One of the oddest things about it was the fact that the man whose spell she appeared to be under, the guru himself, had once been a breakfast-TV reporter, had worked in the very building I sat in now, and when we were kids I can remember often sitting with Tracey, watching him, bowls of cereal in our laps, waiting for his boring grown-up show to be over and for our Saturday-morning cartoons to begin. Once, during my first winter break from university, I went to buy some textbooks in a chain bookshop on the Finchley Road, and while wandering around the film section saw him in person, presenting one of his books in a far-off corner of that mammoth shop. He sat at a plain white desk, dressed all in white, with his prematurely white head of hair, facing a sizable audience. Two girls who worked there stood near me and from behind shelving they peeked out at the peculiar gathering. They were laughing at him. But I was struck not so much by what he was saying as by the odd composition of his audience. There were a few middle-aged white women, dressed in their cozily patterned Christmas jumpers, looking no different from the housewives who would have liked him ten years earlier, but by far the greater part of his crowd was young black men, of about my own age, holding well-worn copies of his books on their knee and listening with an absolute focus and determination to an elaborate conspiracy theory. For the world was run by lizards in human form: the Rockefellers were lizards, and the Kennedys, and almost everybody at Goldman Sachs, and William Hearst had been a lizard, and Ronald Reagan and Napoleon — it was a global lizard plot. Eventually the shop-girls tired of their sniggering and wandered off. I stayed till the end, deeply troubled by what I’d seen, not knowing what to make of it. Only later, when I started reading Tracey’s threads — which were, if you could put aside their insane first premise, striking in their detail and perverse erudition, linking many diverse historical periods and political ideas and facts, combining them all into a sort of theory of everything, which even in its comic wrongness required a certain depth of study and a persistent attention — yes, only then did I feel that I better understood why all those serious-looking young men had gathered in the bookshop that day. It became possible to read between the lines. Wasn’t it all a way of explaining power, in the end? The power that certainly exists in the world? Which few hold and most never get near? A power my old friend must have felt, at that point in her life, she utterly lacked?
“Er, what the fuck is that?”
I turned round in my swivel chair and found Zoe at my shoulder, examining a flashing graphic of a lizard wearing, on top of his lizard head, the Crown Jewels. I minimized the page.
“Album graphics. Bad.”
“Listen, Thursday morning — you’re on, they’ve confirmed. Are you ready? Got everything you need?”
“Don’t worry. It’s going to be fine.”
“Oh, I know it will be. But if you need some Dutch courage,” said Zoe, tapping her nose, “let me know.”
It didn’t come to that. Difficult to piece back together exactly what it did come to. My memory of it and Aimee’s have never had much overlap. I’ve heard her say that she hired me because she felt “we had an immediate connection” that day or, sometimes, because I struck her as being so capable. I think it was because I was inadvertently rude to her, a thing few people were at that time in her life, and in my rudeness must have lodged myself in her brain. A fortnight later, when she found herself in sudden need of a new, young assistant, there I was, lodged in there. She emerged anyway from a car with blacked-out windows in mid-argument with her then assistant, Melanie Wu. Her manager, Judy Ryan, walked two steps behind them both, shouting into a phone. The first thing I ever heard Aimee say was a put-down: “Everything coming out of your mouth right now is totally worthless to me.” I noticed she did not have an Australian accent, not any more, but neither was it quite American or quite British, it was globaclass="underline" it was New York and Paris and Moscow and LA and London combined. Of course now lots of people speak in this way but Aimee’s version was the first time I heard it. “You’re the opposite of helpful,” she said now, to which Melanie replied: “I can totally see that.” A moment later this poor girl found herself in front of me, looked down at my chest, seeking a name tag, and when she looked back up I could see she was broken, struggling not to cry. “So we’re on schedule,” she said, firmly as could be managed, “and it would be great if we could stay on schedule?”
We four stood in the lift, silent. I was determined to speak, but before I managed it Aimee turned to me and pouted at my top, like a pretty teenage boy in a sulk.
“Interesting choice,” she said, to Judy. “Wearing another artist’s shirt when you’re meeting an artist? Professional.”
I looked down at myself and blushed.
“Oh! No! Miss — I mean, Mrs. — Ms. Aimee. I wasn’t trying to make any—”
Judy let out a loud, single laugh, like a seal barking. I tried to say something else, but the lift doors opened and Aimee strode out.
To get to our various appointments we had to walk the halls, and they were lined with people, like the Mall during Diana’s funeral. Nobody seemed to be working. Whenever we stopped in a studio people lost their cool almost immediately, irrespective of their position in the company. I watched a Managing Director tell Aimee that a ballad of hers was the first dance at his wedding. I listened, excruciated, as Zoe launched into a rambling account of the personal resonance “Move with Me” had for her, how it had helped her become a woman, and understand the power of women, and not be afraid to be a woman, and so on. As we got away, finally, along another hall and into another lift, to make our way down to the basement — where Aimee had, to Zoe’s delight, agreed to record a brief interview — I worked up the courage to mention, in the world-weary way of twenty-two-year-olds, how dull I imagined it must be for her to hear people saying these sorts of things to her, day and night, night and day.
“As a matter of fact, Little Miss Green Goddess, I love it.”
“Oh, OK, I just thought—”
“You just thought I had contempt for my own people.”
“No! I just — I—”
“You know, just because you’re not one of my people doesn’t mean they’re not good people. Everybody’s got their tribe. Whose tribe are you in anyway?” She took a second, slow, assessing look at me, up and down. “Oh, right. This we already know.”
“You mean — musically?” I asked, and made the mistake of glancing over at Melanie Wu, in whose face I understood that the conversation should have ended many minutes earlier, should never have started.
Aimee sighed: “Sure.”
“Well… a lot of things… I guess I like a lot of the older stuff, like Billie Holiday? Or Sarah Vaughan. Bessie Smith. Nina. Real singers. I mean, not that — I mean, I feel like—”
“Um, correct me if I’m wrong,” said Judy, her own broad Aussie brogue untouched by the intervening decades. “The interview’s not actually happening in this lift? Thank you.”
We got out at the basement. I was mortified and tried to walk ahead of them all, but Aimee skipped in front of Judy and linked arms with me. I felt my heart rise in my throat, as the old songs tell you it can. I looked down — she’s only five foot two — and for the first time confronted that face close up, somehow both male and female, the eyes with their icy, gray, cat-like beauty, left for the rest of the world to color in. The palest Australian I ever saw. Sometimes, without her make-up on, she did not look like she was from a warm planet at all, and she took steps to keep it that way, protecting herself from the sun at all times. There was something alien about her, a person who belongs to a tribe of one. Almost without knowing it, I smiled. She smiled back.