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