Alien Abduction, page 32
“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 said.
“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.”
“Reading will be hellishly crowded the Saturday before Christmas,” she reminded him. “Be careful not to overdo it—you don’t want any setbacks before Thursday. I suppose I could switch my overtime from Tuesday to Wednesday, if that would help.”
“It wouldn’t,” he said. “I’ve got an appointment with Sylvia—I’ll need the booster even if things go well in Reading, because of Thursday. I could do Monday, though.”
“I’m firmly committed then,” she said. “No matter—can’t be helped. Saturday and Wednesday nights at my place will be fine, no matter how late. You can pick me up on Thursday at the usual time.”
Steve was careful on the Saturday, and contrived to go over Reading Bridge as well as Caversham Bridge in a moderately relaxed state of mind, before braving the Christmas crowds in the Oracle. He bought presents for Alison and Janine as well as Milly, although he hadn’t the slightest idea whether any of them would be considered appropriate, let alone welcome. He had a session with Sylvia Joyce on the Tuesday, which went well, although he played safe by refusing her offer to regress him. The school Christmas party went as well as could be expected, in spite of all the mistletoe and the extreme determination of his sixth-form groups to explore the limits of permissible misbehavior.
“You look nervous,” Milly said, when Steve picked her up to drive her to the meeting at which he was due to reveal all about the recovered memory whose exhumation Sylvia Joyce had begun. “You don’t have anything to be scared of, you know. Compared to a class of fifteen-year-olds, the AlAbAn crowd must be the easiest audience imaginable.”
“It’s not like doing a science lesson, though,” Steve said. “All that comes straight out of the textbook. This is different.”
Steve had spoken to Milly on the phone several times since she’d met with Alison and Janine on the Sunday, as well as hooking up with her on the Wednesday night, but she hadn’t said a word about the outcome of the big discussion, and she didn’t say anything about it while they drove to East Grimstead. She was more even-tempered by far than she’d been a fortnight before, but she still couldn’t pass for cheerful. Steve couldn’t help feeling that he was being gradually edged out of the relationship, in the process of being discarded by slow degrees. He’d been tempted more than once to call Alison and ask her what had happened at the meeting, but he hadn’t dared. Milly would undoubtedly have regarded it as going behind her back.
“I broke my personal record for booking four-by-fours this week,” Milly remarked, as they turned left in Alderbury. “I hadn’t been away very long, but the school run scum had already got used to taking liberties. I wrote so many tickets my wrist got sore. If I were paid on a commission basis I’d have made up all my lost income.”
“Is your vendetta against gas-guzzling vehicles, or women with small children?” Steve asked, indicating by his tone that it was a joke rather an accusation.
“Both,” Milly told him, not taking the least offence. “I’m against all emitters of toxic substances, whether liquid, solid or gaseous. By the way, did you know that the council are thinking of introducing a parking permit system for your street? I had to review the paperwork on Tuesday evening”
“I got a leaflet through my letter-box,” Steve said. “It won’t make any difference to me. If I need a permit, I’ll get one. I’ve never parked illegally in my life. I’m a teacher, after all—I have to set an example, just like you.”
“Yes we do,” Milly said. “That’s why I’ve never learned to drive—so I’ll never be tempted to add to the world’s burden of exhaust fumes. Before you jump on me for collaborating in your sin, remember that you’d be making the journey anyway.”
“It would be a slightly shorter journey if I didn’t call for you,” Steve pointed out, and threw caution to the winds by adding: “Mind you, it was a considerably longer journey when I used to pick Janine up as well, so I suppose you can take credit for reducing the margin—although I suppose we ought to factor Walter Wainwright’s detour into the equation too. The arithmetic of virtue’s quite complicated, when you really get down to it, isn’t it? Sometimes, it almost gives one a sense of relief to remember that the ecosphere’s fucked and the whole human race is doomed to imminent extinction.”
“Doomed we may be,” Milly countered, “but in the meantime, the rules still apply. People can’t just park wherever they want to, no matter what sort of excuses they have. People have to have consideration for other people, no matter how fucked up the atmosphere is.”
Steve had no idea whether she was really talking about parking, or about people screwing other people’s boy-friends and girl-friends, or both. “I know,” he said, anyway, as he found a legal parking-spot within easy walking distance of Amelia Rockham’s cottage. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
As they walked into the meeting together, Steve tried to compose himself, or at least to persuade himself that he wasn’t undertaking a metaphorical walk to the scaffold. He was amazed to see, when he got inside, that Janine wasn’t alone in the green armchair. Alison was perched on one of the arms, with her arm outstretched along the back, behind Janine’s head.
Alison nodded a friendly greeting, which seemed to take in both Steve and Milly. They both nodded back, and Steve even risked a glance that attempted to inform Janine that she was included in the greeting too. Janine didn’t nod back, but her gaze wasn’t hostile, or even coldly indifferent.
“There you are,” Milly whispered in his ear, as they settled into their familiar settee. “One more supportive skeptic to add to your audience. That’s what I call pulling power.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A CAN OF WORMS
I wanted to tell you about my theory as well as my experience, but I talked it over with Walter, and he gave me some good advice. He assured me that I certainly wouldn’t be the first person to have brought a theory to the group, and that the group would be just as tolerant and supportive of the theory as they are of unembellished stories, but he suggested that it might be polite not to use my interpretations of other people’s stories as evidence for my theory. He’s right about that, so I’ll be as discreet as I can, but when it comes to my own experience, it’s impossible to separate the process of remembering from the process of interpretation, so I’m afraid you’ll find that every aspect of what I have to tell you is shot through with my ongoing attempts to understand what it means.
There’s one more thing I ought to say, because I know that none of you would ever be so impolite as to say it, even though you’ve every right to think it. How, you might think, can you possibly take a man seriously as a theorist of the time-stream and the universe, when you have manifest proof before your eyes that he can’t even manage his own love life with a modicum of intelligence or decency? If it were just a theory in physics, of course, that wouldn’t matter—just because Isaac Newton was paranoid, it doesn’t mean that the theory of gravity is a paranoid theory—but my theory isn’t like that. My theory is a theory that’s intimately bound up with such matters as intelligence and decency, and you might be quite right to suspect it of being no more than a pretentious kind of special pleading answering to my own feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, that might be its greatest strength rather than a fatal weakness—you’ll have to make your own minds up about that.
My experience began a few months ago, when I consulted a hypnotherapist about certain phobias I have, to do with flying and heights. I’d always had the phobias, but I’d never consulted anyone about them before, because I’d always taken the view that I could live within their limits. I’d always told myself that the simplest response to a fear of flying is not to fly, and the simplest response to a fear of heights is not to go to the upper floors of tall buildings, especially ones that have open atria or glass-sided lifts. Bridges are a problem too, but it’s a matter of degree. Wiltshire, mercifully, isn’t replete with wide rivers, and if it ever becomes absolutely necessary to go to Wales one day, I can always go via Gloucester. What prompted me to get help wasn’t the day-to-day difficulty of living with my fears but the fact that I’d got a new girlfriend, who was a travel agent. I’m a schoolteacher myself, and most of the people I’d previously had relationships with, after leaving university, were also teachers. There’d never been any particular pressure to go on foreign holidays—but a travel agent is in an ideal position to get ultra-cheap deals, and the first option on deals that are simply too good to miss. I knew the matter was going to come up eventually.
I didn’t expect that the therapist would be able to cure me, but I’d been told that she could teach me relaxation techniques that just might allow me to get through a short-haul flight without overdosing on tranquilizers. That’s all I actually wanted, but Sylvia—that’s the therapist—suggested that if I could figure out the psychological origins of the phobias, I might do even better.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “We might be opening a can of worms.” She had a jokey response all ready for that one, though. “Better a can of worms than a can’t,” she said.
I eventually gave in, and gave her permission to trawl through some of my memories, just to demonstrate the method. She found a trauma easily enough—but the memory wasn’t from early childhood, and the nightmare it recalled couldn’t possibly have caused phobias I’d already had for years. At first, in fact, I thought that it was just a perfectly ordinary nightmare that had been produced by my phobias, which my conscious mind had sensibly repressed, dutifully refusing me access to a disturbing and utterly unreal experience.
I don’t believe that Sylvia suggested that I come to AlAbAn because she thought that the recovered memory might be real. Although she couldn’t give me any specific information, I’m pretty sure that she’s sent other people here in similar circumstances, for exactly the same reason: to help them see that such experiences aren’t unique, as a preparatory stage in being able to entertain them more hospitably, to analyze them, and figure out what they’re trying to tell us. I probably wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t mentioned the existence of the group to my new girl-friend, as a kind of joke. She’d already heard of it, because one of her friends had been coming here regularly for months, and between the two of us, we worked up curiosity enough to take a look. As you know, we kept coming back thereafter.
Sylvia will probably be pleased by the outcome of her suggestion, because she’ll think that everything has gone to plan: that I’ve completed the de-repression of my nightmare, and pieced it together so that I can relive it and relate it, delivering it up for analysis in the hope that it might give us the clue that will lead us to the real traumatic experience that generated my phobias. Well, maybe it will—but that’s not where it led me when I was able to piece it together, in the light of the other stories I heard relived and related in this room. It led me to something much more important than an understanding of my own petty failings and foibles—because I realized that it wasn’t just my nightmare, and that it wasn’t just a lurid transfiguration of my own anxieties.
In accordance with the rules, I make no judgment about the nature of anyone else’s experience, but, speaking for myself, I’m quite certain that I was never actually taken out of my bed and transported into an alien vessel. My experience was subjective—but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t real, or that it wasn’t an authentic revelation. It was real, and it was an authentic revelation; the only point at issue is whether it only reveals something about my twisted mind, or whether it also reveals something about the nature of the universe and the time-stream…or, indeed, whether every vision that reveals something about any individual’s mind, however twisted, also reveals something about the nature of the universe and the time-stream.
What I dreamed, in summary, is this. I dreamed that I was taken aboard an alien vessel, by means of a mechanism that convention calls a “tractor beam”, although I learned in the course of my dream that the term is slightly misleading. I dreamed that I was being subjected to some kind of examination there, without any explanation, and would have been returned to the course of my life none the wiser, if the aliens’ plans hadn’t been interrupted. In my case, though, the interruption wasn’t caused by some kind of weird transtemporal traffic accident, or a scheme that went awry. It was a summons—some kind of mayday call, to which they had to respond, even though I was aboard and surplus to requirements. That was when the aliens thought it necessary for one of them to put on human form, and adopt the human language, in order to explain to me why they could no longer simply opt out of my memory.
In my dream, the mentor appointed to talk me through the adventure took on the appearance of a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, with which most of you are probably familiar. I have no idea why; I’d surely have been more inclined to trust him if he’d pretended to be Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein, both of whose portraits were far more familiar to me than Poe’s, but Poe was who he decided to pretend to be.
