Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  It wasn’t long before the holes in my renewed social costume were unmasked, and the boys realised just how insecure I was about my background. But this only made me work harder to disprove them. After my time in speech therapy back in London, I had all but flushed out the international giveaways in my voice. But I wanted to make sure they were entirely expunged, and I all but tried to impersonate Winston Churchill when I got there. Every now and then there were unfortunate slip-ups, such as pronouncing pasta ‘pahsta’, using the apparently not so common expression ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, and once greeting another student in class with a ‘hey guvna!’ Having felt so rejected by the Islamic structures that bred my anxieties, I wanted the boys to sense no trace of my Arab quiddities; I needed to belong there with them.

  But my humiliation only got worse. Of course, this being Eton, we were forced to recite Latin grace at the beginning and end of some meals, and my inability to reel off the ancient idiom was further ammunition for the boys. My constant verbal slip-ups during the expected refrains in my first term led to Charles turning to Alfred and whispering, ‘Does the Muslim think he’s in a bazaar?’ The whispered joke quickly turned into a house-wide staple about me being a lost Muslim from a market bazaar who had accidentally wandered into Eton. Each night during my first term, as I descended to the dining room for supper, over and over Alfred would chant, ‘There’s a muzzie from the bazaar’, enlisting the rest of the house as the taunting chorus. I wanted desperately to avoid dinner every night, but this wasn’t possible – our attendance was strictly monitored, and I didn’t want to arouse the suspicions of my housemaster or the Dame.

  I also dreaded taking a shower every morning. The showers were in long rows separated by only a thin plastic curtain, and they had to be shared by the fifty students in the house. I had long hair and a body that was more like an assemblage of thin bones wrapped in brown parcel tape; the white, confidently male bodies all around me were intimidating. Not least because the boys in my year group would remove my towel from the rail as I showered, meaning that I often had to run back to my room naked. With my hair and body wet, I looked not dissimilar to a miniature Rasputin. As I slithered back to my room with my scrawny body and sinewy hair, Alfred spotted me and shouted, so that the whole house could hear: ‘There’s a drowned rat in the house!’ The nickname ‘Drowned Rat’ stuck with me for my entire two years there.

  My housemaster – who had a bottom that was as large as his entire torso and head put together, and a voice so posh he choked on his vowels – sensed my discomfort. So, in a selfless act of kindness, he made the decision to help me. By forcing the boys to stop their racist bullying? Don’t be silly – of course not! He helped by trying to make me fluent in British customs, and to seem more quickly like one of them. My housemaster had an obsession with converting me to the Etonian way of life from my first day there – he was also new to the house (his first year as housemaster), and I became his first project. This all came to a head in the horrible tradition of ‘Prayers’.

  Once a week, at the end of dinner, the house was forced to gather around for Prayers. All the students would sing a Christian hymn or psalm, and then one boy was asked to talk to the house about something they wanted to share. When a boy in the year below sang an original song with his guitar – his eyes closed in adolescent earnestness – the boys in his year group pelted him with tomatoes they’d stolen from the kitchen, causing him to run off and cry. (I often think back to this moment, of the lovely red-headed teenager with the voice of an angel, and I feel mad at myself for not having intervened. What was the residual trauma of this incident? Has he been averse to live singing since then? Could my standing up for him have made a difference later in his life? But I guess hindsight’s a bit unforgiving – I mean, I had my own shit to deal with).

  Each week we were notified of who would conduct the following week’s Prayers (Eton’s answer to medieval public pillorying), and my index finger would ache with fear as I ran it down the list on the noticeboard. Sure enough, there I was, selected to speak, only two months in to my being a student there. But, unlike the other boys, who were free to share something about their life – a hobby, a song, an anecdote – I was forced to do whatever the housemaster asked me to. Knowing about my acting career, my housemaster had suggested I apply for a dictation competition. This was as creatively dull as it sounds; we would recite, NOT perform, two texts in an attempt to convey their meaning, and would be judged by a visiting expert. We were forced to present a Shakespeare text, and I was given something from Richard III, a text of which I had no prior knowledge or emotional connection to. Somehow, I made it to the final round, and it was then that my housemaster told me that I would recite this text to the house as part of my rehearsal. When I found out my fate, I privately strategised how I would get out of it – could I pretend my brother had died without my housemaster or parents discovering the lie? It was imperative I found a way, for reciting the text would highlight the failure of both my masculinity and my Britishness – it would be like a public castration. The day of the performance, I begged my housemaster to let me talk about marine biology, but with a smug superiority he told me I would be doing as I was told. ‘It’s what’s best for you!’ he assured me.

  On the evening of the event, I was so riddled with fear that I threw up in the basin in my room. When I went to wash the vomit dribbling down my face, I almost burnt myself with boiling water. I then experienced something akin to a panic attack. The tap in question had grown to become a symbol of British austerity for me – the water came out as either boiling hot from one side, or freezing cold from the other (and you thought you had problems?). So confused as to how I was meant to wash my face, and fearful of the dreaded Colosseum that awaited downstairs, I then did what I promised myself I would not do in my first term at Eton. I called Mama. In our limited text exchanges up till this point, I had deceived my parents into thinking I was having the time of my life, desperate for them to believe that I had finally found my people. When we spoke, of course I didn’t confess that I missed my mother – that all I really wanted was for her to feed me and stroke my hair – but said I was calling because I’d burnt my face in the sink, and that I was in desperate need of her help. And so, on loudspeaker, with gravity in her voice, she coached me with a critical life lesson: put the plug in the sink, mix both the boiling and freezing water together in the basin, and then wash your face with the resultant tepid mixture. Mind blowing. Who knew? I was reminded of the moment when my mother helped me trudge salt water up to my room; although she had never expressed acceptance of my identity, she was telling me she loved me by teaching me how to wash my face. Similarly, I had been unable to share anything honest with her for some time – but pleading for her instruction in the delicate chemistry of water temperatures was my way of telling her I needed her.

  Bolstered by this contact with her, I went downstairs to Prayers. The podium waited in front of me, the sodding monologue resting upon it, the smug fucking cyanide capsule. The expression of the boys during Prayers was either gormless reticence at having been summoned in the first place, or the sharp-clawed glee of a crab, ready to pounce on a confused little mollusc. The sheet of paper quivered in my hands, and so I tried to rest one arm on the podium to balance the jitter. But the podium was a tad too low, and I slipped, throwing the paper down with me. I bent down to pick it up, but kept my face towards the room, in case any fruit was coming to pay me a visit. Before starting the monologue, I opened with, ‘So, the thing about Richard 3 …’ – yes, I actually said three, not third. There were a few initial snorts of laughter, as if the room were clearing its throat for a collective belly cackle. One boy in my year group, who had started to become something like a friend, stared down at the floor, no doubt knowing that if he looked up he’d cry, laugh, or have to shield me from the javelins that were en route. I decided to pitch the monologue up to the ceiling, and most of the boys laughed openly, any attempts at emulating
a powerful male dignitary undermined by my camp gestures and cracking voice. When I trudged upstairs like a droopy, near-dead puppy, sure enough, as had become custom, Alfred chanted the now staple, ‘There’s a muzzie from the bazaar.’

  My housemaster, with a missionary zeal, was also very keen that I embrace the school’s Christian tradition (though it was 2007 – the year the iPhone launched – it seemed Victorian colonial conquests were rampant at Eton). The school in fact offered subcultural faith meetings for non-Christians, but he never informed me of this (I mean, he might not have known, or remembered, and I could have asked, but in any case, I didn’t know that they were an option until my second year). In truth, I wouldn’t have gone, because I was more than willing to take his lead here, and attempt to assimilate fully into British culture by passing as Christian.

  The Eton College chapel has featured in just about every British period drama ever made, and walking through its historic grey buttresses each morning made me feel like I’d made it. Over the first month, I quickly picked up the hymns and refrains, and even tried to join the chapel choir. However, I was prone to gaffes. When asked to prepare a Christian hymn for the audition, I chose, with complete seriousness, ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’; when asked to do a reading in chapel about the land of Galilee in front of 600 boys, I couldn’t stop saying Galileo, whose godless theory of heliocentrism – to put it in context – postdates the founding of Eton by a 150 years. But I was determined.

  When I think back to how anxious I was during this period, a kid with legs like Twiglets, engulfed by the vast vaulted arches of the mighty chapel, I remember how willing I was to subordinate myself to an institutional system. Shedding Islam so decisively had left a void, and Eton’s imperial status became a new ideology to fill it. As I sat in chapel every morning, the light beaming through the stained-glass windows cast a colourful oceanic ripple on my face, inviting me once again to invest in the mystical secrets of another world. I harboured deep envy for the boys in the choir, who got to strut through the chapel’s aisles in their white and red robes, like film stars walking down the world’s quietest red carpet. The vocal ability of the choir was very impressive, and, as I closed my eyes, the soprano harmonies against the rich bass bed made me want to cry. Or at least, made me want to try to cry. I was certainly attempting to will a religious epiphany into fruition, even if I wasn’t actually having one.

  Quite often, there was a chaplain who came to the house – an angelic, blond, and handsome round-faced man, who I seriously wanted to bone – and I would make sure he caught me reading the Bible that had been left in my room for when I first arrived. I accosted him one evening, and told him that I was desperate to convert to Christianity. But rather than celebrate his latest recruit – he’d won over a sodding Muslim, for Christ’s sake – he looked at me with suspicion, responding only with an ‘Oh, right’. At the time I assumed that he shrugged the idea off because I wasn’t worthy of the Christian faith – maybe it’s the whole Muslim thing? – but I realise now that he could sense I was faking it.

  The line between whether I genuinely believed in the Bible or whether I just pretended to is blurred in my mind; it was one of those lies we all convince ourselves to believe as truth, in an attempt to settle any internal confusion. But when I really think about it, it’s clear I wasn’t actually religious – for my piety was only ever performed in public. I remember once trying to pray alone in my room; I was so embarrassed by my amateur performance that I had to stop as soon as I caught my reflection in the mirror. In front of the other boys, however, I would perform the expected rituals that would demonstrate my piety – every lunch I would make the sign of the cross on my chest (often in the wrong order, as my housemaster reminded me).

  We were allowed into Windsor after our early school day finished on Saturdays, and for the first two terms, I always walked alone; most boys used fake IDs to blag pints at one of the local pubs, while I usually found a sushi restaurant where I could munch my sorrows away. But even here, alone, I performed the cross over my chest before I ate; not because I wanted to thank God for a flaccid piece of raw salmon, but because it told the room I was part of a tradition that had nothing to do with my own. On one of those solo Saturday lunches, an elderly Brazilian lady witnessed my pre-meal triptych salute, and yelped with delight and hugged me; we didn’t speak each other’s languages, but I attempted a profound nod as if to say ‘Yes, I know’. Little did she know that internally, Allah was pinning me to a searing hot slab of metal and ripping off my testicles – but at least, for even just a second, I felt like I belonged somewhere, with someone. My performance of Christianity was strictly demonstrative up to this point, not liturgical, but this didn’t dampen my desperation to ‘pass’. And then came the long-awaited proof that my strategy was working: my housemaster asked if I wanted to observe Communion along with some boys from other houses. Result. At this point, I had no idea what the difference between being Protestant or Catholic was, and I felt I’d been invited because my undercover operation had fooled them all. I sat with eight other boys, who I presumed must be fellow insiders, each having earned their place in this spiritual elite. They were all serious Catholics, and I observed as they took Communion, consuming the host of Christ’s body, and drinking the cipher of his blood with quiet gravitas. When the chalice of red wine was eventually in my vicinity, I grabbed it – since the chaplain tried to bypass my participating, I literally had to grab it – and, having memorised how each of my peers took Communion, I closed my eyes, and imitated their general expression of intensity, feigning an emotional gulp of wine, before then presenting my tongue for the sacramental bread in an alarmingly sensual manner. By the end of the mass, I’d convinced even myself that I’d experienced something spiritually significant, and looked around me to share the special moment with everyone else, with the expression of a teenager trying to inhale a cigarette that’s lit the wrong way round in a room full of smokers. But all of them were staring at me as if I’d just said bomb on a plane.

  When the chaplain left and we walked back to our houses, the most devout of the boys, William, held me by the arms and screamed ‘WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?’ The other boys muttered ‘fucking prick’, ‘rude faggot’, or ‘disgusting muzzie’ around me, like orcas encircling a helpless seal stranded on a limp slab of ice. I was baffled – hadn’t I just completely bossed it? The ensuing interrogation went a bit like this:

  ‘Why the Fuck did you take Communion?’

  ‘Duh, because I’m Christian.’

  ‘Oh really! Are you a Catholic then?’

  ‘Erm, YEAH! Obviously.’

  ‘Liar. When were you baptised then?’

  ‘Like everyone dude.’

  ‘Did you get baptised in the Middle East then, you fucking terrorist?’

  ‘I baptised myself man. Chill.’

  ‘You’re such a fucking liar. Who the fuck do you think you are?’

  I ACTUALLY HAVE NO IDEA! is what I wanted to scream back. Instead I burst out crying and ran to my room. The news of my religious charades quickly made its way around the house – my attempt at a new identity now completely foiled.

  In the second term of my first year, I arrived back with not a single friend to talk to. Home with my parents was emotionally closed and painfully lonely, and Eton was another ghostly non-place, where again I was having to hide parts of myself in order to survive. And so, one night, as the boys in my year were watching a film, I decided to come out to a few of them as gay. Adolescent masculinity tends to prey on boys who are hiding things; my first term at Eton had been so tumultuous because it was clear even to Mr Darcy (the dog) that I was lying about myself. Such glaring pretences make it easier for bullies to locate your insecurities.

  When I revealed my ultimate social failing, I earned the respect that comes with honesty, and the boys backed off a little bit. This didn’t change my desperation to be seen as one of them, however – as so
meone really British, who they respected as an equal. And so my coming out led to a deep exaggeration of my experiences with Islam.

  Aware that the majority of my bullies were Islamophobic to some degree (even the ones who would have said they weren’t kind of were), I thought I could fit in by being equally so. As a way to earn their sympathy, I painted my parents as horrific monsters, telling the boys that I had been beaten, abused, and even forced into conversion therapy for my homosexuality. With the words of A Child Called It burnt into my brain, I compelled them all with a thrilling tale of abuse and escape, so that I could be pictured as a hero of sorts. How could they not sympathise? Even Charles, the BNP-enthusiast, placed his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Shit man. That’s shit. I’m sorry.’ It was the nicest he ever was to me. Racism does love company hey? ‘Why the fuck did your parents even come to this country anyway?’ he then said with utter conviction, to which I replied, ‘Muslims are so primitive man.’ William grunted a ‘Forget them’, in agreement as he left the room (as with the Brazilian Catholic, another lie earned me a feeble semblance of belonging). Propagating Islamophobia to make my narrative more plausible was a tactic that actually worked. For the time being, I was off the hook.

  If I’m being honest with myself, this is one of the episodes I’m most ashamed of in my life. To make my own life a little easier, I actually encouraged Islamophobia, and till this day I wonder if any of what I said has made life difficult for Muslims elsewhere in the world. Are Charles or William out there somewhere, drafting legislation, steering foreign policy, weighing up a drone strike, or deciding an aid budget? Do they still see us as somehow beneath them? As someone who had been the subject of such racism at the hands of British boys, why was I willingly invoking more of it? Well, all I can say is, imagine if your life was confined to being on aeroplanes, that you were always in transitory space, never able to land anywhere – the sense of isolation, of belonging nowhere, becomes maddening, and you’ll do anything to land the plane, even in hostile waters, and even if you have to drown other passengers in the process.