I was learning to live in the disquiet I felt in Moorland-Spingarn, in the mess of my mind. The gnawing discomfort, the chaos, the intellectual vertigo was not an alarm. It was a beacon.

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

During weekdays, at the London College of Furniture, I felt free to explore my new self, but at weekends when I saw Tony I softened my appearance. A change of look can happen quickly, but changing on the inside is a more gradual process. On the outside, I was a trendy college student, but in my head I was still the good Christian girl wanting to keep everyone happy. As I look back, I know that I had zero interest in Tony. The fact was I didn’t know how to say no to him; it was that simple. We didn’t do anything or go anywhere, and I don’t recall him ever taking me to a restaurant or a movie like normal couples. He’d pick me up from my home in Brixton, drive me all the way to north London, and we’d watch telly in his room. That was our relationship. I was so meek I didn’t have any voice at all.

I ended up in Middlesbrough, at Teesside Polytechnic, in 1986, doing an honours degree in Interior Architecture and Design. At its height, in the early 1900s, Teesside Steelworks in North Yorkshire had over ninety-one blast furnaces and was one of the largest steel producers in the world, but by the 1980s, Teesside was a post-industrial area in decline. However, I loved being there, and it was a joy and a relief to be away from Tony. I felt free to reinvent myself again. I was five hours away from London and nobody knew who I was. Nobody knew my background, and I could be who I wanted to be.

In my second year I was heavily involved with the Students’ Union and became Entertainments Officer, booking bands and DJs. I was always listening to music on my Walkman and would sing walking along the corridor between courses. Word spread that I could hold a tune, so I started getting offers to sing. A student jazz pianist asked me to sing jazz standards so he could practise his piano, and we would rehearse in a hall on campus. After a solid year of bugging from a guitarist friend, I also joined a covers band, a jazz/soul septet we named JASS. We practised with lesser-known songs like ‘Blind’ by Talking Heads, Rufus and Chaka Khan’s ‘Stop On By’ and Hue and Cry’s version of Prince’s ‘Kiss’.

I am not proud of this, but when I met Agatha and noted that we were to be the only two black girls in the dorm, I was relieved she was dark-skinned. I was relieved she had a wider nose, coarser hair, and fuller lips than me. I was relieved because this meant I would not be at the bottom of the racial pecking order. To be clear, I did not believe that this pecking order was just or right. My father was dark-skinned, as were many of the people I loved and respected the most. But it did not matter what I believed. The rules had been written long before I arrived at St. Mary’s, long before Agatha and I were born. I knew the rules well because they had shaped my life, and because I was obsessed with reading historical texts and literature about people like me: black people, in-between people, people who complicated the rules.