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Authors: Maggie Joel
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with Darren McKenzie not long after Grandma Lake had come to live with them, which meant Jennifer was over at the McKenzies’ most evenings and so had avoided the nightly trauma of Grandma Lake sucking vegetable soup through her dentures and dribbling it onto the nylon tablecloth. By the start of the summer holidays, Jennifer and Darren had been going out for perhaps ten months, which was some sort of milestone for Henry Morton Secondary and a world record for Jennifer.
Going out with Darren McKenzie meant being seen out with him by as many people as possible—the more people that saw them lighting up a Silk Cut at the school gate or sharing a vanilla milkshake at Wimpey or queuing up to see Conan the Barbarian or whatever was on at the Palace, the more significant the relationship was. ‘People’, of course, referred only to other kids in Jennifer’s year at school.
Such ostentation had been, and still was, inexplicable. Charlotte had spent her entire school life staring at her shoes, sitting at the back and generally going out of her way to avoid being seen by anyone and could not have imagined herself telling even her closest friend anything more revealing than her opinion on who had shot J.R. Ewing.
Right up until that Thursday at the end of term. The Thursday of the maths O-level.
‘Would you believe, some people actually try to get themselves onto these committees...’ murmured Geethan Chandrasekaran, the Professor of Celtic Runes, who had squeezed in next to Charlotte at the beginning of the meeting and who had been trying to catch her eye for the last half-hour.
Charlotte smiled faintly in reply. Somewhere in another building a fire alarm began to ring.
Another bell was ringing. It was the bell in the school gymnasium signalling the end of the first period of the afternoon, a Thursday afternoon during the last week of the summer term. A summer that had ended twenty-five years ago.
Outside was the clatter of feet, the screams and shouts of a schoolful of children emerging from classrooms and corridors, swarming towards other classrooms and other corridors. The screams and shouts reached a crescendo then faded. Inside the gymnasium an exam was in progress and there was still an hour left to go. Heads raised, listening to the din outside, then lowered again. No one moved.
No one moved, except for Charlotte, who pushed back her chair from her desk in the seventh row, who stood up right in the middle of a trigonometry question, who knocked her chair with a loud thud onto the parquetry floor and ran out.
She’d been staring at the trigonometry question for ten, fifteen minutes and she knew the answer, had already worked it out in her head (because really trigonometry was quite simple) but had been unable to write down a single number because her eyes were stinging, her teeth were clenched so tightly her jaw was aching and the hand holding her pencil was shaking so that the only marks she made on the answer booklet resembled small bird tracks.
Funny how important a maths exam had seemed at the start of the year—at the start of the day, even. And it was odd how much time you spent preparing and practising and worrying about it and how a good maths grade had seemed essential to one’s entrance into the A-level course, into university, into a career, the rest of your life. And yet it all came down to this one stupid question about a man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees that any idiot could answer but that she was suddenly, bewilderingly, unable to put down on the paper.
Two hours before she had stood outside the girls’ toilet block. Two hours ago someone—Julie Fanshawe, a friend of Jennifer’s—had called her over, had said, all snide-like with that fake schoolgirl concern, Hey Charlotte, there’s something written about you in the girls’ toilets . And Charlotte had marched over there not knowing what to expect but angry. And with a sudden knot twisting her stomach in half.
And now
Going out with Darren McKenzie meant being seen out with him by as many people as possible—the more people that saw them lighting up a Silk Cut at the school gate or sharing a vanilla milkshake at Wimpey or queuing up to see Conan the Barbarian or whatever was on at the Palace, the more significant the relationship was. ‘People’, of course, referred only to other kids in Jennifer’s year at school.
Such ostentation had been, and still was, inexplicable. Charlotte had spent her entire school life staring at her shoes, sitting at the back and generally going out of her way to avoid being seen by anyone and could not have imagined herself telling even her closest friend anything more revealing than her opinion on who had shot J.R. Ewing.
Right up until that Thursday at the end of term. The Thursday of the maths O-level.
‘Would you believe, some people actually try to get themselves onto these committees...’ murmured Geethan Chandrasekaran, the Professor of Celtic Runes, who had squeezed in next to Charlotte at the beginning of the meeting and who had been trying to catch her eye for the last half-hour.
Charlotte smiled faintly in reply. Somewhere in another building a fire alarm began to ring.
Another bell was ringing. It was the bell in the school gymnasium signalling the end of the first period of the afternoon, a Thursday afternoon during the last week of the summer term. A summer that had ended twenty-five years ago.
Outside was the clatter of feet, the screams and shouts of a schoolful of children emerging from classrooms and corridors, swarming towards other classrooms and other corridors. The screams and shouts reached a crescendo then faded. Inside the gymnasium an exam was in progress and there was still an hour left to go. Heads raised, listening to the din outside, then lowered again. No one moved.
No one moved, except for Charlotte, who pushed back her chair from her desk in the seventh row, who stood up right in the middle of a trigonometry question, who knocked her chair with a loud thud onto the parquetry floor and ran out.
She’d been staring at the trigonometry question for ten, fifteen minutes and she knew the answer, had already worked it out in her head (because really trigonometry was quite simple) but had been unable to write down a single number because her eyes were stinging, her teeth were clenched so tightly her jaw was aching and the hand holding her pencil was shaking so that the only marks she made on the answer booklet resembled small bird tracks.
Funny how important a maths exam had seemed at the start of the year—at the start of the day, even. And it was odd how much time you spent preparing and practising and worrying about it and how a good maths grade had seemed essential to one’s entrance into the A-level course, into university, into a career, the rest of your life. And yet it all came down to this one stupid question about a man walking five miles on a bearing of 092 degrees that any idiot could answer but that she was suddenly, bewilderingly, unable to put down on the paper.
Two hours before she had stood outside the girls’ toilet block. Two hours ago someone—Julie Fanshawe, a friend of Jennifer’s—had called her over, had said, all snide-like with that fake schoolgirl concern, Hey Charlotte, there’s something written about you in the girls’ toilets . And Charlotte had marched over there not knowing what to expect but angry. And with a sudden knot twisting her stomach in half.
And now
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