“One or two,” Steve agreed, figuring that there wasn’t too much risk in admitting it, “but there are worse things in life than not being easy.”
“I hope so,” Milly said, with yet another sigh. “I wish Dad had chosen a better time to hover between life and death. It would be a lot more convenient all round if he’d just make up his mind. And please don’t tell me that his mind probably isn’t in a fit condition for making itself up—I do realize that.”
“If it turns out that you can’t get back a week next Thursday,” Steve said, as he slowed the car down and looked or a parking-spot, “shall I tell my story in your absence, or do you want me to wait until the new year? I can tell you tonight, in private, if you like, so you won’t need to worry about it at all.”
“I’ll try to get back,” Milly said. “If not, I’ll tell you when the time comes. I’ve done mine properly, and it’ll be best if you can do yours the same way. Then Janine can do hers, if she wants to.”
“Janine isn’t an abductee,” Steve said, as he pulled the handbrake on. “She’s only coming to hear your story and mine—to get some weird sort of closure.”
“No, she’s not,” Milly told him. “I thought she was, but that was before I talked to her. She says she kept on coming because she’d begun to remember. That’s the only reason. She says she’s not trying to pay us back for betraying her, however much we deserve it—not in that way, at any rate. I still have my suspicions about her sending Ali round to see you, but I think she’s telling the truth about the meetings.”
“You’ve talked to her?” Steve repeated, wonderingly, with his hand frozen on the door-handle. “I thought she wasn’t talking to either of us. When? Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“Yesterday. We talked on the phone. She couldn’t bring herself to blank me, because I wanted to tell her about Dad. She didn’t want to talk about anything else—she certainly didn’t tell me that she’d seen you at the Royal Oak’s quiz night, or that she’d given Alison your address—but she did want to tell me that she wasn’t coming to meetings just to upset us. By the way, in case it gets back to you by some other route, I really did tell her that she could have you back if she wanted you.”
Steve felt as if the head of a claw-hammer had thudded into his heart, although he didn’t know exactly why. He clutched the doorhandle even harder, but didn’t attempt to turn it in order to open the door. “What did she say?” he asked.
“She said she doesn’t.”
Even Steve, who would never have considered himself a good judge of the subtler nuances of female conversation, knew what a world of difference there was between “She said she doesn’t” and “She doesn’t”.
“I’m not some piece of carrion that you two can quarrel over like a pair of stroppy scavengers,” he complained.
“Of course you are,” Milly retorted, although there was no trace of bitterness in her tone now. “But we’re not going to fight. We’re going to try to be better than that, if we can. I don’t think she means it when she says she doesn’t want you back. I think she might take you back, if you went about it the right way.”
Which is what? Steve thought—but he didn’t say it, because it would have been ungentlemanly. On the other hand, he didn’t immediately leap to say that Milly was the only one he wanted, and the only one he ever would want. He knew that she wouldn’t believe him. He finally opened the car door, and got out. Milly got out too, and looked both ways before crossing the road.
Steve followed her. He knew that he didn’t dare ask whether she really would simply allow Janine to take him back, if that turned out to be what he and Janine both wanted, and if they went about it the right way—but he dared to think that it might be possible.
He had completely lost track of Milly’s mood, now, and had no idea what was going on between them. He followed her meekly up the stairs to the front door of her flat, and then paused on the threshold, not entirely certain that he was about to be welcomed in. She held the door open for him, though, and closed it behind him.
“Home sweet home,” she murmured.
“Would you rather I went back to my place?” Steve asked.
“No,” she said, “unless you want to, of course.”
“No,” he said.
“That’s settled, then,” she said. “For now. Tomorrow is another day, as the book says.”
“I honestly don’t know what you’re trying to say,” Steve confessed, as she took his coat and hung it up on the rack.
Milly headed for the bathroom, but she paused long enough to turn round and say: “Maybe Dad’s stroke has put things in a different perspective. I just want to like myself a little better than I’ve been able to do of late, while I’ve been the kind of person who’d hijack her best friend’s boy-friend while her friend was away on a training course. All I’m saying, Steve, is that you don’t owe me anything. You certainly don’t have to stay with me, if you’d rather be with someone else.”
She disappeared then, without giving him a chance to reply, and didn’t reappear for quite some time, after various sounds of running water. When she emerged again, she had taken off her make-up and was wearing the kind of expression that forbade him to take up the thread of the conversation where it had been left dangling, demanding that he let the matter lie and start anew. He had to use the bathroom himself, so that was easy enough to do. When he came out again she was in the kitchenette, making a cup of hot chocolate.
“My experience was very different from yours,” Steve said, out of the blue, “but once you’ve heard it, you might understand me a little bit better.”
“Are we talking about abductions again?” Milly asked, rhetorically, keeping her tone conspicuously light. “I suppose I ought to look forward to it, then—even though we both seem to have been working thus far on the principle that people might like us better, and maybe even love us more, if they didn’t understand us at all.”
* * * *
Steve drove Milly back to the railway station early the next morning, and then drove to school, where he found Friday far less taxing than he usually did. Afterwards, he drove out along the A30 to the far side of Wilton, then turned round and came back again. He suffered no ill-effects at all—which was a small triumph, but a significant one.
“One step at a time,” he murmured, when he got back to his own flat. “Nullify the symptoms, and there’ll be no need for a cure.”
The next day, after doing his shopping, he took his courage in both hands and drove to Southampton, where there were much bigger bridges to be found. He went back and forth across the stretch that broadened the Test into Southampton Water no less than four times, then stopped off for a late lunch in the new national park. He wasn’t about to tackle the Clifton Suspension Bridge just yet, but he felt that he was getting on top of the situation.
Milly called at four to report that there was no further change in her father’s condition, but Steve didn’t tell her what he’d been doing. She didn’t drag out the conversation for long, but before hanging up she said; “I called Ali, by the way. We’re on track to make up. I promised I’d have a drink with her next time I’m in Salisbury, so that we can sort it all out.”
“That’s good,” Steve said.
“I called Jan again, too. She was at her parents’ place, so we couldn’t really talk, but I think she might come along—to meet with Ali and me, that is.”
“Even better,” Steve said, automatically, although he remembered what Milly had said on Thursday night about the price of the three girls restoring their relationship might be that none of them would ever talk to him again.
“Maybe you can come too,” Milly concluded.
“Maybe,” Steve agreed. There was nothing thereafter but a few conventional exchanges of gestures of affection.
Although he wasn’t planning to go out, Steve took a shower, as was his habit on Saturday evenings. He was just wondering whether to spend an hour on the Internet before making himself some dinner when the
phone rang again. He didn’t recognize the caller’s number.
“Hello?” he said, warily. He was always paranoid about the possibility that the year elevens might somehow have got hold of his number, so he never surrendered his name to unknown callers.
“Steve? It’s Alison—Janine’s friend.”
“Oh,” Steve said. “Hi.”
“I just wanted to thank you for talking to Milly. She said you’d told her I called round and you’d advised her to make up. I’ve just had a long chat with her.”
“That’s okay,” Steve said. “It was nothing, really. Milly told me you’d talked.”
“Did she tell you that she talked to Janine, too, and that we might all get together when she’s next in Salisbury.”
“Yes, she did,” Steve said.
“Did she tell you that she suggested that I might ask you to have a drink willi me in the Pheasant tonight?” Alison went on.
Steve looked at the phone quizzically. “No, she didn’t,” he said, speaking very carefully. “Why would she do that?”
“You can probably think of as many reasons as I can,” Alison told him, “but the one she gave me was that if we’re going to have a big summit conference to decide whether we can still be friends, and if you’re included, then perhaps you and I should get to know one another first. That probably seems as unlikely to you as it does to me, but I’m not lying. If you don’t want to, that’s fine, but I figured that if I’m being put to the test, I ought not to duck out.”
“You think you’re being tested?” Steve said, skeptically.
“Of course. You too, probably, but me definitely, and perhaps primarily. I told her I’d been round to your place looking for her, and that you’d let me come in, but she said she already knew. I told her nothing happened, but she said she already knew that too. I think she thinks that the only way to be sure that nothing will happen in future is to set up the experiment and see. It’s a bit convoluted, I know, but that’s the way Milly’s mind tends to work. Straight as a corkscrew—in the nicest possible way, of course.”
“I’d noticed that,” Steve said. “In the nicest possible way, of course. So, the idea is that you and I meet up, and nothing happens—which will prove to Milly that it’s possible for her to keep on being friends with you, and that it’s not yet time to give me the elbow.”
“That’s the idea,” Alison confirmed. “Her idea, remember. When I mentioned the possibility to Janine, though, she told me to go ahead. I’m not entirely sure what she expects. If you feel that you’re being pushed around, by all means say no. I’d be off the hook, because I could say that I’d tried.”
“I don’t know whether I’d be off the hook or not,” Steve admitted. “I don’t know what Milly expects me to do.”
After a slight pause, Alison said; “You don’t actually have to treat it as a puzzle to be solved. If it helps you make up your mind, you’re not in any moral danger. Believe me, this is not Milly’s nightmare version of Alison the Slut talking. It’s Alison the Chastened, who’s having a really tough time at work just now, and doesn’t even have a pub quiz to go to. A quiet drink with someone I don’t have to impress, entertain or drop my knickers for would be a real godsend.”
“Okay,” Steve said, not entirely sorry to have been put in a position in which he couldn’t really refuse without seeming churlishly ungallant. “Shall I meet you in there at half past seven?”
“Fine,” she said.
She was ten minutes late, but that was only to be expected. She wouldn’t have wanted to take the risk of getting there ahead of him and standing there on her own. She asked for a glass of red wine, and he told the bartender to make it two. They retired to a corner opposite the one in which she and Mark had surprised Milly and him, on the fateful night when the proverbial cat had escaped from the bag—as it had been bound to do, eventually.
“I like it here,” Alison explained. “No plasma screen to bring in the football crowd, and no video jukebox. Not the sort of place to attract hen parties, thank God. A bit too convenient for the Town Hall, maybe, but if I’m seen, it’s no bad thing for me to be seen with someone who doesn’t work there.”
“I’m more likely to start whispers going than you are,” Steve reminded her. “The regulars are bound to have seen me here with Milly. It probably isn’t a secret that she’s in Bath, nursing her sick father.”
“Is she nursing him?”
“Not literally—but you know how rumors go. I’m sorry you’ve been having a tough time at work. I know what that’s like. I’ve only just been let out of Coventry at school, although my crimes were committed way back in June and July.”
“You’re lucky,” she said. “Mine extended over every month in the calendar, and not just this year. Never again, though. You always think you can get away with it forever, until...” She passed her forefinger over her throat.
“Never again,” he agreed, raising his glass as if the phrase were a toast.
“Actually,” she said, “it wouldn’t do me any harm at all to be seen with you. You’re a substantial cut above my previous best, let alone my average, looks-wise.”
“Are you fishing for compliments?” he asked.
“Don’t be daft. I’m under no illusions about my ability to compete with Milly and Janine. You must have a hard time at school, if teenage girls are anything like what they were in my day.”
“Not as bad as all that,” he told her. “There’s safety in numbers, I think. One girl with a crush might turn into a stalker, but when there are four or five....”
“Or forty or fifty.”
“...they’re too busy comparing notes and competing for attention to cause any serious difficulties.”
“And besides which,” Alison supplied, “you must get quite a kick out of basking in all that adolescent admiration.”
“I’m just a science teacher, not a singer in a boy-band or some football player. At the end of the day, that fact that I’m still fairly young and fit can’t compensate for the fact that I’m just one more bullshit-spouting bastard they have to call sir.”
“False modesty is just vanity in disguise,” she told him. “If I’d had a teacher like you when I was fifteen, I’d have wet my knickers dreaming about you, even if I’d known that you were terrified of flying and went to a support group of alien abductees.”
Steve gave her a hard stare while he worked out that the former item of information must have come from Janine rather than Milly. “Well,” he said, eventually, “we’re supposed to be getting to know one another, aren’t we? I’d prefer it if you didn’t keep mentioning knickers, though—it’s a bit provocative.”
“Sorry,” she said. “If I tell you my life story, though, it won’t be easy to avoid it. Except that that’s not me, really. It’s just someone I invented, and now have to put away. Perhaps we should make a deal—I’ll tell you about the real me, if you’ll tell me about the real you. That way, we won’t overexcite one another, and we’ll both know something that Janine and Milly don’t.”
“Okay,” he said. So that was what they did, for the remainder of the evening, until Steve walked Alison home, and said goodnight without so much as giving her a peck on the cheek. She said thank you for that, and probably meant it. Then he walked back to his own place, and put his relaxation CD on to play while he lulled himself to sleep.
* * * *
Milly’s father continued not dying throughout the following week, although Milly returned to Salisbury on the Wednesday evening, having finally persuaded her mother that she couldn’t afford to continue missing work. She spent Wednesday night with Steve, but told him that she was going to have to do overtime in the office on Friday, Saturday, Monday and Tuesday in order to make up some of her lost income. On Sunday, she’d arranged to meet Janine and Alison—but Janine had insisted that he not be invited.
“Alison and I had a long chat last Saturday,” he told her. “Just to get to know one another.”
“I know,” she sai
d.
“Did we pass the test, then?”
“What test?” she said, disingenuously. “I think she’s forgiven me for writing that letter. She says she has, but she might just be saying it and not really mean it.”
“I think she means it,” Steve said.
“Of course you do—but I’ve known her a lot longer than you have, and I’ve seen her turn over new leaves before. Anyhow, we can get together late Saturday, if you want, and maybe have a proper date on Wednesday. I’m sorry it’s a bit thin, as sex-schedules go.”
“It’s fine,” he assured her. “I might drive up to Reading on Saturday, and visit Caversham. Next Wednesday’s out, though—it’s the school Christmas party and I can’t get out of it. The sixth-formers are included, so it’s more a matter of acting as a policeman than having fun, or I’d invite you along. I can see you afterwards, though, if you like—at your place or mine.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 33