“Why mercifully?” Steve asked.
“If they weren’t attracted off the streets,” Milly stated, confidently, “they’d all be stalking female traffic wardens.”
“Except for the ones hanging around the schools,” Steve said, reflectively. “Mind you, the perverts peering in through the railings are harmless by comparison with the sex-bombs who are already inside. Hell hath no more demonic temptress like a year eleven siren with a crush. Poor Neville must have found himself on the wrong end of one of those from time to time.”
“He was safely married for most of his career,” Milly observed. “Whereas you’re single, and still the right side of thirty. The little harpies probably see you as a legitimate target—just as the aliens did.”
Steve knew that the last remark was the first cast in a fishing expedition, but he wasn’t about to rise to the bait. “It must be much worse for you,” he said, dryly. “Everybody thinks that traffic wardens are legitimate targets, from pervs with a passion for women in uniform to road rage sufferers armed with machetes.”
“I’m just glad that you fit into the former category, darling,” she said. “Mind you, if you’d met some of the traffic wardens I’ve met, you might lose your passion for women in uniform.”
“If you’d met some of the school kids I’d met,” Steve countered, “you’d know that I’d lost it long ago.”
She looked at him sideways then, and he could see the temptation in her eyes. What she wanted to ask, by way of a casual joke, was: Well, if it’s not the uniform you‘re kinky for, what are you doing with me?—but she didn’t dare. She seemed far less confident now of the destiny that she had hitherto credited with responsibility for their relationship—a relationship that was far from having attained a stage at which remarks like that could pass automatically as jokes. Steve couldn’t see any prospect of getting to that sort of stage any time soon, if ever, and he suspected that Milly couldn’t either. At present, there were far too many meaningless things he couldn’t bring himself to say to her, even when wit or curiosity prompted him, just as there were too many things she couldn’t bring herself to say to him, even when the conversational flow or the logic of a situation licensed them.
Moving back to safer conversational ground, Steve said: “I think Neville’s still after Amelia, you know. She’s a widow now, and he’s a widower, so he must figure he’s in with a chance again— but good old Walter is still around to confuse the situation, just as he was always around in the old days. There is something between Walter and Amelia, I’m convinced—and probably always has been, even though they both married other people. Maybe they were abducted together. Has there ever been an account of a double abduction, in the time that you’ve been attending meetings?”
“No,” Milly said. “It’s always been one at a time. Mind you, I’ve never heard Walter’s own story, or Amelia’s. According to your theory, there couldn’t be any double abductions, could there? If it’s all a matter of private dreams reflecting the uniqueness of the individual, no one could ever share an abduction experience with anyone else, even if they had the most intimate relationship in the world.”
“Maybe not,” Steve conceded. “There’d be no barrier, of course, to someone including another person in their own abduction experience, but there’s no way that the other person could have the same experience. Unless, of course....” He trailed off.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Steve,” Milly said. “It’s all very well wanting to think your ideas through before offering them up for my sagacious judgment, but leaving your sentences dangling like that is annoying as well as untidy.”
“Sorry,” Steve said. “What I was thinking was that maybe, in certain circumstances, one person might be so keen to forge a bond with another person that they’d actually appropriate the other person’s experience, and confirm—maybe even sincerely believe—that they’d experienced it too.”
“Are we talking about Walter and Amelia or about you and me?” Milly asked, immediately.
“I was just thinking,” Steve said. “Hypothetically.”
“Is the reason you won’t tell me any details of your experience because you don’t want me to have the chance of appropriating it for my own selfish ends?” Milly persisted. “Do you think I’m planning to adopt you as a character into my experience?
“No,” Steve said. “That would be absurd. We both know perfectly well that we began formulating our experiences before we’d met, so it would be blatantly anachronistic for either of us to include the other in our stories. Mine’s a solo flight, just like all the rest.”
“So’s mine,” Milly conceded, a trifle reluctantly. Steve guessed that she was wondering whether that concession further weakened her argument regarding the existence of some mysterious bond between the two of them, which might somehow justify their having done the dirty on Janine.
“It would be interesting, though,” Steve said, attempting to defuse the tension filling the car, “to know what did go on between Walter and Amelia, if anything. Why didn’t they get together, I wonder, if they had so much in common? It’s pretty obvious why Neville couldn’t come between them—but if Amelia was as attractive as she probably was, and Walter as handsome as he probably was, you’d think they’d have made an ideal couple.”
At least, he didn’t add, it’s impossible to imagine Walter screwing Amelia’s best friend behind her back. As soon as the thought was formed, though, he couldn’t help contradicting himself, and thinking that maybe it was possible, given that Walter might have taken an entire lifetime to reach his present state of grace, and might have been just as wild and wayward in his youth as any other young man handsome enough to obtain easy opportunities to screw around. Maybe, Steve couldn’t help thinking, that was why Walter was taking such a sympathetic interest in Janine’s plight.
Milly had obviously been following a different but equally embittered train of thought. “I’d have thought you’d have been rooting for Neville rather than Walter,” she said, “After all, you and he are bound to have a natural rapport, being birds of a feather.”
Steve knew that he was supposed to protest against the implication that he could ever be driven to the kind of stalking behavior that Neville had exhibited, so that Milly could tell him, hypocritically, that she’d only meant that they were both science teachers. He decided not to give her the satisfaction. “I never quite had his passion for print, alas,” he said. “I did used to read a fair bit, once, but I couldn’t keep it up when other distractions took over. One of the reasons I did science at school was because there was less homework reading involved than there would have been in history or English.”
“You read Jung’s book on flying saucers only the other week,” Milly pointed out.
“That’s different. That was research. I’ve always been prepared to do functional reading, to investigate facts and theories. I just can’t get into books the way you can. I could never plough through Atlas Shrugged or Star Maker.”
“What Neville was doing was purely functional research,” Milly reminded him. “He couldn’t get into the books either, and he certainly never imbibed the central message of Atlas Shrugged. Birds of a feather, as I said. Maybe the aliens figured that you’d be more useful to them as a serial seducer of innocent maidens—maybe you’re their instrument for researching sexual relationships. Not in the sense that you’re a Kama Sutran experimenter, of course—more in the sense that you’re obliged to run the gamut of all the tangled emotions that sex can whip up. Maybe your emotional incontinence is down to a microchip in your grey matter—just one more information-stream for the aliens to mop up at their leisure.”
“Right,” Steve said. “Neville did the theory of maths and sports, I’m doing the practicals on sex and unreasoning terror, Jill’s doing female hysteria and the tactics of guerilla warfare in the staff-room, and every other science teacher in the country has another little subset of specialties. Walter and Amelia, meanwhile, are studying the side-effects
and after-effects of the investigative process—the aliens’ equivalent of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools. You’re doing practical sex from the female viewpoint, and the ethics of parking. It all makes perfect sense.”
“I ought to be able to laugh at that, oughtn’t I?” Milly said, with unexpected sobriety. “I ought to be able to do one of those giggles that used to make other people giggle—even you, once upon a time—but I can’t. I’ve lost my giggle. I can see the joke, but I just don’t find it funny any more. I’ve fucked everything up, haven’t I, Steve? I wanted you, and I stole you, and now you’re no use to me. You’re like one of the fruits in the Bible—the ones that grow by the Dead Sea, which look luscious on the outside, but only taste of ashes when you bite into them. I’ve fucked things up for you, too, and for Janine. It could have been perfect between you and Janine, but I fucked it up, and now everything tastes of ashes for all of us.”
Steve had seen a great many of Milly’s abrupt changes of mood, but had not yet become wholly accustomed to them, and certainly hadn’t learned how to react to them. This seemed to be one instance, though, when duty called him to take the sting out of her self-accusatory hail.
“It wasn’t you,” Steve said, almost wishing that he believed it. “It was me. I was the one who did the fucking up. It’s my fault, not yours. I spoiled your friendship with Janine, just as I spoiled my own relationship with her, and just as I’m now in the process of spoiling my relationship with you. I wish I could say that I couldn’t help it, but I’m sure that I could have done, and still could, if only I could have figured out the trick of it, or begun to master the technique. I’m the one with the emotional incontinence, remember—the one who lets his nervous excitement drive him, instead of owning it and controlling it. I’m the one to blame.”
Milly sighed deeply. The car moved through Alderbury, which seemed sleepier than ever now that the November nights had begun to turn cold at last, keeping sensible people indoors. After a pause, she said: “Well, that helped, didn’t it?”
“Not really,” Steve said.
“At least we feel like comforting one another now,” she said, “instead of sniping. Shall we go straight home instead of stopping off for food. I’ve got some eggs in the fridge—I could make us an omelet. Unless you’d rather get something delivered.”
Steve assured her that an omelet would be fine. It was, too; Milly had some ham and tomatoes to put in the omelets, and enough bread to make toast on the side.
While they were eating, Milly said: “If I were a liar, I could imagine myself trying to appropriate your abduction experience, trying to squeeze myself into its content one way or another, or to squeeze you into mine as a spear-carrier, but I’m not. I’ll just have to stick to what I can remember, although it’s not as neat a tale as Zoe’s or Neville’s. I’ll do mine first, if you like—you’re very welcome to borrow from it if you want, but I don’t suppose you’ll find anything in it you want or need. At the end of the day, we’re both still alone, aren’t we?”
“No, we’re not,” Steve said. “We fly solo in our alien abductions because we’re all unique, not because we’re alone. We all share the same collective unconscious, and the same mythical future, although our conscious minds sometimes rebel against both. Even though we’re flying solo, there’s a sense in which we’re all in it together, all collaborating on the work of revision and refinement— not just the people who attend AlAbAn meetings, but everyone, and not just everyone who’s alive now, but all the people of the past who helped to build and shape the collective unconscious we inherited...and maybe, in a sense, all the people and non-people of the futures of which we catch glimpses in our dreams. Maybe there is such a thing as time travel, but we’ve mistaken its nature, because we always tend to think in terms of machines and gadgets, of ships and string and sealing-wax....”
“And whether pigs have wings,” she finished for him, disregarding the boiling sea. “They don’t.”
“Not yet,” Steve agreed. “But they will, in the fullness of time.”
She laughed at that, quite spontaneously, and he laughed too. She put out her hand. He took it in his own, and squeezed.
“I’m sorry that I accused you of being like Neville,” Milly said. “You’re not. He’s the exact opposite: the very model of emotional constipation.”
“An equally uncomfortable affliction, I dare say,” Steve said. “Our attitudes to education do appear to be fairly similar, though. He didn’t seem to regard it as a vocation either.”
“A sense of vocation isn’t given to everyone,” Milly told him. “There’s no need to feel bad about that. Those of us who do have a sense of vocation have no particular reason to feel proud of it. After all, what’s so saintly about a compulsion to punish people who park their phallic symbols in the wrong places.”
Steve managed to laugh at that, quite spontaneously, although lie suspected that it would only have made him wince a week—or even an hour—earlier. Maybe, he thought, the corner had been turned. Maybe, from now on, things would get better, and the path of slow progress would be resumed.
Things did get better, but very slowly. Things got better at school, too, and not just because the relaxation techniques that Sylvia Joyce had taught Steve were once again taking some of the sting out of the stresses of teaching and marking. His fellow teachers had begun to stop treating him like a leper, and were on the brink of admitting him back into the fringes of their community. On the Monday after the AlAbAn meeting, Tracy condescended to say hello to him when the two of them happened to meet in the corridor, and once that fact was known to everyone else—having been carried at the speed of light by the school grapevine—it threw the door wide open to the inevitability of his eventual rehabilitation.
“Are you still doing that survival course at the tech?” Rhodri Jenkins asked him, idly, on the Wednesday lunch-time, while the deputy head was fishing for spare bodies to play minder between four and half past five.
Steve was tempted to lie, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. “No,” he admitted.
“You can do computer club again, then,” the Welshman said, oozing satisfaction at the unexpected windfall. “You’ll get your reward in Heaven, as well as in your pay packet. I thought you were doing the course with that travel agent of yours, in preparation for the disintegration of society, so that you could become the new Adam and Eve.”
“That’s off,” Steve admitted. “I’m going out with someone else now.” He considered the possibility of attempting to get out of computer club supervision by inventing a date with Milly, but the truth was that Milly was visiting her parents in Bath, having been summoned home by her mother to discuss some unspecified impending crisis. She’d be catching a three o’clock train after doing an early shift. He decided to let the matter lie, and collect the moral credit due to him for helping the deputy head out of a hole.
“Well, at least you’re not shitting on your own doorstep any more,” the Welshman commented. “What does this one do for a living?”
“She’s a traffic warden.”
“Sleeping with the enemy, eh? Had to bribe her to stop her giving you a ticket, I suppose? Got a face like a horse and an arse to match, I dare say.”
“Actually, she’s very good looking, in a slightly Junoesque sort of way” Steve said. “You’re right about having to seduce her to escape the ticket, though. It’s lucky I’ve got the face of an Adonis.” There was no way his fit of honesty was going to extend as far as letting on to the deputy head that he had met Milly as a result of attending meetings of Alien Abductees Anonymous—that would be almost as suicidal as admitting to a chronic fear of flying, heights and bridges.
“Very lucky, I dare say,” Jenkins said. “Will you be trying the same trick next time some butch motorcycle cop flags you down for speeding on the motorway?”
“That only happens on old American TV shows, Rhodri,” Steve told him. “We’ve got speed cameras on motorway bridges now—it’s all automatic.�
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“I know that, boyo. I was just making a point, in my subtle Cymric fashion, about the double-edged nature of your armor against adversity. I suppose I was trying to steer the conversation around to a point where I could gently warn you, without seeming too deputy-head-like, not to take reckless advantage of the fact that you’ve been provisionally readmitted to the human race, female-staff-wise. I’d prefer it if you could stay in everyone’s good books from now on—it makes my job much easier.”
“That’s Welsh subtlety, is it?” Steve remarked. “I’d hate to see you try to drop a leaden hint.”
“You’ll certainly know it when it lands on your toe,” Rhodri said, with an approving chuckle. “Glad to see you so cheerful, too. Is that the return ticket from Coventry or is it the traffic warden confirming everything they say about women in uniform?”
“It’s just my sunny nature,” Steve assured him, “and the fact that the sixth-formers have put blood and lymph behind them and got on to the nervous system. Tingling neurons are fun—and brains make everybody think.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 25