Sheila had a kid, she was eighteen, she’d done it, no big deal.

Sheila worked in the typing pool, trotted letters around to the various departmental bosses and not-so-bosses, clerical underlings like me.

          There were a dozen girls in the pool, clack-clacking on their machines all day with the middle-aged spinster dispensing the work as it came in.

 Sheila stood out. She was tall, statuesque, couldabeen a netball goalie if she’d had the inclination. Some blokes would’ve said she was turning to fat. But she had curves, a definite waist separating her full breasts and hips.

She wore light, tight sweaters which celebrated those breasts onto which her long black hair tumbled. However, her most defining fashion feature and the reason she stood out were the length of her skirts. Or the lack of the length of her black leather skirts. They scarcely covered her bum.

She was hot, mother or not.

I dreamt my dreams.

I moved into various sections on different floors and then out to a regional office where the manager was a warm, generous fellow in his fifties, a recent widower. Everyone was sympathetic.

I came back to the city after a couple of years and Sheila hadn’t changed. She still squeezed into those skirts. Her kid was growing up.

I’ve no idea how the word got around that I had a literary bent. Maybe it was due to my editing the departmental newsletter, a dull organ with an even duller name – Review. Who thinks of these things?

Sheila was stretching herself, attempting to escape the dead end of the typing pool by studying Matric English.

If she could pass four subjects she could ascend from the purgatory of typists and clerical assistants into public service heaven. She could, in short, become a clerk.

She came to me for poetry lessons.

She said she’d never dug poetry. Could I help? I told her to bring along her texts, we’d look at them over lunch.

I’d never had lunch with a woman before. I’d never read poetry to anyone before. If poetry be the food of love play on.

We began with Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ and I my recitation:

The earth is all before me. With a heart

Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,

I look about; and should the chosen guide

Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,

I cannot miss my way, I breathe again!

The words flowed musically. I told her about poetry being spoken music, about metre, about rhythm, about rhyme. I demonstrated rhythm like the beat of a drum. I was beating to a different drum. I wouldn’t have known I knew so much (or appeared to know so much). I was transcending myself.

Sheila was rapt. She told me how exciting it was hearing poetry explained like this. How alive I made her feel.

I should’ve run my hands through her long black hair, or patted her on her sexy behind but I refrained. I refrained because I was a hands-off teacher, inspiring to a point, constrained, oh so constrained as a man.

I’d like to say the lessons went ahead. I’d like to say my flower bore fruit … we … but no … but no …

She escaped the typing pool to a regional office.

She transferred to the regional office of my acquaintance and within six months had married the manager, the warm generous fellow in his fifties, the now not-so-recent widower.

Sheila was twenty, she was happy (I heard) having found security for her child.

It seemed a waste of Wordsworth to me.

Of possibility.

Not to mention those black leather skirts.