For the first couple of weeks, I didn’t get much besides the odd snail or hermit crab. My life was in stasis. Nothing else meant anything any more. At school, I was distracted, readying myself for the failure of the aquamarine world I was hoping would fix everything. Then one Thursday night at 2 a.m., after finishing an English essay, I checked the tank with the resignation that nothing would be there. And sitting on the rock closest to me was a small, pink-red gelatinous creature, moulded to a rock, waving its tentacles at me as if to say hello.
As the house was asleep, I was free to use the computer to research the origins of this alien being. After hours of scrolling through marine discussion forums, and inspecting Internet encyclopaedias of sea invertebrates, there it was, a picture of my beautiful visitor. What I had inside my tank was a brooding anemone. Brooding anemones are a pretty rare occurrence in the badass world of live rock enthusiasts (we’re talking finding Mew in a pack of Pokémon cards – yes, it’s that serious). For they are a very individual type of anemone; they are hermaphrodites, beginning life as a female and developing testes at a later stage. They are also known to wander the ocean, constantly searching for new rocks until they find one that belongs, though never firmly settling in one place. There inside the tank was a mirror of my soul, winking at me through the glass barrier, as if it had been sent to say: I know.
That morning, it was my father’s turn to drive me to school. I was exhausted, but jubilant at my stint as a queer Christopher Columbus the night before. My father and I never had much to chat about, so we often just listened to Capital FM radio on these morning drives, leaving the generic pop songs to do all the talking for us. But this time, the radio was off. When I tried to put it on, my father smacked my hand off the dashboard.
‘No music Amrou,’ he said sternly, his bushy moustache quivering on top of his tense lips. Shit. What did he find?
‘Why did you tell your friend at school that you are gay? We’ve read all your texts.’ And here was the end of life as I knew it. Was he going to disown me? Ship me to Iraq? Lock me in a mosque until I emerged an Imam? Was there an eject button I could press to throw me out of the car like James Bond? (I’m sure he’d love it if I was like James Bond.)
‘Amrou, never ever say to anybody that you are gay. Habibi (my darling) – you will never be gay. It’s impossible. Listen to this advice from your father: even if you feel gay, just sleep with girls, and you will no longer be gay. Your life will be full of disease if you are gay, and you will have no family, no love, no life. Is that what you want? Promise me you’ll never even think that you are gay ever again. From now on, you are straight. Swear to Allah, and on my and your mother’s life.’
We arrived at the school gate, my face flushed, my heart on the floor of the car, my head swirling; up to this point, all attempts to inhibit my sexuality had been coded, and now he was telling me openly that it was in no way an option. I looked at my dad, who seemed in that moment an utter stranger. I remember being confused that he had anything to do with my conception, feeling that his biology couldn’t possibly be linked to mine, that there was nothing that tied us together. I was stuck in this limbo, until the beeps of the frustrated cars behind us snapped me out of it.
‘I swear to Allah, Baba.’
‘Good. Your mother is heartbroken Amrou. Please be a good son to her from now.’
And with that I left the car and ran to the nearest bathroom. I sat in the thin cubicle, my clunky black shoes moored to the pink marble tiles, unable even to cry, but weighed down by my loneliness, feeling like a stray asteroid meandering the open, empty universe. For the rest of the day, the one thought that helped me through was that of my new friend, the brooding anemone, which would be there to comfort me when school finished.
When I got home that evening, I was taken straight to my mother, who lay on the bed like a withering widow, too grief-stricken to hold her head up and even look at her homosexual son. Her face was swollen from crying. At a loss as to what to say, I went with ‘I’m sorry.’ And you know what? I did, genuinely, feel sorry. Sorry that something inherent about me could cause this level of upset, as if I were a tornado that brought devastation to everything in its path. My father, who had now shut and locked the door, towering above me like a hooded executioner, then told me how my mother had found gay porn on the desktop computer. The fabulous cherry on top. Wonderful.
‘The things that I have now seen, Amrou. I’ll never be the same again.’ I know, right? It is pretty good. ‘It is disgusting – how can you watch these horrible things. Haram.’ Disgusting. I am disgusting. Do you really think I’m disgusting, Mama? She really couldn’t look at me, so I’m guessing that she must have done. My father, who looked more like Darth Vader at this point, chimed in with, ‘Amrou, we’ve been watching you.’ Yes, I noticed. ‘We only want to protect you.’ By calling me disgusting? ‘What has twisted your mind? Is it drugs? Drinking? Are you associated with any Satanic cults?’ Seriously, how would I even have the time for a Satanic cult with all my GCSE revision? I of course denied all charges (and I was being completely honest). My mother, who finally surfaced from her flood of tears, tugged at my fragile heartstrings: ‘Amrou. You and I used to be best friends. You were my Amoura. My angel. I don’t even recognise you any more. You treat me like shit. I feel like you’ve died.’ My mother’s Olivier-worthy monologue set me off, and I wept on the bed. I wept so hard that I sobbed into my mother’s arms, and then my father’s, who cradled us from behind. My crying certainly wasn’t intended to be an apology for my queer identity, which is how I think my parents were interpreting it – I was quite simply heartbroken. I was lying on the deathbed of the young Amrou, crying the entirety of my childhood out of my system. Once the collective weeping subsided, my father, for good measure, made me promise to them both that I would no longer be gay, and that I would do whatever was in my power to become a heterosexual.
‘Of course,’ I said, completely calmly, ‘I will.’ It was as though this episode drained all the anguish out of me. The fear I had of my parents discovering I was gay evaporated; around them, I was now the living dead. My mother said as much – the old Amrou was a goner. I didn’t belong in this family any more. They, too, had died in my head.
When I was back in my room, I went to find solace in the only thing in that house that understood me – my beautiful, brooding anemone. But when I turned on the aquarium’s UV light, I couldn’t find it. It had found somewhere else in the tank to dock. And after hours and hours of scouring the rock, it was nowhere to be seen. Like me, the queer little creature was lost, and had gone in search of somewhere it could belong.
With the disappearance of the brooding anemone came the painful realisation that the tank would not be there for me when I needed it most. And the more extreme the policing of my sexuality became, the further the underwater utopia seemed from me. The aquarium was a parallel universe I could see, look after, even control – but for all its boundless glory, I could never actually get inside it. Even as I gazed, the tank reminded me that I was a mere outsider, the traces of my reflection on the glass obstructing a genuine fusion between me and its queer nirvana.
Eventually, I began to resent it. I remember vividly the night that my relationship with the tank markedly shifted for ever, because it was also the day that I committed my first crime.
While I was shopping with my mother in Selfridges – correction: while I was watching my mother shop in Selfridges – I told her that I wanted to explore on my own. Once I was firmly out of her sight, I sprinted down Oxford Street to the enormous HMV store, and flurried around looking for the DVD of Russell T Davies’ series, Queer as Folk, my hands flicking through the collections with the rapidity of a hummingbird’s wings. And there it was, the Season One box set, boasting real-looking queer men on the front cover, mischievous expressions on all three of their faces. As if my body were acting without consulting my brain, I covertly peeled off the security tag and quickly
threw some coins on the floor. Then I hunched down on the ground and picked up the coins, simultaneously stuffing the DVD down my trousers. I walked slowly out of the store, greeting the security guard with an over-zealous ‘thank you!’ and a wired smile, in that way you do with club bouncers when you’ve got drugs down your sock and you’re trying to seem ‘breezy’. Thankfully, I got away with it. Back with my mother, I walked with a forty-five-degree hunch to hide the bulging DVD in my trousers, and pretended to have painful indigestion until she agreed to drive me home. Due to my ‘tummy ache’, I lay face down on the back seat all the way home.
That night, when the house was once again asleep, I took the DVD down to the living room for my ‘watching-queer-content-at-1-per-cent-volume-at-a-1mm-distance-from the-TV’ ritual. The Season One premiere has to be one of the most radical episodes in British television history, featuring a fifteen-year-old character coming on the chest of an older male stranger who was simultaneously on the phone, discovering that he was imminently about to be a father. Yes, it was unapologetically sexual, but unlike anything else I’d watched, it felt utterly true to real life; I got to see queer male characters, walking down British streets, living gay lives, with all the sexual victories and emotional tragedies that come with that. I could feel myself inhabiting the realities of these men, could feel myself being invited to transplant my desires into theirs. While the other queer content I’d seen reflected my hopes, dreams, anxieties and fears, Queer as Folk went some way further in reflecting me. I went to sleep, the stirring pulse of the show in my veins, and felt my internal desires clawing out of their cage, getting themselves ready for release when it would finally be safe.
After falling asleep, I suffered the most intense night terror of my life until that point, so vivid that it’s imprinted on the inside of my eyelids, its fuzzy impressions always on the periphery whenever I close my eyes. The nightmare was set in the deep recesses of a cave that was entirely ablaze; it had flames in the shape of icicles thrusting downwards from the ceiling, stabbing and searing my naked body, which lay shackled to a metal bed that was white hot. Allah hovered above me, a Gandalf-like figure – except much less cute, and much more menacing – and he strangled my testicles with one hand, bearing a scythe with the other. He interrogated me for all my queer aberrations, each of which I tried to deny. He took the Brokeback Mountain ticket stubs and transformed them into a rope with which he choked me until I confessed; the Queer as Folk DVD box set had been given the weight of a boulder, which was pelted at me and cracked my ribs; and Allah multiplied copies of the Quran that I had defaced with a bum all those years ago, flagellating me with each copy. My parents were also present, and stood with Allah, painfully disappointed in me, and siding with Allah entirely. My mother, shaking her head in disgust, was then called to face Allah’s unyielding torment because of how I had turned out.
The heat of the vision felt so real that I woke up sweating as if I’d been in a sauna, and my bed was drenched in not only perspiration, but also my piss. My pillow was on the other side of the room – I had thrown it there during my sleep in self-defence – the bedspread was on the floor, and I had even ripped up my T-shirt during the episode. I trembled for a while, slowly resurfacing into reality. It was 4 a.m. My brother was fast asleep, and the room was pitch black. I needed my aquarium for comfort.
I ran to it and switched on the blue UV night light. The night is a curious time in marine aquatics. It would be easy to imagine it as an arena of underwater terror, but this is not the case; some creatures rest, and others come alive. I had recently purchased a sun coral, a ravishingly bright orange and yellow organism, whose polyps could only emerge in the dark (whoever came up with the name sun coral is clearly very pleased with themselves). But on this night, as I went to hang out with it, I experienced an acute rush of anger that these polyps were being flaunted so beautifully during my night terror – as if the coral were none the wiser, flowing happily without any awareness of who I was or what I was going through. How dare it? I scanned the tank and tried to grab the attention of the two clownfish fidgeting in an anemone I had recently found for them – but they were a couple who didn’t want to open their relationship, cut off from my pain through the embrace of their purple bodyguard. This was a universe that existed outside any parameters that I could truly access – even though I’d constructed it – and, as I switched off the light, I went back to bed in the knowledge that the oceanic queer universe didn’t have a place for me either.
Like an inert husband checking out of a collapsing marriage, I became cold and distant with my tank. There was a drive in me that was looking to escape to somewhere, and the aquarium became yet another sign of entrapment. I was a prisoner in solitary confinement, offered access to an oasis only through a peephole.
I developed a physical and psychological aversion to the tank, barely able to look at it without the temptation to smash the glass. I quit my job at the Tropical and Marine shop overnight, and didn’t even let Anita and Ahi know, who were worried about me for months. I stopped feeding the fish. I refused to clean the tank. I couldn’t even bring myself to turn on its lights, lest I got duped into thinking that the seductive shapes and colours inside had anything to do with me. The undulating curves of the fish and coral no longer seemed free from boundaries; they had become more like serpents trying to lure me into sin. Eventually, even though the 350-l aquarium dominated the corner of my room, my mind ceased to register it. The image of my mother and father as anything parental was quickly vanishing, I was trying to flush out my Islamic heritage, and along with these parts of me went my aquatic Neverland, yet another place I didn’t belong.
In the year leading up to my GCSEs, I worked so hard that I barely ever spoke. I got up at 5 a.m. to study, usually went to bed at 1 or 2 a.m., and worked between 7 a.m. to midnight every Saturday and Sunday. On a Friday evening after school, as I was sitting at my desk doing a timed English essay, I saw that one of my fish – a gaudy yellow pursed-lipped fish called a Yellow Tang – was floating rigid at the surface. I looked at it with the apathetic glaze of a brutal assassin. Within five minutes, my once prized Regal Tang – this is Dory from Finding Nemo – had also joined the afterlife. What’s Allah doing to YOU, I wonder? Then I saw that my soft corals had rotted, their carcasses floating around the tank like the frozen bodies in the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic. Within the space of thirty minutes, absolutely everything in there was dead. I put down my pen, and with the calm of someone who works at a morgue, flushed every fish and coral away, emptied the tank, and put pictures of the tank to sell on eBay. It was the final confirmation I needed – it was time for somewhere new.
A SEAT AT THE WRONG TABLE: MY TWO-YEAR STINT AS A BRITISH ARISTOCRAT
The aquarium had been my promise of salvation – but it had failed me. What was once a comfort, an invitation into a world where I wouldn’t be alone, was now yet another reminder that I didn’t belong. By the age of fifteen, I felt a bit like an unhinged octopus, a creature missing a unifying brain, a mess of cultures, desires, and separate limbs, all wrestling each other, with no firm sense of place or personality. I was exhausted, and deeply lonely. So I did what any octopus does when it is under threat – I camouflaged. Instead of piecing together the fractures of my contradicting identities, I decided to erase all proof of them. It would be less painful to assimilate, I thought. If my Middle Eastern roots didn’t want me, then maybe I needed to find a space that was the complete opposite to my heritage. After my aquarium died, my aspiration to be a fish was replaced with my aspiration to be a Brit. A proper, aristocratic, period-drama-worthy Brit. But how and where could I achieve this dream?
I think each of us has a secret place we go to in our heads when we feel stuck in our lives. It might happen while you’re walking down the street with headphones on, the music transforming a banal morning commute into a scene from a Cold War spy movie, or it could be dreams of a life we hold on to as a way to tug us through our
days, even if they serve as no more than a mirage. The year I turned fifteen, Eton College became the horizon I chased. As Harry Potter escaped his uncaring foster family into the warm embrace of an archaic wizarding institution, I too yearned for Hogwarts. Eton, I thought, would be my muggle equivalent.
For a while I’d been researching potential boarding schools for my two years of A level studies. It was imperative I moved out of the house, and I developed the urge to implant myself in an archetypally British institution as a way to mark my ultimate severance from Islam. I discovered that Eton opened up their sixth form to a select few candidates, and after a hefty application, I earned myself a place. Once I was admitted, I became obsessed with cultural representations of the school, reading any book or watching any film that offered a window into the aristocratic orphanage that would soon be my home. After studying countless pictures of white boys in glorious tailcoats, walking on the grounds of a historical institution that seemed unquestionably to belong to them, I felt unreservedly that I was about to go where I was always meant to be.
My parents were more at ease with me going than I had anticipated. I put this down to ‘immigrant-status-anxiety’. As a person with a migrant identity, you can develop a desire to prove your right to belong in the country you now reside in – it systemically conditions you to do so. Even though the British government mercilessly destroyed Baghdad – home to many of my parents’ relatives and friends – markers of ‘Western success’ still mattered in our community, for they were a way to tell British-by-blood people that we had just as much of a right to be here as they did. As the first Iraqi in our extended community to have gained entry to Eton, there was collective pride over my achievement.
Unicorn Page 9
