Then She Was Gone(42)

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 goodbye 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: E17 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 house 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 the way, thought the rest would come later. Well, it never did.

And then I read in the 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 humour in a book about maths. But there it was. Humour. 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 favourite; 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 flavour of the month when it comes to these north London mummies. You have to keep on top of things.