by Budge Burgess

Created on: June 16, 2009

The pillow talk was coming back to haunt him. She'd been interested, had wanted to get to know him, and he'd spun her line after line. He fancied seeing her again, fancied repeating this performance a few more times. So he'd sold her a tale of his adventures, had painted an exciting picture of himself.

Excepting, of course, that one of the stories had been a true one, and it had suddenly cast all the distortions and semi-truths into perspective. He'd never thought about it before, but it was one of those moments of personal history which become significant only in retrospect. Just as what he had to do tomorrow would only become significant after the event. And what he had to do, tomorrow, had been transformed by what he had finally recognised tonight.

She was asleep now. He could hear her breathing. Asleep and blissfully unaware that her casual seducer was experiencing a Pauline conversion. The weighing machines, he felt, had fallen from his eyes well, it was the 21st century, scales were way back in the evolutionary process, and tomorrow was undoubtedly in the balance.

He'd hated school, had finally been expelled for truancy. But, long before he stopped attending physically, he'd absented himself mentally and emotionally. And he remembered that morning clearly. It was thirty years ago, but he could picture himself sitting on the right-hand side of the classroom, with two desks behind and three in front.

It was around 10.00 on a mild November day made bitter by confinement in school - he could see blue skies through the upper panels of the windows the lower ones were frosted so boys wouldn't be distracted. Blue skies and freedom from an interminable maths lesson.

He could do maths, he understood it, but it was of no interest to him and no use, so it bored him. He enjoyed watching TV and playing with his huge collection of toy soldiers and riding his bike up into the hills and reading science fiction, and maths was boring. But then, all school was boring.

The maths teacher - a Jesuit priest whose task it was to beat these heathens into obedience to Mother Church - drew a complex diagram on the blackboard. He included a couple of measurements - an angle here, the length of a line there - then turned and asked the class to solve the riddle. What was the length of the line P-W?

Thirty boys bent over their jotters, pens and pencils scratching furiously. Slide rules were brandished by those who knew what a slide rule did,

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