FRIDAY
15 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               'Madam.' Tanvi's voice echoes in my ears. 'The youngest Mr Andrade has arrived.'

I stand at the archway of a courtroom, shaking head to toe, whilst Ima does nothing to acknowledge me. She continues to read and I wait, each second a strike against my spine. The clocks here have truncheons in place of hands. The world runs on my mother's time.

Her nose crinkles when she finally glances at me. 'You look homeless.'

I want to argue that considering she shipped me to America and told me not to come back, in a way, I am homeless. I want to tell her I like the way I dress now, that I don't care what it looks like because I'm finally comfortable in my skin. The seams on these clothes may be one tug from unravelling but they don't come with fishing lines that wind so tight over my chest I can't breathe or hooks that sink into my muscle to command me like a marionette. I want to–

'I'm sorry.'

'I know you weren't intending to wear jeans for Shabbat, Dorian.'

'I... didn't pack– I didn't plan on coming here.'

Ima sneers at my embroidered kippah. It's the only one I brought with me but I realise now it would have been less of a transgression if I entered the house without one.

'I was told you had grown,' she says as she stands. 'You look like you've shrunk, though that may be the illusion of these rags you call attire.'

Without expecting a response, she walks out of the room and I know to follow. Her caftan billows at her ankles. Her hair is covered with a matching scarf and I focus on extrapolating the art deco pattern in my imagination to distract myself from the need to run.

My bedroom looks exactly as it did when I lived here. That's not a statement about them preserving my presence but one about the fact I never had a presence at all.

Ima opens the wardrobe and pulls out a suit, plain and sleek. 'We had this made for you.'

Something happens to my insides when I hear that. They were so confident I would come? Someone was watching me long enough to assume new measurements? Why would she bother spending the money on me? Though the pockets are empty, I know the suit comes with a contract I'll have to sign without reading the terms.

I've barely changed before there's a knock on my door, recognisable as Tanvi's from the million times I've heard it before. She smiles in the impersonal way Ima trained her to.

'Sir, your mother asked me to bring this for you.' She holds out a black velvet kippah. It must be one of Aba's. 'They will wait for you in the dining room.'

I turn around and the mirror on my wardrobe door captures me. It's incredible how quickly I've sunk into the petrified Dorian from my childhood. I will never understand the desire to freeze one's face at eighteen — this is the reflection I crave to hide in my attic.

My fingers go numb as I place the black kippah onto my head. Though it's hardly visible in my reflection when I face the mirror, it completes the obituary; the final stroke an artist brushes on her work purely on ceremony before she stands back and declares it "fini", though, to any viewer, the image would be identical without it.

I shut my eyes and summon the music I've been composing this past week to my fingers. It arrives with visions of Isaiah.

I can leave if I want to. HaShem gave me autonomy: I can leave whenever I want to.

With this reassurance on repeat, I move downstairs. Despite my affirmations, becoming imperceptible in my parents' house is innate: my feet instinctively dodge all the places that make noise. The citizens of totalitarian regimes must memorize the patterns of searchlights.

The table is set, plates and bowls stacked, silver cutlery for each course laid out, and two candles stood at the centre. And standing around the table are not just my mother and father but also Ruben and Elijah.

'Shabbat Shalom, Dorian,' Elijah says. 'You look... It's good to see you.'

Rueben stands behind his chair on the other side of us, both hands gripping the backrest, and doesn't leave his spot to greet me. 'Shabbat Shalom.'

I echo them.

Last, I turn to Aba who stands at the head of the table. I don't dare to look him in the eye and instead watch the tug on his beard when he smiles. 'Welcome home, son.' He indicates at my usual chair. 'Please.'

As I take my place, reality slithers right into one where I never left.

Silence reigns between wine, hand washing, and challah, and as much as I try to stay present, preserve the sanctity of the ritual, and show my gratitude and respect for G-d, my mind fills with a hundred other voices. Who is G-d in the presence of a mother?

Perhaps I was in the wrong to cut them out. Ima often criticises how I see the world in harsh black and white, as though stark extremes are the only options. It's not like Rueben or Elijah had fewer scars (except maybe in the aspect they never had to be here alone, they're so close in age they always had each other whilst I was still in primary school when they fled), so much is obvious by the fact they too moved to different countries at the earliest opportunity. But they didn't have to be selfish and dramatic, they kept up appearances.

I could've tried balance, some sort of compromise, a double life — it wouldn't be the only one at this dinner table. Maybe I've made life harder for everyone.

When conversation finally does start, it's a recorded criminal interview where my brothers plead their innocence to charges of treason and do so with ease. I couldn't: I'm guilty on all accounts. I never learnt the art of hiding truths in semantics. So I stay mute until Ima lifts her eyes to me.

'So... how is he?'

'I don't know.' I bob a piece of chicken on the surface of my soup. 'He doesn't talk to me properly anymore.'

'And yet you came here with him.'

What she means is: I thought I made it clear that you were not to return.

'Your studies are going well, yes?'

'Yes.'

I wait for the regular questions — that I'm focused and on track to graduate on time, whether I've already started to work on my final compositions or essays, am I making the right connections and socialising with the right people — but they don't come. Instead, I'm given silence where every second draws out with blood gushing in my ears.

Ima delivers the attack: 'And he's there too, Oxford?'

'Yes. You already knew that.'

That's the kind of news that got around the parents of Coeus Academy for Boys within hours, embellished with plenty of gossip about how he must have cheated his way in.

She hums. Her spoon scrapes against the porcelain as she scoops out the last of her soup. 'I only find it interesting we don't hear a word from you in six years and then you drive in unannounced with the mamzer for company.'

'Can't you just say what you actually mean?'

Her eyes are cold even when candlelight reflects on them. 'People have seen you — the pair of you. The rumours of your... inclination have gotten louder over the past week. Apparently you're sharing a room. All the work we've done since your departure to America is gone. I thought we agreed you wouldn't come back before you got better.'

Tanvi appears at the side of the table before I can respond. She refills our glasses and collects our bowls into a stack on the heel of her palm. She pauses at mine. I've barely touched it. 'Are you done, sir?'

I nod, unable to look anywhere higher than her hands when I thank her. I hate to think she or Jakób will believe I can't finish any of my food because it doesn't taste good, but how does one muster up an appetite for their last supper?

The room is silent as Tanvi brings the final course: beef-stuffed artichoke, a Sephardic recipe Jakób has Polish-ised with juniper berries. I wait for her to return to the kitchen before my stare crawls to meet Ima's.

'I'm not ill.'

She ignores me. 'The situation can still be mended. With work. People know his mother has passed. We can frame your proximity to him as charity. If you only let us help you.'

Words and emotions card through me, my mind and body unable to settle on any of them and certainly unable to come to a consensus, so that when I say, 'You told me that I was on my own when I turned eighteen,' with a tone of incredulity, my lungs swell with fury against a shrinking ribcage whilst laughter simmers in my stomach.

'I did.' Ima nods, not assent but to say she'll waste her time explaining this to me if I'm too simple to comprehend it on my own and I should be grateful for the generosity. 'And now I'm offering you the opportunity to change your mind.'

'You were young,' Aba tacks on, 'and you can't blame a child for acting foolish. We want to give you the chance to apologise.'

The speed of my emotion zoetrope accelerates to the point where the images blur.

'Apologise? What am I supposed to apologise for?'

'For bringing shame to your family.'

Aba's voice is a salve over Ima's blades but it's no less brutal. 'You're an adult now, you're too old for this. We hoped you would be over it by now.'

'Over it?'

'Your infatuation with this boy.' He lays heavy stress on every other syllable as though speaking in exaggerated iambs. 'Son, nothing good will come from it. You can't sacrifice your position in the world to come for a mamzer who has been damned since his conception.'

I look from him to Ima, back, to Elijah and Rueben, and to Ima again, and I recognise this for the intervention it is. Because he has always been the best imitation of an ally I've had, it's Elijah I speak to. 'Did you know about this?'

'No,' he says earnestly. 'But it's not a bad idea, is it?'

'How is it not a bad idea?'

Rueben addresses me for the first time since his greeting. His voice is matter-of-fact and cordial and, as always, I'm reminded of train announcements. 'You said yourself that he doesn't talk to you anymore. So why would you ruin yourself for him? It's mad.'

He glances at me and returns to his food. Since its arrival, he's been dicing his beef and artichoke into ever smaller pieces without eating any

'You don't hear the way people talk about you — about him, the two of you. How do you think it makes us feel, hearing that about family?'

Elijah concurs with ardent nods. 'You have a family that loves you. You don't have to isolate yourself forever because of one mistake.'

'Mistake? I didn't fall in love with Isaiah by mistake.'

'Dorian, please. It's wrong.'

'I don't think it is.'

I don't know what G-d thinks and I suppose we can only find out when we die, but loving Isaiah and being loved by him was the purest thing I've ever felt, and isn't Judaism all about freedom? He's the kindest person I've known, the only person who allows me to be myself without fear, a sore thumb in modernity's apathy who devotes himself to everything he does and invites me to do the same.

What is more chesed than what I had with him?

Aba is happy to tear the thought from me. 'You can argue about homosexuality if you like, but he's a mamzer, and scripture leaves no room for interpretation in that. It's forbidden.'

Where Aba's tone is soft (which is not a comfort; he is warmest at his highest point of danger) Ima's is beginning to crack. 'You do not have the luxury to make mistakes, Dorian. We are the only Black family in this town.'

'In this half of town,' I correct. Tears sting at the corners of my eyes. Something more than salt, they're filled with toxins my body finally rejects. 'There are plenty of Black families in Lower Halsett.'

'You are not to associate with them.'

'Why, because they're proud of their culture?'

Slamming her hands onto the table, Ima leaps to her feet. 'I gave you everything!'

She glares at me, face contorted with fury.

'Do you honestly think your life would have been better there? If you wish you lived down there, go. If you wish you grew up in Jamaica, go. A boy as weak and soft as you, you wouldn't have survived long enough to meet that lover of yours. I gave up everything to give you the protection I never had — the protection of money, the protection of status, the protection of a name that meant something. The protection of this language and this country and your passport. And you treat it all like it's nothing. You want to toss it away for a boy.'

I rub my tongue against the roof of my mouth to get the taste out, suckling on her anger like vinegar-flavoured sweets. The shell breaks down to reveal a sticky centre and as it lathers my tongue, I realise it's not anger at all but envy. Does she know what sunlight feels like? Has she ever tasted an apple or sat by the river?

'It's not for him. I want to know what love feels like and you make me hate myself.'

Ima breathes slowly as she sits back down. Her posture is straight and her expression elegantly superior but air drags through her trachea as lingering evidence of her loss of control. She irons the tablecloth with her palms. 'The world will chew you up with dreams like that.'

'It already has.'

Ima's anger still echoes in the chandelier.

Suddenly morose, Aba sighs. His gaze finds mine and he pours grief onto me like the oil spills that kill birds at sea. 'I'm sorry. We failed you. We should have put an end to it from the start, we should never have allowed him close enough to poison you with his ideas.'

Ima slits my throat with one slash. 'You've always been impressionable, Dorian.'

I hang my head. Aba's black kippah weighs ten tonnes. 'That's not an issue when it's you I listen to.'

Silence echoes in the room. Elijah jerks as though he wants to move away from me but thinks better of it, Reuben finally stops breaking his beef into crumbs, and Aba takes off his glasses, folds them up onto the table beyond his plate and stares into them as though G-d's eyes stare back through the lenses.

Ima, on the other hand, exhales half of a laugh, a high-pitched chime that sharpens in all the crystals of the dining room. 'This is your last chance. You choose him, this perversion now, you won't be invited back into this family.'

'What family?'

It's a fishbone stuck in my throat. I cough it out after two decades of rotting in the ripples of my oesophagus, spit it with a clump of blood and pus onto my plate. It tears open my skin and fresh tears burn in my eyes but I smile — the wound is worst before it heals.

'This is your decision?' Aba asks.

'Yes.'

Elijah latches onto my arm. 'Dorian, please. This is insanity.'

Aba waves Tanvi over. She cleans my seat as though I'm not here. Reuben's stare is still affixed to the mush of his food whilst Elijah's wide eyes dart between me, Tanvi, and Aba. Ima and I watch as my plate is removed, then my cutlery, my water, my wine. Tanvi has no difficulty carrying them all at once.

When I stand, she'll shift the remaining placements, make minor adjustments to the candles, and none of the other guests will ever guess someone else was expected.

I lift Aba's black kippah from my head and place it where my plate was. Though my body is heavy, the music I've been clawing to unearth for the past six years streams freely into me. What is a mother in the presence of G-d?

Ima resumes her dinner as though it was never interrupted. She cuts a chunk of cold beef and chews it. Her stare slices to me as a machete. I blink tears out of my eyes. Not because I don't want her to see (it's too late for that) but because I don't want a shield between us when I say this.

'I know you're afraid. And I'm sorry. But I don't want to end up like you.'

Notes

Reminder about the kippah, generally, Orthodox Jews wear a black velvet kippahs whereas colourful ones are common for Reformists. Hence why him wearing one that is embroidered with flowers is a point of contempt for his mother and why she makes him change it.

Chesed: Often translated to loving-kindess, "means giving oneself fully, with love and compassion". It is a mitzvah (religious duty) for observant Jews.