FRIDAY
08 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               My head falls against the wall with a thud. Fatigue and the ache resounding through every ligament in my body would be enough to declare today torturous without Dorian's expression adhered to the back of my eyelids. It's half nine and I've already spent hours recounting last night.

"You had sex with someone, didn't you?" Why is that the first thing he assumed? Can I blame him? If me from last week had met myself last night, wouldn't that be the first thing I assumed too? Wouldn't that be what me from last week would have done: find someone to fuck me violently enough to bless me with a distraction at least for a moment?

Can I blame him for being disgusted? Am I not disgusting? Did God not bless me with Earthly life in a body and how do I honour it, by respecting it about as much as a petrol station urinal?

Did I make him feel equally used? I drag him around with me like an emotional support animal and lock him in the doghouse when I don't have a need for him. All I did was go to the river; I had no intention to hurt him. But I did. And I hate that I did. I spent six years wishing I could hurt him even a fraction of how much he hurt me and after the first cut, I'm already buried in regret.

Food has always been Dorian's means of expressing love. The first time he brought me food he'd made himself, I was suspicious to eat it, thinking that as a posh boy who has a family chef, he probably can't tell salt from sugar, only to eat my words along with the matzo ball soup. 

Aside from holidays when I felt comfortable leaving the Caribbean neighbourhoods of Lower Halsett to cross to the Jewish side, I never ate Jewish food. Auntie Tamila and the other women of my street taught me to cook recipes from the islands and I did my best to alter them kosher. The dishes Dorian learnt from his Polish cook were entirely new flavours to me, especially when he started experimenting with his own fusion of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Jamaican flavours. The food he made for me was just as intimate as the music he played when only I was listening.

The image of him waiting for me to come home last night while the soup grew cold fertilizes the shame that strangles my body until creeping ivy transforms into pythons. They constrict tighter and tighter...

And what he said, about sin, I know he didn't mean it to hurt me. In my bitterness, I had already tied the noose around my neck and decided Dorian would pull the rope. Didin't matter whether he wanted to — handcuffed him to it.

The click of heels yanks me from my rumination. Mrs Carter turns the corner and halts. Her shoulder-length twists are twined with much more grey than when I last saw her but she's easily recognizable. Me, on the other hand... I rise to my feet, planning to reintroduce myself but I don't get a word out.

'Isaiah.' Mrs Carter sighs my name like a relative I've not seen in a long time. She wraps me in a hug. 'Lovely to see you. I'm sorry about your mother.'

With no idea how to respond, I thank her.

Mrs Carter doesn't linger on the topic. 'Are you here about the teaching position?'

'What?' I glance behind me for a "HELP WANTED" sign I missed upon arrival. There isn't one but I guess, when an adult shows up unannounced in the teachers' corridor of a school, what should she think? 'No, I were just thinking, could I borrow a computer and printer? One last time, promise. I need to print my dissertation and Moonlight ain't got none them those Microsoft tings.'

She squeezes my arm. 'Of course.'

Pressing my palms together over my chest, I stream "thank you"s. 'I can pay for the ink–'

'Don't be ridiculous. Though I will need you to print two copies so that I can have one for myself.' Her pride is a rock in my throat. She wouldn't look at me like this, like her own son returned after finding success, if she knew half of the things I've done in my time away.

Thundering footsteps approach and a gaggle of pupils swerve into the corridor only to skid to a halt when they spot the headteacher. 'Good morning, Mrs Carter,' they say in unison to make up for their bad behaviour.

'Good morning.' She smiles though in that slanted way that means "I'm letting you off this time but don't let me see you running again", though not one of the four is looking at her anymore.

They're staring at me, one with an open mouth.

I shift my weight but before I can settle on a reaction, the quartet set off to speed-walk past us, whispering excitedly amongst themselves. I stare at the end of the hall for several moments after they've disappeared, then slowly turn to Mrs Carter.

She effortlessly deciphers my confusion. 'You're something like a celebrity around here.' A laugh breezes through her but when she speaks, it's in earnest. 'You're the only person from Lower Halsett to make it to Oxbridge. It gives them hope that they have promise in their futures regardless of where they come from or what they look like.'

Her praise is too bright for what I deserve. I didn't use the opportunity for anything good.

I turn away, eyes finding the corner the kids slipped behind. 'But how do they...?'

To answer, Mrs Carter crosses the corridor to a glass case. It exhibits every success achieved by pupils at Lower Halsett School and College. With the primary function to encourage the kids, there's nothing too small to be put on display. The shelves are flooded with anything from school projects to newspaper cuttings of better apple harvests. The front page story of Melissa Persad's arch bridge that won the public vote when the town was convinced the truss bridge would collapse from acid rain is framed beside a polaroid labelled "Sam Clarke beats Mr Williams at chess, 17.4.1996."

But my attention fixates on two framed photographs on the shelf below. My graduation photos.

On the left, the one from Coeus Academy for Boys where my eighteen-year-old self has rough skin and a bruise peeking on my neck despite how much I tried to hide it with my collar, vitiligo spots limited to the inner corners of my eyes. On the right, the one from my bachelor's at Oxford. My starter locs are only an inch long and poke oddly out of my head. Despite my wide smile, tooth gap on full display, my eyes are glossed: I'd had a flare the week prior and the pain was still oppressive.

'Where did you get these?'

'Your mother, of course.' Mrs Carter must be aware of the steel cultivators shredding my insides because she keeps her voice low. Or maybe it's simply to show respect for the dead. 'She told me you deserved to be put somewhere you'd be recognised for your accomplishments.'

The speckling I've crammed into my tear ducts deteriorates and the photographs blur to splotches of colour. Salt stings my tongue.

'I'm sorry.' I press a hand to my mouth and my words muffle behind it. 'I didn't– I reckoned she'd burnt them or sum. She never came to the ceremonies.'

Anger and solace clash in lightning that bolts through every muscle in my body. I invited her to both graduations though I knew she wouldn't come, then posted her the photographs and copies of my diplomas. I'm not sure why, after all, I built a steadfast narrative that she didn't care, that not even a part of her ever loved a part of me.

It cracks now, a hairline fracture in the foundations not deep enough for the whole thing to collapse but it sways threateningly nonetheless.

She did care. The knowledge sinks in with bitter teeth.

She never once said she loved me, much less that she was proud of me, apparently not because it wasn't true but because she didn't want me to hear it. And now she's dead and I never will, and I'll simply have to accept that alongside the fact she wasn't the irredeemable villain I knew.

It's far too little far too late, but grief finally arrives.

My mother's dead. Muma is dead.

I move my hand to my eyes to cover the tears. I don't attempt to dry them, partly because I know it'd be redundant but mostly because I don't want to see the pictures. 'I'm sorry.'

'You don't have to apologise.' Mrs Carter rubs my arm until my breathing is relatively normal. She has always been kind to me, even when I ditched her school to attend Coeus instead. She welcomed me to use the library and computers to complete my coursework. And she offers the same warmth to me now. 'You can borrow the computer in my office.'

Mrs Carter opens the computer and lets me sit at her desk like so many times before whilst she moves her own workspace to the side where pupils sit. As I calm down, embarrassment trickles in and I blink in a vain attempt to reduce to redness and swelling around my eyes. I keep my face turned away from her as I slip my notebook from my backpack.

I left the motel when pain woke me up at five and drove to the first empty parking spot in town to write my final draft. Though it was awkward to so much as look at Dorian's annotations after our fight, it felt even more disrespectful to not make use of them. They were exactly what I needed; Dorian has always known how to fix my blind spots. How I miss fixing his blind spots.

As I wait for the MS Word application to load, I scan the office. 'So you're looking for an English teacher?' I ask only to make conversation. When I studied here, Mrs Carter was the English teacher for A-levels as well as my primary class teacher half the time. When she became headteacher, she was replaced by a man from Colchester from what I remember.

'Yes. Our last one turned out not to want to settle into Halsett. That is unfortunately the case for most of them. Halsett is the type of town people move out of.'

'So you've got a supply?'

'There are no supply teachers currently available nearby, so I've been alternating with Ethan Levinson.'

I rock on her office chair in thought until the clack of the mechanics reminds me how much everything in this school is on the brink of breaking. Levinson was the biology teacher the last I heard. And Mrs Carter, I'm sure, already has more than one full-time job in managing the school.

'You don't think I'm capable of teaching anymore?'

I jolt upright. 'No. No. It ain't like that. I just feel bad for the kids. I went to this school long enough to know what that's like, but at Coeus...' I drop my focus to my hands. 'They could build the school out of coins and still be swimming in money. People talk about intelligence and talent but if these kids had even a fraction of those resources, plenty of em would be going to Oxbridge. They deserve teachers who aren't stretched so thin they can't remember their names.'

Mrs Carter smiles, satisfaction that borders on arrogance saturated in the wrinkles around her eyes. 'You can start whenever you'd like.'

'No. I didn't mean. I can't.'

'Why not?'

'I ain't got no qualifications.'

Her eyebrow quirks. 'Isaiah, this is Halsett — most of our A-levels teachers don't. You're more than qualified and correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem rather passionate.'

I twist my neck to relieve the ache in it. Maybe to flee the intensity of her stare too. 'I can't.'

'Why not?'

My eyes flicks to the computer screen and my previous dissertation draft still buffering on it. If she kicks me out, I'll have to finish it somewhere else. Palms clammy, I wipe them on my jeans. A torturous itch festers under the skin. I never planned to come out to her and though she, as most of Halsett, must know, it can't be taken back once spoken.

'Mrs Carter, I'm gay.'

Mrs Carter doesn't react with fervour in any direction. 'So?'

'So,' a nervous laugh intermingles into the word only for my throat to parch, 'what about Section 28? I ain't gon live a life where I gotta answer questions about my wife with a shrug and change the pronouns in my stories to "she" and leave my space impersonal to make sure I don't raise suspicions.'

She hums in disapproval. 'If Madam Thatcher has an issue with my choice of teachers, she can come here and tell me so herself.'

I stare at her in silence.

'You care about these kids, Isaiah, and you ain't never met em. That's all that matters to me. I can't promise parents will share my perspective — few will be comfortable with the thought of a gay man teaching their children. But I'll fight with you at every objection.'

The sincerity suffocates me more than the threat of being thrown out.

She must have an inkling of my unease because Mrs Carter smiles in a kind but conclusory sort of way. 'Consider it.' With nothing more, she returns to her work.

Notes

Supply teacher: Substitute teacher.

Section 28: Homophobic legislation in the UK from 1988 to 2003 (2000 in Scotland, the repealment being one of the first things done by the Scottish Parliament which didn't exist until 1999, Scotland Forever🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿) which criminalised the "promotion of homosexuality" by local authorities, including schools.

What's promotion of homosexuality, you ask? Well literally anything that acknowledges gay people exist. This means that teachers could be legally fired for things like: being queer, calling out homophobic bullying especially if that includes slurs, comforting pupils who experienced homophobic bullying, saying any word from the LGBTQ+ alphabet. All books by known queer authors or with queer characters were removed from school libraries and often placed behind the counter in public libraries.

All in all, it was a very dark and traumatising time for the British queer community.