Chapter Seven Pole Position #4
‘I need a wee,’ Leo then pipes up. Strangely, he now looks the calmest of the six of us. Even Pete the plumber is red-faced with what I hope is panic, and not an incipient heart attack.
If Jack’s phobia is exacerbated by being in this predicament, then Leo’s worries over having violence done to him again are probably lessened by it. Hard for anyone to give you a clout if you’re up a fifteen-foot pole.
‘Me too!’ the fat lad says.
I look at my watch. We’ve been up here nearly an hour now. Not such a long time in the grand scheme of things. But when you’re up a pole, it feels like a lifetime.
None of us have our phones to call for help.
I know this should send me into even more heights of panic, but weirdly it doesn’t.
They were popped in lockers back in the hut, where I signed my life away to Bryan and Delta O’Dowd.
. . . who could be lying in a pool of their own blood right now, while Possibly Rachel’s axe murderer tries to fend off the local constabulary.
We are, very much and completely, bloody stuck.
Which is more than a bit on the nose when it comes to parallels for my current problems, when you think about it.
My eyes go flat.
Of course it is.
‘It’s bullshit,’ I tell my fellow pole sitters.
‘What?’ Jack snaps, now fully caught up in the throes of heightened panic.
‘Everything’s fine,’ I tell him.
‘How can you know that??’ Possibly Rachel near shrieks.
I roll my eyes. ‘Because today is all about giving us things to do that parallel what’s going on in our heads.
And right now, the six of us are stuck up a pole with no way off.
We’re stuck fast with a problem we can’t do anything about.
’ I look around the peaceful wooden copse.
‘It’s about as good a metaphor for personal struggle as I can think of, to be honest with you.
That’s the bloody internalised personal truth.
No doubt about it. That’s what Delta wants us to realise.
‘Aah,’ Leo says, relaxing visibly.
Pete the plumber and the fat lad both take on expressions of deep thought. Jack still looks worried, but not quite as much.
Possibly Rachel is having none of it. ‘No! No! Everybody up there is dead! And we’re going to die here as well!’
I don’t know what troubles her in life, but I’m willing to bet it’s something exacerbated by watching too much true crime drama and TikTok videos.
‘Please try to calm down,’ Leo tells her. ‘My friend is right, I think. He’s very good at understanding what’s going on around him.’
Blimey. Am I?
‘Yeah, you are,’ Jack remarks, reading the surprise on my face like an open book. ‘If there’s one thing about you that never changes it’s that you know people. You know . . .’ he waggles his hands around. ‘You know . . . stuff.’
‘Oh,’ I reply, not really knowing what else to say.
The funny thing is, I’d have probably agreed with the two of them up until a few months ago. But if you can’t understand yourself, how on earth are you meant to understand anyone else?
‘No! I won’t calm down!’ Possibly About to Have a Panic Attack Rachel cries, and then does something that returns my heart to its previous high rate.
She unclips her harness.
‘Wait! Don’t do that!’ Jack shouts, his arms out. We all make the same gesture towards her, our own harnesses pulling tight as we do so.
Instantly, we hear Delta O’Dowd’s voice over a loud tannoy. ‘Please remain calm, Rachel, everything is okay.’
I knew it.
I absolutely bloody knew it.
And then, from a specific patch of the forest floor that looks exactly like any other patch of the forest floor, Delta O’Dowd jumps into view like Rambo.
She rises quickly out of a trapdoor, beneath which I spy a little dugout room, with a couple of small TV screens, a camping chair and a bottle of water.
She’s been down there this whole time.
I start to laugh. I don’t know why, but I just can’t help it.
Definitely Rachel looks down at Delta in horror, still locked in whatever nightmarish fantasy she’s driven herself into. She probably thinks it’s the axe murderer, come to finish her off.
This just makes me laugh even harder, which probably sounds cruel, but I can’t help myself.
‘Are you alright?’ Jack asks, looking at me like I’ve gone crazy.
He might not be too far off the mark.
I point downwards. ‘She jumped out of a little hole,’ I remark, sending me off into another gale of laughter.
Jack smiles at this, and then starts laughing as well. As does Leo.
Pete and Fat Lad just look at the three of us like we’ve gone bonkers. There should be nothing about being up a pole for an hour that sends you into hysterics.
But there is.
Oh, my God, there truly, truly is.
Delta immediately goes over to Definitely Rachel’s pole with a ladder and proceeds to help her down off it. By the time they get to the ground, Definitely Rachel has calmed down considerably.
Delta then moves the ladder to my tree, but I wave her off. ‘Oh no. I’m fine. Get everybody else down first,’ I tell her. ‘Start with my friend Jack.’ She gives me a speculative look, and moves over to Jack’s pole instead.
I’m quite happy up here now, truth be told.
Because it’s very easy up here, isn’t it?
And the breeze is nice.
I’m not afraid anymore. Because somebody just jumped out of a hole with all the answers.
I chuckle at this, watching Delta get everybody else down before me.
A sudden urge to tell her to just leave me up here for a few more hours hits me.
I don’t care if it’s lunchtime anymore. I don’t care what the rest of our boot camp activities might be.
I just want to stay up here, on my pole, where everything makes some sort of sense.
Where I’m still the guy who understands people.
Understands . . . stuff. Where I can get to the truth of the matter, with no real effort.
My humour dribbles out of me like sand from a tightly grasped hand.
Because down there is where I have to go, any minute now. And down there is where all the problems are. Where I have absolutely no idea what the truth is.
I know in that moment that whatever we get up to for the rest of today, it’s not going to help me much. Any more than the bloody mushrooms.
Because metaphors aren’t going to do me any good, any more than psilocybin did.
Let me stay up here, I plead to Delta O’Dowd silently.
Read what’s going on behind my eyes, and let me stay up here on my pole.
It’s lovely up here. Calm. Peaceful.
Up here I feel totally—
‘Time to come down, Charlie,’ Delta says, now at eye level with me. She holds my gaze as she says this.
How many like me have come through here? How many like me have wanted to stay up at the top of the pole? How many know this whole thing is a lost cause?
More than a few, I’d bet, judging from the way Delta is looking at me right now. ‘If you come down, I can explain what we’ve just done,’ she tells me.
‘I think I already know,’ I reply, in a low voice.
I then swallow hard, and unclip the harness.
Back on the ground, Delta spends a good ten minutes clarifying what the little experiment we’ve just been through is all about.
She comes out with a lot of what you’d expect.
Mainly that sometimes the truth eludes us, and that everything we see, hear and feel can persuade us that the truth is one thing, when in reality it is completely another.
Not being able to get to the truth can make us feel stuck in place.
Unable to move on. Unable to see that we actually have less to fear than we think we do, when a situation is looked at objectively.
I’m not sure Definitely Rachel agrees with her, judging from the fact she still looks pale and more than a little perturbed, but I certainly have a better idea now of why the waiver was so detailed.
Scaring the crap out of people so they understand their own minds better is always going to be something you need a lot of legal protection to do.
‘And well done to Charlie for understanding what The Truth was really all about,’ Delta then says, inclining her head towards me. I think she’s being genuine, but I’m not entirely sure. ‘It’s actually quite rare for someone to put two and two together so effectively.’
I’ll take that as a compliment.
But you should see me trying to get to the truth when I’m not up your pole, Delta. I don’t think you’d be quite as ready to pay me compliments then . . .
With her sum-up complete, Delta bids us walk back towards the farmhouse, where our much-needed late lunch awaits. The rest are eager to get to it, and take off at a fast clip. But I drag my heels, for some reason.
Delta sees this, hangs back a little and takes my arm gently.
‘You worry me, Charlie,’ she says in a hushed voice, so that nobody else hears.
My eyes go a little wide. ‘Why’s that?’
‘These boot camps are meant to help people with the things that are troubling them.’ She cocks her head. ‘But you really don’t know what’s troubling you, do you? You have no idea what your truth is.’
I shake my head. ‘Not really, no. I said in the email to you that I was having trouble sleeping, and kept getting . . . panicky because of that car accident I was in. How it was affecting everything important in my life – my work, my relationships. But I feel like there’s more to it than I know .
. .’ I drift off, as unable to explain to Delta as I am to anybody else, including myself.
‘I’m thrashing around, looking for answers, and none are coming. ’
She pats my arm. ‘Well, that’s fine. Not everybody gets to know what walls they have to climb over. Not right away.’
That’s a tremendously nice thing for her to say, and the absolute most useful thing I’ll take away from this entire day.
‘I guess not,’ I respond. ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’ She gives me an earnest look. ‘Just try to engage with the rest of today as something fun to do. Don’t overthink it. I fancy half your problem might be overthinking things.’
‘You might be right,’ I say, with a half-smile on my lips.
There’s actually no might be about it. I do overthink things. Always have.
But doesn’t Delta see that because I overthink things, I’m good at my job? Good at my life?
I understand stuff, Delta. Like Jack says. You don’t get to understand stuff unless you do an awful lot of thinking about it.
But if you stopped thinking, maybe the answers would come? Maybe the truth would come?
That’s not how answers work.
That’s not how answers ever work.
I look up the gentle slope at my two friends, who are now in animated conversation with Pete, Fat Lad and Definitely Rachel. The five of them certainly look like they might have some answers.
I suddenly feel crushingly alone.
I think.
I believe.
There might be a chance . . .
Just a small one.
That I might not be, if I’m being completely honest about it . . . totally fine.
I should have stayed up on the pole.