Year 6 Maths SATS Practice Paper
Story Sunday by Ruth Brandt
Mohamed hires a bike. He has to return it by 3pm. The time is 2:25pm. How many minutes has he got left?
Time ticks. The fictional Mohamed dawdles on his bike, waiting for Cara to tell him how much more hire time he’s got. The kitchen clock edges towards 6:30pm, dimming the day with the same persistence that it once ticked off Dick’s wife’s hours. He forces his focus onto Cara’s munched pencil while he waits for her to do something, anything, other than sit with her head back, eyes closed.
“Come on, Cara,” Dick says. “It’s not that hard,”
“Oh my god!”
“Imagine a clock.”
“But Dad, I’ve had this all day and I’ll have it all day tomorrow and the day after. Why do I have to do it at home too?”
“How many minutes are there in an hour?”
“This hour right now, there are twenty billion and they are all a million seconds long.”
Which reminds Dick of something Einstein is supposed to have said: ‘When you sit with a pretty girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.’ Dick doubts Einstein would have said something so glib, but the minutes spent sitting here with Cara not doing her Maths SATs practice paper can only be measured as hot stove minutes.
“Why don’t you phone Rose or something?” Cara says.
“Please, Cara.”
“I mean, like it’s not enough you go round and see her all the time and then message her all evening, because that’s not enough, so we have to go and live with her too. Really? Because it doesn’t work us living here, does it, because that’s what we’ve been doing for ever, so that’s obviously not working.”
“Cara.”
“What?”
“It’s not that far away.”
“Oh my god.”
“Will you stop saying that.”
Cara’s lips scrunch like her mother’s, a look endearing in Sandrine, petulant in Cara. Would Sandrine have had more patience with Cara than Dick does? He finds it hard to tell since Sandrine has become confused in his head between the unbearably inescapable image of a morphined-out, yellowing Sandrine, combined with the soft-smelling Sandrine pitching up at Bristol Airport, crazy dark hair, crazily announcing, ‘I’ve come to you, my darling.’ Sandrine gripping vernix-slimy Cara, ‘We’ve made a girl, Dick. A whole human girl.’ Sandrine’s half smile captured in the photo he’s removed from display in their bedroom, placed in a drawer face down. Sandrine who he no longer knows since there are bits of Rose and Cara intertwined with what he thinks he remembers of her, any of which might be true or imagined. Oh God. A breath in. Hold.
“Dad?”
“We’re trying to make it OK for you,” Dick manages.
“I’m sorry, Dad. Dad?”
Dick points to the next question.
Maria completes the calculation: 95-67=28. Write an addition calculation she could use to check her answer.
2023 minus 2019 equals four unbearable years. 2019 plus four equals distraction, arousal. Contentment?
“Please don’t cry, Dad. I’m really sorry.”
He musses his face into her messed-up crazy hair, and he cannot think and he cannot breathe and he holds onto her so tight. He should be holding her up. She’s eleven and she can’t be his only solace any longer. He cannot lay all that on her.
“Rose and I love each other,” he tries to say, because that is definite. The absolute truth. Except he loves Sandrine too, he loves her terribly, and it’s OK to love two women at the same time under these circumstances, surely?
Cara eases his head away from hers.
“I love you too,” he says. “So much.”
She pushes back her chair.
“It’s twenty-eight plus sixty-seven equals ninety-five,” she says. “The stupid boy has got thirty-five minutes, but he should work that out for himself. I can do it on my own, Dad. I don’t need you.”
And she’s away up the stairs, the stairs that no doubt still harbour a fleck of Sandrine’s skin here, a toe imprint that hasn’t been over-trodden there. The stairs in the house that Dick can no longer bear to be in.
Ruth Brandt is a writer and creative writing tutor. Her prize-winning short story collection No One has any Intention of Building a Wall is published by Fly on the Wall Press. Her stories have been widely published and nominated for prizes including the Best Small fictions and Pushcart Prize.
This is so beautifully sad. I had tears in my eyes reading it.
What a simple yet powerful story. So much is said in few words. I've learnt a lot from this.