The Man With His Head in the Clouds

by Richard O. Smith

  “Yeah,” I say confirming both her points with feeling.

  “Well, I’m happy to cover anything we spend above £50. Which we will with the price of these cocktails.” At this point she catches the eye of a glass-collecting waitress and mimes two more refills, without asking if I want another cocktail.

  “Are you trying to get me drunk on our first date?” I ask.

  “No,” she responds, leaving me unsure whether she spotted the surely obvious fact I was joking.

  “Will you be alright at heights if you’ve had some drinks. Might make you less of a scaredy.” Normally I admire Australian neologisms, but I can’t help feeling her newly-minted antipodean noun “scaredy” reflects neither well on me nor my aimed-for masculinity.

  “Are you going to include the bit about me being terrified of stairs in your review?” I check. “No,” she says, struggling to find an outraged tone of voice and a look of offended sensitivity. She barely locates either. Her attempt at appearing hurt just looks bizarre and out of place, like spotting a koala bear doing a crossword.

  Then she tells me about her phobias and OCD that she struggled with as a teenager, convinced that she was a peculiar case of isolated insanity. It turns out she was trapped by having to perform magical thinking rituals too, counting everything around her repeatedly. So we do have something in common - yet separated by 25 years and 10,000 miles.

  Then she gives me a piece of perceptive advice for the balloon flight: “If it gets too much when you’re high in the sky, just breathe deeply. And tell yourself ‘I don’t need to be frightened here, because being frightened ain’t going to help me in any way at all.’ I used that as a blocking mechanism when I had voices yelling at me, ordering me to count and recount stuff. Remember you are in charge of your brain, so you can relax yourself through it, and block the voices and the anxieties by saying ‘being scared isn’t going to help, performing a ritual isn’t going to help, so I don’t have to do either’. And keep breathing deeply.” That transpires to be the most succinct and useful counselling I have probably ever received. Dispensed not from an experienced certified CBT practitioner or psychoanalyst, but a young, blonde Australian glamour model now onto her third cocktail.

  We walk to the Tube station and begin our departing speeches. She leans forward and kisses me - a proper didn’t-see-it-coming on-the-lips smacker. Right on the chops, mutton chops being the distinctly recognisable flavour of the kiss. “One of the questions they ask is ‘did you kiss’,” she clarifies. “So now we can both put down a ‘yes’. They’ll like that,” she says enthusiastically.

  “Can I say we also had a really great...”

  “No!” she says, braking hard to stop my sentence mid-flow.

  “I was going to say ‘time’. I wasn’t hoping for some illegitimate credibility by writing that we’d...” This time, when I need her to finish my sentence prematurely for me, she doesn’t. Until she adds after an unnecessary delay: “They’d like it even more if we had sex?”

  “Yes,” I agree with probably too much enthusiasm, “They really, really would.” “Well, they know that would never happen in like a trillion years,” she says smiling. “Yeah, a trillion zillion years, obviously.” I confirm, mirroring her smile. Then we both attempt to speak at the same time, basically saying the identical phrase superimposed over each other’s voice: “This has been fun.”

  “So,” she says, “I’m going to give you an 8/10.”

  “Was it going to be a 9/10 before my last joke?” I clarify.

  “Possibly. Well?” she says. “Well?” I reflect. “What score are you going to give me?” she asks impatiently. “9/10,” I reply. “Oh, OK,” she responds as if that’s the lowest score someone could contemplate awarding to anyone for anything.

  “Thanks. That’s nice of you,” she adds, her voice full of disappointment.

  “I suppose we’d better depart before we say anything in the last few seconds that will reduce our scores,” I suggest. She smiles. “Oh, just one thing,” I add as she swivels away. “I just wondered how...” Without needing me to finish the question, she instantly replies: “£200 for doing my half of the article. But I’ll give you a good review and a mark of 9/10.”

  Gender wages disparity is one of the key necessary battles left for feminism to fight. Feminism has mainly won the war against inequality now, with just a few pockets of resistance still left to liberate. So I can’t complain too much at this point in history if I’m the victim of a rare inverse of the usual paradigm where the female earns double the male’s wages for doing the same job.

  Two weeks later the article is published. But not online, so I have to ask a friend in London to pick up a physical copy of the magazine. She gave me a 6/10.

  ***

  The next week they keep me waiting when I report to Steve and Claire for my continued counselling sessions. I wouldn’t normally expect this to be loaded with psychological overtones, but they are psychologists. On entering the room it is conspicuous that they have been having another row. But both gamely put on their professional faces.

  My male counsellor is asking me about my school years and formative teenage development. To avoid the stinging emotions that this line of inquiry will probe, I am diverting the questions by deploying comedy as a blocking mechanism. Frustration is readable in my inquisitors’ faces. This is not a strategy that I am allowed to get away with for long. They deflect it successfully - by refusing to reward my attempts at comedy with a reaction, only offering their attention as treats when I say something honest and revealing about my schooldays.

  “My schooldays weren’t great and I don’t really want to discuss what an inconsequential scholar and full-time idiot I was, or how horrid most of my contemporaries were,” I announce, hoping to move on.

  “Were you exhibiting signs of height anxiety then?” Steve asks.

  “No, I have always been tall.”

  They deliberately do not react, and wait for me to continue.

  “Yes,” I eventually continue, and receive a ‘good boy’ dog pat look from Claire for giving them a serious answer and resisting the compulsion to entertain.

  “How were you with stairs?” enquires Steve.

  “Avoided them.”

  “Why...?”Claire begins, realising instantly that a “why” question risks tarnished association with accusatory rhetoric, and replaces it with a stock open question prefix. “What were the reasons that made your schooldays horrid?” she rephrases.

  I answer honestly: “Some of my fellow pupils were horrid bullies. And I did not engage with the work.”

  I am falling into irreversible regression at this point, slipping down from adulthood back to feeling like I am twelve again. But Claire and Steve are determined to probe me for hidden insecurities.

  “How were your contemporaries horrid?” Steve attempts to establish.

  “’Cos they said and did horrid things,” I reply, more plainly than defensively.

  “How many of them did horrid things?” quantifies Claire.

  “Not sure. Not all of them, obviously. But quite a lot.”

  I really am going to need the tissues soon. It is terrifying how weak and prone to manipulation I am. Kind liberal as I consider myself to be, I am so easily led. No doubt I would have done terrible things under the Nazis.

  “Why?” asks Claire with uncharacteristic curtness. I allow time in case they want to amend the “why” question. But they appear content to leave their question unaltered.

  “Ask them. ’Cos they were immature, I guess.”

  “Maybe you’re being too hard on them and, crucially, yourself. To what extent is that conduct expected among school age children?” Steve counters.

  God, they are good, if relentless, with the open questioning technique.

  “Immaturity is both a mental and physica
l condition,” I bark back.

  They pause to diffuse any gathering tension.

  “Are you becoming angry with us?” Claire seeks to verify.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “It’s OK, you are entitled to become angry with us,” she calms.

  “Thanks. But I’m OK for anger at the moment. I’ll let you know if that changes and I need any.”

  “Angry is allowed,” she smiles reassuringly.

  I don’t think I would ever want to be angry with you, Claire. But I’m not going to say that out loud. Instead I say, “If you’re bad shrink, good shrink - you’re definitely the good shrink.”

  She likes this comment. Predictably Steve’s not so sure.

  “Anxiety sabotages rather than empowers my life,” I suddenly say. They both nod an understanding empathy.

  I decide to tell them a true story, mainly because they won’t believe it’s true, and when they admonish me for being dishonest I can reveal it’s absolutely, genuinely, verifiably true. I realise that under transactional analysis this couldn’t be more bull’s-eye, hole-in-one, jackpot, one-hundred-and-eighty “child”.

  But it is also an important story about fostering emotional development, and my desperation to shed childhood as quickly as possible because I neither cared for it nor my peers. Nor myself - especially myself. Back then I was steadfastly aware that these could not possibly be the promised “best years of your life”. They definitely were not. And it reveals my capacity for over-developed emotional empathy for someone I haven’t seen for thirty years - and to be honest (which I’ve been encouraged to be by my Buy One Get One Free counsellors), probably only met four or five times in my life, and am unlikely to ever encounter again.

  “One of my friends at a rival local school was genuinely nicknamed “Pussylicker”. As a teenage boy I was envious of them possessing such a cool nickname. Though, oddly, she never liked it.”

  See what I did there? A simple inverse-the-expected-gender joke. Or did I?

  Steve literally bites his lip to repress a smirk. His co-counsellor discharges a disappointed sigh, as much for his benefit as mine, in order to loudly express her disapproval. She emits a silent “when you’ve quite finished, boys” with a short shake of her head. Next, she upgrades her communicative weapons of choice, using actual words to chastise us. Though I now instantly regret making my gag, as it has clearly cost me credibility points. Boy, had I misjudged the environment to do material like this - even comics have to learn about the concept of horses for courses - as well as supermarket ready-meal distributors.

  “Please tell us the truth,” she pleads in an unnatural tone, redolent of someone who is professionally patient rather than actually wanting to be. The implication here is similar to a parent’s crumbling patience, forced to concede to their offspring “although we like you, we do not always like the choices you make and therefore the person you choose to be.” She deliberately pauses to locate the right words, speaking slowly like she’s fumbling for individual coins spilt in the dark: “Remember... we spoke last session... about... how you... don’t have to... perform here.”

  Well, my story is true. Although I didn’t go to the same school as her, I did know the unfortunate schoolgirl saddled with the unwelcomed nickname. For all the adulation society places on children, we shouldn’t forget teenagers can be callous, horrid little fascists, especially to each other. We also willingly forget that children have at least two nicknames: one they recall as adults, and another one that was so ineffaceably pernicious with targeted cruelty that teams of odious social network trolls have focus-grouped them to forge the most horrid nickname possible in evil smithies. They will subsequently never admit to it as an adult.

  Often such nicknames are buried so deep to be beyond accidental excavation. Since you ask, my school nickname was Rastus (because I once owned a reggae album - believe me, that was off-the-scale, awarding-winning radicalness for a South Lincolnshire upbringing. (I only bought it to impress Charlotte Jones on our school bus.) No, I didn’t have any other nicknames (actually I did, but I’ve repressed them deeply as they still retain the probable potency to make me start crying again.) It doesn’t matter what colour wire you opt to cut - the red, blue, yellow or green one - none of us has the capacity to defuse the emotional bomb of explosive childhood memories that can suddenly explode without any issued warning in our adult lives. You can step on and activate an emotional landmine years after it’s been planted and its location completely forgotten about.

  Having said that, these were more innocent times. My friend’s unfortunate nickname bridged two separate ages - the end of cultural innocence on one side meeting with the age of mainstream smutty liberalism on the opposite bank. Hence her nickname had the misfortune to span the two ages.

  Because her nickname genuinely originated from having kittens - as in owning young cats, not being in a petrified state. It specifically related to a demonstration in a school “show and tell” talk about how a mother cat licked her kittens clean, as felines, like the French, can forgo the requirement to use water when having a wash. Liking her cats perhaps slightly too much, had caused her to lick a kitten for demonstration purposes. Note to today’s teenagers: this does not make you high. Nor will licking a toad from a British pond. That just gives you really bad breath.

  Licking her kitten was a practical demonstration of natural history, instructional though of questionable hygiene. A stern matriarchal teacher had stopped this unhygienic practice and warned: “It’s not a good idea to lick your pussy, Veronica.” And that was the exact moment that the teacher smashed the champagne bottle onto the hull that launched an unsinkable nickname. No iceberg of teacher intervention could ever sink that nickname.

  From that day forth she was destined to ignore everyone unless they called her by (a) her real name or (b) one of the other nicknames that she actually preferred. (“Zit face” - that was one of mine, I’ve just remembered. There were far worse ones.)

  Unfortunately for Veronica this was the era when benign sitcom Are You Being Served? proved a ratings winner with the character Mrs. Slocombe constantly regaling pre-watershed audiences by inviting everyone to laugh at her pussy - three or four times per episode. That joke was speckled with green spots of staleness approaching the half-way point in the opening episode of the first series, yet alone the following ten series (the tills stayed open for business and innuendo until 1985). This was accepted, wholesome mass entertainment at 7.30pm in the late 1970s - acceptable as the word meant 90% cat with slight 10% undertone of female pudendum. This was as innocent as Powergen buying into the Italian market and deciding to name their Italy-based firm PowergenItalia. Because that spells... oh, you’ve worked it out already.

  When actress Mollie Sugden died aged 86 in 2009, the main BBC six o’clock news honoured her with a clip of her creation Mrs. Slocombe doing - well, what else - a trademark pussy joke three hours ahead of the watershed. And boy could she nail them every time. If you wanted innuendo, in her hands it was never hard and she’d always give you one.

  One day in my early teens I was at Chess Club. This proved to be a bad choice of society to join in order to meet girls. But one of the few girls there was Veronica, my friend saddled with the unfortunate shifting-meaning nickname. Other boys would insensitively address her by this charmless nickname, in the same way they would probably shoot an air rifle at a dove. Not that this distraction stopped the bullies coming after me, and I couldn’t go upstairs to avoid them. Although I always found a way out of going upstairs, which was a painful constraint, as the boys’ toilets were upstairs. On several occasions I risked terrible shame if caught using the girls’ because it was located on the ground floor. These were scary times. Teenage years are bad enough without being scared of stairs.

  Seeing how some bullies taunted my friend with the distressing nickname was hideous. This was confirmed by my preference to han
g around with girls, as I found boys of my same age witheringly immature. Once, after Chess Club, an immensely unpleasant boy, a known bully, was spotted loitering outside our Chess Club room in the same way that a fox is attracted to a chicken coop. Hoping to indulge in some traditionally one-sided blood sports and beat up nerdy chess freaks, he spotted Veronica and proceeded to taunt her by incessantly asking, “are you called that name ’cos you is a lezzer?” (I haven’t bothered to correct his ugly English.) Veronica’s much older sister, who was sufficiently advanced in years above us to drive a car, entered the building at this point. Arriving to pick her up her younger sibling from Chess Club, she duly encountered the taunter and corrected the bully’s ugly face by smacking the reprobate right across his bully chops. He was hit with an equivalent force to stepping out in front of an oncoming beer lorry. Seizing our opportunity, we nerdy chess players escaped from our Chess Club siege conditions by nervously tip-toeing over his prostrate bully body.

  That was the last time I ever saw Veronica. She moved away from the area soon afterwards, probably to go on the road supporting her elder sister’s new career as a travelling prize-fighter. But I do often wonder what happened to her, and her innocently coined nickname tarnished by the shifting sands of cultural expression. I wonder where she is now, and how she answers at bourgeois dinner parties when the cheese course conversation nostalgically turns to school nicknames. “Oh, I didn’t have one,” will probably be her prepared response. As she stabs the cheese knife menacingly into the Jarlsberg so that it stands upright in the wooden board beneath. “Alright, I was just asking,” someone will respond, “there’s no need to have kittens...” And which point she’ll ring her southpaw sister and ask if she can pop round to take care of a troublesome guest.

  “Er... that was actually all true,” I enjoy announcing to my twin counsellors.

  “Really? You know we can’t help you if you’re not honest with us, Richard,” Claire chastises me.