Shown Working by Mike Hickman

The dream strikes at 3:33am every night, always coming at the end of the first sleep cycle. It creates duvet soaked terror that lasts for exactly a quarter of an hour before the cup of tea and the out-of-the-kitchen-window fag takes half an hour more. It features – it always features – the same equation. 19 x 19. Two digit by two digit multiplication. A step up for the children and a bugger to explain with the standard algorithm if you were dumb enough to think it had to be solved that way. Some nights you are that dumb and you catch Level 6 Owen sitting there on the carpet – if the dream has provided a carpet that night – right at the back with his arms folded and shaking his head. Other nights you remember. Oh, I can make this easy for you, and you turn to the board – if it is a board – and you raise the pen – sometimes chalk, sometimes a banana – and you show them the short-cut. And you show them that you can do it because it has long ceased being about them and what they understand.

            19 x 10 is 190 the chalk/pen/banana writes.

            19 x 10 is 190 it writes immediately below.

            19 x 20 = 2 x 19 x 10.

            The writing becomes less certain now and maybe Owen coughs something about brackets.

            Therefore, you write, neglecting the mathematical symbol because you don’t want to give him anything else to mutter about, 19 x 20 = 2 x 19 x 10 = 190 + 190 = 190 x 2 = 380.

            At 3:33 in the morning, and until the fag has been extinguished 45 minutes later, you can feel the tension, hear the class draw in their collective breath as they wait to see if you can get there. Maybe twenty of them willing you on. Maybe five of them looking out of the window. At least three picking their noses. And one actively wishing your humiliation, even if he’ll be the only one who knows. Heart rate increasing, duvet twisting and drenching, you turn with a final flourish on demonstrating that 19 x 19 is one 19 less than 19 x 20 and you don’t care what the little bastard already with his hand up will have to say about BODMAS or any of it. You were an English specialist with half a day’s math training a week to get this far. And you can do it. You can. You have. It’s 361. And it’s also 3:33 in the morning and you taught for seven years nearly twenty years ago.

            For how much longer will you be waking every night to this?

            Don’t forget to show your working.

Mike Hickman is a former academic and (very much current!) writer from York, England. He has written for Off the Rock Productions (stage and audio) and has recently been published in the Blake-Jones Review and the Cabinet of Heed. Twitter: @MikeHic13940507