Free We That Are Left by Clare Clark Page B

uncles and brothers gleamed pale as ghosts in the darkness. One eveningafter supper Oscar came back to the dormitory to find Tuckwell and Jamieson standing by his bed. Jamieson was holding Theo’s photograph. Someone had drawn a Prussian spike onto Theo’s cap and extended his moustache, curling the ends around his ears. A speech bubble extending from his mouth said
DEUTSCH SCHWEIN
in capital letters. Oscar held his breath and waited to see what the boys would do to him, but Jamieson only spat on his handkerchief and scrubbed furiously at the glass, smearing the ink. Then, without a word, he put the photograph back where he had found it.
    After that there was always a black smear on Theo’s face and a shadow across the turret wall, as though a Zeppelin was blocking out the sun. Oscar touched the shadow before he went to bed, not for good luck so much as to keep the bad luck from getting any worse. He did not think it worked but he went on doing it anyway, the same way his mother whistled when she saw a magpie and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Magpie, where’s your brother?’ The trouble with luck, she said, was that you never knew if without it things would have been any different.
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    It was the term after Theo was killed that Oscar was put into Mr Leach’s Mathematics division. By then the only teachers left were either ancient or cripples. Mr Leach had thin hair pasted in careful stripes over his skull and a flat round face with a sharp nose in the centre like the gnomon of a sundial, which was the sharp part that cast the shadow. It was because of Mr Leach that Oscar knew the word gnomon in the first place. According to the dictionary it came from the Ancient Greek for ‘that which reveals’.
    The only thing Mr Leach revealed was his dislike for Oscar. In one of his first lessons, Oscar made the mistake of pointing out a mistake in the equation Mr Leach had written on the blackboard. Mr Leach rubbed out the equation and wrote
‘Insolence, if unpunished, increases’ ARISTOTLE
across the top instead. Then he gave Oscar a thrashing in front of the class.
    After that he called Oscar the Prince of Mathematics with a sneer that made his long nostrils flare, exposing the hair inside. Everyone knew that the Prince of Mathematics was the nickname for Carl Friedrich Gauss and that Gauss was German. It enraged Mr Leach that Oscar did not follow his prescribed working methods but only wrote down the solutions that rose like bubbles in his head when he looked at the questions. Mr Leach said that answers alone made a mockery of mathematics. Instead, he insisted on strings and strings of gobbledegook he called ‘workings’. If Oscar forgot any of it Mr Leach thrashed him. The effort made his eyes bulge and dislodged the pasted strands of his hair.
    Oscar could tolerate the thrashings. It was the equations that made him wretched. For one whole term and then another, Mr Leach set Oscar the same pointless problems, over and over again. The workings were like lead weights tied to the numbers’ feet. With nowhere to go and nothing to entertain them, they started to jabber and thrash in Oscar’s head. At night, in the darkness, he could feel them writhing in the lobes of his brain, as though they were looking for a way out. They did not dance for him any more, or hardly ever. They were dull, their eyes glazed over, their old suppleness fattened with tedium and frustration. Sometimes, when he tried to fit them together they would not go, even though they had gone that way before, and then they grew angry and shouted in his ears. For the first time in his life he was afraid of them.
    His mother wrote to him. She sent him a postcard on which she had printed a quotation from Galileo.
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The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles,