My father was sent to get the shoes. The pink of the leather turned out to be a lighter shade than I’d hoped, it looked like the underside of a kitten, and the sole was a dirty gray cat’s tongue, and there were no long pink satin ribbons to criss-cross over the ankles, no, only a sad little elastic strap which my father had sewn on himself. I was extremely bitter about it. But perhaps they were, like the espadrilles, deliberately “simple,” in good taste? It was possible to hold on to this idea right up to the moment when, having entered the hall, we were told to change into our dance clothes by the plastic chairs and go over to the opposite wall, to the barre. Almost everybody had the pink satin shoes, not the pale pink, piggy leather I was stuck with, and some — girls whom I knew to be on benefits, or fatherless, or both — had the shoes with long satin ribbons, criss-crossing round their ankles. Tracey, who was standing next to me, with her left foot in her mother’s hand, had both — the deep pink satin and the criss-cross — and also a full tutu, which no one else had even considered as a possibility, no more than turning up to a first swimming lesson in a diving suit. Miss Isabel, meanwhile, was sweet-faced and friendly, but old, perhaps as old as forty-five. It was disappointing. Solidly constructed, she looked more like a farmer’s wife than a ballet dancer and was all over pink and yellow, pink and yellow. Her hair was yellow, not blond, yellow like a canary. Her skin was very pink, raw pink, now that I think of it she probably suffered from rosacea. Her leotard was pink, her tracksuit bottoms were pink, her cover-up ballet cardigan was mohair and pink — yet her shoes were silk and yellow, the same shade as her hair. I was bitter about this, too. Yellow had never been mentioned! Next to her, in the corner, a very old white man in a trilby sat playing an upright piano, “Night and Day,” a song I loved and was proud to recognize. I got the old songs from my father, whose own father had been a keen pub singer, the kind of man — or so my father believed — whose petty criminality represents, at least in part, some thwarted creative instinct. The piano player was called Mr. Booth. I hummed loudly along with him as he played, hoping to be heard, putting a lot of vibrato into my humming. I was a better singer than dancer — I was not a dancer at all — although I took too much pride in my singing, in a manner I knew my mother found obnoxious. Singing came naturally to me, but things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth.
Our mothers served as our balance, as our foot-rests. We placed one hand on their shoulders, we placed one foot on their bended knees. My body was presently in the hands of my mother — being hoiked up and tied down, fastened and straightened, brushed off — but my mind was on Tracey, and on the soles of her ballet shoes, upon which I now read “Freed” clearly stamped in the leather. Her natural arches were two hummingbirds in flight, curved in on themselves. My own feet were square and flat, they seemed to grind through the positions. I felt like a toddler placing wooden blocks at a series of right angles to each other. Flutter, flutter, flutter said Isabel, yes that’s lovely Tracey. Compliments made Tracey throw her head back and flare her little pig nose awfully. Aside from that, she was perfection, I was besotted. Her mother seemed equally infatuated, her commitment to those classes the only consistent feature of what we would now call “her parenting.” She came to class more than any other mother, and while there her attention rarely wavered from her daughter’s feet. My own mother’s focus was always elsewhere. She could never simply sit somewhere and let time pass, she had to be learning something. She might arrive at the beginning of class with, say, The Black Jacobins in hand, and by the time I came over to ask her to swap my ballet shoes for tap she would already be a hundred pages through. Later, when my father took over, he either slept or “went for a walk,” the parental euphemism for smoking in the churchyard.
At this early stage Tracey and I were not friends or enemies or even acquaintances: we barely spoke. Yet there was always this mutual awareness, an invisible band strung between us, connecting us and preventing us from straying too deeply into relations with others. Technically, I spoke more to Lily Bingham — who went to my school — and Tracey’s own standby was sad old Danika Babić, with her ripped tights and thick accent, she lived on Tracey’s corridor. But though we giggled and joked with these white girls during class, and although they had every right to assume that they were our focus, our central concern — that we were, to them, the good friends we appeared to be — as soon as it came to break-time and squash and biscuits Tracey and I lined up next to each other, every time, it was almost unconscious, two iron filings drawn to a magnet.
It turned out Tracey was as curious about my family as I was about hers, arguing, with a certain authority, that we had things “the wrong way round.” I listened to her theory one day during break, dipping a biscuit anxiously into my orange squash. “With everyone else it’s the dad,” she said, and because I knew this to be more or less accurate I could think of nothing more to say. “When your dad’s white it means—” she continued, but at that moment Lily Bingham came and stood next to us and I never did learn what it meant when your dad was white. Lily was gangly, a foot taller than everyone else. She had long, perfectly straight blond hair, pink cheeks and a happy, open nature that seemed, both to Tracey and me, the direct consequence of 29 Exeter Road, a whole house, to which I had been recently invited, eagerly reporting back to Tracey — who had never been — a private garden, a giant jam-jar full of “spare change” and a Swatch watch as big as a human man hanging on a bedroom wall. There were, consequently, things you couldn’t discuss in front of Lily Bingham, and now Tracey shut her mouth, stuck her nose in the air and crossed the room to ask her mother for her ballet shoes.
What do we want from our mothers when we are children? Complete submission.
Oh, it’s very nice and rational and respectable to say that a woman has every right to her life, to her ambitions, to her needs, and so on — it’s what I’ve always demanded myself — but as a child, no, the truth is it’s a war of attrition, rationality doesn’t come into it, not one bit, all you want from your mother is that she once and for all admit that she is your mother and only your mother, and that her battle with the rest of life is over. She has to lay down arms and come to you. And if she doesn’t do it, then it’s really a war, and it was a war between my mother and me. Only as an adult did I come to truly admire her — especially in the last, painful years of her life — for all that she had done to claw some space in this world for herself. When I was young her refusal to submit to me confused and wounded me, especially as I felt none of the usual reasons for refusal applied. I was her only child and she had no job — not back then — and she hardly spoke to the rest of her family. As far as I was concerned, she had nothing but time. Yet still I couldn’t get her complete submission! My earliest sense of her was of a woman plotting an escape, from me, from the very role of motherhood. I felt sorry for my father. He was still a fairly young man, he loved her, he wanted more children — it was their daily argument — but on this issue, as on all things, my mother refused to budge. Her mother had birthed seven children, her grandmother, eleven. She was not going back to all that. She believed my father wanted more children in order to entrap her, and she was basically right about that, although entrapment in this case was only another word for love. How he loved her! More than she knew or cared to know, she was someone who lived in her own dreamscape, who presumed that everyone around her was at all times feeling exactly as she was. And so when she began, first slowly, and then with increasing speed, to outgrow my father, both intellectually and personally, she naturally expected that he was undergoing the same process at the same time. But he carried on as before. Looking after me, loving her, trying to keep up, reading The Communist Manifesto in his slow and diligent way. “Some people carry the bible,” he told me proudly. “This is my bible.” It sounded impressive — it was meant to impress my mother — but I had already noticed that he seemed to always be reading this book and not much else, he took it to every dance class, and yet never got any further than the first twenty pages. Within the context of the marriage it was a romantic gesture: they’d first encountered each other at a meeting of the SWP, in Dollis Hill. But even this was a form of misunderstanding for my father had gone to meet nice leftist girls in short skirts with no religion while my mother really was there for Karl Marx. My childhood took place in the widening gap. I watched my autodidact mother swiftly, easily, outstrip my father. The shelves in our lounge — which he built — filled up with second-hand books, Open University textbooks, political books, history books, books on race, books on gender, “All the ‘isms,’” as my father liked to call them, whenever a neighbor happened to come by and spot the queer accumulation.