I was doing such a good job too.
"I think it's a fairly weak argument." Why am I doing this to myself? Why am I letting them in? My anger won't let me stop my mouth from opening.
"What do you know?" Isla's chin wobbles with disgust.
"It creates a false dichotomy. It's a god of the gaps argument. It's the worst kind of begging the question. There are much better arguments for God." So I lied – there are no good arguments for god but I can't exactly come out and say that.
"You're a little brat. What do you know?" She pokes her finger into my shoulder.
She knows I don't like that. She knows I don't like to be touched. It makes me want to punch her in the face. "I know I'm smarter than you."
And that was something else which pissed me off about Isla: she was outside now, she'd made the escape but instead of making her own choices she'd rebuilt the same life around her – what a waste.
The way she eats, that annoys me too. It doesn't matter how much she likes the food (and I know she likes the food) she picks at it with a fork in her right hand in a lateral motion and skewers little bits that she then seems able to get into her mouth without opening. Even though my dad eats like a pig and would use a shovel to eat with if he thought he could get away with it, at least I know he’s enjoying my cooking.
She goes to poke me again and I slap her hand away. "Leave me alone!" I want to punch her in the face and tell her what a stupid idiot she is. My chest stabs at the fact that I can't bring myself to do it.
"Stop it!" My Mum gives Isla a stern look.
I throw my cutlery down on the plate and storm away from the table. I grab my bag and I leave the house, slamming the door behind me. I wish she'd fuck off back to university and leave us all to get on with things without her. I make a fist with my hand and I drag it down the bricks so my knuckles bleed. Then I suck the blood away with my mouth and press the wound into my jeans so it stops bleeding. I'm such an idiot – why do I let her do this to me?
My mum comes out a few minutes later.
"Sorry," I say. I am but not for the reason she thinks.
My mum drops me off at the library and I'm relieved she doesn't notice my knuckles. I usually walk there myself but she has to go shopping for supplies for the Sri Lanka trip so she's happy to drive me. The library is where I spend the three weekdays I'm not at school. For the past three years I've been studying on my own, immersing myself in a subject and then taking exams when I can score at least 95% on mock papers.
For GCSEs I took: Mathematics, English Language, English Literature, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Religious Studies, Statistics, Geology, Astronomy, Classical Arabic, Classical Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Latin, French, Spanish and Mandarin and got all A stars. Then last month I took my first three A-levels in Mathematics, Physics and Biology and am expecting top marks.
As well as this, I get a lot of time to study what I want and there are four things which fascinate me: cuisine, science, poetry and religion, or should I say, religion and atheism if you can call that a subject. So I'd much rather be at the library than at school anyway.
It all started after I'd recovered from my illness and my mum and dad dropped me off for my first day of school. I started screaming as they tried to get me to go through the gates and all they could do was take me away. So my mum started homeschooling me but within a couple of weeks she couldn't keep up with the pace at which I was learning.
I found I could read a book at four pages a minute and hold onto all the salient information. She kept going for about a month until we got to the end of the exercises in the Mathematics GCSE book and then she wouldn't have it that I didn't need to go over it again or practice any more. That's when she booked me to take an exam to prove me wrong.
I was seeing the doctor at the hospital about once a month at that time and she said it was remarkable after what had happened to me but that when the brain is damaged it can sometimes compensate in other ways.
There's something about my brain which connects things together for me. If I have to do an exam like the one for my English Literature GCSE, I don't even have to think about what I'm going to write or plan out the essay. My brain does it for me.
It's easier to explain the other way around: say I was thinking about food and tried to create a new dish. I might start by fixing on a main ingredient, let's say, chicken, and then I'd think about what style of thing it could be, like a pastry thing or a stir fry or a roulade, all depending on what I felt hungry for at the time. However, from there on in I have to ruminate on which ingredients would work well and how they'd all taste together. I'd have to make decisions at each step and every decision would be a conscious choice.
For anything like physics, maths or any kind of academia, my mind does it all for me. It's like there's another Malachi living in my head who's continuously working and feeds me the relevant information when I need it. That's the best way I can explain it. I know that must sound great, and it is, but there are other, hard to deal with elements that I think came along with it.
As soon as I see any type of connection between two seemingly disparate things I feel a compulsion to seek out other similar connections. So though I can choose a subject and read about it, my inner Malachi always seems more interested in pushing me to follow what he's curious about.
I don't know if I was like this before the illness or not as my parents don't like talking about anything that happened before it. There is one huge downside – I get angry and emotional beyond my control if I have to stop and don't want to. The inner Malachi does not like to be told what to do. I used to scream and shout and kick and punch when my parents tried to drag me away from a book but I'm a little better now and they are a little more understanding.
The doctor said I'd fallen into being an autodidact, or self-teacher. Though my mum said I had always been clever, this was something new. She told my mum that it should be seen as a gift and if it were her choice she'd let me study for at least half my time in whatever subjects excited me and the other half of my time in directed study.
Of course, my mum read gift as gift from god.
Once I got the A star for that maths exam my mum said I could study at the library so long as I went to school for a couple of days a week. So through his contacts my dad got me in part time at John the Baptist's, which served him well in regards to new members for his congregation, which I think might have been the only reason I had to go in the first place. Within a week both my parents were on every committee the school had going.
The best thing about being at the library is the fact I get unsupervised use of the internet, which means I get to find out answers to all my questions about being gay. At home I'm only allowed to go on for an hour a day and only when my parents are around so they can check I'm not looking at porn or messaging gay serial killers or something like that. I'm not allowed to play any computer games which don't glorify god, which means the only game I play on the home computer is FreeCell, and that is something else that totally annoys me:
MY FREECELL STATS
Games played: 7491
Games won: 7491
Win percentage: 100%
Longest winning streak: 7491
Longest losing streak: 0
Current streak: 7491
Now, this is what the stats on the computer really say:
Games played: 7641
Games won: 7522
Win percentage: 98%
Longest winning streak: 1123
Longest losing streak: 7
Current streak: -2
The reason for this disparity? My dad. He likes to play the odd game but does not understand, no matter how much I tell him, that almost every hand of FreeCell is winnable. In the version we have there are one million possible games and out of those only eight of them can't be won, games: 11,982; 146,692; 186,216; 455,889; 495,505; 512,118; 517,776 and 781,948.
When you get the point in a game where you can go no further you don't quit, you press Ctrl+Z unti
l you get back to a favourable position or back to the beginning and try again. My dad doesn't do this, he starts a new game. It makes me want to scream!
But now I'm in the library and I don't feel much like studying. So I go to the computer and try to find out what to do when your dad finds out you've been gay wanking but all I can find are a load of dirty stories that made me feel ill.
People on the message boards I read say that you can't know you're gay until you've had a sexual experience but I don't think that's true.
A year after leaving the hospital I got my first crush. Horribly warm fuzzy feelings about Daniel, a sixteen year old boy from church who I believe, in hindsight, only paid me any attention at all because I was the son of the pastor. We went on a church trip to Southend and I saw him in nothing but his trunks. He was tall and strong, had cropped brown hair and a toned body. His arse was like glue for my gaze the whole day.
Once, when I was having a particularly dreadful day and I got upset because I thought I'd lost a book, he did seem to notice. He asked me if I was all right and placed his hand on my shoulder.
It was like magic what it did to my mind and my body. Like an inner earthquake, so strong I felt like my knees would buckle under me. I was too young then to know what was possible but I did feel like I could fall into him and never let him go.
I must have looked like a deer caught in the headlights and did not know what I was about to do. Was I going to cry, laugh, scream, throw myself at him? In that one moment my body was far ahead of my mind, crying out for something I couldn't comprehend and sending pulses of data to my brain that it couldn't compute. This was also when I first realised that the body can be much more powerful than the mind and no matter how clever you are, you can't think your way out it when stuff like this does happen. I can't tell you how long we stared at one another but at some point the puzzle that was his face, resolved, as he figured it out. Figured me out. He drew his hand away and walked away disgusted.
For the next few weeks after that he was all I could think about – the pleasure of his eyes and his face. My insides did a spin cycle every time I saw him at church but he never once spoke to me again. Soon after he moved away to Frome with his family and that was the end of it.
My mind is in its own place today and distracted by everything that happened yesterday. I'm left thinking about the Kalam cosmological argument from this morning. It's an argument made up of two syllogisms which follow on from one another. This is how it goes:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause;
The universe began to exist;
Therefore: The universe has a cause.
This is the second part:
The universe has a cause;
If the universe has a cause, then it must be created by an uncaused cause that is infinite and enormously powerful;
We call that creator, God.
Believe it or not, it's considered to be the holy grail of arguments for a god. The way it works is to rule out all possibilities for the creation of the universe other than god and it doesn't do it very well. Think about this:
Imagine a string of blue plasma that stretches out to infinity. It is made up of a type of matter and energy of which we have no knowledge and have never encountered. We cannot even perceive its existence from inside our universe. It exists in its own dimension that has no commonalties or laws that might apply in our universe. Time here may or may not exist, or may operate in a different way. An infinite number of spheres bubble out of the energy, pushed out by more spheres which are formed underneath them creating a foam. Each sphere in this foam is a universe, like or unlike our own. The spheres expand as they move outwards and in the end lose their cohesion. This process is infinite; it has no beginning and it never stops.
What I’ve done is created a hypothesis for first cause: the creation of our universe. One that would mean our universe was a temporal feature of a natural, infinite system. And it's one that meets all the demands of Kalam, rendering it debunked. In reality there's more and more evidence that we're living in a multi-verse which might be a lot like this.
The truth is that all philosophical arguments about physical reality are useless. To find out truths about the universe, philosophical argument needs to be combined with empirical observation – we call that activity science. Here's a proof of it I recently saw called Curley's Coin:
If you want to demonstrate the differences in the relative effectiveness between philosophy and empiricism to investigate reality, you must flip a coin behind you 100 times, each time going through the same process:
1) Without any sensory data you must make a philosophical argument to determine if the toss was a heads or a tails. You're allowed to use any philosophical argument or method you like to do this. Then write down your answer.
2) Then make an empirical observation by looking at the coin and writing down the answer.
What you will ultimately discover is step 1 will give you the right answer about 50% of the time, which is exactly the result you would get by chance. And step 2 will give you the correct result 100% of the time.
To demonstrate that non empirical, philosophical arguments have any value at all in determining reality, you must develop argumentation which consistently gives you a correct answer more often than can be achieved by luck alone.
To demonstrate that it's as effective as the empirical method, you need to develop argumentation which gives you the correct result 100% of the time.
If you can't philosophise well enough to work out something as simple as the result of a coin toss then you can make no claims about empirical reality, let alone the formation of the universe.
So I don't get any real work done, all I'm able to do is write a poem. Poetry is more like food for me than academia. I could lick the pages of poetry collections. In my mind they're also things I need to create consciously, although I do sometimes get a poem which feels like it writes itself. This one took the shape of a villanelle but with much shorter lines. Villanelles are my favourite form. They're like the bacon sandwich of the poetry menu.
Outcast
The boys said he was queer
and kicked him to the ground
when Daniel grew his hair.
The teacher shrieked in fear.
She asked the children, "Why?"
A boy said, "He's a queer!"
They circled him and stared,
spat on his uniform,
bent down and pulled his hair.
They laughed at every tear
he cried, sat on his own.
They thought he was a queer.
The headmistress despaired,
suspended him a week
until he'd cut his hair.
His mother said, "In here!"
The scissors in her hand.
"You'll not look like a queer!"
He couldn't leave it there;
he got the clippers out
and shaved off all his hair.
He pocketed a knife
for the next boy who dared
suggest that he was queer.
And when the people asked
how this had happened here,
the boys said, "He was queer.
Just look – he has no hair."
I leave the library at two in the afternoon, giving myself an hour off because this is the start of the summer holiday for me. That doesn't mean I won't come to the library – my regular escape to freedom – I'll be here most days.
As I walk home by myself I am daydreaming about how much I will enjoy the next six weeks (apart from the three weeks away with my family). I won't be going out and playing games with friends (I don't have those anyway) but I'll have the freedom from people who seem to think they know my life better then I do. Which, at school, at home and at church is everyone. That, and I'll get to spend many days in museums and art galleries.
I walk through the suburban Harrow streets back to my home which is a part of a huge modern Baptist church in Sudbury.
When you tell people you live in Sudbury, they always ask, In Suffolk? I think the reason is the Sudbury in London is eclipsed by two of the most famous places in England, Wembley and Harrow. Still, it's so annoying to have to say it all the time, so I often tell people I'm from Wembley.
All the streets around here have Elm in their title. Years ago, all the streets did have elm trees planted into the pavements (I've seen them in old photographs) but Dutch Elm Disease wiped them all out. Now they only survive in name.
The church is a dark brown brick building with brown wooden window frames and planters which hold various herbaceous shrubs. I enter the code 4748 into the electronic lock and the door buzzes, clicks and pops open. There is a dead bolt on the door as well but other than at night, that is always unlocked. It might seem cool to have an electronic number pad to open your door but it's only there because a lot of the time, ministers, the warden and other church functionaries are going in and out of my parents' office.
There is no real hallway. As soon as you enter the house you're faced by the office. There are two brown desks, each with PCs and on the other side of the room a set of riserless stairs covered with the same brown carpet as the rest of the ground floor, which take you up to the bedrooms.
My dad is at the computer in his Friday afternoon ritual of writing his Sunday message. He doesn't like to call it a sermon as he thinks that's a bit too Catholic or Anglican. Either way, when he reads it on a Sunday it always sounds exactly like a sermon. He's wearing his black pastor shirt and dog collar.
My mum is standing in the middle of the room, looking at me as I come through the door, which means she's been waiting for me to get back. The room smells of roasted chicken that I'm not looking forward to eating, as, even after thirty three years on the planet, my mum still has no idea how to cook one. My dad spins round in his brown faux leather office chair to face me. "How was the library?"
The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Malachi the Queer Page 3