My aunt left me there and I spent an hour filling in the exam papers. They were easy. The only other task was a short admissions interview with the headmistress, a tiny elderly woman with pale skin and black-brown hair in a severely triple-wound bun. I admired its staying power. She asked me about Shakespeare and about current events and I made a joke about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She looked at me in an unfamiliar way. It was part smile, and part surprise.
A week later, the headmistress phoned my aunt and told her I had the highest mathematics scores the school had ever seen. They wanted to offer me two of their best-paying scholarships, to run simultaneously, reducing their fees to a quarter of the usual rate. Even so, it was more than we could afford.
—
My aunt and uncle would send me to bed at around ten, but I never wanted to sleep. They made me turn out the light, so I would read clandestinely under the eiderdown, diving into this secret study space with a tiny torch, originally from a key ring, that was dim enough not to shine through the covers and give me away. The practice gave me headaches and might have been what ruined my eyesight, but it kept my mind alive.
The night of the headmistress’s phone call I was put to bed on schedule, and had just pulled out my flashlight to continue The Mysterious Affair at Styles when I heard my uncle’s raised voice. My aunt and uncle argued often, the sparks of sound seeping through the house’s wobbly doorframes and porous floorboards, eventually settling into its nooks and crannies like ash. Usually I didn’t listen because it didn’t help anybody.
This time was different. I realized right away that I needed to hear the whole conversation, not just the loud side. I quietly snuck out onto the dark square landing at the top of the stairwell, from which, laying myself out flat on my stomach, I could dangle my head through the space between the top two banisters. This afforded me a line of sight as well as good audibility, while I remained minimally visible.
My uncle was pacing. My aunt was opening a bottle of wine.
“And the government assistance will help,” she was saying.
My uncle snorted. “Don’t see why they get to tax my salary, just to pay for kids like her to go to some stuck-up private school. Nothing wrong with the comp. Nothing. Did me okay, didn’t it?” He paused ominously. “Or are you saying not?”
“Of course, no, I just meant…she’s gifted. She deserves a chance.”
“A chance?” He was snarling now. “Of a better life. That’s it, isn’t it? She’s better. Better than me. Better than this shit.” He swung his arm around, knocked a china dog from the mantelpiece, and swore.
My aunt scurried around him and picked the dog up off the carpet.
“Fucking gifted. She’s a little freak is what she is.”
“For god’s sake, be quiet!” my aunt hissed.
My uncle lowered his voice a little and growled, “Well, you know it. Look at her.”
“You won’t need to worry about it at all. Look, I did some sums, and when you bear in mind she’ll be on full board at school, with all the money that’ll save us here at home…” She held out a piece of paper torn from the notebook by the phone.
My uncle ripped it in half and dropped it on the floor. “I don’t need to see more of your plans for how to spend my money.”
“I’ll see to her packing. I’ll take care of everything.” I saw my aunt’s posture shift a little. “And she’d be out of the way.”
This got no response except a hiss. “Little freak. Just like her mother.”
“Please, James! You can’t blame Victoria. She’s a child.”
“You don’t fucking tell me what I can’t do!”
My uncle snatched the open wine bottle from my aunt’s hand and stormed out of the house, slamming the back door.
—
In the morning I woke up before everyone else, and went out to what we called the “back garden”—a sunless paved area between our house and the alley full of rubbish bins, where my aunt tended a row of potted plants with perennial optimism. There were several small pieces of green glass scattered around the fence. Aimlessly, I began to pick them up, and when I had them all I tried to put them in the flat-lidded dustbin. But with my hands full of the glass fragments I couldn’t lift the lid properly, and I ended up dropping most of the glass and cutting my fingers.
I came back into the kitchen to wash them. My aunt was up now, listening to one of her favourite mixtapes while she did last night’s washing-up. I stuck my hands in the sink and she asked what was wrong. I told her I had been tidying some glass in the back garden, and she flushed.
“Oh no! That’s my fault, I dropped a bottle outside last night when I was taking the rubbish out. I thought I’d cleared it all up.”
She hurried out to finish the job, as Tammy Wynette sang to me that after all, he’s just a man.
Later that day, she told me she was coming to sleep in my room for a little while, because her snoring was keeping my uncle awake at night.
“And he needs to sleep very well, you see, so he is fresh for work in the morning. It’ll be fun. I can bring up the camp bed!”
The camp bed was ex-army supply, a piece of khaki canvas slung across a folding frame. It was not comfortable. When we had to put up a guest overnight my aunt would set it out in the front room, covering it with blankets
