Alien Abduction, page 27
“Maybe that’s why they’re so interested in us,” Steve said, going with the flow. “Maybe we’re not just the first manifestation of Earthly intelligence. Maybe we’re also the first species to have been destroyed by time-traveling researchers. I have to teach the second-year A-level students about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I don’t really understand it myself, but what it boils down to, so far as I can see, is that the act of observation affects that which is being observed. In physics, that comes about because very tiny things are very sensitive to the interference that any process of observation involves, but there’s a similar problem affecting the observation of entities that are aware of being observed. The time-travelers may be changing us simply by virtue of all the ways in which they’re trying to observe us—including turning some of us into instruments of self-observation. Maybe it’s not just us; maybe the same thing will recur all along the time-stream, with every species that becomes interesting being warped and then obliterated by the interest it attracts. You’re right, Mil; that’s a much better tale than the one I dredged up from my so-called recovered memory. If we could make a story out of that—or two stories, to tell at consecutive meetings.…”
“It would be cheating,” Milly finished for him.
“Yes, it would,” Steve agreed.
“Not that…,” she began and then stopped.
“Not that we can claim the moral high ground,” Steve finished for her, “when it comes to cheating on our friends and lovers.”
Milly was blushing again, but Steve kept his eyes on the road. “See,” he said, after a slight pause. “Wireless telepathy isn’t all that difficult. We need to get the tales we have out into the open, don’t we? In one sense, we have all the time in the world, but in another…we don’t. I’ll make you a definite promise. I will put my hand up next week—and the next. If you go first, I’ll be right behind you, and if you change your mind again…then I’ll lead the way.”
“I won’t change my mind again,” she said. “I’m really not that sort of person.”
He knew that she wasn’t telling the exact truth, but he also knew why she’d said it. She was reminding him, in what was supposed be a subtle fashion, that he was that kind of person, and couldn’t deny it.
“It’s a definite promise,” he repeated. “No going back. We might not be any happier afterwards, mind—but maybe there are more important things than happiness.”
Milly didn’t reply to that—but then, Milly didn’t know what a big thing it was for him to make that concession, even if she did suspect that he was thinking about Janine, and not so much about happiness as sexiness. In his heart of hearts, though, Steve couldn’t help wondering whether, once he and Milly had both got their secrets out into the open, it might somehow become easier to trade Milly in for Janine than it was just at present, when they all had so much to hide.
They had just reached the outskirts of Salisbury when Milly suddenly grabbed at her coat pocket. Steve didn’t understand what she was doing, at first; then he realized that she must have switched off her mobile’s ring-tone so that it wouldn’t disturb the AlAbAn meeting, but had left the vibrate function activated in case someone wanted to get through to her urgently.
“Hello, Mummy?” Milly said, when she had got the phone out and had read the name of the caller from the display. “No.… Oh.… Yes.… No.… Yes…first thing in the morning. I promise. Yes.”
“Bad news?” Steve asked, as she let the hand holding the phone fall back into her lap.
“Daddy’s had another stroke,” Milly said. “He’s just been taken into hospital. He might die.”
“Oh,” Steve said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
Steve and Milly had had plans for Friday and Saturday evenings, but they all became redundant when Milly had to take the train to Bath first thing Friday morning, not knowing when she’d be able to return. Steve was able to gladden Rhodri Jenkins’ heart and rake up extra moral credit by actually volunteering to stay on after hours on Friday afternoon. He set out to follow exactly the same schedule thereafter as he’d followed on the Wednesday, except that he bought fish and chips instead of cooking for himself. He’d barely settled down at his PC desk and picked up his headphones, however, when his doorbell rang.
Steve couldn’t help feeling a flutter of hope that maybe it was Janine, who had decided at last that they really ought to have a serious talk, and see if they could patch things up. When he opened the door, though, that faint flicker of hope turned instantly to ashes. It wasn’t Janine; it was her friend Alison.
Alison was dripping wet, because it was raining heavily outside. She had no umbrella and she was bare-headed. Her raincoat was soaked, and so was her almost-blonde hair, which seemed almost grey in the dull light. Her blue eyes weren’t bright at present; they too seemed almost grey, in harmony with her dismal attitude.
Steve froze, holding the door defensively, as if he were facing a charity-collector or a pair of neatly-dressed Mormons.
“Is Milly here?” Alison asked.
“No,” Steve said, bluntly.
“Oh,” Alison said. “Only, I’ve been round to her place, and she’s not there. Janine said that she might be here.”
That cleared up the mystery of how Alison had found out his address—as a schoolteacher, of course, Steve wasn’t listed in the telephone directory—but it still left a lot of questions unanswered, none of which Steve dared ask.
“Well, she isn’t,” Steve said. He realized, though, that the brusqueness of his tone, which was only significant of his own embarrassment, might suggest to Alison that he might be lying, and that Milly might have sent him to the door with instructions to deny that she was there when she really was. It was for that reason that he added: “She had to go to Bath. Her father had a stroke. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”
“Oh,” Alison said, again. “Right. I left her a voicemail, you know, ages ago—twice, just in case she deleted it without listening to it the first time. She still won’t return my calls. I don’t want it to end like this. I don’t suppose, by any chance, that you’d be willing to have a word with her?”
“About what?” Steve said, utterly confused.
“About the situation. It’s unfair. You must see that. It really wasn’t my fault.”
“What wasn’t?” Steve asked, helplessly.
He watched comprehension dawn on Alison’s face. “She hasn’t told you, has she?” she said. “She hasn’t told you what actually happened?”
“I have no idea that you’re talking about,” Steve confessed.
“I didn’t shop her to Janine,” Alison said. “Not deliberately. It was an accident. I had no idea you and she were together, that night in the Pheasant. I had no reason to doubt that Janine would be along any minute, and if I had thought something was going on, I wouldn’t have phoned Jan to tell her. In fact, when Janine phoned me half an hour later, I automatically assumed that she was phoning from the Pheasant, because Milly had told her that she’d seen me, and that we’d talked again about getting together for one of our nights out because I’d had to rule out the previous Tuesday. I assumed that Milly was there with her. I didn’t mean to let the cat out of the bag. I didn’t know there was a cat in the bag, and if I had, I wouldn’t have let it out—but I didn’t, so I did, by accident. It wasn’t my fault. It really wasn’t. Milly won’t listen, though. She blames me. Did she tell you about the letter?”
Steve shook his head, dumbly.
Alison shook hers, because she was on the brink of tears—an impression assisted by the raindrops clinging to her slightly puffy cheeks. “Look,” she said, “Can I come in? I can’t talk about the letter on your doorstep. It’s too…can I come in?”
Steve opened the door fully and stepped aside. Alison came in, and sat down on the settee. Steve pulled one of the dining chairs away from the table and perched on it awkwardly, keeping the bulk of the coffee-table between them. This was, after all, Alison the Slut, who had a dark history of screwing Milly’s boy-friends. She didn’t look much like a scheming temptress at the moment, however—not with her wet hair plastered to her skull and the collar of her blouse soaking wet—and Steve believed everything she’d said about the way in which Janine had found out, entirely accidentally, that he and Milly had been together in the pub on that fateful night.
“Would you like a cup of tea?” Steve asked, because that was the sort of thing people were supposed to ask when other people came into their homes.
“No thanks,” Alison replied. “Milly wrote a letter to the Town Hall—addressed to the Town Clerk, of all people, although it got passed around quite a bit. It was about me and Mark, and a few other people working for the council I’d previously had relationships with. It gave details. Luckily, most of the details were false, because I’d embroidered the tales I’d told Janine and Milly, and that made most of the rest potentially deniable. The allegations were dismissed as malicious or unprovable, so no formal action was contemplated, let alone taken. I haven’t lost my job, and neither has Mark—but even so, it was extremely embarrassing. It got back to Mark’s wife…and one or two of the other wives too, all of whom believe that there’s no smoke without fire. You can’t imagine what it’s like to become the Scarlet Woman of Salisbury throughout the local government system.”
Steve thought briefly about Tracy and Jill and practically being sent to Coventry, but he realized that the comparison must be rather pale. Alison worked at the hub of the civic community, along with hundreds of other local government officials and God only knew what else, in actual corridors of power. He really couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be cast as the Scarlet Woman of Salisbury in circumstances like those; being cast as the Roaring Boy of the city’s second best comp obviously didn’t come close.
“I know she wrote the letter before she heard my voicemail,” Alison said, “and wouldn’t have done it if she’d realized, but even so…she could have given me a chance to explain. I know there was the other thing, which was all my fault, but I don’t know how my times I’ve apologized for that, and she’s always said that she’d forgiven me, and that we’d moved on. I really didn’t think that she still hated me for that—but even if she did, she really could have given me a chance to explain before doing that. And now she won’t return my calls. She won’t even let me try to make it right.”
“Oh,” was all Steve could say. Alison had not, in fact, burst into tears, but she still looked as if she might. He had no idea what to do in a situation of this sort, so he stayed silent.
“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “You must think we’re all completely mad—all three of us. Didn’t bargain for this sort of palaver, I imagine, when you first started dating Janine.”
“No,” Steve admitted.
“We aren’t like this really,” Alison said, regretfully. “We weren’t like it when we were at school. You don’t teach at our old place, do you—you’re at the other one?”
Steve nodded.
“Still,” Alison went on, “You must know what it’s like—the kind of friendships schoolgirls form, and try to hold together when their schooldays come to an end. There was a bigger group of us at school, of course, but we three were always the core of it. When we decided not to go away to university—which was a sort of mutual decision, in a way, and a perverse one, given that Milly, at least, was certainly university material—we got tighter. I suppose we got tighter still when Milly’s parents moved to Bath and she stayed, apparently staying with us rather than just behind. She was the one who was most insistent on us staying friends then, although Jan had never got on with her parents, so she needed the unholy trinity too. So did I. I think I always needed it most, even though I didn’t have that kind of practical reason. I was always the hanger-on, not as pretty as them. I always had to work harder to be part of it—to entertain them. It was as if they were two queens and I was the court jester. Sometimes, it was as if I were doing things on their behalf. Janine and Milly talked incessantly about losing their virginity, but I was the one who did it first. They talked incessantly abut screwing this teacher or that, but I was the only one who did it at all. Half the things I did, I only did so I could tell them about it, because it amused them so much—and then Milly puts it all in a bloody letter to the Town Clerk! If only I hadn’t made up all those gory details! If only I hadn’t done the things I did do, in order to have some gory details to embroider! You can see, can’t you, why it’s all so bloody unfair?”
Steve contrived a hesitant nod.
“Don’t look so frightened, Steve,” Alison said, with only a slight harshness in her voice. “You’re in no moral danger. Jan did suggest, when she gave me your address, that if I found you on your own I could get my own back on Milly by doing my thing again, but she really wanted me to get her own back, and she didn’t really want that. It would be too much, even for me—and it’s not really my thing at all. I’m really not that sort of person. I mean, it’s one thing to get carried away in a reckless moment, and screw someone else’s boyfriend without giving a thought to the possible consequences, but it would be something else entirely to plan something like that, wouldn’t it?” She waited for Steve to nod again before adding: “So you’re quite safe. I won’t throw myself at you. Okay?”
“I understand,” Steve said. “I’m sorry—I didn’t know about all of this. It’s taken me by surprise. I suppose Milly didn’t want to confess to me that she’d made a mistake, and didn’t think it would matter if she let me carry on thinking that her original conclusions were justified. She wouldn’t have told me about the letter anyway, I don’t think…and, to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure I needed or wanted to know about that.”
“I’m sorry,” Alison said. “I really did come here looking for Mil, not to make trouble. It might be best, on reflection, if you don’t tell her I called. I’ll ask Jan to let me know when she comes back from Bath, and keep on trying her at her flat until I find her there—preferably on her own. Jan will know when she comes back, won’t she? I know they’re not talking to one another, but Jan still sees her at that UFO group they go to, doesn’t she?”
“Yes,” Steve said. “But it only meets once a fortnight.”
“Well, maybe Jan will start returning Mil’s calls, and they’ll begin patching things up. Then, maybe, we can get the whole thing patched up. I suppose it shouldn’t matter, really, now that we’re all grown women with our own jobs and our own lives. We should all have our own boy-friends too, I suppose, but Mil seems to have the monopoly for the moment. If we could just get one each, and stop borrowing one another’s…sorry, that’s a bit undiplomatic, isn’t it?”
“Don’t mind me,” Steve said. “I’m sorry for my part in causing you all such distress. If I hadn’t slept with Milly behind Janine’s back, you wouldn’t be in difficulties either, so I suppose I’m as much to blame for your troubles as Milly is…more, even.”
“You weren’t to know,” Alison assured him. “The roots of the problem go back a long way. You were just a catalyst. You just did what men do. You disappointed Jan, mind—she thought you might be better than that.”
“I don’t know why,” Steve said. “She knew my track record. I never have been any better.”
“Fair enough,” Alison said. “What she probably really thought was that she was special enough to break your pattern and keep you in line. She’s always been the prettiest one of the three, you see—she probably assumed that what had happened to Milly could never happen to her. I love her dearly, but she’s always had that hint of smugness about her. That’s why she’s so terribly broken up about it.”
“Is she?” Steve said, genuinely surprised.
“Oh yes. She won’t thank me for letting you know, but she’s taken it very hard. Not because you’re anything extra special, perhaps—more because she lost out to Milly. It won’t last forever. It can’t, because she needs us as much as we need her. The fact that she’s seeing so much of her parents will be a constant reminder of that. In the end, she’ll have to patch it up with Mil, and Mil will have to patch it up with me, because we’re still best friends, in spite—or perhaps because—of the fact that we’re all so jealous of one another. At least, I hope we’ll patch it up.”
“And what about me?” Steve asked.
“Pardon?”
“What happens to me, when you all get back together and patch it up?”
“God knows,” she said. “What do you want to happen to you?”
Steve couldn’t answer that one without betraying someone, so he said nothing.
“It’s not my problem,” Alison told him. “I’ve got enough of my own, and I’m certainly not going to add yours to my list as well as Jan’s and Mil’s. If it’s any help, Jan really does want you back—desperately, even—but I’m not sure that she’d be willing to take you back. I don’t know how much pride she has, but it’s a lot more than I’ve got. What Milly wants, I don’t know—she won’t return my calls. What do you want?”
There was still nothing Steve could say, so he said it.
“You don’t know,” Alison said, on his behalf. “Or, if you do, you daren’t say. Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault. You just happened to fall into the whirlpool. Being abducted by aliens is a breeze compared with getting caught up in this sort of maelstrom, I dare say.”
Steve could see that Alison was no longer on the brink of tears, even though the rain hadn’t quite evaporated from her face; indeed, she seemed to be growing more robust by the minute, drawing strength from the knowledge that he was in a predicament as awkward as her own.
“You’ve never been abducted, then?” Steve said, knowing how feeble the remark was as a riposte.
“I get abducted by aliens all the time,” she replied, trying to contrive a laugh but not succeeding. “I’m the group slut, remember: the Scarlet Woman of Salisbury. Aliens are always probing me in uncomfortable places. Mil used to pester us to go to AlAbAn meetings with her, in the beginning, but Jan thought it was too silly, and I thought it was unnecessary. I used our girls’ nights out as my confessionals, you see. I never believed for a moment that Milly really believed she’d been abducted, but I could never figure out why she was going to the meetings. You probably understand that a lot better than I do.”
