One Plus One: A Novel Read Free Page B

coffee and biscuits. You could tell they were homemade. Mum used to make the same kind before Dad left.
    Tanzie sat down on the edge of the sofa and gazed at the two men opposite. The one with the mustache smiled like the nurse did before she gave you an injection. Mum had pulled her bag onto her lap and Tanzie could see her holding her hand over the corner Norman had chewed. Her leg was jiggling.
    “This is Mr. Cruikshank. He’s the head of maths. And I’m Mr. Daly. I’ve been head here for the past two years.”
    Tanzie looked up from her biscuit.
    “Do you do chords?”
    “We do,” Mr. Cruikshank said.
    “And probability?”
    “That, too.”
    Mr. Cruikshank leaned forward. “We’ve been looking at your test results. And we think, Costanza, that you should sit your GCSE in maths next year and get it out of the way. Because I think you’d rather enjoy the A-level problems.”
    She looked at him. “Have you got actual papers?”
    “I’ve got some next door. Would you like to see them?”
    She couldn’t believe he was asking. She thought briefly of saying “Well, duh,” like Nicky would. But she just nodded.
    Mr. Daly handed Mum a coffee. “I won’t beat around the bush, Mrs. Thomas. You are well aware that your daughter has an exceptional ability. We have only seen scores like hers once before and that was from a pupil who went on to be a fellow at Trinity.”
    He went on and on so much that Tanzie tuned out a little: “. . . for a very select group of pupils who have a demonstrably unusual ability, we have created a new equal-access scholarship.”
Blah, blah, blah
. “It would offer a child who might not otherwise get the advantages of a school like this the chance to fulfill their potential in . . .”
Blah, blah
. “While we are very keen to see how far Costanza could go in the field of maths, we would also want to make sure that she was well rounded in other parts of her student life. We have a full sporting and musical curriculum.”
Blah, blah, blah
 . . . “Numerate children are often also able in languages . . .”
Blah, blah
” . . . and drama—that’s often very popular with girls of her age.”
    “I only really like maths,” she told him. “And dogs.”
    “Well, we don’t have much in the way of dogs, but we’d certainly offer you lots of opportunities to stretch yourself mathematically. But I think you might be surprised by what else you enjoy. Do you play any instruments?”
    She shook her head.
    “Any languages?”
    The room went a bit quiet.
    “Other interests?”
    “We go swimming on Fridays,” Mum said.
    “We haven’t been swimming since Dad left.”
    Mum smiled, but it went a bit wonky. “We have, Tanzie.”
    “Once. May the thirteenth. But now you work on Fridays.”
    Mr. Cruikshank left the room, and reappeared a moment later with his papers. She stuffed the last biscuit into her mouth, then got up and went to sit next to him. He had a whole pile of them. Stuff she hadn’t even started yet!
    She began going through the pages with him, showing him what she had done and what she hadn’t, and in the background she could hear Mum and the headmaster’s voices rumbling away.
    It sounded like it was going all right. Tanzie let her attention travel to what was on the page. “Yes,” Mr. Cruikshank was saying quietly, his finger on the page. “But the curious feature of renewal processes is that, if we wait some predetermined time and then observe how large the renewal interval containing it is, we should expect it to be typically larger than a renewal interval of average size.”
    She knew about this! “So the monkeys would take longer to type Macbeth?”
    “That’s it.” He smiled. “I wasn’t sure you’d have covered any renewal theory.”
    “I haven’t, really. But Mr. Tsvangarai told me about it once and I looked it up on the Internet. I liked the whole monkey thing.” She flicked through the papers. The numbers sang to her. She could feel