Alien Abduction, page 28
“I think so,” Steve said. “Actually, I don’t believe for a moment that I was physically transported into the distant future by a time-traveling spaceship armed with a tractor beam—but that’s not the point. The point is that the experiences are real, even if they’re just a particular kind of hallucination. Milly’s not lying, and it’s not some kind of game she’s playing with Janine and you. Something really did happen to her, and it really did disturb her, even if she never left her nice warm bed.”
“Right,” Alison said. “Maybe I ought to start coming to the meetings, now that Jan’s a regular. It might help us get back together and settle our differences. What do you think?” While she was speaking she stood up, obviously having decided that it was time to go. Because she’d never so much as unbuckled the belt of her raincoat, there were no further preparations to be made.
“It’s up to you,” Steve said, standing up in his turn. “I don’t have an opinion, one way or the other.” He walked her to the door of the flat, and opened it for her.
“Thanks for listening,” she said, hesitating on the threshold. “You did me a real favor—I needed to talk to someone, to get it all out in the open. I could hardly spill the beans to anyone at work.”
“You’re welcome,” Steve said.
“You can tell Mil whatever you like,” Alison added, “or nothing at all.”
“We don’t have anything to hide, do we?” Steve said.
For the first time, Alison smiled. “No,” she said, “we don’t. Nothing at all. Not so much as a single wicked thought. You’d almost think that we were the kind of people who could learn from our past mistakes. Thanks again.”
“You’re welcome,” Steve repeated, automatically. Instead of going back to his PC, though, he went back to the settee and sat down, carefully avoiding the slight damp patch left by Alison’s coat-clad backside.
He couldn’t help wondering what might have happened had he made the first move that Alison had so ostentatiously refrained from making—maybe by making a heroic effort to comfort her when she’d almost been in tears—even though there had never been the slightest possibility that he might have done anything of the sort, in this or any other universe. He had, at the end of the day, proved to be better than that.
Milly phoned later that evening to say that she’d be in Bath all weekend and perhaps most of the following week. Her father was still in the Intensive Care Unit, because he couldn’t breathe unaided, but he was stable at present. If he managed to recover sufficient control of his muscles in the wake to the stroke to breathe unaided again, there was a chance that he might also be able to talk again, and live some sort of a conscious life—but if he didn’t, he might relapse into a permanent vegetative state. Only time would tell—and even the best possible outcome, it seemed, would not restore him to anything that would pass for a normal life. It was unlikely in the extreme that he’d ever be able to walk again, or feed himself.
Steve didn’t mention Alison’s visit. It didn’t seem to be the kind of thing that he ought to try to explain on the phone, especially when Milly’s father was lying at death’s door.
The situation eventually extended throughout the entire week. Steve spoke to Milly every evening on the phone—which seemed to emphasize the fact that he was suspended in a kind of existential limbo, always at a loose end, playing internet poker or surfing. He did three stints of after-school supervision on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, but when he volunteered again on the Friday Rhodri Jenkins actually turned him down.
“Have to share the burden, boyo,” the deputy head explained. “Can’t get into a situation where the shirkers can get way with it because the suckers are willing to do all the work. Can’t get too dependent on you, either, as you’ll doubtless be making up for lost time when your girl-friend finally gets back—although it’s beginning to look as if that might not be before the end of term. Don’t go getting up to any mischief in the meantime, mind. It’s high time you settled down, and a traffic warden’s exactly the kind of woman you need to keep you in line.”
In spite of this instruction, Steve attempted to call Janine that night, for the first time in three weeks, thinking that she had probably seen Alison since the previous Friday, and that Alison might have put in a good word for him, in the cause of getting all the warring factions together to settle their various differences. Janine refused to talk to him, and told him, not for the first time, never to call her again. Evidently her pride still had the upper hand in its ongoing contest with her desperation.
By the time Saturday night rolled around, Steve was feeling seriously restless. He’d spent the afternoon betting on the exchanges, but he’d ended up thirty pounds down and exceeded his self-imposed limit for the week. He knew that he had to resist the temptation to think that he had to go on line to win it back at poker, because that was the way to addiction. He was well up to date in checking out the other websites on his favorites list, and he couldn’t face the thought of an evening watching television, even though his ability to cope with cliffhangers had been recently tested, and not found wanting. He didn’t dare try to call Janine again so soon after his last knock-back, and also rejected the possibility of trying to discover Alison’s phone number, after only a few moments’ consideration.
Eventually, Steve looked Walter Wainwright up in the phone book and rang him to ask if he could have a quiet word in private about AlAbAn rules and etiquette, as he was planning to volunteer to tell his story the following Thursday.
“I’m very busy, Steve,” Walter said, apologetically, “especially with it being quiz night at the Royal Oak. I haven’t missed one of those in twenty years. The quiz doesn’t start till eight, though, so I suppose we could have a quiet drink beforehand, if that would be convenient for you.”
“I don’t have anything else to do,” Steve assured him. “Where is the Royal Oak, exactly?”
It wasn’t until Walter told him that the Royal Oak was in Codford St. Mary that Steve remembered having been there once before, when Janine had reluctantly taken him to meet her parents, who lived in Codford St. Peter. That didn’t prepare him, though, for the shock of walking into the pub’s lounge at five past seven and running straight into Janine, who was carrying a pint of lager in one hand and two gin-and-tonics in the other. Steve almost ducked, but it was obviously her father’s lager, and Janine wasn’t the kind of girl to use someone else’s pint to make a futile gesture.
“Are you stalking me, you slimy bastard?” she demanded hotly.
“Actually,” Steve said, in his best martyred tone, “I’m meeting Walter Wainwright.” In the meantime, he put two and two together, and realized that the reason Walter was giving Janine lifts to AlAbAn meetings probably had something to do with him knowing her parents, as he’d mentioned more than once when Janine started going to the meetings. Presumably, that acquaintance was not unconnected with Walter’s twenty years’ experience of quiz nights in the Royal Oak. Steve also realized that Janine was so short of something to do on a Saturday night now that she’d dumped him that she was volunteering for her Dad’s pub quiz team, in spite of the fact that she didn’t get on with her parents at all.
Steve found Walter without further ado, and asked him what he was drinking. He returned from the crowded bar with a whisky and water for Walter and a glass of Shiraz for himself. “The reason I wanted to talk to you,” he said, without further ado, “is that I’ve formulated a theory that might help to explain what’s really going on in people’s abduction experiences, and I wondered if it would be within the rules to present it to the group along with my own experience.”
“You aren’t the first person to have a theory, by any means,” Walter told him, dolefully, “and you wouldn’t be the first to tell the group all about it, if that’s what you want to do. I’m always reluctant to tell people that there are things they shouldn’t say, because we’re a support group, and we want people to feel free to say whatever they need to say—but you’re a teacher, so I’m sure you can see that there’s a slight problem…well, of course you can, or you wouldn’t be here now, would you? The thing is that, in order for us to support you, as fully as we’d like, we do need you to show a little reciprocity. If you were to start using other people’s experiences as fodder for your theories, you see, that might not seem very supportive to them. They might feel that their experiences were being questioned, or even undermined, and that’s not what AlAbAn is all about. Theorizing your own experience is perfectly fine—the search for explanations is always part and parcel of coming to terms with the experience, but it might be polite if you stuck to your own experience, and didn’t involve anyone else’s.”
“I take your point,” Steve said. “But not being able to make generalizations is a bit restrictive, given that making generalizations is what theorizing is all about. I probably won’t need to refer to anyone else’s story in a specific sense, but I will have to refer to the general themes that keep cropping up.”
“What sort of general themes?” Walter asked.
“Well, the fact that all the stories I’ve heard are interpretable in terms of the aliens being time-travelers rather than space travelers, and the fact that, if you look at them collectively, they do add up to a vague image of what the future will be like: a long series of adaptive radiations, producing very different kinds of climax communities, punctuated by large-scale extinction-events.”
“You haven’t been coming to the group very long, Steve—just since the beginning of September, if I remember rightly, and we’re only at the beginning of December. I’m not sure that you ought, as a good scientist, to be generalizing on the basis of such a small sample.”
“Fair comment,” Steve said. “I’d love to have a broader perspective, if you’d care to share your own observations with me. It wouldn’t necessarily harm my theory, though, to find out that the time travel theme is fairly recent and fairly localized, because the sort of process I’m envisaging is a dynamic one. It would be entirely expectable, for instance, that all experiences of alien sightings and excursions would have been interpreted in terms of space travel back in the 1960s, because that was the dominant idea of the day—a key notion in our attempt to interpret our situation in the universe and our prospects for the future. Things are different now—the idea that we can see the future as the pioneering of new frontiers in space is more-or-less dead and buried, and all our calculations regarding future social progress have been confused and confounded by global warming and the unfolding ecocatastrophe. It’s not surprising, in those historical circumstances, that we should be interpreting our abduction experiences—and, more importantly sharing our abduction experiences—with the aid of different hypothetical reference-points. Do you see what I’m driving at?”
“Oh yes,” Walter said, earnestly. “I may be an old fool, but I’m not an idiot. I’ve read Jung too, you know—and a lot of books you probably haven’t. I’ve heard other theories, remember. They come and they go. That’s not what AlAbAn is for, Steve. AlAbAn’s purpose is to lend support to people who have these experiences, who couldn’t get that support from anywhere else—not from their families, or their workmates, or their friends. It’s for people to tell their stories in a non-skeptical environment, where no one will laugh at them or accuse them of deluding themselves. I don’t want to violate that principle here and now by questioning your theory or suggesting that you shouldn’t have a theory. I’m delighted that you’ve found that means of getting to grips with your own experience, and you have my full support in extrapolating it as far as you can and as far as you need to. I don’t want to censor what you might want to say to the meeting, be it next Thursday or some time in the new year. All I’m asking you to do is think about it, and try to make sure that you’re continuing to offer us the kind of support you want and expect from us. We’re not scientific investigators, and we’re not educators—we’re just a group of friends, trying to help one another out. If I’ve learned one thing in forty years of chairing the local branch of AlAbAn, it’s that we all have to come to terms with our own experiences in our own way.”
“We’re all unique,” Steve said. “Yes, that’s part and parcel of my theory. Even though we’re all unique, though, we’re also all parts of something greater. AlAbAn is a collective as well as a set of individuals. The communication aspect is important.”
“Yes it is,” Walter said. “It’s very important. That’s why we have to be so careful. That’s why we have to be supportive, and non-judgmental, and accept one another for exactly what we are, instead of trying to fit one another’s experiences into our own way of seeing. I think you know well enough what can happen to a group of friends when that kind of supportiveness breaks down.”
Steve started slightly at that, although he realized that he had no call to be surprised. Even if Janine hadn’t taken Walter Wainwright into her confidence by telling him everything, the old man wasn’t blind, and he was certainly no fool.
“You must have formed general impressions of your own,” Steve said, “in more than forty years. You must have ideas of your own as to what’s really going on.”
“Of course I have,” the old man agreed. “I even used to formulate theories, once upon a time. Then I gave it up—not just for the reasons I’ve just given you, but for another. You might not be as sympathetic to that one, given that you’re a teacher, but I’ll tell you anyway. Theorizing is, in essence, a matter of telling other people what to think, telling them how to interpret their own experiences. Even if the theories are right—in fact, especially if the theories are right—they don’t like it. They resent it. Even if they need it, the way your pupils need the substance of the national curriculum, not just in order to pass their exams but to function as thinking individuals, they still resent it.
“Running AlAbAn and its predecessors has taught me that people like listening to stories. They’re prepared to be interested in things that happened to another person, and sometimes become quite enthusiastic to know what happened next. Because of that, they’re prepared to take an interest in how what happened made the story-teller feel, and sometimes in what it made the story-teller think—but mostly, they just want to know what happened next. What they’re not interested in, and won’t thank a story-teller for, is telling them how it’s supposed to make them feel, and what it’s supposed to make them think. When I realized that, I made my own decision as to what was important, and what my groups could actually do for people—people like you, Milly and Janine.
“I want to give people space and time to come to terms with their own experiences in their own way, whatever that might be. I’ve been lucky enough to find other people to help me do that—especially Amelia. I’ve been friends with Amelia for more than fifty years. I’d like to think that we’d both been lucky in that respect, and that we’d shared our luck with our other friends. It’s up to you, Steve. You can say anything you want to at the meeting. All I ask is that you think about it first—about all our mutual friends, even the absent ones, and whether you can support them as well as supplying your own needs. It’s not easy, sometimes, as you well know.”
“I get it,” Steve said. “Thanks, Walter—I think that’s what I needed to hear. At any rate, it’s a judgment worthy of Solomon, and I certainly don’t think that you’re an old fool. I never did. I think they’re setting up for the quiz now, so I’d better leave you to it. Thanks for slotting me in.”
“Actually,” Walter said, “you could return the favor if you’ve nothing better to do. We’re a man short tonight. Our history specialist had to go into hospital for a hernia operation.”
“I’m a science teacher,” Steve said apologetically.
“I know,” Walter told him. “We rarely get science questions, unfortunately, but it doesn’t much matter. We rarely win, even when we’re at full strength. Our combined ages usually add up to far more than three hundred, which is a lot of experience, but our memories aren’t what they used to be and we’ve lost touch with modern fashions in just about everything. If you can bear the thought of spending Saturday night with four old men, we’ll be glad of your company as well as your input—unless, of course, you’d feel happier teamed with people of your own age. There are always a few strays around to form up new teams, and you might do better playing against us than for us. The prizes aren’t up to much, though.”
Steve looked around, to watch the other teams forming up. Janine, he observed, was the only young person in a team of older people, although her father and his three companions weren’t nearly as old as Walter and the other old men who were shuffling over to join him now that he’d signaled them to do so.
“They won’t let you on to that team, I’m afraid,” Walter said, following the direction of Steve’s forlorn gaze. “They’re frequent winners, so there’s always a queue to join them. It put one or two noses out of joint, I can tell you, when Janine got in ahead of their regular reserves—but family always counts for more than convention, and rightly so. She pulls her weight, mind—very good on geography, I understand. We get a lot of geography questions, since the budget airlines made foreign tourism so cheap. Not our forte, alas—Stan and Keith haven’t been out of the country since they came back from National Service in the Far East in the fifties. Different generations, different attitudes.”
“I don’t travel abroad myself,” Steve admitted, “but if you’ll have me, I’m in. Maybe we’ll get an unexpected glut of science questions and give Janine’s Dad a run for his money.”
No such glut materialized, alas, and Walter’s team came a poor seventh in spite of Steve’s heroic assistance in the well-trodden field of popular culture. Unfortunately, the Royal Oak had no shortage of experts in that area, whose knowledge of television shows was far greater than Steve’s. He was able to take some comfort, though, from the fact that Janine’s father’s team hadn’t won either, perhaps because their new star player had been distracted by the necessity of looking daggers at Steve all night.
