TUESDAY
08 OCTOBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               The fluorescent lights of the Londis corner shop sear my eyes in their sockets. I squeeze them shut, praying for the migraine that has been lurking in my periphery for hours not to pounce though I know I'm testing my luck. Working on my dissertation this late wouldn't do wonders even if I wasn't doing it in this lighting.

Someone snaps their fingers and I jolt. A woman waits at the till, waving a hand in my direction as she leans over the counter. 'Oi, hello!'

I apologise as I stand from the saddle stool. She glares at me the whole time as I scan her celery, clementines, and laundry detergent, an odd selection of ingredients for someone to be buying at this time. We mostly get students buying ramen past nine o'clock. I do my best to ignore the needles her stare tacks into my hands and face as I take the money from her.

'Why are you sitting down while working? It doesn't look good.'

Am I supposed to stand for eight hours even when there are no customers? Most of us who take nightshifts are students and our manager is perfectly fine with us working on school things on company time as long as everything else is done. I imagine telling her that I'm disabled though I've had this interaction enough times to know the response will be "you don't look disabled" which is just a complicated way of saying you're a liar.

I offer her the receipt and change. 'Have a good night, ma'am.'

With a scornful huff, she takes her shopping and leaves. I watch the door swing shut with a chime of the bell and resist the urge to roll my eyes.

Someone places a bottle of Coke and a bag of sweet chilli crisps on the counter. 'She needs to relax.' He says it with the exaggerated annunciation of a comedy sitcom.

I grant him a smile though don't bother meeting his eye.

He opens his wallet but his fingers card the notes tucked into it without taking any out. 'Do I know you?'

I don't glance at his face before I reply. 'I don't think so.'

'Yeah, I know you.'

I look up to a face I certainly don't recognise and just as I'm about to tell him that he's mistaken me for someone else, he leers. I still don't recognise him but I'll recognise a smirk like this on any face.

'My mates have told me about you. Doubt there's anyone else in this city with skin like that.'

There certainly are other people in Oxford with vitiligo, but what are the chances there are other people in Oxford with vitiligo who are common conversation topics among men? Among men who discuss their conquests with their mates.

Those are my ideal men, the kind who don't notice when I don't get hard and I don't have to explain my complicated web of chronic illness and medications, any one of which could be responsible. No one else is going to be like Dorian, who, the first time my body betrayed me at the pivotal moment and I withered with embarrassment because most eighteen-year-olds have the opposite problem, said, "when have you ever done things just because everyone else does?"

Once, a man pulled his trousers up and handed me a tenner and when I told him I'm not a hooker, he stared at me with genuine shock and asked, "Why would you let me treat you like this?" Which meant: what are you gaining from this? The answer I gave was a shrug to say, nothing.

Why do I do it then? I don't know. Why did I start smoking? I can't remember anymore but it's too late to quit now.

Besides, I'm not intended to enjoy sex. I was taught that long before I kissed Dorian. My place is under men who can't handle the intimacy of beds.

The man finally peels the money from his wallet but doesn't offer it to me. 'So when do you get off?'

I check the time. 'Ten minutes.'

Say yes. Just say yes. I've had plenty of men fuck me in the back alley or my car. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. Just because he's back doesn't mean anything has changed–

'But I have to ring my mum tonight.'

The stranger grimaces in the way a man does when reminded the things he fucks are in fact people who continue to exist when he stops looking. He finally gives me the money and slides his night snack from the counter.

'I'm here three nights a week.' I'm not sure why I tell him. Do I feel sorry? Am I trying to soften the rejection — This isn't about you, don't take it personally? We both know he won't try again. I return to my regular script: 'Have a good night, sir.'

With a jingle of the bell, the shop is empty again.

Sarah comes to relieve me from my shift to spend the last hour alone and I pack up my still-incomplete dissertation. I was supposed to submit it last spring but my health got so bad that I was given an extension.

The night air clings to me with the humidity of recent rain. My arms rise to goosebumps under my zip-up and a shiver jerks at my spine. My car takes nearly the whole drive to warm up and when I arrive at my flat, I find it equally frosty.

Still, I open a window to light a cigarette. I take several deep drags before I pick up the telephone receiver and dial. I'm sure most sons don't phone their mothers at three in the morning but Muma won't mind. A single dose of relief injects into my chest when I hear the dial tone and not a robotic voice that informs me the line has been disconnected.

It rings several times before she picks up.

'Hi, Muma.' When she doesn't respond, I continue. 'How yuh stay?'

'Me irie.' The words have barely left her before she coughs. They build up until the fit is so violent I feel like my lungs are turning inside out and, the way you yawn when someone else does, I clear my throat.

I wait for them to stop before I speak. 'You sure?'

'It's only a cough, nun that'll kill me.' Her impatience can be tasted in the air like the approach of winter. 'Not that yuh care.'

My ribs splinter with thorns that pierce straight through my torso. 'Course, I'd care.'

Muma hums a laugh. 'What, yuh rush back here and do what then? What good would yuh be, ah? Yuh ain't no doctor. Nuh, yuh want to study literature.' She sucks her teeth whilst I roll my eyes. 'Trust, when yuh is my age and ain't got no money, you'll wish you'd'a listened to yuh muma.'

'Uni's criss, thanks for asking.'

I invited her to my bachelor's graduation, thinking that when she saw I was best of the 240 students placed in the English course, maybe she'd be even a little proud of me, but she didn't show. In the end, that was a relief. Despite my monthly calls to her, I haven't seen my mother in person since I left and I don't know if I'd be able to handle it.

'I were ringing to let you know I got paid yesterday so I transferred what I could to your account.' I pause for a few seconds, but she doesn't thank me. 'Maybe you could get someone to fix the heating. Winter's coming, it'll be freezing in that house.'

'Like yuh give me enough for that. Yuh give me petty cash.'

'Still enough for heroin, yeah?'

The words reach my tongue before my brain and I regret them the moment I speak. Still, when the pregnant pause comes from her end, I don't apologise.

'Well, weh yuh ah seh? Sum going on in your life other than them books?'

'Don't reckon I'd tell you if there were,' I say, but my tongue gets away from me the second time tonight. 'Dorian's back.'

I tell Muma because I need to tell someone and she's the only person who knows my name other than Dorian himself. I tell her because I need to somehow convince her that she wasn't right, that he found me, that he cared enough to look for me, that he didn't return to the country a year ago and we didn't have a reunion based wholly on chance.

Maybe it's exactly because I tell her that she knows the opposite is true. She was right and he never did come back for me. Dorian would have gone the rest of our lives living on the same street and not cared enough to look for me. I'm a mamzer, a child conceived through sex forbidden by halakah: I'll always be below him.

'Don't do it, baby.'

'Do what?' I hate the bite in my tone; it declares her victory.

Every fight we've had during my lifetime has balanced on the crux that is Dorian and if she wins this one, she wins all of them. The domino chain starts at you're not good enough for him and culminates with I should've had an abortion.

'Whatever yuh is thinking of doing with him.'

For a moment, I allow myself to pretend she's looking out for me, that after everything, maybe she does genuinely care. But I know full well the only person she's worried about is herself — the umbilical cord never quite severed, I'll always be an extension of her and my shame biomagnifies in her bloodstream.

'Yuh's gonna regret it.'

'I know...'

But it's Dorian.

I return the cigarette to my lips. My inhale trembles and refuses to carry the smoke with it.

I'm nothing but stiff joints and hurt, what difference will a little more make? So what if I ransack the whole city until I find him only to be shoved away? I'll get to see him again. I'd do anything to see him again, just for a minute.

She deciphers the turmoil from my silence and hums with a level of sympathy hitherto alien to her. 'Yuh's addicted to punishing yourself... Yuh is just like yuh muma.'

The silence that settles between us takes care of goodbyes on our behalf. There are no well wishes or reminders of love in conversations with my mother. The way country folk shoo out guests with a slap on their thighs before they climb to their feet, we sit mute until one hangs up.

Tonight, it's my turn. Though I breach etiquette to say, 'Fix the heating. Please.'

Dropping the phone back into its hold, I slump against the windowsill and watch the night sky as I finish my cigarette. The smoke I exhale camouflages quickly into the grey, aided by the peripheral blur of my tears which have finally stopped. Oxfordshire has too much light pollution to show even a third of the stars you could spot in Suffolk. Not that it matters. Who am I going to count the stars with here?

For all the things I sacrificed to be here, Oxford has turned out to be less than desired.

I was promised so much — Move to a city, get out of your country village, things are all glorious there. The City has done nothing but make me claustrophobic. Anywhere I look, I face a wall. I can't handle seeing so many people every day but not looking one in the eye. I miss being able to not wear shoes and not have to fear glass or feel weird — when did I start caring about being weird? The city has made me cold and paranoid, and I was told I'd find love.

Maybe the issue is the people. Anyone who thinks people are more tolerant in Oxford has never been to Oxford... or maybe they've never been to Halsett.

People in Oxford don't call me slurs with the ease they might in the country, or draw swastikas on the dust on my car, or tell me to go back to where I came from — as if I wasn't born here, as if I wouldn't if I could. But they find their ways. Oxford is full of academics who treat oppression as a thought experiment, who debate socialism over glasses of champagne, and pressure me to rank my Blackness and my Judaism, and then, where does your homosexuality fit into all this? As if they're jelly tots you can pick out of a packet one flavour at a time based on preference — Today I'm gay and tomorrow I'll be chronically ill.

People who are a little too happy to read the outright racism and anti-Semitism in the literature we're assigned and like to play "devil's advocate", the same people who "just don't understand" why they have to read a single novel from the global south because they know, just like we all do, that "classic" is code for white.

Of course, these reasons are scapegoats. The real reason Oxford turned out such a disappointment is that it was never about Oxford, it was about coming here with Dorian.

It was about being free with Dorian, about kissing him on the street because we were finally surrounded by only strangers, about living together without having to whisper in our own bed, about him cooking for me while I read a book out loud, about coming home and unloading all our daily frustrations to someone who understands and knows when to make a joke and when to caress. I could cope with anything if I could go home to him.

Notes

How yuh stay?: How are you?

Me irie: I'm fine.

Criss: Good/alright.

Weh yuh ah seh?: What ae you saying? Another way to ask how are you or what's going on with you?

Mamzer: Bastard. A child born out of sex that is prohibited in Judaism (affair or incest). Mamzers and their parents suffer the biblical punishment of "karet", also know as "excision", which means to be separated from the Jewish people, and according to scripture, will be excluded both from Jewish communities and from Heaven until the tenth generation that is descended from a mamzer.