Single Figures

by Alexandra Fox 

There is a knife sticking out of my head, out of my right temple, approximately 3.5 centimetres away from my eye.

Danny Grey, the kid who threw it (“Miss Sole,” he said, and just let fly although I hadn’t picked on him to speak all lesson), was sitting in the 2nd row, 4 seats along, 2 from the centre. That must be why his aim was so accurate.

I didn’t know it was a knife at first. I thought I’d been hit by a stone, or by some internal cranial explosion. It wasn’t until I put my hand up to my face and drew a finger along the blade that I felt it there, and my touch stilled its twanging. It hit with not so much a pain as a thud which whipped my head to one side, a vibration like a tuning fork synchronised with the shrill screaming of the girls in the classroom. If an orchestral A is set at 440, this felt 1000 times tighter, higher.

My finger bleeds faster than my head. It’s lower. There is a slow dull trickle down my temple, my cheek, my neck, not yet enough to pool in the hollow above my sternum. Perhaps the capillaries are stoppered by steel.

I hear the voices behind me, breathless Miss Terry who tries to teach RE and doubles as First-Aider, “Should we try to pull it out?”

And then Mark Oxted, Head of Science, painfully unemotional, “No. Leave it to the professionals. We’ve no idea what damage it’s done in there. It could’ve cut through an artery. If we interfere we could cause a major bleed.”

The knife itself is a great example of the purity of number 1. I’d like to remark upon it to the class. I’ve noticed it before, the difference between the cocked 7 of a folded cut-throat razor, a flighted arrow, a tick … and the straightness of a 1, ready for action. There is poetry in 1. Danny understands that, and in that elementary understanding lies a foundation.

The knife here stands proud, alone, perpendicular to my face. I rest my knuckles under it, sit back against the desk, for its weight makes me ache. I think it’s a pen knife, possibly a Victorinox in a red enamelled case like the one my father used to pare his fingernails. I’d like to ask if this knife has a Swiss flag printed on it, but I think people might look at me oddly.

With the callipers of my fingers I estimate that the handle of the knife is 9 centimetres long. The unburied length of blade is 6. That means 3 centimetres have entered my head – that’s 0.3 for skin, a scant layer of fat, then the thickness of the skull, the meninges – say 0.5? A minimum of 2 centimetres have pierced the grey matter of my brain.

I don’t feel any different, except that there are people peering into my face as though they are adjusting the settings on a television set.

I’d like to ask Mark – he teaches biology, after all – what parts of my consciousness lie just below the temple, but I’m afraid I’d stammer (as I have each time I’ve spoken to him since that single time we slept together last year), and he’d think it was a sign of brain damage (rather than a simple short tear to the heart).

So I test my senses. I can smell chips from the dining hall, boys’ hot socks on underfloor heating. There’s the brrr of an electric bell, the tramp of feet, distant sobbing, the vibration of a mobile phone on a desk. I know what day, period and classroom this is. I have the centre of myself safe, my name, the cacophony of numbers that makes me up.

Am I fraying only at the edges? I could live without things on the periphery. Pluto has lost its planetary status because it failed the requirement for orbital dominance, although Neptune got away with it. A man shot dead 4 people today who weren’t his fickle girlfriend, and then fired 2 shots that rolled around the perimeter of his own skull and left him alive. An Austrian girl lived 10 years behind a trapdoor in a room 10 feet long, while her parents, 10 miles away, ended their 10-year coupledom in the grief of her supposed death. And a woman who is famous for counting the bacteria in washing-up sponges gave birth 40 years ago to a stillborn boy, wrapped him in a tea-towel and buried him in the park with a spoon. Did she return the spoon to the drawer afterwards, or was there a number forever missing from the set?

What part of me is damaged? Is it a part I’ve never explored? Will I miss it?

It was nothing that caused this, and it would be a delicious equation if nothing were taken away.

For Danny, I gave him zero in a test, perfectly red, perfectly round on the bottom of a paper passed along a sniggering row of kids. How could I do otherwise? That’s the beauty of mathematics at this basic level: there is right and there is wrong. And what can be more perfect than a zero? A limpid, dark-edged pool that promises oblivion, the funnel at that still hot centre where the Parsees sweep the vulture-stripped bones of their fathers? It’s cleaner, stronger than an ugly duckling 2, a blindly writhing 3. A zero has hope; it can dilate to 8, 9, 10 centimetres and be born again. But this zero, this nothing, threw a knife, as a snake’s mouth shoots out a venomous tongue. The calculation of weight, weighting, torque, thrust, windspeed as it passed the open window, speaks of an innate mathematical ability far in advance of anything Danny’s shown in class. In spite of myself, I am impressed.

The paramedics have arrived, 3 of them, immaculately green. They strap me to a stretcher, my head to a block built of 2 halves. They build up padding around the knife to keep it straight. My fingers relax.

Am I lobotomised? I am calm, perfectly clear, able to speak without caution.

“I love numbers more than people.” I say to the room as I am carried out. “And I die a little more each day teaching children who don’t want to learn or appreciate them.”

“James Johnson, the number of days you don’t shower is greater than the number of days you do. Reverse the sign.”

“Emma Dunstan, I know you have help with your coursework. Your classwork demonstrates no understanding whatsoever of the music and relationship of number to number, and I feel dirty awarding you high grades.”

“Enid Terry, your teaching skills are non-existent. They call your syllabus the ‘Miss-Terry Tour’. You are a joke.”

“Mark Oxted, I love you more than any man on earth, more than any number. You left me smashed into countless fragments and I’ve been trying to put myself together ever since.”

And to Danny, who has been subtracted from the room, Danny who straightened his circle and hit me with the power of one, I want to say I think I understand.