At Tracey’s, the only raised voices came from the television. I knew I was meant to pity Tracey for her fatherlessness — the blight marking every other door on our corridor — and to be thankful for my two married parents, but whenever I sat on her huge white leather settee eating her Angel Delight and peacefully watching Easter Parade or The Red Shoes—Tracey’s mother would tolerate only Technicolor musicals — I couldn’t help but notice the placidity of a small, all-female household. In Tracey’s home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they had never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home. No one was surprised by Tracey’s father’s failure to foment revolution or do anything else. Yet Tracey was steadfast and loyal to his memory, far more likely to defend her absent father than I was to speak kindly of my wholly attentive one. Whenever her mother bad-mouthed him, Tracey would make sure to take me into her room, or some other private spot, and quickly integrate whatever her mother had just said into her own official story, which was that her father had not abandoned her, no, not at all, he was only very busy because he was one of Michael Jackson’s backing dancers. Few people could keep up with Michael Jackson as he danced — in fact, almost nobody could, maybe there were only twenty dancers in the whole world who were up to it. Tracey’s father was one such. He hadn’t even had to finish his audition — he was that good they knew right away. This was why he was hardly ever home: he was on an eternal world tour. The next time he would be in town was probably next Christmas, when Michael played Wembley. On a clear day we could see this stadium from Tracey’s balcony. It’s hard for me to say now how much credence I gave this tale — certainly some part of me knew that Michael Jackson, at last free of his family, now danced alone — but just like Tracey I never brought up the subject in her mother’s presence. As a fact it was, in my mind, at one and the same time absolutely true and obviously untrue, and perhaps only children are able to accommodate double-faced facts like these.
I was at Tracey’s, watching Top of the Pops, when the Thriller video came on, it was the first time any of us had seen it. Tracey’s mother got very excited: without actually standing, she danced madly, bopping up and down in the creases of her recliner. “Go on, girls! Let’s be having you! Get moving — come on!” We unstuck ourselves from the sofa and began sliding back and forth across the rug, me poorly, Tracey with a good deal of skill. We spun round, we lifted our right legs, leaving the foot dangling like the foot of a puppet, we jerked our zombie bodies. There was so much new information: the red leather trousers, the red leather jacket, what had once been an Afro now transformed into something greater even than Tracey’s own ringlets! And of course that pretty brown girl in blue, the potential victim. Was she “half-caste” too?
Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult.
So read the credits, at the beginning, these were Michael’s own words, but what did they mean? We understood only the seriousness of this word “film.” What we were watching was not a music video at all, it was a work of art that should properly be seen in a cinema, it was really a world event, a clarion call. We were modern! This was modern life! Generally I felt distant from modern life and the music that came with it — my mother had made a sankofa bird of me — but it happened that my father had told me a story about Fred Astaire himself once coming to Michael’s house, coming as a kind of disciple, and he had begged Michael to teach him the moonwalk, and this makes sense to me, even now, for a great dancer has no time, no generation, he moves eternally through the world, so that any dancer in any age may recognize him. Picasso would be incomprehensible to Rembrandt, but Nijinsky would understand Michael Jackson. “Don’t stop now, girls — get up!” cried Tracey’s mother, when for a moment we paused to rest against her sofa. “Don’t stop till you get enough! Get moving!” How long that song seemed — longer than life. I felt it would never end, that we were caught in a time loop, and would have to dance in this demonic way for ever, like poor Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes: “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by, but the red shoes dance on…” But then it was over. “That was fucking priceless,” sighed Tracey’s mother, forgetting herself, and we bowed and curtsied and ran to Tracey’s room.
“She loves it when she sees him on TV,” confided Tracey, once we were alone. “It makes their love stronger. She sees him and she knows he still loves her.”
“Which one was he?” I asked.
“Second row, at the end, on the right,” replied Tracey, without missing a beat.
I did not try — it wasn’t possible — to integrate these “facts” about Tracey’s father with the very few occasions I actually saw him, the first of which was the most terrible, it was in early November, not long after we had watched Thriller. We were all three in the kitchen, trying to make jacket potatoes stuffed with cheese and bacon, we were going to wrap them in foil and take them with us to Roundwood Park, where we’d watch the fireworks. The kitchens in the flats on Tracey’s estate were even smaller than the kitchens in ours: when you opened the oven door it almost scraped the wall opposite. To have three people in there at the same time, one person — in this case, Tracey — had to sit on the counter. It was her job to scrape the potato out of its jacket, and then my job, standing next to her, to mix the potato with grated cheese and bacon bits snipped with a pair of scissors, and then her mother put it all back in the jacket and returned it to the oven for browning. Despite my mother’s constant implication that Tracey’s mother was slovenly, a magnet for chaos, I found her kitchen both cleaner and more orderly than ours. The food was never healthy and yet it was prepared with seriousness and care, whereas my mother, who aspired to healthy eating, could not spend fifteen minutes in a kitchen without being reduced to a sort of self-pitying mania, and quite often the whole, misguided experiment (to make vegetarian lasagne, to do “something” with okra) became so torturous for everybody that she would manufacture a row and storm off, shouting. We would end up eating Findus Crispy Pancakes again. Round Tracey’s, things were simpler: you began with the clear intention of making Findus Crispy Pancakes or pizza (from frozen) or sausages and chips and it was all delicious and no one shouted about it. These potatoes were a special treat, a Fireworks Night tradition. Outside it was dark, though only five in the afternoon, and all over the estate you could smell gunpowder. Each flat had its private arsenal, and the random bangs and small, localized conflagrations had begun two weeks before, as soon as the sweetshops started selling fireworks. No one waited for official events. Cats were the most frequent victims of this general pyromania, but every now and then some kid went off to Casualty. Because of all the banging — and how used we were to bangs — at first the sound of someone beating on Tracey’s front door didn’t register, but then we heard somebody half yelling and half whispering, and we recognized panic and caution fighting each other. It was a man’s voice, he was saying: “Let me in. Let me in! You there? Open up, woman!”