Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

teenage sons who towered over her and who always arrived at the college in a hail of threats from Mrs Ratlow as she drove into the car park and shoehorned the huge hulking boys out of her tiny Riley Elf. She shouted all the time. She took Valium in class. She threw books at our heads and she threatened to kill us. All of that was still allowed.
    Mrs Ratlow came tearing out of the English course-work room, foolishly situated by the trampoline room. When she had stopped shouting at us I said it was all to do with Nabokov, and I had to get past N.
    ‘But you're already reading Wilfred Owen.’
    ‘I know, but he's poetry. English Literature in Prose A–Z is what I'm doing. There's a writer called Mrs Oliphant . . .’
    Mrs Ratlow puffed up her chest like a pigeon. ‘Mrs Oliphant is not literature – you may not read her!’
    ‘I've got no choice – she's on the shelf.’
    ‘Explain yourself, girl,’ said Mrs Ratlow, who was interested now in spite of wanting to mark twenty essays on Pride and Prejudice .
    And so it all came tumbling out – the mother, the Mini, the library, the books. Mrs Ratlow was silent, which was very unusual. Then she said, ‘You are living in a Mini and when you are not, in fact, in the Mini, you are working on the market to earn money, or you are here at the college, and otherwise you are in the Accrington Public Library reading English Literature in Prose A–Z.’
    Yes, that was an accurate summary of my entire life apart from sex.
    ‘I have now included poetry,’ I said, explaining about T. S. Eliot.
    She was looking at me like a scene from Quatermass and the Pit , as a previously knowable object was transforming in front of her eyes. Then she said, ‘There is a spare room in my house. Pay for your own food and no noise after 10 p.m. You can have a key.’

    ‘A key?’
    ‘Yes. A key is a metal device that opens a door.’
    I was back to moron-status in her eyes, but I didn't care. I said, ‘I have never had a key, except to the Mini.’
    ‘I shall go and speak to that mother of yours.’
    ‘Don't,’ I said. ‘Please don't.’
    She handed me the key. ‘Don't expect any lifts into college. The boys sit in the back and my bag sits in the front.’ Then she paused, and she said, ‘Nabokov may or may not be a great writer. I do not know and I do not care.’
    ‘Do I have to finish Lolita ?’
    ‘Yes. But you must not read Mrs Oliphant. I shall certainly have a word with the librarian at the weekend. And, in any case, you don't have to read alphabetically, you know.’
    I started to say that I had to have an order – like only eating and reading in the front of the Mini and only sleeping in the back – but then I just stopped, just stopped dead, because trampolining had started again and Mrs Ratlow was already firing herself forward towards the sweaty springy bouncing canvas, shouting about Jane Austen.
    I went off down to the library with the little silver key in my pocket.
    I was helping the librarian shelve the books, something I really liked to do because I liked the weight of the books and the way they slotted onto the shelves.
    She gave me a pile of orange giggle-strip Humour, and that is when I first noticed Gertrude Stein.
    ‘I thought you were on N?’ said the librarian, who like most librarians believed in alphabetical order.

    ‘I am, but I am having a little look around too,’ I said. ‘My English teacher told me to do that. She says that Mrs Oliphant is not literature. She's coming to see you about her.’
    The librarian raised her eyebrows. ‘Is she now? I do not say that I disagree with her. But can we really leap from N to P? Yet, there are difficulties with the letter O.’
    ‘There were difficulties with the letter N.’
    ‘Yes. English literature – perhaps all literature – is never what we expect. And not always what we enjoy. I myself had great difficulties with the letter C . . . Lewis Carroll. Joseph Conrad. Coleridge.’
    It was always a mistake to argue with the librarian but before I could stop myself I started to recite:

It were a vain endeavour,
    Though I should gaze forever
    On that green light that lingers in the west;
    I may not hope from outward forms to win
    The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.

    The librarian regarded me. ‘That is very beautiful.’
    ‘It's Coleridge. “Dejection: An Ode”.’
    ‘Well, perhaps I shall have to reconsider the letter C.’
    ‘Will I have to reconsider the letter