Swing Time

by Zadie Smith

But while the rest of the team came out of that whirlwind exhausted, completely wrung out, ready to lie down for a decade, Aimee herself proved largely unaffected, she was more or less as she had always been, full of a terrifying amount of energy.

felt as I watched her, is the way she’s able to summon joy out of effort, for no move of hers flowed instinctively or naturally from the next, each “step” was clearly visible, choreographed, and yet as she sweated away at their execution, the hard work itself felt erotic, it was like witnessing a woman cross the line at the end of a marathon, or working toward her own orgasm. That same ecstatic revelation of a woman’s will.

Reading was basically impossible when you worked for Aimee, it was seen, by the rest of the team, as deeply impractical and I think in some sense fundamentally disloyal.

If I tried to make a case for whatever it was Judy would shrug and say: “What do I know? I’m just a little bogan girl from Bendigo,” and this, said within Aimee’s earshot, killed any project dead.

Aimee never underestimated the importance of the heartland.

Her theory was that a star has New York and LA in their pocket, a star can take Paris and London and Tokyo—but only a superstar takes Cleveland and Hyderabad and Bendigo. A superstar takes everybody everywhere.

“Jesus, the Norwegians were dull, weren’t they?” she muttered, and then an idea came to her, as if none of our conversations of the past three weeks had happened at all: “Why don’t we go out? Like, right now. Judy won’t know. We’ll go out the back way. Have a few cocktails? I’m in the mood. We don’t need a reason.” I smiled at her. I thought about what it must be like to live in this world of shifting facts that move or disappear, depending on your mood. “Something funny?” “Nope. Let’s

She took a shower and got dressed in her civilian outfit: black jeans, black vest and a black baseball cap pulled low, which made her ears stick out through her hair and gave her an unexpectedly goofy look. People don’t believe me when I say she liked to go out dancing, and it’s true we didn’t do it often, not in the later years, but it did happen and it never created much fuss, probably because we went late, and to gay places, and by the time the boys spotted her they were usually high and happy and full of an expansive sort of goodwill: they wanted to be protective of

her. ...

been theirs years ago, before she was anybody’s, and looking after her now was a way of demonstrating that sh...

I thought of Nina Simone dividing each note from the next, so viciously, with such precision, as Bach, her hero, had taught her to do, and I thought of her name for it—“Black Classical Music”—she hated the word jazz, considering it a white word for black people, she rejected it totally—and I thought of her voice, the way she could extend a note beyond the point of tolerability and force her audience to

concede to it, to her timescale, to her vision of the song, how she was completely without pity for her audience, and so relentless in pursuit of her freedom!

“In this life,” she said, falling back against the leather, “you’ve got to know what you want. You have to visualize it,

and then you have to pull it down. But we’ve talked about this many times. Many times.” I nodded and smiled, too

want,” Aimee was saying, “but I don’t think you do know, yet. OK, so you’re smart, we get that. You think what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, but it does. The brain is connected to the heart and the eye—it’s all visualization, all of it. Want it, see it, take it. No apologies. I don’t apologize ever for what I want! But I see you—and I see that you spend your life apologizing! It’s like you’ve got survivor’s guilt or something! But we’re not in Bendigo any more! You’ve left Bendigo—right? Like Baldwin left Harlem. Like Dylan left . . . wherever the fuck it was he was

from. Sometimes you gotta

get out—get the fuck out of Bendigo! Thanks be to Christ we both have. Long ago. Bendigo’s behind us. You get what ...

experience. What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process?

The whole history of us, the chronology sliding woozily back and forth in time and vodka, all resentments writ large, pleasures either diminished or destroyed, and the longer I spoke the clearer I saw and understood—as if the truth were a sunken thing rising up through a well of vodka to meet me—that only one thing had happened in London, really: I’d seen Tracey.

After so many years of not seeing Tracey I had seen her. None of the rest mattered. It was as if nothing in the period between the last time I saw her and this had happened at all.

“And she’s a dancer?” “Yes.” “Best type of people! Their bodies tell them what to do!”

“Well, you can’t make old friends,” announced Aimee, in

such a way that you might have assumed the phrase originated with her. “What would I do without my dear old Jude? Since we were fifteen! She fucked the dude I took to the school dance! But she calls me on my shit, yes she does. No one else does that

“Well, it was a disaster—we went to see a show. And she was in that fucking show.” “You spoke to her.” “No! I haven’t spoken to her in eight years. I just told you that. Are you even listening to me?”

“You don’t understand. She did a terrible thing to me. We were twenty-two. A terrible thing.”

put my face to the window, closed my eyes, felt the flecks of rain and told the story as I remembered it, the fiction and the reality, in a jagged, painful rush, as if I were running across broken glass, but when I opened my eyes it was to the sound of Aimee

laughing again. “It’s not fucking funny!” “Wait—are you being serious right now?”

was startling, after so many years of my own twisted logic, to hear the problem ironed out into Aimee’s preferred straight line. The clarity disturbed me.

Aimee sighed. “That’s the stupidest fucking thing I ever heard. You went and made yourself sad for no reason at all.” She reached out to touch my shoulder, but I turned my back on her and wiped a rogue tear from my eye. “Pretty stupid.” “No. We all have our shit. You should call your friend, though.” She made a little pillow of her jacket and lay her head against her window, and by the time we’d crossed Sixth Avenue she was already asleep. She was the queen of power naps, had to be, to live as she did.

Later I wondered whether we were chosen primarily for this reason, exactly

because we tended to be people with few external ties, without partners or children, with the very minimum of family. The way we lived certainly kept us that way. Out of Aimee’s four female assistants, only one of us ever had a child, and only then in her mid-forties, long after quitting. Climbing aboard that Learjet, you had to be untethered. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise. I had only one rope now—my mother—and she was, like Aimee, in her prime, although unlike Aimee my mother had very little need

you found my mother overbearing, you could take comfort in Miriam’s unassuming passivity, while people who were bored by Miriam relished the excitement my mother created wherever she went. Looking at Miriam now, nodding quickly, receptively, as my mother speechified, I knew that I was also glad of Miriam: she was a useful buffer. I went over and put a hand on my mother’s shoulder. She did not look up or stop talking, but she registered my touch and raised a hand to lay over mine, accepting the kiss I pressed to her cheek. I drew out a chair and sat down.

“I think it’s really a school she wants to build. A girls’ school.” “Because if she’s serious,” said my mother, over my reply, “you should advise her that she needs to talk to us, to be in partnership with government in one way or another . . . Obviously she has the financial means and the public’s attention—that’s all good—but without understanding the mechanics, it’s just a lot of good intention that goes nowhere. She needs to meet with the relevant authorities.”

I refused dessert, said I had to get going, but as I moved to take my raincoat off the back of the chair my mother nodded at Miriam and Miriam passed me a folder, official-looking, ring-bound, with chapters and photographs, lists of contacts, architectural suggestions, a brief history of education in the region, an analysis of the likely “media impact,” plans for government partnership, and so on: a “viability study.” The sun crept through the gray, a mental fog cleared, I saw that the whole lunch had been for this purpose, really, and I was just a channel through which information was meant to pass, to Aimee. My mother, too, was a customer.

And I, who couldn’t cry, once again found them both to be far more convincing children of my father than I had ever been. And yet, in our family, we had never wanted to admit this unlikelihood, we always batted away what we considered to be the banal and prurient curiosity of strangers—“But won’t she grow up confused?” “How will she choose between your cultures?”—to the point that sometimes I felt the whole purpose of my childhood was to demonstrate to the less enlightened that I was not confused and had no trouble choosing. “Life is confusing!”—my mother’s imperious rebuff. But isn’t there also a deep expectation of sameness between parent and child? I think I was strange to my mother and to my father,

a changeling belonging to neither one of them, and although this is of course true of all children, in the end—we are not our parents and they are not us—my father’s children would have come to this knowledge with a certain slowness, over years, were perhaps only learning it fully at this very moment, as the flames ate the pinewood, whereas I was born knowing it, I have always known it, it is a truth stamped all over my face.

discreet, surprisingly short woman, make-up free, so pale as to be almost translucent, in a prim-tweed suit with blue veins running up her legs, wearing her own natural, straight, brown

“They didn’t have a chance,” said my mother quietly, but firmly, and only later, walking back across the bridge, when my bad temper had passed, did I see that it was a sentence moving in two directions.

the kankurang wielded two machetes, long as arms. “Come!” cried Lamin, reaching a hand down for me, and I pulled myself up to him, clinging to his white shirt as he danced, trying to keep my balance. I looked down at the frenzy below. I thought: here is the joy I’ve been looking for all my

Who comes for the girls? If not the kankurang, who? Their mothers? Their grandmothers? A friend?

didn’t dare tell her that I lay out on our balcony on any hot day, aiming at exactly the quality she seemed to dread: more color, darkness, for all my freckles to join and merge and leave me with the same deep dark brown of my mother.

was an attitude I remembered from the old neighborhood, a way of representing, which in the village meant dressing for a certain part: I am one of the serious, modern young men. I

am the future of my country. I always felt absurd next to them. Compared to their sense of personal destiny, I looked like I was in the world by mere accident, having given no thought at all to what I represented, dressed in my wrinkled olive cargo pants and my filthy Converse, dragging a battered rucksack around. Lamin got back

And when the two sums of money I was looking for finally appeared in their adjacent windows all I did was sit and stare at them for a long time. In the comparison, as it turned out, Aimee came out a little ahead. And just like that the GDP of an entire country could fit into

a single person, like one Russian doll into another.

Tracey’s happiness was intense, she reached over the balcony, as if to pull her father up to her, yelling at him to come, come up here, Dad, come up, but he winked at us and said: “I’ve got a better idea, let’s go down the high road.” We ran down and each took a hand. The first thing I noticed was that he had the body of a dancer, and moved like a dancer, rhythmically, with force but also with lightness, so that we three didn’t just walk along the high road, we promenaded.

I snatched four musicals in a blissful panic: Ali Baba Goes to Town Broadway Melody of 1936 Swing Time It’s Always Fair Weather

He went back up to the counter to get milkshakes. When he returned he looked burdened, and without introducing the topic in any formal way, he began to talk to us about the inside, about how you found, when you were inside, that it wasn’t like the neighborhood, no, not at all, it was very different, because when you were inside everybody understood that people had better keep to their own kind, and that’s how it was, “like stayed with like,” there was hardly any mixing, not like up at the flats, and it wasn’t the guards or anyone telling you to do it, that’s just the way it was, tribes stick together, and it even goes by shade, he explained, pulling up his sleeve and pointing at his arm, so all of us that was dark like me, well, we’re over here, tight with each other, always—he drew a line on the Formica tabletop—and brown like you two is somewhere over here, and Paki is somewhere else, and Indian is somewhere else. White is split, too: Irish, Scottish, English. And in the English some of them are BNP and some are all right. Everybody goes with their own is the point, and it’s natural. Makes you think.

You learn a lot that you can’t learn in school, because these people won’t tell you nothing, nothing about African kings, nothing about Egyptian queens, nothing about Mohammed, they hide it all, they hide the whole of our history so we feel like we’re nothing, we feel like we’re at the bottom of the pyramid, that’s the whole plan, but the truth is we built the fucking Pyramids!

and watching him I felt I understood now what Tracey had meant by placing her father and Michael Jackson in one reality, and I didn’t find that she was a liar, exactly, or at least I felt that within the lie there was a deeper truth.