Doogso Ynot waits on Margate Sands for the perfect moment in what will be his landmark day. The shimmering Bank Holiday air is ornamented with moon and sun, is filigree-hazed at horizon. Dreamland’s doors are thrown wide for the trickle of exhausted wet-backed customers to shade themselves on dodgem and ferris wheel. Open-beaked gulls line promenade railings waiting to witness a miracle. Pointless kites wilt ground-bound beside locked bicycles. So many abandoned sandals wait in line for the comfort of soles that Doogso is reminded of a shore-side mosque. 

​

Imagine a stork, still as a petrified branch, waiting on a carp to rise from cool depths. Doogso abides, tilts his head to the sky, closes a blackened eye, wets a finger, raises it to the air, inspects the desert-day, wonders whether limp flags on flaccid flagpoles will serve as windsocks. He supposes.

​

Aircraft lattice the sky, ships vein the sea. Tourists kebab the beach, Arlington House gravestones the railway station. And all the while the weight of the sunshine in the cloudless sky mocks chewing-gum gut-stuck and guttered. Slot machines thrum hopelessly. By the time whipped ice-cream hits the wafer it is nine-tenths liquid. Helium balloons leak gas until a specific-gravity’s achieved. They gaudy-ballet-chorus at knee-height, bold-coloured, wander the promenade at noon among mad-dogs, Englishmen, burger wrappers, ketchup chipped lips, lost children. 

 

It is coming, change is coming. Inevitable as the downshifting of morning into afternoon, the gearing of before to ever after. Not even Doogso Ynot can be sure., But he is ripe with expectation, he supposes, he supposes, bed of roses. Change is coming. It is for him to fetch.

 

Why not be a have than a have not? Be an is rather than an is not?

 

****

 

About Doogso’s feet fizzle supine families of all geometries, colours, categories. The scalding singing Sands became, as morning wore on, a wasteland patchwork quilt comprising many yarns and textures. Bright umbrellas shade quaking black-lipped dogs. Cheerful buckets and spades border-guard towelled territories. A weary silence has cloaked the beach; lungs compressed by fever dreams permit no words to rise above a murmur.

 

Though the white sun vetoes any shadow’s appearance, though suncream and vinegar choke amber sand petrichor, though hokey-cokey penny amusement arcades orchestrate small change, though kiss-me-quick-or-not-at-all passes for scripture, through two-thousand thoughs, Doogso Ynot shall not be deflected, diverted, distracted from his becoming, his coming out as who he is.

 

The kind of man he wants to be is rare about these parts of little England. Here is not home. Never was never will be. Here he is unable to become what he is not. He’s chosen a untrod path. His is the dilemma known by children of immigrants: to collect from lost property at the border the identity his parents abandoned, the old clothes they judged might frighten the natives. Doogso, unfitting, round peg. 

 

Upon waking this morning he knew the truth so deeply he vibrated. Any child threatened by adult-shaped tomorrows might choose, like him, the turbulent air over the tumultuous ground. Better to take a chance on impossibility than suffocating norms. If he were to turn left his family would heft him right. They’d only exalt or cherish him if he chooses to mimic their decisions. He supposes, he supposes, that’s the fate of every child: to accept the confines and thorns or escape to someplace other. 

 

He waits for a change in the wind. The clock tower celebrates the passing of another hour. Doogso watches a girl too thin, impossibly white, tiptoeing between slumbering flesh, step-stoning into the sand with pointed toes so her feet do not have time to burn, fetching her prize of cloudy seawater carried in a plastic bottle, a bag of seaweed, and a palmful of sea-glass. Diamond-drips fall from her green nylon fishing-net to startle seal-like men awake. They rise white, flap red, curse blue, then fall exhausted and scarlet-backed upon gaudy towels, there to grumble-groan and utter walrus-gruff drowsy obscenities. 

 

Doogso imagines this a Winter Garden show, follow the words, you at the back, all together now: ’Fucking kids, fucking kids, fucking kids,’ these fathers of countless children chide, chanting like a rising wave as she passes.

 

Fathers urge you to leave, then berate your going.

 

There’s no winning, he supposes.

 

****

 

One afternoon several days ago, during a few final hushed hours in the last public library in the county, before being closed to save an ugly penny, Doogso Ynot had crouched by a couch and read a sentence of a purple paragraph in a hundred-year-old book written by a man later shot by a Nazi in a small Polish town. He read words meant for everyone set apart. Sentences assuring him that Doogso Ynot would turn out just fine, no matter what the world seemed to suggest; the word on the street of crocodiles was transposed in tense and place and person to be placed within his ear. Others like you have lived, and some, even, survived.

 

His stunned steps took him back to a home he no longer recognised. Through time he drifted until today, this instant. Hence the beach. And his standing as the slumbering masses sprawl. Hence the uplift of his manifesto: ‘It’s not so bad being whoever whatever wherever, at least it is your choice rather than theirs.’

 

And if this does not work then he will have gained nothing he did not already possess: ridicule. He’d have gifted himself a blessing by trying. And if it does work? He’ll see. 

 

They’ll all see.

 

****

 

His family he thinks are concrete buildings: crushing, cutting out the light of neighbours. 

 

One tower-block ignorant father, half a bungalow low-slung mother, an older dulled brother apprenticed to their parents’ well-trod footsteps. Each had in their own manner said Doogso was an afterthought. Loved, they intimated, too casually to convince, yet coda. Other, mainly nada. 

 

Since that sentence in the library, Doogso Ynot is beginning to live a life lived well, assert his choices, have opinions. You’d have thought, given their reaction, that having a creed was harmful as chlamydia. And well, look, suddenly his family do not like him anymore. 

 

To raise a child – even an epilogue babe – until it grows ugly seems mighty cruel to Doogso Ynot. In response to their son asking, ‘Are you not happy I am I?’ they trawled the ocean clean of silver fish-wishes, put their son on ice, chanted, ‘Ho yo, we do not know you anymore.’ 

 

Long-listed his shortcomings. ‘Master Ynot, why why why, who do you think you are?’ 

 

Encouraged conformity, convention, comparability. He was not to call attention to them. They lived in a trench: turn your light out! ‘Herr Haughty, Mr Uppity, you shall amount to nothing if you flout the norms of the land.’ 

 

Doogso Ynot repeated his father’s mantra, got in quickly a pre-emptive: ‘I am so terribly disappointed.’ Became banished for several days.

 

Being barely able to ever insert an askance word into the stream of conscious straightness of his family’s conversation, Doogso Ynot had the reputation of silence awarded him as if it were a laurel rather than a crown of thorns. The quiet boy became more quiet still as time passed. When thirteen he had been moved to speak when his father decided to euthanise Doogso’s dog for being old. Growing elderly in this family, the boy guessed, would prove hazardous. 

 

Their child’s guess proved right. Everything he said from thirteen on was deemed more wrong than all that came before. Just so at school, where the colour of his skin prompted questions of his homeland from teachers making mention of a third world, rife with debt and bloody history, in places crammed with disease and poverty. Here, too, thirteen had come calling before Doogso felt able to point out this was his country. He had not been imported, and he owed no tariff-duty. As English as the royals. ‘Say no more, son, say no more.’

 

On this matter his parents were silent. Head-down, keep squeaky clean, do not frighten the locals. It makes sense until the sense of who you are has been wrung out of you. Thus the meaning of his difference was Doogso’s to discover. They wished him well, but they could not guarantee they’d be about when the time came to pick up his pieces. If their youngest insisted on climbing out of the trench, it wouldn’t be their fault when he was shot. 

 

He was busily colonising himself, declaring his ownership of self, there, in the foredoomed library, and after, at a hotel-feeling home, mid pronouncement, when his family mocked him most cruelly. ‘Skid-doo hush-mouthed weirdo, put the kettle on, it will suit you better than such airs, hairs and graces.’

 

‘What makes you so special?’ his brother wondered.

 

‘Nothing, nowt, not a dicky-bird,’ his father hollered hollowly. 

 

‘Certainly not his uncut sausage,’ his mother growled. 

 

‘We do not know you any more,’ they chimed. 

 

****

 

The oven-ready-child becomes today a fresh-baked-man, grows-up-up-and-away, feathers outstretched. He will bathe this old-shore town in shadow, restore awe. Remodel the flaccid stupor of shrivelled razor-shells, seagulls, stall-holders, potted brown shrimp, footsore tourists padding footslog pavements. He supposes, bread and roses, as his old self slowly closes, will come the beauty of this day.

He gathers himself, spits in his swim goggles, adjusts his crotch, shakes arms.

 

****

 

His family, who might one day have read of him in red-top tabloids, more recently have gathered their opinions, propensities, and prejudices from unsocial media. This’ll teach them.

 

Doogso Ynot is about to go viral. Become an earthquake. He is due to shimmy boundary markers of this sad conservative parish. Shuffle the expected sleight-of-hand that comes with junctures. Speak without words what has so far remained silent. Doogso will tango the TikTok schlock world, Jenga expectations of obedience. 

 

In a minute, one sliced moment, just as the slither of the tock of the tick of his final earth hour comes to tear open his sternum, showing to slumbering tourists unused colours any of them might own if only they searched inside, the boy-no-longer-a-child will unfurl, uncurl in public, and make a timeless mark that will never be rewound, lost, forgotten, or untagged. Some kids grab forever by scratching their name in stone. Some tag motorway bridges. Doogso Ynot will scribble his one life on hearts.

 

Today will never be erased. Ynot: the final graffiti. Doogso: a modern cave painting. A snorkelling aerialist contorting an echo on earth of a moon ghosted by daylight. The boy who is now a man has learned family is finite in its beauty, limited in forgiveness and loving-tokens, and boundless in its greed for twisting him into a clone of itself. A family is an autocracy, an oppression Doogso Ynot needs to overthrow so he might breathe. Without remorse his family grips. 

 

To grow up is to grow apart.

 

****

 

He shakes his legs, loosens his limbs, rolls his head about his neck. 

 

On your marks.

 

He is the only once-boy standing on a beach sardined with drowsy tourists. Doogso is an exclamation mark at the end of a sunbathed sentence. He is the beginning of a new paragraph. The only figure wholly clothed head to toe in a world of naked skin. He wears doubled-over wild-swim gear, swim shoes, a scarlet cap, mirror-goggles, holds high in gloved hands an orange safety float tied to his waist, so that should he be pulled out by tide or down by undertow, taken in the shallows by shark, observers will spy his float and maybe alert the life guards. 

 

Set.

 

Doogso Ynot, bringer of a new swim-stroke. Doogso Ynot, capital letter of a new verse, adopts a dive position on the sand. 

 

Go.

 

Head tucked safe beneath his steepled arms, each ear protected by his biceps, every finger spiring, the boy lifts a foot free of coarse sand, of ground-down shell and pebble, and there, he balances for a moment, gaining his bearings, before he pivots, pirouettes, and is away. 

 

Sculls into air. 

 

Kicks up from beach. 

 

Strikes out from land. 

 

Lifts off.

 

Particles of plastic, particles of sand, fall from Doogso Ynot’s shoes. Specks of astonishment tumble slowly down, glitter as they settle on the beach, sprinkle resting bodies red and tan, infect sandwiches with caustic pollution, coarsen apple cores, grit the widening eyes of disbelief. 

 

A boy must not fly. He must stay like the rest of us. A boy of uncertain origins must not go searching for his past and thus his future. A boy – he must not – must not – boys must not – 

 

Doogso Ynot is a line from Lorca – the one you read that summons orange-peel longing at midnight, or the ballad of a firing-squad moon at dawn. He is a fantasy of Rushdie sketched on the real – that makes your stomach chocolate-curl from the deep rightness of your first wholly selfless and most beautiful kiss, as you fail to distinguish between lips, longing and tenderness.

 

Doogso backstrokes above sun worshippers. Pulls the atmosphere between his fingers. Kicks hard ten meters in to sky. Swims a lazy breeze. Casts umbra over children juggling fear, fascination, ice cream. 

 

A few hands reach up as Doogso Ynot tumble-turns down, pauses to tread air, gain his bearings. He backstrokes among swooping oyster-catchers. Orange-eyed gulls rest on Doogso Ynot’s stomach. Toddlers chase the flying boy. Terriers foul themselves, hackles form mountains. Mothers turn away the heads of the children they can reach. Grandmothers confess they once dreamed of this. Fathers follow the flying boy with bright nylon fishing nets, as if he is a butterfly they wish to collect. Pale poets wonder if they too might abandoned the dead-weight of their lives. Earphones are lost along with surety. 

 

High he reaches, high. Stretches for the calm of the moon in the turbulent air. Doogso Ynot leaves the earthbound to their blue despairing depths. Endows footprints to air, to fable, eddies searching for meaning. 

 

The video of the floating once-boy goes pandemic, solo epidemic. The rest of us, living bound by a deterministic universe, feel undone, strangers to physics. 

 

His brother resigns from the family, his father sabotages his own elevator, his mother locks tight her shutters. 

 

‘No Ynot he, no nah nee roar. We do not know him any more,’ family parrot in exclusive interviews, the evening news, on poe-faced podcasts. 

 

Catholics claim Doogso Ynot for their own, each sect and cult, the same. 

 

A jet is scrambled but detects no trace of the boy who stepped beyond the beach, climbed with a soft-stroke dance intangible air, became a dot, a speck, a spot, to leave us grieving in his shadow. 

 

The next day’s copy-editor headlines fail to find new words to describe the boy’s ascension. Influencers, opinion-shapers, conspiracy constructors, befuddlers, Rupert Murdoch, struggle to comprehend Ynot’s regenerated world. He will pass, they hope. Bury the news, steal the narrative.

 

He leaves behind… gravity. 

 

All we assumed was true. 

 

Sense. 

 

He is survived by… those he left behind. 

 

A family pleading for his non-return. 

 

Science.

 

Only Ynot does not pass. His shadow-shape glows gold as a secret angel whispering into the ears of sons, daughters, others, reinvented forms of selfless life, who taste, as if taking in strange pheromones, a change upon the wind. Ynot’s floating presence comes to be a sentence of a purple paragraph in hundred-year-old book written by a man shot by a Nazi, assuring all who let the words show them, that they will turn out fine no matter what the world seems to suggest. Children and teenagers gather in public parks to sing, to raise joined hands toward the sky their parents cannot comprehend, why not Doogso Ynot why not us, too? ‘Why not be a have than a have

not? Be an is rather than an is not?’ the chorus melodies.

 

The following week, the millstone Government borrows billions in order to supply weighted shoes for every child approaching puberty. Issues each parent heavy chains when the fee for a birth certificate and citizenship is paid. Public information films are produced warning against youth radicalisation, doubling-down on class-speak, chance-speak, change-speak. Doogso Ynot’s face appears on wanted posters throughout England, though he always fancied himself, he muses, oaring invisibly through the cool of the turbulent air, toward an untouchable moon, unwanted.