CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MAKING SLOW PROGRESS

As he and Milly drove back to Salisbury after listening to Neville’s story, Steve couldn’t help thinking about Janine sitting in the passenger seat of Walter Wainwright’s car, perhaps taking Walter into her confidence regarding her troubles, and telling him things that she’d never told Steve. He didn’t suppose for a moment that Walter Wainwright would make a pass at her, or that she would be anything less than scandalized if he did, but the notion that they might be in the process of building some kind of intimate relationship, however Platonic, troubled him anyway. Janine, after all, didn’t really belong at AlAbAn; she was only there in order to exact some strange kind of fee from Steve and Milly by listening to their stories, and disapproving of their togetherness in the meantime. Walter Wainwright surely ought to disapprove of that, and certainly ought not to be assisting in such a malign project.

“It’s hard to think of poor old Amelia once having had a stalker,” he said to Milly, to break a silence that was on the point of becoming awkward.

“No, it’s not,” Milly said, continuing a habit she’d lately developed of contradicting Steve’s harmless conversational remarks. “She must have been quite pretty back in 1962, or whenever, and even if she hadn’t been, men were no different then than they are now. A public library’s the sort of place that attracts weirdoes—mercifully.”

“Why mercifully?” Steve asked.

“If they weren’t attracted off the streets,” Milly stated, confidently, “they’d all be stalking female traffic wardens.”

“Except for the ones hanging around the schools,” Steve said, reflectively. “Mind you, the perverts peering in through the railings are harmless by comparison with the sex-bombs who are already inside. Hell hath no more demonic temptress than a year eleven siren with a crush. Poor Neville must have found himself on the wrong end of one of those from time to time.”

“He was safely married for most of his career,” Milly observed. “Whereas you’re single, and still the right side of thirty. The little harpies probably see you as a legitimate target—just as the aliens did.”

Steve knew that the last remark was the first cast in a fishing expedition, but he wasn’t about to rise to the bait. “It must be much worse for you,” he said, dryly. “Everybody thinks that traffic wardens are legitimate targets, from pervs with a passion for women in uniform to road rage sufferers armed with machetes.”

“I’m just glad that you fit into the former category, darling,” she said. “Mind you, if you’d met some of the traffic wardens I’ve met, you might lose your passion for women in uniform.”

“If you’d met some of the school kids I’d met,” Steve countered, “you’d know that I’d lost it long ago.”

She looked at him sideways then, and he could see the temptation in her eyes. What she wanted to ask, by way of a casual joke, was: Well, if it’s not the uniform you’re kinky for, what are you doing with me?—but she didn’t dare. She seemed far less confident now of the destiny that she had hitherto credited with responsibility for their relationship—a relationship that was far from having attained a stage at which remarks like that could pass automatically as jokes. Steve couldn’t see any prospect of getting to that sort of stage any time soon, if ever, and he suspected that Milly couldn’t either. At present, there were far too many meaningless things he couldn’t bring himself to say to her, even when wit or curiosity prompted him, just as there were too many things she couldn’t bring herself to say to him, even when the conversational flow or the logic of a situation licensed them.

Moving back to safer conversational ground, Steve said: “I think Neville’s still after Amelia, you know. She’s a widow now, and he’s a widower, so he must figure he’s in with a chance again—but good old Walter is still around to confuse the situation, just as he was always around in the old days. There is something between Walter and Amelia, I’m convinced—and probably always has been, even though they both married other people. Maybe they were abducted together. Has there ever been an account of a double abduction, in the time that you’ve been attending meetings?”

“No,” Milly said. “It’s always been one at a time. Mind you, I’ve never heard Walter’s own story, or Amelia’s. According to your theory, there couldn’t be any double abductions, could there? If it’s all a matter of private dreams reflecting the uniqueness of the individual, no one could ever share an abduction experience with anyone else, even if they had the most intimate relationship in the world.”

“Maybe not,” Steve conceded. “There’d be no barrier, of course, to someone including another person in their own abduction experience, but there’s no way that the other person could have the same experience. Unless, of course.…” He trailed off.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that, Steve,” Milly said. “It’s all very well wanting to think your ideas through before offering them up for my sagacious judgment, but leaving your sentences dangling like that is annoying as well as untidy.”

“Sorry,” Steve said. “What I was thinking was that maybe, in certain circumstances, one person might be so keen to forge a bond with another person that they’d actually appropriate the other person’s experience, and confirm—maybe even sincerely believe—that they’d experienced it too.”

“Are we talking about Walter and Amelia or about you and me?” Milly asked, immediately.

“I was just thinking,” Steve said. “Hypothetically.”

“Is the reason you won’t tell me any details of your experience because you don’t want me to have the chance of appropriating it for my own selfish ends?” Milly persisted. “Do you think I’m planning to adopt you as a character into my experience?

“No,” Steve said. “That would be absurd. We both know perfectly well that we began formulating our experiences before we’d met, so it would be blatantly anachronistic for either of us to include the other in our stories. Mine’s a solo flight, just like all the rest.”

“So’s mine,” Milly conceded, a trifle reluctantly. Steve guessed that she was wondering whether that concession further weakened her argument regarding the existence of some mysterious bond between the two of them, which might somehow justify their having done the dirty on Janine.

“It would be interesting, though,” Steve said, attempting to defuse the tension filling the car, “to know what did go on between Walter and Amelia, if anything. Why didn’t they get together, I wonder, if they had so much in common? It’s pretty obvious why Neville couldn’t come between them—but if Amelia was as attractive as she probably was, and Walter as handsome as he probably was, you’d think they’d have made an ideal couple.”

At least, he didn’t add, it’s impossible to imagine Walter screwing Amelia’s best friend behind her back. As soon as the thought was formed, though, he couldn’t help contradicting himself, and thinking that maybe it was possible, given that Walter might have taken an entire lifetime to reach his present state of grace, and might have been just as wild and wayward in his youth as any other young man handsome enough to obtain easy opportunities to screw around. Maybe, Steve couldn’t help thinking, that was why Walter was taking such a sympathetic interest in Janine’s plight.

Milly had obviously been following a different but equally embittered train of thought. “I’d have thought you’d have been rooting for Neville rather than Walter,” she said, “After all, you and he are bound to have a natural rapport, being birds of a feather.”

Steve knew that he was supposed to protest against the implication that he could ever be driven to the kind of stalking behavior that Neville had exhibited, so that Milly could tell him, hypocritically, that she’d only meant that they were both science teachers. He decided not to give her the satisfaction. “I never quite had his passion for print, alas,” he said. “I used to read a fair bit, once, but I couldn’t keep it up when other distractions took over. One of the reasons I did science at school was because there was less homework reading involved than there would have been in history or English.”

“You read Jung’s book on flying saucers only the other week,” Milly pointed out.

“That’s different. That was research. I’ve always been prepared to do functional reading, to investigate facts and theories. I just can’t get into books the way you can. I could never plough through Atlas Shrugged or Star Maker.”

“What Neville was doing was purely functional research,” Milly reminded him. “He couldn’t get into the books either, and he certainly never imbibed the central message of Atlas Shrugged. Birds of a feather, as I said. Maybe the aliens figured that you’d be more useful to them as a serial seducer of innocent maidens—maybe you’re their instrument for researching sexual relationships. Not in the sense that you’re a Kama Sutran experimenter, of course—more in the sense that you’re obliged to run the gamut of all the tangled emotions that sex can whip up. Maybe your emotional incontinence is down to a microchip in your grey matter—just one more information-stream for the aliens to mop up at their leisure.”

“Right,” Steve said. “Neville did the theory of maths and sports, I’m doing the practicals on sex and unreasoning terror, Jill’s doing female hysteria and the tactics of guerilla warfare in the staff-room, and every other science teacher in the country has another little subset of specialties. Walter and Amelia, meanwhile, are studying the side-effects and after-effects of the investigative process—the aliens’ equivalent of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools. You’re doing practical sex from the female viewpoint, and the ethics of parking. It all makes perfect sense.”

“I ought to be able to laugh at that, oughtn’t I?” Milly said, with unexpected sobriety. “I ought to be able to do one of those giggles that used to make other people giggle—even you, once upon a time—but I can’t. I’ve lost my giggle. I can see the joke, but I just don’t find it funny any more. I’ve fucked everything up, haven’t I, Steve? I wanted you, and I stole you, and now you’re no use to me. You’re like one of the fruits in the Bible—the ones that grow by the Dead Sea, which look luscious on the outside, but only taste of ashes when you bite into them. I’ve fucked things up for you, too, and for Janine. It could have been perfect between you and Janine, but I fucked it up, and now everything tastes of ashes for all of us.”

Steve had seen a great many of Milly’s abrupt changes of mood, but had not yet become wholly accustomed to them, and certainly hadn’t learned how to react to them. This seemed to be one instance, though, when duty called him to take the sting out of her self-accusatory hail.

“It wasn’t you,” Steve said, almost wishing that he believed it. “It was me. I was the one who did the fucking up. It’s my fault, not yours. I spoiled your friendship with Janine, just as I spoiled my own relationship with her, and just as I’m now in the process of spoiling my relationship with you. I wish I could say that I couldn’t help it, but I’m sure that I could have done, and still could, if only I could have figured out the trick of it, or begun to master the technique. I’m the one with the emotional incontinence, remember—the one who lets his nervous excitement drive him, instead of owning it and controlling it. I’m the one to blame.”

Milly sighed deeply. The car moved through Alderbury, which seemed sleepier than ever now that the November nights had begun to turn cold at last, keeping sensible people indoors. After a pause, she said: “Well, that helped, didn’t it?”

“Not really,” Steve said.

“At least we feel like comforting one another now,” she said, “instead of sniping. Shall we go straight home instead of stopping off for food. I’ve got some eggs in the fridge—I could make us an omelet. Unless you’d rather get something delivered.”

Steve assured her that an omelet would be fine. It was, too; Milly had some ham and tomatoes to put in the omelets, and enough bread to make toast on the side.

While they were eating, Milly said: “If I were a liar, I could imagine myself trying to appropriate your abduction experience, trying to squeeze myself into its content one way or another, or to squeeze you into mine as a spear-carrier, but I’m not. I’ll just have to stick to what I can remember, although it’s not as neat a tale as Zoe’s or Neville’s. I’ll do mine first, if you like—you’re very welcome to borrow from it if you want, but I don’t suppose you’ll find anything in it you want or need. At the end of the day, we’re both still alone, aren’t we?”

“No, we’re not,” Steve said. “We fly solo in our alien abductions because we’re all unique, not because we’re alone. We all share the same collective unconscious, and the same mythical future, although our conscious minds sometimes rebel against both. Even though we’re flying solo, there’s a sense in which we’re all in it together, all collaborating on the work of revision and refinement—not just the people who attend AlAbAn meetings, but everyone, and not just everyone who’s alive now, but all the people of the past who helped to build and shape the collective unconscious we inherited…and maybe, in a sense, all the people and non-people of the futures of which we catch glimpses in our dreams. Maybe there is such a thing as time travel, but we’ve mistaken its nature, because we always tend to think in terms of machines and gadgets, of ships and string and sealing-wax.…”

“And whether pigs have wings,” she finished for him, disregarding the boiling sea. “They don’t.”

“Not yet,” Steve agreed. “But they will, in the fullness of time.”

She laughed at that, quite spontaneously, and he laughed too. She put out her hand. He took it in his own, and squeezed.

“I’m sorry that I accused you of being like Neville,” Milly said. “You’re not. He’s the exact opposite: the very model of emotional constipation.”

“An equally uncomfortable affliction, I dare say,” Steve said. “Our attitudes to education do appear to be fairly similar, though. He didn’t seem to regard it as a vocation either.”

“A sense of vocation isn’t given to everyone,” Milly told him. “There’s no need to feel bad about that. Those of us who do have a sense of vocation have no particular reason to feel proud of it. After all, what’s so saintly about a compulsion to punish people who park their phallic symbols in the wrong places.”

Steve managed to laugh at that, quite spontaneously, although he suspected that it would only have made him wince a week—or even an hour—earlier. Maybe, he thought, the corner had been turned. Maybe, from now on, things would get better, and the path of slow progress would be resumed.

Things did get better, but very slowly. Things got better at school, too, and not just because the relaxation techniques that Sylvia Joyce had taught Steve were once again taking some of the sting out of the stresses of teaching and marking. His fellow teachers had begun to stop treating him like a leper, and were on the brink of admitting him back into the fringes of their community. On the Monday after the AlAbAn meeting, Tracy condescended to say hello to him when the two of them happened to meet in the corridor, and once that fact was known to everyone else—having been carried at the speed of light by the school grapevine—it threw the door wide open to the inevitability of his eventual rehabilitation.

“Are you still doing that survival course at the tech?” Rhodri Jenkins asked him, idly, on the Wednesday lunch-time, while the deputy head was fishing for spare bodies to play minder between four and half past five.

Steve was tempted to lie, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. “No,” he admitted.

“You can do computer club again, then,” the Welshman said, oozing satisfaction at the unexpected windfall. “You’ll get your reward in Heaven, as well as in your pay packet. I thought you were doing the course with that travel agent of yours, in preparation for the disintegration of society, so that you could become the new Adam and Eve.”

“That’s off,” Steve admitted. “I’m going out with someone else now.” He considered the possibility of attempting to get out of computer club supervision by inventing a date with Milly, but the truth was that Milly was visiting her parents in Bath, having been summoned home by her mother to discuss some unspecified impending crisis. She’d be catching a three o’clock train after doing an early shift. He decided to let the matter lie, and collect the moral credit due to him for helping the deputy head out of a hole.

“Well, at least you’re not shitting on your own doorstep any more,” the Welshman commented. “What does this one do for a living?”

“She’s a traffic warden.”

“Sleeping with the enemy, eh? Had to bribe her to stop her giving you a ticket, I suppose? Got a face like a horse and an arse to match, I dare say.”

“Actually, she’s very good looking, in a slightly Junoesque sort of way” Steve said. “You’re right about having to seduce her to escape the ticket, though. It’s lucky I’ve got the face of an Adonis.” There was no way his fit of honesty was going to extend as far as letting on to the deputy head that he had met Milly as a result of attending meetings of Alien Abductees Anonymous—that would be almost as suicidal as admitting to a chronic fear of flying, heights and bridges.

“Very lucky, I dare say,” Jenkins said. “Will you be trying the same trick next time some butch motorcycle cop flags you down for speeding on the motorway?”

“That only happens on old American TV shows, Rhodri,” Steve told him. “We’ve got speed cameras on motorway bridges now—it’s all automatic.”

“I know that, boyo. I was just making a point, in my subtle Cymric fashion, about the double-edged nature of your armor against adversity. I suppose I was trying to steer the conversation around to a point where I could gently warn you, without seeming too deputy-head-like, not to take reckless advantage of the fact that you’ve been provisionally readmitted to the human race, female-staff-wise. I’d prefer it if you could stay in everyone’s good books from now on—it makes my job much easier.”

“That’s Welsh subtlety, is it?” Steve remarked. “I’d hate to see you try to drop a leaden hint.”

“You’ll certainly know it when it lands on your toe,” Rhodri said, with an approving chuckle. “Glad to see you so cheerful, too. Is that the return ticket from Coventry or is it the traffic warden confirming everything they say about women in uniform?”

“It’s just my sunny nature,” Steve assured him, “and the fact that the sixth-formers have put blood and lymph behind them and got on to the nervous system. Tingling neurons are fun—and brains make everybody think.”

He was in a tolerably good mood, though, considering that there were still two days to go until the weekend; he survived computer club without losing his serenity and went home, having already caught up with his marking, to cook himself a substantial plateful of sausages and chips, delete all the spam from his email inbox and spend a lazy evening catching up with postings on YouTube—which he did in perfect safety, there being no blurred cliffhanger climaxes on view.

Steve couldn’t help wondering, occasionally, what Janine might be doing, now that she was no longer being educated in survival techniques, but he didn’t let the thought torment him too much. He didn’t have bad dreams either, when he finally went to bed.

Steve spent the following Wednesday evening—the one before the next AlAbAn meeting—at Milly’s flat. The vague plan they had both had in mind for the evening was a Marks & Spencer’s ready-made meal hot out of the microwave, with a bottle of Merlot, a cursory chat about the various hassles of the day—in which Milly’s abusive road-users would beat Steve’s abusive kids hands down, as usual—and then sex, before Steve went back home so that they could both spread themselves out to sleep instead of jostling for position in the inadequate space available in Milly’s single bed. As things turned out, however, the agenda somehow got turned around, so that they had the sex first, and then lay in bed, mildly exhausted but unable to sleep, for an hour or so before Milly could pluck up the energy to switch on the microwave and pull a couple of plates out of the cupboard.

Steve knew that it wasn’t really lust that had dragged them into bed ahead of the other items on the agenda. Even though their relationship had become less strained since the evening when Neville had told his story, Milly had not got over feeling guilty about having stolen her best friend’s boyfriend, nor had Steve stopped regretting that he had been a culpable accessory to the crime. They both missed Janine, who was still refusing to speak to either of them, although they had both tried to reinstitute contact. Steve knew that Milly was only pretending that her lust was urgent in order to cover up her other feelings, just as he’d earlier pretended that the urgency of his own lust excused what he’d done. He still didn’t need Viagra, though; he appreciated every opportunity that presented itself to lose himself in that kind of emotional incontinence.

It wasn’t just the timetable of their evening that was turned on its head. Instead of exploiting their easiest conversational resource while they were eating, by laying into the horrific habits of pupils and drivers with their usual sadistic glee, they were somehow drawn to tackle the most difficult. They returned, for the first time since the aftermath of the previous meeting, to the topic of their untold stories—not to give away any actual details, but to resume discussion of the necessity of getting around to telling them.

“I don’t want to keep putting it off any longer,” Steve said. “When I said that I wouldn’t be ready till January, it was just cowardice speaking.”

“You can talk,” Milly said. “I’ve probably been to more meetings without spilling the beans than anyone else in this history of the organization, even if it has been going since before I was born. That’s cowardice.” Steve observed, though, that although there was shame in her voice, there was a certain perverse pride too. “I’m not sure why I’ve been such a coward,” Milly went on. “In a way, it’s not like me at all. It only took me three weeks to confess everything at the Eating Disorders Group. I suppose I was a lot better at vomiting things up in those days. Maybe, if I hadn’t got that straightened out.…”

“It has nothing to do with that,” Steve said. “It’s a totally different matter. You were just waiting for the right moment. I can understand that—but I don’t want to put it off any longer. I’ve got what I needed from Sylvia Joyce, and I don’t have any real excuses left. I’m certainly not going to wait for Janine to get bored and go away. That really would be cowardice. Tomorrow, when Walter calls for volunteers, my hand is going up.”

“Mine too,” Milly said. “We’ll let Walter decide which of us goes first.”

Steve frowned slightly at that, because he knew that Milly must know, just as well as he did, what would happen if Milly and Steve both volunteered to tell their stories. Walter would be certain to give priority to Milly, partly because of the length of time she’d been in the group and partly because his old-fashioned politeness would oblige him to operate on the principle of Ladies First.

“You don’t have to do that, Mil,” Steve said. “I don’t mind going first, if you’d rather.”

“Why would I rather you went first?” Milly countered.

“No reason,” Steve said, “but if you did…I wouldn’t want to push you into something you’re not quite ready to do.”

“I know that,” Milly said. “Nor would I.” She didn’t repeat what Steve had said about not waiting until Janine had stopped attending meetings, but it was obvious that something of the sort was on her mind. If Milly’s tiny kitchenette had been large enough to contain a metaphorical elephant as well as the breakfast-bar at which they were eating, Janine would have certainly filled the role, even though she was a good deal slimmer than Milly now that Milly was eating regularly and hardly ever throwing up at all.

“Would you rather go first?” Steve asked.

“You’ve only been coming for a few weeks,” Milly observed, instead of answering. “That’s normal. There are some who want to get it over with as quickly as possible and blurt it out at the first opportunity, but most wait to see how things go and hear a few stories, so that they can reassure themselves that their own experience isn’t going to sound significantly sillier than anyone else’s, and that the listeners are going to treat them with extra-thick kid gloves. That’s only sensible—but I was convinced of all that nine months ago, and I still haven’t put up my hand. That’s silly. If I keep on this way, Walter will get even more suspicious. He probably thinks I’m some kind of snoop, doing research for a book or something.”

“Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations,” Steve suggested. “You’ve read all about Roswell, now read all about East Grimstead. If anyone’s inviting suspicion of that sort, it’s more likely to be me than you. I’m a science teacher, after all—I’m supposed to have a vested interest in debunking.”

“As a science teacher, though,” Milly pointed out, “you’re not expected to be literate. Science teaching isn’t what it used to be back in dear old Neville’s day, is it?” She paused for a moment, and then said: “You aren’t, are you? Thinking of writing a book, I mean. You’ll have to change all the names—including yours.”

“No, I’m not,” Steve said. “You’d be a useful mine of information if I were, I suppose, after all those meetings—but if I wanted to do the job properly, I’d have to con Walter or Amelia into telling me all. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. That would require true journalism cynicism, which I don’t have.”

“Think of all the stories they must have heard, though, in almost forty years!” Milly said. “If only they’d kept some kind of record—what an archive that would be! Maybe they have. Maybe Walter’s insistence on not writing minutes is just a bluff, and as soon as he gets home every Thursday night he whips out his fountain-pen and writes down every word. Maybe Amelia’s got a hidden mike somewhere in the sitting-room, and a cupboard full of tapes. I can’t believe it, though. If they’re not honest, nobody is. They’re honest, I’m sure of it.”

“And we should try to follow their good example,” Steve said. “Whichever of us goes first, I think we’re both ready, I hope I’m ready, at any rate. For someone who suffers from emotional incontinence, you know, I can be quite hesitant at times.”

“Whenever you have to cross a bridge, for instance,” Milly supplied. Steve didn’t take it as an insult. He took it as a jokey casual remark.

“And whenever I need to be regressed,” Steve added. “I have to take myself in hand, don’t I? I have to grit my teeth and get on with it.”

“Me too,” Milly said. “As I said earlier, let’s both throw caution to the winds, and let Walter decide. He might pick you. Maybe it would be better if I did go first, though—I might have to spend more time in Bath over the next few weeks. It’s not impossible that I might even have to miss an AlAbAn meeting or two, if things go from bad to worse.”

“Why, what’s up?” Steve asked.

“Probably nothing—but Dad seems to have had a mini-stroke, and Mum’s terrified that he’s working up to a big one. He’s had high blood-pressure for ages, but he hates taking his beta-blockers. He says they take all the zest out of life. When she nags him, it only makes him dig his heels in. She thinks he’ll listen to me, but she’s wrong. Just because I’m his darling daughter doesn’t mean that he’s going to take my advice—quite the reverse, in fact. Anyway, nothing terrible has happened yet, but I thought I’d best warn you that it might. We’ll be in the run-up to Christmas soon, and that always piles on the stress within the family.”

“Mine are the same,” Steve admitted, “although Dad’s as fit as a fiddle. They’ll be badgering me to go home, I dare say, but I’m going to put my foot down and say that I can’t go. I won’t say that I intend spending it with you—they’d just start nagging me to bring you with me.”

“Whereas my lot will want me all to themselves, and would react with horror if I said that I wanted to bring a guest. Still, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it—if it’s not too high or wide.”

“Metaphorical bridges,” he assured her, “are no trouble at all.”

He meant it at the time, but he couldn’t help remembering it wryly when the moment came the following evening, and neither he nor Milly raised a hand. In the event, the only person who moved a muscle, after an unusually protracted pregnant pause, was a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, who introduced herself as “Megan”.