The summer Adam took a job at the Department of Examinations and Standards was the same his friends had started working for free. People were kinder than they had to be. They looked into their wines and said “Well at least it’s writing.”
“Writing” in italics.
“At least it’s honest.” He had replied, more than once, and had then excused himself to go stand in the bathroom.
“Honest” in bold.
The places his friends were working seemed to vary a lot in size and purpose, but the feel of these places–their “aura” as he had more than once referred to them as–seemed unified. They had small names in big writing. ZONE one was called. BIG was another. Tiny east and west London “creative hubs” that needed young guns for their twitter feeds and young hands scrubbing the inside of their cafetieres, letting the grains of yesterday’s inspiration run in tepid water through their fingers.
Still, at least it was writing. The Department of Exams and Standards had standards, after all. His interview had been with a man in his fifties called Danny, which had felt ludicrous at the time. Danny was a name built for backwards baseball caps.
“Of course, it’s an advantage if you like children” he had said, with a second’s pause “…but not in that way!” he finished, before laughing manically.
Danny, the Champion of the World.
Testing the intelligence of children between the ages of 11 and 14 was suddenly a topic within Adam’s remit. They had given him Literacy. He shared an office with a woman in her fifties called Nancy, who did Numeracy. When he met her he blurted out the first thing that had come to mind.
“My girlfriend’s name is Nancy.”
She wasn’t really. Well, there was a girl called Nancy and she had been appearing and disappearing all summer. It was a dull, skimpy romance with little to fantasize or wonder about.
Nancy came from Brighton, so appeared at his apartment whenever there was a London birthday party or theatre event she was desperate to attend. She didn’t pretend she was there to see him, which he could at least sort of respect. She manifested like a sister, dumping her rucksack at his door and trudging into the kitchen to make herself a coffee. She chided him for never having food in the house. Eventually she would sit cross-legged on the floor of his bedroom and start “putting her face on.” She chatted as he watched her, drawing lines around her eyes and lines between everything.
“Anyone who has studied theatre couldn’t tell you the first thing about Direction.”
“No-one under 25 has ever written – or could ever write – a real play.”
“My complexion could never take lipstick.”
Sure of herself as a kid with a stick in the sand. At some point though, when she was just moments away from applying the finishing touches, she would see him and smile at his reflection in her mirror.
“Oh, hello, Duckie.”
Easing herself up from the floor, she unfolded her limbs like a waking animal. She waited until her skirt had fallen back to her knees before she started taking her underwear off. She stepped out of them once they were just a silky heap on the floor, and sat with her legs astride him. Her mouth shiny with a candy gloss, she would start kissing him, her mouth surprisingly yielding. She would make him lie down and then unzip his jeans, pulling them down just past his thighs. The actress in her always wanted sex with all of their clothes on. Nudity was not in her contract.
Both Exams Nancy and Sex Nancy were highly suspicious of him.
He learned three days into his new job that the last person who did Literacy had died the month before. Everyone on the Exams floor seemed keen to be the first person to tell him about this, each with their own message to deliver.
“Judith worked here forty years, with not a single day taken ill. On the day she died, she called in sick at five past eight.”
“Forty years, we had the old girl. Even after her work got… well, you know. Seventy nine she was. We look after our kind here. Worth remembering.”
“You’ll look after Nancy, won’t you?”
If either Nancy needed his help, they never implied as much. Sex Nancy left as soon as she realised she was late, and Exams Nancy dumped a stack of old exam papers on his desk at regular, bi-weekly intervals. Exams Nancy pressed a yellowing fingernail to the stack she had placed on his desk.
“Just use these.”
Doctor is to hospital as wife is to
Store House Kitchen Street
“These look a little…dated.”
A long sigh that smelled like instant coffee.
“Edit them. Re-work them. You need to dismantle any pattern so the tests don’t become predictable.”
He looked again at the stack of papers.
“But these aren’t accessible to the public. Are they? I mean…it’s not like anyone can look them up to study them.”
She stared at him, wincing her eyes slightly in obvious disgust.
“So we should just present the same test every year, then?”
They didn’t talk for the rest of the afternoon.
Doctor is to hospital as child is to
School Class Church Street
So he set about dismantling the pattern. In preparing the 11-14 National Literacy Examinations for 2013, he pulled an anagram from 1974 and a riddle from 1981. He took out references to spinning tops and replaced them with a Playstation 3. He became involved. His head went down at 9am and at 5.30 he would have five fresh reading comprehensions, the characters crisp and their motivations clear. He named them all after his friends. Sometimes he included jokes.
Which cheese is made backwards?
Cheddar Swiss Brie Edam
Everything he prepared went to Danny, who never had feedback. Having spent the last two decades in a department full of ex-headmistresses, he was excited by Adam. He followed him into the break room and asked about his life, and since he mentioned her, about Nancy. Sex Nancy.
“She’s an actress.” He announced proudly, because it was something technically true about her. It was an enthusiasm he couldn’t muster around his friends, who had met Nancy.
Nancy was the kind of girl who had gone quietly mad in her late teens, and whose parents had supported her dropping out of University when they had mutually decided it had become “too much”. She now waitressed three days a week, and spent two lying on a single bed in her childhood bedroom, reading monologues.
When he told Sex Nancy about Exams Nancy–a stab at pillow chat that he didn’t expect to take–she latched on to the information with a strange fervour.
“Tell me about her. Tell me about Other Nancy.”
“She…she’s, I don’t know. She’s old.”
“How old?”
“In her fifties, maybe?”
“And what does she do? What is she like?”
He thought about Exams Nancy. He had known her for two months now, holed up in a square room with only the sound of her throat clearing for company. Every morning at 10.30 she took her coffee break, when she snapped open a Tupperware container and took two Jaffa Cakes out of it. She laid them on a paper towel on her desk, and spent two hours eating them. She would take a silent sip of strong, sweet tea and nibble the edge of the sponge, and put it down again, returning to her work. Gradually, the Jaffas disappeared.
He told her–Sex Nancy–this and she clapped her hands together in delight. She started imitating the movements of Exams Nancy using a condom wrapper on Adam’s bedside table. In a second, Sex Nancy became thick and crotchety, as lumbering and stoic as an old sheep.
While pretending to appreciate the performance, he was annoyed that she could be so enthralled by a boring person and a boring story.
“Don’t you think that’s great, though? That sort of, sparing instinct she has? It’s not something our generation would ever think about doing. We were raised to always have more. She was raised to expect less.”
He thought this was patronising, and a little heavy-handed, but this was the most interest she had ever shown in his life, so they talked about it until it was time for her to leave.
Ben has three chocolates and only eats one. He is ______ them.
Saving Sparing Fasting Leaving
Sex Nancy demanded more information about the other Nancy, claiming that she could make “a great character someday.”
Adam’s luck with the Nancys was changing. A few days later, Exams Nancy offered him a Jaffa cake.
“But you only have two,” he said, confused that she would break her ritual for him.
“I brought two more from home,” she replied hurriedly “I used to bring them for Judith, too.”
It was the first time she had mentioned Judith to him–maybe the first she had mentioned her at all since her death–and he called Sex Nancy from the bathroom to tell her all about it.
“Oh my God,” said Sex Nancy, “that is the most tragic. You guys are like friends now. Like Harold and Maude.” He suddenly realised that this was the first time they had talked on the phone.
From there, his relationship with both Nancys seemed to blossom at the same rate. The two were not mutually exclusive. Exams Nancy would do something, and he would tell Sex Nancy all about it. One July Wednesday he mumbled something to her from across the room and her head snapped right up.
“I beg your pudding?”
He began texting Sex Nancy immediately:
“Other Nancy Quote of the Day: I BEG YOUR PUDDING”
A response, minutes later.
“LOL. That is THE BEST. I’ll beg your pudding later. ;-)”
He began going to her parties with her, where “I beg your pudding” became their little catchphrase, their public in-joke.
“This is Adam,” she would announce, gesturing at him, “he’s my…thing.” The way she said it seemed to suggest that she was just too frantically busy right now to define what role in her life Adam filled, a lie that only Adam knew wasn’t true. She had started staying in his house after he went to work, and he would come home to find his bed made and her sleeping naked on it.
“Adam has the weirdest job. He spends all day with this little old lady, writing up exam papers for kids. It’s very sweet really. Her partner – this other little old lady called Judith – has just died, you see, and Adam, like, comforts her about it.”
“Why did you say that?” he asked her, when they got home. “That stuff about Nancy. You made her out to be like, a grieving lesbian.”
“No I didn’t.”
“You did. You said partner. Partner implies they were together. Romantically.”
“Partner can mean anything,” she said, wrinkling her nose in annoyance. “Like, business partner. And besides, they probably were lesbians.”
“And I don’t comfort her about it. She brought it up once.”
“Hey,” she said sharply, before softening, putting her hand on his crotch and squeezing gently. “Don’t you want everyone to know what a nice guy you are?”
He did. He did he did he did he did.
“You know, when Judith did Literacy, we used to have a little game.” Exams Nancy volunteered this information on a day in August, as she stopped by his window to examine the rain. Judith. Her second mention in six weeks!
“We called it the Double Letter Game.”
The Double Letter Game involved taking two things which were related, where the first had a letter that appeared twice, and the second didn’t. So, Exams Nancy explained, “Apples, but not oranges,” “Books, but not movies,” or maybe “Baseball, but not hockey.”
Over the years the game had become idle verbal ping pong that had helped pass the time. Woolf but not Brontë. Jesus but not God. Kissing but not sex.
“People used to pass our office with the most confused looks on their faces. They thought we were speaking in code.”
He sensed that he and Exams Nancy were the only ones left who knew the rules of the game. Wondering if this was an invitation to play, he spent a few minutes trying to think of one.
“Queen, but not king?”
Sex Nancy came over that night. They didn’t go out. They made dinner, which they ate next to the TV, and he told her about the Double Letter Game. They played until they got bored of it, had sex, and fell asleep holding one another.
“Adam,” Sex Nancy whispered, “Thank you for being nice to me.”
“That’s okay,” he replied, trying not to spoil the moment “thanks for being nice.”
The next morning she made him a lunch to take to the Department of Exams and Standards with him. With a small, embarrassed sense of ceremony, she gave him a Tupperware box containing a pastrami bagel and a tiny carton of juice. He pulled her close, swung her around, delighted that anyone would get up at 7.30 to make him a bagel and pack him a juice. “You know, other Nancy has Tupperware just like this. You’re becoming more and more like her every day.”
Exams Nancy and he played the Double Letter Game again in the morning. She was impressed with his progress – since practicing last night he was quicker on the draw.
At 10.30 Adam went to the bathroom and Nancy made coffee for both of them. Passing his desk, she spotted the Tupperware container and wondered idly how it had made its way to Adam’s desk. Snapping it open, there was a moment of confusion before she realised the lunchbox wasn’t hers. Pulling out the bagel, three slips of paper, fortune cookie sized, fluttered to the floor.
“Pussy, but not cunt” said the first.
Exams Nancy crushed Sex Nancy’s message in her hand as Adam re-entered the room. Nancy slammed the box on his desk, where more weightless slips of paper bounced into the air. Adam caught one.
“Phallus, but not dick” in Sharpie ink.
There were eight or nine slips of paper. Sex Nancy’s impression of humour. He walked the five long paces to Nancy’s desk, where she stood with her back to him. Both of her hands were flat on the wood surface and her eyes were closed.
“Nancy…my girlfriend. Do you remember my girlfriend? I told you about her on my first day?”
No response.
“I told her about your game. Yours and Judith’s game. And well, she went crazy for it. This…this is her…her sense of humour, showing through, I guess.”
He touched her shoulder–rigidly soft with cable-knit cardigan–and felt it jut angrily away from him. He stooped to pick up an errant fortune cookie slip and threw it into his waste paper basket without reading it.
“I’m sorry, Nancy.” He said, and sat back at his desk, returning to his exam.
David’s friends are all here. Some of them are having cake and some of them are having ______.
Pizza Cake Tea Fun
