Chapter 21
A-Levels and the Shape of the Future
The A-level examinations arrived in May of Marcus's final year of sixth form, timed, it seemed, to coincide with the longest days the sky light until nine in the evenings, which made the hours of revision feel endless and somehow also not enough.
He was sitting three A-levels: English Literature, History, and Geography. Mr. Okafor, who was still technically his teacher despite the school year being over by examination season, had told him once that the combination was unusual but coherent they were all, at root, disciplines about how people related to place and time, about cause and consequence, about the way power moved through the world and what it left behind.
Marcus had thought about that a great deal. He had written in his journal: 'I am studying the same thing from three angles. That is not confusion. That is depth.'
He revised methodically, the way he did everything with a plan, worked through steadily, without panic. He had learned from his mother that the secret of difficult things was not to meet them all at once. You broke them down. You took one part and worked it and moved to the next.
The examinations themselves he approached with the same quality of calm that he brought to long-distance running: settling in to the pace, trusting the preparation, not going out too hard.
He came out of the English Literature paper feeling the quiet satisfaction of having said everything he meant to say. The History paper pushed him a question about the legacies of colonialism that he answered with a comprehensiveness and a personal groundedness that surprised even him as he wrote. The Geography paper he finished with twenty minutes to spare.
He called his mother that evening.
'Well?' she said, without preamble.
'Good,' he said. 'I think. I said what I meant.'
'Then it's enough,' she said. 'Whatever comes from it, if you said what you meant and meant what you said, it's enough.'
The results came in August: three A grades. A starred A in English Literature.
He had applied to university the previous autumn, following the advice of his school's guidance counsellor, targeting institutions with strong education departments he had known for a year now that he wanted to teach. Not in the abstract way of someone who falls back on a familiar profession, but with the specific clarity of someone who has identified a purpose and is moving toward it.
He had been offered a place at the University of Birmingham, reading Education with English. The offer letter had arrived in February and he had told almost no one not from superstition, but from the particular quietness of large things, the sense that some things were too significant to speak aloud until they were real.
He told his mother the day the offer came. She said, very quietly: 'I knew it.' Then: 'I'm going to write this down tonight.'
He told Beverley, who made a meal that was the Caribbean equivalent of a celebration everything, all at once, the kitchen smelling of her entire repertoire.
He wrote to Leroy: 'University. Birmingham. I'm doing it.'
Leroy wrote back within a week: 'I KNOW you were going to do it. I always knew. Now go do it properly. And write to me.'
Marcus smiled at the letter for a long time before he folded it and put it in the shoebox.