Florence took another careful look at the four exam questions remaining. The first depicted a woman from a 1960s primary school reader, with no distinguishing features bar a thickly outlined skein of hair. She was holding a ruler in front of her, like an anti-vampire charm, and standing 20m back from an unusually small tree, attached to a large triangle which hit her straight between the eyes.
Janet estimates the height of the tree, by holding a 30cm ruler vertically at arm’s length until it appears to cover the tree. Estimate the height of the tree.
Florence found herself uncharacteristically distracted. Without moving her neck or turning her head, both forbidden acts, she raised her eyes to the horizon, over rows of troubled shoulders, looking through the giant window panes at other summer trees. She could feel the trinket, now tethered with a chain, tapping gently on the crossover of her sensible white bra.
Angus, Jenny and Krzysztof play football. Angus has scored eight more goals than Krzysztof. Jenny has scored five more goals than Angus. Altogether they have scored seventy-two goals. How many goals did Jenny score?
(a) 30
(b) 35
(c) 25
(d) 20
The younger year groups were enacting the scene live in the far sports field, just before the Astro-Turf turned into wild reality, their primary-coloured tabards skipping and intermingling in the sun. Florence was thinking of a different match. Her parents. The score seemed even right now. She was tired of the silent bickering though – the dark glances, the shrugs and the reluctant concessions. She wasn’t sure how she felt about the metallic object anymore. It had a lucky resonance: she’d felt it in her history mock exam. But it seemed to hold no memory or meaning for her mother now, whatever spirit of passion and permanence in which it had been given.
She looked over the next question.
Three identical circles have been drawn inside one large circle. See figure A. The centres of the small circles lie on the diameter of the large circle. What fraction of the large circle is shaded?
She could not imagine any real-life context in which the puzzle might be of use, except perhaps for calculating how many jam tarts one might still make from a giant round of pastry having already extracted three. It reminded her of those diagrams she had seen on the kitchen table and her mother’s desk. Venn diagrams, a lot of them, but sometimes just circles, linked together with pencil lines, like a cluster of disparate balloons floating together in the sky, filled not with helium but comments scratched in lead. She didn’t really understand what her mother was up to. A mid-life crisis, she supposed. Trying to explore avenues that had been blocked to her before, to prove herself in some way. Being a mother – one that remembered to feed them all, pick them up at night and display more than a sporadically intense bout of interest in their homework or exams – wasn’t enough, it seemed.
She doubted her mother even remembered she had an exam today. They’d argued about that before. Said she’d sent a text just after the history mock and that of course she was interested in everything she did. Florence had checked and rechecked her messages. No such text had been sent.
At least the next question might be of some practical use.
Oli is going to make crispy cakes for the school bazaar, using crisped rice, peanut butter and chocolate, mixed in the ratio of 3:2:4 respectively. How much chocolate will be needed to make 1800g of mixture?
(a) 400
(b) 600
(c) 1000
(d) 800
She might try that recipe with Isaac, to keep him busy when he got back from school and stop him getting into fights with Tim or interrupting whatever it was her mother was so very busy doing. If they cut them in the round, they might even make the most efficient use of the rolled-out dough, given the mathematical facts implicit in question three.
Florence thought carefully, methodically, and wrote out her workings in tidy rows. The bell went as she completed the last one.
*
As the rows were dismissed from front to back, like knitting undoing itself in a reducing band of black, Florence filed out behind the others and was steered out of the doors and round to the left by the eye movements of two sour-faced invigilators, unable even now to approve of anything less than silence, trying to suppress the murmur bubbling out of the nylon-blazered flow.
Glancing round to see where Isobel might be in the crowd behind her, Florence happened to see a startling image framed in the glass-paned door to Male PE. A boy slumped with his head deep in his hands, a pool of bright red blood spreading out beneath his feet.
She tried to turn back against the tide, to go and rescue him. First aid was part of D of E, and she knew what to do, but the invigilators, far back down the corridor now, thought she was up to no good and made angry flicking gestures to sweep her out. Florence raised her eyebrows in a visual tut, the nearest she would ever get to challenging authority, and turned herself around to be carried along again by the stream of candidates. As soon as she was out of sight, she peeled off through the female changing room corridor, hurried round the side of the building and re-entered by a fire exit, left open to release the sweaty air.
He was still sitting there when she took the final turn through the dingy PE corridor, looking down in resignation at the floor.
‘Are you OK? What happened? Did you hit your head?’ She put a kind hand on his shoulder and tried to see his face beneath the dark black mop of hair. He turned to look at her, blue eyes surrounded by a lustrous fringe of captivating black lashes. She tried not to stare at the estuary of bloody mucus fanning out below.
‘Oh. Nosebleed,’ he said airily. ‘Happens all the time. Particularly in moments involving high degrees of mental stress. Pretty sure it was trying to do the linear equalities without a calculator that did it. Usually quite good at them. But having one of those little machines would definitely have helped.’
Florence was aghast. ‘But that was the calculator paper – I mean pretty much all of those were calculator questions.’ Florence had two of everything in her clear pencil case. She couldn’t imagine being caught without.
‘It’s OK. I can retake it. To be honest, I can usually do most of it in my head. But I think the A star grade is now out of the question. That little constellation is right now heading for certain supernova death.’
‘You need to be holding your nose,’ urged Florence. ‘Pinching it above.’ She started to do it for him, as he didn’t seem inclined.
‘Oh, that’s kind of you,’ he said, waving her hand away as she made to squeeze the freckled white skin carefully below the bridge, ‘but I find it’s better just to leave it – let nature take its course. It’s starting to clot already. In fact, it did stop a few minutes ago, but then I started to black out and it let rip again. Besides, that will give me time to resolve the current situation regarding my attire.’
He pulled his blazer lapels apart ruefully, and she could see that underneath was his tie. Just his tie, wrung into a damp twist, dangling over a delicate white chest just starting to fuzz with downy hairs.
‘Took off my shirt to rinse it out,’ he said.
She could see it now, bundled up, pink-stained and dripping through the slats along the bench.
‘Thinking I would then put my clean PE top on.’
Florence nodded, following his logic and wondering what was coming next.
‘Trouble is, turns out my PE kit is not in my bag at all, but somewhere entirely different. A parallel universe somewhere, for all I know. Anyway, there is nothing, nothing resembling an appropriate garment of any kind which I can access in this dank and odorous chamber. Apparel-wise, I’m stuffed.’
Florence raised her eyebrows. His nose had almost stopped dripping now, and she offered him a flower-embossed tissue from her pencil case.
‘Which leaves me,’ he carried on, ‘with the delicate problem of how to get past those frightful guardians of the exam hall entrance, and other members of the school staff, who, troubled enough by the sight of pupils without their shirts tucked in, will be rendered positively apoplectic at seeing one without a shirt at all, especially one who appears to have had his clothes ripped off and his nose broken in a barbaric interschool brawl.’
Florence looked at him in puzzlement as she gathered a pile of paper towels from the sink and laid them on the tiles to soak up the patch of blood. She’d couldn’t attach his face to any form group she knew.
‘External candidate,’ he explained. ‘Midforth High. Wouldn’t let me do exams early over there. So that’s how I’ve ended up here, planted in a throng of individuals I barely know, making Kim Kardashian look positively overdressed.’
Florence giggled, in spite of herself. ‘Can’t you text someone?’ she said. ‘Couldn’t someone from home come out with a spare? Your mum? Is she at home? You probably oughtn’t to go back on your own either, after losing all that blood.’
‘Oh, she’s busy,’ said the boy. ‘Well, she’s the opposite of busy actually. She can’t move in fact. She’s got ME. That’s why I put so much effort into setting up a laundry here.’ He waved at the row of sinks. ‘Still tries to get up and do everything, especially if one has had the thoughtlessness to create an extraordinary amount of mess, only next day she pays the price and can’t do even more than she couldn’t do the day before. So I try not to – add to the chores that is. My dad’s dead by the way, before you ask. Long time ago. No need for an I’m-so-sorry glance or wondering what to say. I don’t remember a thing about him, and more importantly, he didn’t bequeath me any clothes and clearly would not be in a position to deliver them to me now if he had. The long and the short of it is, as a result of this afternoon’s events, I am doomed to temporary shirtlessness and permanent embarrassment.’
‘Couldn’t you just draw the front of the blazer together, with the lapels turned out, like you were doing before?’
‘Regrettably, no. According to the writing on the inside pocket, this blazer is the property of Abe Laughton, form 10D, and when I say I could access no appropriate garments in here, I’m being ungrateful and untruthful, because this particular garment has been extremely useful in preventing me from attracting undue attention over the last five minutes. But it’s absolutely not mine, and I don’t wish Abe to be punished for not having it tomorrow, so I’ll be hanging it back up on this peg where I found it as soon as I’ve worked out a strategy for getting unobtrusively out of here.’
‘There’s this,’ said Florence suddenly, getting her navy school jumper out of her bag, ‘and I’ve got a carrier bag as well, if you want to put your wet shirt in that. No one will suspect anything. They’ll just think you’re from our school.’
He looked at her with disbelieving gratitude, staring at the jumper, then back at his chest, and back at her. ‘Are you sure? I mean—’
‘Absolutely. I hardly need it on a day like today. You should be keeping warm though. You’re shivering a bit.’
He was shaking a little, as he always did two minutes after the flow had stopped. He struggled out of the blazer, taking care not to defile it with smears of congealing blood, took the wetted tissue she offered, to wipe his hands and face, and put on the jumper, squeezing his glossy blue-black curls through the V neck. It was generous on him, body-wise. Florence was taller by three inches, and puberty had decreed she would expand stockily sideways before she soared up to inherit her mother’s easy, long-limbed frame. He smoothed it down, and loosened his tie, so that it might appear just to be poking out from a shirt collar tucked deeply inside.
‘You’d better put this on too,’ she said, unconvinced, passing him the pressed white polo shirt she kept for badminton after school. He reversed the jumper procedure and put it on underneath.
‘There.’ She examined him, just stopping herself from pulling down the collar and tightening up his tie. ‘To be honest, they’ll probably all have gone now anyway. No one’s monitoring the Year Elevens now they’re on study leave, and there are so few of us doing them early they don’t check up on the Year Tens. We can just walk out slowly, and no one will suspect at all.’
‘But doesn’t your bell go in a minute? Won’t we be trampled by the curious younger masses as we make for the gate?’
‘Actually, it’s gone already,’ Florence noticed with surprise. ‘We finish at three-fifteen.’
‘Goodness. We go on ’til four. Not to mention the Saturday morning thing.’
‘Anyway, we can just saunter out I think,’ said Florence. ‘I mean you’re free to go.’
He got up, pausing for a moment while his brain caught up with his head. Then they walked back through the dingy brick-lined corridor and looked out into the sun. The exam hall crowds flowed down the broad pathway dividing the gently inclined field, before being slowly extruded through the far gate.
‘I didn’t ask your name,’ said Florence. A first aider always ought to check.
‘Benjamin,’ he said. ‘Benjamin for short, please. I don’t abbreviate.’
‘Florence,’ she said in exchange. ‘And only my dad calls me Flo.’
‘I knew it. Florence. Florens. Florio. So, are you the blossoming, prosperous or flourishing kind?’
She didn’t know any Latin but wasn’t surprised he did. She didn’t feel any of those adjectives might be applied to her. In fact, she’d always found her own name unnecessarily decorative and felt she was much more of a Sarah or a Jo. Benjamin suited him though. Different, a little old-fashioned. Distinguished yet slightly odd.
‘So, whereabouts do you actually live?’ she asked, before they stepped out. ‘I’m near Westwood Way. You should probably have someone with you, in case you faint again.’
‘Oh, I’m near there, quite near there,’ he said quickly, ‘really very close.’
‘I’ll walk with you for a bit then,’ she said, decisively, ‘just to make sure you’re OK.’
They walked down the path together. No one ahead turned back around to see. Florence didn’t know whether to be pleased or not. Five minutes later, they were underneath the stone arch of the gateway. Benjamin turned to her and cleared his throat.
‘Look, it’s incredibly kind of you, but honestly, I feel absolutely OK now. I can reassure you this happens two or three times a month, and I’ve never ever had any remotely dangerous aftereffects at all. Really, I can’t impose upon your kindness any more.’
Florence was quiet for a moment. ‘Will I see you in the non-calculator exam?’ she said.
‘You certainly will. Not that – in that respect – it’ll feel much different from today.’
Florence laughed. ‘Are you sure you’re fully recovered? You still look a bit pale.’
‘I’m absolutely back to normal. Porcelain is my usual hue. If I’m really poorly I go a distinctive shade of cornflower blue.’
‘Well, if you’re sure…’ said Florence.
‘Totally sure. I’ll see you in the non-calculator. With this jumper, spruced up and cleaned and ironed of course, returned in this very carrier bag. I’m just calling in on a friend,’ he said suddenly, ‘so I’m going to go off this way – just for today.’
He turned right down the tree-lined pathway, along the side of the school wall and into the dark leafiness of the park. Florence turned left along the wall towards the roundabout. They stopped and turned, thirty paces on, as if in a sort of unplanned duel. He pretended to clutch his head and fall in a dramatic faint, then stood back up again and beamed ridiculously. She folded in the middle, laughing silently, throwing over her shoulder a helpless smiling wave.