THURSDAY
07 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               The rustle of the wisteria scrapes against my skin. That's what it feels like, anyway. The nearest protruding roots are three metres from my trainers and yet each shiver of its leaves flashes scalpels through the air. The seams of my hired suit are polluted with remnants of detergent or embedded with parasitic thorns. I can't stop pulling at it which I'm sure Rabbi Aharon has noticed.

The itch is worst in my palms and feet where it bristles under four layers of skin. No matter how much I claw and scrub my hands against my trousers, the prickling only inflames until I'm sure the only thing that'll get rid of it is to dig my teeth into the core.

The migraine I've been evading for months has grown impatient. I'm constantly on the verge of tears or throwing up. The sky is too bright, Rabbi Aharon's voice too hoarse. Everything from the croak of the crows to the pressure of the pins that keep my kippah in place fills me with rage.

I need a cigarette.

Rabbi Aharon recites passages from Psalms and Proverbs, then the memorial prayers. I asked for the whole service to be performed at the graveside; it would feel ridiculous to occupy the temple for a single mourner. When I met with him yesterday, he did me the kindness of pretending he didn't know my mother, that he wasn't fully aware I'd be the only person attending and asked me all the same questions you would of a stranger with a dead relative.

'And her parents, are you sure they won't come?'

'I don't even know their names.'

For a moment, I imagine climbing off a plane in Kingston and running from temple to temple asking for any information about anyone with the surname Matalon, asking if anyone remembers the nineteen-year-old girl who fled the country twenty-four years ago.

I imagine finding her parents in a mansion once built by British colonizers, immediately identifiable from its Georgian architecture, elevated on stilts and embellished with balustrades and finials like I've seen in pictures. It's painted a gentle yellow, the same shade as the chicks in Auntie Tamila's backyard. I'm led to a sitting room with windows that reach from floor to ceiling and are covered by sheer curtains to diffuse furious sunbeams into soft light, and there, my grandparents are weeping into lace handkerchiefs because they've been weeping for twenty-four years and only stop when they see me. Somehow, they know before I can say a word.

They rush to embrace me and assure me they regret their abandonment of her every day, that they scoured all of England until they eventually had to give up and pray that, one day, she'd return. God heard their prayers. God sent me to them. This is the second chance they've begged for. They're sorry for abandoning me too. They love me, mamzer or not. Won't I stay?

An icy gust thrusts me back to the cemetery where I'm alone.

Dorian offered to come. He offered so many times it started to sound like insisting. I almost caved, solely because Muma would hate it more than anything. Anything except having Dorian's mother at her funeral — the only name Muma speaks with more venom than mine is Miriam Andrade.

But I'm too tired even for spite and pettiness. So I came alone.

I'm the only one here to shovel dirt into the grave. I'm the only one here to escort her to God.

I recite Psalms 78:38 as I do, then Isaiah 6:7 — "Your transgression will depart and your sin will be atoned." When the coffin is covered, I face Jerusalem to speak the burial Kaddish. As important as it is in Jewish tradition, I wrote no eulogy. I couldn't come up with a word to say. It's almost funny: with a master's degree in literature, I could be expected to be a better writer.

Rabbi Aharon doesn't seem to hold it against me. When all the prayers are said, he squeezes my shoulder with what I can only describe as a fatherly air though I wouldn't know what that's like. It brews something horrible in my stomach.

'Please come talk to me if you need it, Isaiah. I know you haven't often felt it, but you are always welcome here.'

He leaves to allow me privacy with Muma. I crouch beside the gravestone to brush away dust that isn't there.

He's right. I haven't ever felt welcome here. Every Jewish person in this town knew I'm a mamzer before I understood what the word meant.

Dorian used to say he wishes he could care about people's opinions as little as I do but he has it wrong. It's not that I don't care... it was just always too late for me. I was born a mamzer, people have been judging me since my conception and there's nothing I can do about that. I have nothing to lose so I might as well be openly gay — at least it grants some variation in the scripture verses spat at me. But I doubt the vitriol is any less toxic in my body than it would be in his.

As Muma's addiction got worse, Halsett found out about that too. It didn't help that she didn't raise me Jewish because she didn't raise me at all and in my ignorance, I stumbled in ways that are obvious and unforgivable to our Sephardi Haredi community. I didn't get many blessings, not on Shabbat or on holidays. Nor did Muma, who had stopped attending even Yom Kippur services by the time I was nine.

She never got her escape. She came to England to get away from the shame but, unwittingly, she carried it with her. Like sand that finds its way into your luggage and then into your house where it slowly gathers in the fibres of the carpet and between the floorboards until every door opened is a flipped hourglass that counts down to damnation.

Did she ever regret leaving? Does she ever wish she had stayed, had the patience to work things out with her parents? I know I do. You can't escape a place if you carry it with you.

And, it turns out, you can't escape a person when half of you is them. Not even when they die. Even after six years of not seeing her face, I can't tell which of my thoughts and feelings are mine and which are hers.

If pruning Dorian out of my veins was difficult, the infestation that is my mother will be impossible. She hasn't just diseased my roots, she planted them into contaminated soil. Professionals will advise to burn the whole tree down before it infects the forest.

The others might find joy in watching me char. Their stain would finally be cleared out. Or maybe they wouldn't: every person in this town appears untarnished by sin as long as I'm around.

I never felt welcome here. Coming to temple was something I did because it was an excuse to get away from Muma that would result in relatively small punishments. She hates when I leave the house. She thinks I go out to suck cock for the whole town to see or whatever else drags more sand over her threshold. When I go to temple she might laugh at me and remind me God has forsaken me already, but it never makes her violent.

So I came for Sabbath service I could to get away from her.

Until I met Dorian.

He found me throwing fallen apples under car tyres for them to flatten on the road and sat beside me to watch. He was the first person who didn't treat me as the Lower scum who trudged up several kilometres across our sparse town in clothes that were too big, dirty, and not nearly nice enough to attend temple in. I don't believe in love at first sight but I think I knew I was going to love him the second my eyes found his. The warmth in my chest was too sweet not to be the cultivation of my ribs for love.

There was a period in early puberty when I wondered if my mother had made me gay by assuming I was. She started punishing me for it before I understood what the words meant and if I'd already served the sentence, I might as well commit the crime.

More depraved still, I wondered if maybe I played with attraction to men only because she told me not to. If maybe my gaze lingered on Denzel Washington and Prince in the magazine covers at Angela's Grocery just long enough to be noticed by other mothers, if I hid porn magazines under my mattress where they weren't hard to find, and if I fantasized about men's bodies, of their shoulders and stomachs and cocks, as revenge.

If the sex she chose to have labelled me a reprobate and chained me notoriety I'll never unshackle, wasn't it only fair for me to choose sex that would do the same to her? Do I even like Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson or did I just want to ensure everyone knew Eliana Matalon has a poof for a son?

But then I fell in love with Dorian and I knew that couldn't be the case. The love I had for Dorian and the love he had for me was far too pure to have such sinister roots.

My gayness, it turned out, had little to do with shoulders and stomachs and everything with the inside of the wrist, the spot just left of his Adam's apple only accessible when his head falls back, and the silky skin on the inside of his thigh that, when kissed, makes him shiver unlike any spot on his cock. It had everything to do with reading each other's essays before any teacher did, preparing chamomile tea to watch him drink it, and the way our feet align when we walk.

His friendship grew around the hatred and fear I had for my mother but now it's shrivelled. Once again, I have nothing but her shame.

The umbilical cord only fed me shame. 

My mother ensured I knew my place. Five weeks after conception, she set to work and trained me like Pavlov did his dogs; starved me, then fed me humiliation, until I was born with the conditioned response to salivate at the clink of a belt, born with a malnourished heart and hollow bones.

I was diagnosed anaemic when I was two years old. Iron pills are tough to swallow but nothing is quite like a mother's hatred.

She couldn't be bothered with the price of the supplements and before long, replaced them with capsules of her own blood. Who needs a pharmacy when you have a mother? Don't forget your iron, baby. There's no iron anywhere else. No iron anywhere but in her blood and if I wanted to survive, there was nowhere to go. She made me an addict to keep me in her womb with the umbilical noose around my neck for eighteen years after I'd been dissected from it.

At twenty-three, I'm still there, rotting in the dirt with her. I'm buried alive inside the womb of my dead mother.

Notes

AN: There's a quote in The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett that goes: "Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles. You could not drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same." I think about that a lot and I think it really captures Isaiah's whole mood.