On the day her A levels started, Julie still wasn’t sure what she was going to do about all her university offers. Her dad had been pleased; her mum was thrilled – separately, obviously, since they were no longer together when the offers all came along.
Julie was eighteen, and still at that stage where every detail of her education could still be monitored. She knew that if she got her predicted four As for her A levels she’d have very little control over her future. As if she was one of the molecules she studied in chemistry, everybody would watch what she did next, and help, while she weighed up her options and chose which university to go to. Her parents would help her prepare for going away; her dad would give her financial advice, and her mum might help her pack, or at least give her a lecture on being a successful, strong, in-control woman. Her dad would drive her to the university, not allowing her to drive herself in the clapped-out Mini, and her mum might wave, if she was there.
She sat down to her first exam – physics – imagining this moment. All she could see was Luke at the window, the same way he’d been when she first saw him, waving goodbye to her. That song, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, had come to her as she looked at the unopened physics paper and she’d lost herself in the lyrics as they came into her head. She’d never even realised she knew the lyrics to that song. Julie loved exams, and she’d studied for this one for two years. But she failed it on purpose, because there wasn’t anything else she could do.
At first, failing the exams was difficult. She’d revised like mad – not that she needed to, and it would have been easy for Julie to get As in all her subjects. It was far harder to fail pitifully, to quell her urges to impress the examiner and do her best, things she’d always excelled at in the past. But she had to fail. If she failed she could be there for Luke. If she failed, she could get her life back and breathe again, rather than live through the shallow-breathing head-dizzying hell of student grants and halls of residence and other people and everyone being so proud but expecting so much. Julie knew she was doing the right thing. In some warped way she knew she’d be moving back on the right side of the microscope if she did this. She felt like a hero. She had to feel like that, because it was the only thing that gave her the courage to do what she did.
By mid-June, Julie had thrown away her future. She still had the last chemistry and maths exams to go but what she’d already done – her life’s great work – was enough to ruin all her chances of a place in any scientific department of any higher-educational institution in the country. Each time Julie failed another exam, she walked out of the exam room defiant, rebellious, and feeling only slightly sick. Her failure was her secret, for the time being, and she sank into it like a huge blanket, comforting and secure. The only times this feeling evaporated were on the horrible, chilling mornings when she’d wake up and think it had all been a bad dream; that she’d just woken up from a nightmare in which she was throwing her future away. But instead of waking up and finding it was all only a dream, she was waking up to find that the nightmare hadn’t been a dream at all; it was actually her life.
Every morning during the exam period Julie would see an image of her mother, colourful and proud on Greenham Common, or in her old polytechnic student bar, talking about feminism and education and how proud she was to have a daughter who was brave and strong and who could run the world one day if she wanted. She’d see her mother and know she should be succeeding for her but then she’d remember that her mother was the one who’d left her, right in the middle of her last year at school, and that she couldn’t care if she’d done that. Maybe failing would make her care again but anyway, perhaps in the end Julie’s mother didn’t matter to her as much as her only friend, who could look out of the window only at night, and probably wouldn’t even be able to see her off if she did leave to go to university because she’d have to leave in the day, like normal people do.
For a few years after the exams, Julie went to imaginary evening classes in her head just before she dropped off to sleep and got the four As that she deserved. In the dreams, she did it in secret, just for herself, so she could go to university once Luke was cured. In her head, a man in a white coat came to her front door one day and demanded to know what happened to her all those years ago – the brightest applicant he’d ever encountered. In the fantasy, she cried into his shoulder and explained that she’d deliberately failed her exams because her friend needed her, and he was so shocked, so stunned, so impressed by her admission, that he demanded that she accept an offer to do research at his institution, which was always either Oxford or Cambridge, right away. When Julie said she still wouldn’t go because of Luke, the man insisted that Luke came too, so that he could be studied, cured and ultimately set free.
But the only person who ever came to Julie’s door was the postman, and all he ever brought her were catalogues that she didn’t want, which she only got because she couldn’t say no to the women with the clipboards on the High Street.
Perhaps the worst thing was that her parents weren’t totally shocked when Julie failed. She’d spent every day since her exams crying, certain she’d done the right thing but feeling inexplicably sentimental, already missing the future she would never have. She knew that when she picked up the envelope from the school, her life would change – for the better – and everyone would leave her alone. She had done the right thing, hadn’t she?
It was too late. By the time the results came, Julie’s certainty was stuck to her like a frozen smile and she couldn’t question it any more. When she showed the contents of the envelope to her father, he just shook his head and said, ‘I’ll run you into town on Monday and we’ll find you a job.’ Her mother had looked at her father in a strange way and looked at Julie and looked at her hands and said, eventually, ‘Julie can find her own job, can’t you?’ And that was pretty much that.
And Julie was free.