“No, that’s all right,” Milly replied. “I’ll come and eat with you, if you don’t mind. If you want to follow the usual routine I can walk home from Jan’s—it’s no trouble. I promise that I won’t stay long. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of your amatory plans.”
Steve thought that was a bit rich, but there was nothing he could say.
“That wouldn’t be fair,” Janine said. “If we’re all eating together, we should pick somewhere near your place. Does the Pheasant do food?”
“After a fashion,” Milly said—causing Steve’s faint heart to flutter again, since he and Milly had been into the pub in question on more than one occasion as a couple. Milly was quick enough to substitute a suggestion of her own, though. “I know a better place—an Italian called the Arlequino. They do some nice chicken dishes as well as the usual pasta and pizza—veal too if you can stand the guilt. They won’t be booked up on a Thursday.”
“Fine by me,” Janine said.
“You’ll have to give me directions,” Steve told her.
Milly laughed in response to that. Janine laughed too, as usual, although she couldn’t have known why Milly was laughing.
Steve wasn’t looking forward to the meal, but some distraction was provided when they walked into the restaurant, because Janine and Milly spotted their friend Alison at a corner table and rushed to greet her. She was dining with a man at least ten years her senior, who seemed distinctly discomfited by the fact that his tryst had been discovered. They were just finishing their desserts.
Steve had always thought Janine and Milly an exercise in contrasts, because Janine was so slightly built and Milly so robust, but Alison provided a striking contrast with both of them. While the others had very dark hair, Alison’s was quite fair, although not so bright as to qualify as blonde. Whereas Janine’s features were delicately sculpted and Milly’s boldly outlined, Alison’s were strangely indistinct, the basic thinness of her face being compromised by rounded cheeks, and her snub nose looking as if it had strayed from another face entirely. The starkest contrast of all was, however, in her eyes. Whereas Milly and Janine had eyes as dark as their hair, Alison had pale blue eyes that would presumably have looked far brighter in sunlight than they did in the dimly-lit Arlequino.
Alison was not as distressed by the encounter as her companion seemed to be. She stood up and welcomed her friends gladly. When Janine introduced Steve as “my boyfriend, Steve”, she introduced her own companion simply as “Mark”.
“We’ve just been to AlAbAn,” Milly said. “Now that Janine’s a regular, you really ought to come along. “We could all travel out together in Steve’s car—all you’d have to do is pop around to my place by seven.” She turned to Steve to add: “Ali only lives two streets away, the other side of the Pheasant.”
“It’s okay by me,” he said—causing Alison to look directly at him for a little longer than she had when he was introduced.
“So you’re Steve,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“We’ve already done that routine, Ali,” Milly said. “Janine’s already assured him that she hasn’t loaded us down with embarrassing details of his intimate habits, so there’s no point trying to wind him up.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Alison said, smiling at Steve to emphasize that she wasn’t being sarcastic.
“We have to organize another night out,” Janine said. “How about Tuesday next?”
“I don’t know,” Alison said. “I’ll figure it out—ring me tomorrow. It’s great to see you, but will you excuse us now? We need to finish our coffees and get on. Maybe I’ll see you Tuesday, if I can make it.”
The waiter was hovering, evidently anxious to get Milly, Janine and Steve seated on the far side of the room, and they consented to be led away. By the time they’d finished studying the menus and were looking around expectantly for someone to take their orders, Mark had paid the bill and was hurrying Alison along. Alison waved goodbye as she left, but Mark never glanced in their direction.
“No prizes for guessing why they’re in such a hurry,” Milly said “He’s obviously married—has to get home to the wife once he’s dipped his wick.”
“Poor Ali,” Janine said. “I wish she could find a nice single one, for a change.”
“She chooses them deliberately,” Milly opined. “Thinks that it’s less complicated. Besides, it allows her to be ruthless when she fills us in on the stories so far. If she actually cared about them, she’d be as coy as you are.”
“She cares, in her own way,” Janine said. “She only gives us all the pornographic details because you gloat over them so much.”
“And you don’t? If she’s feeding a demand, it doesn’t just come from me. It’s okay—you don’t have to worry about letting on in front of Steve. He’ll understand.”
Janine was blushing. She obviously didn’t want Steve to think that her tastes in gossip were seriously salacious, or to wonder whether Alison was really content to feed her appetite without getting anything in return.
“It’s Alison’s fault that we can’t invite you to our little soirees, Steve,” Milly went on, blithely. “Janine and I are paragons of virtue by comparison, with Jan being contentedly monogamous nowadays and me being practically a nun, so Ali has to play the slut or we wouldn’t have anything to talk about at all. In any case, she’s not as good-looking as we are, so she has to try harder—plain girls always have more sex, because they can’t afford to be so picky.”
“That’s not fair,” Janine objected, although she couldn’t possibly know how unfair it really was.
“She’s got very nice eyes,” Steve observed. “They must really reflect the sky on a sunny day.”
“Oh God!” Milly groaned. “He’s been imagining her naked too. Don’t you ever stop?”
“Ignore her, Steve,” Janine said. “She’s bounced back from her post-meeting triste and now she’s delirious. What’s that phrase you use, Mil? Emotional incontinence?”
The waiter finally arrived at that point to take their orders. Steve was glad of the interruption, and invited Janine to go first. Janine and Milly both ordered lemon chicken, but Steve went for the veal Marsala in spite of the fact that he knew that Janine would disapprove. Instead of allowing Janine time to comment on the evil of veal crates, however, Milly immediately reverted to their prior topic of conversation.
“I don’t suffer from emotional incontinence,” Milly said, as if her character had been called into question. “That’s something I observe in others. I’m merely being witty and charming. For instance, Ali’s emotionally incontinent, in failing to resist the slimy charms of all the office Romeos at the Town Hall—at least until she’s tried them and found them wanting—and verbally incontinent too, when she tells us all about her adventures. You and I, by contrast, are always in control of our amatory affairs. How about you. Steve? Is this problem you have with imagining women naked getting out of control? Do you brag about your conquests in the staff-room?”
“I don’t have enough imagination to picture women naked,” Steve said, grimly. “I’m a science teacher. I certainly don’t talk about my sex life in the staff-room. Every one else did, at one time, but that seems to have faded away now, mercifully.”
“They’ve finally forgiven you for all those broken hearts, have they?” Janine put in, perhaps thinking that she was helping Steve to withstand Milly’s onslaught.
“No hearts were broken,” Steve insisted, gruffly. “Things just got a bit tangled last term, that’s all. It’s ancient history now. Can we possibly talk about something else?”
“Sure,” Janine said. “At Tom Cook’s, Christmas breaks are all the rage. Do you fancy one?”
“Actually,” Steve said, awkwardly, “My parents expect me home for Christmas. I haven’t yet plucked up the courage to disappoint them, although I keep meaning to. I’m an only child, you see.”
“So are we all,” Janine said. “I never go home for Christmas. It’s okay—I wasn
’t thinking of the Costa del Sol, or even darkest Wales. You can get ferries over to St. Malo and Le Havre, you know.”
Steve still hadn’t told Milly exactly what his phobias were, in spite of the fact that she’d asked a few probing questions, but if he had, Janine would not have been aware of the fact. There was another matter of principle at stake, and Steve tried to use his facial expression to remind Janine that she’d promised not to let Milly in on their secret. She seemed to get the message. “Okay,” she said. “Too boring, obviously. No more travel talk, then. Book any flash cars today, Mil?”
“A few BMWs, one Jag and one top-of-the-range Saab,” Milly said. “Nothing special. I’ll do better tomorrow, and even better on Saturday. Saturday’s when the rank amateurs and compulsive liberty-takers come out in force. I love Saturday shifts. There’s no opportunity to wind up the school run brigade, but the sheer variety is more than adequate compensation. You two will be getting together, I suppose?”
“Nothing special,” Janine answered. “Multiscreen, wine bar, Chinese and home.”
“Sounds special to me,” Milly said, with a contrived sigh. Her sighs were almost as infectious as her laughs, and it was all that Steve could do to stop himself from echoing it.
“Love life still not going well?” Janine asked, innocently.
“Not going at all,” Milly lied. “Not for want of offers, mind— but I’m not about to take up any of the colorful suggestions my punters make. What I need is a nice safe parker who respects yellow lines, always feeds his meter and always sticks close to the kerb. Not a lot of them about, these days.”
“Tomorrow’s a really bad day for me,” Steve said, figuring that if no one else were going to steer the subject-matter on to safer ground he’d better do it himself. “Two sessions with the sixth—one a double period—and two with year eleven. We’ve got past optics and the digestive system, but the periodic table and circulatory system aren’t much better.”
“When do you get on to reproduction?” Milly asked, brutally.
“Not till January,” Steve answered, calmly. “That’s with the sixth. I don’t have to explain it to the year elevens at all, thank God, although they’re the ones most likely to provide practical demonstrations of teenage pregnancy. The circulatory system can raise problems of its own, though—especially when we get the little darlings to ascertain their own blood groups. They’re a lot keener on sticking needles in one another than in themselves.”
“Tell them that it’s good practice for future drug-taking activities and tattoo acquisition,” Milly suggested.
“The class smartarses would only argue that it’s better to smoke heroin and crack than to inject it,” Steve said, “and launch into elaborate discourses on the technicalities of body-piercing and the aesthetics of tattoo-placement. Mind you, the year elevens would probably be more than capable of doing all of that with even greater gruesomeness, if the curriculum provided them with an opening. At least GCSEs weed out the worst cases of extensive self-mutilation; the A level groups are much less prone to it.”
“But harder to lead around by the nipples,” Milly supplied, mischievously. “Which must be a pity, given that they’re legal.”
“No touching allowed,” Steve said, wearily. “Strictly forbidden, no matter how old they are.”
“Must be difficult to restrain yourself, though, on occasion,” Milly followed up, relentlessly. “All those nubile young girls, hungry for a proper education. We were, weren’t we, Jan?”
“I’d never dare,” Steve assured them both. “They terrify me far too much. Older women are saner and safer by far—most of them, anyhow.”
“I’d hate to think that you were only with me because I’m easier to deal with,” Janine said.
In desperation, Steve made another stab at changing the subject. “I read Carl Jung’s book about flying saucers the other week,” he said. “He wrote it before the alien abduction business started, so it’s mostly about sightings, but it’s easy enough to see how abduction experiences could be slotted into his theory. He reckons that the entire UFO mythos is a psychological response to contemporary historical crises, in which the collective unconscious supplies the conscious mind with encoded archetypal imagery appropriate to the hopes and fears of our era. He thinks the collective unconscious is something fixed and stable, though—the product of our evolutionary heritage, which constitutes as well as containing the mythical past. I think it’s a lot more malleable and changeable. I reckon that modern idea-structures like the UFO-complex are part and parcel of our attempts to remake and remold the collective unconscious— constructing the mythical future, as it were. That’s what’s really going on at AlAbAn meetings, I think. We’re exchanging ideas of the mythical future, so that imaginative cross-fertilization can re-equip the collective unconscious with a new set of archetypal instruments.”
“Did you notice that he said all that without once drawing breath?” Milly said to Janine.
“He often does that when he’s desperate,” Janine replied. “Learned it in the classroom, I suppose.”
“Don’t tell me that you haven’t been reading around the subject,” Steve said, to both of them. “You must have formed theories of your own regarding the stories we’ve been listening to. They cry out for some sort of psychological explanation—Zoe’s most of all.”
“I’ve looked up a few things on the net,” Janine confessed. “There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there in cyberspace, but not a lot of psychology.”
“I keep my UFO books in the bedroom,” Milly said. “They’re almost as good as self-help manuals for reading oneself to sleep, but not as instantly effective as the Highway Code. Reading books about alien abductions at bedtime produces more strange dreams than theories, as you might expect. AlAbAn meetings sometimes have the same effect, but I don’t think the idea of Zoe naked in a glass cage will do as much for me as it will for Steve.”
“Zoe’s story was interesting in terms of its biology too,” Steve said, although he realized belatedly that it might have been a mistake to mention Zoe specifically, “although the idea that the course of future evolution might one day produce a simulacrum of vitalist theory isn’t as easy to accept as Jim’s suggestion that creationism might one day become an active philosophy instead of an idiotic way of trying to deny all the evidence of geology and paleontology. You’ve been going to the meetings a lot longer than we have, Milly—you must have come across lots of similar notions. After all, the members are feeding on one another’s dreams, aren’t they? They’re borrowing ideas all the time to fit into their own stories.”
“It’s more or less taken for granted in the group that people are entitled to borrow anything they take a fancy to,” Milly said, cruelly improvising yet another double entendre that would be inaudible to Janine. “It’s an essential element of being a successful mutual support group.”
“I must have a long talk to Walter Wainwright some time—or maybe Amelia Rockham,” Steve continued, doggedly. “They’ve heard all the stories, going back forty years and more. They must be aware of the broad patterns. I wonder when the emphasis of the stories began to shift from space travel to time travel—some time after the Viking landers proved that Mars is lifeless, obviously. There was probably a transition phase, when the emphasis shifted from interplanetary craft to starships—but time travel’s more pertinent now, as well as more convenient, if what’s really going on is the gradual manufacture of a new mythical future. It needn’t be conscious of course—all the borrowing, I mean. In fact, it probably makes more sense if it’s almost entirely unconscious.”
“It’s not,” Milly assured him.
“We’re not supposed to be skeptical, Steve,” Janine reminded him. “We’re not supposed to write off people’s stories as hallucinations or fabrications, let alone make up fancy theories to explain them away. Have some consideration for Milly, will you?”
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Milly said. “I won’t let him explain away my abduction expe
rience before I’ve even reported it. You can be as skeptical as you like in private, Steve—but you really shouldn’t bring that kind of talk to group, and it would be too exploitative to start pumping poor Mrs. Rockham for evidence to feed your psychobabble. Walter could probably cope, but maybe you’d do better lo keep it all to yourself. No need for verbal incontinence, is there?”
Steve was profoundly glad when the time eventually came to split the bill and move on. He took Milly home first, then headed for Janine’s.
“You seem very edgy tonight, Steve,” Janine observed. “Is something wrong?”
“Nothing at all,” Steve assured her. “It’s just that my relaxation techniques don’t seem to be working as well as I’d hoped, even on the everyday stress of work. I’m in two minds as to whether to go back to Sylvia next Tuesday for another booster session, or whether to give up on her altogether. Maybe I ought to try Prozac.”
“That’s a bit desperate, isn’t it?”
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