While this exchange continued between the two girls, Steve kept his eyes on the road, looking out for stray deer and wishing that the unlit stretch connecting West Grimstead to Alderbury didn’t look quite so much like a road that wasn’t really a road at all, mysteriously heading directly to nowhere. On the other hand, he thought, how wonderful would it be to belong to a world in which intelligence was everywhere, and in which the only fundamental political philosophy was creationism?
Janine and Milly’s private discussion petered out as they reached Alderbury. “Shall we stop off for something to eat?” Steve asked, as he turned on to the A36. “I didn’t get away from school until half past five, so I haven’t had a chance.”
“I’m okay,” Milly said. “I had a snack before I came out.”
“We can stop off at the Chinese takeaway on the corner of my street after we drop Milly off, if you like,” Janine said. “We can eat at my place.”
“Good idea.” Steve said.
“You will be going to go to the next meeting, won’t you?” Milly put in, quickly.
Janine tried to save Steve from the necessity of answering by saying “I don’t know,” and would probably have gone on to say that she could let Milly know when they got together the following week, but Steve had already decided that he didn’t need saving.
“We can pick you up at the same time, if you like,” he said. “I’ll give it one more go, at least. It’s free, after all—and anything’s better than watching TV.”
“Thanks,” Milly said. “I appreciate it. The bus is awful, and I don’t like begging lifts from the others, even though a couple of them drive through Salisbury on their way further west.”
“Warminster used to get a lot of UFO activity, didn’t it?” Steve said. “Cley Hill was quite famous back in the fifties and sixties, so I hear.”
“Some of the long-term members remember it fondly,” Milly said. “The whole of Salisbury Plain was said to be a hot spot. That’s probably why Wiltshire has its own branch of AlAbAn—most of the others are in big cities, although I think there’s one in Devon.”
“They used to get a lot of crop circles in the Pewsey area,” Janine said, “but I think the fashion’s passed. Maybe the aliens are attracted to Stonehenge—they probably built it, along with the pyramids.”
“The armed services have a long tradition of using the plain for military exercises,” Steve pointed out. “Lots of helicopters ferrying men back and forth—and all that empty airspace higher up for testing new aircraft.”
Milly didn’t object to the injection of skepticism. When they dropped her off at her flat, she seemed to be in a very good mood. She thanked Steve profusely for the lift, and told Janine that she would call her to firm up arrangements for the following week.
“Milly doesn’t seem the AlAbAn type, somehow,” Steve said, as he drove away in the direction of Old Sarum, where Janine had a bedsit in a triply divided terraced house. “How did she get involved in it?”
“I’m not sure,” Janine replied. “I think it was someone she knew from her old support group who got her involved.”
“But she really does believe that she was abducted by aliens?”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know. It’s the only thing I’ve ever known her to be reluctant to talk about. She’s always urging Ali and me to go with her to meetings, but she won’t tell us what supposedly happened to her. Now I’ve seen the group, though, I can see why she likes the atmosphere, and the etiquette. You don’t get a lot of feedback when you spend all day handing out parking tickets. She’s been threatened with violence on many an occasion—one white van man told her in great detail exactly what he was going to do when he raped her. She took a bit of the color out of his cheeks by telling him exactly what she was going to do by way of reprisal, but it shook her up just the same. She can strike an intimidating attitude, but she’s not as strong as she looks. She can be very moody—but you saw how tonight cheered her up. I know it seems a bit silly, but I think the group does her good, and probably does its other members good too. It’s harmless, at least. I was surprised that you were so quick to offer her another lift, though. Fancy her, do you?”
“I thought it would be interesting to take another look,” Steve said. “At the meeting, not Milly. I’d like to see if the other stories they tell are as enterprising as that one. If they are…well, it’ll be much better than television, and it’s only once a fortnight.”
He found a parking-spot not far from the house where Janine had a top floor flat. The house wasn’t dissimilar to the one in which his own flat was located, but he had a ground floor apartment which, though slightly smaller than its own upper-level companion, was considerably more spacious than Janine’s garret. It was only a short walk to the Chinese restaurant. While they waited for their order to be cooked and boxed, Janine said: “Do you think going to the meetings might help you remember more of your own nightmare?”
“Maybe,” Steve said.
“And that’s what you want to do?”
“Maybe,” Steve repeated. “I honestly don’t know. Part of me thinks that getting deeper into this will only make me crazier than I already am, part of me thinks that Sylvia might actually be right, and that I might learn something useful—from the group as well as from the nightmare. It’s the uncertainty as much as anything else that makes me think I ought to go back at least once. I can stop at any time, can’t I?”
“So you’re taking it seriously—the alien abduction thing?”
“It depends what you mean by seriously,” he parried.
“What do you mean by seriously?” Janine pressed on.
Steve shrugged his shoulders. “What Sylvia Joyce would mean, I guess. Even if the stories can’t be taken literally, they might still be revealing in psychological terms—generally as well as personally. In a sense, the stories might be more interesting as dreams to be interpreted than mere accidents of happenstance.”
“You never did tell me exactly why you went to see the hypnotherapist in the first place,” Janine reminded him. “What is this phobia you have?”
Steve looked away, as if to study the menu posted on the restaurant wall. “Like your friend Milly,” he said, although he knew full well that he was merely procrastinating, “I’m not quite ready to tell you everything yet. A mystery or two helps keep a relationship interesting, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps it does,” she countered, “but only in the sense that it provides a target to aim at. Am I supposed to winkle it out of you by guesswork and experiment?”
“No,” Steve said. “Just let me work up to it for a while. To change the subject, the advice Jim’s time-traveler gave him was pretty sound. If the ecocatastrophe does accelerate, survival skills might be a good thing to have. There’s a course starting at the old technical college next week, still open for enrolments. It’s ten weeks in the classroom—Wednesday evenings, so it won’t clash with AlAbAn—then a field trip in December, with two nights sleeping rough on the plain. We could do it, if you like.”
“Why not?” Janine replied. “It’s always good to know how to catch, skin and cook a rabbit—and as you say, anything’s better than having to watch television. I’m not moving to Antarctica, though, no matter how hot the weather gets.”
When Steve saw Sylvia Joyce for a second time on the following Tuesday, the therapist was almost as glad to hear that Steve had gone to AlAbAn as Rhodri Jenkins had been to hear that Steve had gone to Sylvia Joyce. When Steve added Milly’s gratitude for the forging of an extra link between herself and Janine and the convenience of regular lifts of East Grimstead into the equation, he seemed to be delighting a great many people—which made a pleasant change from all the alienating he’d done as