Maths land

Maths Land

Tariq opened his eyes and looked at his alarm clock. The time was 7:15. He had fallen asleep at 22:05. He noticed things like that. Everyone in Maths Land noticed things like that.

Breakfast consisted of half a grapefruit each for his mum, his dad and his sister. He hated grapefruit. Mum had bought them yesterday at a 20% discount. She had also had twelve apples in one bag and fourteen oranges in another and spent some minutes checking that they weighed the same.

Tariq walked to school following streets which led in suspiciously predictable directions. The streets were all straight. He looked at the street names as he passed - North Street, Hill Street, Station Street. That one led to the station. The streets all had incredibly simplistic, predictable names, describing where they were or what they passed.

At 8:15 he knocked on the door of his friend John. John’s mother was a shockingly stereotypical woman who stayed at home all day apparently baking and shopping for baking ingredients and sharing her baking with friends.

Today was February the 29th. It was Tariq’s least favourite day of the entire year, as John would constantly remind him of how unusual the day was.

Tariq’s stride was 10% shorter than John’s but frankly he didn’t care. John was fat, white, wore glasses and had a bewildering range of dumb hobbies, like folding pieces of paper or collecting prime numbers. Tariq should have hated him, but somehow didn’t.

The trouble started at the school gate, standing at exactly 45 degrees to the line of the fence.

“Where is your partner?” asked Mr. Green the teacher who wore a brown tie and drove a white car. He played tennis all the time with Mr. White and Mr. Brown when not teaching.

“John is my partner” answered Tariq.

“But where is the girl?” asked Mr. Green.

“She left last week, remember? Her father had saved £1500 per year for 10 years to afford a house somewhere or other. They moved, having compared the price of different moving agencies.”

That’s when Susan turned up.

“Here is the new girl. She will be your partner.”

Exactly one third of the school were girls. They were all obsessed with something – each to their own obsession.

It turned out Susan was obsessed with measuring.

She had brought her own ribbons and scissors.

The day passed in hellish torment as always. There was the usual unfeasible rate of absenteeism, always an exact fraction of the school population. Workmen appeared to build unnecessary shelving all over the school and never seemed to have worked out what length of planks they needed in advance. Susan was sickeningly good at helping them out.

Bob with the huge hands was sharing out apples again at break time. Always fruit. Always bloody fruit.

PE lessons were a drag in the afternoon. Everyone had to run at an exactly constant speed in the races, and, weirdly started at different times. Susan was employed measuring the distances. John was allowed to draw graphs of how fast they ran. Tariq concentrated on keeping his running speed constant.

Tariq particularly hated lunch time. Always round things. Pizzas, flans, pancakes, pies – and always divided into fractions: 25% ham, 25% pineapple, 50% tomato... Tariq was always given the job of drawing a chart of any pie that was served during the day.

He resented always having to share everything he owned with John and now, presumably, Susan. He couldn’t sneak a pack of biscuits into the place without having to give 30% each to John and whichever girl they were forced to mingle with.

Tariq would have loved to be in a group with other South Asian kids, such as Mohammad, who was in a group with Paul and Mary, but there seemed to be a rule that the BME kids were not allowed to be in the same group. Exactly 1/3 of the school’s population were from BME backgrounds.

The worst lesson of the day was undoubtedly maths. As if there hadn’t been enough calculations to do already, he had to spend ages answering stupid questions about clones of himself, John and Susan doing pointless things.

He arrived home at 3:45 p.m. having taken a bus into town for no reason. The bus timetable was almost indecipherable. He hated buses. He wasn’t sure why he had caught one.