This short piece was a writing exercise at a Royston Writers Circle meeting. The exercise was to open a book at random and use the first full sentence as a prompt.
I wrote in response to this quote:
‘God, if he believed in him, and his conscience, if he had one, were the only judges to whom he might look.’
Jules Verne, ‘20000 Leagues Under the Sea’
Since he was furnished with neither a belief in a deity, of any kind you understand, he was not prejudiced against any religion in particular; nor had committed any act his conscience deemed worthy of note, Stuart had simply floated through his formative years unencumbered by such fetters. It was at the tender age of fourteen and a half that he was first troubled by either one of these concepts. In truth, it turned out to be a combination of both.
The priests at Stuart’s school had all attempted to instil in the children an unholy fear of the consequences of misbehaviour which, unfortunately for Stuart, appeared to include his burgeoning feelings of being rather more interested in boys than in girls. As he grew up, indeed, it was to his best friend, Jack, that his attentions turned.
Jack was a good, god-fearing boy, so Stuart’s mother told him, and an example Stuart would apparently do well to follow more closely. Stuart was happy to heed his mother’s advice, though perhaps she had not intended him to interpret her words in quite the way he did. It was safe to say that she was surprised when she walked in on the two of them sharing a kiss after school one afternoon. She demanded that Stuart examine his conscience as a result of his actions. However, having done so, he could only conclude that, like god, his conscience did not appear to exist.
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