sarah eve kelly

Last weekend I spent a happy afternoon in a Spanish pub off Oxford Street with a friend. After several vodka-and-Cokes, we emerged and walked aimlessly for a while, and at sundown, we parted ways. I turned around, deciding to bypass Tottenham Court Road station – my way home – and turn the corner into Oxford Street again for some window shopping.

It’s a lucky thing that I usually have headphones on when I’m alone in public. I can’t stand just walking down streets listening to urban din and thinking my thoughts, so some sort of equipment comes with me wherever I go. This helps me with the many entreaties the London pedestrian will get simply for the happenstance of being on a street, any street, at any time of day. I don’t mean people asking for money; I feel a pang for them as I always have, I give when I can, and I certainly don’t feel like my aura is being invaded. What I mean is the touts, the handbag salesmen, the surveyors from Barnardo’s who click into your deepest-held insecurities if you don’t stop for them to Save the Children (once I was carrying a Belgian waffle home for Mike’s birthday breakfast and shook my head at a Barnardo’s guy, who replied very loudly that the waffle was going to go straight to my thighs).

The headphones – big, silver, easily visible from ten paces or more – do for me what I am utterly unable to do for myself: say “I’m not interested” or “Get out of my way”. Because I will stand and listen to a handbag dealer tell me that his Gucci fake will get me the job I want, take two inches off my hips, and do my taxes for me. I have stood and listened to this, hearing a voice, which turns out to be mine, actually encouraging these people. Without headphones, I am unarmed. With headphones, however, I can walk down any London street I choose without fear of molestation.

Except this time.

As it turned out, my audiobook had ended on this particular occasion. I didn’t dare take off the headphones, of course, and was content enough to listen to dead air until the next convenient pausing point. But the dead air is the reason I heard the woman with the clipboard ask, “If you could change one thing about your personality, what would it be?”

I looked at her, shook my head, and made to keep walking. That’s when she grabbed my arm.

“This is so easy, and it’s going to tell you so much about yourself,” she said to me through a large, threatening smile. “If you could change one thing about your personality, what would it be?”

“I would be more assertive,” I said, miserably.

“Very good, very good,” she said. “I can understand that very problem.”

I didn’t think she could.

Then she started speaking very rapidly. The only words I could understand were “computer” and “so quick”, and before I knew it, I was inside a building. I’m not lying to you. Inside a building, and being whisked down a flight of stairs.

“It looks like a lot of questions,” she said, shoving me into a cubicle with a stack of paper a foot high and a golf pencil. “but you can really do ten a minute. Just let me know when you’re done and we’ll run it through the computer.” And she bustled back upstairs.

The room was a vast one, at least fifty other cubicles just like mine. I was the only person there. On the wall was an enormous plaque which read, “YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.” I looked down at the questionnaire.

Question 1. Have you ever said something to someone that you wished you could take back?

I flipped several pages.

Question 82. Have you ever experienced a failure that you continue to regret?

I looked back up at the wall. YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

I’ve heard about this feeling before, but never have experienced it quite this completely: I felt as though I’d stepped across a threshold and been suddenly lurched upside-down. You see all sorts of things over the course of a day reminding you that the world is not a perfect place: children without shoes, dogs with limps, the digital Skechers sign in Times Square reverting to DOS, reduced to a blinking colon. But one learns very quickly to apply a mental filter to unpleasant sights and sounds. You know it’s wrong, of course it is, but you’re watching it through a screen; you’re not part of it.

Well, I was part of this, and my heart was bounding. It was wrong, it felt instantly wrong. The pencil was shaking in my hand. I was alone in a basement room and there were a bunch of grinning thugs upstairs, waiting for my answers to these 200 questions. For an instant I tried to think of what I would say if I went upstairs not having completed the questionnaire, what excuse I would give. That’s the Sarah I know. (In my darker moments I can imagine myself babbling politesses to a rapist to avoid hurting his feelings.) But luckily that feeling didn’t last for more than a couple of seconds: an instant later a beast reared up and I felt honest-to-God fight or flight for the first time in my life. I dropped the pencil, grabbed my bag, and ran – did not walk – up the stairs.

The woman who had absconded with me was back out on the street with her clipboard. I ran past her, didn’t stop running until I was at the end of the block.

I hadn’t been caught. That should have been the end of it. But it took me two hours to get that sick feeling out of my stomach. I think it’s because I knew that if I hadn’t run, if I’d stopped to talk to anyone, I would have humbly returned downstairs, completed the questionnaire, and proceeded to give the Church of Scientology all my money. I felt sure I would have done that, simply to avoid unpleasantness.

Did that woman teach me anything? She did. Assertiveness is what I want, more than anything, to change about my personality. How to do it, God only knows. I began by turning up my fresh audiobook and making absolutely no eye contact with anyone. (Now I know why pedestrians in London crash into each other so often: what with one thing and another, they’re never looking up. In fact, the City is now testing padded lampposts for precisely this purpose.) I also gave £10 in pocket change to various people on the walk from that intersection to Oxford Circus station, just to show that I only ignore the people I don’t like. It’s not much of a stand, I know, but I felt the blessings they offered me.

I know everything I need to know about Scientology from South Park. I also know a thing or two about simulacra, having sort of paid attention during a full-year critical theory course: to wit, a sign saying YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE is only put up in a room for which the truth of the contrary needs to be hidden.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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