“And pretend it never happened?” she countered, arching an eyebrow. “Well, if that’s what you want. It takes two, after all, and either one of us has the power of veto. If you’ve decided that it’ll never happen again, then it’ll never happen again, because you have the power to make that decision. You don’t have to consult me about it. I’ll go along with whatever you decide. If you want to pretend that it never happened, I’ll pretend too. I’ll never breathe a word to anyone. I can keep a secret.”
Steve felt that he was being mocked. Everything Milly said was true. He did have the power to make the decision. He’d had it the previous evening, and he’d had it tonight. Somehow, though, he’d failed to exercise it on both occasions. Milly was obviously unconvinced that he’d be able to do better in future—and if he were honest with himself, he had to admit that he was a trifle doubtful himself. He remembered, uncomfortably, that Rhodri Jenkins had adopted a similarly mocking tone at lunch-time, when he’d hazarded a wild and entirely unserious guess about Steve’s two-timing proclivities.
“What would you rather do?” he asked, defensively.
“I’d rather not make any promises I couldn’t keep,” Milly told him. “I’d rather not maintain any pretences, between the two of us, whatever pretences we maintain with Janine.”
Steve took that to mean that Milly didn’t want to rule out the possibility of their doing it again—and again—if ever they found themselves in the mood.”
“I’m an idiot,” Steve said. “I’m the pathetic one, not you. I’m the one who’s out of his depth. How on earth do I get myself into these situations?”
“It’s not the first time, then,” Milly said, perceptively.
“No—but I swore that the last time would be the last.”
“There you go,” Milly pointed out. “Why make promises you can’t keep, even to yourself? You have to learn to read the signs, Steve. Why are you seeing a hypnotherapist?”
The abrupt change of direction took Steve by surprise. “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.
“You asked me a question. How on earth do I get myself into these situations? I can’t tell you the answer unless I know all the facts. I asked Janine, but she was very cagey about it, so I’m asking you. If you can tell me why you’re seeing a hypnotherapist, I might be able to tell you how you keep getting into situations you don’t want to be in.”
“Maybe I’d be better off telling my hypnotherapist about you,” Steve opined.
“Maybe,” Milly agreed, “but I don’t charge, so I’ve no interest in spinning out the process. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Have you even told Janine?”
“Yes I have,” Steve retorted—but then realized that if he now refused to tell Milly, it would look like another insult, another implication that what he’d done with her was just a hit of fun, of no real consequence. “Phobias,” he said, shortly. “I’m trying to use the relaxation techniques she’s taught me to conquer some irrational fears I happen to have.”
“That’s what I thought,” Milly said.
Steve felt mildly insulted himself. “What do you mean, that’s what I thought?” he demanded. “Why would you have thought anything?”
“Because I’ve experienced the other symptoms first hand. Phobias fit—they’re exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to find in the same package. Don’t tell me your hypnotherapist hasn’t pointed that out?”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” Steve confessed, helplessly.
“Emotional incontinence,” Milly told him. “You get carried away—by lust, by fear. They’re the same thing, really, in purely physiological terms—you’re a biologist, so you ought to know that. At the level of true causation, they’re essentially similar petty excitations of the nervous system and bursts of hormonal activity, which the conscious mind interprets in different ways. Given that you have trouble containing and constraining your particular lusts, it’s entirely expectable that you’d have trouble containing and constraining your particular fears. In a sense, fucking me when you really want to be faithful to Janine is exactly the same as throwing a panic attack whenever you see a spider—or whatever it is that you’re phobic about. Remembering an alien abduction is just another way of representing the problem to yourself.”
It occurred to Steve then that perhaps he ought to have paid more attention to the bookshelves in Milly’s bedroom, instead of allowing himself to be so totally distracted by her anatomy. She obviously wasn’t the kind of girl who lulled herself to sleep with Mills and Boon or the latest issue of Heat. He’d read Carl Jung’s book on Flying Saucers, by way of attempting to understand his own predicament, but she’d had a lot longer to extend her research, and had evidently not been wasting her time. He remembered that she had mentioned self-help books. She was obviously not taking the same approach to the solution of her problems as he was, but she was obviously working just as hard.
“Emotional incontinence,” he repeated, dazedly. “That’s what I’ve got, you reckon?”
“It’s very common nowadays,” she told him. “You probably see as much of it in your line of work as I do in mine, although you probably write it off as adolescent behavior. We’re all adolescents now, apparently—long into our forties, at any rate. I’ll make an exception for Walter and Amelia, although some of their friends are a bit suspect.”
“You too?” Steve queried.
“Certainly. I used to suffer from eating disorders, as Janine presumably told you. I was shaping up to be a real wreck, before I went to the support group, started work as a traffic warden and began figuring out how to pull myself back from the edge. I’m much more disciplined now. I think I’ve nearly got it beaten, but I’m well aware of the possibility of self-delusion.”
“So last night and this evening were some sort of relapse?” Steve said.
“Oh no. You were overcome by emotional incontinence. I knew exactly what I was doing—borrowing Janine’s luscious boy-friend. That’s why I can be so reasonable about it all, while you’re shitting yourself at the thought that she might find out. Don’t worry: it’s our secret. I think I’m almost ready to let go of the other one—the abduction experience, that is—but I’m perfectly happy to keep this one for as long as necessary.”
“And how long will that be?” Steve wanted to know.
“Who can tell? We’ll just have to see how things go. Maybe your hypnotherapist will cure you, and you’ll find the means to control your phobias and your lusts. Maybe she won’t. I saw a therapist when I had my problems—not the same one you’re seeing—but her contribution to my cure was minimal. The support group was more help, but at the end of the day, therapy and support can only help you to help yourself. You can take pills, though. Have you tried Prozac?”
“I’m not depressed,” Steve said.
“It’s not just an antidepressant,” Milly told him. “It gees up your brain in all sorts of ways. I don’t take it any more, though. You can get dependent, and that’s bad—especially for people like us.”
“People like us?” Steve queried.
“Teachers and traffic wardens,” she explained. “High-stress jobs that involve us in continual confrontation with hostile adversaries. Did you think I meant alien abductees? When you’ve been coming to meetings a little bit longer, you’ll see that they come in all shades and sizes—as Walter Wainwright says, everybody’s been abducted by aliens. You and I have much more in common than that.”
“You want me to dump Janine, don’t you?” Steve divined. “You want me to say that I’ve seen the light, and that I want to be your boy-friend, not hers?”
“That would be a nice compliment,” Milly admitted, “but I’d only want you to say that if it were true, and I’d only want you to do that if it were what you really wanted. At present, all that’s happened is that you’ve given way to your emotion incontinence, and now you’re feeling guilty, confused and scared half to death—which is entirely understandable, given your emotio
nal incontinence. You really ought to work on that. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to make a reasoned decision as to what you want out of life, or carry any decision you do make through to a successful conclusion.”
Steve had to remind himself that he wasn’t listening to some irresistibly wicked femme fatale, but merely to someone who had read a lot of self-help books, because she had thought she needed them in the days before she became a traffic warden and made contact with her inner control-freak. He still felt that he had as much freedom of action as the average glove-puppet, but he had to admire the brilliance of Milly’s passive-aggressive technique. Here, he thought, was a woman who might actually be able to reform him, given a chance—but she wasn’t as good-looking as Janine, and she certainly didn’t seem to be as nice as Janine, and she might well prove to be far too robust for his delicate sensibilities.
Milly appeared to be dead right, though, about his so-called emotional incontinence. He really did need to work on that, and quickly—although he had a strong suspicion that he wasn’t going to be able to do it quickly enough to save his relationship with Janine, whether Milly stuck fast to her promises or not. It occurred to Steve, very belatedly, that Janine’s casual insistence that he go to the AlAbAn meeting without her might have been a kind of fidelity test—in which case, he’d failed spectacularly. Animal intelligence, he decided, had some pretty obvious defects. Given that he was trapped within it, though, he figured that he needed to put it to good use if he could. The first thing to do was to make sure that things didn’t get any worse.
“We just got carried away,” he said to Milly. “It happens. As you say, adolescence lasts well into our forties nowadays. It’s only natural, given the kind of creatures we are. We just have to keep our heads in future.”
“Absolutely,” she said. “Shall we go back to bed, now?”
* * * *
Steve was worried that the evening of the next AlAbAn meeting might precipitate the disaster that he and Milly had been scrupulously keeping at bay for the previous fortnight, but they all fell into their normal behavior-pattern without any difficulty. As he drove to East Grimstead the conversation between Janine and Milly was as light and inconsequential as usual. Janine gave no hint that she suspected that Steve was two-timing her with Milly, and Milly gave no indication that she might let the cat out of the bag, accidentally or intentionally. Fortunately, it wasn’t totally out of character for Steve to be quiet on the journey, except for the occasional terse response to a direct question.
Steve felt a good deal better than he’d expected to feel, partly because the situation had proved more easily manageable than he’d dared to hope during the previous fortnight, and partly because there was a certain undeniable sense of satisfaction in having a mini-harem at his disposal.
He and Janine had never got to the stage of seeing one another every night, and now that Janine had started management training she felt that there was a certain pressure on her to do more in the shop, to play a larger part in team meetings, and to do extra tasks at home. They had regular dates every Wednesday at the technical college and every second Thursday at AlAbAn, and Friday night was also sacred, but on every other evening of the week including Saturdays, if the second eleven was playing away—it was permissible for one or other of them to offer working late or having to take work home as an excuse. That left plenty of space for Steve and Milly to get together twice a week without either one of them having to put a strain on their authentic extracurricular commitments.
Steve was no longer under any delusion, however, that his liaison with Milly could be excused as mere emotional incontinence. It had started that way, but it was definitely a full-blooded affair by now, consciously maintained and managed. He was no longer a hapless idiot but a thoroughgoing rat. He didn’t like to think of himself that way, but there was no way around it.
Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any way back. Whenever he broached the possibility of giving up seeing Milly and putting the affair behind them, she blithely agreed that it was entirely up to him, and assured him that he could trust her implicitly never to let on to Janine that anything had ever happened. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her, although he was pretty sure that she was using reverse psychology—a topic that he knew to be well-covered in her bedtime reading, now that he had had abundant leisure to examine her bookshelves—but he couldn’t believe that the thing could simply be closed down and buried, especially while he, Janine and Milly had a standing arrangement to attend AlAbAn meetings every second Thursday. Even if it had been feasible for him to cut Milly out of his own life, it would not have been feasible to cut her out of Janine’s, and while she was still in Janine’s life, she was still implicitly in his; merely cutting out the AlAbAn meetings couldn’t and wouldn’t solve the problem.
Steve hadn’t told Sylvia Joyce about this aspect of his predicament, nor had he suggested to the hypnotherapist that his phobias might be aspects of a more general phenomenon and problem. He was still working hard at relaxation, still hoping to chip away his difficulties bit by bit, in spite of the fact that they seemed to be increasing and multiplying while he worked.
Because Milly knew about Janine, while Janine didn’t know about Milly, Steve now found being with Milly intrinsically more relaxing than being with Janine, even though he preferred being with Janine because he liked her even more now than he had before, in spite of the fact that he also liked Milly, quite sincerely and quite a lot. They were quite different in bed, partly for purely dimensional reasons and partly by virtue of their contrasting techniques, and he found the variety exhilarating, like the spice of life it was rumored to be. All in all, though, the complexity of the situation was getting to be a bit much. He felt that he was being slowly but inexorably overwhelmed, crushed by the weight of so many expectations. He could not, in his heart of hearts, believe that he was making progress in any respect whatsoever.
In the meantime, however, Janine continued chatting to Milly as they drove to the AlAbAn meeting with all the cheerfulness that might be expected of the blissfully ignorant, while Milly chatted to Janine with all the blitheness that could possibly be manufactured by a successful deceiver. Every time Milly’s infectious laugh bubbled up, Janice’s echo followed close behind. Neither of them seemed to notice that Steve never laughed once during the entire journey
Once they had arrived at Amelia Rockham’s cottage and were safely ensconced in the front room drinking cups of tea, Steve eased himself away from both his lovers. Instead of sitting down on the settee when Janine took her usual place he buttonholed Walter Wainwright and offered an unnecessarily profuse apology for the fact that he hadn’t so far got himself into a frame of mind in which he felt that he could tell his story. He was able to spin the conversation out further with similarly profuse enthusiasm regarding the group’s utility.
“I think you’ve done a wonderful job with it,” Steve said. “It works very smoothly, and I’m sure it does a great deal of good. It’s certainly doing me good, even though all I’ve done so far is listen. It’s been a real eye-opener.”
“I’m delighted that you’re finding it helpful,” Walter said. “Don’t worry about taking all the time you need before telling us your story. Newcomers rarely arrive in the group with their recovered memories complete and coherent; we old hands all know what it feels like to have to piece things together, like a jigsaw puzzle, and we all understand why listening to other people’s stories helps the process along. Members often feel the need to feel perfectly at home before they can reveal themselves, and that can take a long time, as it has with your friend Milly.”
“I don’t know anything at all about Milly’s abduction experience,” Steve was quick to say, “but I know that she really appreciates the group. She says that it’s the most supportive support group she’s ever attended. She has experience in that respect, because she used to suffer from eating disorders. As a traffic warden, of course, she doesn’t get much moral support in the everyday c
ontext.”
“She’s very lucky to have friends like you and Janine,” the old man said, with such sincerity that Steve felt an unusually sharp pang of guilt about the quality of the friendship he’d recently been supplying to Janine. He was mildly relieved when Mrs. Rockham started clearing the tea-cups away and he had lo lake his seat. He hoped that the confession would be interesting enough to distract him from his problems.
The woman invited to tell her story gave her name as “Zoe”. Although she was some fifteen or twenty years older than Janine and Milly, she was still moderately attractive, having obviously had some cosmetic surgery. She was conspicuously well-dressed, and Steve concluded that she was probably an executive wife from one of the Winterbournes or the Winterslows. She had been to at least as many meetings as Steve, but this was apparently the first time she’d plucked up the courage to tell her tale.
<
* * * *
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Force of Darkness
I’ve listened to enough of your stories by now to know that the earlier part of my experience is tediously commonplace. It happened in the early hours of the morning, in December last year, a few days before Christmas. I’d been feeling a little lower than usual, because I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder. My husband Josh thinks that’s an imaginary disease, like restless leg syndrome and CFIDS— that’s chronic fatigue and immune dysfunction syndrome—from which I also suffer, but it isn’t. Josh and I sleep in separate rooms, and I’m certain that he slept through the whole thing. The window in his room faces east, while mine faces west, so he wouldn’t have seen the bright light that woke me up and drew me to the window like a magnet.
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 15
