“Perhaps as well,” Jenkins observed. “A young Adonis like you would have got into all kinds of trouble in a sink of iniquity like this—probably have been paying three lots of child support all the way through uni. What does your new girl-friend do?”
“She works for Thomas Cook, in the pedestrian precinct.”
“A travel agent! No wonder there’s a verboten sign on Club 18-30. Still, you should have been able to get away easily enough, to somewhere nice. Travel agents always bag the best deals for themselves and their nearest and dearest, I dare say.”
“Well, we didn’t,” Steve said.
“Plenty to keep you at home in the first flush of enthusiasm, I dare say. You’re of an age to start thinking in the longer term, now—settling down and getting married. Keep you out of trouble, at least for a while. Think on. You’ll want to get away at half-term, I suppose—or a Christmas break in the sun. Can’t tell whether there’s a future in a relationship until you’ve gone away together. A travel agent’s ideal for fixing that sort of do—she’s probably thinking along the same lines.”
Steve didn’t say anything in response to this network of suggestions, because there was nothing he could say. The truth was that he had only been on a foreign holiday once, when his parents had dragged him to the Canaries at the age of thirteen, in spite of his loud protests. He and they had both sworn never to repeat the experiment. Since then, he hadn’t even been as far afield as Wales. He wasn’t only phobic about flying, but also of driving over large bridges. He had never been over the Severn Bridge, even as a passenger, but he had once been taken over the Clifton Suspension Bridge by his parents, while they were still optimistic enough to think that he might get over his phobia if he were forced to confront it. That was another experience they had never attempted to repeat. There had been one more occasion when they had tried to cajole and shame him into boarding a plane to Malaga, but they had failed miserably; then, like sensible folk, they’d given up and reverted to taking their last few family holidays in Bournemouth, Poole or Weymouth—all of which could reached by car, provided that the route was properly planned, without crossing any rivers wider than thirty yards.
Unperturbed by Steve’s silence, Rhodri Jenkins rambled on “I don’t go abroad, myself. Why would I, when I can go home to the lovely mountains and Cardigan Bay? I never dated a travel agent, mind. I’m not much of a boozer, mind—these days, binge drinking is all the rage, so I hear, and Spain is very cheap for that.”
“Just because Janine works for Cook’s,” Steve told him, wearily “it doesn’t mean that she’s addicted to foreign holidays. She doesn’t go binge-drinking either.” He wasn’t entirely sure about the final item, because Janine still went on occasional “girls’ nights out” with her old school friends Milly and Alison, from which boy-friends were banned—so strictly that he hadn’t yet met Milly or Alison. When she was with him, though, Janine was a very moderate drinker, and had not yet shown any conspicuous interest in dragging him off to foreign climes. If she were to start measuring him up for a permanent relationship, though, it would only be a matter of time.…
“Better get back to the classroom, boyo,” the deputy head said, cutting off Steve’s train of thought. “It’s doing us good, I don’t doubt, to be put in the kids’ shoes for once. Just let it wash over you.”
“On second thoughts,” Steve said. “It can’t actually hurt to explore new possibilities, can it? What was the name of your hypnotherapist again?”
Jenkins beamed, like a man who had just made an unexpected breakthrough in pastoral care. “Sylvia Joyce.” he said, as he stood up and lobbed his sandwich-wrapper into the nearest bin, while pocketing his half-full bottle of Evian. “I’ll pop a card in your pigeon-hole, but she’s in the yellow pages, if I forget. She’ll do you the world of good—teach you to cope with any amount of stress.”
Steve didn’t hurry to keep up with the Welshman, but lingered a few moments more over his can of diet coke before tidying up in a slightly more decorous fashion and making his way back through the corridor at his own pace.
The exchange had given him food for thought. It was just possible, he thought, that a hypnotherapist might be able to help him with his phobias—which had become a considerable nuisance even before he’d started going out with Janine, if only because of the absolute necessity of concealing them from his colleagues and pupils. If ever it got around the school that he was incapable of getting on a plane or driving over the Severn Bridge, he’d be a laughing-stock till the day he retired. Maybe, if Sylvia Joyce were such a hot shot at teaching people to relax, she could also train him not to have panic attacks whenever he so much as thought about the Avon Gorge. At least he’d be safe confiding in her, if she were as scrupulous a practitioner as Rhodri Jenkins claimed.
“After all,” Steve said to himself, as he paused in the doorway of the classroom and stiffened his back in order to face up to the mute hostility of his colleagues and the patronizing smile of the instructor, “it can’t do any harm, can it?”
Steve was able to book a two-hour appointment with Sylvia Joyce for the following Tuesday evening. She talked him through a relaxation procedure by way of demonstration, and suggested that he ought to make a personalized relaxation CD on his PC, which he could play to himself whenever he went to bed alone, in order to practice the technique. “Can you do that?” she asked. “It works best if you lay down a backing-track of soothing music, then put on a voice-track taking you through the various stages I’ve mapped out for you.”
“Sure,” Steve said. “I’ve got mixing software, and a huge collection of MP3s. Ambient chill-out isn’t really my thing, but I can find enough to make a long lullaby, and I think I can do the sonorous voice.”
“Eventually,” she said, “you’ll internalize the CD, so that you can play it to yourself in your imagination, as it were—you can summon it up in the classroom, or if you’re in a queue, or any other time you feel tension building up.”
“Would that help to combat a panic attack, if I happened to be having one? Steve asked.
“It might,” the therapist told him. “Why—do you often have panic attacks?”
“Not often,” Steve said—and then shut up.
“We’re supposed to be compiling an issue-profile here, Steve,” Sylvia said, maternally. “I can’t help you with your problems unless you tell me what they are. When do you have panic attacks?”
“Mostly when I go over bridges,” Steve admitted. “But that’s only because I never travel by air or look over the edges of cliffs and tall buildings.”
“You mean that you suffer from acrophobia.”
“Yes. I get panicky about heights, especially if they involve airplanes and rivers. Viaducts aren’t so bad. I’m not helpless, mind—I can do short spans with little more than a slight shiver. If I can learn your relaxation techniques well enough to reduce the shiver, and maybe let me get on a plane once in a while without tranquilizing myself into oblivion, that would be useful.”
“Well, you’ll certainly find that the relaxation techniques will help. If you really want to get to grips with the phobias, though, I can do much more than that. If we could search out the cause, by investigating your childhood.…”
“Regression, you mean?” Steve said. Psychology wasn’t one of the sciences Steve taught—he’d done chemistry and physics along with biology at A level before going to university to train as a teacher—but he wasn’t entirely a stranger to psychological theory. He’d read a fair amount in his time, although he didn’t read nearly as much now that he’d got so heavily into the internet. He was vaguely familiar with the notion of hypnotic regression, and with the Freudian notion of abreaction, whereby repressed memories had to be dredged up and confronted in order to obtain release from the irrational anxieties they transmitted from the unconscious to afflict everyday behavior.
“Regression’s