One Thing at a Time

The match started at six o’clock.

Yuvan had known this since Tuesday. It was on the fridge. He had written it on the fridge himself, on the white board bit, in his best writing: MATCH 6 PM. Under it he had drawn a stump with the bails coming off, which was possibly the best thing he had ever drawn.

The rule in the house was simple and everybody knew it. Homework first. Bag by the door, notebook on the table, glass of water, go.

The homework was six sums.

He sat down at four o’clock at the table by the window, with his notebook and his pen and a glass of water. He propped the phone up against the water bottle, at an angle, so he could see it and do the sums at the same time.

The video was a man building a treehouse. It was a good video. It was thirty-one minutes long. There was a bit at nine minutes where the man dropped a plank on his own foot. It was, honestly, the funniest thing in the world.

Sum one took eleven minutes.

That is a very long time for a sum, and it was not a hard sum. What happened was this. He would carry the one, and then the man on the screen would say something, and he would look up. Then he would look down, and the one was gone. Not gone off the page. Gone out of his head.

So he would go back to the start of the sum.

Sum two, he had to go back three times.

At the plank bit he laughed out loud and lost the whole line and had to rub it out. The eraser took a corner of the paper with it and left a grey smear that would not come off.

At half past four, Ma went past with the washing and looked at the notebook and said nothing at all, which is a skill.

Sum three took eight minutes. Sum four took nine.

At quarter past five, Yuvan looked at the clock.

He had done four sums. He had two left. Behind him the fan was going. In front of him the man had got the treehouse floor down and was starting on the rail.

Yuvan did the arithmetic that actually mattered, which was not on the page.

Two sums. At nine minutes each, that was eighteen minutes, and that was if nothing went wrong. Then the bag, then the pen, then Ma checking it. Six o’clock was in forty-five minutes.

The toss was at ten to.

He reached over and turned the phone face-down against the water bottle.

It was in his way. In his way the way a bag is in your way when it is on the chair you want. So he moved it.

The room went quiet in a way he had not expected. Just the fan, and a crow on the wall outside, and his own pen on the paper.

Sum five took three minutes.

He noticed that, and it annoyed him slightly, because of the two hours.

Sum six took four, including checking it twice, which he never did.

He shut the notebook at twenty-two minutes past the moment he had turned the phone over. He knew this because he had looked at the clock when he turned the phone over. He had not meant to start a race with himself. He had started one.

He put the notebook in the bag by the door. He took the glass to the sink. He got the last two biscuits out of the tin, on the grounds that he had earned them and nobody had said he hadn’t.

Then he went and sat down in the middle of the sofa, with a biscuit in each hand, at eight minutes to six.

The toss had not happened yet.

The treehouse man was still upside down on the table by the window, halfway through his rail, and stayed there all evening.