Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations

by By Brian Stableford

  “Is it? I read somewhere that Prozac and its generic equivalents account for nearly a third of NHS drug-spending. That’s a lot of prescriptions, considering that it isn’t actually a cure for any definable disease.”

  “That’s only because it’s so difficult to get Viagra on the NHS,” Janine said. “If people could have that for the asking, it would probably take up more than half the drug budget. Mind you, it’s obviously easy enough to get off-prescription, I get emails every day offering me cheap supplies—almost as many as I get offering me penis extensions.”

  “I just delete them,” Steve said, trying not to sound overly defensive.

  “Of course you do,” Janine said. “Why would you need Viagra, when you have me? Or Prozac, come to think of it. Aren’t I antidepressant enough.”

  “They aren’t just antidepressants,” Steve told her. “They affect other brain functions too. They might help with my phobias.”

  “Milly told me that,” Janine observed. “About the other effects, that is. Shall I ask her if phobia treatment is one of them? She reads a lot of pseudomedical self-help books—a hangover from her eating disorder days, I guess. She seemed fine tonight, though—a very healthy appetite, for someone with no measurable love life. I do hope she didn’t throw it all up as soon as she got home. She needs to keep her strength up, in her line of work. I won’t mention that they’re your phobias, though—I’ll just put it as a hypothetical question.”

  “She’ll guess,” Steve said, grimly. “Please don’t bother.”

  “She was a bit hard on poor Alison, I thought,” Janine went on, as Steve locked the car and followed her to the door of the house that contained her flat. “I think it’s because Ali slept with one of her boy-friends once. She always assures Ali that it’s all forgiven and forgotten, but I’m not sure that it is, really. Milly isn’t a naturally forgiving person—that’s why she’s such a good traffic warden.”

  “What happened to the boy-friend?” Steve asked, innocently.

  “Mil dumped him as soon as she found out. Never saw or spoke to him again. You have to take a firm line in such matters, don’t you? You can’t tolerate a boy-friend who’ll sleep with your friends behind your back. No future in that at all.”

  In the past, Janine’s boast that that no one could possibly need Viagra if they had her had always been totally justified, but the generalization faltered that night. Steve had to make his excuses and leave, hoping desperately that he would be able to do better the following night.

  * * * *

  The situation couldn’t last, of course. Steve had known that all along, and so had Milly. At first, Milly had taken some delight in it, obviously pleased to have out-competed—or at least out-maneuvered—her slightly prettier friend, but as time went by the delight ebbed away and her guilt-feelings increased in proportion. Their three-way dinner seemed to have exaggerated that process considerably; when Steve next saw Milly, on the following Monday evening, she was in a terrible mood. Steve half-expected her to say that it couldn’t and mustn’t go on, but she didn’t. Indeed, she seemed even more resolute in the absence of the delight factor than she had while intoxication was buoying her up.

  Neither of them had dared voice the thought that Janine was bound to find out eventually, because that would have forced them to discuss what would happen afterwards, but Milly was a past master at hinting and Steve was very quick on the uptake where that sort of hint was concerned, so he was as fully aware of her cognizance of the fact as she was of his. They hadn’t reduced the frequency of their meetings, though; the awareness lent an extra measure of urgency to their physical relationship.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Sylvia tomorrow evening,” Steve told Milly, as they lay in bed—more by way of informing her that he wouldn’t be seeing Janine than to excuse his inability to see her.

  “Bully for you,” Milly said, though not abrasively—the sex had taken the edge off her bad mood.

  “Progress seems to have stalled,” Steve explained. “With the relaxation, that is. Of course, the difference might be that the stress level at work has increased markedly, because of the pre-half-term course-work rush. It’s all deadlines these days—as soon as one’s past, another looms. Rhodri will be after me with heaps of scripts, wanting me do the plagiarism checks.”

  “The Christmas shopping season starts soon,” Milly observed. “More frustration leads to more ill-advised parking, which leads to more tickets, which leads to more road rage. A vicious circle, I might get some Prozac. You can buy it on-line, you know. No point in bothering the doctor. You can get Viagra too, if you need it.”

  “I don’t” Steve said.

  “Of course not. You’re young and fit—only ten years past the sexual peak that your pupils are enjoying so much. At least it’s not affecting your cricket now that the season’s finished.”

  Steve said nothing, because all the things he could think of were things he couldn’t voice, like we can’t go on like this indefinitely and we can’t keep the secret forever.

  In the event, the secret stayed kept for exactly one more week.

  Steve and Milly didn’t immediately realize that disaster had struck when they walked into the Pheasant on the following Monday evening to find themselves confronted yet again by Alison and her friend Mark, who were rushing through the preliminaries to yet another illicit assignation. At first it seemed that Milly had saved the day with her genius for improvisation. “Hi, Ali,” she said, without hesitation. “You remember Steve, don’t you—Janine’s boy-friend. Janine will be along any minute. Won’t you join us? It’s ages since the three of us got together, and you let us down last Tuesday.”

  “We can’t stop,” Alison was quick to say, obviously unwilling to expose her date to the kind of suggestive inquisition that Milly could contrive, with or without Janine’s support. “Thanks anyway.”

  “That’s a shame,” Milly said. “It would be a useful opportunity for Mark and Steve to get to know one another. Maybe, if I can rope in an escort of my own, we could all go out together one night.”

  “It is a shame,” Alison agreed, failing to hide her insincerity. “We must do that some time. We really have to dash now, though— function at the Town Hall.” She glanced at Steve, her blue eyes offering an apology, apparently signaling that her annoyance was reserved for Milly.

  “He probably does function at the Town Hall,” Milly said, when the other couple had left. “I hope he has a leather-topped desk. We wouldn’t want Ali to get splinters in her tits, would we?”

  “Considering that she’s supposed to be one of your two best friends,” Steve observed, as he bought the drinks, “you don’t seem to like her very much.”

  “I love her to bits, really,” Milly said. “You know how it is with old friends—insults that would be terrible if addressed to an outsider become jokey gestures of affection. She can’t help being a slut any more than you can. I don’t hold it against her. She makes jokes about me, too, when we’re all together. We even contrive to wind Jan up occasionally, although it’s not easy.”

  “You don’t think she’ll mention to Janine that she saw us together, next time she bumps into her?”

  “No chance. She’ll erase the encounter from her memory, because she won’t want me going on about her being caught with the same married man twice over.”

  Milly was usually a good judge of such matters, so Steve took her word for it, and didn’t spare Alison another thought until half past ten, when he and Milly were interrupted in mid-sex-session by someone hammering on the door of the flat.

  “Oh fuck,” Milly said, disengaging hastily and groping in the dark for her discarded underwear. “This isn’t going to look good. The nosey bitch must have twigged—and she’s gone and shopped us. Who’d have thought it?”

  “Don’t answer the door!” Steve whispered.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Milly said. “She doesn’t need a traffic warden’s eagle eye to know that your car’s parked right outsid
e the front door. Get dressed, double quick—and let me do the talking.”

  Steve had to admire Milly’s optimism, but he knew as he pulled liis clothes back on that no story in the world was going to convince Janine that there was a perfectly innocent explanation for his being in Milly’s flat.

  He never got a chance to find out what kind of story Milly would have improvised. As Milly herself had once observed, actions speak louder than words; when she opened the door to the flat Janine gave her an open-handed slap that knocked her off her feet.

  “How could you?” Janine demanded, not even glancing at Steve but going to stand astride Milly’s supine form, her righteous fury belying the obvious fact that Milly’s superior strength would have allowed her to knock seven bells out of Janine if she’d cared to make a fight of it. “How in the name of God could you?”

  Milly didn’t even try to get up, let alone make a fight of it. She stayed on the floor, supporting herself on her elbows. “I don’t know, Jan,” she retorted, eventually. “How do you think I did it?”

  “I knew you never really liked Alison,” Janine said. “Through all those years of pretending to be her friend, I knew you didn’t like her, even before she fucked your boy-friend—but I never suspected, even for a minute, that you secretly hated me. I never even suspected that you were pretending with me too. Why, Mil? For God’s sake, why?”

  “I wasn’t pretending,” Milly said. “Honestly. I like you more than anyone else in the world—and Ali too. I always have.”

  Janine seemed to be disappointed that Milly wouldn’t get up, so that she could hit her again, but she wasn’t the kind of girl who could kick someone in the ribs or stamp on them, so all she could do was move her fists impotently up, down and around. Finally, confronted with Milly’s refusal to give her any further grounds for verbal or actual violence, she rounded on Steve, who was just checking to make sure that his fly was done up.

  “If it was her you wanted,” Janine said, “All you had to do was say.”

  Steve observed that the phrasing of this remark left no room for a safe response. He couldn’t, after all, say that he hadn’t wanted Milly at all, or that he had wanted both of them. His actions had already spoken, far louder than words.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Milly said, making a direly unconvincing show of springing heroically to his defense, on seeing that he couldn’t defend himself. “I took advantage of him. I’m sorry. I was jealous of you. I always have been. I wanted him because he was yours.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” Janine retorted, immediately seeing through the maneuver. “You didn’t need to be Helen of Troy to pull this tosser. He’d have fucked you just as readily if you’d had a wooden leg and a paper bag over your head. Of course it’s his fault—and yours too. It’s the kind of fault that needs one hundred per cent commitment from both parties. I never want to speak to either of you again, ever. Next time you see me in the street, look the other way—if you don’t, I will.”

  “You don’t have to be like that,” Milly said. “Shit happens, right? We can still be friends.”

  “Shut up, Milly. Steve, you’re a coward and an idiot—and this silly bitch is worse than you. You deserve one another. I hope you’ll be very happy together, now that I’m out of your lives.”

  “Thanks, Jan,” said Milly, abruptly switching from attempted mollification to sarcasm. “It won’t be easy, but you can be sure that we’ll do our very best.” She managed not to flinch when Janine made as if to hit her again, in spite of the fact that she was still propped up on her elbows—but Janine couldn’t reach Milly’s face without bending down, and there were obviously limits to the extent to which she was prepared to lower herself. Instead of lashing out again, the outraged party contented herself with turning on her heel, marching out and slamming the door behind her.

  Milly released a deep sigh, and got to her feet. “Well. I didn’t think she’d react as badly as that,” she said. “She might have given me a chance to explain. We’ve been friends forever—you’d think she owed me that.”

  Steve sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands. He didn’t burst into tears, though. He was just miming despair.

  Milly came over and sat down beside him. “It could have been worse,” she said. “At least the situation’s clarified now. She’ll probably come around, when she’s had a chance to calm down and lick the wound, and we can all patch things up. The worse case scenario, right now, would be if I dumped you too, but I’m not going to do that. I might have lost a best friend—temporarily, I hope—and you might have lost the prettier of your two girl-friends, but we’ve still got each other. It’s not the end of the world.”

  “Did you plan all this?” Steve asked.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Milly replied. “Even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, how could I have done it? I really didn’t believe that Alison was smart enough to have guessed that I was lying about Janine being along in a minute, and I certainly didn’t think that she’d be malicious enough to phone Janine even if she had. She owes me one, remember. I’ve been really nice about her fucking my boy-friend, always taking trouble to reassure her that she was forgiven, because our friendship was too precious to throw away over something so silly. I don’t know how many times Janine heard me say that, but it was certainly enough to make her think twice about the appropriate response to what she just found out. I expect too much of people, you know. I always have. You’re not going to turn on me as well, are you? That would be just too much!”

  Steve observed, without any great surprise, that the question and its supplementary remark were phrased in such a way as to leave him no choice at all.

  “Oh well,” Milly said. “I suppose we’d better go back to bed to lick our own wounds—and whatever else seems appropriate.”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t until Steve was alone again that remorse really kicked in. He had always known, of course, that the one he really wanted was Janine. Janine had been absolutely right in her description of him. He’d been a complete idiot to get involved with Milly in the first place, and an arrant coward to carry on seeing her behind Janine’s back without making any attempt to correct the situation. It wasn’t until he was no longer in Milly’s curiously assertive presence, however, that he felt the full impact of his idiocy and cowardice. The fact that he hadn’t been able to turn on Milly—because that really would have been too much—only made things worse.

  What he wanted now was to dump Milly and obtain Janine’s forgiveness, but he couldn’t, firstly because he couldn’t believe for a moment that Janine would actually take him back, secondly because he couldn’t do that to Milly—who obviously hadn’t planned for things to turn out the way they had and was just as distressed about it as he was—and thirdly because it would make him seem like a really shallow person if he cast off a perfectly serviceable, attractive girl-friend, who was obviously willing to stick to him through thick and thin, in favor of one who no longer wanted to know him, but was slightly better-looking. As a secondary school science teacher, Steve had always prided himself on being a cultured individual, and had always been prepared to recruit the support of John Keats in support of the strict equivalence of beauty and truth in matters of the heart, but he had a sneaking suspicion that even Keats might not approve of his ditching Milly purely on the grounds of her lack of delicate perfection.

  Because the bust-up had happened on a Monday, Steve had an excuse—albeit a feeble one—to call Janine regarding the possibility of picking her up so that they could attend the Wednesday meeting of the survival course. She told him, in no uncertain terms, that she no longer had the slightest interest in going to a survival course with him, because if it should ever happen that he and she were the last man and woman on Earth, she would not wish to survive. She instructed him never to call her again, for any reason whatsoever, including Milly’s hopefully-imminent death and the end of the world as she had known it.

  The wounds inflicted by this hars
h exchange were still raw when Steve drove Milly out to East Grimstead on the Thursday for the AlAbAn meeting. He hadn’t been able to take Milly to the survival course on Wednesday, because enrolments weren’t transferable. Unable to bear the prospect of going alone, he had abandoned the course, in spite of having paid the fee up front. He didn’t want to be thought of as the kind of person who might abandon a survival course when the going got tough, but there seemed to be no alternative.

  Steve was astonished to find, when he followed Milly into Amelia Rockham’s front room, that Janine was already there, sitting in one of the green armchairs sipping tea from a pink cup. Steve was utterly nonplussed by this discovery. He stared at Janine in amazement, but Janine refused to meet his gaze.

  Milly obviously felt a similar amazement. “What the hell’s she doing here?” she whispered in Steve’s ear, as they made their way to the slightly-worn Naugahyde settee on which Steve had previously sat with Janine.

  Steve couldn’t help wondering, briefly, whether Janine’s appearance might part of some kind of Machiavellian scheme, cunningly adapted to the purpose of getting him back without losing face and putting the boot into her faithless ex-best friend into the bargain, but that seemed to be far too much to hope for. “I don’t know,” he replied, glad to be able to tell the truth for once.