Mr Wilson regarded his reflection in the mirror thoughtfully. "Not bad," thought he to himself, "not bad for a man in his mid thirties. Still plenty of hair, none of it grey, only one chin, no spectacles, no purple blotches, all my own teeth. No, not bad at all," and he smiled to himself as he replaced the cap on the new bottle of aftershave and carefully locked the door of the new bathroom cabinet.

And Mr. Wilson continued to smile to himself as he set about the unaccustomed business of preparing his own breakfast. When he cracked his egg against the edge of the flying pan and the egg separated, half in the pan and half on the cooker hob, he smiled, and when his toast, underdone at the first attempt, sprang into the air at its second coming, black and smoking like a demon from hell, he was still smiling. For today was the first day of a new life for Mr. Wilson.

Yesterday morning, he had awoken in the same small bedroom in the same small terraced house in which he had awoken for most of the thirty-six years of his life. The wall paper hadn't been changed in the ten years since his father had died, the same cheap carpet had covered the floor for as long as he could remember, and the curtains were the cut down renmants of the front room curtains his mother had salvaged years ago from his Grans old cottage after Gran`s funeral. And because his mother had allowed nothing to be changed, the room had become a museum of every piece of electronic equipment he had ever made or bought. From the very first electronic experimental kit his father had given him for his ninth birthday, to the computer on which he had written his first computer game and with which he had hit the financial jackpot.

That had been years ago, and although he had invested in much more expensive electronic equipment since then, none of it had entered the house because the money he had made on his first game had been enough to enable him to rent a small lockup building on a trading estate on the other side of town. Here he had programmed more successful games, had employed his first assistant, had taken on more staff and published his first computer magazine, and finally had sold the business to a famous American company who had been only too happy to pay through the nose for his many patents and copyrights. And all this time he had returned home every evening to the little terraced house in the back street near the factory where his father had spent all his working life.

His mother had never regarded his interest in electronics as work and, to be honest, Mr. Wilson himself had enjoyed it too much to think of it as work. To them both, work meant getting up early in the morning, joining the mass of people walking, cycling or travelling by tram to their workplace, clocking in and then spending the day doing a repetitive job with tea breaks and dinner breaks. And then, when the hooter blew, joining the same mass of people homeward bound to their little terraced houses where their evening meal would be ready on the table. Work was not something to be enjoyed, it was something you did after leaving school. It provided you with food, rent and clothes with, if you were lucky, a little bit left over to put by for a weeks holiday at the seaside and a bit more in the Co-op for a rainy day. Work helped to pass your life away.

True, work had its good points. Mr. Wilson's father had had some good mates at work, some of them he had gone to school with. They had all followed the same football team, had gone to the same pub on Saturday nights and they had borne him in his coffin when he had died prematurely after an accident. Work had also given Mr. Wilson's father a good reason to get out of the house for five days a week.

Mr. Wilson's mother had never gone out to work. The only child of a master plumber, she had been brought up, as a member of the lower middle class, to look down her nose at the young women of her neighbourhood who daily rushed off to the factories and shops. Instead she had stayed at home with her mother, learning how to cook and dust and polish so that by the time she had married, dusting and polishing had become her main interest in life. Every day she would go right through the house with her dusters and tin of polish making sure that she could see her reflection in every surface which was polishable. The fact that every inch of every surface was hidden by china and brass ornaments, relics of her parents` home, or souvenirs and photographs of family holidays, just added to her pleasure, for they also needed polishing and dusting. On the day they went on their annual holiday she always rose an hour earlier than normal to give everything an extra shine to make up for the time she was away.

Proud of the fact that she had never had to go out to work it never occurred to her that she probably worked far harder than most of the despised working classes, and in the end work killed her.

Mr. Wilson spent most of the day she died trying to sort out a few glitches in a new games program. He had traced most of the errors but one particular fault kept recurring. He had been so engrossed in the problem that, until Mrs. Webber his secretary had called "Goodnight Mr. Wilson", he hadn't realised how late it was and that everyone else had gone home. Quickly shutting down his computer, he had grabbed his coat and his attaché case and making sure everything else had been turned off, he had locked up the building and hurried out to his car. Luckily the traffic was quite light and he was able to make up a few minutes on the journey home, but he was still five minutes late when he drove into the garage at the bottom of the back garden.

"Now for trouble" he thought to himself as he hurried up the garden path. The last time he had been late for dinner his mother had nagged at him the whole evening and then refused to speak to him the rest of the week. He had quickly taken off his shoes and put on his slippers in the back porch. He wasn't allowed to wear outdoor shoes indoors even though he had only walked a few yards to and from his car. "No matter how far they have walked, outdoor shoes are not to be worn indoors" his mother had ordained. He remembered years ago in a moment of rebellion saying to his father "It's a wonder she doesn't make us use felt pads like they do in army barracks" but his father had quickly told him to be quiet and not put ideas in his mother's head. Father had learnt long ago that he couldn't win any argument concerning the inside of the house. That had always been Mother's domain and she had made all the rules. Mr. Wilson opened the back door and called out "I'm home" as he had done every evening of his working life, but there was no answer.

"Here we go," he thought to himself as he carefully hung his coat on a hanger in the hall and put his attaché case in the little cupboard behind the front door. Then bracing himself for the storm to come, he opened the dining room door - to find the room empty and the table not even laid.

"My God, I'm only five minutes late," he thought to himself "She can't have cleared everything away already." He went into the kitchen. No sign of any dirty dishes. No smell of cooking either.

"Strange," he thought to himself

He went out into the hail again. "Mother! Are you there?"

No reply.

"Mother! Where are you?" he called, growing more anxious as he quickly climbed the stairs. All the doors on the landing were closed and he knocked on his mother's bedroom door.

"Mother, are you alright?" Still no answer.

"Perhaps she's just having a nap," he tried to convince himself, knowing full well that mother didn't hold with having naps.

He knocked on the door again, louder this time, and when there was still no reply he gently turned the doorknob and slowly pushed the door open far enough to be able to get his head through. He saw at once that the bed was made but empty, and as he opened the door wider he saw that the room was also empty.

"Where the hell is she?"

He looked in the bathroom, everything clean and bright and shining as normal, the same with the spare bedroom, and then he went to his own bedroom. He turned the knob and pushed the door but it only opened a few inches.

"Mother what on earth are you doing?" he yelled. No reply and there wasn't enough room to get his head around the door so he put his shoulder to it and pushed. Slowly the door opened until he was able to peer inside.

The first thing he saw was his old Second World War Rl 155 transceiver which he had found in a junk shop man years ago when he was still at school. It had been on the top shelf of the little alcove just inside the bedroom door for years, but now it was lying on the floor together with some other long abandoned radio bits and pieces and a magazine. Pushing the door a little further he was able to get his shoulder through and look behind the door and there, lying on the blood stained carpet beside an overturned chair was his mother, and he could see at once that she was dead. Stopping only to pick up the magazine he ran down the stairs and phoned the family doctor and the police. The police arrived first and forced their way into the bedroom and when the doctor arrived a few minutes later he was able to confirm that she was indeed dead and had probably been lying there most of the day.

There was an inquest, of course, and after hearing the evidence of the police, the doctor and Mr. Wilson, the coroner gave his verdict that death was accidental. In all probability she had overbalanced while standing on the chair to dust the top shelf and in grabbing at the heavy radio to try to save herself she had pulled it off the shelf and it had fallen on her head fracturing her skull and causing instant death. The coroner warned the public of the danger of standing on chairs to reach inaccessible places and he offered his condolences to Mr. Wilson on his sudden and untimely loss.

That had been three months ago. The American company had been trying to persuade Mr Wilson to sell them his business for more than a year. They were especially keen to own the licence of a new type of criminal investigation game he had developed called "The Vital Clue" in which the player had to be the detective and find the vital clue which proved who, out of a number of suspects, was the guilty person.

Mr Wilson had resisted their increasingly tempting offers while his mother was alive because his business had been the only thing that had kept him sane, but now with his mother gone he was a free man. So he had accepted their offer on condition that all his staff would be offered employment, had sold his mother`s terraced house at a knock down price to a young couple from the dreaded "working class" and had bought himself a brand new house in the suburbs of a town near the south coast.

He had stayed on in the house for the three months since his mother's death, arranging for the disposal of contents and sorting out the legal and financial affairs. The house clearance man had been surprised and delighted when Mr Wil had told him that everything was to go and that he would not be keeping anything as a memento, although this was not strictly true as he had slipped a magazine into his pocket when the man wasn't looking.

And now Mr Wilson was free and was beginning his brand new life in his brand new house full of his brand new modern style furniture and he felt great. He whistled to himself as he packed his dirty breakfast dishes into his brand new washing machine and he sang as he vacuumed the brand new carpet and dusted the furniture.

His biggest smile came as he straightened the only picture frame in the room, the only picture frame in the house in fact. "If only you could talk,' he said aloud, "If only you could talk".

But the frame couldn't talk and the girlie magazine with the blonde girl in a crude suggestive pose on the front cover couldn't talk either, which was just as well for Mr Wilson. For if they had been able to talk they would have told how Mr Wilson had put the magazine on the top shelf in his bedroom so that it was just visible. Knowing that some time or other his mother would see it and knowing that "filthy magazines like that were not allowed in her house" he knew that she would be so disgusted that she would straight away try to get it down without wasting time fetching a pair of steps from the garage.

He had pulled the radio transceiver forward so that it was just balancing on the shelf and had left the trap to be sprung at some time or other. He hadn't been expecting it to happen that day, in fact he hadn't thought anything about it for several days and when it had happened it had come as rather a shock, but he had remembered to pick up the magazine before calling the police, and now the framed magazine entitled" The Vital Clue" was the only reminder of his old fettered restricted life. "Freedom at last," he sang as he took the lid off a brand new tin of furniture polish and began to vigorously rub the wax into his brand new dining table with a brand new yellow duster.