“That’s all good,” the therapist assured him. “I’m sure you’ll see the effects soon. Have you had any further thoughts about attempting another regression?”
“I’m not sure there’ll be any need,” he said. “I think I might be able to make more progress consciously. The AlAbAn members may be a little bit crazy, but it might turn out to be a constructive kind of craziness. I’ve only heard one report so far, and that one didn’t even get as far as outer space, but it’s already triggered some ideas.”
“Have you recovered any more of your own experience?”
“Not really,” Steve admitted. “I haven’t had any recurrence of the nightmare itself—so far as I can remember—but the imagery does keep on niggling at my mind. I think I prefer trying to deal with it while I’m fully conscious, with the aid of a scientific outlook, rather than having it seize me by the throat while I’m off guard.”
“Isn’t that just beating around the bush?” Sylvia asked him. “You can think of any number of excuses for not trying to get to grips with it, but there’s no substitute for head-on confrontation.”
“I don’t think head-on confrontation is the best way to go,” Steve said. “Some things are best approached by stealth, and a scientific attitude is never a bad thing. I need time to practice the relaxation techniques, and to bring them to bear on all the different aspects of my life in which they might be useful. This might be one race that slow and steady really can win.
“If that’s the way you want to do it, Steve,” Sylvia said, blandly, “that’s fine. I can’t talk about my other clients, as you know, but you wouldn’t be the first who wanted to talk all around his problem as a way of not facing up to it. You know, don’t you, how many psychotherapists it takes to change a light-bulb.”
“Yes I do,” Steve said. “Only one—and pretty much any one will do—but the light-bulb has to want to be changed.”
“Do you want to be changed, Steve?” the therapist followed up, relentlessly.
“My filament hasn’t gone yet,” Steve told her. “I know you’re used to working with the traditional brand of light-bulb they still sell in Sainsbury’s, but I’m the new sort—the low-energy, long-life, curled-up-radiant-tube sort. I’m not the reckless type, in spite of what Rhodri Jenkins may have told you about my love life.”
“I don’t talk to other clients about you, either,” Sylvia told him.
“Of course not,” Steve said, “but that doesn’t prevent your clients from talking about each other, does it? I bet he’s mentioned me to you, since he found out I took his advice—-just by way of being helpful, of course. You might not be an orthodox Freudian, but he is, at least in the sense that he thinks that sex is the root of all psychological problems. He thinks I’m a Don Juan because I’ve had four of my female colleagues in the last two years, while he’s only had half a dozen of them in twenty, despite being made deputy head—and most of them were probably married ones bored enough to bonk anyone who could make them feel more attractive than a soggy chip. Actually, my attitude to sex couldn’t be healthier, and I’m perfectly happy with my current girl-friend. That has nothing at all to do with my phobias, or my classroom-induced stress.”
“Are you familiar with the quotation, ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks’?” Sylvia asked him.
“It’s from Hamlet,” Steve said, relieved to be able to retain the intellectual high ground. “Shakespeare’s hymn of praise to methodical madness. I was just trying to make the point that my phobias aren’t symptomatic of some sexual hang-up, in spite of what you might suspect or Rhodri might have hinted to you.”
“Thanks for sharing that with me,” Sylvia said. “You’ll forgive me, I suppose, if I reserve my judgment until we can resume our attempts to get to the bottom of the problem.”
“It’s possible, isn’t it,” Steve said, “that some problems don’t actually have bottoms—that they’re just what they seem to be, and nothing more? And it’s possible, too, that some problems are better solved by whittling away patiently, rather than attempting to blast them open with dynamite?”
“Quite possible,” Sylvia conceded. “But I wouldn’t be doing my job, would I, if I didn’t explore all the possibilities available to us?”
* * * *
Steve and Janine went to the first meeting of the survival course on the day after Steve’s second session with Sylvia Joyce, but it turned out to be a formularistic introduction session, with the standard icebreakers that now seemed to be universally accepted as “best practice” by teachers of every sort, although Steve loathed them. The icebreakers were followed by a long pep talk on the necessity of self-sufficiency in a fast-changing world.
On the Thursday night Janine went out with Milly and Alison, but Steve didn’t mind being deserted, because it gave him a chance to play poker on-line. He played for four hours, ending up thirty pounds down—an unusually bad result. He always played in low-stakes games that were too trivial to attract predatory sharks, and was usually able to come out ahead, but the competition had been atypically disciplined and the cards he’d been dealt had been profoundly unexciting.
On Friday he and Janine met up at the wine bar again to celebrate the beginning of the weekend.
“Did you have a good time last night?” he asked.
“Great,” she said. “And before you ask, we hardly talked about you at all. Milly told Alison how extremely good-looking you were, and that you were one more reason why she ought to start coming to AlAbAn meetings with us, but Ali didn’t seem impressed.”
“Her description obviously didn’t do me justice,” Steve observed. “I can’t imagine why Alison wouldn’t be prepared to go to the ends of the earth just to get a glimpse of me, if my magnificence had been properly explained. You must have run me down, so as to keep the opposition to a minimum.”
“It was me who suggested that we give Milly a lift to AlAbAn, remember?” Janine said. “I’d hardly have done that if I were afraid of opposition. Don’t worry—I’m sure you’ll meet all my friends eventually. You haven’t introduced me to any of yours yet.”
“They’re all cricketers and schoolteachers,” Steve said. “You’d find them incredibly boring. Besides which, I’m not as brave as you—I wouldn’t take the risk of introducing a girl as stunningly beautiful as you to any of my male friends. I may be a young Adonis—I’m quoting my deputy head there, so it must be true—but I’m too good a poker player to take that sort of reckless risk.”
“They’d probably find me boring,” Janine said. “I’m just a travel agent. I’m getting to the age now when I wish I’d tried a bit harder at school—sad, isn’t it? Milly was saying the same thing last night—she’s beginning to get a sense of unfulfilled potential. She never used to crack a book when we were at school, but she reads a lot nowadays. I told her that she ought to go to the tech and do A levels in the evenings. She might, if Ali or I would go with her—but Ali’s got a career path of sorts already mapped out for her in local government, and I’d be better off doing an in-house management training course. I’ve been thinking of putting in for one.”
“Why not?” Steve said. “Go for it. Might as well take advantage of any opportunities that are going.”
“Milly and Alison said the same. None of us is likely to get on to the property ladder any time soon unless we can bump our salaries up, even if we find a suitable partner.”
Steve was well aware of the problems of getting on to the property ladder, even if one could find a suitable partner with whom to bear the burden of a mortgage , but he didn’t want to start discussing his relationship with Janine in terms like that just yet. “Milly gave me the impression that your girls’ nights out were far too lewd for tender ears like mine,” he said. “It’s a bit disappointing to discover that you spend your time comparing salaries and promotion prospects.”
“Oh, we did the X-rated stuff too—not me, I hasten to add. They wanted all the lurid details, of course, but I maintained a diplomatic silence
. Ali’s the one who usually provides that sort of entertainment, although Milly’s had her moments. Don’t let your imagination run riot, though...on second thoughts, maybe I should have let you carry on thinking that it was all shop talk. What do you talk about when you go out boozing after your cricket matches?”
“We talk about all the reasons why the umpire’s decision to give us out LBW was an absolute atrocity, how many times we nearly found the edge while bowling but didn’t quite, how many times we thought about hooking their fast bowler for six while batting, but decided to duck instead, and whether the Pakistanis really were guilty of ball-tampering in the final test. It’s riveting stuff, at least as interesting as the average teachers’ drinking session, when everyone complains at great length about the iniquities of CPD and how much we all hate the beginning of term—that’s why I always sneak off early to get together with you, if I can.”
“Well, I’m glad I can attract you away from such strong competition,” she said. “That makes me feel really good.”
Unfortunately, that Saturday’s game was an away fixture, and by the time Steve got back to Salisbury Janine was beginning to wonder, audibly, whether she really wanted to spend as much time hanging around waiting for him to favor her with his belated presence. He assured her that winter was not far off now that Autumn had begun, and that the season would be over soon enough. They patched things up on the Sunday, but they didn’t meet up again until Wednesday, when the survival course made little progress, being mostly concerned with nutrition—highlighting the deficiency diseases that might result from inadequate vitamin provision—and the elements of paramedical improvisation, which Steve had previously thought of as “first aid”.
On Thursday, Steve picked Janine and Milly up in quick succession on the way to the AlAbAn meeting. Milly seemed to be in a much more buoyant and frivolous mood than she had been on the previous occasion, presumably because Steve was no longer an unknown quantity and she no longer felt the need to be wary of him. She asked how their survival course was going in a flirtatious manner, and Janine countered by asking Milly, in a much more earnest tone, whether she’d thought any more about going to A level evening classes.
“I don’t know,” Milly said, dubiously. “I don’t really rate the tech, you know. I did a martial arts course last year, remember, and I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to learn to hurt people, but it was more about learning how not to hurt people.”
“A levels aren’t quite the same thing, are they?” Janine said. “You get a much better class of homework.”
“You’re only saying that because you were too scared to let me practice on you.” Milly retorted. “Ali let me throw her—mind you, she’s not much bigger than you are, so it wasn’t hard. If you’d been going out with Steve then I could have borrowed him, and found out whether big people really do fall harder.”
“I’m not exactly a rugby player,” Steve pointed out. “You’d be taller than me if you wore high heels.”
“I think the answer I was looking for,” Milly said, “was: You‘re welcome to throw me any time, darling.” She giggled as she said it, revealing that she had a rather infectious laugh
“That might have been the answer you were looking for, darling,” Janine said, stifling the infection that made her want to giggle in her turn, “but if you’d got it, you’d both have been in trouble. You’d do better to set your eyes on Walter Wainwright, Milly—an affair with an older man would do you good, or at least calm you down.”
“I wouldn’t dare,” Milly said, breezily. “Amelia looks innocent and harmless, but so did Lucrezia Borgia.”
“According to the head of history at school, Lucrezia Borgia was much maligned,” Steve put in. “She really was sweet and innocent, but horribly exploited by her relatives and direly besmirched by historians.”
“Is the head of history one of the ones you seduced?” Milly asked, clinging insistently to her flirtatious vein. “Jan told me all about your checkered past.”
“Good god, no,” Steve said. “And it’s really not that checkered.”
“Are you going to tell, your story tonight, Mil?” Janine asked— a question that immediately dampened the mood. Milly took some time before muttering a denial. Steve glanced sideways, attempting to judge whether the move had been deliberate, but Janine wouldn’t meet his eye.
They got to the meeting a little earlier than they had the previous week, although Steve wasn’t consciously aware of having pressed the accelerator any more firmly, and had time to watch the greater number of the faithful arrive. Janine drew Milly aside when they’d collected their cups of tea, so Steve slipped into scientific observer mode and studied the AlAbAn regulars—especially Walter Wainwright, who was busy greeting people as they came in. After watching him for a few minutes Steve decided that his initial judgment had been a little hard on Walter Wainwright, even if he did turn out to be an ex-Man from the Pru. On observing him more intently, Steve decided that Walter was neither as much of a lech nor as much of a con man as he’d first elected to believe. Beyond the insistent amiability and quasi-paternal attitude there was an aura of authority and competence, and there was a genuine warmth in the way he addressed people.
Walter Wainwright must have observed Steve observing him, because he came over just as Janine returned from her intimate chat with Milly. “It’s good lo see you again, Steve,” he said. “I’m glad you decided to return—I’m always disappointed when people don’t give us a second chance. It’s good to see you too, Janine. I saw your parents on Saturday, and mentioned that I’d seen you. I hope I didn’t put my foot in it—they seemed rather surprised that you’d been to an AlAbAn meeting.”
“I hadn’t had a chance to mention it to them myself,” Janine said, vaguely. “I really must give them a ring some time soon— thanks for reminding me.”
Steve knew that Janine was rather dilatory in the matter of keeping in touch with her parents, although he wasn’t sure exactly why. On the one occasion when she’d taken him to meet them, on a Sunday when he didn’t have a game, they’d all gone to the local pub for lunch. It had seemed to him to be a fairly comfortable experience, as such experiences went, but Janine had been very glad when it was over. Steve had remarked that Janine and her parents didn’t see eye-to-eye on a good may issues, especially the propriety of working as an “office skivvy” for Thomas Cook’s, but they hadn’t seemed to be any harder on her than the average concerned parent Obviously, they’d expected better of her, and would presumably have been more content if she’d had a job more akin to Steve’s, but he’d seen far worse performances at every parents’ evening he’d ever been forced to attend.
“Is there anything you’d like me to say to them if I see them this weekend, my dear?” Walter said, radiating concern, “or anything you’d particularly like me not to say.”
“Nothing at all,” Janine said, with a furtive smile. Steve took this to mean that she was perfectly prepared to let her parents suspect that she might think she’d been abducted by aliens. From her point of view, he supposed, that was probably an alternative preferable to letting them believe that she was in a steady relationship with a man who thought that he’d been abducted by aliens
Steve couldn’t resist saying: “Do Janine’s parents know that you believe that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, Mr. Wainwright?”
“Call me Walter, Steve,” the old man replied. “And yes, of course they do. I don’t hide my opinions. It wouldn’t do me any good if I tried—it would only lead to people in the pub pointing at me slyly and whispering: That’s nutty old Walter Wainwright—he thinks that everybody in the world’s been abducted by aliens. It’s better to be open about such things, don’t you think?”
“I guess so,” Steve agreed, wondering whether the old man was hinting that he ought to be a bit more open about things, even though he couldn’t possibly know how open Steve was or wasn’t.
“Friends of Milly’s are particularly welcome here,” Wa
lter added. “We’re all very fond of Milly.”
“She’s been my best friend for years,” Janine said. “This is the one thing we haven’t shared, until now. She’s never told me what happened to her, though.”
“It often takes time,” Walter said. “We all had to wait until we were ready, and we understand perfectly why it takes some people longer to reach that point than others. You must both take all the time you need. Excuse me, please.” Walter allowed himself to be drawn away by Amelia Rockham.
Janine was still smiling, and Steve could see that she had no intention of explaining to Walter that she was only here to keep Steve company.
“You want your parents to worry about you, don’t you?” he said.
“You’re the one who thinks that a little mystery spices up a relationship,” she retorted. “Let’s sit down—we’re about to start.”
They took their places on the Naugahyde settee, which was already beginning to feel like “their” seat. When the preliminaries were over and newcomers had been duly advised of the rules, Walter invited “Mary”—a middle-aged and very well-furnished woman, who gave the impression that she had certainly never suffered from an eating disorder of the sort that had once afflicted poor Milly—to tell the story of an encounter she had had some twenty-five years before, in 1981. The prospect did not seem overly exciting, at first— but Steve found out soon enough that appearances could be quite deceptive.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 7