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Then Mother opened her door and got into the car and unlocked my door and I got in and we drove away.
And when we got to school Siobhan said, “So you’re Christopher’s mother.” And Siobhan said that she was glad to see me again and she asked if I was OK and I said I was tired. And Mother explained that I was upset because I couldn’t do my maths A level so I hadn’t been eating properly or sleeping properly.
And then, Mother went away and I drew a picture of a bus using perspective so that I didn’t think about the pain in my chest and it looked like this:
And after lunch Siobhan said that she had spoken to Mrs. Gascoyne and she still had my A-level papers in 3 sealed envelopes in her desk.
So I asked if I could still do my A level. And Siobhan said, “I think so. We’re going to ring the Reverend Peters this afternoon to make sure he can still come in and be your invigilator. And Mrs. Gascoyne is going to write a letter to the examination board to say that you’re going to take the exam after all. And hopefully they’ll say that that’s OK. But we can’t know that for sure.” Then she stopped talking for a few seconds. “I thought I should tell you now. So you could think about it.”
And I said, “So I could think about what?”
And she said, “Is this what you want to do, Christopher?”
And I thought about the question and I wasn’t sure what the answer was because I wanted to do my maths A level but I was very tired and when I tried to think about maths my brain didn’t work properly and when I tried to remember certain facts, like the logarithmic formula for the approximate number of prime numbers not greater than x, I couldn’t remember them and this made me frightened.
And Siobhan said, “You don’t have to do it, Christopher. If you say you don’t want to do it no one is going to be angry with you. And it won’t be wrong or illegal or stupid. It will just be what you want and that will be fine.”
And I said, “I want to do it,” because I don’t like it when I put things in my timetable and I have to take them out again, because when I do that it makes me feel sick.
And Siobhan said, “OK.”
And she rang the Reverend Peters and he came into school at 3:27 p.m. and he said, “So, young man, are we ready to roll?”
And I did Paper 1 of my maths A level sitting in the Art Room. And the Reverend Peters was the invigilator and he sat at a desk while I did the exam and he read a book called The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and ate a sandwich. And in the middle of the exam he went and smoked a cigarette outside the window, but he watched me through the window in case I cheated.
And when I opened the paper and read through it I couldn’t think how to answer any of the questions and also I couldn’t breathe properly. And I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army knife, but there wasn’t anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army knife except the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my Swiss Army knife he wouldn’t be my invigilator for the rest of the exam. So I took deep breaths like Siobhan said I should do when I want to hit someone in school and I counted 50 breaths and did cubes of the cardinal numbers as I counted, like this:
1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, 1000, 1331, 1728, 2197, 2744, 3375, 4096, 4913… etc.
And that made me feel a little calmer. But the exam was 2 hours long and 20 minutes had already gone so I had to work really fast and I didn’t have time to check my answers properly.
And that night, just after I got home, Father came back to the house and I screamed but Mother said she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to me and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible. And when Father came out of the house he looked at me for a long time and then he punched the fence and made a hole in it and went away.
And I slept a little bit that night because I was doing my maths A level. And I had some spinach soup for supper.
And the next day I did Paper 2 and the Reverend Peters read The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but this time he didn’t smoke a cigarette and Siobhan made me go into the toilets before the exam and sit on my own and do breathing and counting.
And I was playing The 11th Hour on my computer that evening when a taxi stopped outside the house. Mr. Shears was in the taxi and he got out of the taxi and threw a big cardboard box of things belonging to Mother onto the lawn. And they were a hair dryer and some knickers and some L’Oreal shampoo and a box of muesli and two books, DIANA: Her True Story by Andrew Morton and Rivals by Jilly Cooper, and a photograph of me in a silver frame. And the glass in the photograph frame broke when it fell onto the grass.
Then he got some keys out of his pocket and got into his car and drove away and Mother ran out of the house and she ran into the street and shouted, “Don’t fucking bother coming back, either!” And she threw the box of muesli and it hit the boot of his car as he drove away and Mrs. Shears was looking out of her window when Mother did this.
The next day I did Paper 3 and the Reverend Peters read the Daily Mail and smoked three cigarettes.
And this was my favorite question:
Prove the following result:
A triangle with sides that can be written in the form n^2 + 1, n^2 – 1 and 2n (where n > 1) is right-angled.
Show, by means of a counterexample, that the converse is false.
And I was going to write out how I answered the question except Siobhan said it wasn’t very interesting, but I said it was. And she said people wouldn’t want to read the answers to a maths question in a book, and she said I could put the answer in an Appendix, which is an extra chapter at the end of a book which people can read if they want to. And that is what I have done.
And then my chest didn’t hurt so much and it was easier to breathe. But I still felt sick because I didn’t know if I’d done well in the exam and because I didn’t know if the examination board would allow my exam paper to be considered after Mrs. Gascoyne had told them I wasn’t going to take it.
And it’s best if you know a good thing is going to happen, like an eclipse or getting a microscope for Christmas. And it’s bad if you know a bad thing is going to happen, like having a filling or going to France. But I think it is worst if you don’t know whether it is a good thing or a bad thing which is going to happen.
And Father came round to the house that night and I was sitting on the sofa watching University Challenge and just answering the science questions. And he stood in the doorway of the living room and he said, “Don’t scream, OK, Christopher? I’m not going to hurt you.”
And Mother was standing behind him so I didn’t scream.
Then he came a bit closer to me and he crouched down like you do with dogs to show that you are not an Aggressor and he said, “I wanted to ask you how the exam went.”
But I didn’t say anything.
And Mother said, “Tell him, Christopher.”
But I still didn’t say anything.
And Mother said, “Please, Christopher.”
So I said, “I don’t know if I got all the questions right because I was really tired and I hadn’t eaten any food so I couldn’t think properly.”
And then Father nodded and he didn’t say anything for a short while. Then he said “Thank you.”
And I said, “What for?”