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 couple-dom.
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 pl
enty 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 able 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 our 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, b
ut 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.”
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