The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  With our evolutionary smugness, we’ve got home espresso machines now instead of Mellow Birds instant coffee granules (nowadays you only offer someone an instant coffee if you want to insult them). Yet for all the veneer of superiority humans like to bring to their evolutionary progress, our mating rituals transplant us right back to the monkeys. It could have been a scene from the Serengeti half a million years ago. As, equally, could have been the responsive behaviour of her potential mate. Miss Harrison was arching her back and thrusting up an ample display of décolletage.

  The guy responds with a darting snake tongue and cartoon eyes-on-stalks. Fortunately for an already over-populated world, just at the crucial moment when this mating ritual is reaching its conclusion, marked by the handyman scraping his right hoof across the Tea Room parquet floor and charging towards his quarry, the other teacher reappears in the café. Immediately, and speechless, she literally drags Miss Harrison off, leading her away like a dog who has just been discovered attempting to get through a hole in the fence to liaise with next door’s bitch.

  Once out of the room she starts to speak, pointing out at some volume to Miss Harrison, that (a) more than one teacher should be supervising a class of very young children on a 130-foot high roof (told you it was dangerous) and (b) how could she possibly be thinking about men and dating again “after what she’s just been through” what with her pledges and vows of sending SAEs to nunneries only a few moments earlier? “And why aren’t you wearing your glasses?” she enquires. Miss Harrison is more busted than I was that time I was milk monitor and gave my friends double rations. That plan would have worked if there had been some milk left once half the class had been served. For quite a while after that fateful day, I was widely tipped for a career in politics. An embarrassed and busted Miss Harrison puts her glasses back on and is pulled up the stairs by the other teacher.

  I am left along with a disappointing can of Cresta and an even more disappointed handy man. “That went well,” I feel like saying to him, “not your lucky day is it. Plus you get to spend the best years of your adulthood in the 1970s which, as a decade, definitely sucks.”

  But I liked Miss Harrison - she was kind to me. Then I realise why she was reluctant to go upstairs too and out onto the roof. In retrospect I can recognise a fellow acute acrophobe when I hold their sweating, shivering hand on a stairwell.

  I often wonder what happened to Miss Harrison. I heard she moved to the Falklands one week before the Argentine invasion. Perhaps she had gone there to escape a guy and believed it would just be her and the penguins. Afterwards I was told she moved to Holland and got married to a local man. Typical of an acute acrophobia sufferer to want to live in a country mainly below sea level. She married a Dutchmen, the Dutch being, according to UN statistics, the tallest nation on earth. Why? There’s nothing there that they need to see over!

  Back on the bus, the kids talk about the views. “So, what have we learnt today?” asks a teacher. Other than that it’s definitely worth Miss Harrison paying the extra and investing in water-proof mascara? Well, I’ve categorically learnt that I suffer from acrophobia. And bathmophobia. Big words for a small person.

  Whenever I go past that castle today, decades later, I still feel a shivering sense of shame and regret. After - or if - I do my balloon trip in honour of Sadler, I will return and conquer those stairs too. And finally get to see the view I missed on all those decades earlier. And discover if it’s possible forty years later to get a decent cup of coffee in their tea room.

  ***

  I am fifteen, desperate for sixteen. Greedy for life experience, yet restrained from most potential teenage experiences due to a combination of anxieties: the usual teenage cocktail of angst and insecurities mixed with a peculiarly unique fear of stairs. It never dawned upon me to discuss it, i.e. admit it to anyone, either the helpful and resourceful (health care professionals) or sneering piss takers (my peers). Placating my nagging mind’s insistence on performing Obsessive Compulsive Disorder completion rituals clearly did not help me fulfil my teenage potential either.

  Travelling home on the school bus I am wondering, not for the first time, if it is normal to consider my peer group desperately immature. Sometimes during these journeys I peer out from behind my teenage eyes and dirty bus window to survey the immaturity surrounding me, wondering if I am the only one with a gift of seeing how jejeune everyone is. No, I don’t want to hide someone’s bag, throw some unfortunate’s possessions out of a window or make stupid noises. I just don’t. Right now, I’d rather be in my forties. I’ve seen how people in their forties behave and it’s considerably better than this. They read, have meaningful conversations, listen to Radio 4 and tell people about it afterwards without getting beaten up. Plus they get to eat things like rye bread and olives. And sip wine appreciatively with meals.

  Predictably, this attitude guarantees that I have few friends among my peer group. And since education in my home town enforces a strict apartheid gender policy, I know scarcely any girls. The few times I have stolen access to girls in this forbidding town, I have discovered they are more empathetic than boys, and on average noticeably less immature as a species. Hence I prefer their company.

  There are four principal secondary schools in my hometown and all operate along stern single sex divisions, which hardly prepares anyone in their formative years for dealing with the world at large. I can’t help noticing subsequently, perhaps more than I’d admit to my wife, that there appear to be several women in the world. No one made any provision for that eventuality during my entire secondary school education.

  However, even in my early teenage years I am capable of recognising a girl - I saw a picture of one once. This sounds obvious, but not in the pre-Internet age it wasn’t. You know how today people leave copies of Metro on Tube trains (presumably in Paris people leave copies of Tube on the Metro)? In our day it was hedges and porn magazines. By rights, today’s teenagers should have to access a laptop hidden in a hedge. Top shelf magazines were how we discovered female anatomy. Most boys of my generation were in their early twenties until they released that naked women did not come as standard with two staples in their midriff. Though, ironically, there is now a fashion among women to have belly button piercings - girls voluntarily putting the staples back.

  Already in my early years I had learnt one thing. There is nothing in nature as beautiful as a woman. Sunsets, mountain ranges, rainbows, giraffes - all fine efforts, God, but nowhere near as beautiful as a female human called Charlotte Jones. Charlotte has dolphin-blue eyes, and I discover myself harbouring incommensurable affection for her. Charlotte is more attractive than any human surely ever needs to be.

  Her name chimes with my favourite song at the time: Charlotte Sometimes by The Cure. The Cure were my top band, fronted by Robert “Mad Bob” Smith, a man, like Albert Einstein, who showed what it is possible to achieve in life if you don’t waste time brushing your hair. Robert Smith also wore bright red pouting lipstick, badly applied, which always gave him the appearance of someone who had put on lippy in the back of a car while going over speed bumps.

  Charlotte was the genuine girl next door type, mainly because she was the girl who lived next door - and my own age. Although in our rural isolation next door constituted an eight-minute walk, as we lived in a remote part of Lincolnshire’s empty flatlands miles from the town where we attended separate schools. Furthermore, the boys’ and girls’ schools were on extreme polar-opposite sides of my hometown, to discourage even the most accidental of fraternisation between the genders.

  Twenty houses and an inn constituted the hamlet where I grew up and Charlotte had suffered the cultural shockwave of moving here from London. Only once did it make the news. When Jeffrey Archer was an inmate at an open prison in the locality, he allegedly treated two of his prison warders to a pub lunch in our hamlet. This caused much outcry in the press, but surely it wasn’t the first time that Arc
her had paid for a screw. (My marks out of ten for that joke: /10.)

  Maybe Charlotte was not a classic beauty, the type that a careers adviser would tell: “You should be an artist’s muse - the hours are good”. But I thought Charlotte was stunningly beautiful, and crucially female. Looking back, my earlier pre-Charlotte infatuations were not well chosen. There was Sandra who may not have been the most refined of sophisticates, blowing her bubble gum into a balloon equivalent to Sadler’s circumference, and laughing crudely at her friends even cruder jokes. Yet I felt Cupid pulling back his bow string and aiming at me. This was probably because she had one major attribute going for her: she was female. And I had virtually no access to females in my emotionally isolated teenage life. Refined, urbane culturists like Charlotte Jones were as exotic as unicorns. Though my friend pointed out that Sandra was definitely up for a snog. Unfortunately, this involved climbing up a water tower one afternoon. So that didn’t happen.

  Boarding the school bus one afternoon I spot Charlotte, flicking her long chestnut mane over her shoulders and carrying a book of Rimbaud’s poetry. In French. Wow, she is so cool, sophisticated and debonair. And she wears perfume too - what an all-round class act. Charlotte and I allow a feral pack of schoolboys to ram their way onto the bus before boarding ourselves. The problem with today’s bus journey is now there are no more seats on the ground floor. “Plenty of seats upstairs!” trills the driver, in a pitch similar to the bell. I pretend, unconvincingly, not to have heard him and stand up. This is infinitely preferable to saying out loud, in front of numerous bullies and morons devoid of any developed sensitivity: “I won’t go upstairs because I am really scared of stairs and heights. If you’d please only hit me one at a time, bullies. Thank you.”

  A week earlier I saw Charlotte’s long legs striding past KFC where she threw me a pitying glance as my friends and I classily ate out of a bucket while sitting on the pavement, grease stains dribbling down our white school shirts. She was so much more sophisticated than us. Had a Kentucky Fried Grouse opened, maybe she would then have frequented it - but not KFC.

  Not only did she own a Miles Davis LP that I once saw her carrying under her refined arm as she alighted at my bus stop one evening - still reeling from her move to these isolated, unedifying wastelands from worldly London a few weeks earlier - but I also saw her talking to another girl about French cinema. My peers all listened to Status Quo; cultivated Charlotte represented a challenge to that status quo orthodoxy. This is why I like girls - because they talk about French cinema and don’t like Status Quo.

  The next night Charlotte boards the bus, but goes upstairs. So I won’t be eavesdropping on her conversation tonight. Nor the next night when she also rushes up to the top deck. Eventually one evening I find her downstairs. She has progressed to Italian cinema and mentions The Bicycle Thief to another girl. I eagerly rent it for the weekend, and make notes, write observations, learn pre-prepared soundbites. I am ready for Operation Impress Charlotte. She watches Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 black and white masterpiece in an era when my contemporaries were almost exclusively watching Porky’s I, Porky’s II and, with the predictability of leaves falling in autumn, Porky’s III. My heart actually made a noise it pined for Charlotte so much.

  On Monday she boards the bus, but goes upstairs. Tuesday, she quickly scurries up the staircase like a hamster darting up a tunnel eager to escape a pursuing snake. She repeats this behaviour, scampering upstairs on both Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday she starts to scuttle up the bus stairs again. Moments later her lovely light-brown knees, still tanned from an obvious middle-class family excursion to somewhere warm, descend the steps, and I see her dark green school skirt surprisingly reappearing into view. Presumably there was no room on the top deck; it was fully colonised by rabid, acne-ridden school kids. So she sits on her own in front of me downstairs.

  Friday I’m In Love. Another Cure song plays in my head competing for air time with Charlotte Sometimes in my internal jukebox. This is my chance to talk to her. She pulls her long free-flowing hair upwards and applies a hairgrip. Behind her I am sitting in a bus seat conquered by her enticing beauty, admiring the back of her gorgeous neck, contemplating how Charlotte misses out on this view: the back of her own beautiful neck. I rehearse opening lines internally. My heartbeat doesn’t appear to be helping, suddenly racing at 200 loud pounds per minute, booming like a bass drum incessantly struck to a fast dance beat. It is so noticeably loud that it will surely drown out any words I attempt to orate.

  Then, in a voice I hardly recognise as my own, I open with “Hello”. “Hello” is my grand, rehearsed, practised to the point of obsession in front of the mirror for weeks, line. My big opening. As opening chat-up lines go, it’s a standard. Not a classic, but a standard nevertheless. I decide to build on my one-word opening, and succeed in adding one further comprehensible word to make: “Hello Charlotte.” Unfortunately she appears to expect me to add to my initiatory two words. This is where preparation is the key. There is also traceable alarm in her expression, her look audibly wondering: “How do you know my name, weirdo?” I know her name purely because I overheard her friends call her that. I prefer “observant” to “eavesdropping”, “taking an interest” to “stalker”.

  But she ignores my disconcerting use of her name, allowing me to go straight to my prepared line which has finally come back to me, after the abject panic triggered by the unfamiliarity encountered in speaking with an actual human female of my own age: “I heard you were really saying something... I mean talking Italian.” This is supposed to be a key speech in my teenage years and I’m involuntarily reciting Bananarama lyrics. Go away Bananarama, you’re not helping.

  I try again: “I heard you saying something really interesting about Italian cinema and The Bicycle Thief.” She eyes me like an unordered side dish placed before her in a restaurant. I continue and make one of my prepared spontaneous observations about Italian cinema, enabling me to reach the final of the Britain’s Most Pretentious Man Contest. Then I fall silent.

  After a full quarter mile, she says something: “Shy Boy”. Clever. You see, she had responded to my Bananarama Tourettes by saying the title of that band’s then current Top 5 single. This, alas, was completely over my head. It was decades later - on the cusp of 2014 to be exact - before I worked out the smart significance of her response. She really was decades ahead of me. Sighing pitifully when I fail to understand the concept of her witticism, she arrows me a look which suggests her intellect shines with the intensity of a thousand suns compared to mine: a lone speck of dust. Oh well. I conclude she’s intellectually superior, a tad snooty, out of my league, perhaps mildly obnoxious and vastly more attractive and popular than me. So why do I suffer the huge inconvenience of liking her so much? At least she didn’t freak out completely when I called her by her name. I seem to have got away with that one. We get off the bus together at our abandoned rural outpost and spin in different directions - me to the right and her to the left.

  Monday and Tuesday of the next week she goes upstairs. On Wednesday she sits downstairs, but as soon as I sit on the only vacant seat next to her, she immediately puts on her new Sony Walkman and music leaks out of her headphones. I had never seen a personal stereo device before, and Charlotte could not only have been Lincolnshire’s earliest adopter, but likely the very first person in the UK to annoy every other bus passenger with an inconsiderate inability to keep their personal stereo device personal.

  She’s listening to The Cure! Wow. At least we have something in common. I decide I must tell her this - only of course she cannot hear me. Plus the song title Boys Don’t Cry doesn’t turn out to be true - it transpires Charlotte has made it her teenage specialism to disprove the premise of that title. Indeed, she probably kept a skip underneath her bedroom window into which to toss boys’ broken hearts.

  Most would see the instant application of headphones as a snub - and they would be right. But I dep
loy a positive re-frame technique instead. After all, this allows more preparation time for me to struggle with a timeless dilemma. Yes, human beings can use radiometric dating to discover the earth’s exact formation date, colonise space, cross continents in hours, map the genome. Yet I’ll only be really impressed when scientists finally figure out an answer to the most timeless yet basic human question: how do you tell a girl or boy that you like them? (Then they can move on next to making broccoli taste like chocolate.)

  The next night she travels on the top deck. As usual we both get off the bus in our backwater, the only two people to end their journey in this landscape so isolated and deserted it resembles one of the photos sent back by a Mars probe. From the unfashionable, less desirable part of Mars. North, south, east and west, nothing but flat fields of crops, a featureless undefined landscape without buildings or culture. Charlotte and I are surrounded by this arable desert, an unbroken breeze constantly blowing low across the fields. Everything here is destined to be played out beneath a huge, melancholy-inducing sky squatting above us. There is nothing hidden in this landscape; no hills, no obscuring trees - consequently everything is constantly in a state of existing revelation. No surprises hidden or wrapped, no mystique preserved. Though this area is so uncompromisingly flat that the local authority is officially named “Holland”, it is an ideal dwelling choice for height anxiety-ridden acrophobes like me.

  Surely Charlotte will see fate has given us something in common: this culturally estranged nowhere, this no man’s land between two forgotten borders. We are connected by it; the only two people in the world to share this remote school bus stop.