May Contain Nuts (7 page)

‘Oh,
Friends Reunited
,' said David, looking over my shoulder. ‘Are you on there?'

‘Er, no, can't be bothered with all that mid-life crisis nostalgia nonsense,' I said, hastily turning off the computer. Getting the children into bed that evening had been a greater battle than usual and I hauled myself up from the computer and collapsed on the sofa. It was only now that I realized how tired I was following the sleepless night we had spent debating our daughter's school entrance exam. I flicked through the TV channels until I found the programme about a young family leaving behind their hectic life in north London to become organic olive farmers in Tuscany. I wondered if olive farmers watch programmes about people who've decided to become anxious inner-city parents tooting their horns in traffic jams because they're already late for their daughter's Scottish country dancing lesson? I let out a long exhausted sigh, kicked off my shoes, wiggled my body slightly to get extra comfortable in the soft folds of my favourite sofa and raised a large glass of chilled white wine to my dry lips.

But the glass didn't stop there. The arc of its flight continued upwards as it was deftly removed from my hand and placed on the sideboard by David.

‘No wine yet, I'm afraid, young lady. You've got work to do …'

‘What? Don't be ridiculous. Give me my glass back!'

‘You can't do a test paper after drinking alcohol. It will affect your score. You can have a drink when you've finished – that can be your reward.'

‘Don't treat me like a child, David. I want my wine and I want it now!'

‘After you've done a numeracy test. Come on! There's a paper waiting for you on my desk. And a glass of milk and some biscuits.'

Why was it that whenever I announced a project my husband had to be even more keen on it than I was? Why couldn't I be married to one of those wonderful husbands who are completely unsupportive and uninterested in their wives or children?

‘I'll do it tomorrow,' I mumbled sulkily.

‘No, tomorrow is non-verbal reasoning. I've worked out your revision timetable' – and he thrust his spreadsheet under my nose as if this was some higher authority that neither of us could argue with.

‘Now, come on, if we're going to do this we've got to do it properly. All the kids going for this exam will have been tutored and tested for the past couple of years; you can't assume that you'll do better than them just because you're an adult. It's twenty years since you got your maths O level.'

This didn't seem the moment to mention to my husband that in fact I never got my maths O level. That I had failed it twice and then given up. Even now I regularly set the video for 18:30, thus failing to record the programme that started at half past eight.

‘Well, I was just going to have ten minutes, but I can start now if you want,' I said getting to my feet. ‘I am thirty-six. I would imagine that I'm going to be a bit smarter than any tenor eleven-year-old …'

David's desk had been cleared of all clutter. Reflecting the harsh glare of the spotlight, a clean white test paper stared up at me from where it lay beside a freshly sharpened pencil. An
alarm clock was placed on the desk where it ticked slightly too loudly.

‘I've made it as much like the real thing as possible. Now remember to check your answers,' he said, ‘and show any workings out.'

‘Yes, yes, I know,' I said tersely.

‘And if you get stuck on a question, just move on to the next one and come back to it if you have time at the end.'

‘Right, that's it! I'm not doing it! If you are going to patronize me and exploit this exercise to try to make yourself appear all superior then I'll do the tests in my own time.'

‘But that's what you say to Molly …'

‘Molly is eleven.'

‘And so are you, my darling. You have to walk like an eleven-year-old, talk like an eleven-year-old, write like an eleven-year-old and even fidget like an eleven-year-old. Now come on, do this paper and I'll buy you an Avril Lavigne CD.' I read the first question and was surprised by how easy it was. Converting fractions to decimals … I remembered doing these with Molly. 1/100 as a decimal is 0.01, so I quickly wrote the answer in the box and was aware of an approving grunt from behind me.

‘Could you shut the door please, David?'

He pushed the door to and, without looking round, I added, ‘No, from the other side.'

I occasionally wonder how husband-and-wife teams ever achieve anything. Did Hilary Clinton really think it would be possible to reform US healthcare policy when the president was her husband?

‘Bill, have you read my draft report on Medicare reforms?'

‘You don't have to say it in
that voice
…'

‘I'm not saying it in any voice, I just want to know if you've bothered to read it?'

‘Bothered? So you're saying I'm lazy now? Just because I forgot our anniversary when we were invading Somalia …'

I was determined not to give David a single incorrect answer at which he could tut and shake his head in disappointed pity. My husband considered himself something of an intellectual. When he watched
University Challenge
or
Mastermind
, he usually got the answers wrong, but still took pride in the fact that his wrong answers were the same as the wrong answers given by the super-brainy contestants. This evening he would have no reason to feel smug. He would mark my paper and force himself to say, ‘Well done. A perfect score,' as he tried to remember why it was he felt a vague sense of disappointment. I finished the decimals and fractions and moved on to the next section.

‘Which are the next
two
numbers in this sequence: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17 … ?' OK, I thought, not immediately obvious, but these things are always very straightforward – it's just a question of working out a pattern. Now, let me see … the numbers increase by one unit once, then by two units twice, ah yes, I see the pattern, now it will be increasing by three units, three times, will it? No, it won't; damn. OK, there must be some other sequence … I reread the question just to make sure I wasn't missing something obvious.

Ah, I've got it. If you add 2 and 3 you get the next number, 5. So if I add 3 and 5 I should get the next number, which is … shit, it's 7. They must mean 8, it must be a misprint … Every time I tried to listen to my own quiet thoughts it was like there was a car alarm going off in another part of my head, and ten minutes later I was still staring at the numbers until eventually they blurred into dead meaningless shapes. Ugh, it is SO unfair, I sulked to myself, infuriated by being forced to endure extra maths homework like this. My head
was resting on my hand and my arm was slumped resentfully across the desk. I let out a long grumpy sigh. I ran my fingers through my hair and noticed a few flecks of dandruff fall onto the test paper. Dandruff, urgh, how long had I had dandruff ? There was none on my shoulders, but by vigorously scratching my scalp I was able to send a few more tiny specks of skin tumbling onto the exam paper. I adjusted the spotlight slightly to get a better look and tipped up the paper to pour the collection onto the desk. There were a couple of dark hairs in the mix and one that looked albino white. It wasn't enough that I was going grey, now the grey hairs were falling out as well. I was slowly turning into one of those old ladies with thin white hair and a shiny pink scalp clearly visible underneath. I might as well buy a tartan shopping trolley and fill it with half-price loaves of sliced white bread to empty out on the edge of the common for all the pigeons.

‘You've had twenty minutes,' called David through the office door. ‘You should be on section two by now!'

‘Thank you, darling!' I shouted, sticking two fingers up at the closed door. I quickly brushed away the fascinating detritus of my scalp and returned to the paper. I was miles behind. I was not even halfway through section one. I left the stupid number sequence question with the obvious misprint and moved on to some straightforward percentages. ‘If Simon has 7 apples, Peter has 6 apples and Jennifer has 11, what percentage of the total number of apples does Peter have?' Easy. There are 24 apples altogether, and Peter has 6, so to get the percentage you just multiply that by 24 and divide by 100, which gives … 1.44 per cent. Hmm, that doesn't sound right. OK, it must be the other way round. It is 24 divided by 6, times 100, which gives you the answer … 400. Peter has 400 per cent of the 24 apples. This was serious now. I was going to
do badly. I wasn't anxious about the test I would be sitting for Molly just yet – strangely, that felt too far away to worry about right now. It was David's likely reaction to my failure this evening that I couldn't bear to contemplate. The prospect of him 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-clip
sculpture 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 my
own. 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'. ‘Time up!' said David, bursting through the door. Giving out a little squeal of surprise, I quickly leant my arm over the calculator. The suddenness of my movement made it slide across the desk and it was now poised to fall off the edge unless I kept pressing it hard against the corner. ‘Oh you made me jump!' I said. I couldn't move my arm or the calculator would clatter to the floor.

‘Right, let's go see how we got on,' said David.

‘Good idea,' I said, not moving a muscle, smiling up at him.

‘Strange,' he said, looking at his perfectly ordered desk. ‘That doesn't look right.'

There was a big gap between the magnetic paper-clip sculpture and the Sellotape dispenser. I couldn't keep pressing the missing calculator against the corner of the desk for much longer.

‘My dispenser has run out of Sellotape. I wonder when that happened?'

He grabbed my exam paper from in front of me and headed through to the kitchen. I breathed a sigh of relief and replaced his calculator. And then I glanced down at where he had revealed the next sheet in the folder: ‘For Parents Only: Answers to Paper One.'

‘Congratulations! You did fantastically!' exclaimed David, coming into the lounge to find me draining the glass of wine that I had surrendered earlier in the evening. ‘You got 91 per cent on your first go, and you'd said that maths was going to be your toughest paper …'

‘Whatever,' I mumbled, brushing past him to refill my glass, not wanting to betray my guilt with any eye contact.