May Contain Nuts (16 page)

‘What do you mean?'

‘The supervisor rumbled me; he threatened to call the police.'

‘The police? Shit! Did he think you were trying to kidnap a child or something?'

‘Worse – he accused me of being a journalist.'

I felt totally exhausted; the intense mental effort involved in sustaining my subterfuge had finally hit me. ‘Shit! I can't believe it – it's not going to work. All that effort, all that study and it's not going to work! What are we going to do? I mean, that's it, isn't it? We'll have to take Molly out of school altogether and teach her ourselves, or we'll have to sell our house to pay for another school and we'll have to live in a mobile home that we can park right outside the gates to make sure we live close enough to get in and all our children will be teased and bullied for being trailer trash.'

‘Calm down, calm down. We'll think of something.'

‘Oh great! That's your solution, is it?
We'll think of something
. You're about as much help as Microsoft Help.' I was devastated. I felt utterly miserable and negative and defeated. ‘I need a drink. Do you want another half?'

‘No, I'm all right, get yourself a large one – I'm OK to drive.'

The stout and bearded landlord was chatting with a regular and seemed to do a strange double-take as he saw me approach the bar.

‘Vodka and tonic, please,' I said with a long-suffering sigh. ‘And make it a large one.' My body ached for alcohol, like chocolate after swimming lessons.

‘Sorry, but I wasn't actually looking to lose my licence this evening,' he said in exaggerated sarcastic tones.

‘I beg your pardon?'

He pointed to a number plate behind the bar with the registration
RU 18
. ‘Can't you read? Or have they stopped teaching you that at school these days? Go on, out! Come back in a few years when it's not way past your bedtime.'

I was dumbstruck. ‘Oh, thank you!' I cried. ‘You have made my day!' I could have leant over the bar and kissed him full on the lips, except that he was hideous and smelt of stale pipe tobacco. ‘David! David!' I shouted excitedly across the bar. ‘He won' serve me, he says I'm too young!'

‘Oh yes!' declared my husband. ‘What a result!'

On the way home I told David all about the youth club.

‘
The Childcare and Children's Supervision Act of 1994
? How did you know about that?' he said, laughing.

‘I didn't. I just made it up. Do you think he might contact the police?'

‘No, because then it will come out that he was flirting with the other play leader instead of keeping an eye on you lot.' When David had heard a full account of the evening he put it to me that I had indeed got away with being a child up until the point that I'd decided to take on Danny Shea at table tennis. His newfound excitement persuaded me that he was right. I had done it really. I had just blown it at the end by coming out of character. But I wouldn't do that a second time. I had learnt my lesson – that was what this evening was supposed to be about. David persuaded me that it followed that there was no reason why I shouldn't get away with it at Chelsea College, so long as I managed not to hit anyone.

‘Not even if I see Ffion?'

‘Oh yeah, Ffion excepted. If you see Ffion, you can punch her as hard as you like. But you're ready, Alice. The exam is just a few days away and you are ready.'

I felt a surge of excitement and trepidation as I faced the prospect ahead of me.

‘Why are we stopping?' I said as he pulled up at a petrol station.

‘The final touch for your exam,' he said enigmatically. ‘These places always have a few soft toys. We are going to buy you a lucky gonk …'

 

Feng Shui Your Mind

By Rohan Jayasekera

Sunrise Books £6.99

Your mind has various compartments, or ‘chambers', just like the rooms in your home. There are passageways that are cluttered and untidy, there are little nooks and crannies that you'd almost forgotten about. Most of your everyday thinking is done in the central part of your brain; this is your mind's ‘Living Room'. Go upstairs from there and you come to the chamber that is used for dreaming – let us call that the ‘Brain-Bedroom'. And through a little door in here is your psychological ‘Attic', that dark space where we put all the things we don't want to think about any more. And just as in a building you can redirect and concentrate the positive energy flowing through a space, so using meditation and positive thinking can you harmonize the ‘chi' within, letting energy and light flow through the windows of your mind!

 

NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY LETTERS

including Psychoneuroimmunology, Neuropsychopharmacology, Reproductive Medicine, Chronobiology and Human Ethology,
www.nel.edu/25_4/NEL250404R01_Esch_Stefano.htm

With regard to specialized brain compartments involved in motivational processes, the physiological substrate for appetitive or aversive motivation primarily lies within the limbic system. The limbic lobe surrounds the corpus callosum and consists of the cingulate gyrus and the parahippocampal gyrus. The hippocampus, which is in the floor of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle and is closely linked to memory processing, is also included in the limbic lobe. Additional structures incorporated in the limbic system are the dentate gyrus, amygdala, hypothalamus (especially the mammillary bodies), septal area (in the basal forebrain) and thalamus (anterior and some other nuclei). Functionally, the ‘hippocampal formation' consists of the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus and most of the parahippocampal gyrus.

I re-read both explanations of the brain's compartments, and decided to go with the Feng Shui one. I mean, if you're worried about your mind's ability to concentrate, it doesn't help to have your husband print out some advanced medical guide to your brain that has you giving up at the end of the second sentence.

The time to put my brain to the test had finally come; it was my mental D-Day, as David put it. We'd been looking at a picture of the Normandy beaches that Jamie had drawn for his project: hundreds of stick soldiers wading ashore, grenades going off, ships sinking and planes exploding in the sky. June 1944: the greatest invasion force ever unleashed. However, this was nothing compared with the onslaught being faced by the staff of Chelsea College on the Saturday morning of their school's entrance exam. Hundreds of middle-class mothers and fathers, all pushing to the front of the reception desk at the back of the examination hall to explain that their child had woken during the night because of the neighbour's car alarm and could this be taken into account when their child's exam was marked:

‘This is Edina Symes from Thomas's Preparatory School – she has poor circulation. I have a doctor's note here saying she needs a seat near a radiator, look, you can read it, that's from an actual doctor saying she needs a seat near a radiator, she has to do the exam near a radiator, this letter proves it …'

‘Excuse me, my wife knows the deputy head Mr Worrall? Yes, well, you see we were under the impression that the exam was two hours, not three hours; we've been practising two-hour tests, so he's not really geared up for a three-hour test, I mean it's hardly his fault, will this be taken into account during marking? As I say, my wife knows the deputy head Mr Worrall …'

‘My son will need to go to the toilet during the exam, won't you, Henry, can he go to the toilet during the exam, he always evacuates his bowels at exactly 11.30, don't you, Henry, he's very regular but it does take him about ten minutes, can he have ten extra minutes at the end because it wouldn't be fair if pupils were penalized for having regular bowels, you should get
extra
marks if anything …'

Was this what I was like? Surely I could never be as aggressive as these mothers; I didn't have the fanatical certainty of these
über
-parents. David says I always worry too much about doing the wrong thing or appearing rude – just because I still put ‘yours sincerely' at the end of text messages.

The teachers behind the registration desks seemed to age several years during this frantic twenty minutes. They tried to reason that only genuinely ‘exceptional' factors could be taken into account, but this only seemed to reinforce the very point that every single mother was making. The teachers had suddenly transformed into monstrous authority figures who dared to try and drive a wedge between their child and the word ‘exceptional'. The parents had, in fact, been told not to
come into the building at all but to drop off their children outside, but this ruling didn't apply to them, any more than the double yellow lines outside the school gates where rows of 4x4s were all double-parked with their hazard lights flashing (which apparently makes it acceptable to block all traffic going in both directions).

I felt curiously detached from the whole manic experience. Like my war-artist son, I was an invisible observer. Perhaps this was because I seemed to be the only student to have no adult fussing over me, crouching down to give me last-minute guidance or checking yet again that I had my back-up fountain pens with spare cartridges. My invisibility was no doubt aided by the retiring persona I had adopted. I wore my baseball cap pulled low over my face, and I stared at the ground and hovered inconspicuously at the back waiting to be ticked off. Such was the chaos inside the school that I wondered if after all my efforts I could have just turned up in my adult clothes and sat the exam as I was without anyone noticing. One or two of the other children glanced at the spotty strange girl for a moment, but soon found their chins being yanked back to face their parents who were manically gabbling ‘… and-don't-forget-to-have-a-drink-from-your-water-bottle-but-don't-drink-too-much-because-you-don't-want-to-have-to-waste-time-going-to-the-toilet-during-the-exam-blahdy-blahdy-blahdy-blahdy-blah-blah-blah …' but by now the children seemed so cranked up with endless conflicting tips and advice that they were just nodding blankly as if they'd been plonked into the middle of a teeming Arab souk after five years in solitary confinement.

Honestly, why can't these parents just leave their children to it? Why can't they let their kids put out their own pencil cases and choose their own desks and find their own way of
doing things? I mused as I prepared to take the entire examination on behalf of my daughter. In the urgent competitive atmosphere engendered by so many desperate parents I felt strangely serene and prepared; I may have had only one spare pen, I may not have brought a cushion for my chair or a glucose energy drink but I felt that I did have one advantage over many of the other entrants to this exam: I was thirty-six rather than eleven. This factor, I thought, could well be decisive.

However, as a mother I had found it very hard to leave the house that morning, what with my daughter being so unwell. ‘Gosh, Molly, you look pale …' we had both said to her the night before. ‘You're white as a sheet; you look like you're going down with something …'

‘I don't feel ill,' she had countered brightly.

‘Ah, you see, no, you wouldn't do; not with this particular virus that's going round,' David added. ‘What incredible bad luck – and just before you're supposed to be doing the test for Chelsea College …'

‘But I feel fine …' she protested as I popped a thermometer in her mouth. David fetched her duvet down for her to lie on the sofa in front of the telly and gradually Molly seemed to be persuaded that this might be what was required. A few minutes later, frowning severely at the ‘normal' reading that shimmered in the glass, I announced that her temperature was very high and she couldn't possibly sit the exam the next day; we'd have to arrange for her to take it later at home.

With David ensuring that the attention of all three children was diverted by the fail-safe hypnotist that is television, I proceeded to execute the now well-rehearsed transformation into Odd-kid. Locked in the bathroom, I applied the constellations of zits that even made me want to look away. I stuck on the
baseball cap, pulling the peak down low. With the clothes came the whole persona. I found myself naturally hanging my head slightly as I stood in front of the mirror, picking nervously at my nails: timid, self-conscious and awkward. There had been a girl just like this when I was at school. Always on her own, alternately laughed at and despised. I spoke to her only once. When three girls had emptied her bag in a puddle, I helped her pick her things up. ‘Thank you,' she had whispered without daring to make eye contact.

‘That's all right,' I had said. ‘They're horrible.'

And then I didn't think about her for another twenty-five years. Until suddenly there I was, back at school, remembering her mannerisms and the way she stared at the ground, as I stood alone in the queue at Chelsea College awaiting my turn to whisper my name at the registration desk. Having no grown-up to push into the queue on my behalf meant that I was going to be one of the very last children to be ticked off the list. I could see only one other girl who was also unaccompanied. A neatly dressed young girl with tightly braided hair and a shy face, who stood behind me looking a little bewildered. It was only when I saw her that I realized I had not seen another black child in the whole hall. Apart from a Japanese child and one or two Asian kids, every child here was white and looked just like Molly and her friends. A whole hall full of children who would all have had their comfortable lives documented in tasteful black and white photos up the stairs of spacious Victorian townhouses like ours.

I was wondering if any of Molly's friends would be taking their entrance exam on this particular Saturday when I spotted Bronwyn, and then, striding out a few yards in front, her mother, completely bypassing the registration desk to claim the best spot for her daughter before anyone else had
even thought about the next stage of the arrangements. The chair was tested and deemed to be unsuitable. While Bronwyn was instructed to place both hands on the table to prevent anyone else making any territorial claims (‘No,
both
hands, darling'), her mother tried out a couple of other seats, finally taking a seat from a desk a few rows back where a nervous-looking man was just settling his child. Bronwyn was clearly embarrassed by her mother's chutzpah, particularly now that she noticed that the whole episode had been observed by that strange spotty girl with the thick glasses. For a split second she seemed to have the impression that she had seen me somewhere before, but once our eyes met she looked away and continued to scan the room in vain for the real Molly.