WEDNESDAY
19 NOVEMBER, 1996
DORIAN

               I scratch out a few notes from my score paper and replace them before I play through the sequence again. Luckily, the music room is unoccupied during common lunch hours and I get to use the wall piano instead of the electric keyboard with headphones. Music always sounds better when it's allowed to fill up the room.

Considering I had no instruments with me, I managed to get a surprising amount of composing done while in Halsett (it's not surprising at all: I was with you). That said, the drafts have several kinks to smooth out. It doesn't take long for me to lose myself in the music and for my hands to do the work while my mind drifts along equally winding paths.

I like to wonder when it was that I fell in love with Isaiah.

It's an oddly calming exercise that lets me sit back and rewind my life as a movie, notice every tiny detail from the lighting to the way he angles his fingers or I incline my head, and, at the pivotal scene, exclaim: This is it! This is the moment that changed everything.

Maybe it was only weeks before our first kiss when he gifted me a music box he'd found in a charity shop. The hinges were rusty and an unknown embellishment had broken off the lid, possibly why he was so embarrassed giving it to me. It played Bach's Air on the G string. Ima threw it away when she forced me to America but I can still hear the metal pluck through the melody.

Maybe it was months before that when he discovered Louise Bennett Coverly's poetry written in Patois and the sheer joy of something beautiful written in a language considered primitive brought him to tears. He read them to me, translating each line to standard English so I could understand, not once criticising me for not knowing my mother's tongue.

Maybe it was the August after our GCSEs. I had summer school in Cairo and we didn't talk for two months. The day we had arranged to meet again, he was waiting for me at the bridge that would lead to Lower Halsett, leaning against the rusted balustrade. I don't know whether it was he who had changed or me, but something was different.

He was dressed in his faded sleeveless Whitney Houston t-shirt and the sun soaked on his biceps. He'd come from his shift at the garage and something about the grease that stained his hands and forearms made my mouth water. And when he greeted me with his "wah gwaan" and fist bump, there was a glint in his eye that said he knew I was confused and he liked being the cause of it.

When we had walked along the river for ten minutes, I turned to him, squinting because of the sun that haloed him. 'Aren't you going to ask what Egypt was like?'

'I'm pretty sure them those libraries in Egypt are the same as libraries in Suffolk. Assuming they've got shelves with books on em.' He grinned to display his tooth gap though there was a gentle edge to it that meant: I read all your postcards, I know what it was like. 'If I ask, will you have sum interesting to say?'

I wanted to argue that I'd done other things than sit at the library. I wanted to argue that the rich engraved walnut our host school built bookshelves from was different from the pine we had at Coeus. But he was right.

I hated how effortlessly he stripped me naked, yet loved it twice as much. How should you react to tender mockery if not fall in love?

At least, it was an hour later, once we had settled to our usual enclave at the river's bend where we were accompanied only by water and the yellow blossoms of common gorse and therefore safe to smoke our first spliff which we had planned since we were twelve ("we'll try it together"), that I felt that terrifying hook somewhere between my belly button and groin for the first time.

With his gaze adhered to me, Isaiah licked the edge of the rolling paper to seal it.

I was dominated by the will to mould into anything he'd like me to be, to become the rolling paper so that I could have his tongue on me if only for a utilitarian function, to be the handcrafted filter he wrapped his lips around. Sitting across from me, he traced my sternum with his palm flat on my chest — "Here. You have to inhale it properly until you feel it here." 

With Madonna's Like A Prayer streaming from his pocket radio, I experienced lust for the first time.

Maybe it was two months earlier, when I arrived at my summer dorm and unpacked to find an envelope between my sheet music. It was full of postcards, all with the same generic orchard photograph, all addressed to a post pick-up point at Angela's Grocery, and all with a future date already written in his flawless handwriting in the top corner — one for every second day of the summer.

On top of the stack was a note: "You better write or I'll smack you when you come home. Nothing's too boring. (You'll have to buy the stamps yourself)." He signed it off, not with his name, but with a heart.

Though I didn't hear from him all summer because he couldn't afford post or calls to Africa, writing to him kept me sane. We'd never been apart for so long and I'd already resigned to the fear he'd forget me and find cooler more fun friends, and the way he knew exactly the ledge I stood on and how to nudge me back filled me with affection in a way entirely new to me.

Isaiah has always had a supernatural talent for knowing when to push and when not to, where to poke me out of my comfort zone and where to respect it.

Like the summer after we turned thirteen. It was the last summer before he started working and my parents insisted I take extra classes. It was the last summer we got to spend every waking moment together.

After weeks of no rain, the plains surrounding Halsett became pale and itchy and we hardly left our river enclave except to sleep. Swimming eventually got boring, so, despite the heat, Isaiah suggested we continue further west. "Like an adventure, except we can't get lost if we keep sight of the water."

We pet sheep and horses over their fences until Isaiah abruptly stopped us and dared me to steal an apple. Just one that wouldn't be missed by the orchard owner — scrumping, he called it.

Though the thought thrilled me, I shook my head.

'Forget your bar mitzvah, this is the ritual that turns you into a man.' He burst into laughter at his own joke and ran a hand over his face to wipe away his grin. 'It's fun though, trust. Sides, you from Suffolk, you have to do it at least once.'

I was already sold but pretended to need further persuading. 'I'm from Jamaica.'

'Oh, now you from Jamaica? Say plantain.'

Or maybe it was after we started at Coeus Academy for Boys in year seven. Though we'd already been friends for five years, we went to different primary schools, and after a month of reading over all his assignments and notes, I noticed my y's, which had before been two straight lines, adopted a cursive tail, exactly the way Isaiah wrote his.

Or maybe I really did fall in love with him the first time we met. It was after a Shabbat service. Sitting by the road out of the Sha'are Sedek Synagogue, Isaiah tossed rotten apples onto the pavement and grinned each time he managed to aim under the wheel of a car on its way out. None of the adults seemed to notice him and for a moment, I thought he was some non-human trickster only kids could see.

I moved to stand at his side without a word and he smiled. He plucked a soft apple from the pocket of a jacket that was so large it must have been his mother's and handed it to me, equally silent. Though I didn't understand the point, I rolled the fruit onto the road and watched it squash under someone's tyre.

With a cheer, Isaiah smacked my arm and joy fluttered through me. 'Good one, cuz.' He handed me a second.

I kept it in my fist. 'Did you bring all these apples with you inside?'

'Yeah.'

He was so different from anyone I'd met, so apart from everything I knew, I couldn't have created an imaginary friend like him. He fit so perfectly beside me that I never doubted the existence of G-d.

Or maybe I realised far too late, when I listened to his own recorded confession on the flight to John F. Kennedy International Airport...

In reality, of course, there is no one moment, no clear scene that can be plotted into a story arc to declare as the crucial one. Pieces of me fell in love with pieces of him the whole time, a soft love that doesn't require reason nor include eureka.

I don't know why we spent so many months — if not years — in the understanding of our mutual feelings without acting on them but I don't regret it. I think we would've ruined the gentle delicacies of our transition if we'd rushed it too quickly. To draw a rigorous line between best friend and lover is to make them mutually exclusive, to go from best friend to lover rather than best friend and lover where neither takes precedence over the other. That is the best form of love, where every role coexists in harmony. Isaiah is my best friend, my lover, my brother, my wife, my husband, my mother and my father.

And now I'm faced with the possibility of losing it forever. I won't ever build a connection like this with anyone.

'This is quite genius.'

I snap my head to the door. My tutor leans against the frame, watching me with a smile.

'I'm glad you found your inspiration again.' Pushing upright, Richard takes a step into the music room. 'In all honesty, I was worried that maybe they'd made a mistake accepting you here. Don't misunderstand me, all your work has been good but this... this has soul.'

I turn away from the praise like one does from a draft. It doesn't have soul, it is my soul. But I thank him.

'Does it have a title?'

Though I hadn't thought of it yet, my tongue, still tasting the tattoo inked into the base of his spine, answers on its own. 'Ille me servat — He saves me.'