School portraits / One house hunt, July to the following spring
A House Between Two Schools
Two campuses, two children, two highlighters, and a father who was determined to solve Kuala Lumpur with a map.
Tom Prescott bought a map of Kuala Lumpur and two highlighters, which is how his wife knew it was serious. The Alice Smith School had offered their children places: Isla in Year 6 at the primary campus on Jalan Bellamy, in the middle of the city, and Ben in Year 8 at the secondary campus at Equine Park, out in Seri Kembangan. The school’s own advice was to test the journey to both at school-run time. Tom intended to do better than that. Tom intended to solve it.
He drew a yellow circle around Jalan Bellamy for everything within twenty minutes of Isla’s gate, and a pink one around Equine Park for Ben’s. The circles did not touch. He widened both to thirty minutes, on the grounds that the children were resilient, and the circles met at a single point on a highway, where nobody lives except the highway. Nadia looked at the map and said, “So we’re buying a toll booth.”
They drove the routes, as instructed, at seven in the morning. Nadia timed it; Tom narrated. From a flat they liked near Bangsar, Isla’s run was pleasant and Ben’s was a lecture on Malaysian road design. From a house they liked near Seri Kembangan, Ben could have walked and Isla would have arrived at Jalan Bellamy with the air of a child who had crossed a continent. Ben, thirteen, suggested that Isla could simply be “dropped first, early”, and Isla, ten, suggested that Ben could simply be “dropped last, late”, and both children were asked to stop helping.
The agent, a patient woman called Mei Ling, showed them eleven properties and never once mentioned that she had seen this exact family before, in different clothes. At the fifth house Tom asked whether there was a school bus, and there was, and he asked whether it went to both campuses, and Mei Ling explained kindly that a bus, like a child, can only be in one school at a time. Nadia, meanwhile, had read the fee schedule and found the one line of it she loved: parents must join the Alice Smith Schools Association, for twenty ringgit. “Finally,” she said, “something at this school that costs less than lunch.”
They took a house in Taman Desa, on the toll-booth principle, equidistant and inconvenient for everyone. Tom built a timetable with colour coding. Isla went in the car with Nadia, Ben went on the bus, and on the days of Isla’s netball Tom left work early and drove a loop that Mei Ling, had she seen it, would have recognised too. It worked. It was, Tom said, a system.
In the spring Isla brought home a letter about moving up to Year 7. She would be joining Ben at Equine Park in August, as Year 6 children do, and would take his bus, as she had always planned to. Tom looked at the map on the kitchen wall, with its two circles and its one shared point, and understood that he had chosen a house for a problem that lasted ten months. Nadia took the pink highlighter and drew a new circle, small and tidy, around Seri Kembangan. “Next year,” she said, “we live near Ben.” Tom pointed out, with some dignity, that they already lived in a toll booth.