Read by Tricia Stewart
It would’ve been okay if people had just kept off his mopped floors. He didn’t enjoy mopping, didn’t look forward to getting up every weekday for a hard day's floor cleaning, but he had to do it and he was determined to do it right.
Once at school the careers advisor had asked him what he wanted to do in life. Twenty minutes before the meeting he had been handed his French jotter which either someone had been murdered on, or the red ink showing his mistakes was blotting out the original work. He had looked at the adviser through tired eyes and muttered the famous teenage fallback: “Dunno”. Exams came, which he studied for (when he wasn’t busy sorting out fake IDs and drug deals) and then, suddenly, school was over with.
The SQA sent him a letter in the summer listing the grades he didn’t get. It was easy to shrug off, just a stupid bit of paper, especially when he had bonfire parties to attend. Living in the now was all he cared about. Then he started to notice his friends' cars and flats and girlfriends. He lacked all three but he wanted them badly. His mate Gregor took him for a drive up the coast and told him what he was missing.
“Money,” he said “you’re going to need some hard cash, Wayne.” He realised how many of his pals were in apprenticeships or at the uni. What had he been doing? The next day he made an appointment at the job centre. It was time to start his career.
His date with destiny didn’t go exactly as he’d planned. It looked like he was going to uni after all. As a janitor.
Of course his maw loved the idea. “Your first job! Think of the holidays you’ll be able to take me on!” His mates were a bit less supportive, some of them offered to club together to get him a blue jumpsuit like The Janitor’s in Scrubs. In his mind he didn’t have a choice, he just hoped chicks dug custodians.
That was all twelve years ago. When he had started he had been of a similar age to the students and had even managed to get invited to some student hall parties. He only went to two before realising that the next day he would be mopping up the excesses of the night before. Wayne decided that there was no worse feeling than having to clean the bright blue puke of a WKD-filled girl he had totally failed to pull last night while his head somehow seemed to digest itself. Out there his schoolmates were all master joiners or primary school teachers. And his Holy Trinity of girls, wheels and a pad was still out there. He knew he could do so much more.
He would go to night classes and get the qualifications he needed to get out of his cleaner's life. In the meantime he’d make sure when a floor got mopped it sparkled, and no muddy Converse would trail over it while it was wet. It was something.
So he knuckled down to Intermediate 2 Maths in the evenings and found he could do it. The meagre studying skills he’d managed to cobble together had dissolved, rusted or fallen apart over time. But he had a brain!
Now when Wayne went into work he shone from the inside (like that time he’d eaten all those glow sticks). Sure, he was still performing menial tasks for next to no money but he had a secret: he was intelligent. He took to standing at the back of lectures, soaking in all the free knowledge. When he found a Mathematics class he would listen closely; even though it was all over his head he felt like it wouldn’t be long before he knew what it all meant.
Now he wasn’t being forced to learn he enjoyed the trappings of education. He had bought himself a Celtic pencil case and filled it with things he’d never had any use for, like Parker pens and protractors. He even bought a scientific calculator and resolved to understand all of its functions. A small part of him was sad that no-one used blackboards any more. He would’ve volunteered to clap the erasers for his teach’ and the uni lecturers.
People weren’t used to seeing a smug janitor and Wayne turned some heads as he strutted and swept. He swam in the attention like it was maple syrup. Then, one day, he was spying on a maths lecture that mentioned his name. The implausibly suave orator was talking about Fortune’s conjecture: that no fortunate numbers were composite. Wayne was used to hearing people call him a Wheel of Fortune or Wayne Fartune (how hilarious!) but didn’t know there were mathematicians who were suffering the same outrageous slings and arrows. It was a sign! Surely Wayne, with his newly found maths genius skills and maths genius name was the perfect person to find a composite fortunate number! He just had to understand what the hell that meant.
The next 45 minutes were torture for Wayne. He was concentrating so hard he was sweating more than he ever had when mopping the 2,000 square feet of the uni’s atrium. He considered taking off his boiling boiler suit but didn’t think the sight of a partially clothed, crumpled, red in the face janitor stealing others' education would go down well if he was noticed. When the lecturer's time was up and he packed away, Wayne was relieved, and determined.
The teacher had been using a whiteboard and had left it covered in mathematical notation. He loved that when maths got so complex the symbols and equations used looked like an ancient or alien language. Wayne walked towards the board, every step slow and portentous. While listening to the lecture he hadn’t had a sudden breakthrough where he understood everything that was being said. Since he’d heard his name he believed this was his fate. He was drunk on Dettol Power and night classes. He gazed at the board with determination … and then realised he had no idea where to start finding a composite fortunate number. He lifted a board pen, stuck out his tongue and wrote his lucky number: 2. Then he stood back.
This wasn’t going well. He looked up and saw the words “Prime Number Theory”. Scratching his nose, he tried to remember what a prime number was. He was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Transformers, despite the images his brain was throwing up. He rubbed off parts of some equations with his sleeve. Then replaced what he’d erased with whatever he felt like. It didn’t make any sense to him before, and still didn’t. He felt frustration firing him up. Taking a different track, he quickly wrote random strings of numbers and did some simple division to check what times tables they fit into. Quickly he found that only odd numbers worked, all the even ones were divisible by 2. His lucky number! Progress! He worked for another five minutes, scrawling fast to try and reach a conclusion.
He looked at his work, dejected. He was beginning to think that discovering all even numbers can be divided by two was not going to set the world of maths on fire. An idea struck him. Later he would have no idea where it had come from. Just that it was right. He closed his eyes, relaxed and let his hand move the pen for him, without his mind interfering. This would work.
When the next class started at 3pm the students saw the smudges and the scribbles and the scratches on the board. But that wasn’t what drew their attention most. Right in the middle of the board, taking up half of the available space, was a veined, ejaculating cock. Wayne was upstairs in the atrium, mopping and chasing people from his wet floor signs with tears in his eyes, telling himself it was just the chemicals in his trolley making them water, that’s all. This floor was going to sparkle. He might not have a beautiful mind, but at least he could have beautiful linoleum.
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Fortune by John Harrower was read by Tricia Stewart at the Liars’ League Brains & Beauty event on Tuesday 14 September 2010 at The Phoenix, Cavendish Square, London
John Harrower, 23, WM, NS, GSOH, OMG, WLTM interesting individuals that he can shamelessly use as characters in his flash fiction or put in ridiculous and often fantastical situations for embarrassing effect. Find him in Stirling, Scotland scrawling non sequiturs in underpasses.
An original Scottish lassie, Tricia Stewart is now a fully-adopted Londoner after moving south to complete a postgraduate course in Acting and finally fulfil her dream of becoming a full-time actress. Having worked primarily on screen for some months, she is delighted to have the opportunity to enjoy some 'live' performance again with Liars' League.
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