Unicorn

by Amrou Al-Kadhi

  By the time I’d arrived at Eton, I was so sick of feeling that I had no clear story, that I belonged nowhere, and so I rehearsed a narrative of my upbringing that rendered me with more definition. It brings to light an important question about whether any story we tell about ourselves can be truthful – because it is true that I had been rejected by Islam. I did feel severed from my family, and even if they thought it was for my own protection, I did feel emotionally abused. So if I had to recite a story – albeit fictitious – that would narrate these very feelings, wouldn’t it in a sense be true? Up till this point in my life, no stable environment had been available to me; so in pitching my heritage as the Voldemort to Eton – the heroic magical castle – I was trying to establish a simple summary of what I felt. Have you ever thought of what your own elevator pitch would be? What would be the most concise way to explain your position in the world? What would be the neatest summation on your Tinder profile? I think we all harbour a desire for a neat narrative that tells other people who we are, and the utter chaos and confusion around my upbringing made my yearning for this much more acute.

  The issue in doing this, however, is that it erases the complexity of being a person. It’s like trying to understand a film by only watching the trailer. It disregards the fact that we’re made out of many different identities. You’re essentially throwing important parts of yourself under the bus in order to save the bits you might think are more worthwhile. You see, even as I basically cast my mother as a child abuser to my contemporaries, once a month she drove up to see me, and I hid in her car, and ate the Iraqi food she cooked so beautifully. And even though we ate in silence, it was always the favourite part of my month.

  One day, this contradiction threatened to blow up in my face. Each year, the school held a picnic at which parents were invited to feast with the boys on the prestigious Eton lawns. This day should have been called ‘Who-can-afford-the-biggest-hamper day?’, and you’d be forgiven for assuming that Fortnum & Mason were official sponsors. It was all chronically English. Among the day’s activities – which included getting to play with the school’s hunting Beagles – we drank Pimm’s and generally rejoiced in our privilege.

  My father was away with work, and my mother was forced into coming. I was of course nervous that my story wouldn’t match up; my peers would be expecting a woman in a niqab with her eyes to the floor, but instead they’d be met with the closest thing to a Victoria’s Secret model that any of them would ever see. I explained to the students that my mother was all about appearances – as were most of the women in my upbringing – and thus she’d probably attempt to hide the truths of our abusive relationship. Mama, apparently labouring under the belief that a British picnic took place in a saloon straight out of a Western, came to the event in Gucci cowboy boots and a Missoni straw hat. Did she get the idea from the poster for Brokeback Mountain? I had to hold her steady as she wobbled on the cobbles, and as I walked her to the picnic spot, I felt an enormous rush of love for her, and particularly for the way she treated every public appearance like a Vogue cover shoot. Compared to all the British mothers in their sensible trousers and maxi-dresses, Mama really was the fairest of them all. Nevertheless, I had to keep the boys separated from her; the Amrou they knew was an openly gay survivor of parental abuse, and could not be allowed to cross paths with Mama.

  And so I spent the afternoon with my mother and all the other mothers. They were fascinated by the Arabian queen who had graced their presence, and I watched Mama do the thing she does best – cast a spell of enchantment. The mother of the one friend I had in the house – a British–German psychotherapist – was the only woman Mama hit it off with, and they sat in the corner like two girls at high school forming a pact. The alliance, as it happens, was against a universally disliked mother of one of the other boys – let’s call her Mrs Nosy. She was that kind of mother who, uninvited, sent around pictures of her two sons to all the other mothers, and tried to organise parent bonding exercises like fruit picking in remote country villages. In another instance of Mama being an inspirational diva, she ensured all emails from Mrs Nosy were immediately sent to her spam. You see, Mama used the email I set up for her at the age of eleven, the first word of which was ‘cool—’. I fully comprehended Mama’s disdain for Mrs Nosy when she looked at her and asked, ‘Cool – would you like a glass of Pimm’s?’

  ‘I brought my own,’ my mother said through her Botoxed lips, flicking her hair and ever so slightly rolling her eyes as she turned to look at me. As it happens, my mother actually brought nothing in the hamper she trudged up to Eton – it was an empty offering only for show. As soon as my mother caught sight of the Beagles, she asked me to take her back to the car – due to a childhood incident she refuses to talk about, she’s deathly afraid of dogs – and we sat in there as she gloriously bitched about the woman who called her ‘Cool’. I had to save face and head back out to the picnic, but really, all I wanted to do was sit in the car with Mama. I missed the smells of her perfumes, the colour of her clothes, her tactility, her warmth, even when she was being cold; it was a world away from the constipated British austerity I had come to experience at Eton. But then, as Mama was about to drive off, she caught a glimpse of my bright pink socks, took a deep breath in, looked away from me and said, ‘Those socks are disgusting.’ Once I hopped out, I stood stuck to the cobbles, already feeling a gulf between me and Mama, yet unable to decide whether I could face going back to the picnic. Instead, I went into my room and watched Finding Nemo.

  Once Christianity had collapsed on me, I spent a lot of time at Eton jumping from group to group, activity to activity, hoping that something new would eventually stick. I compulsively attended as many extra-curricular talks for each and every subject. The speech from a guest lecturer who came to talk about early medieval runes? I was there. The Russian Society play where two pupils performed entirely in Russian? Front row, babe. The rare-board-game members club – you betcha! In this latest iteration of my OCD, I pursued each and every school offering as the potential glue to my crumbling identity.

  In the summer before my second year, I went to the British Museum for some coursework research, but really I was going to mine a new identity. That part of London is a notorious spot for collectors, with everything from rare book and coin dealers to vintage-comic stores and stamp archives. My identity was about as robust as a prismic hologram by this point, and it was looking for any kind of shape in which to solidify. As I circled Russell Square, I feigned a passion for all the quirky collector shops. At the comic store I asked for their ‘rarest comic’, and was presented with a gaudy little thing in a plastic sleeve. Could this be the new me? Could I be that vintage individual outsider, who collects comic books, who lives in the curious world of superheroes? Such was the process as I went from shop to shop, sampling the different identities as if they were clothes on a sale rack. I concluded the fickle afternoon by forking out fifty quid for a pseudo-rare coin from the Elizabethan age, which I kept in a beautiful little box, even though it was quite hideous and of no interest to me whatsoever.

  I also applied to be a member of Eton’s more exclusive societies, the ones that vetted their members. I tried for a foreign exchange programme to an American school that I had absolutely no desire to go on. Next, I decided to try out the school’s prestigious wine tasting society – yes, in case you’re wondering, I know how this sounds – and I was put on the waiting list. Thankfully, I knew someone on the inside.

  One of my History of Art teachers was a delightfully camp man, who could be spotted trotting to the indoor swimming pool every morning with a bright pink towel in his hand. One of my other History of Art teachers, when not at Eton, wore leather chaps and could be spotted topless in Ibiza with his husband, a former pupil. Safe to say, I collected the ones who ‘got me’. Mr Pink Towel was my favourite beak at the entire school, and being taught by him was like living in a Carry On film, a camp explosion of British romp that lay dormant
in regular British society. Ever the gay godfather, he got me into the wine tasting club. Other than myself, it was attended only by white students, one of whom was linked to the Rothschilds. It was quite a serious space, and we had to be discerning in our assessment of the flavours. While other boys could shrewdly make out ‘a trace of lychee’, or sagely observe that ‘this wine was raised in an oak barrel’, I usually came out with ‘it’s quite intense’, ‘it’s quite spicy’, and once, ‘yeah, you can definitely taste the grape’! While the other boys sipped at their goblets like lethargic Greek gods, Mr Pink Towel sat with me in the corner. Instead of discerning flavours, we’d compare what we tasted to works of art we liked (again, I know how this sounds). When we were presented with a dessert wine and asked to assess what cheese it might go best with, Mr Pink Towel and I, as if reading each other’s queer minds, cried: ‘Why, Gustav Klimt!’ It was in little moments like these that I felt somewhat at home.

  Overall, most of my time at Eton was spent chasing people and things that had nothing to offer me. One prime example of this was when I got into drugs during my penultimate term at Eton. When I turned sixteen, my father had suddenly made a lot of money. The company that he had been so tirelessly building exploded at a rate faster than anyone had anticipated, and he became a millionaire. I knew that everything had changed the day he drove home in an Aston Martin (I would go on to throw up in it one day, but that’s another story). The wealth lasted only two years – we lost almost everything in the 2008 recession – but at its peak, my mother came home in white python Burberry coats and Valentino silk dresses that elevated her to the status she had always envisioned for herself. In the emotionally cold way I had come to expect from my father, he began wiring lots of money into my bank account, the surplus of cash perhaps an attempt to silence my urges to tell him I was gay (though of course I was very appreciative of the financial support!). In many Middle Eastern families, money is used as a tool of parental control; your kids are less individual agents, and more economic investments that should guarantee a return. Whenever a fight ensued about whether what I was wearing was too flamboyant, it always came down to money: ‘We pay for your clothes, so you’ll wear what we say.’ The generous allowance hooks you into a lifestyle where you’ll continue to depend on it, and thus all of your life decisions feel as if you are directly tied to your parents’ investment. It was only in my early twenties, when I refused my parents’ money, that I was really able to explore who I was without them; I have relatives in their thirties who still depend entirely on their parental bank accounts, unable to pursue desires that fall outside the economic familial contract.

  In that embarrassingly clichéd way in which excess money often seems to lead to drug use, my cash was spent on cocaine, and trying to buy new friends. It all started during my second year at Eton, when I made a friend who introduced me to the world of London nightclubbing. This boy, let’s call him Kamal, was of a similar ethnic background to me, and had a mother as domineering and ridiculous as my own. It was on our walks to and from Maths lessons that we shared stories about our upbringings, and we formed a connection that I cherished during my second year there. Kamal’s family had always been wealthy, and he was known to harbour a penchant for luxury London nightclubs. The clubs he famously enjoyed going to were ones centred around VIP ‘tables’ – these tables cost around £2,000 a pop, and with them came absurdly overpriced bottles of vodka and champagne. Sometimes, these tables could cost £20,000, and I once witnessed a genuinely terrifying man spend £50,000 on a very large and rare bottle of champagne that he then sprayed over the floor. It pains me to say that at the time I was impressed by such a grossly capitalist and wasteful act – it offered me yet another thing to aspire to that had nothing to do with my heritage.

  In our final year at school, we were allowed to leave Eton almost every weekend, and it was during this period that my habits with Kamal developed. On one such weekend, he invited me onto his nightclub table. I stood sheepishly behind Kamal as we waited in the queue outside the club, terrified that I might be rejected for not having an ID, or for looking like Gollum when everyone around me looked like deities. But no questions were asked, the velvet ropes were lifted, and we were led through the club-proletariat and into a sectioned-off corner reserved for the gods. In this constructed Olympus we sat on velvet couches in front of metallic, LED-infused tables, upon them buckets of expertly chiselled ice cubes. The procession from the outside door to the nightclub’s royal quarters offered me a feeling of status and belonging I had long been yearning for. And the only thing required of me was that I helped pay the bill. I can’t believe it’s so simple.

  The setting was very dark, the dimness broken only by perfectly coordinated pink laser lights; I felt as if I was floating in space, no longer tied to the structures of the cruel human world that were inhospitable to me. It was a bit like swimming inside my old aquarium, a ceiling of UV lights above the shrine. The deafening music meant I didn’t even have a second to think – the only option was to be fully immersed and embodied in the experience all around me. It was like a visual and sonic lobotomy, erasing all my anxieties.

  Around the table danced a gorgeous woman who had the physicality of a proud gazelle, and as a thank you for all the drinks I helped provide for her, she took me to a private toilet cubicle where I had my first ever line of cocaine. Of course, I pretended that I was a habitual snorter, a lie instantly ruptured when I tried to snort through one nostril without closing the other, and then when I sneezed with fright the time it did actually enter my nose. But it got there … and the resultant high … well, it felt as if my internal organs were being hugged by a benevolent Allah who was full of love for me. Not only did I feel energised, even happy, but I felt confident, able to take up space and talk to people without the voice in my head telling me I didn’t belong there.

  After this night I was hooked, and I left Eton most Saturday afternoons, partied through the night, and returned late on Sunday before classes on the Monday morning. I seldom stayed with my parents when in London, and instead slept on the couches of the people I went clubbing with. Because I had money, I became popular. People who were never nice to me in the past, such as the Pop-elites at school and London’s top-tier socialites, crowded around my tables, knowing that they would be treated to a free night of drinks, drugs and dancing. For the first time in my life, texts flooded my phone asking me what I was up to, velvet ropes were lifted as I approached, and anyone who used my name on club doors was granted immediate access. I had nearly nothing in common with any of the people I was ‘friends’ with, and spent most of my time high on cocaine having conversations about nightclub politics. And this, I think, is what made me happy. The stampede of self-loathing in my brain was deadened by the constant lines of cocaine and conversations so inane that they were effectively a kind of anaesthesia.

  I knew deep down that not a single person there was truly a friend, but at least I had the tool to keep them by my side – money. Once the novelty wore off, however, the prospect of going home alone or back to Eton began to terrify me, and I became known for violent blackouts. Near the end of every party, I would become heinously inebriated, screaming and crying unintelligibly on cab rides home. After I single-handedly funded an entire night for some boys at school, the group had to stop me sprinting onto the road, where I very nearly got run over by a double-decker bus.

  The worst episode ensued during a night out with Oliver (one of the so-called ‘Machos’ from my previous school). I brought him out to meet my new ‘friends’, and he was alarmed by the way I was behaving. ‘Why are you trying to impress these dickheads?’ he asked me, mourning the geek he spent his teenager years with. He couldn’t fathom why it was so critical for me to be accepted by rugby jocks and cocaine-fuelled trust-fund kids – but this fickle and superficial level of status was one of the only ways I forgot how deeply alone I felt. Him being there made me feel naked, like the emperor with no clothes. My response to
this feeling was to down thirteen sambuca shots in about five minutes. Soon enough, I vomited on the floor, and next I was being carried by bouncers up the stairs; I clung onto the bannister, my body horizontal, refusing to be let out into the real world. Oliver, like the beautiful, kind boy he always was, took me home in a cab, where I was delivered with trousers round my ankles into my mother’s arms, totally paralytic. When I woke up the next day, my mother checked to see if I was still alive, before then saying, ‘What have you become?’ as she left the house. Oliver called me soon after and, once he was satisfied that I hadn’t died in my sleep, he gently told me that I had punched him several times and he was bruised in the face.

  Even writing this now, I feel a pummel of guilt in the gut. Why Oliver? How could I punch Oliver? The kindest, most lovely Macho, Oliver? My feeling now is that I was trying to obliterate any manifestation of my old, more genuine identity, of which Oliver was a reminder that night. My past was something I could not afford to go back to – for there was the place where my homosexuality might have me shot; there was the land where boiling water would wreck my insides; there was the place where I was just a vulnerable and weak outsider, with nowhere to belong. But whenever drugs and alcohol took control, the markers of my new identity collapsed like a fickle house of cards, letting loose a rage that not even I had come to reckon with. On the phone, Oliver told me straight. ‘All those people, Amrou. They’re not your friends. They’re going to fuck you over.’

  I hung up the phone, refusing to believe him. But as soon as the money ran out – and it swiftly did that very summer – not one of my nightclub gang was by my side. My stint as a nightclub bachelor concluded when I tried to get myself onto a friend’s table (one who had leeched off me several times). But without a penny to my name, his friend – an extraordinarily rich and repugnant creature – after complaining that my dancing was ‘too fucking gay’ (what’s wrong with a bit of belly work!), told me to ‘fuck off’. And not one person on the table sacrificed the honour of a free vodka Red Bull to stand up for me.