Janine had wept a few discreet tears at the spectacle of Mary’s distress, although she’d tried to wipe them away discreetly with her sleeve, but Milly hadn’t. Steve wasn’t surprised by that—not because he had assumed that Milly’s relative physical fortitude was reflected emotionally, but simply because Milly was an old AlAbAn hand. From her viewpoint, Mary’s story must the thirtieth or fortieth in line rather than the second, and must have contained enough familiar details—even if they were purely coincidental ones—to make parts of it seem stale.
Amelia Rockham was the real heroine of the evening, though, in Steve’s view. She had been able to comfort Mary, and had even persuaded her to listen to a few spoken responses. Needless to say, no one asked any questions. The only people who spoke offered warmly sympathetic comments, as they were supposed to do. Neither Janine nor Milly was among them, but Steve saw Milly nodding and murmuring in the general chorus, as was apparently her wont. When they left the cottage, though, Milly seemed more subdued than she had been on the outward journey, and she made no further attempts to flirt with Steve.
“I suspect that AlAbAn meetings must proceed rather differently in the branches based in London, Birmingham and Manchester,” Steve said, pensively, as he waited for two other cars to pass before easing himself out into the unexpectedly busy traffic. “Urban stroppiness must surely override the genteel etiquette of the shires, and turn the meetings into slanging matches. Wiltshire isn’t even your common-or-garden shire, like Hampshire or Hertfordshire, or all the other places where hurricanes hardly ever happen and everybody knows the price of elderberry wine. It’s a shire squared, like dear old Dorset: quaintness run riot. It would be the perfect home for an organization like AlAbAn, even if it weren’t such an intense focal point of UFO activity.”
“That must help, though,” said Janine. “If Walter’s right, and everyone in the world has been abducted by aliens at least once, so that the victims in need of support are merely the unlucky few whose memory-wipes have failed, it’s hardly surprising that Wiltshire had more than its fair share of rememberers. There’s so much talk of UFOs hereabouts, even nowadays—so many props and prompts to struggling and faltering memories.”
“And it’s hardly surprising, either, that the Wiltshire rememberers should include veterans like Amelia Rockham and Walter Wainwright,” Steve added. “They must have been way ahead of the wave of fashionability if they remembered their own abductions way back in the fifties. That was long before everybody else began to get in on the act and forging crop-circles became a popular summer pastime. They’re entitled to get a little merry on the success of their enterprise.”
Milly listened to this exchange from the back seat, but didn’t join in. It wasn’t until Janine turned round and began chatting about the possibility of another night out with Alison that Milly broke her silence, and not until Janine asked her what kind of week she’d had that she found an occasion to deploy her infectious laugh, in an anecdote about road rage on the school run.
“You can come with us to the Chinese if you like, Mil,” Janine said, as they came back into the city. “I’m sure Steve wouldn’t mind driving you home, later.”
“No, that’s all right,” Milly said. “Drop me off first and have yourselves a ball.”
Steve stopped the car to let Milly out, and turned his head to let her kiss him on the cheek before she got out. She kissed Janine, too, saying: “Same time on the twenty-eighth?”
“Absolutely,” Steve said.
When Milly was safely inside, Steve turned to Janine and said: “You actually warned her off, didn’t you? Just because she made that remark about throwing her any time?”
“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Janine retorted. “Do you really think that I’m so desperate to hang on to you that I’d read the riot act to anyone who invited you to call her darling?”
“I’d like to think so,” Steve said, as he steered the car in the direction of Janine’s flat and the nearby Chinese take-away.
“Well, I didn’t. I think it was Mary’s story that cooled her down. She’s always been that way—up one minute, down the next. It gave me a shiver or two, although it certainly made me grateful for modern hygiene. Thank God there’s no possibility of my entertaining the ancestors of countless potential sentient races in the Second and Third Arthropodan Eras. Imagine if you caught head-lice from one of your filthy kids, and had to use that disgusting medicated shampoo, wondering whether every vigorous scrub might be exterminating potential ancestors of sentient species to come. Every swipe of the nit-comb might be changing future history.”
“My kids aren’t any dirtier, on average, than your customers,” Steve said, although he wasn’t usually in the habit of defending his charges. “Schools only suffer from epidemic outbreaks because there are so many people gathered together in one place. Anyway, we needn’t think of it in terms of exterminating potential ancestors. We could take pride in being the instigators of such a rigorous selective regime, hastening the evolution of insect-kind. We might be making a small but crucial contribution to their eventual rise to sentient intelligence. One of those stinky scrubs or deft flicks of the nit-comb might be selecting out the Mitochondrial Eve of future Arthropodan culture and civilization.”
“And that would be something to take pride in?” she said.
“Why not?”
“As opposed, say, to scrubbing just a little bit harder, wiping out the ultimate ancestor of arthropodan civilization, and paving the way for a new evolution of something much more like us instead?”
“Or something even less like us, which not even a maternal Mary could learn to love?” Steve countered. “Changing history is a tricky business, especial when we can’t tell one louse from another, so we’ve no way of identifying the ones with potential. You have to remember, too, that head-lice aren’t the only kind we have. If I had to bet which kind would be most likely to give rise to intelligent offspring a couple of hundred million years in the future, I’d go for the crotch-crabs every time.”
“Now you’re being deliberately disgusting,” Janine said. “Unless, of course, you’re trying to be superior, because you know something I don’t. Will there be pubic lice in the story that you’re working your way up to telling?”
“If there are,” Steve assured her, “that’s a part of the dream I haven’t remembered yet. In the meantime, if ever I get an itch down there, I won’t hesitate for an instant before taking the cure, even if I might be exterminating the ancestors of a thousand potential sentient species. In matters of that sort, the principle of informed consent simply isn’t relevant.” He pulled on the handbrake by way of punctuation, and switched off the engine.
“What a busy life we’re beginning to lead,” Janine said, with a contrived sigh, once they had reached the Chinese and placed their order. “Survival studies on Wednesdays, victim support every second Thursday. When you throw in your Tuesday sessions with your psychotherapist, and all your staff meetings at school, you must be exhausted by Friday—and yet you still manage to lead me up the garden path every now and again.”
“Cricket keeps me fit,” Steve told her. “It’s a pity, in a way, that the school doesn’t have a team. If I could do a bit of coaching, Rhodri mightn’t be on at me so often to supervise computer club or run plagiarism checks on his wretched assessment projects. That’s the trouble with being young and computer literate—the old hands get you to do all their dirty work for them. Mercifully, it’s only the second week of term—that particular deluge doesn’t usually start until the end of October. On the other hand, it’s better than helping out with coaching rugby. Rhodri and Mrs. Jones the PE are welcome to that one.”
“She’s Welsh too, is she?”
“Her husband is. He was a rugby player in his time—built like an ox, although he’s running to fat now. She can hold her own in a scrum, mind. Do you know the old joke about nothing good ever coming out of Wales but rugby players and loose women?”
“
My wife’s Welsh—what position does she play? Yes, heard it a million times. Is that still going the grounds in the playground?”
“I doubt it. I try not to listen to playground talk—way too filthy for my tender ears.”
“Especially the bits about you, no doubt. It’s really quite decorous in Tom Cook’s, considering the reputation reps have. I thought of becoming a rep, you know, if only to give Mum and Dad heart attacks, but I’m too good on the computer. I’m going to put in for management training, though, given that you think it’s a good idea. It involves the occasional weekend course, but they’ll be child’s play compared with the survival course we’re planning to do in December. Nice seaside hotels or jaunts to London—you know the sort of thing.”
“Not really,” Steve admitted. “It’s been a while since I went as far as Bournemouth, and I don’t go to London at all if I can possibly help it.”
“Is it crowds you’re phobic about, then?” Janine said, striking so unexpectedly that she caught Steve completely off-guard.
“No,” he said, shortly.
“You’ll have to tell me eventually,” she said. “You do realize that—unless you’re planning to dump me if I get too close.”
“No,” Steve said, again, then had to add: “That’s no to the second part. I don’t plan to dump you. I know I’m going to have to let you in on it eventually—but give me time, okay? If I can just make a start on breaking the phobias down, it’ll be so much easier to confess to having them. Bear with me, will you?”
“Sure,” she said. “As Walter Wainwright says, it sometimes takes a while. I’ll be here when you get around to it, just as I’ll be here in a fortnight’s time, when you need your next dose of victim support. In fact, I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m beginning to understand how Milly got hooked—but I hope the next story has a little more zip in it.”
“So do I,” Steve said.
* * * *
The weekend went well—especially the Sunday, when Steve was able to enjoy a long and uncommonly productive bowling stint in the friendly, finishing up with four wickets, and then won forty-three pounds in a long poker session. He turned up at school the next morning in a state of absolute exhaustion, but the kids didn’t care and most of the staff still weren’t talking to him. Rhodri Jenkins made a muttered remark en passant about travel agents and marathons, but he was far too busy to stop and chat.
On the Wednesday, Steve and Janine went to the third seminar of the survival course, which mostly had to do with the necessities involved in procuring and using a supply of fresh water in the absence of any kind of tap-supply. Thirst, the course-leader alleged, might be the most urgent problem, but it wasn’t the only killer to be feared. His account of the possible and probable consequences of bad hygiene was suitably blood-curdling, although substantial compensation was offered in the practical part of the demonstration, which explained how to improvise a still.
Steve met Janine again on the Friday; they went to a comedy club in Swindon, where there was an open mike night. Steve preferred open mike nights to gigs featuring big names, partly because he was naturally antipathetic to TV-brokered celebrity and partly because it seemed so much more exciting when some youngster who was still only practicing turned out to be funny against all the odds.
There was no one particularly promising in the first batch of three, but Steve was still hopeful that the next batch might throw up a surprise or two. In fact, though, the surprise came earlier than that, during the break, while he was doing his best to enjoy a Red Bull because Janine didn’t approve of his having even one alcoholic drink when he was driving.
“I won’t be able to come out next Friday,” she said, “and I’ll have to miss Thursday’s meeting too. I booked on to a management training course yesterday, and the induction session’s next week. It’s a bit short notice, I know, but that’s the way we like to do things in the travel business—the last-minute deals are always the juiciest. I’ll be away from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.”
“Okay,” Steve said, heroically. “You have my full support in your bid for promotion, obviously. Does this mean that you’re now firmly committed to a career in travel and tourism?”
“I suppose it does,” she replied. “I only took the job as a fill-in, to begin with. I was desperate to leave home, and I needed an income to pay the rent on my flat while I looked around for something more suitable—but nothing more suitable ever landed in my lap, and I never really went out searching. Everybody my age seems to be permanently looking around for something more suitable—jobs, flats, partners, whatever but we rarely do much about it, except for scanning the job ads in the local freesheet, pausing to look in the occasional estate agent’s windows, or, in your case, staring at some other girl’s tits while you’re supposed to be listening to me.”
Steve immediately locked gazes with her again, although he’d actually been staring into empty space while he wondered exactly what significance he ought to attach to the fact that Janine had really decided to go for promotion, rather than just chatting about it. Did it mean, for instance, that she was thinking of moving her entire life forward a stage, making vague but highly symbolic preparations for saving up for a deposit on a house, with a view to eventually having a family?
“The travel business is as good as any other, I guess,” he said.
“Thomas Cook is a huge company,” she told him. “It offers a lot of scope to interested and willing employees.”
“Is that what it said in the ad for the course?”
“It’s in all the staff literature. Anyway, if I do eventually want to look around for something more suitable in time to come, it’ll be far easier to do that from half way up the ladder than the bottom rung. Any potential employer will want to know how I used the time spent in my previous post, and it’s no bad thing to have hard evidence of enterprise and ambition.”
“None at all,” Steve agreed. “Whether you stay with Cook’s or not, the course will do you good. You’re wasted on the front line. You’ve got the brains and the personality to do much better.”
“If not the tits,” she said, sarcastically, to register the fact that she could recognize idle flattery when it was presented to her on a plate.
“Management trainees in travel and tourism don’t need the same qualifications as models in lad’s mags,” he said, “but as it happens, there’s nothing wrong with your qualifications in any regard. Trust me, I’m....”
“A connoisseur of delicacy,” she finished for him. “Sometimes, I’m not so sure that’s as complimentary as you try to make it sound. I can be indelicate when I need to be, and I’m certainly not made of porcelain. Anyhow, I’m sorry that I’ll have to miss AlAbAn and Friday night. It can’t be helped.”
“I’ll probably give AlAbAn a miss too,” Steve said. “A couple of quiet nights in will give me a chance to catch up with the kids’ course-work. I certainly won’t be shedding any tears when GCSEs and A levels go back to all-exam assessment. In the meantime, I’d be happier if my lot plagiarized far more of their work off the Internet—that way I wouldn’t have to wrestle with their tortured spelling and grammar.”
“You don’t need me to hold your hand at the AlAbAn meeting,” Janine told him. “You’re going on doctor’s orders, remember—and we promised Milly a lift after the last one.”
“Sylvia’s not a doctor,” Steve said, unable to resist correcting the error. “She doesn’t have an M.D.—although she does like to decorate her wall with certificates, and has a string of letters after her name much longer than my meager B.Ed.”
“I wasn’t speaking pedantically,” Janine assured him. “Therapist’s orders, therapist’s recommendations, whatever...the point is that you’re supposed to be going for the benefit of your health.”
“I suppose I am,” Steve admitted. “But supposed’s the operative word, isn’t it? I suspect that what it’s really supposed to do, from Sylvia’s point of view, is to make me more receptive to the idea o
f being regressed again. The idea is to help me remember-in-inverted-commas more of my abduction-experience-in-inverted-commas, so that it will be fit for exposure at AlAbAn. In Sylvia’s mind, that will help me move on to the next step in delving down to the actual source of my anxieties.”
“Which is wrong because...?” Janine left the sentence dangling, inviting him to complete it
“Because that’s not the direction in which I want to go. I think the whole regression plan’s a red herring, and that I’ll be much better off sticking to the relaxation techniques. They seem to be working well enough, thus far, even though progress is a bit slow.”
“You’ve been working on your phobias, then? Confronting your demons every night you’re not with me?”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 10