Heaven's Promise Read Online Free PDF Page B

thinking about when self pity wells up and spreads itself inside of you.
    I should explain here something about this teenage trauma which haunts me so and which kicked off, back in the days of my schooltime, and introduce to you one Miss Tuesday Driver, First Sweetheart of my life, a cool, collected woman who had my heart flipping this way and that for all the time I knew her. Tuesday always was and always will be ten steps ahead of everyone else, walking the paths no one else dared to with a determined self belief in herself that rubbed everybody up the wrong way. She came to my attention when her and her mother, the father has passed away at an early age, moved to London and she enrolled at my school just as the fourth year was fading out. I didn’t even notice her presence in our class until the afternoon, one of those hot sticky days where all you could do was gaze out of the window and wish you were miles away, drifting away on a barge that gently carried you up and down the gentle Thames, sunning yourself up, quenching thirst, listening to music, and then suddenly realising that it wasn’t the bees that you could hear droning around and about you but the relentlessly dull words of the ancient, white haired history teacher that stood before you, delivering the same lecture that he had given all his life to, as far as he was concerned, the same pupils but with their names changed. Just as he was finishing off some business about Roundheads and Cavaliers, there was the sound, from the back of the room a chair scraping against the floor.
    â€˜Excuse me sir,’ came a female and unfamiliar to me voice, ‘I don’t mean to be rude but surely in the period that you are talking about, Cromwell was responsible for launching an invasion of Ireland, the consequences of which are still us with now as we see on our TV’s most nights.’
    There was a brief, stunned silence. Then a few giggles and then, before the teacher could muster a reply, one of the lads shouted out, ‘yes sir, what about Cromwell and the paddies!’ Half the class cracked into laughter and Miss Tuesday Driver simply collected up her books and majestically walked out. ‘Where on earth do you think you’re going?’ the History Man demanded but Tuesday was out of the door before his words could even reach her. She turned up for class the next morning, after everyone had seen her emerging tight lipped from the Head’s office, by which time I was head over heels and the boys were all calling her Maggie, after our glorious PM. Then and there I prepared to move everything in sight to win her over, a task made predictably easier by the aforementioned caveman types running a mile everytime she came into view. At that point in my life I was consumed with shyness when it came to gals and so when, that very weekend, I bumped into her at a record fair, my heart skipped a double beat. Uno, because she was standing right beside me flicking through the seven inch singles laid out on a table, and I had never been this close to her, and due, because women are a rare sight at such functions as they are at those antiquated men only clubs for retired bankers (rhyme it) and colonels, the sort you read about with increasing incredulity in those posh magazines they leave out for you at the local surgery. Tuesday seemed lost in her mission and so when I ventured a brief, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ it was as if I had just awoken her from some trance. She looked at me questioningly until she was able to fit the face and then gave me a small nod of recognition.
    â€˜Oh, it’s you,’ she said as if making an important discovery. ‘It’s a bit pricey here, isn’t it?’
    â€˜What are you looking for?’
    â€˜Girl soul.’
    â€˜As opposed to boy soul.’
    â€˜Definitely. Women sing it better than men. They’ve got more to lose and you can hear it.’
    I was intrigued by her outlook just as I