Alien Abduction, page 3
Janine astonished him by saying: “Oh, I know all about that. My friend Milly goes regularly—she’s been trying to persuade Alison and me to go with her for ages. They meet over in East Grimstead—she must be serious about it, because she takes the bus.”
Steve seized upon the unexpected opportunity to draw the conversation into what seemed to be safer waters. “Your friend Milly thinks she’s been abducted by aliens?” he queried. “When? What happened to her?”
“Oh, she’s never confided in me or Alison,” Janine said, with a slight hint of bitterness. “I don’t even know whether she’s ever told her story to the group. She says there’s no pressure on people to talk about their experiences if they don’t want to, but that it helps just to listen. If you ask me, she just got addicted to support groups after the other one. That one cured her, after a fashion, so she’s being more careful this time—eking it out, so to speak.”
“What other one?” Steve asked, glad for he opportunity to take control of the conversational tempo. Even though he didn’t know Milly, he was fully entitled to ask about her, because Janine had brought the subject up and left the information she’d supplied tantalizingly incomplete.
“It was a group for people with Eating Disorders.”
“You mean she’s fat—or was.”
“No, the opposite. When we were at school she got very thin after GCSEs. She used to make herself sick after eating—even after school lunches. Mind you, that wasn’t so very unusual once we got to year eleven. Alison and I were never in the sick club, but there was quite a clique. The pressure of the A levels that we never got around to taking, I suppose. We could have—we were all clever enough, Ali especially, but none of us wanted to. Milly’s bulimia just gave us one more reason for resolving to get out. She never committed herself fully to the clique, mercifully; Ali and I remained her crucial connection to normality. As I said, she’s cured now, and had to move on from the Eating Disorders group. She eats normally, and works out a quite a bit at the police gym. Did you know that traffic wardens are allowed to use the police gym? She gets preferential treatment housing-wise as well—a special flat for key workers, Ali’s got one too, but travel agents don’t qualify.”
“Teachers do,” Steve said, “but I prefer my own place—I like older houses. So, is Milly contentedly plump now?”
“No. She’s bigger than me—nearly as tall as you, I suppose—so she can carry more weight that I can without looking fleshy. Actually, she looks very good—the broad shoulders and big bones give her an athletic look. Beside her, I look like a fragile doll. She needs that sort of appearance, mind—being a traffic warden’s definitely a high stress job. Victims of road rage are even worse than rebellious pheromone-crazed adolescents. Should I recommend your hypnotherapist to her, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Sylvia’s a fan of AlAbAn, at any rate. She’d approve of Milly going, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t disapprove,” Janine said. “I just prefer conventional girls’ nights out to support groups.”
“You get free tea and biscuits, so I’m told,” Steve rambled on, “although I don’t suppose that’s much of an attraction, if she’s paranoid about what she eats.”
“She’s not, any more,” Janine reminded him. “She’d really appreciate it if we gave her a lift, mind. The bus service is terrible. She doesn’t drive herself, you see—doesn’t think it’s becoming for a traffic warden to fraternize with the enemy.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking of going,” Steve said. “I know perfectly well that I haven’t really been abducted by aliens. The ones who think they have wouldn’t want someone like me there, sticking my skeptical oar in. Your Milly probably wouldn’t like it either. Hang on—that’s our number. Back in a sec.”
When he came back with the two plates and the cutlery, Janine was quick to take up the thread of the conversation. “They don’t mind skeptics, apparently,” she said. “According to Milly, they’re very tolerant—she says it’s a very supportive support group—much more so than the Eating Disorder group, which tended to be much stricter and more censorious. There are rules, though, that everyone has to follow. I don’t think you’re allowed to accuse the other members of the group of being deluded or telling lies. I think we should go, though; it might be fun.”
Steve gathered that Janine was at least slightly curious about her friend’s involvement with AlAbAn, and was not ungrateful for an excuse to relent in her refusal to attend the meetings. Steve wasn’t so sure that Milly would be pleased about it, but when Janine insisted on ringing Milly’s mobile there and then, without even finishing her food, she carried through her mission with irresistible aplomb.
“That’s settled, then” Janine said, as she put her phone back in her bag. “You’d better pick me up first, between six-thirty and six forty-five. I said we’d get to her before seven. The meeting starts at seven-thirty, but they like people to be prompt.”
“Right,” said Steve, uncertain whether to be mildly annoyed because the decision had been take out of his hands or mildly pleased because Janine seemed to have forgotten all about his reasons for seeking hypnotherapeutic assistance. “I guess that’s a date, then.”
The very concept of a “support group” had always sent a vague shiver through Steve’s body, and the notion that someone like him might be in need of an institution like AlAbAn was slightly horrifying. Under the circumstances, though, he was able to justify his impending attendance at the AlAbAn meeting as a means by which Janine could introduce him to one of her closest friends, and thus move their relationship forward by one more small but vital step.
As Janine had mentioned. Milly lived in one of the brand new flats that had been built near the city centre, in one of the smaller ones reserved for occupancy by “key workers”. It was a nice flat, with central heating—which Steve’s flat didn’t have, being reliant on an old-fashioned gas fire for winter heat—but it was rather tiny. Milly was, indeed, built on a more generous scale than Janine, but she was wearing flat heels, so she was still a comfortable inch shorter than Steve. She wasn’t as exquisitely beautiful as Janine, but the relative boldness of her features was matched by a boldness of attitude and manner that chimed in perfectly with the style of her looks. Steve wouldn’t have cast her as Helen of Troy—although he could see Janine in that role—but he reckoned that she would have made a strikingly imperious and satisfyingly voluptuous Cleopatra. She greeted Steve warmly, telling him that she’d heard a lot about him.
“All good, I hope,” Steve said, lazily falling back on the conventional cliché rather than trying to improvise something wittier.
“Oh yes,” Milly said. “Quite an ad, really—but Jan’s always polite about her boy-friends. Ali’s the one who always runs them down. Jan always thinks she might have got hold of a good one at last—but in your case, she’s certainly not mistaken about your boy-band looks. You’d make a very handsome couple if you weren’t so much taller than she is.”
“Don’t mind Milly,” Janine put in. “She’s a past master of the back-handed compliment. It’s me she’s insulting, in what she thinks is a subtle fashion, not you.”
“I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of delicacy as well as beauty,” Steve said, ostensibly to Milly. “I like Janine’s perfect economy of form as much as I like her perfect facial symmetry. She’s practically my ideal.”
“Oh dear,” Milly said. “Practically your ideal. And Jan thinks I’m one for back-handed compliments. You’ll have to watch out for that margin, Jan—the next thing you know, he’ll be referring to your almost perfect economy of form and your almost perfect facial symmetry, and it’ll all be downhill from then on. I’m all ready—we can go.”
Fortunately, Milly didn’t have time to quiz Steve about why he was going to the AlAbAn meeting during the journey to East Grimstead, because she was too eager to instruct both her companions in the nature and etiquette of the group. “They’re not at all doctrinaire,” she told them, wriggling slightly to settle her backside more comfortably into the rear seat of Steve’s Citroen. “It’s not in the least unusual for the stories they tell to be wildly different, even mutually contradictory, but everyone’s supposed to be supportive, no matter what improbabilities they’re faced with, and everyone is. You mustn’t challenge anything anyone says, even if you think you’ve found some crucial logical flaw or elementary violation of the laws of physics. It’s taken for granted that everyone’s experience is valid, no matter how peculiar it might be, and that everyone’s equally deserving of trust and moral support. If you listen quietly for two or three meetings, you’ll find yourselves slipping into it very easily.
“Amelia, the hostess, is one of those incredibly polite and pleasant old dears that everyone wishes they had for a granny, and Walter, the chairman, has a remarkable way with people. If anyone steps out of line, he just eases them back into it with the utmost gentleness. I never knew anyone so good at compelling politeness. He’d probably have been the greatest traffic warden the world has ever seen, instantly quelling the worst road rage with a slight frown and a few soothing words, but I’m not absolutely certain what he actually did before he retired—something to do with insurance, I think. You’ll find that a lot of the crowd are pretty old, although all age-groups are fairly represented.
“Walter and Amelia have been running the group for more than forty years, since the 1960s—although it wasn’t always called AlAbAn. Walter reckons that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, but that the aliens have some kind of device for blanking out the memories. He thinks that the people who remember what happened are a tiny minority, who often need help to bring the buried memories back to the surface as well as help in coming to terms with them, but he also thinks they’re enormously privileged, because they obtain glimpses of possibilities far beyond those available to our narrow lives. He considers AlAbAn members the most privileged of all, because they have the chance to see how their glimpses fit in with others. Not that there’s any overall pattern that I can see, although you often catch echoes of one person’s story in another.”
This last item of news didn’t surprise Steve in the least. He figured that the real purpose of the group, for most of its members, must be to assist in the elaboration of individual confabulations. People went there, he assumed, in order to plagiarize bits of other people’s delusions to make their own more detailed, and perhaps more satisfactory. He hoped that by forewarning himself of this fact he might forearm himself against any similar effect, although he didn’t think that it would do him any great harm to start dreaming about other people’s supposed alien abductions, or even projecting himself into such dreams, provided that he remained fully conscious of the fact that dreams were what they were. He was confident, as a man of science—even the second-rate kind who taught science to school kids rather than actually doing it—that he could resist the temptation to start believing in nonsense simply because it was sometimes spouted by people who had the gift of the gab, capable of sweetening the tempers of road hogs and selling ice to Eskimos.
Before picking Milly up, Steve had vaguely assumed that the AlAbAn group would meet in East Grimstead’s village hall, but by the time they had passed through West Grimstead Milly had disabused him of that notion and had given him fair warning that the front room of Amelia Rockham’s so-called cottage could get a little crowded.
Steve was surprised to find, when he, Janine and Milly arrived, that there were already twenty-five people gathered, most of them perched on folding chairs with no space to stretch their legs. There were more than enough tea-cups to go round, though; Mrs. Rockham was obviously used to catering for such numbers. She greeted the newcomers warmly, and told them not to be shy about grabbing their fair share of the biscuits, because no one else would be.
When Milly introduced Janine and Steve to the chairperson, Walter Wainwright—who was even older than Mrs. Rockham—Steve felt vindicated in his anticipations, because the old man seemed every inch a slick salesman, of the type who could easily transfer skills learned flogging second-hand cars or dodgy stocks and shares to the context of a church, a cult or a support group. Walter hardly glanced at him, though, before greeting Janine much more warmly, claiming to know her parents quite well. Steve immediately added “old lech” to the list of pre-prepared insults he had organized, but the conversation was brief because the old man had other people clamoring for his attention and there were other newcomers to be introduced to him.
Milly obviously had a seat reserved for her by the other regulars—an old armchair that had seen better days, and she only paused briefly before taking it, making an apologetic gesture to Janine because the folding seats to either side of it were already occupied. Janine nodded to indicate her appreciation of the situation, and drew Steve across the room so that they could sit together, almost directly opposite Milly’s position, on a settee that was even older than the armchair. It was upholstered in a synthetic fabric whose brief fashionability had evaporated before Steve was out of short pants. “It’s called Naugahyde,” he whispered to Janine. “My parents had one once. So sad.”
He looked around then, and tried to gauge the composition of the audience. He, Janine and Milly were probably the youngest people in the room, although there was one other man and one other woman who were probably under thirty, There were half a dozen people apparently in their thirties and half a dozen apparently in their forties, but the remainder were over fifty, and at least ten must have been senior citizens. There were more men than women, although not so many more as to form an overpowering majority. Steve noted, though, that apart from himself and Janine there were only two obvious couples in the assembly; he suspected that the proportion of widows, widowers and divorced people in the group might be substantially higher than was manifest in the population of Wiltshire as a whole.
There was no round of general introductions when the meeting got under way, and no minutes to be read. Walter Wainwright’s welcome seemed to Steve to be more like a warm-up man’s patter than a preamble to the kind of meeting that he had to attend at school once a week or thereabouts, but he wasn’t displeased by that. The chairman ran briskly through the rules that Milly had already summarized, but didn’t labor the key points; when he asked whether anyone wanted to speak, Steve dutifully stared at his shoes, but the precaution was unnecessary. One of the non-debutant members seemed only too eager to introduce himself—as “Jim”—and to volunteer to tell his tale.
Jim, it seemed, had come all the way from Ringwood to attend the last few meetings, because Dorset apparently didn’t yet have its own branch of AlAbAn. He gave the impression that he wouldn’t be back once he’d got his story off his chest, although that obviously wasn’t typical, given the size of his audience and the attentiveness of its members.
Steve tensed himself for a painful experience. Within a very few minutes, though, he had to admit to himself that Jim’s story wasn’t at all what he’d expected or feared. It wasn’t an account of alien abduction at all, although Steve could see why the guy had brought the story to AlAbAn in search of a sympathetic hearing rather than broadcasting it to the regulars in his local.
CHAPTER TWO
CREATIONISM
I work in Southampton so my normal way home is the motorway and then the A31, but I’d had to visit a client that day whose offices were on the north side of Romsey. I’m in corporate insurance. We finished late—after seven—and instead of driving back to the motorway junction I let the SatNav guide me home by a more direct route. It took me through Awbridge, Sherfield English, and Plaitford, and then to a place that’s actually called Nomansland. It was south of there, aimed vaguely in the direction of Fritham, that it happened.
This was late November, so it was pretty dark and the road was empty. Because it was a B-road, I wasn’t doing much more than thirty—fifty at the most—and I was keeping my eyes peeled for headlights coming in the opposite direction. I didn’t see the deer until I was almost on top of it. It wasn’t a big deer—a roe deer, I guess, and not fully grown at that—but it was plenty big enough to put some hefty dents in the radiator and the bonnet if I hit it head on. I braked hard, but I didn’t think it would be hard enough, because the damn thing stood stock still until the last possible moment, when it suddenly leapt sideways.
I will gladly swear on every Holy Book there is that there was nothing else on the road before that moment—but when the deer bounded from my side of the road to the other, it was suddenly in front of another vehicle, which appeared out of nowhere, coming in the opposite direction without its headlights on. Even if he’d braked, the other guy would have been certain to hit the stupid creature, but it didn’t seem to me that he braked at all. Instead, he swerved—which, as you know, is entirely the wrong thing to do. If he’d swerved my way, he’d only have clipped my back end, because I was still moving forward even though I’d slammed the brakes on. In fact, he went the other way, straight into a tree.
I didn’t actually see him hit the tree, because he didn’t have his headlights on and mine were pointed in the wrong direction, but there was an almighty bang. I came to a halt shortly afterwards, and jumped out immediately—well, almost immediately—to see if there was anything I could do. I left the door open in the hope that the car’s internal lights would give me enough light to see what was what.
I took my mobile with me, and began thumbing 999 before I noticed that there was no signal—which was peculiar in itself, given that I wasn’t exactly a million miles from civilization, even if they have just made half of Dorset into a National Park.
