I picked up the exercise book, retreated to my room, and went above and beyond for all three pieces of homework. With the neatest handwriting my black-ink fountain pen could conjure, I completed the three best pieces of work in my school career up till that point: a comprehension exercise on Treasure Island, in which I answered every one-mark question with an essay; an actual essay about some poems we had been reading, for which I went beyond the parameters of the question, citing every other poem from the anthology; and an example of a ‘formal letter’, which was so extraordinarily well presented it looked like a bit of museum calligraphy preserved from the Elizabethan era. I worked throughout the night, and my focus never faltered.
Even though I was tired the next day, I felt a sense of hope as I handed in my opus. At the end of the week, our English teacher (let’s call her Ms Clare) – a dainty, sweetly-spoken American lady with a perfect, bouncy bob – asked us to come to the front of the class to collect our homework, as was the routine every Friday. On the procession to her desk, I felt as if I was preparing to meet Allah on Judgement Day.
As she handed me my fate, Ms Clare winked at me. I wonder if Allah winks at people who get into Heaven on Judgement Day? The wink comforted me only for a moment; my negative thought patterns didn’t let me believe it was something good, and I immediately assumed she must have had something in her eye. Well, that was until she said: ‘I can tell how hard you worked on this. And it paid off.’ The euphoria I felt was extraordinary – a current of joy flowed through the base of my feet, surging up through my thighs, rising into my belly and all the way up to my face. As I skipped back to my desk with a smile so wide it looked as though I was on a dentist’s chair, I flicked through my work. Every single red tick offered a validation I hadn’t felt since I was five years old and unquestionably my mother’s favourite. The next time I would experience such a pure, unadulterated bliss was when performing in drag for the first time some years later at university; but for now this high was something I needed another hit of, and soon. It was abundantly clear: a hundred per cent academic track record would be the antidote to everything negative I believed about myself.
Pretty quickly, however, the chase for a high became an agonising addiction, with each high feeling meagre in comparison to the one before. My chase for the 100 per cent mark made even 99 per cent feel like a catastrophic failure; if I didn’t get 100 per cent in every single exam and piece of homework, then I was a worthless queer who deserved to rot in hell and be shot by my mother. These extreme patterns of thinking led to some maddening episodes of OCD, and actions that must have seemed totally fucking crazy to my teachers and my parents. There are too many examples to recount, but a few stand out in my memory.
At thirteen, we were forced to decide which subjects to take for GCSE. Let’s just say, I did not approach the task lightly; a bomb defuser deciding which wire to cut in order to save mankind probably approaches their task with less gravity. As well as the standard mixture of Maths, French, English and Sciences, we had to decide which of the humanities we wanted to pursue. The reputability of History and Geography were no-brainers, but what to choose for my third spare slot? Classical Civilisation brought with it the Oxbridge kudos of antiquity, Art was a huge passion of mine, and I believed it would demonstrate my creative side to universities, and Statistics was an additional Maths GCSE that I thought would show people I was an academic BALLER. This is the hardest decision I have ever had to make. I scheduled meetings with each of the department heads multiple times, coming to school early to wait outside the staffroom, so they could repeat everything they had all told me several times already. During the weekend, I called pretty much every classmate on our house phone to hear their analysis, and as I was such a nerd, most were willing to take my call as a trade for me doing their homework. Eventually, though, they all tired of me; their parents would pick up and lie that their child was out even though I heard them laughing on the other line.
So I did what in the early millennium felt like uncharted territory: I Asked Jeeves (the camper, more budget precursor to Google). Soon I found myself on an online forum for academic students trying to ace their GCSEs and A levels, and I put the question to them. The overwhelming majority responded with: ‘Just do what you like; what matters to universities is if you do well in your core subjects.’ PAH! I’m not falling through the admissions cracks on that lazy excuse. Amateurs! What ensued was a creation of multiple different profiles, each of whom asked the question in slightly different, veiled terms, so I could collate as much information as possible. Safe to say, I was blocked from ever using the forum again. And unable to make this life-altering decision, I convinced the school to let me study all three – Classical Civilisation in the allotted school time, Art after school three times a week, and Statistics at home combined with extra homework. YOLO.
Every single piece of school work soon became an odyssey I had to conquer so as not to feel rotten inside. Even a single page of multiple-choice exercises could become an all-night endurance test on which my life depended. Things significantly ramped up a gear when we were given our first piece of coursework that would actually contribute to our GCSE for Maths. In other words – it was a BIG FUCKING DEAL. The task we were given was relatively benign: we had to follow a sequence involving cubes, to see how the number of visible faces would increase the higher the number of cubes. Add another cube, how many more visible faces are added to the sequence? From that, we could deduce a formula that predicted the laws of this pattern, so that if we were to plug in, say, 279 cubes into the formula, we’d accurately be able to predict just how many faces would be visible. To get an A*, the syllabus required that after we completed the set assignment, we should try to invent one additional variable to the existing exercise – perhaps one side of each cube being red – to demonstrate our capacity to apply the rules of the exercise to a slightly different problem. I’ll repeat: the syllabus required that we only do this ONCE, and that the workings could be summarised on a SINGLE PAGE. I, wanting to ensure that I did everything in my power to obtain this critical A*, did not just do one additional sequence. Oh no. I did 123 additional variations of the event. For the course of the two weeks, I pulled an all-nighter every single night to be able to meet the expectations of this self-imposed and totally futile task. And on the day we had to hand in the work, as every other member in the class handed in a neatly ordered slim plastic sleeve with their coursework, I arrived with a package of nearly 200 pages. My maths teacher – let’s call him Mr Brute (it suits him) – stared down at me as if I were presenting him with leather anal beads instead of coursework, lifted the dense wad of workings from my hands, and shook his head. As I trudged back to my seat, I heard him muttering something I couldn’t make out.
But poor Mr Brute hadn’t seen the last of me. For the rest of the week, I read through my coursework/PhD on cubes every night at home, becoming incredibly distressed whenever I spotted a spelling or grammar error; and every morning I would arrive early to school so I could badger Mr Brute in the staffroom and swap out the pages containing the offending mistakes with the new ones that I’d printed. By the end of the week, the look in his eyes had gone from terrified to pitying, and eventually to seriously concerned. As I hunched over on the floor by his desk, replacing pages with the quivering fragility of a drug-pumped lab rat, he looked at me and said: ‘Jesus, Amrou. You must have worked really hard on that.’ Yes, Mr Brute. You could say that.
Maths, of course, could easily trigger my obsessive compulsions. But my quest for 100 per cent became far more emotional – even political – when it came to English. For while Maths is a universal subject detached from identity, I was an Arab outsider who was distinctly not English. As an immigrant in the UK, you walk around with an inherent sense of displacement. This is especially the case when you’re a recent immigrant, when every street you walk down feels like a foreign land where you don’t have