THURSDAY
20 SEPTEMBER, 1990
ISAIAH

               I slip another honey-coted apple wedge into my mouth as I turn the page of Erich Fromm's The Art Of Loving. As Sephardim, we should be eating panganat but they're far from readily available in Suffolk so we borrow the Ashkenazi tradition of apples. Despite September's haste to slip away before I can ground myself in it, the sun bathes hot on my back.

Not that I'm complaining. The delay of torrential downpour — the kind the Bible calls the apocalypse and England calls autumn — means Dorian and I still get to spend our free periods in our usual spot in the school grounds.

Normally, we'd use the time to study but today is Rosh Hashana and the school lies dormant.

Coeus Academy for Boys isn't a Jewish school, but with a rough seventy-four per cent Jewish pupil body, it becomes one in practice. Our assembly hall is primarily used for prayer and the meals served are kosher to alleviate the staff from the plight of having to cook several foods. We even have our own residential rabbi and, today, we were encouraged to join the Taschlich by the river even if it meant missing lessons.

We can't formally have the day off but, with almost all our teachers and administration too being Jewish, none give us proper work. Hence, we can afford to idle the day enjoying the sun between prayers and meals.

Dorian sits cross-legged beside me with his characteristically awful posture as he writes into a score notebook propped on his knee. His free hand plays with the friendship bracelet on my left wrist.

I'll never forget the day he showed the bracelets to me on my tenth birthday. Apparently, he practised for a month until he learned a flawless weave and still presented the gift with bashful reassurances that I didn't need to wear it if I didn't want to. Though I've always been firm in our no-gifts rule, I let it bend this time. He tied one around my left wrist and I tied the other to his right.

'Why blue and orange?' I asked, out of curiosity.

'They're your favourite colours.'

'Are they?'

'Aren't they?'

I see why he would think so. To this day, most of my clothes are orange or blue because they're the ones left at the charity shops; nobody wants orange clothes and blue is so ubiquitous that there are plenty left even after everyone else has rummaged through.

In all honesty, I didn't have a favourite colour. Until that moment.

His fingers prod into my wrist and I look up, thinking he's trying to get my attention. But he's just as engrossed in his music as he was half an hour ago and my gaze trails down to our hands.

Dorian's skin is the richest of browns, so warm and dark I'm surprised flowers don't mistake him for a garden. Yet that under his fingernails is pale enough that, from a distance, it looks as though he has painted his nails white.

I worship his fingers. His fingernails, which are always trimmed and clean — unlike mine: peeling and dotted by deficiencies, his knuckles that bend with no ache when he plays his instruments, and the way he's capable of performing completely different rhythms with each hand simultaneously.

Just once, I'd like to suckle honey from your fingers to pray for sweetness in the year to come. L'Shana Tovah tikatevu, Doron.

I allow the dream a moment to tickle my heartstrings before I force my attention to his other hand. Dorian has illegible handwriting except when it comes to music, where he somehow manages to make each note look digitally drawn — even treble clef and quarter rest symbols. The cream paper in his notebook is expensive enough for his pencil to leave no embossment to the other side of the page even when he presses it much harder than he should.

When it comes to composing, Dorian finds inspiration everywhere. Using a bulky QFX shoebox cassette recorder, he tapes everything from birdsong to hip-hop tracks on the radio to people's overlapping conversions at lunch. One of the times my diazepam made me pass out during a lesson — maths, this being before GCSEs when we both dropped it — rather than wake me up, he recorded my breathing.

Devices that record directly to CDs are still a technology too expensive even for him and the strain of burning CDs on the computer if he used an external recorder is too time-consuming. "Plus, they break easily." Those are the logical reasons he provides if asked why he still uses tapes, but in reality, it's because Dorian is a person of habit.

So, Dorian walks around with each footfall accompanied by the rattle of spare cassettes in his backpack. He's always listening to something since he's easily overwhelmed by noise... Though the things he records sound like more noise to me.

He crams his headset over my ears. 'What is this song?'

I listen to it for only a moment before I pull one side off my ear. 'It's called You Don't Have to Worry by En Vogue.' All the MTV I watch at Auntie Tamila's is finally useful.

The afternoon sun halos around his head and I have to squint to see his dimples. The golden light trickles onto his dark skin. I crave to kiss it off. The coming year will be sweet.

'My mum doesn't let me listen to the radio,' he says in his own defence, as though I don't already know.

'Your muma a lunatic,' I say, as though I don't hide my pocket radio like my savings. Before my mood sours, the recorded snippet of the song ends and a faint scribbling begins. 'What's this?'

Dorian leans close to listen from the vacant speaker resting behind my ear. 'It's you writing.'

'Ain't you already recorded that a million times?'

'Every poem sounds different.'

He meets my eye without moving back and the grounds blur into greens. You don't have any idea how you make my heart bloom, do you? You don't have any idea that though they might sound different, all my poems are about you. I haven't told you yet.

Dorian stays so close that his breath fans against my cheek. He smiles as he stares right into me without the respite of blinking. Dorian's music transforms him entirely, takes the shy and fumbling boy who stumbles over his words if I as much as touch his arm and makes him unafraid of everything.

'It's nice, right?'

I wish I'd have something substantial to say, the kind of thing people draped in embroidered silks as they lounge on daybeds quip to the pleasure of their artistic companions. But I hear nothing more than the scrape of a pen on paper.

Of course, it's nice if you think it's nice. I would eat pears every day if it pleased you even if I can't stand the taste.

Dorian pauses the recording, pulls the headphones from my ears, and suddenly becomes aware of his ambush, of our proximity, of the way he's driving me nearer the grass, the fact there won't be anywhere to flee soon and we'll have no choice but to kiss.

He jolts back. 'Sorry.'

'Don't be. I'd rather you kept going.'

He casts me his best attempt at a reprimanding stare. That's not funny, it says.

I stare back, unabashed. I'm not joking.

Grinning, I grab the top of his head and knock it gently to the side so his kippah falls off. Even the virgin coils of his buzzcut are soft against my palm. I loll his head back to me.

'You're obsessed with me.'

Ducking free of me, he shakes dry blades of grass from his black velvet kippah and replaces it on his head. 'I'm not obsessed with you.'

'Shame. Cause I'm definitely obsessed with you.'

Frown evaporating, he knees me in the rib and I pretend to lose my balance before I seize his head and shove it down. His kippah falls off again. I misjudge his laughter for surrender only to be knocked onto my side when he shoves me.

This is the play wrestling of brothers. It's no different now than it was when we were six. Regardless of whatever is developing between us, we'll always be best friends first, soulmates if only platonically, and that won't die or be replaced by the addition of something new. It's a comfort to know. It makes the path less daunting.

Dorian shakes his kippah clean for the second time. 'You coming to synagogue today?'

I slip the library check-out card which I use as a bookmark onto the opening of The Art of Loving and shut it. I thumb a bubble in the laminate. 'I were gonna see if I could pick up a shift somewhere.'

'On Rosh Hashanah?'

'Yeah, Dorian, some of us are poor.'

In the periphery, I see him grimace at his tactlessness, which is exactly what washes out my own guilt. He fumbles with his headphone cord. 'I only meant... aren't you doing something with your mum?'

'My muma hates me.'

I know he wants to argue. The dart of his eyes to mine says, don't say that, of course, she doesn't. But she does. The only reason she didn't have an abortion is that when she found out, as did everybody else and I had already ruined her life.

I check the time from the watch on Dorian's left wrist. He has one of the posh digital ones that includes the seconds, date, and an alarm. He never learnt to read analogue clocks, though I think it's less that he can't read them and more that he doesn't trust himself enough, so he checks once, then twice, and a third and fourth time and remains convinced he's read it wrong.

'We should probably go.'

He's in the middle of writing and I crack the aching knuckles of my fingers. I should go. I'm the one who needs an extra ten minutes for any walk just in case. And he doesn't have to let me use the showers in his dorm because we hardly have warm water at home and Muma yells at me if I run it for longer than three minutes.

My stomach twists. He risks so much for me. My scholarship doesn't include accommodation; I have no right to shower or sleep here. It's a miracle no one has reported us yet.

Well maybe not a miracle: Dorian's family were among the founders of both Coeus Academy and the town of Halsett. The Andrade name carries enough prestige to warrant him some special treatment. I'm not complaining, though. It's also the sole reason I got into this school. At the age of ten, Dorian is the one who helped me apply and even took it upon himself to vouch for me to Headteacher Zelikowitz.

Just as I'm about to tell him he can stay, Dorian shuts his notebook. He slips it into his backpack, along with his cassette recorder and the tangle of his headphones. Next, he picks up the plastic food container. He eats one apple wedge and offers me the last one.

I pack my own things and adjust my rainbow kippah which has stayed on through our wrestling thanks to pins that attach it to my braids.

We start our trek to the House Perses dormitory building. The sun radiates our backs though the horizon is grey, the base of the clouds undefined to reveal rain over Halsett.

'Oi, Isaiah, heard you were at the doctor's yesterday.'

My attention snaps to Bechor and the rest of the lacrosse team lounging on the opposite side of the duck pond as we pass it. All the other boys idling their day by the water look up, ever the attentive audience.

'Is it true you've got AIDS?'

I affix my stare to the dorm building. The speed rumours spread here will never fail to exhaust me. Gossip to rich people is like money to everyone else.

'I'd keep my distance, Dorian.'

Dorian spins around but I pull him along before he can reward them a response. He'll only stumble over his words and give them more to ridicule. Realising as much himself, he resists only for a second, though continues to throw glances over his shoulder as laughter chases us out beyond their line of sight.

'Are you okay?'

'Criss.'

Dorian eyes me as though he doesn't quite believe me.

He taps his thigh. Disorganised to the untrained eye but I know he's playing Chopin's first piano concerto: he's nervous. 'I forgot to ask — how was the doctor?' He's avoided asking all day but Bechor severed his self-control and the question is spoken with a whine to his tone that reveals he regrets it even as it's on his tongue.

'I've lost weight. And I've less iron. Which is the opposite of what's supposed to be happening so... not thrilled.' The weight in my stomach lifts when I glance at him and see his grim expression. Laughing, I shove him. 'Relax. I ain't dying.'

As he falls back in step with me, his fingers brush mine, such a light touch I'd think it accidental if I didn't know there's no such thing as accidental touch with Dorian. The point of contact warms me all the way to my chest and I forget all about money, Bechor, and doctors.

The flavour of honey and apple lingers on my tongue. I smile to myself. This is the year we graduate. This is the year we leave. This is the year we get away from it all.

Notes

Panganat: Pomengranate.

Rosh Hashana: The start of the Jewish new year. 

Taschlich: A ritual of casting away your sins performed on the first day of Rosh Hashana. 

L'Shana Tovah tikatevu, Doron: Jewish New Year wish. Lit. "May you be inscribed for a good year." Doron (lit. gift) is the root word where the name Dorian comes from and Isaiah's nickname for him.