CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CLEARING UP MISCONCEPTIONS

“I thought you were going to put your hand up,” Milly said, when Steve put the car in gear and pulled away, with his eyes on the rear-view mirror, in which he could see Walter Wainwright politely opening the passenger door of his Renault Megane for Janine. Steve hadn’t done that for Milly, and had never done it for Janine in all the time they’d been going out—not even in the first flush of sheer infatuation.

“I think I would have put my hand up if you’d put yours up,” Steve said—honestly, so far as he could tell. “I only hesitated—but then, when you didn’t put your hand up, I got stuck in the hesitation. I suppose you got caught in the same sort of trap.”

“No, I just chickened out,” Milly said, appropriating the petty virtue of admitting her fault frankly.

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, defensively.

“It’s okay,” Milly replied, claiming the additional petty virtue of generosity. “I was supposed to go first—that was the deal. When I didn’t put my hand up, you must have thought I was pulling a fast one on you. And it wasn’t just me, was it? You were thinking about Janine, too. Even though you’re with me now, you’re always looking at her.”

“Given that we sit side-by-side while she always plonks herself down in the green armchair,” Steve said, his defensiveness edging towards paranoia “that’s a simple matter of geometry. Should I complain because you’re always looking in her direction instead of turning your head through ninety degrees to stare at me?”

“Women are allowed to look at one another,” Milly said. “It’s a completely different emotional experience. Anyway, I’ll have another go next time—at putting my hand up, I mean—whether you do or not, I mean. I am ready. I wish I had done it today, then I wouldn’t have to follow Megan. Her story was much better than mine. I know that the group’s the most supportive support group anyone could ever hope to find, but my story’s not nearly as good as most. I’ve tried to dress it up with philosophizing, the way Megan did, but I’m no good at that sort of thing, and I can’t alter the actual events, can I? That would be cheating. It’s just my luck to have an experience that wasn’t as neat, or pretty or delicate as other people’s. On the other hand, that’s me all over—bloody typical.”

She stopped then, quite abruptly. Out of the corner of his eye, Steve saw her blush. He’d never seen her blush before; three years’ experience as a traffic warden had rendered her pretty much embarrassment-proof. He realized that she thought she’d revealed too much of herself, not merely in what she’d just said but in her failure to volunteer to tell her story. It was, he thought, the failure of her resolve that she was condemning as “bloody typical”, as well as all the respects in which she thought that she couldn’t quite measure up to Janine.

“Mine lacks literary polish too,” he said, trying to help her out. “Megan obviously did a lot of work on hers before she ever showed her face at AlAbAn, and people like Arthur and Neville have honed theirs by continual repetition. There’s a sense, of course, in which they’re all simply made up, but there’s a more important sense in which they’re not, in which they really are given to us, as they are, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. It would be cheating to switch things around or invent things in the interests of more dramatic tension or smoother development. No matter how mad we all are, there’s a profound method in our madness. The collective unconscious isn’t the kind of thing that has motives or makes purposive plans, but there’s still a sense in which we’re instrumental. We have parts to play.

For once, Milly was prepared to join in. “Megan’s right,” she said. “We’re not entirely ourselves. We might not have huge worms inside us, wearing us like smart cockleshells, but there are still things in us that aren’t really us—things we can’t command and can’t control. Emotional incontinence.”

“I think it might go further than that,” Steve said, reflectively. “The limited empire of reason is part of the human condition. The bits of our minds that we think of as us have always had to battle against impulses from elsewhere—animal spirits, the passions, the id, whatever you want to call them—but this is something different.”

“This?” Milly echoed, not quite getting his drift.

“Alien abduction,” he said. “AlAbAn. The way our stories intersect and overlap. Something else is going on.”

“Of course it is,” Milly said, with a wry smile. “We’re being abducted by inquisitive aliens—probed and analyzed and put to work on all kinds of weird tasks in other times, and maybe on other planets. No wonder we’re not quite ourselves. We’re probably infested with all kinds of escaped neuroworms from a multitude of future eras, whose cross-breeding will produce even more monstrous varieties. Maybe that’s why we’re about to become extinct. It probably has nothing to do with global warming and the release of all that trapped methane—we’re going to be eaten up by parasitic worms from the great swamps that sprawl all over the time-stream. Now that’s a better story by far than the one in my experience. If only I could work that into a tale to tell.…”

“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.”

“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.

Milly phoned him, as usual, on Sunday afternoon. “I phoned three times last night,” she said, “but you had your mobile switched off.”

“I had to,” Steve explained. “Rules of the game. I went to see Walter Wainwright to check up on lines I might be in danger of crossing if I tell my story on Thursday, and got drafted into playing for his team in his local pub quiz. No ring-tones allowed.”

“Would that be the quiz night at the Royal Oak in Codford, by any chance?” Milly asked, her suddenly-icy tone seeming to freeze the phone in Steve’s hand. “The one that Janine’s father always wins?”

“He only came third last night,” Steve said, feebly. He waited for the deadly question, but it never came; Milly, it seemed, already knew—or was prepared to take it for granted—that Janine must have been there.

“I just wanted to ask Walter about group protocol,” Steve insisted. “I thought, with your father being at death’s door, that you might not make it Thursday and I’d have to do my thing instead, as I’d sworn on oath.” He figured out a moment too late why that had been an extremely unwise thing to have thought, let alone said.

“You mean,” Milly said, “that you were planning to tell your story while I wasn’t there?”

Steve’s explanations, which had to do with promises made and anxieties formed and a general tendency to thoughtlessness, stuck in his throat, while Milly added; “Well, you don’t have to worry. Dad’s still stable, and seems likely to remain that way for some time to come. Come hell or high water, I’ll be there.”

She kept her promise, although Steve didn’t see her until she phoned after school had packed up on Thursday to tell him to pick her up at the railway station at seven. Their conversation on the way out to East Grimstead was entirely dominated by the subject of her father’s health and her mother’s response to its deterioration. Steve couldn’t help noticing that Milly seemed to be suffering more considerably than was strictly necessary in sympathy with her parents; she didn’t seem to be herself at all.

“You’re in no condition to tell your story,” he observed, as he parked the Citroen, although he knew there was some risk in saying so. “Far better to let me go first.”

“It’s just talking,” Milly replied. “I can do talking. I don’t have panic attacks when I relive my experience.” When Steve opened his mouth to reply, she immediately added: “Just leave it, will you. Let’s get inside. I’m dying for a cup of tea and a biscuit.”

She seemed to be telling the truth—at least, once they were inside, she paid far more attention to her tea and biscuits than she paid to Steve, or anyone else.

When the time came for Walter Wainwright to call for volunteers to tell a story, they both stuck up their hands immediately, as agreed. As expected, Walter chose Milly.