BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

▬▬ 03

THURSDAY
20 SEPTEMBER, 1990
ISAIAH

               I slip another honey-coted apple wedge into my mouth as I turn the page of Erich Fromm's The Art Of Loving. As Sephardim, we should be eating panganat but they're far from readily available in Suffolk so we borrow the Ashkenazi tradition of apples. Despite September's haste to slip away before I can ground myself in it, the sun bathes hot on my back.

Not that I'm complaining. The delay of torrential downpour — the kind the Bible calls the apocalypse and England calls autumn — means Dorian and I still get to spend our free periods in our usual spot in the school grounds.

Normally, we'd use the time to study but today is Rosh Hashana and the school lies dormant.

Coeus Academy for Boys isn't a Jewish school, but with a rough seventy-four per cent Jewish pupil body, it becomes one in practice. Our assembly hall is primarily used for prayer and the meals served are kosher to alleviate the staff from the plight of having to cook several foods. We even have our own residential rabbi and, today, we were encouraged to join the Taschlich by the river even if it meant missing lessons.

We can't formally have the day off but, with almost all our teachers and administration too being Jewish, none give us proper work. Hence, we can afford to idle the day enjoying the sun between prayers and meals.

Dorian sits cross-legged beside me with his characteristically awful posture as he writes into a score notebook propped on his knee. His free hand plays with the friendship bracelet on my left wrist.

I'll never forget the day he showed the bracelets to me on my tenth birthday. Apparently, he practised for a month until he learned a flawless weave and still presented the gift with bashful reassurances that I didn't need to wear it if I didn't want to. Though I've always been firm in our no-gifts rule, I let it bend this time. He tied one around my left wrist and I tied the other to his right.

'Why blue and orange?' I asked, out of curiosity.

'They're your favourite colours.'

'Are they?'

'Aren't they?'

I see why he would think so. To this day, most of my clothes are orange or blue because they're the ones left at the charity shops; nobody wants orange clothes and blue is so ubiquitous that there are plenty left even after everyone else has rummaged through.

In all honesty, I didn't have a favourite colour. Until that moment.

His fingers prod into my wrist and I look up, thinking he's trying to get my attention. But he's just as engrossed in his music as he was half an hour ago and my gaze trails down to our hands.

Dorian's skin is the richest of browns, so warm and dark I'm surprised flowers don't mistake him for a garden. Yet that under his fingernails is pale enough that, from a distance, it looks as though he has painted his nails white.

I worship his fingers. His fingernails, which are always trimmed and clean — unlike mine: peeling and dotted by deficiencies, his knuckles that bend with no ache when he plays his instruments, and the way he's capable of performing completely different rhythms with each hand simultaneously.

Just once, I'd like to suckle honey from your fingers to pray for sweetness in the year to come. L'Shana Tovah tikatevu, Doron.

I allow the dream a moment to tickle my heartstrings before I force my attention to his other hand. Dorian has illegible handwriting except when it comes to music, where he somehow manages to make each note look digitally drawn — even treble clef and quarter rest symbols. The cream paper in his notebook is expensive enough for his pencil to leave no embossment to the other side of the page even when he presses it much harder than he should.