Free May Contain Nuts by John O'Farrell

‘Time up!’ said David, bursting through the door. Giving out a little squeal of surprise, I quickly leant my arm over the calculator. The suddenness of my movement made it slide across the desk and it was now poised to fall off the edge unless I kept pressing it hard against the corner. ‘Oh you made me jump!’ I said. I couldn’t move my arm or the calculator would clatter to the floor.
    â€˜Right, let’s go see how we got on,’ said David.
    â€˜Good idea,’ I said, not moving a muscle, smiling up at him.
    â€˜Strange,’ he said, looking at his perfectly ordered desk. ‘That doesn’t look right.’
    There was a big gap between the magnetic paper-clip sculpture and the Sellotape dispenser. I couldn’t keep pressing the missing calculator against the corner of the desk for much longer.
    â€˜My dispenser has run out of Sellotape. I wonder when that happened?’
    He grabbed my exam paper from in front of me and headed through to the kitchen. I breathed a sigh of relief and replaced his calculator. And then I glanced down at where he had revealed the next sheet in the folder: ‘For Parents Only: Answers to Paper One.’
    â€˜Congratulations! You did fantastically!’ exclaimed David, coming into the lounge to find me draining the glass of wine that I had surrendered earlier in the evening. ‘You got 91 per cent on your first go, and you’d said that maths was going to be your toughest paper …’
    â€˜Whatever,’ I mumbled, brushing past him to refill my glass, not wanting to betray my guilt with any eye contact.
    â€˜Well, aren’t you pleased?’ he asked deflatedly.
    â€˜Yeah, great, where’s that bottle of wine?’
    â€˜Alice, you just scored the sort of mark that is going to get Molly into Chelsea College and you seem disappointed.’
    â€˜No, I’m just tired.’
    This was true enough, but deep down I felt angry. Those bastards had been right all along. I was only cheating myself. I was also irritated by his presumption that this was all going to be so easy for me. ‘Anyway, I guessed a lot of the answers. I must have just got lucky …’
    â€˜What, you guessed that the square root of 196 is 14? Come on, you did brilliantly. You’re going to walk it.’
    â€˜ I am not going to walk it, all right? ’ I snapped. ‘It is not as easy as you think! You don’t understand what the pressure is like: having all this responsibility on my shoulders. It’s bloody hard enough being a good mother without having to sit bloody maths exams to decide their future as well! As if there aren’t enough tests already without having to hurriedly recheck that eight-twelfths expressed as a percentage is seventy-fucking-five, knowing that if I make one little mistake it might ruin my daughter’s entire life!’
    â€˜Sixty-six.’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Eight-twelfths is two-thirds, which is 66.6 recurring. I’m sure you would have got it right if you’d checked it …’ mumbled David, realizing that this probably wasn’t the best time to correct me on my mental arithmetic.
    â€˜That’s it! I quit! You take the bloody exam. You put on a pink gingham skirt and a blond wig and pretend to be an eleven-year-old girl, if you’re so bloody great at maths.’
    â€˜But I’m six foot one.’
    â€˜So she’s tall for her age …’
    â€˜And I have a moustache.’
    â€˜So what, so does Ffion, I don’t care, I’m not doing it! I can’t do it. It’s not going to work.’
    I claimed that I was going out to take Alfie’s video back to Blockbuster, although it wasn’t clear why this required me to slam the front door quite so hard. It wasn’t until I was outside that I realized that I didn’t have my car keys in my coat pocket. I couldn’t go back inside and endure David’s upbeat