Structo Issue 17

Mike Fox another way of seeing ‘Education is a platform,’ my father said, ‘but the train seems to have left without you.’

He held the sheet containing my final exam results between his thumb and forefinger, by the very tip of one corner, as though to avoid contamination.

‘Perhaps I could hitch a lift?’ I suggested.

His eyebrows were known in the family for their freakish autonomy.

Now the left one formed an almost gothic arch above the unsmiling eye beneath it. He obviously preferred his own metaphors.

So I entered the world of work at sixteen without the ballast of my father’s approval.

Certain parents, I now understand, have two essential functions.

The first is to give you life, and the second is to ruin it. Sometimes they do this swiftly and dramatically, but more often the effect is incremental. My parents, I feel, took the latter approach.

At the time of the above exchange, I had yet to realise the process was already under way. In fact I felt rather buoyant. A boys-only boarding school had done its worst, but a hopeful face still emerged in the mirror as I scraped away shaving foam, mostly unnecessarily, with my first razor.

After all, my mother continued to use the word ‘genius’ when describing me to other parents, although recently she had began to pair it with ‘flawed’. I was unperturbed by this. To me it sounded romantic. I was obviously troubled and volatile – as well as brilliant.

‘So you had grandiose ideation by the age of sixteen?’ my therapist said. She phrased questions as though they were statements. It had taken ten sessions to get this far: she was nothing if not methodical.

‘To me it seemed like optimism,’ I said. ‘Still does really.’

‘Do you still think you’re a genius?’ she asked the thirty-nine year old version of myself sitting opposite her. 