School portraits / Semester one, the first eleven school days
Ten School Days
A Scottish accountant in Doha, a posting nobody would confirm, and the one deadline in his life that kept its word.
Callum Rae arrived in Doha in August with a wife, a nine-year-old and a posting that his employer described as “firm, subject to review.” The American School of Doha’s fee policy, which he read on the plane, was clearer than his contract: withdraw in the first ten school days of the semester and you pay two per cent of the semester’s tuition for each day attended, up to twenty; from day eleven, no tuition refund at all. Callum, an accountant by training and a worrier by vocation, took out a pen.
He drew a grid on the back of the boarding pass. Ten boxes. Each box was worth two per cent, which he converted into riyals, then into pounds, then into the number of family dinners at the hotel buffet it represented. His wife Fiona, who had spent the flight watching a film about a dog, asked what he was doing. “Risk management,” he said. “It’s a countdown,” she said. “To what?” He did not have an answer, so he shaded in the first box.
Day one, Hamish came home from the Al Bustan Street campus with a lanyard, a form about something called Spirit Week and the news that a boy called Tariq had a pet tortoise. Day two, box shaded, the review at Callum’s office was “progressing”. Day three, Hamish needed trainers for PE, and a particular kind. Day four, the tortoise had a name and Hamish had been to see it. Callum did the maths: four boxes, eight per cent, one tortoise.
On day six the review became a meeting, and the meeting became a phone call at ten at night from a man in Aberdeen who said things like “visibility” and “Q4”. Callum asked him, as plainly as a person can, whether they were staying. The man said he would know by the end of the week. Callum looked at the grid. The end of the week was day ten. He thought of the fee policy with something close to affection: it was the only party in the whole arrangement that had committed to a date.
Day nine, Fiona came in while he was shading. “You missed day seven,” she said. He had. He checked his notes. On day seven Hamish had come home with a friend’s phone number written on his arm in biro, and Callum had spent the evening copying it onto paper before it washed off, and had forgotten the grid entirely. Day eight he had shaded late, from memory. Day nine’s box was the first one he had done on time since the tortoise.
The call came on day eleven, at four in the afternoon, one full school day after the refund window closed. The posting was confirmed. Two years, maybe three, “with good visibility”. Callum thanked the man, hung up, and found the boarding pass under a pile of PE kit. Nine boxes shaded, one empty, and the whole thing already out of date. He had been counting down to the day he could leave without losing money, and somewhere between a tortoise and a biro’d phone number his son had stopped being refundable.