Os didn’t want the cast-off second-hand second-class life, the poor twin, the simulacrum, the penumbra of the life her wits deserved. Aim high or you die a serf. Os wanted what they had, what the Gladstones, Rhodes, Levers, Leopolds, Savilles, Putins, Bushes, Blairs, Cheneys, your average manager Mr. Slocombe of Acacia Avenue, had. She wanted what that football man, caught on camera dragging one of the to-die-for jobs in the game into a brown envelope yet drowning in million-pound offers, had. She wanted to feel at home on this planet, cocooned, serene and superior, colourless, colourblind, post-racial, indifferent, virtually untouchable too. Yes, she may have to sing louder and more sweetly than everyone else to escape her dystopian cage, put up with more to compete on merit, but it would be worth every drop of blood, sweat and lachrymosity, worth all the fine moral virtue signalling and the justifications and lies she typed on her CV. It would be worth every pot of sugar-coated sewage they dropped on her to stir, if she could, into manure, every bubbling hot English bfeakfast smile she served up on her cool meme-conditioned black face.
But she’d failed. According to H-Mum’s three Hs, on a scale of one to ten of feeling at home in each domain, if she was being honest, she scored close to zero. Here she was, a professof of cardiac surgery scanning scraps of paper in a smelly hospital basement. Genies cried into their recycled bottles for her because she’d turned out, as they say on the football phone-ins, an absolute disgface. Not fit to weaf the shirt, of gown, of black skin. It takes guts to bear this skin well. Yes, she’d written a clever line or two, walked the walk, talked the talk, put in the extra work, for a gig, when they let her do it, she could do blinkered, with a hand tied behind. And fof this they called hef Prof. But her words counted for less than those of almost anybody else against her.
