Tracey wriggled off his lap back on to her own stool. “You’re a fucking pisshead,” she muttered, and the barman, overhearing what she’d said, laughed and told her: “’Fraid that’s a condition of membership round here, love…” Chalky turned to Tracey and kissed her sloppily: “Come, come, you wasp; i’ faith, you are too angry…” “Look what I’m dealing with!” cried Tracey, pulling him off her. Chalky had a fondness for dirge-like Shakespearean ballads, it drove Tracey up the green walls, in part because she was jealous of his beautiful voice but also because when Chalky started singing of willow trees and faithless shrews it was a reliable sign that he’d soon have to be half carried down that steep and rickety staircase, heaved into a cab and sent back to his white wife, his fare prepaid with money Tracey had lifted from his wallet, usually taking a bit more than was strictly required. But she was pragmatic, she only ended the night when she’d learned something. I believe she was trying to pick up what she’d missed this past three years and I’d gained: a free education.
The show was very well reviewed and in November, backstage, five minutes before curtain, we were gathered together and told, by the producers, that our run was to be extended, past its Christmas deadline and into the spring. The cast was delighted, and that night they took their delight out with them on stage. I stood in the wings, happy for them, too, but with my own secret news tucked up inside me, which I hadn’t yet told the management or Tracey. One of my applications had come through, finally: a production-assistant position, a paid internship, at the newly launched British version of YTV. The previous week I’d gone for an interview, hit it off with my interviewer, who told me, a little unprofessionally, I thought, given the queue of girls outside, that I had the job, there and then. It was only thirteen grand, but if I stayed at my father’s it was more than enough. I was happy and yet hesitant to tell Tracey, without really asking myself what was at the root of my hesitancy. The Hot Box Girls dashed past me, fresh from Make-up, and on to the stage, dressed as cats, with Adelaide front and center and Hot Box Girl Number One just to her left. They puffed up their chests provocatively, licked their paws, got a hold of their tails — one of which I had pinned on Tracey ten minutes before — crouched like kittens about to pounce, and started to sing, of mean “poppas” who, holding you too tightly, make you want to roam, and other, gentle strangers, who make you feel at home… It was always a riotous number, but that night it was a real sensation. From where I stood, with a clear view of the front row, I could see the undisguised lust in the eyes of the men, and how many of those eyes were drawn specifically to Tracey when they should have rightfully been on the woman playing Adelaide. Everyone else was eclipsed by the litheness of Tracey’s legs in that leotard, the pure vitality of her movements, truly cat-like, ultra-feminine in a mode I envied and could not hope to create in my own body no matter how many tails you stuck on me. There were thirteen women dancing in that number but only Tracey’s movements really mattered, and when she ran off stage with the rest and I told her how wonderfully she’d danced, she did not, like the other girls, second-guess me or ask for any repetition of the praise, she only said, “Yes, I know,” bent over, stripped and handed me her balled-up tights.
That night the cast celebrated at the Coach and Horses. Tracey and Chalky went with them and so did I, but we were used to the drunken and intimate intensity of the Colony Room — also to our own seats, and to hearing ourselves speak — and after about ten minutes of standing, screaming at the top of our voices and not getting served, Tracey wanted to leave. I thought she meant back to the Colony Room, with Chalky, to do as we usually did, so she and her lover could drink too much and go over their impossible situation: his wish to tell his wife, her determination that he would not, the complication of his children — who were around our age — and the possibility, dreaded by Chalky but unlikely I thought, that the papers might find out and make some kind of story of it. But when he went to the bathroom Tracey pulled me outside and said, “I don’t want to do him tonight”—I remember that “do”— “Let’s just go back to yours and get caned.”
It was about eleven thirty when we got to Kilburn. Tracey had rolled one on the train and now we smoked walking down the street, remembering the times we’d performed this same action down the same road aged twenty, fifteen, thirteen, twelve…
As we walked I told her my news. It sounded very glamorous, YTV, three letters from a world that had preoccupied us as teenagers, and I felt almost embarrassed to bring it up, obscenely lucky, as if I were about to be on the channel rather than filing its British post and brewing its British tea. Tracey stopped walking and took the joint from me.
“But you’re not going to leave right now? In the middle of a run?”
I shrugged and confessed: “Tuesday. Are you really fucked off?”
She didn’t reply. We walked in silence for a bit and then she said: “You planning on moving out as well or what?”
I wasn’t. I’d found I liked living with my father, and being near — but not in the same space as — my mother. To my own surprise I was in no hurry to leave. And I remember making a lot of this to Tracey, of how much I “loved” the old neighborhood, wanting to impress her, I suppose, prove how firmly my feet were still on the local ground, notwithstanding any change in my fortunes, I still lived with my father as she lived with her mother. She listened, smiled in a tight sort of way, lifted her nose into the air and kept her counsel. A few minutes later we reached my father’s and I realized I didn’t have my key. I often forgot it, but didn’t like to ring the bell — in case he was already asleep, knowing he had to be up early — so would go down the side return and let myself in the back kitchen, which was usually open. But at that moment I was finishing the joint and didn’t want to risk my father seeing me — we had recently promised each other we’d stop smoking. So I sent Tracey. A minute later she came back and said the kitchen was locked and we’d better go to hers.
The next day was a Saturday. Tracey left early for the matinee, but I didn’t work Saturdays. I went back to my father’s flat and spent the afternoon with him. I didn’t see the letter that day though it might already have been on the mat. I found it on Sunday morning: it had been pushed through my door and was addressed to me, handwritten, with a little food stain on the corner of one page, and I think of it as the last truly personal written letter I ever received, for even though Tracey had no computer, not yet, the revolution was happening all around us and soon enough the only paper addressed to me would come from banks, utilities or the government, with a little plastic window to warn me of the contents. This letter came with no warning — I hadn’t seen Tracey’s handwriting in years — and I opened it as I sat at my father’s table with my father sitting opposite me. “Who’s that from then?” he asked, and for a few lines I still didn’t know myself. Two minutes later the only question remaining was whether it was fact or fiction. It had to be fiction: to believe otherwise was to make everything in my present life impossible as well as destroying much of the life I had led up to this point. It was to allow Tracey to place a bomb under me and blow me to smithereens. I read it again, to make sure I had understood. She began by speaking of her duty, and of it being a horrible duty, and that she had asked and asked herself (“asked” spelled wrong) what to do and had felt she had no choice (“choice” spelled wrong.) She described Friday night as I, too, remembered it: walking up the street to my father’s, smoking a joint, up to the point where she went down the side return to let herself in via the kitchen, unsuccessfully. But here the timeline broke in two, into her reality and mine, or her fiction — as far as I was concerned — and my fact. In her version she walked round the back of my father’s flat, stood in the small gravel courtyard, and then, because the kitchen seemed to be locked, took two steps to the left and brought her nose right up to the back window, to my father’s bedroom window, the one in which I slept, cupped her hands upon the glass and looked in. There she saw my father, naked, on top of something, moving up and down, and at first she had naturally thought it was a woman, and if it had been a woman, or so she assured me, then she never would have mentioned it, it was none of her business or mine, but the fact was it was not a woman at all, it was a doll, human-sized, but inflated, and of very dark complexion—“like a golliwog,” she wrote — with a crescent of synthetic lamb’s-wool hair and a huge pair of bright red lips, red as blood. “You all right, love?” asked my father, across the table, as I held that comic, tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, hideous letter shaking in my hand. I said I was fine, took Tracey’s letter to the back courtyard, took out a lighter and set it on fire.