style="font-size:15px;"> What I didn’t realise then was how much my life was about to change. Later that year my father was offered a new job with Majid, and our family moved from Bahrain to London. It was time to find some armour; for I was about to enter a whole new battlefield.
THE IRAQI COMES TO LONDON: A STRANGE CASE OF JEKYLL AND HYDE
When I was thirteen, I made one of the most important decisions of my life. The memory of making it is so vivid that every detail of the room I was in and what I was feeling when I made it remains clear.
It was 8 p.m., and I was sitting on the floor of our living room in Chiswick. Since coming to London, I had felt a heaviness and general malaise, and I had fallen behind with my homework that term. I needed to hand in a backlog of three English assignments for the next morning. I retrieved the brand-new exercise book from my backpack – the front cover was mauve, of a tone not that dissimilar to my mother’s old work pencil-skirt – and I stared at the blank pages, daunted and unwilling. My mother was on the couch furthest away from me, glued to yet another Egyptian TV show (you can take the girl out of the Middle East …). My eyes moved between her, the TV, and my blank page, each one a hostile prospect. My mother now comfortably assumed the role of villain in my head (I was her Child Called It); Arab TV brought with it the soundscape from the warnings of hell in Islam class; and the blank pages in front of me were a further indication of my failings. But as I looked at the open exercise book, I had a realisation: these blank pages were also an opportunity to rewrite my narrative, to start completely afresh, on my own terms, with a total, uninhibited agency. I had no control over my burgeoning queer desires, nor my family’s attempts to police them. But with this homework, this mauve exercise book, these blank pages, I could control my fate. With the clarity of perfectly clean glass, I knew what I had to do: I am going to do amazingly at school. The decision was made, almost as if I had never believed in anything else. I can control how hard I work at school. If I get 100 per cent in everything, then maybe I won’t feel wrong any more. And even if my family think I’m wrong, I’ll have proof that I’m not because I’ll get straight As.
I picked up the exercise book, retreated to my room, and went above and beyond for all three pieces of homework. With the neatest handwriting my black-ink fountain pen could conjure, I completed the three best pieces of work in my school career up till that point: a comprehension exercise on Treasure Island, in which I answered every one-mark question with an essay; an actual essay about some poems we had been reading, for which I went beyond the parameters of the question, citing every other poem from the anthology; and an example of a ‘formal letter’, which was so extraordinarily well presented it looked like a bit of museum calligraphy preserved from the Elizabethan era. I worked throughout the night, and my focus never faltered.
Even though I was tired the next day, I felt a sense of hope as I handed in my opus. At the end of the week, our English teacher (let’s call her Ms Clare) – a dainty, sweetly-spoken American lady with a perfect, bouncy bob – asked us to come to the front of the class to collect our homework, as was the routine every Friday. On the procession to her desk, I felt as if I was preparing to meet Allah on Judgement Day.
As she handed me my fate, Ms Clare winked at me. I wonder if Allah winks at people who get into Heaven on Judgement Day? The wink comforted me only for a moment; my negative thought patterns didn’t let me believe it was something good, and I immediately assumed she must have had something in her eye. Well, that was until she said: ‘I can tell how hard you worked on this. And it paid off.’ The euphoria I felt was extraordinary – a current of joy flowed through the base of my feet, surging up through my thighs, rising into my belly and all the way up to my face. As I skipped back to my desk with a smile so wide it looked as though I was on a dentist’s chair, I flicked through my work. Every single red tick offered a validation I hadn’t felt since I was five years old and unquestionably my mother’s favourite. The next time I would experience such a pure, unadulterated bliss was when performing in drag for the first time some years later at university; but for now this high was something I needed another hit of, and soon. It was abundantly clear: a hundred per cent academic track record would be the antidote to everything negative I believed about myself.
Pretty quickly, however, the chase for a high became an agonising addiction, with each high feeling meagre in comparison to the one before. My chase for the 100 per cent mark made even 99 per cent feel like a catastrophic failure; if I didn’t get 100 per cent in every single exam and piece of homework, then I was a worthless queer who deserved to rot in hell and be shot by my mother. These extreme patterns of thinking led to some maddening episodes of OCD, and actions that must have seemed totally fucking crazy to my teachers and my parents. There are too many examples to recount, but a few stand out in my memory.
At thirteen, we were forced to decide which subjects to take for GCSE. Let’s just say, I did not approach the task lightly; a bomb defuser deciding which wire to cut in order to save mankind probably approaches their task with less gravity. As well as the standard mixture of Maths, French, English and Sciences, we had to decide which of the humanities we wanted to pursue. The reputability of History and Geography were no-brainers, but what to choose for my third spare slot? Classical Civilisation brought with it the Oxbridge kudos of antiquity, Art was a huge passion of mine, and I believed it would demonstrate my creative side to universities, and Statistics was an additional Maths GCSE that I thought would show people I was an academic BALLER. This is the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I scheduled meetings with each of the department heads multiple times, coming to school early to wait outside the staffroom, so they could repeat everything they had all told me several times already. During the weekend, I called pretty much every classmate on our house phone to hear their analysis, and as I was such a nerd, most were willing to take my call as a trade for me doing their homework. Eventually, though, they all tired of me; their parents would pick up and lie that their child was out even though I heard them laughing on the other line.
So I did what in the early millennium felt like uncharted territory: I Asked Jeeves (the camper, more budget precursor to Google). Soon I found myself on an online forum for academic students trying to ace their GCSEs and A levels, and I put the question to them. The overwhelming majority responded with: ‘Just do what you like; what matters to universities is if you do well in your core subjects.’ PAH! I’m not falling through the admissions cracks on that lazy excuse. Amateurs! What ensued was a creation of multiple different profiles, each of whom asked the question in slightly different, veiled terms, so I could collate as much information as possible. Safe to say, I was blocked from ever using the forum again. And unable to make this life-altering decision, I convinced the school to let me study all three – Classical Civilisation in the allotted school time, Art after school three times a week, and Statistics at home combined with extra homework. YOLO.
Every single piece of school work soon became an odyssey I had to conquer so as not to feel rotten inside. Even a single page of multiple-choice exercises could become an all-night endurance test on which my life depended. Things significantly ramped up a gear when we were given our first piece of coursework that would actually contribute to our GCSE for Maths. In other words – it was a BIG FUCKING DEAL. The task we were given was relatively benign: we had to follow a sequence involving cubes, to see how the number of visible faces would increase the higher the number of cubes. Add another cube, how many more visible faces are added to the sequence? From that, we could deduce a formula that predicted the laws of this pattern, so that if we were to plug in, say, 279 cubes into the formula, we’d accurately be able to predict just how many faces would be visible. To get an A*, the syllabus required that after we completed the set assignment, we should try to invent one additional variable to the existing exercise – perhaps one side of each cube being red – to demonstrate our capacity to apply the rules of the exercise to a slightly different problem. I’ll repeat: the syllabus required that we only do this ONCE, and that the workings could be summarised on a SINGLE PAGE. I, wanting to ensure that I did everything in my power to obtain this critical A*, did not just do one additional sequence. Oh no.
