Read Online May Contain Nuts by John O'Farrell - Free Book Online Page B

patiently explaining to me where I had gone wrong on each question between now and midnight, the tone of voice he would use when he said, ‘You mean you don’t even know how to work out a percentage?’ … I had to do well, if only to ensure I wouldn’t be convicted of murdering my husband, leaving my children to be taken into care while I spent the rest of my life in Holloway prison writing sexually explicit letters to Premiership footballers.
    The next page of sums appeared to be completely incomprehensible. I began to panic. Maybe I have ‘dyscalculia’, I thought to myself, maybe I’m ‘number-phobic’. When I’d had lunch with Ffion and Sarah in Mange Tooting recently, the bill had been plonked down in front of me to be split into three. And I had stared at it for a while before announcing; ‘By the way, this is my treat, let me get this … no, really, because you paid for the parking meter.’ Not that Ffion had put up much of a fight.
    My mind was just so cluttered and messy – it was worse than the loft. I used to know exactly where everything was up there but now there were so many useless bits of rubbish piled on top of one another that I could never lay my hands on anything. David’s brain was like his office: methodical and ordered. Looking around his study it occurred to me that I had never dreamed in my wild student days that I’d end up being married to a man who put a polythene cover over his computer in the evening. He had a desk tidy on his tidy desk. He had CDs that were in their cases. He had a tear-off calendar actually showing today’s date, a magnetic paper-clipsculpture in a perfect line between the Sellotape dispenser and the pocket calculator. A pocket calculator!
    It stared at me, defying me to switch it on, just to check a couple of answers that I was pretty sure I had answered correctly already. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. The point of this test is to see how much work I have to do between now and the examination at the end of next month. If I cheat now, I will be completely wasting my time. Anyway, knowing David’s thoroughness, he would have already taken the batteries out as a precaution. I actually became indignant at this thought: that David should trust me so little, so I pressed the ‘On’ button to see if the screen came to life or not. A digital zero glowed at me, reminding me of the possibility that zero might well be my final mark. I double-checked my last answer and found that it was correct, so there was no harm done. But then the answer before that turned out to be wrong, so I wrote in the correct total, reasoning that there is no point in giving a response that you know to be incorrect. Then the calculator told me that the solution to the first question of section two was 147. I discovered that the average number of clothes pegs in question seven was 93. I worked out that 6 over 24 was in fact 25 per cent. The square root of 196 is 14. Lunch at Mange Tooting would have come to £13.72 each. I whizzed through all three sections making up for lost time. There were still a couple of questions too obtuse for me even to work out with a calculator, but most of them could be answered instantly, leaving me twenty minutes to realize that the numbers in the impossible sequence that I had struggled with had one thing in common. Of course, they were all prime numbers. Like Ffion and her money, they could not be divided. So the next two numbers in the sequence were 19 and 23. With my confidence brimming I managed the last remaining blank questions on myown. I had done it, I had completed the whole paper in time and even had a feeling that I might have done rather well. I went to turn the calculator off. It was the advanced model with all sorts of buttons that I didn’t understand. There was a button that said ‘sin’, so I pressed it to see if it made the screen say ‘repent’.