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By Root 201 0

into work every day, I still had enough pride to want to succeed, even if it was only just scraping through. Ed didn’t help, either. I know he meant well, but he would insist on trying to keep my spirits up by telling me he was sure that I had done really well and that there would be no problem. Me, however, I had different ideas. He hadn’t been in that room and sat there with a feeling of inadequacy, a feeling that had grown as soon as I’d left the building and that had continued to grow as the countdown to results day progressed. I knew how much better I could have done, something that Ed’s reaction when I told him that I had left the exam hall early – he had winced – only reinforced.

On the day that the results were due out, the post still hadn’t arrived by the time I left for the mortuary. I never even thought about hanging around, happy to spend the day in blissful ignorance, but about halfway through the morning Ed came down to the mortuary demanding to know what my results were. I told him that I didn’t know and he was astonished that I was willing to wait until the evening to find out.

‘I’ll give you a lift home at lunchtime.’

‘Why?’

‘So you can get your result.’ Ed didn’t seem to appreciate that I didn’t particularly want to know my result.

‘It doesn’t matter. It can wait. I don’t want to trouble you.’

‘Rubbish! It’s no trouble. I’m as keen to have the good news as you are.’

‘It might not be convenient for Clive.’

But Clive, bless him, said at once, ‘I haven’t got a problem with that. We’re quiet and the place is pretty clean. I can spare you for three-quarters of an hour.’

So Ed drove me home while I sat in his car and realized that I was very, very bothered indeed about the result. I was so bothered that I was feeling like I had when I had sat the bloody thing – wobbly-legged, sick and almost out of my body with stress. He behaved as if this was a normal day; he had Radio 2 on, while chatting about nothing at all. As we pulled up outside my house he turned to me, smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, Michelle. In the long run, it doesn’t really matter.’

I wasn’t sure how to take that but smiled back and nodded and said, ‘No.’

It’s not a long walk up to my front door from the pavement but it seemed like it at that moment. The boys heard me coming of course and there was a gigantic explosion of barking as I approached. I put the key into the lock, turned it and pushed the door open, my head already turned down to look at the floor of the front porch where the post lay.

There were three pieces of junk mail, a bill for the telephone and an A4 brown envelope that I knew at once was the result I had been dreading. I knew from talking to the other candidates that if the envelope was flimsy then it was a fail but if it was quite stiff then I had passed. With the boys barking for England behind the frosted glass of the inner door and my stomach so full of sickness I thought I was going to vomit, I bent down and picked it up, flexing it slightly.

And you know what? I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know which of those it was, flimsy or stiff. Inside might have been a letter telling me I was a loser, or it might have been a certificate proclaiming me a brain-box. Without ceremony, I ripped the top off and dived in.

I had passed.

Not a great pass, I have to admit now. Something of a scrape, as Ed cheerfully observed when he looked at my marks, but I wasn’t bothered. A pass is a pass is a pass; end of. I was happy.

Clive and Maddie were pleased as punch, of course, and I spent the rest of the day in a happy glow, similar to the way I’d felt when I’d got the job in the first place. I had phoned Luke at once and he was over the moon too, promising that we would go out that night to celebrate. When I phoned Mum to tell her she almost burst into tears and I could hear Dad in the background shouting, ‘I knew she’d do it. I knew our Michelle would do it.’

We all arranged to meet at the pub at eight that evening and by half past, as we sat in the fading daylight of the beer garden, the lager-fuelled banter was at its height. I