CHAPTER FIVE

REVEALING THE TRUTH

Steve thought that Mary’s story was even more interesting than Jim’s, in terms of potential psychological insights. He couldn’t be certain whether the elements of coincidence between the stories were just that, or aspects of a pattern, but he was enthusiastic to find out. He was tempted to ask Walter Wainwright whether the coincidental aspects had cropped up before—and how frequently they recurred, if so—but he knew that the chairman wouldn’t appreciate a question like that being raised in a meeting, even in the casual chat phase that preceded the general retreat.

In any case, Steve thought, even if it were to be confirmed that the coincidental resemblances were more than merely coincidental, that would only open up a new set of questions. The overwhelming likelihood was that AlAbAn members borrowed from one another in reconstructing their own stories, perhaps unconsciously—a turn of phrase here, an interpretative guess there. It was entirely natural, he supposed, that some such process should occur; every AlAbAn group, and perhaps every other group remotely like it, must develop its own idiosyncratic culture as its particular membership formed a social microcosm, which newcomers learned and then passed on. The mild sensation of intoxication that the group was able to conjure up in its meetings probably had more to do with that petty kind of creationism than with the exotic content of the stories that were told, although the particular stories told by Jim and Mary certainly lent a distinctive flavor to the experience.

Janine had wept a few discreet tears at the spectacle of Mary’s distress, although she’d tried to wipe them away covertly with her sleeve, but Milly hadn’t. Steve wasn’t surprised by that—not because he had assumed that Milly’s relative physical fortitude was reflected emotionally, but simply because Milly was an old AlAbAn hand. From her viewpoint, Mary’s story must the thirtieth or fortieth in line rather than the second, and must have contained enough familiar details—even if they were purely coincidental ones—to make parts of it seem stale.

Amelia Rockham was the real heroine of the evening, though, in Steve’s view. She had been able to comfort Mary, and had even persuaded her to listen to a few spoken responses. Needless to say, no one asked any questions. The only people who spoke offered warmly sympathetic comments, as they were supposed to do. Neither Janine nor Milly was among them, but Steve saw Milly nodding and murmuring in the general chorus, as was apparently her wont. When they left the cottage, though, Milly seemed more subdued than she had been on the outward journey, and she made no further attempts to flirt with Steve.

“I suspect that AlAbAn meetings must proceed rather differently in the branches based in London, Birmingham and Manchester,” Steve said, pensively, as he waited for two other cars to pass before easing himself out into the unexpectedly busy traffic. “Urban stroppiness must surely override the genteel etiquette of the shires, and turn the meetings into slanging matches. Wiltshire isn’t even your common-or-garden shire, like Hampshire or Hertfordshire, or all the other places where hurricanes hardly ever happen and everybody knows the price of elderberry wine. It’s a shire squared, like dear old Dorset: quaintness run riot. It would be the perfect home for an organization like AlAbAn, even if it weren’t such an intense focal point of UFO activity.”

“That must help, though,” said Janine. “If Walter’s right, and everyone in the world has been abducted by aliens at least once, so that the victims in need of support are merely the unlucky few whose memory-wipes have failed, it’s hardly surprising that Wiltshire has more than its fair share of rememberers. There’s so much talk of UFOs hereabouts, even nowadays—so many props and prompts to struggling and faltering memories.”

“And it’s hardly surprising, either, that the Wiltshire rememberers should include veterans like Amelia Rockham and Walter Wainwright,” Steve added. “They must have been way ahead of the wave of fashionability if they remembered their own abductions way back in the fifties. That was long before everybody else began to get in on the act and forging crop-circles became a popular summer pastime. They’re entitled to get a little merry on the success of their enterprise.”

Milly listened to this exchange from the back seat, but didn’t join in. It wasn’t until Janine turned round and began chatting about the possibility of another night out with Alison that Milly broke her silence, and not until Janine asked her what kind of week she’d had that she found an occasion to deploy her infectious laugh, in an anecdote about road rage on the school run.

“You can come with us to the Chinese if you like, Mil,” Janine said, as they came back into the city. “I’m sure Steve wouldn’t mind driving you home, later.”

“No, that’s all right,” Milly said. “Drop me off first and have yourselves a ball.”

Steve stopped the car to let Milly out, and turned his head to let her kiss him on the cheek before she got out. She kissed Janine, too, saying: “Same time on the twenty-eighth?”

“Absolutely,” Steve said.

When Milly was safely inside, Steve turned to Janine and said: “You actually warned her off, didn’t you? Just because she made that remark about throwing her any time?”

“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you?” Janine retorted. “Do you really think that I’m so desperate to hang on to you that I’d read the riot act to anyone who invited you to call her darling?”

“I’d like to think so,” Steve said, as he steered the car in the direction of Janine’s flat and the nearby Chinese take-away.

“Well, I didn’t. I think it was Mary’s story that cooled her down. She’s always been that way—up one minute, down the next. It gave me a shiver or two, although it certainly made me grateful for modern hygiene. Thank God there’s no possibility of my entertaining the ancestors of countless potential sentient races in the Second and Third Arthropodan Eras. Imagine if you caught head-lice from one of your filthy kids, and had to use that disgusting medicated shampoo, wondering whether every vigorous scrub might be exterminating potential ancestors of sentient species to come. Every swipe of the nit-comb might be changing future history.”

“My kids aren’t any dirtier, on average, than your customers,” Steve said, although he wasn’t usually in the habit of defending his charges. “Schools only suffer from epidemic outbreaks because there are so many people gathered together in one place. Anyway, we needn’t think of it in terms of exterminating potential ancestors. We could take pride in being the instigators of such a rigorous selective regime, hastening the evolution of insect-kind. We might be making a small but crucial contribution to their eventual rise to sentient intelligence. One of those stinky scrubs or deft flicks of the nit-comb might be selecting out the Mitochondrial Eve of future Arthropodan culture and civilization.”

“And that would be something to take pride in?” she said.

“Why not?”

“As opposed, say, to scrubbing just a little bit harder, wiping out the ultimate ancestor of arthropodan civilization, and paving the way for a new evolution of something much more like us instead?”

“Or something even less like us, which not even a maternal Mary could learn to love?” Steve countered. “Changing history is a tricky business, especial when we can’t tell one louse from another, so we’ve no way of identifying the ones with potential. You have to remember, too, that head-lice aren’t the only kind we have. If I had to bet which kind would be most likely to give rise to intelligent offspring a couple of hundred million years in the future, I’d go for the crotch-crabs every time.”

“Now you’re being deliberately disgusting,” Janine said. “Unless, of course, you’re trying to be superior, because you know something I don’t. Will there be pubic lice in the story that you’re working your way up to telling?”

“If there are,” Steve assured her, “that’s a part of the dream I haven’t remembered yet. In the meantime, if ever I get an itch down there, I won’t hesitate for an instant before taking the cure, even if I might be exterminating the ancestors of a thousand potential sentient species. In matters of that sort, the principle of informed consent simply isn’t relevant.” He pulled on the handbrake by way of punctuation, and switched off the engine.

“What a busy life we’re beginning to lead,” Janine said, with a contrived sigh, once they had reached the Chinese and placed their order. “Survival studies on Wednesdays, victim support every second Thursday. When you throw in your Tuesday sessions with your psychotherapist, and all your staff meetings at school, you must be exhausted by Friday—and yet you still manage to lead me up the garden path every now and again.”

“Cricket keeps me fit,” Steve told her. “It’s a pity, in a way, that the school doesn’t have a team. If I could do a bit of coaching, Rhodri mightn’t be on at me so often to supervise computer club or run plagiarism checks on his wretched assessment projects. That’s the trouble with being young and computer literate—the old hands get you to do all their dirty work for them. Mercifully, it’s only the second week of term—that particular deluge doesn’t usually start until the end of October. On the other hand, it’s better than helping out with coaching rugby. Rhodri and Mrs. Jones the PE are welcome to that one.”

“She’s Welsh too, is she?”

“Her husband is. He was a rugby player in his time—built like an ox, although he’s running to fat now. She can hold her own in a scrum, mind. Do you know the old joke about nothing good ever coming out of Wales but rugby players and loose women?”

“My wife’s Welsh—what position does she play? Yes, heard it a million times. Is that still going the rounds in the playground?”

“I doubt it. I try not to listen to playground talk—way too filthy for my tender ears.”

“Especially the bits about you, no doubt. It’s really quite decorous in Tom Cook’s, considering the reputation reps have. I thought of becoming a rep, you know, if only to give Mum and Dad heart attacks, but I’m too good on the computer. I’m going to put in for management training, though, given that you think it’s a good idea. It involves the occasional weekend course, but they’ll be child’s play compared with the survival course we’re planning to do in December. Nice seaside hotels or jaunts to London—you know the sort of thing.”

“Not really,” Steve admitted. “It’s been a while since I went as far as Bournemouth, and I don’t go to London at all if I can possibly help it.”

“Is it crowds you’re phobic about, then?” Janine said, striking so unexpectedly that she caught Steve completely off-guard.

“No,” he said, shortly.

“You’ll have to tell me eventually,” she said. “You do realize that—unless you’re planning to dump me if I get too close.”

“No,” Steve said, again, then had to add: “That’s no to the second part. I don’t plan to dump you. I know I’m going to have to let you in on it eventually—but give me time, okay? If I can just make a start on breaking the phobias down, it’ll be so much easier to confess to having them. Bear with me, will you?”

“Sure,” she said. “As Walter Wainwright says, it sometimes takes a while. I’ll be here when you get around to it, just as I’ll be here in a fortnight’s time, when you need your next dose of victim support. In fact, I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m beginning to understand how Milly got hooked—but I hope the next story has a little more zip in it.”

“So do I,” Steve said.

The weekend went well—especially the Sunday, when Steve was able to enjoy a long and uncommonly productive bowling stint in the friendly, finishing up with four wickets, and then won forty-three pounds in a long poker session. He turned up at school the next morning in a state of absolute exhaustion, but the kids didn’t care and most of the staff still weren’t talking to him. Rhodri Jenkins made a muttered remark en passant about travel agents and marathons, but he was far too busy to stop and chat.

On the Wednesday, Steve and Janine went to the third seminar of the survival course, which mostly had to do with the necessities involved in procuring and using a supply of fresh water in the absence of any kind of tap-supply. Thirst, the course-leader alleged, might be the most urgent problem, but it wasn’t the only killer to be feared. His account of the possible and probable consequences of bad hygiene was suitably blood-curdling, although substantial compensation was offered in the practical part of the demonstration, which explained how to improvise a still.

Steve met Janine again on the Friday; they went to a comedy club in Swindon, where there was an open mike night. Steve preferred open mike nights to gigs featuring big names, partly because he was naturally antipathetic to TV-brokered celebrity and partly because it seemed so much more exciting when some youngster who was still only practicing turned out to be funny against all the odds.

There was no one particularly promising in the first batch of three, but Steve was still hopeful that the next batch might throw up a surprise or two. In fact, though, the surprise came earlier than that, during the break, while he was doing his best to enjoy a Red Bull because Janine didn’t approve of his having even one alcoholic drink when he was driving.

“I won’t be able to come out next Friday,” she said, “and I’ll have to miss Thursday’s meeting too. I booked on to a management training course yesterday, and the induction session’s next week. It’s a bit short notice, I know, but that’s the way we like to do things in the travel business—the last-minute deals are always the juiciest. I’ll be away from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.”

“Okay,” Steve said, heroically. “You have my full support in your bid for promotion, obviously. Does this mean that you’re now firmly committed to a career in travel and tourism?”

“I suppose it does,” she replied. “I only took the job as a fill-in, to begin with. I was desperate to leave home, and I needed an income to pay the rent on my flat while I looked around for something more suitable—but nothing more suitable ever landed in my lap, and I never really went out searching. Everybody my age seems to be permanently looking around for something more suitable—jobs, flats, partners, whatever—but we rarely do much about it, except for scanning the job ads in the local freesheet, pausing to look in the occasional estate agent’s windows, or, in your case, staring at some other girl’s tits while you’re supposed to be listening to me.”

Steve immediately locked gazes with her again, although he’d actually been staring into empty space while he wondered exactly what significance he ought to attach to the fact that Janine had really decided to go for promotion, rather than just chatting about it. Did it mean, for instance, that she was thinking of moving her entire life forward a stage, making vague but highly symbolic preparations for saving up for a deposit on a house, with a view to eventually having a family?

“The travel business is as good as any other, I guess,” he said.

“Thomas Cook is a huge company,” she told him. “It offers a lot of scope to interested and willing employees.”

“Is that what it said in the ad for the course?”

“It’s in all the staff literature. Anyway, if I do eventually want to look around for something more suitable in time to come, it’ll be far easier to do that from half way up the ladder than the bottom rung. Any potential employer will want to know how I used the time spent in my previous post, and it’s no bad thing to have hard evidence of enterprise and ambition.”

“None at all,” Steve agreed. “Whether you stay with Cook’s or not, the course will do you good. You’re wasted on the front line. You’ve got the brains and the personality to do much better.”

“If not the tits,” she said, sarcastically, to register the fact that she could recognize idle flattery when it was presented to her on a plate.

“Management trainees in travel and tourism don’t need the same qualifications as models in lad’s mags,” he said, “but as it happens, there’s nothing wrong with your qualifications in any regard. Trust me, I’m.…”

“A connoisseur of delicacy,” she finished for him. “Sometimes, I’m not so sure that’s as complimentary as you try to make it sound. I can be indelicate when I need to be, and I’m certainly not made of porcelain. Anyhow, I’m sorry that I’ll have to miss AlAbAn and Friday night. It can’t be helped.”

“I’ll probably give AlAbAn a miss too,” Steve said. “A couple of quiet nights in will give me a chance to catch up with the kids’ course-work. I certainly won’t be shedding any tears when GCSEs and A levels go back to all-exam assessment. In the meantime, I’d be happier if my lot plagiarized far more of their work off the Internet—that way I wouldn’t have to wrestle with their tortured spelling and grammar.”

“You don’t need me to hold your hand at the AlAbAn meeting,” Janine told him. “You’re going on doctor’s orders, remember—and we promised Milly a lift after the last one.”

“Sylvia’s not a doctor,” Steve said, unable to resist correcting the error. “She doesn’t have an M.D.—although she does like to decorate her wall with certificates, and has a string of letters after her name much longer than my meager B.Ed.”

“I wasn’t speaking pedantically,” Janine assured him. “Therapist’s orders, therapist’s recommendations, whatever…the point is that you’re supposed to be going for the benefit of your health.”

“I suppose I am,” Steve admitted. “But supposed’s the operative word, isn’t it? I suspect that what it’s really supposed to do, from Sylvia’s point of view, is to make me more receptive to the idea of being regressed again. The idea is to help me remember-in-inverted-commas more of my abduction-experience-in-inverted-commas, so that it will be fit for exposure at AlAbAn. In Sylvia’s mind, that will help me move on to the next step in delving down to the actual source of my anxieties.”

“Which is wrong because…?” Janine left the sentence dangling, inviting him to complete it

“Because that’s not the direction in which I want to go. I think the whole regression plan’s a red herring, and that I’ll be much better off sticking to the relaxation techniques. They seem to be working well enough, thus far, even though progress is a bit slow.”

“You’ve been working on your phobias, then? Confronting your demons every night you’re not with me?”

Steve blushed. He had been taking the occasional drive along the Bourne, crossing and recrossing it as the bridges came along, quieting his racing heart as best he could. “It’s most obvious at school,” he said. “I’m coping better with the everyday stresses, just as Rhodri Jenkins said I would. I reckon that if I can just keep chipping away at the other things, I can gradually wear them away. If that’s the case, AlAbAn’s just a pleasant distraction. I don’t need to go to every meeting.”

“But you enjoy it. The performances we’ve seen in East Grimstead are better than the ones we just saw on stage—and future ones are just as likely to be better still as the ones that we’ll be seeing after the break. Mind you, it might be a lot simpler if you just told me what you’re phobic about, so that we can stop beating around the bush.”

Steve could see the sense in that, and his inhibitions seemed to have taken a short break, even though he hadn’t touched a drop of anything more powerful than caffeine. “Flying,” he said, contriving to throw caution to the wind just long enough to expel the two syllables.

“Is that all?” Janine said, in frank amazement.

“No,” Steve said, only able to contrive one syllable this time.

Janine was flustered by the brutal simplicity of the reply, momentarily unable to connect it up with her own remark. Eventually, though, she worked it out. “Heights?” she guessed.

“That too,” Steve admitted. He was breathing more easily now; the barrier was down and he knew that he could continue if he wanted to. After a moment’s pause, he decided that he might as well seize the opportunity. “Especially as seen from bridges,” he added.

Janine took another pause in order to be appropriately startled. “All bridges?” she queried. “Or just very high ones?”

“The extent of the panic is proportional to both the height and width of the bridge,” he said, scrupulously. “The equation might need a couple of specific constants to being it to perfection, but the basic relationship is obvious enough. More width, more panic; more height, more panic.” He paused, but then carried on. “Short road bridges over the Wylye and the Bourne only give me a nasty frisson. I’ve never dared attempt the Severn Bridge, but the Clifton Suspension Bridge was my idea of hell on Earth until I read about the opening of that new bridge connecting Sweden to Denmark. I can’t watch Charmed on TV because of those scenes set on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, and every time there’s a movie on with a literal cliffhanger I turn into a quivering wreck. I went to an i-max cinema once, just to see a wildlife documentary, and nearly had a heart attack. So now you know.”

“I can see why you keep saying that anything’s better than watching TV,” Janine murmured. “Look—I’m sorry. I can see now why you found it so difficult—why your pride seemed to be on the line, and why you wouldn’t want your pupils finding out. I’m glad you told me, though. I’m glad it’s not a secret between us any more.”

“It stays between us, right?” Steve said. “You won’t tell Milly?”

“No, I won’t. Jesus—you went to Sylvia Joyce because you started going out with me, didn’t you? You wanted to be better able to travel, because I’m a travel agent?”

“Partly,” Steve said. “You’re not the only one thinking about taking steps forward in life, though. I’m just as close to the dreaded thirty as you are. I can’t avoid flying, tall buildings and long bridges forever, can I? Well, actually, I suppose I could—but, as you say, my pride is on the line. I’d rather not be that kind of coward if I can avoid it.”

“Phobias aren’t cowardice,” Janine told him, as she was honor-bound to do. “What happened when your hypnotherapist regressed you, then? Did you have a panic attack?”

“And how. Usually, it’s just the queasy feeling, maybe with a little nausea thrown in. Sometimes there’s cold sweat, and breathing difficulties. In extreme cases, though, your arteries constrict. I’ve never seen it, of course, but when the blood-flow to your brain cuts off you go a remarkable shade of grey. Usually, you come back after you’ve blacked out—but not necessarily. People really can die of fright, even in nightmares of their own manufacture. Best not to take the chance.”

“And that’s why your therapist suggested that you go to AlAbAn? She thought that if you could relive the experience, in safe and supportive surroundings, you might defuse it? And that might be a crucial first step in defusing the whole complex?”

“I told you that you had the brains and personality to be management material,” Steve said—but the discussion was cut abruptly short then, because the next hopeful amateur had come to the mike. The local protocol demanded that people in the audience shouldn’t talk over the opening of an act, although judicious heckling was allowed after the first couple of minutes or so.

Steve didn’t sigh, but he did feel relieved. It was all over, at least for a while—except, of course, that it had only just begun, Janine would start thinking about it now. In fact, she probably already had, in spite of the fact that the act had started. The first amateur up was an obese bloke in his twenties who obviously thought that his falsetto Liverpudlian accent was funny enough to get laughs even though his material was a great deal thinner than he was—thus leaving plenty of vacant mindspace for the various members of his audience to go exploring.

Janine’s curiosity, Steve knew, would have been whetted rather than soothed by the revelations with which he’d just parted. She would be keen to know exactly what experience he’d had when Sylvia Joyce had regressed him, and exactly why it had generated such a powerful panic attack. She would not be put off for long by the excuse that he couldn’t remember much of it himself, and wasn’t at all sure that he wanted to try, even with the aid of a very supportive support group. How long, in fact, could he be content with that excuse himself? For all his expressed doubts about Sylvia’s tactics, he had to admit that she probably had a point. If he could bring the nightmarish fantasy into some sort of completion, especially if he could add the kind of narrative trajectory to it that the AlAbAn story-tellers achieved, then it might indeed reveal something about the ultimate source of his phobias, and might indeed assist the hypnotherapist in reaching further back into his psyche in search of answers, if not possible solutions. The only thing stopping him from taking that route was fear itself—a phobic response to his own awareness of his phobias.

Steve also knew that Janine would not simply have become hungry for more information. She would also start to process the information she had. She was probably sitting beside him right now, ignoring the weak-kneed scouser while she wondered what the symbolism of his fear of bridges might be. All women, it seemed, thought of men as inherently commitment-phobic, and she would probably wonder whether his bridge-anxiety might somehow be reducible to a fear of crossing existential or experiential rubicons. She had already guessed that he had been inspired to take up arms against his sea of troubles by the fact that he had started going out with her, and was bound to wonder whether it might be the character of the relationship rather than the nature of her employment that had turned the screw and moved him to act. Among the other things she’d be hungry to know, she’d be bound to ask whether he’d revealed his awful secret to any of his previous girlfriends—and if she believed him when he said no, she’d be bound to read something into that regarding the potential future development of their coupledom.

In fact, though, when the Liverpudlian went off and there was a half-minute respite before the next act was introduced, the question that Janine asked was: “Are you going to go, then?”

“Where?” Steve asked, thinking about bridges.

“To AlAbAn. Next Thursday. Will you give Milly a lift, or shall I ring her and tell her that she’ll have to take the bus?”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Yes, sure, if you don’t mind. I’ll go—why not?”

The next act—a bottle-blonde whose repertoire mostly consisted of jokes about tampons and the many inadequacies of the phallus as an instrument of female pleasure-seeking—gave him plenty of mindspace to wonder whether that had been the right answer, and to think of possible reasons why not. He was suddenly unsure exactly what he ought to read into Janine’s apparent insistence that he should go to the AlAbAn meeting with Milly. Did Janine mean that, in her opinion, he needed the support group’s support so desperately that he couldn’t afford to miss a meeting? Did it mean that she suspected that he and Milly were both hooked on the members’ confessions, and was merely giving her permission for them to get their fix? Might she be making the point that she trusted him to spend an evening alone—except for the twenty or so other people who would be at the meeting—with Milly, because she trusted him implicitly? Might it, on the other hand, mean that she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, and wanted Milly to keep an eye on him for her, to make sure that he didn’t get into mischief while she was away? Presumably, Janine trusted Milly implicitly, whether she trusted him or not, given that they’d been friends since the year dot—except that he still wasn’t convinced that Janine hadn’t ordered Milly to keep her hands off at the commencement of the last AlAbAn meeting.

Steve wished, briefly, that his experience of relationships had had more depth than variety in it, so that the practice they’d provided would have improved his understanding of womankind rather than further confusing it. The comedienne wasn’t helping, either.

“I wonder whether she’d dare to do that set in a working men’s club?” Janine said, when the turn ended.

“Sure,” Steve said, “Even horny-handed sons of toil are new men these days, and it wouldn’t be macho to let on that it might be getting to them. What would take real courage would be doing it at the mother’s union.”

“Is there still such a thing as the mothers’ union?” Janine asked.

“How should I know?” Steve replied. “Probably. It’s a hell of a lot more likely than AlAbAn—although having a baby must be very similar to being abducted by aliens. Less than half the population has to go through it, of course, but they’re more likely to remember it.”

“My mother certainly remembered it,” Janine said, hurrying to get the last word in before the next act reached the mike, “and never forgave me for it. That’s why I’m an only child.”

Steve was an only child too, but his mother had never given him an explanation for that—even an explanation as fatuous as remembering what it had been like giving birth the first time. On the other hand, he thought, as an unsteady flow of attempted political satire began to build up pace on stage, perhaps it wasn’t as fatuous as it sounded. Maybe women did have to forget the pain of their previous childbirths in order to be ale to contemplate going through it again. Maybe they had built-in memory-censors to ensure that they did exactly that—except that the censors occasionally failed in their duty, permitting the horror of the event to remain in situ, blighting everyday intercourse as well as instilling a deep-seated phobia regarding the possibility of future conception.

That reminded him of Mary, and her fantasy of nurturing a chrysalis with her blood, exactly as every mother nurtured an embryo inside herself whenever she brought another human being into the world—occasionally accompanied, so it was rumored, by hemorrhoids and varicose veins, not to mention episiotomies and umbilical cords.

Steve quickly shut such thoughts away, although the queasiness they made him feel was quite different from the queasiness he felt whenever someone was hanging off the edge of a high-rise in some TV melodrama, and concentrated on the political satire. There was something ineffably cozy and relaxing about mocking politicians, relentlessly making fun of their vanity, their ambition, their incompetence and their incessant peccadilloes.

One thing Steve had contrived to learn from his previous bouts of relationship fever was not to ask Janine any of the questions that had occurred to him regarding her possible motives for urging him to go to the following Thursday’s AlAbAn meeting with Milly even though she would not be with them. He didn’t raise the issue again that evening. Nor did Janine, who was apparently quite satisfied that his earlier reply had settled the question. As Steve drove back to Salisbury, feeling conspicuously sober, Janine told him a little more about the management training course, but the only hard fact that Steve was able to ascertain was that it would be in Brighton—a place to which he had never been, even though it was by no means notorious for the size or multiplicity of its bridges.

When the following Thursday rolled around, Steve went to pick Milly up at her flat.

“It’s just me, I’m afraid,” Steve explained, although he knew that Milly must have been thoroughly briefed. “Janine’s away in Brighton doing extreme geography,”

“I know,” Milly said. “She asked me to keep an eye on you.”

Steve had no idea whether that was true, or what it might imply if it was, or what it might imply if it wasn’t. “Bang go my chances of chatting up Amelia Rockham, then,” he said, figuring that there was always safety in absurdist humor.

Milly was still in her uniform, having only just finished her shift, and Steve had to wait for her to change. Unlike Janine’s bedsit, Milly’s flat had a separate bedroom, so there was no possibility of any undue embarrassment. Steve was able to sit on a sofa studying the sparse furnishings while the operation was completed. He had glanced around on past visits, but had never taken the time to consider the implications of the various visible objects. He observed that Milly had a CD collection, which fitted into a pair of forty-slot towers, but he didn’t know whether that signified that she wasn’t particular fond of music or whether she had moved on to MP3s as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The pictures on her walls were mostly prints of flowers, ranging from Monet-esque studies of water lilies to intimate Georgia O’Keefe-style close-ups. She had a rowing-machine propped up beside the window that overlooked the street, and a flatpack set of bookshelves crammed with paperbacks.

Figuring that the books were more likely to offer an insight into Milly’s personality than anything else, he squinted in an effort to make out the titles. They all seemed to be fiction, but there was no evident genre specialization and many of them were far from contemporary. She did seem to like thick books whose page-count offered value for money, though: Gone with the Wind sat beside Doctor Zhivago, Star Maker, Atlas Shrugged, and Lady of Hay.

Milly came out of the bedroom dressed in a pink T-shirt, blue jeans, and trainers while Steve was still leaning forward and squinting. “The non-fiction section’s in the bedroom,” she said. “Self-help books are my preferred material for reading myself to sleep, but if I get really desperate I’ve got an old copy of the Highway Code.” She laughed before adding: “I always buy second-hand—it’s much cheaper.”

“I used to,” Steve said, smiling in response to the laugh, “but I spend so much more time on-line these days that I don’t have time for reading, except for the occasional text-book. Even that’s rarely necessary, given the amount of stuff there is on-line.”

They left the flat and went downstairs. “Good day?” Steve asked, once they were in the car and on the move.

“Fair to middling,” she replied.

“Made your ticket-quota without any difficulty, then?”

“No problem. The world’s full of people who can’t see a double yellow without wanting to park on it—especially mums on the school run. They seem to think that motherhood sets them above the law—not that they behave like madonnas if they catch me in the act. They go off like cluster-bombs, spraying expletives about like the Israeli air force.”

“They probably think you’re failing in your duty as a member of the great sisterhood, rather than doing your duty as a police auxiliary,” Steve said. “It’s a question of priorities.”

“No they don’t,” Milly told him. “They hate me more for not being part of their sisterhood of breeders than for being a traffic warden. They think I should be pumping out kids, taking my share of the misery. They’re not as likely to accuse me of being a lesbian as male drivers are, but that’s only because they think that would somehow be letting me off the hook. On the other hand, they never threaten to rape me—just to gouge my eyes out with carefully-painted fingernails.”

“Must be a fun job,” Steve observed. “Any prospect of moving up to management, like Janine, and getting out of the firing-line?”

“Not really,” Milly admitted. “Janine’s lucky in that respect, at Tom Cook’s. There are far more career-paths mapped out there than in my line. On the other hand, I am a civil servant of sorts, like Ali, so there’d be a possibility of transferring to some other line of work within the sector, if I wanted to.”

“But you don’t?”

“Maybe, in time. For the moment, I’m still in the frame of mind where I’ll be damned if I’ll let the bastards grind me down. At the end of the day, I’m the one who hands out the fines, so I always get the last laugh—at least until someone really does gouge my eyes out with fake fingernails or bend me over a bonnet and fuck me up the back passage. Has any of your pupils pulled a knife on you yet?”

“Not yet,” Steve admitted. “I’ve never even been punched, even though they know I’m not allowed to hit them back. A year eleven girl kicked me in the shin last year, but she was wearing trainers, so it wasn’t a crippling wound. She’s in the sixth form now, but she isn’t doing Biology A level, so I’m no longer at risk from that direction. The present year elevens are mouthy, but so far it’s all obscenities and bad breath—no one’s tried to bite.”

“It’s the same with my lot, really,” Milly admitted. “All talk and no action. They know as well as I do that it’s not me they’re really angry at. I just give them an opportunity to let it out.”

“I don’t have that consolation,” Steve said. “It really is teachers that make the kids angry and frustrated, because we’re the ones who have to try to discipline their behavior from nine to four—or, increasingly, to half-past five or six, because we have to hold on to them till their parents get home from work. Somebody has to do it, I guess. Janine mostly deals with people in search of leisure pursuits, so she gets a much more hopeful and even-tempered class of client, on the whole.”

When they went into Amelia Rockham’s front room, Milly immediately went to her usual armchair rather than moving towards the settee with Steve. Steve took one to the folding chairs, figuring that he ought to leave the Naugahyde nook to a couple, but he took one opposite Milly rather than in parallel with her.

As things turned out, there were no newcomers at the group that night, and it was one of those occasions when nobody wanted to relate any new experience. A few of the regulars looked at Milly in a speculative fashion, but no one looked at Steve. Steve didn’t know whether or not to feel insulted by that, but decided to believe that it was just a matter of seniority. Milly was evidently not yet ready to step in and plug the gap, and Steve was certainly in no rush to fill the breach, so there was a full minute’s awkward silence before Walter Wainwright began talking again.

Walter explained that when occasions such as these presented themselves, the normal practice was to ask whether one of the long-standing members might care to retell a story that the younger members of the group hadn’t yet had the opportunity to hear. After all, he went on to say, because the group was very scrupulous about not keeping minutes, stories sometimes needed to be retold, so that recent abductees could discover what their forebears had gone through in the difficult days when abductees hadn’t had the same opportunities for obtaining a sympathetic hearing.

Steve hoped, briefly, that Walter might be about to retell the story of his own abduction, or at least ask Amelia to oblige by retelling hers, but in the event the chairman followed his preamble by asking a man named Arthur if he would mind repeating his story, for the benefit of all the people who’d joined since the last time it had been told. Arthur, it seemed, was only too happy to oblige.