So, it’s my turn, is it?
OK then. OK.
Shall we do it like an AA meeting? My name is Noelle Donnelly and I did something bad.
I’m not about to make excuses, but I had a tough time growing up. Two horrible brothers above me. Two below. And a sister who died when she was only eight. My mother and father were unforgiving of the limitations of children. They believed that a child should be a grown-up in every way apart from the way of having an opinion you could call your own. Not that religious, which was strange for the times and the place. Church on a Sunday was a good opportunity to find out that everyone else’s children were doing better than their own. The Bible had some good quotes that could be used to sow a seed of terror here and there. We all believed in hell and heaven, even if we believed in nothing else. And sex was something that only disgusting people did, married or not. We never asked after our own provenance, imagined a kind of chaste communion across a brick wall somehow. Because they had separate bedrooms, my mother and father.
Home was a ten-bedroom villa on a hill, sheep all around, a mile and a half to school, downhill going there, uphill coming back. My parents took in orphans sometimes, in emergencies. They’d arrive bleary-eyed in the small hours, huge sets of siblings that they housed in the dormitory room in the attic. We called it “the orphan room” long after there’d been an orphan in it. So my parents can’t have been all bad. But mainly, on the whole, yes they were.
We were known as the clever family. You know that family? We all know that family. Pianos all over the place. Books beyond belief. Grade As or you had failed. That was all we ever talked of. Academic success. My father was a maths teacher. My mother was a writer of books about medical history. We all went to
the best schools and worked harder than everyone else and won all the awards and all the medals and all the scholarships and all the trophies going. I swear there was not a scrap of anything left for anyone else.
Well, I was clever enough to keep up, there was no doubt about that. But I was at a disadvantage for being (a) the middle child, (b) a girl, and (c) not the girl who had died. Michaela. That was who I was not. Michaela, who was bonnier than me and nicer than me and yes, naturally, cleverer than me. And also much less alive than me. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that that would make me all the more precious to my mother and father. Well, at least we still have our lovely Noelle. But no.
Michaela died of cancer. We all thought it was a cold. We were wrong.
Anyway, that was me. The less bonny, less clever, less dead sister with the four horrible brothers and the mum and dad who judged more than they loved.
I did OK. I got into Trinity. I got a degree in mathematics, a PhD in applied mathematics. I moved to London shortly after I graduated and it was nice for a while just to be clever Noelle, not just one of the Donnellys. I tried my hand in the financial sector, thinking that I’d quite like to be very rich and have a performance car and an apartment with a balcony. But it really wasn’t me and everyone there knew it wasn’t me and so I left before I’d earned enough money for a scooter let alone a car.
You know, when I look back at this time, I’m amazed by myself, I really am. I was so young and so appallingly unsophisticated, didn’t know a soul, yet there I was in the seething belly of the metropolis, had a room in a flat in Holland Park of all places. I had no idea then how high I was flying in that postcode; I thought everyone who came to London from Ireland lived in a road full of big wedding cake houses. I didn’t know that Walthamstow existed. And I was cute, you know, looking back on it, had model looks, almost, in that bare-faced, hollow-chested sort of way, all legs and tangled hair and huge watery eyes. No one ever told me I was pretty, though, not once; I don’t really know why.
I took a job at a posh magazine for a while. I was in the finance department and I was literally invisible for the full three years. Then I got made redundant and I had to give up my little room in lovely Holland Park, say good-bye to the wide avenue with the organic butcher before anyone knew what organic even meant, the food shop that sold lobster bisque in tins, the park itself with its
orangery and its bowers. And that was when I discovered that Walthamstow existed: E11 with its little brown houses and its tired laundrettes, shuttered cab offices and boarded-up buildings.
I decided to retrain as a teacher.
I don’t know what possessed me. I’d already proved to myself that I had no presence, that I was unable to draw any attention to myself whatsoever. How I thought I’d be able to engage a class of thirty slack-jawed teenagers on the principles of algebra I do not know.
I qualified but I never did teach my own class. I lost my nerve. It made me feel sick to my stomach just thinking about it. So at the age of thirty, I placed an ad in my local paper and I began tutoring. I was very good at it and all those smoothie-making mums spread the word, passed me around like a restaurant recommendation, and I made enough to move out of my little room in the little house in Walthamstow and buy myself a place in Stroud Green where the houses were slightly bigger, but not much. And that was that. That was that for a long time. And, oh—did I mention?—I was still a virgin at this point.
No, seriously, I was.
I’d had a boyfriend for a while back in Ireland, from age fourteen to fifteen. Tony. So I’d got all the kissing stuff out of the way, thought the rest would come later. Well, it never did.
And then I read in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) about a book. It was aimed at people who thought they “couldn’t do maths,” and believe me the world is full of people who think they can’t do maths, which I have to try very hard to understand, because truly, I don’t. How can people understand how to walk into a room full of people and find something to talk about but they can’t understand how numbers work? It makes no sense to me. Anyway, I can’t remember the name of the book now. It might even have been called Bad at Maths. Yes, that’s right, it was. Bad at Maths. I bought it and I read it. It opened my eyes to things I’d never thought about before. But more than that, it made me laugh. I wasn’t one for reading books, generally, and I only read this because it was in the TES, and so I hadn’t been expecting such humor in a book about maths. But there it was. Humor. Bags of it. And a photo on the inside cover of a lovely man with a smiling face and a thatch of dark hair.
It was a photo of you.
I’d never been a fan of anything much before I read your book. There were TV shows I enjoyed, Brookside being a particular favorite; I watched that up to the last episode. And I always perked up if Take That came on the radio, although on the whole I was more of a classical fan. And of course I’d had crushes across the years. Loads of them. But this was different.
You were different.
Do you remember, the first time we met? I know you do. You were signing books on your publisher’s stand at the Education Show at the NEC. I go every year. Tutoring is a lonely world and you have to plug yourself into the mains every now and then and get a fix of what everyone else is getting. You can’t be yesterday’s flavor of the month when it comes to these north London mummies. You have to keep on top of things.
But mainly I was there because I knew you were going to be there. I’d made an extra-special effort: I had on a skirt and tights and a lipstick the color of toffee apples that set fire to my hair and made my blue eyes shine. I was forty-one years old. The autumn of my youth. Christ, virtually the winter. And yes, I was still a virgin.
You sat on a high stool at a high table, a small pile of your books in front of you. There was no one there, no queue, only a small sign on the wall behind you that said “Author Floyd Dunn Will Be Signing Copies of His Book ‘Bad at Maths’ Today, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.” And next to it a photo, that photo of you, the same one from inside your book that I’d stared at for so many hours, memorizing the way your hair fell around your ears, the line your mouth made as it attempted a serious smile.
My eye went from the photo to you and back to the photo. You were thinner than I’d imagined. I’d expected a little belly, maybe. I don’t know why.
“Hello!” you said at my approach, as though someone had just plugged you in and switched you on. “Hello!” You wouldn’t have known how nervous I was. You wouldn’t have guessed. I played it very, very cool.
“Hello,” I replied, my hands tight around my dog-eared copy of your book. “I have my own copy. Would you mind signing it for me?”
I passed it across to you and you smiled that smile you have, the one that makes your eyes into fireworks that go bang bang bang in my soul.
“Well,” you said, “that is a well-loved copy.”
I could have told you I’d read it thirty times. I could have told you that your book made me laugh more in a week than I’d laughed in the year before I read it. I could have told you that I was completely in awe of you. But I wanted you to see me as an equal. So I simply said, “It has been a very useful tool. I’m a maths tutor.”
“Well,” you said, “I am very glad to hear that.” You took the book from me and held your pen over the title page. “Shall I sign it to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Please. Noelle.”
“Noelle,” you said. “That’s a lovely name. Were you a Christmas baby?” “Yes. December the twenty-fourth.”
“Best Christmas present ever, eh?”
“No,” I replied, “apparently not. Apparently I ruined Christmas Day for everyone.”
You laughed then; I hadn’t imagined a laugh for you. In your photo you looked as if you might go so far as a chuckle, if tickled to the point of no return. But no, you had a proper laugh where your mouth opened wide and your head tipped back on your neck and a big thunderclap boom exploded from you. I liked it, very much.
You wrote something after my name, I wanted to see what it was, but I didn’t want to look as though I cared.
“You’re American,” I said.
“To a certain extent,” you said. “And you’re Irish?” “Yes. To the fullest possible extent.”
You liked my little joke and you laughed again. It felt like someone massaging the inside of my stomach with velvet-gloved hands.
“Where are you from?”
“Near Dublin,” I replied. “County Wicklow. Where all the sheep live.”
You laughed for a third time and I felt emboldened in a way I’d never felt before in my life. I looked behind me to check that a queue hadn’t built as we’d talked. But I still had you all to myself.
“Are you here again tomorrow?” I asked.
“No. No. They’re putting me on a train back to London after this. Which leaves in, oh”—you looked at your watch—“approximately two hours. I should probably be wrapping this up soon.”
“Have you signed many books?”
“Oh, yeah, hundreds and hundreds.” You clicked the lid back on your pen and gave me a sideways smile. “Kidding,” you said. “About twenty.”
“Long way to come, to sign twenty books.” “I tend to agree with you.”
You slid the pen into your jacket pocket and turned away from me, looking about for a person to whisk you away, no doubt.
“Well,” I said. “I’ll let you get away. I hope you have a safe journey back to London. Whereabouts do you live?”
“North London.”
“Oh,” I said, an Oscar-worthy moment of fakery, “snap. So do I.” “Oh!” you said. “Whereabouts?”
“Stroud Green.”
“Well, well. What a coincidence. Me, too.”
“What? You live in Stroud Green?” This I had not known. This I could never have believed to be possible.
“Yes! Latymer Road. Do you know it?”
“Yes,” I said, joy virtually pouring out of my ears and my eyeballs and my nostrils. “Yes, I do know it. I’m just a few roads down from you.”
“Well, well, well. Maybe our paths will cross again then?”
“Yes,” I’d said, as though it would be no more than a fun coincidence if they did, not the culmination of all my hopes and worldly dreams. “Maybe they will.”
Two weeks later, they did.
