Chapter 11: The Long Game

I’ve been putting it off. The adding up. Not because I don’t want to know — because I sort of already do, and the number in my head is going to be different from the number on the screen, and one of those is going to be disappointing and I’m not sure which.

Saturday. No shift. Yus is at his mate’s house, which means the flat is quiet in a way that feels weird, like a bus with no passengers. Mum’s at work — twelve till eight. Nani’s watching something on her phone in the bedroom, volume up, the tinny sound of an Urdu drama leaking through the wall.

I open the building society app. Tap the balance.

£141.07.

I set a target at the start of the year. £200 for a laptop. Not a MacBook — obviously not a MacBook — just something I could do schoolwork on without borrowing Mum’s phone or walking to the library. A refurbished one. Darius had mentioned CeX on Broadway, said they do Chromebooks for under a hundred if you don’t mind a scuff on the lid.

£141.07. That’s twenty-two hours of shelf-stacking. If I’d saved every penny of every shift since September, I’d have way more than this. But you can’t save every penny when the pennies are already spoken for. Bus pass. Phone. The month I put £30 towards shopping because Mum’s hours got cut. The school trip to York that I hadn’t budgeted for.

So. £141.07. Not £200. But it’s closer than I expected, which is something I suppose.

I open ClearScore while I’m at it. Haven’t checked since March.

362. Was 287. The phone contract — gone. The wrong address — gone. The financial association — disputed, removed. Mum hadn’t even told me she’d done it. ‘I rang them. They sorted it.’ Like four phone calls and a letter was nothing.

I close ClearScore. Open a new tab and type ‘CeX Bradford Chromebooks’ into Google. The website comes up — uk.webuy.com. I scroll through. Acer Chromebook 314, Grade B, £85. Lenovo something, Grade B, £95. HP Chromebook, Grade A, £110.

The Acer. £85. Plus if I go in person there might be others. CeX prices change depending on what they’ve got in.

£141 minus — let’s say £90, to be safe. That leaves £51.

£51 in my emergency pot. My emergency pot that started at £35 a month when I set it up after seeing Nani’s tins, then dropped to £15 when things got tight. Currently sitting at about fifty quid because some months I managed the fifteen and some months I didn’t. Not great. But I’d have the Chromebook and I’d still have something left.

I close the app. Open it again. Close it.

Right.

CeX on a Wednesday after school. Broadway. The shop smells the way all CeX shops smell — slightly warm electronics and carpet that hasn’t been replaced since the shop opened.

I don’t tell anyone I’m going. Not Sienna — she’d want to come and turn it into a whole thing. Not Mum — she’d ask where I got the money and I’d have to explain the savings and she’d feel something about that and I don’t want her to feel something about it right now. I just want to buy a laptop.

The Chromebooks are on the second shelf. Four of them. All refurbished, all with little stickers: Grade A, Grade B. I pick up the Acer 314. It’s got a scratch on the top — like someone dragged it across a table — but it opens fine, the screen’s clean, the keyboard’s not sticky.

£90. Not £85 like the website. The sticker says £90.

I could ask if there’s a cheaper one in the back. I could come back next week.

I take it to the counter. The lad scans it. I hand over the cash. Nine tenners from the building society, withdrawn yesterday. He puts it in a bag — thin plastic, won’t survive the bus. He hands me the receipt.

I walk out. Down Broadway. Turn left toward the interchange. The bag’s light — the laptop weighs almost nothing. The receipt’s in my pocket. Twenty-four month warranty.

I stand at the bus stop. A pigeon walks across the pavement in front of me, unbothered. The 72 comes. I get on.

On the bus, I open the building society app. £51.07.

Theek hai.

At work the next day, Darius is in the break room. He’s on his phone, doing something with a spreadsheet — I can see the cells from where I’m sitting. He does that now, since he started the payoff plan. Checks the numbers. He’d told me last week he was eight months from clearing the credit card completely, if nothing went wrong.

‘You want one?’ I say, nodding at the machine.

‘Nah, I’m good. Had one earlier. It was rank.’

‘They’re all rank.’

‘Yeah.’

I get myself one anyway. Press the button. Watch the cup fill. The machine gurgles.

Three days later, Darius doesn’t come in.

He texts me Thursday.

car’s dead
clutch gone
garage says 900

I read it twice. £900. That’s a hundred and forty hours at my rate. Over seventeen full shifts.

thats brutal
can you get to work without it?

buses dont run early enough for the 5am
trying to sort summat

He comes back Monday. Got a lift from his cousin, he says, but that’s not sustainable because his cousin works in Leeds.

Break. We’re in the back near the loading bay, sitting on upturned crates. The loading bay door is open and the air coming through is warm for May.

‘What are you gonna do?’ I say.

‘About what?’

‘The car.’

He tips his head back. ‘I’ve got options.’

‘Like what?’

He doesn’t answer immediately. Picks at the label on his water bottle. Peels a strip off. Rolls it between his fingers. Drops it on the ground. Peels another strip. He does this until there’s a little pile of label strips on the concrete between his trainers.

‘Credit card’s maxed. I’m not putting it on another credit card, I’m not doing that again.’ He rubs his face with both hands, palms flat against his eyes. ‘My mum can’t help. She’s got her own stuff.’

‘What about —’

‘I looked at one of them payday loan things last night.’

I don’t say anything.

‘QuickQuid or whatever. Typed in nine hundred, thirty days.’ He pulls his phone out. ‘Seven quid twenty a day in interest. Two-sixteen over the month. Total payback: eleven-sixteen.’

£1,116. For £900.

Neither of us says anything for a bit. The fork-truck beeps outside. Someone shouts something I can’t hear. Darius puts his phone back in his pocket.

‘Are you going to do it?’ I say.

‘Nah.’ He scratches his neck. ‘Been there.’

That’s it. Two words. He doesn’t tell me what “been there” means. He doesn’t need to — I’ve been paying attention since October. Eight months from clearing the card, he’d said. Eight months.

And now the clutch.

I sit with that. Not the numbers — I already worked the numbers out. He’d done the spreadsheet, opened the ISA. He was actually getting somewhere. And then one afternoon the clutch goes and it’s nine hundred quid and there’s nothing to catch it.

I walk home from the bus stop. Fill the kettle. Stand there while it boils.

Fifty-one quid in the emergency pot. If my phone screen cracked tomorrow, that’s it gone. If anything happened that cost more than what I’ve got, I’d be Darius. Different numbers, same shape.

There is no family emergency fund. There’s Nani’s tins, which are Nani’s. There’s whatever Mum’s got left at the end of the month, which some months is nothing. There’s my fifty-one quid. That’s the buffer for four people in a two-bed flat.

I open the Monzo app. The emergency fund pot. I change the monthly contribution. £15 becomes £30. Something else gets less. Probably the going-out pot.

Mr Okafor’s room is on the second floor of the business studies block, which means you’re already out of breath by the time you sit down, which means the first five minutes of every lesson is just people catching their breath while he pretends not to notice.

Tuesday. Fifth period. Business studies. Nineteen out of twenty-three. Jayden’s excluded again. Priya’s got a driving lesson she booked during school time, which is a power move I respect.

Mr Okafor’s got the projector on. A graph. One of those ones that goes up slowly and then goes up fast.

‘Right,’ he says. ‘Investing. Who knows what an investment is?’

‘Putting money in and getting more back,’ says Fatimah.

‘Sometimes. If you’re lucky and patient. And sometimes putting money in and getting less back, which is the bit nobody wants to talk about.’ He clicks the slide. A number appears: £100.

‘Hypothetical. You’re eighteen. You start putting a hundred pounds a month into an investment. Every month. You never stop. How much at thirty?’

Silence.

‘Come on. It’s maths. Twelve years, hundred a month.’

‘Fourteen thousand four hundred,’ says Fatimah.

‘That’s what you’d have if you put it in a jar. But investments grow. On average. Over long periods. Not every year — some years you lose money. 2008, the whole market dropped by about thirty per cent. 2022, similar thing. But over decades, the average for global stock markets has been about seven per cent a year.’

He clicks. The table goes up.

Age	Put in	Value
30	£14,400	~£22,600
40	£26,400	~£62,000
50	£38,400	~£142,700

I look at the last line. Then I look again.

‘Sir — is that real? A hundred and forty-two thousand?’

‘What makes you doubt it?’

‘Because it sounds like something someone says right before they ask for your bank details.’

Laugh from the class. Mr Okafor doesn’t laugh but his face does something.

‘Fair. Let’s look at why. First twelve years — you’ve put in fourteen grand, the growth adds eight. Not bad. But look at the jump between forty and fifty. In those ten years, you contribute another twelve thousand. But the pot grows by eighty thousand. The growth on the growth is doing most of the work by then.’

‘The interest is earning interest,’ Fatimah says.

‘Yep. Compound growth. The longer it runs, the more the curve bends upward. Which is why —’ He points at the table. ‘— you contributed about a quarter of the final number. The rest is time.’

He lets that sit. Someone coughs.

I pull out my phone under the desk. Open Google. ‘Compound interest calculator UK.’ Tap the first one. £100 a month. 7%. 32 years. £142,714.

I change it to £50. Same years. £71,357.

I change the rate to 5%. £100 a month. 32 years. £92,812.

Different numbers, same shape. It starts slow and then the line bends. Every time.

‘So what do you actually buy?’ Connor says. ‘Like, shares in Apple or summat?’

‘You could. That’s called stock-picking — buying shares in one company and hoping it goes up. The problem is, if that company has a bad year, your money has a bad year. There’s another way. An index fund.’

He writes it on the board. INDEX FUND.

‘Instead of one company, you buy into a fund that holds shares in hundreds of companies. Thousands, sometimes. The FTSE 100 is the biggest hundred companies in the UK. There are global ones that track nine thousand companies across the world. If one goes down —’

‘The others hold it up,’ I say.

‘Usually. The key word. Usually.’ He caps the marker. ‘Not always. The whole market can drop. But over a long enough period, it’s recovered every time. So far.’

‘Like crypto?’ Kai says. Hoodie up. Leaning back. Voice flat, like he doesn’t care about the answer. But he asked.

‘No,’ Mr Okafor says. ‘And here’s how you know the difference. When you invest in an index fund and it drops ten per cent — what do you do?’

Nobody answers.

‘Nothing. You wait. It’s boring. You check it once a quarter, maybe. You carry on with your life.’

He looks at the room. Not at Kai specifically — at everyone.

‘When you put money into something and it drops and your first feeling is that you need to put more money in right now to get it back — that’s not investing. That’s something else.’

Kai shifts in his chair. Pulls his hoodie strings. Doesn’t say anything. But he’s looking at the board, not his phone, and for Kai that’s something.

Mr Okafor moves on. ‘Quick thing before we finish. Not everyone in this room is going to uni. And that’s a financially valid choice. Run the numbers on whatever path you’re looking at. What does it cost, what does it lead to.’

Next slide. I half listen.

After the lesson I sit on the bench outside the sports hall. Eating a cereal bar that’s been in my bag since Monday and has the texture of a damp sponge. Someone’s carved JH + KW into the bench. The Year 8s are mental.

I Google ‘Junior ISA UK.’

A Junior ISA. For under-18s. Tax-free — whatever it earns, you keep. Cash version or stocks and shares version. The stocks and shares one connects to what Mr Okafor was talking about — index fund inside a tax-free wrapper.

Annual limit: £9,000. I nearly laugh. Nine grand a year. For children. I don’t know who these children are.

Then the thing that stops me.

A parent or guardian has to open it. I can’t do it myself. Not just “Mum signs the form” — she’s the account holder. And I can’t pay into it. Not directly. Under-18s can’t contribute. If I want to put money in, I give the cash to Mum. Mum deposits it. My money. Her account. My savings that I can only access through her.

I sit with that for a second. Six months ago I wouldn’t have asked. Not because she’d say no — because we didn’t talk about money. We lived around it, quietly, like the damp patch in the kitchen at the old flat. You just don’t look up. But since September — the payslip, the budget, all that stuff — something cracked open. We went from not talking to talking. And now I need to ask my mum to open an account for me because the system says I can’t do it myself. Which is actually fine. It’s just new.

Can’t withdraw until 18. Two years. At 18 it converts to an adult ISA automatically. The money stays.

The bell goes. I go to German. Conjugate three verbs badly.

Mum gets in at half eight. Still in her uniform — blue tunic, lanyard, the sensible shoes she replaces every six months because they wear through. She kicks them off by the door. Nani says there’s roti and chicken.

I wait until she’s eaten. Until the shoes are off and the lanyard’s on the hook and she’s had her tea.

‘Mum.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Can I show you something?’

The look. I wait.

‘It won’t take long.’

I sit next to her. I’ve got my phone open to a JISA information page.

‘There’s this thing called a Junior ISA.’

‘A what?’

‘ISA. It’s like a savings account but you don’t pay tax on —’ I stop. ‘Do you know what an ISA is?’

She looks at me. ‘Maya, I have a current account and a jar on the dresser. That’s it.’

‘Right. Okay.’ I pull the Chromebook toward me and open the page I’d been looking at. ‘So basically it’s a savings account where whatever it earns, you keep. The government doesn’t take a cut. And there’s a version for under-18s.’

‘And you want one.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I’ve got some money saved and if it’s just sitting in a normal account it’s not really — hang on.’ I turn the screen toward her. ‘See this bit? Stocks and shares JISA. It means the money goes into, like… a bundle of companies. An index fund.’

‘Stocks and shares.’ She says it the way you’d say bungee jumping.

‘It’s not — it sounds scarier than it is. I think. Basically instead of one company, it’s loads of them at once, so if one goes down the others sort of…’ I point at a line on the screen. ‘Mr Okafor was showing us this in class. Over years it usually goes up. Not always. Some years it drops.’

She drinks her tea. Doesn’t say anything. Looks at the screen. I think she’s stopped listening but then:

‘Usually.’

‘Yeah. Usually. I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s guaranteed because it’s not.’

‘The thing is — you have to open it. I can’t do it myself. And I can’t pay into it directly. I’d give you the cash, and you’d deposit it.’

She puts the mug down. Looks at me.

‘You need me to open it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You can’t do it without me.’

‘No.’

She’s quiet for a moment. Looking at me.

‘Stocks and shares. That’s — that’s gambling, isn’t it?’

‘No. Well — it’s not the same. Gambling is like, you pick one thing and hope. This is spreading it across hundreds of companies. Thousands. So even if some of them have a bad year, the rest —’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘No. I don’t know that.’ I close the laptop lid halfway. ‘But the alternative is it sits in a savings account earning basically nothing, and in ten years it’s still basically nothing.’

She looks at the table. Picks up her mug. Puts it down without drinking.

‘What do I need to do?’

I open the Chromebook back up.

Nani comes in. Fills the kettle.

‘Nani, chai?’

‘Haan, beta. You want?’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Your mum?’

‘She’s got hers.’

Nani nods. Makes her tea. Goes back to the living room.

We fill in the form. Provider, child details, parent details, type of account. I explain stocks and shares again. She nods. She doesn’t fully understand, but she trusts the explanation, and she trusts that I’ve looked into it. Contribution: £20 a month. From Mum’s account — because that’s the rule. I’ll give her the cash.

It takes twelve minutes. The broadband drops twice.

Confirmation screen. Account opened. First contribution pending.

Mum looks at the screen.

She puts her hand on the back of my head — just for a second, the way she does — and picks up her mug.

‘Your roti’s going cold.’

Late. The flat’s dark and Yus is asleep and Mum’s light is off under the door.

I’m on the sofa bed with my phone at 14%. The extension lead reaches the plug now because I moved it last week.

Twenty quid a month going into a JISA I can’t touch for two years. Money I’m sending to future Maya. She can deal with it when she gets there.

And Darius. Eight months from clear on the credit card, and then the clutch. The phone screen with £1,116 on it. Two words — “been there” — and a pile of label strips on the loading bay floor.

I should sleep. Shift tomorrow. German on Thursday.

My phone buzzes.

maya
did u actually buy a laptop from cex without telling anyone

Sienna. No idea how she found out. She always finds out.

yh
90 quid

ur mad
but like good mad
night x

night x

I put the phone down. Outside, a car alarm goes off somewhere on the estate. Three blasts. Silence.

I think about Yus. He’s twelve. He’s got birthday money in a jar on his windowsill — I’ve seen it, mostly coins and a couple of fivers. He doesn’t think about money the way I do. Not yet. He thinks about FIFA and his mates and whether Mum will let him have the last yoghurt.

But he’s twelve. And twelve becomes thirteen becomes sixteen, and then he’s sitting where I’m sitting, on a sofa bed with a phone at 14%, trying to figure out how to turn the money that comes in into something that lasts.

Maybe I should — I don’t know. Take him to the building society. Show him the form. Not lecture him, just — show him the door exists.

I’m almost asleep when the front door goes.

That’s wrong. It’s half eleven. Mum doesn’t finish until eight tomorrow. Nani’s been in bed since nine. Yus is asleep. Nobody comes to our flat at half eleven.

Keys. The sound of shoes being put down carefully, the way you put them down when you’re trying not to wake people. Then the kitchen light — my light, because the kitchen is the front room is my bedroom — flicks on.

Mum.

She’s still in her uniform. Blue tunic. Lanyard. But it’s half eleven and her shift doesn’t end until —

‘Mum?’

She jumps. Hand on her chest. ‘Maya. Sorry, I didn’t —’

‘What are you doing home?’

She doesn’t answer. She fills the kettle. Plugs it in. Stands there with her hands on the counter and her back to me, and her shoulders are tight.

‘Mum.’

‘They’ve cut the contract.’ She says it to the kettle. ‘The agency. The whole night team. New provider coming in from July.’

July. Six weeks.

‘How many of you?’

‘All the nights. Seven of us.’ She turns the kettle off and on again, like she forgot she’d already pressed it. ‘They’re bringing in some company from Leeds. Cheaper. The manager said it was a “commissioning decision.” Three years I’ve been there. Three years and they told us at the end of shift.’

Three years. Every Christmas. Every bank holiday. Every 5am when the buses weren’t running and she got a taxi she couldn’t afford because the shift was the shift and you don’t say no.

‘When did they tell you?’

‘Tonight. Half nine. Janet was crying in the car park. I just — came home.’

The kettle clicks. She doesn’t pour it. Her hands stay on the counter.

The calculation is automatic now — the numbers just start. Mum’s earning maybe five hundred a month from the care home on a good month. UC tops it up, but the taper takes 55p out of every pound over four hundred. So if the care home money goes to zero, UC goes up — but not to the full amount, not straight away. There’s the assessment period. There’s the five-week wait if she has to make a new claim. There’s the housing element we only just filed for.

Rent’s £433. That doesn’t stop. Council tax doesn’t stop. The electric doesn’t stop. None of it stops.

I think about the JISA we opened an hour ago. Twenty quid a month to future Maya. And now this. The compound interest graph bends upward over decades. Decades. We need to get through July.

‘All of you?’ I say again. Stupid. She already said.

‘All of us, Maya.’

She pours the water but doesn’t drink it. She stands at the counter with her back to me, both hands flat on the worktop, shoulders tight.

‘I’ll sort it,’ she says. ‘I’ve been through worse.’

I don’t say anything. But I know what “I’ll sort it” means. It means she’ll ring the agency tomorrow and they’ll say there’s nothing. It means she’ll go on the council jobs page and scroll through listings for roles that want qualifications she doesn’t have or hours that clash with school runs. It means she’ll check the UC journal and see numbers that don’t add up to rent.

Six months ago I wouldn’t have known any of that. I’d have heard “I’ll sort it” and believed it the way you believe the weather forecast — someone else’s job, nothing I can do. But I’ve seen the spreadsheet now. I’ve seen the taper rate. I’ve seen what happens when you do everything right and the numbers still don’t work.

She doesn’t know I know all this. Or maybe she does and she’s choosing not to look at it.

‘Mum.’

‘Go to sleep, beta.’ She pushes off the counter. ‘I’ll sort it.’

She goes to the bedroom. The door clicks shut. The light under it stays on for a long time.

I lie there. The sofa bed creaks. The fridge hums. My phone says 2%.

Eighty quid in the emergency fund. Twenty quid a month going into a JISA I can’t touch for two years. A Chromebook with a scratch on the lid. And the rent’s due in three weeks.

I plug the phone in. I wait for the screen to come back on.

I open the UC journal — Mum’s login is still saved on the Chromebook from when we filed the housing element. I don’t know what I’m looking for. The payment dates, maybe. The assessment period. How long before the system catches up to what just happened.

The screen loads. Grey text on white. Headings that don’t explain themselves.

I start reading.