“How could I know? She didn’t tell me.”
I heard Miriam kiss her teeth at me.
“Anyone with any sense just needs to look at the woman to know something is wrong!”
I wept. Miriam patiently listened. My instinct was to get off the phone and call my mother, but when I tried to do this Miriam begged me not to.
“She doesn’t want you to know. She knows you have to travel and whatnot — she doesn’t want to disturb your plans. She’d know I told you. I’m the only person who knows.”
I couldn’t stand this vision of myself as a person my own mother would rather die than disturb. To avoid it, I cast around for dramatic gestures, and without even knowing whether or not it was possible offered up the services of Aimee’s many private doctors in Harley Street. Miriam chucked sadly.
“Private? Don’t you know your mother by now? No, if you want to do something for her, I can tell you what would make the most difference right at this moment. This crazy woman bothering her? I don’t know why it’s obsessing her so much but it needs to stop, it’s all she can think about — and that’s not right at a time like this. She told me that she spoke to you about it?”
“Yes. She was going to forward me the e-mails but she hasn’t.”
“I have them, I’ll do that.”
“Oh, OK… I thought — I mean, she said, at dinner, that you two…”
“Yes, yes, many months ago. But your mother is someone who will always be in my life. She’s not the kind of person who leaves your life once she’s in it. Anyway, when someone you care about gets ill, all the other business… it just goes.”
A few minutes after I put down the phone the e-mails started to arrive, in little flurries, until I had fifty or more. I sat where I was reading them, stunned by the rage. The force of it made me feel inadequate — as if Tracey had more feeling for my mother than I did — even though it was not love expressed here but hate. Stunned, too, by how well she wrote, never boring, not for a second, her dyslexia and many grammatical errors were no hindrance to her: she had the gift of being interesting. You couldn’t start reading one without wanting to finish it. Her central accusation against my mother was neglect: of her son’s problems at school, of Tracey’s own complaints and e-mails, and of her duty — I mean my mother’s — to push forward the interests of her constituents. If I’m honest, the earliest e-mails did not seem to me unreasonable, but then Tracey broadened her scope. Neglect of state schools in the borough, neglect of black children in those schools, of black people in England, of black working-class people in England, of single mothers, of the children of single mothers, and of Tracey the single child of a single mother, all those years ago. It interested me that she wrote “single mother” here, as if her father had never existed at all. The tone became sweary, abusive. In some of the e-mails she sounded drunk or high. Soon it was a one-way correspondence, a systematic dissection of all the many ways Tracey believed my mother had let her down. You never liked me, you never wanted me around, you always tried to humiliate me, I was never good enough for you, you were scared of being associated with me, you always held yourself apart, you pretended you were for the community but you were only ever for yourself, you told everybody I stole that money but you had no proof and you never defended me. There was a whole tranche of letters that referred only to the estate. Nothing was being done to improve the units the council residents lived in, these units were being left to degenerate — almost all of them now in Tracey’s block — they hadn’t been touched since the early eighties. Meanwhile, the estate across the road — our estate, which the council were now busily selling off — had filled up with young white couples and their babies and looked like a “fucking hotel resort.” And what was my mother going to do about the boys selling crack on the corner of Torbay Road? The closure of the swimming pool? The whorehouses on Willesden Lane?
That’s how it was: a surreal mix of personal vendetta, painful memory, astute political protest and a local resident’s complaints. I noticed that the letters got longer as the weeks passed, starting at a paragraph or two and expanding to thousands and thousands of words. In the most recent some of the fantasies and conspiratorial thinking I remembered from ten years earlier re-emerged, in spirit if not in letter. Lizards made no appearance: now a secret eighteenth-century Bavarian sect had survived its own suppression and was at work in the world today, its members many powerful and famous blacks — in league with elite whites and the Jews — and Tracey was researching all this very deeply and was increasingly convinced that my mother might herself be a tool of these people, minor but dangerous, who had managed to worm her way right into the heart of British government.
Just after midday I read the last e-mail, put my coat on, walked down the road and waited for the 52 bus. I got off at Brondesbury Park, walked the length of Christchurch Avenue, arrived at Tracey’s estate, climbed the stairs and rang her bell. She must have been in the hallway already because she opened the door right away, a new baby of four or five months on her hip, its face turned from me. Behind her I could hear more children, arguing, and a TV at high volume. I don’t know what I expected, but what was in front of me was an anxious, heavy-set, middle-aged woman in terrycloth pajama bottoms, house slippers and a black sweatshirt that had one word written on it: OBEY. I looked so much younger.
“It’s you,” she said. She put a protective hand to the back of her baby’s head.
“Tracey, we need to talk.”
“MUM!” cried a voice from inside. “WHO IS IT?”
“Yeah, well, I’m in the middle of making lunch?”
“My mother is dying,” I said — that old childhood habit of exaggeration spontaneously came back to me—“and you’ve got to stop what you’re—”
Just then her two older children stuck their heads round the door to stare at me. The girl looked white, with wavy brown hair and sea-green eyes. The boy had Tracey’s coloring and a springy Afro but didn’t look especially like her: he must have taken after his father. The baby was far darker than all of us, and when she turned her face toward me I saw she was Tracey’s double and incredibly beautiful. But they all were.
“Can I come in?”
She didn’t answer. She sighed, pushed the door open with her slippered foot and I followed her in.
“Who are you, who are you, who are you?” the little girl asked me and before she got an answer slipped her hand into mine. I saw, as we walked through the lounge, that I had interrupted a screening of South Pacific. This detail moved me, and made it hard to keep in mind the hateful Tracey of the e-mails or the Tracey who had put that letter through my door ten years before. I knew the Tracey who wasted an afternoon on South Pacific and I loved that girl.
“You like it?” her daughter asked me, and when I said I did, she pulled my arm till I sat on the settee between her and her older brother, who was playing on a phone. I had marched down Brondesbury Park full of righteous fury, but now it seemed completely possible that I might just sit on this sofa and pass the afternoon watching South Pacific with a little girl’s hand nestled in mine. I asked her for her name.
“Mariah Mimi Alicia Chantelle!”
“Her name’s Jeni,” said the boy, without looking up. I thought he looked to be eight, and Jeni five or six.
“And what’s your name?” I asked, cringing to hear my mother’s voice in me, talking to all children, whatever their age, as if they were barely sentient.