I met Christine at a bus stop. We both carried violas. Not just nerds but black nerds, _female viola-playin_g black nerds. Christine was at least discreet: wasp-waisted Nigerian form neat in sensible skirt suits. I had less instinct for self-preservation. One red shoe, one white, a red shirt, a white skirt, and a red-and-white tartan beret. For this ensemble I took abuse from four Jamaican girls in the back seat who found everything I did and wore and said offensive to reason:

Illustration by GRAFILU

“BUT WHERE’D YOU GET THEM SHOES DOUGH?”

“They’re two pairs. One from each.”

“TWO PAIRS? THEY AIN’T PAIRS!”

“They’re almost identical. It was cheap—a charity shop.”

“BUT DID YOU WASH THEM DOUGH? OI I’M ARKSING YOU AQUESTION. OH MY DAYS SHE AIN’T EVEN WASHED THEM!”

One day, my skirt, for which I was too fat, freed itself from its safety pin and fell round my ankles, revealing my brother’s boxers. Christine did me a great charity: she sat down beside me and began a conversation, as if I were a normal human being.

A funny sort of friendship—conducted mainly on the bus or in the viola section of the Brent Youth Orchestra, which consisted of just us two. We should have been insufferable; actually, only I was insufferable. Christine was principled and hardworking, determined to break what politicians call “a cycle of urban underachievement.” Her situation was more precarious than mine; she was correspondingly less reckless. She did not spend the summer of 1992 smoking weed, practicing a signature inspired by Elizabeth I. She was always reminding me of our black-nerd goals. We would not get pregnant, we would pass our exams, we would attend university. Admire the music of Mary J. Blige but try not to live the life of Mary J. Blige.

We did our exams. We went to university. Christine fell pregnant. But she had her baby and carried on: finished her degree, qualified as a teacher, had another child, continued being remarkable. Whenever I was in England, we would meet. She told me of her grownup life, and I marvelled. I told her of my latest mishap. When I fell out of my bedroom window, when my flat burned down, when I dropped the house phone and my cell phone in water on the same day (toilet, vase), when I electrocuted myself cleaning a light switch—Christine extended me the charity of believing that it was because my mind was on higher things that I made a mess of everything else, an explanation my own family discounted circa 1987. Christine is one of many people to whom I am always surreptitiously apologizing for my obscene luck. Why do I have money when so many of my friends and family—all of whom have worked harder than I—do not?

Can’t have been an easy e-mail to write. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, and she knew how it looked. She was desperate: a housing-related debt that was making life as a single working mother untenable. Methodically she laid out the rent arrears, the rate of repayment. A financial illiterate, I focussed on two sentences at the end:

This is really emotional but I have gotten this far and I know that I can do this, if someone just believes in me and trusts me. Who can I ask but you?

Not such a lot of money. No skin off my nose. Why did I make such a performance of it?

hi christine, just wondering how things are going and when we can expect our first repayment. best, zx Christine, could you please answer my previous email? i’m meeting my accountant and need to know when you’re intending to start paying me back. . . . it doesn’t matter if you can’t start immediately, but i do need you to answer my emails and texts. thanks, zadie I kept e-mailing. She kept not replying. Somewhere in the silence, I let suspicion breed. There should be a word that means “the fatal underestimation of another’s honesty.”

Christine, I’m really hoping you’re stuck out of the country because of the ash cloud, because the christine i know (or thought i knew!) would never ask someone for X grand and then disappear. I don’t care about the money. I just want to know you’re not dead. If I have to go to your mother to ask, I’ll do that. But i’d rather hear it from you. Please, if you have a moment, just drop me a quick line? It’s the decent thing to do, no? love, zadie

Until this episode, I’d thought of myself as a working-class girl who’d happened upon money, my essential character unchanged. But money is not neutral; it changes everything, including the ability to neutrally judge what people will or will not do for it. George Sand: “Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.” Well, it needn’t, but it does the way I do it.

I continued passively-aggressively texting in the middle-class tradition—to the wrong number, it turned out. And here’s news: when one is turfed out of council property one does not take one’s Internet connection along. The first check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire someone to do that. Then Christine did me one more charity: she forgave me. ♦