School portraits / Year 7 to Year 13, with one spreadsheet throughout
The Thirty Thousand That Came Back
A Glaswegian accountant, a refundable debenture, and seven years of referring to it as a loan.
Craig Monroe had built the spreadsheet before his son had sat the assessment. Column A was Dubai schools, column B was annual tuition, and Dubai College sat near the top of column B looking, in his words, “no worse than the rest of them.” Then he reached the line on the fee page about a personal debenture of thirty thousand dirhams, refundable when the pupil leaves, and he did what accountants do when they meet a number they had not planned for. He opened a new tab.
His wife, Leanne, found him there at eleven that night, with the tab titled DEBENTURE in capital letters. “It comes back,” she said, reading over his shoulder. “It says refundable.” Craig explained, with the patience of a man who had once audited a shipping firm, that money which comes back in seven years is not the same as money you have now, and that in the meantime Dubai College would be holding thirty thousand of his dirhams in a manner he would be describing, from this point on, as a loan. He was not paying for school. He was lending the school money, and it was lending him a son.
Fergus got in. Craig paid the tuition, the debenture and the five per cent re-registration thing he had asked the bursar’s office about twice, and he began, that first September, to refer to the debenture at dinner. Not often. Perhaps once a week. If Fergus mentioned a geography trip, Craig would say, mildly, that some of that was the loan at work. If Fergus came home with a worse mark in maths than the week before, Craig would ask whether the loan had been informed. Leanne banned the word from the table in October. Craig switched to “the arrangement.”
The joke wore a groove. By Year 9, when GCSE science began and Fergus came home talking about moles in a way that was not about gardening, Craig had stopped checking the fee page and started checking a line in his own spreadsheet that he had labelled, in a weak moment, Return Date. By Year 12, when Fergus picked four A levels and then, as the school had warned, dropped one for Year 13, Craig observed that the arrangement was now carrying three subjects instead of four and would be writing to the bursar about proportionality. He did not write to the bursar. Leanne checked.
What nobody warned him about was how the arrangement ended. Fergus left in June, with results and a university place and a cardboard box of ring binders that Craig was not allowed to recycle. In August, a letter arrived from Al Sufouh. The refund had been processed, less outstanding amounts, of which there were none, because Craig Monroe does not leave outstanding amounts. Thirty thousand dirhams, back in the account, exactly as promised.
He sat at the kitchen table with the letter and the laptop and did not open the spreadsheet. Leanne came in, read it, and said the thing she had been saving for seven years, which was “Told you it came back.” Craig looked at the number for a while. Then he said that it was the only thing that had, and went to find the ring binders.