GCSE Maths, Second Attempt

The classroom smelled exactly the same. That was the first thing. Twenty-five years and they've still got the same blue carpet tiles and the same radiator that ticks. I sat at the back out of instinct and then made myself move to the middle, because I'm forty-one and I'm paying for this. There were eleven of us. A lad in a Deliveroo jacket who'd come straight from a shift. Two women who clearly knew each other and had come as a pact. A bloke about my age in a suit who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else. A grandmother, I think, who'd brought her own calculator in a case. The teacher was called Femi. Younger than me by a good ten years. He said, "Right, I'm going to say something and I want you to actually hear it. Every one of you is here because at some point someone made you feel stupid about this. I'm not going to do that. If I do, tell me." Then he put a fraction on the board and I felt my whole chest close up like a fist. I want to explain what it's like. It's not that I can't do it. It's that when I see it, a voice in my head that sounds a lot like Mr Hargreaves in 1999 says, "Well, we know how this goes," and then I stop looking. I've done that with bank statements. I've done it with my son's homework, handing it to his dad with a laugh like it was a joke. It wasn't a joke. It was twenty-five years of a fist in my chest. Femi asked us to add two fractions. Simple ones. I wrote the first one down and stopped. "You've stopped," he said. He'd come over. Not in a loud way. "I don't know what to do next." "Yes you do. What's the bottom number called?" "The denominator." "There you go. You know more than you think. What do we need the bottom numbers to be?" "The same." "So make them the same." And I did. It took me a minute and I got it wrong the first time and he didn't sigh, he just said, "Nearly, look at the top again," and I looked at the top again, and it was right.

That's it. That's the whole story. I added two fractions in a room that smelled like 1999 and I didn't cry, which I'd honestly given about forty per cent odds. Afterwards the woman with the calculator case caught me in the car park. "First time back?" she said. "Is it that obvious?" "You had the look. I had it in September. It goes." "What are you doing it for? If you don't mind me asking." "My daughter's a nurse. She's doing a course and she asked me to help her with the drug calculations and I couldn't. Sixty-three years old and I couldn't help my own kid." She shrugged. "So." Driving home I did the fractions again in my head. Then I did some others, ones I made up. At a red light I realised I was doing them for fun, which is not a sentence I've ever thought before. I've got homework. Actual homework, in a folder. I'm going to do it at the kitchen table where my son can see me, and when he asks what it is I'm going to tell him.