A short story about me

I am a middle-aged non-binary teacher and writer living in Walthamstow. Outwardly, I am so unremarkable that people walk right into me when I go into the city. I have often considered using this as an advantage in a life of crime. Can you describe the suspect? No, officer, I never noticed them. My ordinary skin is just the wrapping.

Although I was born in Wales, I grew up in an Outback mining town four days’ drive out from the most isolated city in the world. There was one channel on the TV and it broadcast for five hours a day. Rain was an event and mud a luxury beyond words. We had lizard hospitals and knew how to treat snakebite. Our food would arrive in road trains, trucks flying banners of red dust across the desert sky. It was Kuruma Marthundunera land but we never learned their name, nor was I told about John Pat, sixteen years old and beaten to death by police just up the highway.

I went into teaching so that I could travel. I’d already studied in New York and spent a month in Egypt. I taught in Togo, a tiny country nobody’s ever heard of in West Africa. On weekends I ran with the international bright young things in Ghana, clubbing all night, then jetskiing or horse riding or quietly nursing a hangover at the beach. After that it was Italy, bumping my Vespa over cobblestones in Rome to look at bits of dead saints. Then North Carolina, where I lost my job because I was gay.

This is me!

England was not home. It was that place which had to take me when I had to go there. In 2008 there was no equal marriage in the States and it didn’t look like there was going to be any in our lifetime, but my visa was expiring and I was in love. So we came here and got married, which snowballed into a house and children and gardening and chickens and the PTA and knowing who my local councillors are. I never thought I would be this happy.

My wife and children are black. I do everyone’s hair, including updos, locs and cornrows. My children are properly moisturised.

Also underneath my skin are the books I have read and the stories that I write. I have five separate reading apps on my phone; two library platforms and Bookshop.org as well as the Amazon apps for when all else has failed. My stories look at life from the margins, from the flip side and the side eye. Some of them have won prizes. You should read them.