Banjul, exhausted from their journey, or at the thought of the pink house, who knew. All around us the talk was of the President. We endured the same jokes over and over: how much we knew, or were claiming not to know, or who between the two of us knew more. No one mentioned Aimee. What I couldn’t work out among all this frenetic rumor and counter-rumor was whether a visit from the President was longed for or dreaded. It’s the same when you hear of a storm that’s coming to town, explained Fern, as we drove the tin legs of the folding chairs into the sand. Even if you fear it you’re curious to see it.
Four
I was at King’s Cross station with my father in the early morning, on one of our last-minute trips to view a university. We’d just missed our train, not because we were late but because the price of a ticket was twice what I’d warned my father it might be, and during the argument about what to do next—one of us go now, the other later, or both not go or both go another afternoon, outside the peak-fare period—the train had pulled away from the platform without us. We were still snapping testily at each other in front of the announcement board when we spotted Tracey coming up the escalator from the tube. What a vision! Spotless white jeans and little high-heeled ankle boots and a black leather jacket cut close to her body and zipped up right to her chin: it looked like a kind of body armor. My father’s mood transformed. He lifted both his arms like an air-traffic controller signaling in a plane. I watched Tracey walk toward us in a weirdly formal way, a formality my father missed altogether, hugging her as he had done in the old days, without noting the rigidity of her body next to his or the ram-rod stillness of her arms. He pulled back and asked after her parents, how her summer was going. Tracey gave a series of bloodless replies that contained, to my ear, no real information. I saw his face cloud over. Not at what she was saying, exactly, but at the manner in which it was being said, a brand-new style of hers that seemed to have nothing to do with the wild, funny, courageous girl he thought he had known. It belonged to a different girl altogether, from a different neighborhood, a different world. “What they giving you in that crazy place,” he asked, “elocution lessons?” “Yes,” said Tracey primly and stuck her nose in the air, and it was clear she wanted to end the subject here, but my father, never very good at hints, wouldn’t let it go. He kept teasing her, and to defend herself against his ridicule Tracey now began listing the many skills she was developing in her summer singing and fencing lessons, her ballroom dancing and drama lessons, skills not necessary in the neighborhood but which a person needed to perform on what she was now calling the “West End stage.” I wondered, but did not ask, how she was paying for it all. As she rambled on to me, my father stood staring at her and then suddenly interrupted. “But you’re not serious, are you, Trace? Stop it with all that—it’s just us here! No need to talk fancy with us. We know you, we’ve known you since you were this high, you don’t have to pretend to be Lady Muck with us!” But Tracey became agitated, she spoke faster and faster, in this funny new voice of hers that perhaps she had thought would impress my father instead of repel him, and which did not quite have control over itself and veered unnaturally every other sentence back to our shared past and jaggedly forward into her mysterious present, until my father lost control of himself entirely and giggled at her, in the middle of King’s Cross station, in front of all those rush-hour commuters. He meant no harm—he was only bemused—but I saw how it hurt her. To her credit, though, Tracey didn’t lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman’s art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use. She excused herself politely and said she had to get to a class.