As Leaving Cert Results land and anxious students around the country tot up their points and consider their options, one writer remembers the night her future was decided, or so she thought…
It was a golden brown envelope, soft to touch and miniature in size. As the school principal handed it to me I wondered was it relief that I detected in her smile, or sympathy – shared regret. I couldn’t read her little tight-lipped spectral grin. And when I joined the spilling crowds of girls outside the building and gingerly opened the envelope I had to stare for some time at the piece of paper it contained. I trained my eyes along the column of numbers, up and down. I didn’t understand the numbers on the Leaving Cert results card, the card which contained my fate.
This was inconvenient. I didn’t know how to add up the points into a total number of points, to that final score, the sacred scripture, the number that would from this day define us, like a tattoo or a scar, so we believed.
I reached for my friend, the one who is a mathematical genius, who’d got 750 points or something and was crying with happiness – and asked her to tot up the sums. Claire took the card from me and scrutinised it, crunched the numbers, and told me my result. The result was good. I had not failed Maths – hooray for having written those few theorems on my thighs before Maths Paper 2 and ‘thank hell’ I’d met my friend Ruth in the bathroom during the lightly-invigilated exam! Relief. I would get my first choice and go to college in a month. It was all looking very good.
My principal’s smile had been one of congratulations, because she was happy for a student that had failed tests and underperformed through secondary school, who’d stopped attending class at various stages, a student for whom expulsion loomed. During most of my fourteen years of schooling, I had no understanding of schoolwork; lessons all just drifted meaninglessly past my head, over my more interesting daydreams. My parents had despaired. The sight of the two of them from our pavilion classroom window, being led from their car across the school grounds with my principal and vice principal on either side, was so common, it was only barely amusing to me. My grades were disastrous. But I had eventually knuckled down and studied for my Leaving Cert, the race was over, and I’d won, I actually believed, with my heart beating in the school yard. I’d reached a pinnacle of success.
There is no exam in the subject of living life, but managing to do so is its own reward.
We had to celebrate immediately. Ruth, Claire and I got together and our parents let us drink wine with a delivery of the biggest pizzas Dominos could make. We dressed up in our most revealing clothing – in 2002, a bluestocking combination of knee-length skirt with dark tights, a spaghetti string top and wool cardigan.
We stood in a sweaty nightclub, too shy to dance; we drank sugary mixed drinks, we went back to a smoke-filled flat somewhere near enough to Leeson Street – I wasn’t sure, I had no sense of direction. Just followed the gang. Quietly I was on fire – I thought I could do anything. Get a job, go interrailing. I could even go home if I wanted. That’s what I’ll do, I decided much later on, when I was bored and exhausted. So I said goodbye and left, alone, and went to find a taxi on the street.
It was a sizable modern apartment block, nondescript and magnolia all over, in a development set apart from the main road, and it was without interest in my surroundings that I thumped sleepily to the end of the corridor. I could not recall which floor we were on, so I found the lift, and pressed the button. I waited, and the lift didn’t come, maybe the lift was broken, that is possible. I took the stairs down several floors, each one identical when I scanned the corridors for an exit, which I somehow couldn’t find. It was getting so late, it was early, and I really wanted to go home. Feeling my way along one blank wall of this bland labyrinth, I spotted a promising door. The door had a heavy metal handle. I pushed the handle down, it sprang back up, I pushed it down again. I pulled the handle up, I shook it, I twisted it, but the door didn’t open. The door was locked from the inside.
Maybe it was the wrong door – I must have the wrong exit, I thought. I didn’t own a mobile phone; my mother and I shared one, implausibly. I didn’t even have an email address; mobile phones and emails were only just becoming necessary human trackers, in a time that also saw the aftershocks of 9/11 and the beginning of the so-called ‘War on Terror’; Roy Keane’s devastating departure during the World Cup; boomtime in Ireland and the advent of fake tan. I walked the vacant corridor again, and yes! I found a fire exit, tried the handle, but it couldn’t be opened. I went back to the first exit, and battered it again, charged at it, but nothing gave. Then I had a lightbulb of a moment – I would go back to the party where everyone was. Embarrassing, maybe, but the faster I went back, the faster I’d find someone to help me get out – I walked the halls, and nothing. The doors were all identical, and the walls were eerily soundproof. I was unsure, in fact, which floor the party had happened on. Had there ever been a party; was tonight still tonight? I hadn’t yet read anything by Franz Kafka, but I certainly planned to, and could safely say this was the perfect introduction to his works. With creeping misery I walked the halls, retracing my steps, holding my platform heels and I imagine, in my handbag, my Leaving Cert results card.
In reality I was probably only stuck in there for a total of forty minutes, hard to tell. But when I did find the green Exit button that released the door and when I got back on the street and found a taxi, I was unphased by the ordeal. Just glad, as much as any women going home at night, to be safe. But I am more troubled now remembering it, 22 years later. To think that a person could know how to leave school, how to sit the Leaving Cert and get into university but not know how to leave the Leaving Cert results afterparty.
After so much failure, success had meant everything. Points meant a great deal to me and seemingly to the adults who would ask, plainly – ‘What did you get?’ Points were the sum total of your worldly intelligence, your ticket to freedom, I reckoned, and I had ruthlessly set out to acquire as many of them as I could. I knew how to do this; how to isolate myself from all my peers, how to cram in volumes of obscure slash useless information during sleepless nights of study, and I guess, let’s face it, how to cheat in Leaving Cert Maths. Books, I was capable of reading, and many books I’d go on read, over the next four years, studying pure English. Much too many.
Points may be a helpful crumb trail up the path of education, but results and honours have led me to the exact same place of bewilderment as that day outside the door that would not open. Academic success doesn’t hurt, but coping with the rest of life, with the multitude of knotty and frustrating problems that bedevil us each day? I think wistfully and often of the things I still do not know how to do; change a tyre, sew a hem back on; book a Ryanair flight without succumbing to panic; calculate a percentage; paint a wall; earn a steady income; pitch a tent; keep a plant alive; be on time; work a printer; mind children when it rains; leave a party. There is no exam in the subject of living life, but managing to do so is its own reward.
The best things you learn come from failure, from making mistakes and figuring out what not to do. I think of a statement attributed to Mark Twain: ‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.’ And of something someone told me Aristotle said, that ‘educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.’ Good luck kids. Tear open those doors.
Maggie Armstrong is the author of Old Romantics, out now from Tramp Press.