Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  But in my heart, I knew that I was going to make a clean break with Islam. In fact, in the summer before I went, I came out to my parents. No, not as gay. I wasn’t out of my mind. I came out as ‘English’. Whenever they tried to remind me of ‘where I was from’ – say I disrespected a cultural tradition, for example by eating pork in front of Muslims – I would remark, with an utterly unblinking expression, ‘But I’m not Arab. I’m English.’ ‘No Amrou, you are Iraqi,’ my parents would reason with me, utterly bemused. And with the certainty of someone just saying their name, I would reply, ‘No. You’re Iraqi. And I’m nothing like you. I’m English.’ In truth, there was a part of me that even identified as white, and whenever I had to show my face at an Arab cultural event, I felt a surge of racial hatred towards Arabs in my belly. I couldn’t wait to start studying at Eton – there I could build a new me. No longer the damaged Muslim disappointing everyone around them. Oh no. It was time for the new me: Viscount Amrou Al-Kadhi – the British aristocrat.

  On the drive up to Eton for my very first term, I sat in silence in my mother’s car. My feeble knees trembled against the dashboard, jittery with excitement and fear. Deep down, I was mourning the loss of my marine utopia and the failure of my relationship with my parents. The journey had a feeling of finality, as though my childhood was being led towards a lethal injection. I made it my mission to refrain from all eye contact with my mother on the journey. I needed to picture her as a stranger, even a ghost; it would be too knotty and painful to feel anything loving towards her. I had no room for ambivalence. As we drove, I had the twisted thought that it would have been simpler had both my parents died instantly in a plane crash – it’s not that I wanted this to happen, but I craved the simplicity and finality of the thought. They would be gone, and there wouldn’t be any need to interrogate the complicated feelings I had for them; it would end the previous chapter of my life. For I really was desperately seeking a chance to build a new me, and on the two-hour drive to Windsor, I plotted my integration into the most British of institutions. This would be the most convincing undercover operation known to man.

  Once we’d entered the gates, there was still a drive through the grounds to my boarding house. The imposing architecture was formidable, in both enticing and frightening ways. Thousands and thousands of red bricks abounded towering walls and pillars, each crevice of mortar reminding me that this place had existed centuries before my arrival. From now on, it would boast traces of Amrou in its continuing story. When we reached our destination, my quaking feet meeting the historic cobbles as I hopped out of the car, the gravitas of my surroundings flowed through me. I was hit by the weight of tradition and history, and the urge to anchor myself within it intensified. It was one of those moments when you see something new and it ignites a fire in you, and you think, No matter what anyone says, this is what I want. And I am going to do whatever I need to be a part of this. I sort of imagine it’s what people auditioning for the X Factor must feel during the Judges’ Houses phase. At sixteen, I wanted not only a place to belong to, but a history; a tried and tested narrative that bore none of the chaos of my own. I would start all over again, shedding all traces of my Islamic heritage, and would return to the closet, suppressing my femininity for an image more befitting an upper-class British lad. Easy, right?

  My mother wept as she hugged me goodbye (I was stifling my own tears, but made sure she didn’t know I was sad). I think she sensed that I’d never be coming home in a way that she recognised again. Although I didn’t know this at the time, this really was my official moving out, since my parents ended up returning to the Middle East when I was eighteen. As she sobbed in my arms, I thought about how tragic it was that we could have gone from me burning my hand to be close to her, to now doing whatever I could to be apart from her. I controlled my breathing so as to resist my tears, and we looked at each other, a canyon of unsaid things between us. ‘Goodbye Mama,’ I said, my lips now on the verge of an uncontrollable quiver. ‘Goodbye, my Amoura.’ She turned away from me, all but limping with grief, both of us well aware that the son she once loved was no longer.

  Laden with belongings, I entered the house. The grandeur of the façade masked a rather dull interior – in fact, the first space I discovered was a narrow grey-carpeted corridor that looked a bit medical. Where were the moving Hogwarts’ staircases? As I stood there taking in my surroundings, a fluster of white faces whirled around me, accompanied by the sounds of British mothers and fathers bidding adieu to their little angels. And then I heard the high-pitched shrill that I’m certain cracked ice as far away as Antarctica: ‘Mr Darcy, where are you?!’ Coming to greet me from out of the living room came the Dame, the matriarchal queen of the house – responsible for our pastoral well-being. She was followed around by her giant grey poodle, called Mr Darcy (no, I’m not kidding), both of them coiffed with matching hairdos. Yay! One minute in, and I’m in an Austen utopia. Mr Darcy, probably unaccustomed to foreigners, took one look at me and growled.

  ‘You must be Amrou. Let me show you to your room,’ the Dame whistled. Racist Mr Darcy snarled.

  ‘Good afternooooooon,’ I replied, attempting to do my best Prince William impression but coming across more like Princess Jasmine.

  ‘You can call me ma’am or mam.’

  ‘Mum?’ I’m actually looking for a new one, you know.

  ‘I beg your pardon?! Never mum. Ma’am.’ Fuck. This is going to be harder than I thought.

  When I got to my room, my immediate mission was to ensure its interior design reflected the new persona I was going to be projecting. A girlfriend from my old school had agreed to act as my ‘beard’, so the bulletin board above my bed became a collage of the two of us doing things that British couples do – ice-skating during the Christmas holidays, dressed up for a relative’s wedding together, and of course there were a few of her solo, which was intended to give the illusion that I wanked about banging her. Next, I opened my suitcase to dress the shelves with the DVDs and books I wanted the boys to believe interested me. As I emptied the bag, a miniature green Quran, encased in an ornate silver sleeve, wormed its way out onto the bed. Mama had put this in there. This was something she did when we travelled as kids, so that Allah could ensure our safety. Perhaps the Quran’s function was similarly apotropaic this time around, but it felt as though my mother was trying to keep me connected to the institution to which she believed I truly belonged.

  There it sat, sandwiched by a Brontë book and a cumbersome edition of King Lear (as if I ever opened this), already turning my bed into a cultural battlefield. With a sudden jolt, I snatched the tiny Quran and looked for the nearest bin. But, as it rested on my fingers, they started to jitter and, as the gold-leaf shimmer from the little page-edges glared up at me, my left shoulder sparked with pain. A chorus of thudding footsteps and September greetings echoed around the house, and I shoved the tiny book under my mattress. Throughout my whole first year, I never removed it from this location.

  My bedroom door flew open – we weren’t allowed locks – and in came some boys from my year group. One jumped straight onto the desk chair, whacking his legs onto the desk to let me know that he had more power than I did, while two immediately flicked through my DVD collection. The entitled knob who’d mounted my furniture immediately clocked the photographs of my ‘girlfriend’. ‘Who’s this YAT then?’ he coughed out, as if his own privilege was clogged into a lump in his throat (‘yat’ was a deplorable word used to talk about women.) ‘Oh, Jessica?’ I responded, caressing the photo as if it were a hamster. ‘She’s my girlfriend! Isn’t she gorge? I mean fit. Yeah man … she’s pretty great, if you know what I mean.’ I caught sight of my reflection, and noticed that part of my tie was poking out of my trousers’ zipper. Mr ‘Your-Room-is-My-Office’ – let’s call him Maximus – raised his eyebrows and shared a look with the others, rewarding me with a ‘Fair play mate.’ Phew. For now, I’m out of the woods.

  The othe
r two boys were of an artier order. The first, Alfred, who I’ll discuss in more detail later, had ginger hair and intimidatingly intelligent eyes that felt as though they were always hypnotising you; the second, let’s call him Antonio, had the look of an affected intellectual, a long, flowing pashmina, thick black square Woody Allen frames, and holes in his clothes that could have been created deliberately. It wasn’t clear. They scanned my books and DVDs, discussing their findings between themselves, even though I was right next to them. Antonio found my copy of Cinema Paradiso, an old Italian film that I truly loved. With hindsight I see how saccharine the film really is, but I watched it with my mother when I was a kid, and deeply empathised with the young boy obsessed with cinema, so unable to fight his natural curiosities and his yearning for a new world. I thought Antonio would be impressed with my knowledge of romantic Italian classics, but all he said was something like: ‘God, this film is so fucking corny. How can anyone think it’s actually any good?’ I thought it was the most profound thing in cultural history after CATS. ‘Yeah, it is corny,’ I said, and then I just smiled like someone who was high on marijuana with no recollection of what I’d just said.

  Alfred was equally quick to dismiss the collection that I had hoped would earn me the intellectual credibility of Byron. ‘A Chorus Line?’ he laughed, in the guise of a rhetorical question that meant to imply I had no taste. Most of the other cinematic triumphs got the same treatment, with my shoo-ins Titanic and Good Will Hunting garnering me little kudos. And then there was The Day After Tomorrow. Now look, I’m not defending the film or its idiotic director (he’s the guy who made Stonewall, which erased the black trans women integral to the movement to platform some cisgender white guys instead), but I’ve always had a soft spot for tacky, crap disaster films. Watching one is like being put into a coma; you sit on your chair and enter a vegetative state as the film’s nauseating production value does all the work for you. They’re like comfort food for the eyes. But when Alfred saw this, he took great pleasure in saying, ‘God. How terrible. This is the worst film that’s ever been made’ – yes, but let me explain – ‘it’s actually offensive to cinema. I can’t believe anyone with a brain would actually watch this.’ And so I resorted to the spliff-induced-Cheshire-Cat-grin, and soon they left me alone.

  Even after that difficult first evening, I was determined, and at first I was enamoured of everything. The hub of Eton College is condensed into a small area of Windsor, which feels like a separate time-continuum from the rest of the world. Schoolboys and teachers – or ‘beaks’, as we called them for no apparent reason – wander the cobbled streets in long black tailcoats, striped black trousers, waistcoats and bow ties, with the awesome buttresses of the magnificent fifteenth-century chapel casting its shadow over the city centre. I was daunted, but elated. By the age of sixteen, I had lost all faith in a higher power; Allah was a villain to me – I literally pictured him as Saddam Hussein in my mind – and my fish tank an inhospitable mirage, an empty hologram of hope. I was desperately looking for a new system to put my faith in. Here was a tangible parallel universe – on land – for me to jump into; a white, aristocratic version of Britain that was drenched in a past that had nothing to do with mine. Whatever it would take to fit in here, I would do. I set about learning the school’s ideology, eager to submit myself to its commandments.

  The houses at Eton are organised according to a strict hierarchy. There is one that contains the cleverest boys in the school – the only house to have fourteen from each year – and they are called the King’s Scholars. They live in separate, grander, more historic quarters to the rest of the pupils, who are called Oppidans (the great unwashed by comparison). There are some houses with an exceptional sporting reputation, meaning that many of their top year group are selected to be in Pop, an elite group of athletes who are allowed to wear any kind of waistcoat they want (oh how I fantasised about what I’d wear had I been given the chance: while the rugby players went for magenta and mustard chequered designs – BARF – I’d have wowed the boys with waistcoats boasting embroidered coral reefs). Pop was basically an abbreviation for popular, and if you weren’t the best sportsman, overwhelming likeability among your peers was key. When I couldn’t get to sleep at night, I used to imagine myself as the leader of Pop, in a waistcoat so resplendent with detail and colour – think Glamrou and the Amazing Technicolor Waistcoat – that all the boys would bow to me as I stomped over the cobbled catwalks.

  There was a moment where I flirted with the possibility that I might be liked well enough to earn my spot among the sporty Warhols. If likeability was a key ingredient, then I would exude it in boundless amounts. But without the knowledge of how to get boys like these to like me, my tactic was to act like a saint, and never have a bad word to say about anyone. ‘Amrou, who’s in your Maths class?’ ‘I’m with Ned Edison. He’s really nice.’ Ned Edison had the personality of Argon gas. ‘What did you think of that History of Art class, Amrou?’ ‘I think the beak is really nice. And I like the course. It’s a nice course.’ I repeated the word nice with the hope that it might get me a halo and grant me access into Pop’s heavenly layer. But my obsession with the world’s most benign adjective annoyed the boys, and when I once commented that the sandpaper dry chicken we were eating for lunch was ‘nice’, Alfred shouted, ‘Stop fucking saying everything’s nice! Grow a fucking opinion.’ As if you’ll ever speak to me like that once I’m in POP, biatch. Sadly, the pipe dream was cut short when a teacher I raised the subject with laughed in my face. ‘Pop’s not really … for you, Amrou (pronounced Am-e-row).’ What a blow.

  Costume perks were all part of the Eton status game. For example, there was a set of achievements that warranted you a ‘stick-up’ – meaning that instead of wearing just the empty white collar, that felt more like a noose, you were allowed to bedeck it with a white bow tie. Most of the ways of getting a stick-up were out of my reach as a new student – being the head of a certain club, say, an outstanding sports credential, or being a house captain. But being an unornamented nobody wasn’t an option for me. And so I searched the little book of information called Fixtures, that we received each term, and read of a position that permitted ‘stick-ups’ – this position was called The Keeper of Societies. Even today, I have no fucking idea what the hell this position entailed, but I managed to convince the beak in charge to award me the title with a very hefty application letter that stated, ‘It has long been my dream to look after societies and to ensure their productivity.’ I also claimed to have ‘a deep passion for Excel’, and promised that ‘I would cherish the opportunity to chart the progress of Eton’s illustrious societies through this worthy administrative software.’ And so I got my stick-up. As was the custom, the news was announced in my house that evening over dinner: ‘May we congratulate Mister Amrou Al-Kadhi on his position as Keeper of Societies.’ A faint sludge of applause came from the house, most boys bemused that such a role even existed at the school, with my year group openly laughing in my face. And even though I never once ‘kept’ a single fucking thing about a single society – so much so that the Head Master’s Junior summoned me in to discuss why there was no record of any single society in any single school document – I got my white bow tie, and that was what mattered. Like my mum, I knew the importance of sartorial signifiers of success.

  Apart from the King’s Scholars, every house at Eton slept ten boys from each of the five year groups. There were only nine boys from my year group in the house I was assigned to, following the expulsion (or death) of one the previous year – I was the replacement tenth. The year group of the house I joined was notorious around the school for being troublesome; whenever I told a fellow student which house was mine, their faces would relay a beat of concern for my well-being, their heads tilting ever so slightly in condolence. Pretty quickly, I understood why.

  Other houses were known for their dramatic or musical reputation, and the school would flock to their productions whenever they were
announced. If only I could have been in one of those houses, finding comfort and validation on the stage, a space where I had been able to express myself more freely at my previous school. The year group in my house were notorious failures – low down the ladder academically, useless at sports, and incapable of organising a watchable production. And so the isolated bunch were left to turn on each other like a William Hogarth rendition of The Hunger Games. And I was the fresh carcass, ready to be savaged.

  Alfred, who we met a few pages ago, became a cruel bully, enlisting two friends from another house to help him with his torment – let’s call them Charles and William. Alfred had the worst academic marks of the group, but was one of the most quick-witted people I have ever met, showcasing his humour by picking on vulnerable prey. Charles was from a military background, outwardly supported the BNP, and read the Daily Telegraph every morning. Charles was very racist. William was a devout Catholic, and an unashamed Islamophobe. He had a menacing laugh that was like a mix between someone choking and someone choking someone else and he never blinked – literally, NOT ONCE.

  In my third week at Eton, I saw a poster in the house for a production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome taking place in the school. Over lunch, when William and Charles were visiting, I asked Alfred who Oscar Wilde was.

  ‘Amrou doesn’t know who Oscar Wilde is!’ Alfred yelped gleefully, like a salivating dog licking its lips.

  ‘They don’t know who Oscar Wilde is at the mosque then?’ William sneered (without blinking, of course).

  ‘Fucking foreigner,’ Charles tutted under his breath, completing the hat-trick of racist lunchtime jibes.

  Not knowing who Oscar Wilde was – Gasp! Shock! Horror! Can you in your wildest dreams imagine something so grotesquely blasphemous? Was there no analysis of The Importance of Being Earnest in Islam class? The boys looked at me as if I must have been educated in a Jihadi cave or something.