She wrote a long word on the board, and told us that we had started to learn about it. Probability. The mathematics of chance. Then she told us she was going to ask a question, and the first person to get it right could go on their break early. We were all excited by now, and I could see Paul grinning at me from his desk, that evil grin he used just before a killer punch. He was sharpening his pencil, dusting a new page down for the question, but Miss Sayer told him to close the book. ‘There will be no pen and paper used in this lesson,’ she said. ‘You must use your heads. Is everybody concentrating? Very well. Who can tell me what this last domino is? Children… play to win!’
Immediately panic set in.
I was still standing at the front of the class. From that position I could see the look of fear creep over every kid’s face. Someone on the front row stood up then, and that started a stampede. They were all up and running around in circles, banging into each other, trying their best to find a pair of numbers that none of them had. It was chaos. Paul was actually going round stealing dominoes off the weaker kids, hoping to stockpile his own little abacus, with one missing piece. ‘We’ve got to work together,’ he shouted, by way of justification. He was only helping himself to the answer. Cheating, in other words. The strange thing was, Miss Sayer didn’t seem to mind this behaviour. She was smiling at the chaos she had created.
She was smiling at me. It was as though she was inside my head, guiding me to the answer. Maybe that was only my brain hurting with this sudden onslaught of numbers, but something definitely happened that day, something I still can’t explain, even after all these years.
‘Two-zero.’ It just came to me. I whispered it first. And then louder, and then louder still. ‘I think it’s the two-zero domino, miss.’
Maybe I’d been subconsciously counting the dominoes as they were chosen. Maybe. I don’t know.
‘OK everybody!’ The teacher clapped her hands for quiet. ‘This child thinks he has the answer. Tell us, please.’
‘It’s the two-zero domino,’ I repeated.
‘Bollocks!’ That was from Paul, of course.
I lifted up the last domino and turned it over in my hand…
‘He peeked! He peeked at it, miss!’ Paul again, coming forward to see for himself.
‘No. I was here. I kept my eye on him. Not everybody needs to cheat, double-six. Well done, two-zero. You may go to break now.’
I gave a whoop of delight, right in Paul’s face, and ran out of the door. There were only fifteen minutes left till official break anyway, but I didn’t care. I’d won! Domino! At last I’d won over Paul. I was the master, and I couldn’t stop laughing all the way down the corridor.
Play to win
‘You know what happened then, don’t you, Daisy?’
‘You went back?’
‘Yes. I did. I stopped at the doors to the playground. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I might be missing. What was Miss Sayer teaching the other kids without me being there. What were the dominoes doing now? I’d won, but I’d lost. So I went back, and that was the start of it. The start of my career.’
‘And you think this Paul, what was it…?’
‘Malthorpe.’
‘You think he’s the Mister Million?’
‘The thing is, we all became rather good at mathematics that year. Miss Sayer was very special. She taught us to play a mean game of dominoes, and during the play we’d be fed the principles of higher maths. She didn’t treat us like imbeciles, you see. She didn’t teach us adding up and subtraction; she started off with probability and combination theory, disciplines like that, and left the basics to seep down from the top.’
‘It could have been any one of you.’
‘Possibly. I have here a printout of all twenty-eight pupils. Myself; Two-Zero. Prentice, Susan; Five-Blank. Malthorpe, Paul; Six-Six. The team will need to check on them all, but my money’s on Paul. You know the prize for winning the double-six AnnoBone?’
‘You get to become Mister Million.’
‘That’s typical of Malthorpe. He loves the dangerous bet. And consider this…’ Hackle pointed out another name on the list. ‘Horn, George; Zero-Zero. He was the runt of the class, Georgie Horn. A skinny little thing, all buck teeth and inane giggles. Slightly subnormal. Looking back, I guess we were very cruel to him, the names we called him and the things we did. Malthorpe was the worst, of course, but I stand guilty as well. So when Georgie chose the double-zero domino, it raised a terrible laugh from the whole classroom. Miss Sayer tried to tell us that the double-zero was one of the most important numbers, but we were having none of that. The strange thing is, as soon as he won that number, Malthorpe took Georgie under his wing. They became a partnership, the double-six and the double-blank. It was perfect, and another example of what was going on in that classroom. It couldn’t just be chance, considering the Joker Bone.’