Читать книгу Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations - Brian Stableford - Страница 3
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
LEARNING TO RELAX
Steve had never thought that the time would come when he would be glad to see Rhodri Jenkins, but the deputy head still seemed to be the only member of staff who was talking to him—or, at least, the only one who was actually prepared to sit down opposite him in the school canteen, which seemed like a very large and lonely place without any pupils in it. Although there was still an entire fortnight to go before the new school year started, the staff had been summoned to pay homage to the latest idol adopted by the local authority: Continuing Professional Development. The “refresher” course had sucked them all in, from the Newly Qualified—a category from which Steve had only just escaped—to those with thirty years service, like Jenkins.
Steve had hoped that the new year might be a chance to start again with a clean slate, but four weeks of absence had not been sufficient to make the hearts of the female staff grow fonder, or the inclination of the male staff—who were in a conspicuous minority—to withdraw their manifest support for the outrage felt by the female staff. The Tracy/Jill affair obviously would not be forgotten for some little time to come. The school’s deputy head, however, could not sensibly refuse to talk to any of those to whom he had occasionally to assign additional duties, so Jenkins actually made a point of filling one of the empty chairs on the table where Steve would otherwise have been condemned to eat alone.
“Don’t look so depressed, boyo,” Jenkins instructed him. “If you’re in that sort of a mood now, imagine what you’ll be like after thirteen weeks of teaching. Can’t let it happen. Give in to the pressure and you’ll go under.”
“CPD is enough to make anyone suicidal,” Steve told him. “It’s ten times worse than teaching. I thought I’d put that sort of bullshit behind me when I got through my probation, but now it looks as if I’ll have to put up with it for the rest of my career.”
“The secret,” Jenkins assured him, “is to let it wash over you. You have to learn to relax. Mind you, a young fellow like you ought to be perfectly relaxed after four weeks’ holiday. You’re still young enough to go on those Club 18-30 jaunts, aren’t you? Unlimited sun, sangria and sex, so they say. Or did you run out of prophylactics and catch some horrible venereal disease?”
Jenkins pronounced the first syllable of “prophylactics” to rhyme with “toe” and the second to rhyme with “pie”. Steve had never figured out whether it was a purely personal idiosyncrasy or whether everyone west of Cardiff pronounced it that way.
“I didn’t manage to get away,” Steve admitted. “Never got out of Salisbury, in fact—and now I’m back on site, everyone’s picked up exactly where they left off in July. You’re the only one who’s addressed more than a monosyllable to me all day.”
“Ach, it won’t last. Once the kids are back and life reverts to normal, they’ll relax the freeze and issue your return ticket from Coventry. They have to go through the motions first, to teach you a lesson. This is a special kind of community, not like uni, where you can play Don Juan to your heart’s content. Here, the rule is don’t shit in your own backyard…or if you do, keep it quiet…and if you can’t keep it quiet, ration yourself to breaking one heart per term.”
Steve looked glumly down at his corned-beef-and-salad sandwich, which he’d painstakingly assembled and wrapped in clingfilm all by himself that morning, because the canteen staff wouldn’t be returning to duty until the pupils were back. He couldn’t meet Jenkins’ eye for the moment, because he knew that the old man was right. If he’d just been able to keep a lid on his affair with Tracy, everything would have been fine, but a messy break-up in mid-term would have been bad enough even if the cause hadn’t been his taking up with Jill—and to break up with Jill with two weeks still to go until the end of term had been fatal. Even Steve thought that he fully deserved the universal cold shoulder, and wasn’t yet fully qualified for remission and rehabilitation.
“Still playing cricket to keep fit, are you?” Jenkins asked.
“Yes,” Steve replied. “Saturday league games for the seconds and Sunday friendlies. Took three wickets yesterday, and a good catch down at long leg.”
“Don’t confuse me with technical terminology, Boyo—I’m a rugby man, as you know, and was only asking to be polite. I’m sorry the school doesn’t have a cricket pitch, but you could always volunteer to help us out with the rugby. Mrs. Jones would be glad to have you aboard. No chance of an injury that would spoil your looks while playing with kids, is there?”
“You’re joking,” Steve said. “I’m only five-nine—half the boys in the second year sixth are taller than I am, and the ones who play rugby are mostly two stone heavier. I manage to stay fit in the winter without risking a broken neck. I get plenty of exercise.” That wasn’t strictly true; his sporting interests over the winter consisted entirely of watching horse-racing on Saturdays, while betting on the internet exchanges, and playing internet poker—neither of which activities did much for his muscle-development.
Jenkins sighed. “That sort of exercise won’t do you much good in the long run,” he said, obviously thinking that Steve meant sex. “What you ought to try, by way of learning the art of healthy relaxation, is hypnotherapy.”
“No way,” Steve said, immediately. “I’m not letting anyone put me in a trance—and no matter what you and everyone else might think, I don’t need treatment for sex addiction.”
“For once, boyo, I’m not only thinking about sex,” the deputy head informed him. “I’m thinking about getting through the working day, week after week and term after term. Hypnotherapy’s not about trances, if there’s any such thing, and it’s certainly not about planting posthypnotic suggestions that make you think you’re a chicken and act accordingly. A proper therapist would no more dream of playing that sort of silly game than your GP would dream of using leeches. If there’s one thing people in this job need more than anything else, it’s the ability to relax when the stress mounts up. If you can’t get through a two-week refresher course in Best Practice without tensing up, that GCSE group of yours will drive you to an early grave. Since we aren’t allowed to switch them off, it’s a great advantage to be able to switch off ourselves, whenever we need to. It’s pricey, mind, but worth every penny.”
“I don’t think so,” Steve said, dubiously. “It’s not my sort of thing.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, boyo,” Rhodri told him, in the kind of authoritatively patronizing voice that schoolteachers of thirty years’ experience invariably cultivated, whether they were Welsh or not. “I only wish I’d known about Sylvia—or someone like her—when I was your age.”
“Sylvia?” Steve repeated, questioningly.
“Sylvia Joyce—my hypnotherapist. You can take that lustful gleam out of your eye, mind. She’s a handsome woman, but she’s old enough to be your mother. If she were of an age to have her heart broken, you can be certain that I wouldn’t let you anywhere near her, the way you carry on.”
Steve honestly didn’t think that having slept with four of his female colleagues in two years made him into a Casanova, even if two of them had been in the same term. After all, none of them had been married—which was probably more than Rhodri Jenkins could claim about all the female teachers he’d slept with in the course of his long career. Even so, Steve had sworn an oath never to get involved with a colleague again after the Tracy/Jill fiasco.
“I’m going out with someone else now,” he said, defensively. “Not a teacher. From now on, my sex-life is strictly out of school hours and off school premises.”
“Glad to hear it,” Jenkins said. “Not an ex-pupil, I hope?”
“No,” Steve said, patiently. “She went to the other one.” Although Salisbury qualified as a city, by virtue of possessing a cathedral, it wasn’t even as big as Swindon, so the staff and pupils at its two large comprehensives were always able to refer to “the other one” with perfect clarity.
“Better and better,” the deputy head said. “You’re a local boy, aren’t you—is that where you went to school?”
“No,” Steve said, “I went to the boys’ grammar.”
“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 one term we use,” Sylvia confirmed. “It’s not so different from what any psychotherapist would do, though. It’s all a matter of getting you into a state of mind to skip back in time, to recover the full sensation of your early memories. Think of it as a further stage of relaxation—that’s all it is, really, although some people call it a trance.”
“I don’t know about that,” Steve said. “It might be opening a can of worms.”
“That’s the whole point of it,” Sylvia told him. “Better a can of worms than a can’t of worms, I always say. Sometimes, you have to regress before you can progress. The recovered memories can be painful—they probably wouldn’t have been repressed in the first place, and wouldn’t be causing you difficulties now, if they weren’t—but it’s not a good idea to let them fester indefinitely. This is as safe an environment as you’re likely to find to reach out and touch them, I can do a swift demonstration now, if you like. Nothing heavy—I’ll just send you back five or ten years, if you like, so we won’t risk touching on anything too stressful, and you can see how it works. Then, if you’re agreeable, we can try to go deeper next time I see you.”
Steve hesitated. “I’m not sure I believe in that whole thing,” he said. “It would be convenient, I suppose, if all our problems could be traced back to childhood traumas, and then surgically excised by confronting the relevant horrors, but I really don’t think my phobias have that sort of cause. I think they’re just some sort of random neurophysiological accident—so I’m more interested in treating the manifest symptoms than going in search of potentially illusory causes. People start coming out with all sorts of rubbish when they’re regressed, don’t they? Past lives and false memories of being abused as children, and all that sort of crap. There’s a risk of increasing the problems instead of solving them, I think.”
“Memories of child abuse aren’t necessarily false,” the hypnotherapist told him, “even if the people cast as abusers deny it. I don’t agree that there’s any risk of increasing your problems, although it’s true that people who do begin to remember traumatic things sometimes find recovered memories hard to deal with. Can of worms or not, I believe it’s best to get such things out in the open.”
“I’m not sure that I can agree,” Steve said. “You might be right about memories of child abuse—but memories of past lives are certainly false. If delusions as blatantly ridiculous as once having served in Nelson’s fleet at Waterloo or as one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens can carry as much conviction as they’re said to do, how can anyone trust recovered memories of any sort? Regression can’t help me if it turns out to be nothing but an invitation to fantasize, and I sucker myself into believing my own fantasies.”
“You don’t have to believe anything you might recover, Steve,” Sylvia assured him, “and the recovered imagery might be revealing and helpful, even if it’s a blatant fabrication. The unconscious mind doesn’t send us these messages unless it’s trying to help. What do you have to lose?”
Steve didn’t know what he had to lose, and that was what worried him. He didn’t like taking leaps in the dark.
“Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, Steve.” Sylvia Joyce said, gently. “Maybe the time has come to stop procrastinating. You’re here, aren’t you? Why not make the most of it? You can stop at any time.”
“Okay,” Steve said, eventually. “It can’t hurt to give it a go, I suppose, Give me a gentle introduction, mind. Just a brief trip into a safe and familiar yesteryear. That can’t do any harm.”
Ten minutes later, those had come to seem like famous last words. As promised, once he had begun to drift away with the fairies, Sylvia had asked him, in her most soothing and reassuring tone, to go back to the age of twenty-one, when he’d been in his third year at university, and as happy and carefree as in any period of his life before or since. The last thing he’d expected was to go into a full-blown panic attack—but that was what happened.
He felt the physical symptoms first—the cold sweat, the nausea, the dizziness. If he’d been able to faint, he probably wouldn’t have obtained any conscious sensations at all—but he was lying down on Sylvia Joyce’s couch, and the blood couldn’t drain away from his head under the pull of gravity. After the horrid physical sensations came the horrid psychological ones: a fully-fledged hallucination; a waking nightmare such as he’d never experienced before…or never, at any rate, allowed himself to remember after he awoke.
“Wow,” said Sylvia, after sitting him up giving him a glass of water from which to sip. “You really do suffer from phobias, don’t you? I’ve seen reactions like that before, but never in a first session and never in response to such a minimal regression.
“It was just a dream,” Steve said. “A nightmare. I don’t remember having suffered from nightmares like that at uni, but I suppose I must have. It was crazy.”
“Can you remember any of the images?” the therapist asked.
“I can now,” Steve told her, accusingly. “I was aboard some sort of spaceship, looking down at the Earth from a great height—from orbit, I suppose. The Earth was dark, devastated. I think the sun was about to explode. I was up so high…higher than I could ever go in real life. I felt such an awful vertigo.…” He handed the glass of water back, and lay down again, to armor himself against the possibility of fainting.
“That’s okay,” Sylvia said. “It’s enough, for now. You’re going to have to deal with it, though, if we’re to get on the root of your phobias—not just this nightmare, but others, maybe even worse.”
“A can of worms,” Steve murmured. “Just like I said.”
“And we can work on it,” the therapist insisted. “It’s not insuperable. It just needs time.”
“It was only a dream,” Steve said, sharply. “It wasn’t real. It can’t have anything to do with the cause of my phobias. It’s just one more stupid symptom.”
“It would be a mistake to back away from it,” Sylvia advised him. “Even if it was only a dream, it might well have significant meanings wrapped up in it. You really need to recover more of it, and get a better grip on it—and you probably will recover more, now, even if you try to put it back in its mental box and throw away the key. In my experience, once these things begin to resurface, they usually continue to bubble up. It’s far better to control that process, to the extent that we can, so that we can try to make some sense of it. If you resist, you’ll just make it more difficult for you to deal with it.”
“No way,” Steve said, remembering the flight to the Canaries and the crossing of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. “No more regression. Not now, not ever.”
“I don’t want to abandon you, Steve,” the hypnotherapist told him, presumably meaning that she didn’t want him to abandon her. “You need to deal with this. I won’t regress you again, if you don’t want me to, but you may be in greater need now of learning to relax properly than you were before.”
“Is this how you drum up business?” Steve asked, angrily. “Is this why Rhodri Jenkins has been coming to you for donkey’s years—because he’s getting further and further away from a cure for whatever ails him with every visit?”
“I can’t discuss another client, Steve,” the therapist said, soothingly. “And I don’t drum up business. I don’t have to. The world does that for me. You’re not further away from finding an answer to your problems than you were before—you’re closer. You just need a little more help in completing the journey.”
“No more regression,” Steve repeated. “I won’t bin the relaxation treatment, but that’s all I need from you, okay? I don’t need to be cured, in the way you think I can be—I just need to get my head into a state where I can step on a plane, if need be, or cross the Severn Bridge, without being reduced to a gibbering idiot. That’s all. We need to focus on that. Management, not cure. Forget about hypothetical causes, let’s just treat the symptoms.”
“If that’s what you want,” she told him, “We can do that. You’re the client.”
As long as you get your money, he thought, it doesn’t really matter which particular brand of old rope I buy, does it? Aloud, though, he only said: “Just a couple of sessions more, mind. No point in throwing money away if it isn’t working.” The reason he said that was because he thought there was just a possibility that she might be right, if only about more bits of the “recovered memory” resurfacing. If that proved to be the case, he might need someone to talk to about them—and who else could he possibly tell, apart from his therapist?
“If it’s the money that bothers you, Steve, there’s something you might try for free,” Sylvia said, still full of apparent concern. “There’s a local support group for people who’ve had…experiences like yours. It’s called AlAbAn. That’s short for Alien Abductees Anonymous. They couldn’t call themselves Triple-A because that was already taken. They meet in East Grimstead every second Thursday.”
Steve was flabbergasted by the suggestion that he could be put in the same bag as lunatics who thought they’d been abducted by aliens, but the reflexive denial died on his lips. “East Grimstead?” he said, weakly, when he had recovered himself. “Isn’t that where the Scientologists’ headquarters are?”
“No, that’s East Grinstead with an en, in Sussex. This is East Grimstead with an em. Unsurprisingly, it’s a couple of miles the other side of West Grimstead, after you’ve taken a left turn off the A36 in Alderbury. You don’t have to worry about any big bridges, once you’re over the Bourne. Here’s the address—they meet later this week.” She handed him a piece of paper, on which she’d been scribbling while she spoke.
“I don’t need a support group,” Steve said. “I haven’t been abducted by aliens—I’ve just been suckered into having a bad dream in a hypnotherapist’s comfy chair.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you were abducted by aliens or not,” Sylvia assured him. “What matters is whether or not you can get to the bottom of whatever it was that produced those images in your mind. AlAbAn can help, believe me. I’ve referred people there before, and they’ve always got something out of it, if only a nice cup of tea and a few biscuits. It’s free, as I said, and they won’t pressure you into telling your story if you don’t want to. Just go along and listen for a week or two. It can’t do any harm, and you might be surprised by how helpful it is.”
“That’s what you said about the regression,” Steve reminded her.
“And I was right about that, too,” Sylvia told him. “We just have to work through it, to see what your unconscious is trying to tell your conscious mind. If your conscious mind were in a more receptive frame, maybe communication with your unconscious wouldn’t be so difficult, and you wouldn’t have cultivated your phobias in the first place.”
“I knew it would wind up being my fault,” Steve said. “It always does with you people, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely not,” Sylvia told him. “There’s no fault involved. That’s one of the things of which you have to convince yourself. We can get there, if you’ll give it a chance. You really should go to AlAbAn—it might be interesting, even if it isn’t helpful, and it can’t hurt.”
Steve finally consented to take the proffered piece of paper, but he had no intention of going to the meeting. He didn’t think he was that crazy—not yet, at any rate. He didn’t want to reopen the can of worms into which he’d accidentally peered, so he didn’t want to do anything that might jiggle its lid, let alone anything that might help him get to its slimy bottom.
Steve hadn’t yet told Janine that he was seeing a hypnotherapist, because he didn’t want to let on about his phobias yet, and it would be direly difficult to do one without the other. He wasn’t yet sure that their two-month-old relationship had the sort of future that entitled her to know such things about him, and wasn’t even sure whether he ought to hope that it might.
In the past, he’d always told himself that he wouldn’t be ready to settle down for a long time yet, and that he had many more notches to put on the bedpost before he began to contemplate trading in the bachelor life, but he knew that Rhodri Jenkins might have a point. While he remained conscientiously young, free and single, conspicuously regarding every young woman he met as a potential conquest, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to settle into the kind of community that the school’s staff-members were trying to be: one that could set a good example to the students as well as preserving its own harmony.
There was no doubt in his mind that Janine was one of the finest conquests he had ever made, not just because she was so good-looking but because she was bright and witty. She hadn’t been to university, but he gathered that it was because she’d been too desperate to win her independence in order that she could leave home and set herself up with an entire new life. He’d met her parents once, and couldn’t see that they were particularly terrible, but there was obviously more there than met the eye. He could imagine himself living happily ever after with Janine—or as close to happily ever after as any real people could ever get. He’d have to get to know her more thoroughly first, of course—meet her friends, for sure, and maybe go away on holiday with her, if only as far as Weymouth—but he couldn’t see any reason, at present, why he shouldn’t try to prolong the present relationship indefinitely.
It seemed to Steve, moreover, that Janine was thinking along much the same lines. They’d already reached the stage in the relationship in which she felt entitled to be curious about how he spent the time he wasn’t spending with her, and what sort of things he considered adequate excuses for delaying their meetings. She’d accepted that cricket matches sometimes dragged on, so that he couldn’t always be on time for Saturday night dates, and understood that he sometimes felt the need to spend whole evenings alone with his PC, checking the videos on YouTube, playing poker, listening to his music or just surfing. She showed every sign of being adaptable to his habit and hobbies, and no sign of turning into a nag—although he knew that early appearances could sometimes be deceptive in the latter respect.
When he turned up half an hour late to meet her at the wine bar, after the appointment with Sylvia at which he’d come up with the “abduction experience”, Janine had the ideal excuse for demanding an adequate explanation and not being put off by any casual evasion, but she didn’t press as hard as a committed nag would have done.
“So you’ve been seeing another woman, “she said, lightly, when he returned from the bar with two large glasses of house red and explained that Rhodri Jenkins had sent him to a hypnotherapist, in order that he might learn to relax, and thus be better able to cope with the stresses and strains of classroom life.
“She’s older than my mother,” Steve told her, “and not so good-looking.” Janine had met Steve’s mother, and had complimented her by saying that it was obvious where Steve got his looks from. Steve’s mother, in consequence, thought that Janine was a “very nice girl—better than you deserve”.
“Did she hypnotize you, then?” Janine asked.
“Of course—that’s what I went for. It’s not like stage hypnotism, though, or old movies with swinging watches and rotating spirals. You don’t really go into a trance. She’d told me that I ought to make a CD in my computer that will take me through the stages of relaxation in the comfort of my own home. Do you want eat here, or shall we go on somewhere else?”
“Might as well stay here,” she said. “I know it’s only Tuesday, but I’m already feeling a touch of end-of-the week apathy. Can I get a copy—of your CD, I mean? Then we could both learn to relax.”
“I think it needs to be personalized. Besides which, you’re relaxed enough already. I don’t know how you do it, since you’re dealing with members of the public all day, but you seem perfectly able to shrug it off even when someone does have a go at you.”
Janine shrugged, as if to demonstrate how it was done. “Shit happens,” she said, in an insouciant one. “You have to take things in your stride. You get upset for a moment, then you wind down.”
“I find it much more difficult than that,” Steve admitted. “Things get to me, I guess, and gnaw away at me. I worry.
“I’ve noticed—but I didn’t think it was so bad that you’d have to seek professional help. Is there anything more I should know? If you’ve got dark secrets, I’d rather know about them sooner than later.”
Steve contemplated brushing the question off with a flippant remark, but he found himself in the unaccustomed position of not wanting to tell his girl-friend an outright lie—not, at any rate, an unnecessary outright lie.
“Stress can really take its toll on teachers,” he said, earnestly. “It’s not a trivial matter. You’re fortunate to have a natural resistance to that sort of thing.”
“Oh, it’s not natural,” she said. “I got a lot of practice at home. My mother got upset over the slightest thing—so much so that she was almost impossible to live with. She loved me, I suppose, but I was such a worry to her that the love never got a look in—and Dad just armored himself by withdrawing into his obsessions. I’d never have believed that a man could treat a pub quiz like an Olympic final if I hadn’t seen him in obsessive action. I just went the opposite way. Shit happens—that’s my motto. Accept it and move on. That’s easy to say, mind, while I’m not put under too much pressure. I suspect that I’ve got my breaking point. Is it really so difficult to deal with stroppy children?”
“The A level groups aren’t so bad,” Steve said, “but the year elevens are awful. Most of them will reach the age of consent during the year. Combined with the fact that they’ll be sitting their GCSEs next May, that turns the classroom into a witches’ cauldron of seething hormones, fear of being left out, terror of not being in with the crowd, anxiety about not being able to cut it…you must remember the recipe from your own schooldays.”
“Sure,” Janine said. “Alison, Milly and I were witches all right, cackling away like the best of them. Gave our teachers hell, I suppose, although we didn’t think of their poor nerves at the time—or, if we did, only about how better to get on them in the hope of inducing a comprehensive breakdown. Okay, I take it back—stroppy adolescents probably are far worse than people complaining about their holidays from hell and whining about the inadequacy of the travel insurance they never wanted to buy. Can your hypnotherapist and your do-it-yourself relaxation CD take care of that, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Can’t hurt, at any rate. Shall I place our orders at the bar? What do you want?”
There must have been something in Steve’s tone that he hadn’t intentionally incorporated into it, because Janine picked up on the fact that there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” she said, after she’d made her selection from the menu. “Either that, or there’s some other reason you went to the therapist. You don’t have to tell me, of course—but I really would prefer it if I didn’t discover some dark secret six months into our relationship that you could have come clean about much sooner. That wouldn’t be nice.”
Steve could have fenced that off by saying that six months was a long time, relationship-wise, and that maybe she was being over-optimistic, but he knew that wasn’t the right thing to do, in the circumstances. “I have a phobia,” he said, reluctantly, when he returned from the bar clutching a numbered ticket “I don’t think Sylvia will be able to do much about that, though, except maybe ameliorate the symptoms. Then, in the faint hope of deflecting the obvious question, he added: “She wanted to try regression, and persuaded me to agree, but it turned into a farce. I didn’t even get back to my childhood. I only remembered some stupid sci-fi nightmare. Sylvia took it seriously, though—she tried to persuade me to go to some support group for nutcases. Would you believe that there’s actually a group called Alien Abductees Anonymous, and that they have a branch in Wiltshire?”
Janine astonished him by saying: “Oh, I know all about that. My friend Milly goes regularly—she’s been trying to persuade Alison and me to go with her for ages. They meet over in East Grimstead—she must be serious about it, because she takes the bus.”
Steve seized upon the unexpected opportunity to draw the conversation into what seemed to be safer waters. “Your friend Milly thinks she’s been abducted by aliens?” he queried. “When? What happened to her?”
“Oh, she’s never confided in me or Alison,” Janine said, with a slight hint of bitterness. “I don’t even know whether she’s ever told her story to the group. She says there’s no pressure on people to talk about their experiences if they don’t want to, but that it helps just to listen. If you ask me, she just got addicted to support groups after the other one. That one cured her, after a fashion, so she’s being more careful this time—eking it out, so to speak.”
“What other one?” Steve asked, glad for he opportunity to take control of the conversational tempo. Even though he didn’t know Milly, he was fully entitled to ask about her, because Janine had brought the subject up and left the information she’d supplied tantalizingly incomplete.
“It was a group for people with Eating Disorders.”
“You mean she’s fat—or was.”
“No, the opposite. When we were at school she got very thin after GCSEs. She used to make herself sick after eating—even after school lunches. Mind you, that wasn’t so very unusual once we got to year eleven. Alison and I were never in the sick club, but there was quite a clique. The pressure of the A levels that we never got around to taking, I suppose. We could have—we were all clever enough, Ali especially, but none of us wanted to. Milly’s bulimia just gave us one more reason for resolving to get out. She never committed herself fully to the clique, mercifully; Ali and I remained her crucial connection to normality. As I said, she’s cured now, and had to move on from the Eating Disorders group. She eats normally, and works out a quite a bit at the police gym. Did you know that traffic wardens are allowed to use the police gym? She gets preferential treatment housing-wise as well—a special flat for key workers, Ali’s got one too, but travel agents don’t qualify.”
“Teachers do,” Steve said, “but I prefer my own place—I like older houses. So, is Milly contentedly plump now?”
“No. She’s bigger than me—nearly as tall as you, I suppose—so she can carry more weight that I can without looking fleshy. Actually, she looks very good—the broad shoulders and big bones give her an athletic look. Beside her, I look like a fragile doll. She needs that sort of appearance, mind—being a traffic warden’s definitely a high stress job. Victims of road rage are even worse than rebellious pheromone-crazed adolescents. Should I recommend your hypnotherapist to her, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Sylvia’s a fan of AlAbAn, at any rate. She’d approve of Milly going, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t disapprove,” Janine said. “I just prefer conventional girls’ nights out to support groups.”
“You get free tea and biscuits, so I’m told,” Steve rambled on, “although I don’t suppose that’s much of an attraction, if she’s paranoid about what she eats.”
“She’s not, any more,” Janine reminded him. “She’d really appreciate it if we gave her a lift, mind. The bus service is terrible. She doesn’t drive herself, you see—doesn’t think it’s becoming for a traffic warden to fraternize with the enemy.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking of going,” Steve said. “I know perfectly well that I haven’t really been abducted by aliens. The ones who think they have wouldn’t want someone like me there, sticking my skeptical oar in. Your Milly probably wouldn’t like it either. Hang on—that’s our number. Back in a sec.”
When he came back with the two plates and the cutlery, Janine was quick to take up the thread of the conversation. “They don’t mind skeptics, apparently,” she said. “According to Milly, they’re very tolerant—she says it’s a very supportive support group—much more so than the Eating Disorder group, which tended to be much stricter and more censorious. There are rules, though, that everyone has to follow. I don’t think you’re allowed to accuse the other members of the group of being deluded or telling lies. I think we should go, though; it might be fun.”
Steve gathered that Janine was at least slightly curious about her friend’s involvement with AlAbAn, and was not ungrateful for an excuse to relent in her refusal to attend the meetings. Steve wasn’t so sure that Milly would be pleased about it, but when Janine insisted on ringing Milly’s mobile there and then, without even finishing her food, she carried through her mission with irresistible aplomb.
“That’s settled, then” Janine said, as she put her phone back in her bag. “You’d better pick me up first, between six-thirty and six forty-five. I said we’d get to her before seven. The meeting starts at seven-thirty, but they like people to be prompt.”
“Right,” said Steve, uncertain whether to be mildly annoyed because the decision had been take out of his hands or mildly pleased because Janine seemed to have forgotten all about his reasons for seeking hypnotherapeutic assistance. “I guess that’s a date, then.”
The very concept of a “support group” had always sent a vague shiver through Steve’s body, and the notion that someone like him might be in need of an institution like AlAbAn was slightly horrifying. Under the circumstances, though, he was able to justify his impending attendance at the AlAbAn meeting as a means by which Janine could introduce him to one of her closest friends, and thus move their relationship forward by one more small but vital step.
As Janine had mentioned. Milly lived in one of the brand new flats that had been built near the city centre, in one of the smaller ones reserved for occupancy by “key workers”. It was a nice flat, with central heating—which Steve’s flat didn’t have, being reliant on an old-fashioned gas fire for winter heat—but it was rather tiny. Milly was, indeed, built on a more generous scale than Janine, but she was wearing flat heels, so she was still a comfortable inch shorter than Steve. She wasn’t as exquisitely beautiful as Janine, but the relative boldness of her features was matched by a boldness of attitude and manner that chimed in perfectly with the style of her looks. Steve wouldn’t have cast her as Helen of Troy—although he could see Janine in that role—but he reckoned that she would have made a strikingly imperious and satisfyingly voluptuous Cleopatra. She greeted Steve warmly, telling him that she’d heard a lot about him.
“All good, I hope,” Steve said, lazily falling back on the conventional cliché rather than trying to improvise something wittier.
“Oh yes,” Milly said. “Quite an ad, really—but Jan’s always polite about her boy-friends. Ali’s the one who always runs them down. Jan always thinks she might have got hold of a good one at last—but in your case, she’s certainly not mistaken about your boy-band looks. You’d make a very handsome couple if you weren’t so much taller than she is.”
“Don’t mind Milly,” Janine put in. “She’s a past master of the back-handed compliment. It’s me she’s insulting, in what she thinks is a subtle fashion, not you.”
“I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of delicacy as well as beauty,” Steve said, ostensibly to Milly. “I like Janine’s perfect economy of form as much as I like her perfect facial symmetry. She’s practically my ideal.”
“Oh dear,” Milly said. “Practically your ideal. And Jan thinks I’m one for back-handed compliments. You’ll have to watch out for that margin, Jan—the next thing you know, he’ll be referring to your almost perfect economy of form and your almost perfect facial symmetry, and it’ll all be downhill from then on. I’m all ready—we can go.”
Fortunately, Milly didn’t have time to quiz Steve about why he was going to the AlAbAn meeting during the journey to East Grimstead, because she was too eager to instruct both her companions in the nature and etiquette of the group. “They’re not at all doctrinaire,” she told them, wriggling slightly to settle her backside more comfortably into the rear seat of Steve’s Citroen. “It’s not in the least unusual for the stories they tell to be wildly different, even mutually contradictory, but everyone’s supposed to be supportive, no matter what improbabilities they’re faced with, and everyone is. You mustn’t challenge anything anyone says, even if you think you’ve found some crucial logical flaw or elementary violation of the laws of physics. It’s taken for granted that everyone’s experience is valid, no matter how peculiar it might be, and that everyone’s equally deserving of trust and moral support. If you listen quietly for two or three meetings, you’ll find yourselves slipping into it very easily.
“Amelia, the hostess, is one of those incredibly polite and pleasant old dears that everyone wishes they had for a granny, and Walter, the chairman, has a remarkable way with people. If anyone steps out of line, he just eases them back into it with the utmost gentleness. I never knew anyone so good at compelling politeness. He’d probably have been the greatest traffic warden the world has ever seen, instantly quelling the worst road rage with a slight frown and a few soothing words, but I’m not absolutely certain what he actually did before he retired—something to do with insurance, I think. You’ll find that a lot of the crowd are pretty old, although all age-groups are fairly represented.
“Walter and Amelia have been running the group for more than forty years, since the 1960s—although it wasn’t always called AlAbAn. Walter reckons that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, but that the aliens have some kind of device for blanking out the memories. He thinks that the people who remember what happened are a tiny minority, who often need help to bring the buried memories back to the surface as well as help in coming to terms with them, but he also thinks they’re enormously privileged, because they obtain glimpses of possibilities far beyond those available to our narrow lives. He considers AlAbAn members the most privileged of all, because they have the chance to see how their glimpses fit in with others. Not that there’s any overall pattern that I can see, although you often catch echoes of one person’s story in another.”
This last item of news didn’t surprise Steve in the least. He figured that the real purpose of the group, for most of its members, must be to assist in the elaboration of individual confabulations. People went there, he assumed, in order to plagiarize bits of other people’s delusions to make their own more detailed, and perhaps more satisfactory. He hoped that by forewarning himself of this fact he might forearm himself against any similar effect, although he didn’t think that it would do him any great harm to start dreaming about other people’s supposed alien abductions, or even projecting himself into such dreams, provided that he remained fully conscious of the fact that dreams were what they were. He was confident, as a man of science—even the second-rate kind who taught science to school kids rather than actually doing it—that he could resist the temptation to start believing in nonsense simply because it was sometimes spouted by people who had the gift of the gab, capable of sweetening the tempers of road hogs and selling ice to Eskimos.
Before picking Milly up, Steve had vaguely assumed that the AlAbAn group would meet in East Grimstead’s village hall, but by the time they had passed through West Grimstead Milly had disabused him of that notion and had given him fair warning that the front room of Amelia Rockham’s so-called cottage could get a little crowded.
Steve was surprised to find, when he, Janine and Milly arrived, that there were already twenty-five people gathered, most of them perched on folding chairs with no space to stretch their legs. There were more than enough tea-cups to go round, though; Mrs. Rockham was obviously used to catering for such numbers. She greeted the newcomers warmly, and told them not to be shy about grabbing their fair share of the biscuits, because no one else would be.
When Milly introduced Janine and Steve to the chairperson, Walter Wainwright—who was even older than Mrs. Rockham—Steve felt vindicated in his anticipations, because the old man seemed every inch a slick salesman, of the type who could easily transfer skills learned flogging second-hand cars or dodgy stocks and shares to the context of a church, a cult or a support group. Walter hardly glanced at him, though, before greeting Janine much more warmly, claiming to know her parents quite well. Steve immediately added “old lech” to the list of pre-prepared insults he had organized, but the conversation was brief because the old man had other people clamoring for his attention and there were other newcomers to be introduced to him.
Milly obviously had a seat reserved for her by the other regulars—an old armchair that had seen better days, and she only paused briefly before taking it, making an apologetic gesture to Janine because the folding seats to either side of it were already occupied. Janine nodded to indicate her appreciation of the situation, and drew Steve across the room so that they could sit together, almost directly opposite Milly’s position, on a settee that was even older than the armchair. It was upholstered in a synthetic fabric whose brief fashionability had evaporated before Steve was out of short pants. “It’s called Naugahyde,” he whispered to Janine. “My parents had one once. So sad.”
He looked around then, and tried to gauge the composition of the audience. He, Janine and Milly were probably the youngest people in the room, although there was one other man and one other woman who were probably under thirty, There were half a dozen people apparently in their thirties and half a dozen apparently in their forties, but the remainder were over fifty, and at least ten must have been senior citizens. There were more men than women, although not so many more as to form an overpowering majority. Steve noted, though, that apart from himself and Janine there were only two obvious couples in the assembly; he suspected that the proportion of widows, widowers and divorced people in the group might be substantially higher than was manifest in the population of Wiltshire as a whole.
There was no round of general introductions when the meeting got under way, and no minutes to be read. Walter Wainwright’s welcome seemed to Steve to be more like a warm-up man’s patter than a preamble to the kind of meeting that he had to attend at school once a week or thereabouts, but he wasn’t displeased by that. The chairman ran briskly through the rules that Milly had already summarized, but didn’t labor the key points; when he asked whether anyone wanted to speak, Steve dutifully stared at his shoes, but the precaution was unnecessary. One of the non-debutant members seemed only too eager to introduce himself—as “Jim”—and to volunteer to tell his tale.
Jim, it seemed, had come all the way from Ringwood to attend the last few meetings, because Dorset apparently didn’t yet have its own branch of AlAbAn. He gave the impression that he wouldn’t be back once he’d got his story off his chest, although that obviously wasn’t typical, given the size of his audience and the attentiveness of its members.
Steve tensed himself for a painful experience. Within a very few minutes, though, he had to admit to himself that Jim’s story wasn’t at all what he’d expected or feared. It wasn’t an account of alien abduction at all, although Steve could see why the guy had brought the story to AlAbAn in search of a sympathetic hearing rather than broadcasting it to the regulars in his local.
