“The right situation,” I said. “The right time.”
She smiled, the old cruelty in her face: “Oh, OK. Good luck with that. Funny, innit,” she said, exaggerating her accent for effect, and turning to the television, not me: “Rich birds with no kids, poor birds with plenty. Sure your mum would have a lot to say about that.”
The kids finished eating. I picked up their plates and took them to the kitchen and sat there for a minute on the high stool, breathing in and out mindfully—as Aimee’s yoga teacher had shown us all how to do—and looking out through the strip of window into the parking bays. There were answers I wanted from her, going a long way back. I was trying to work out how to re-enter the living room in a way that would reset the afternoon in my favor, but before I figured it out Tracey walked in and said: “Thing is, what’s between me and your mum is between me and your mum. I don’t even know why you’ve come round here, honestly.”
“I’m just trying to understand why you would—”
“Yeah, but that’s the thing! There can’t be no understanding between you and me any more! You’re part of a different system now. People like you think you can control everything. But you can’t control me!”
“People like me? What are you talking about? Trace, you’re a grown woman now, you’ve got three beautiful kids, you really need to get a grip on this kind of delusional—”
“You can call it by any fancy name you like, love: there’s a system, and you and your fucking mother are both a part of it.”
I stood up.
“Stop harassing my family, Tracey,” I said, as I walked purposefully out of the kitchen, pursued by Tracey, through the living room toward the front door. “If it carries on, the police will be involved.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep walking, keep walking,” she said and slammed the door behind me.
Six
In early December Aimee returned to check on the progress of her academy, traveling with a smaller group—Granger, Judy, her ditzy e-mail proxy, Mary-Beth, Fern and me—without press and with a specific agenda: she wanted to propose a sexual-health clinic within the grounds of the school itself. Nobody disagreed in principle but it was also very difficult to see how it could possibly be referred to publicly as a sexual-health clinic or how Fern’s discreet reports of the sexual vulnerability of the local girls—which he had gathered slowly, and with a great deal of trust, from a few of the female teachers, who had taken great risks themselves in speaking to him—could be brought out into the light of the village without causing interpersonal chaos and offense and perhaps the end of our whole project. On the flight over we discussed it. I tried, stumblingly, to speak to Aimee about the need for delicacy, and what I knew of the local context, thinking, in my mind, of Hawa, while Fern, more eloquently, discussed an earlier German medical NGO’s interventions in a nearby Mandinka village, where female circumcision was practiced by all, and the German nurses had found oblique approaches won traction where more direct condemnations failed. Aimee frowned at these comparisons and then took up again where she had left off: “Look, it happened to me in Bendigo, it happened to me in New York, it happens everywhere. It’s not about your ‘local context’—this is everywhere. I had a big family, cousins and uncles coming and going—I know what goes on. And I’ll bet you a million dollars you go into any classroom of thirty girls anywhere in this world and there’s going to be one at least who has a secret she can’t tell. I remember. I had nowhere to go. I want these girls to have somewhere to go!”
Beside her own passion and commitment our qualifications and concerns looked petty and narrow, but we managed to wear her down to the word “clinic,” and an emphasis—at least when discussing the clinic with local mothers—on menstrual health, which was its own complication for many girls without the means to pay for sanitary products. But personally I didn’t think Aimee was wrong: I remembered my own classrooms, dance classes, playgrounds, youth groups, birthday parties, hen nights, I remember there was always a girl with a secret, with something furtive and broken in her, and walking through the village with Aimee, entering people’s homes, shaking their hands, accepting their food and drink, being hugged by their children, I often thought I saw her again, this girl who lives everywhere and at all times in history, who is sweeping the yard or pouring out tea or carrying somebody else’s baby on her hip and looking over at you with a secret she can’t tell.