Alien Abduction, page 1
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2009, 2013 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER 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.”
