“If it’s the money that bothers you, Steve, there’s something you might try for free,” Sylvia said, still full of apparent concern. “There’s a local support group for people who’ve had…experiences like yours. It’s called AlAbAn. That’s short for Alien Abductees Anonymous. They couldn’t call themselves Triple-A because that was already taken. They meet in East Grimstead every second Thursday.”
Steve was flabbergasted by the suggestion that he could be put in the same bag as lunatics who thought they’d been abducted by aliens, but the reflexive denial died on his lips. “East Grimstead?” he said, weakly, when he had recovered himself. “Isn’t that where the Scientologists’ headquarters are?”
“No, that’s East Grinstead with an en, in Sussex. This is East Grimstead with an em. Unsurprisingly, it’s a couple of miles the other side of West Grimstead, after you’ve taken a left turn off the A36 in Alderbury. You don’t have to worry about any big bridges, once you’re over the Bourne. Here’s the address—they meet later this week.” She handed him a piece of paper, on which she’d been scribbling while she spoke.
“I don’t need a support group,” Steve said. “I haven’t been abducted by aliens—I’ve just been suckered into having a bad dream in a hypnotherapist’s comfy chair.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you were abducted by aliens or not,” Sylvia assured him. “What matters is whether or not you can get to the bottom of whatever it was that produced those images in your mind. AlAbAn can help, believe me. I’ve referred people there before, and they’ve always got something out of it, if only a nice cup of tea and a few biscuits. It’s free, as I said, and they won’t pressure you into telling your story if you don’t want to. Just go along and listen for a week or two. It can’t do any harm, and you might be surprised by how helpful it is.”
“That’s what you said about the regression,” Steve reminded her.
“And I was right about that, too,” Sylvia told him. “We just have to work through it, to see what your unconscious is trying to tell your conscious mind. If your conscious mind were in a more receptive frame, maybe communication with your unconscious wouldn’t be so difficult, and you wouldn’t have cultivated your phobias in the first place.”
“I knew it would wind up being my fault,” Steve said. “It always does with you people, doesn’t it?”
“Absolutely not,” Sylvia told him. “There’s no fault involved. That’s one of the things of which you have to convince yourself. We can get there, if you’ll give it a chance. You really should go to AlAbAn—it might be interesting, even if it isn’t helpful, and it can’t hurt.”
Steve finally consented to take the proffered piece of paper, but he had no intention of going to the meeting. He didn’t think he was that crazy—not yet, at any rate. He didn’t want to reopen the can of worms into which he’d accidentally peered, so he didn’t want to do anything that might jiggle its lid, let alone anything that might help him get to its slimy bottom.
Steve hadn’t yet told Janine that he was seeing a hypnotherapist, because he didn’t want to let on about his phobias yet, and it would be direly difficult to do one without the other. He wasn’t yet sure that their two-month-old relationship had the sort of future that entitled her to know such things about him, and wasn’t even sure whether he ought to hope that it might.
In the past, he’d always told himself that he wouldn’t be ready to settle down for a long time yet, and that he had many more notches to put on the bedpost before he began to contemplate trading in the bachelor life, but he knew that Rhodri Jenkins might have a point. While he remained conscientiously young, free and single, conspicuously regarding every young woman he met as a potential conquest, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to settle into the kind of community that the school’s staff-members were trying to be: one that could set a good example to the students as well as preserving its own harmony.
There was no doubt in his mind that Janine was one of the finest conquests he had ever made, not just because she was so good-looking but because she was bright and witty. She hadn’t been to university, but he gathered that it was because she’d been too desperate to win her independence in order that she could leave home and set herself up with an entire new life. He’d met her parents once, and couldn’t see that they were particularly terrible, but there was obviously more there than met the eye. He could imagine himself living happily ever after with Janine—or as close to happily ever after as any real people could ever get. He’d have to get to know her more thoroughly first, of course—meet her friends, for sure, and maybe go away on holiday with her, if only as far as Weymouth—but he couldn’t see any reason, at present, why he shouldn’t try to prolong the present relationship indefinitely.
It seemed to Steve, moreover, that Janine was thinking along much the same lines. They’d already reached the stage in the relationship in which she felt entitled to be curious about how he spent the time he wasn’t spending with her, and what sort of things he considered adequate excuses for delaying their meetings. She’d accepted that cricket matches sometimes dragged on, so that he couldn’t always be on time for Saturday night dates, and understood that he sometimes felt the need to spend whole evenings alone with his PC, checking the videos on YouTube, playing poker, listening to his music or just surfing. She showed every sign of being adaptable to his habit and hobbies, and no sign of turning into a nag—although he knew that early appearances could sometimes be deceptive in the latter respect.
When he turned up half an hour late to meet her at the wine bar, after the appointment with Sylvia at which he’d come up with the “abduction experience”, Janine had the ideal excuse for demanding an adequate explanation and not being put off by any casual evasion, but she didn’t press as hard as a committed nag would have done.
“So you’ve been seeing another woman, “she said, lightly, when he returned from the bar with two large glasses of house red and explained that Rhodri Jenkins had sent him to a hypnotherapist, in order that he might learn to relax, and thus be better able to cope with the stresses and strains of classroom life.
“She’s older than my mother,” Steve told her, “and not so good-looking.” Janine had met Steve’s mother, and had complimented her by saying that it was obvious where Steve got his looks from. Steve’s mother, in consequence, thought that Janine was a “very nice girl—better than you deserve”.
“Did she hypnotize you, then?” Janine asked.
“Of course—that’s what I went for. It’s not like stage hypnotism, though, or old movies with swinging watches and rotating spirals. You don’t really go into a trance. She’d told me that I ought to make a CD in my computer that will take me through the stages of relaxation in the comfort of my own home. Do you want eat here, or shall we go on somewhere else?”
“Might as well stay here,” she said. “I know it’s only Tuesday, but I’m already feeling a touch of end-of-the week apathy. Can I get a copy—of your CD, I mean? Then we could both learn to relax.”
“I think it needs to be personalized. Besides which, you’re relaxed enough already. I don’t know how you do it, since you’re dealing with members of the public all day, but you seem perfectly able to shrug it off even when someone does have a go at you.”
Janine shrugged, as if to demonstrate how it was done. “Shit happens,” she said, in an insouciant one. “You have to take things in your stride. You get upset for a moment, then you wind down.”
“I find it much more difficult than that,” Steve admitted. “Things get to me, I guess, and gnaw away at me. I worry.
“I’ve noticed—but I didn’t think it was so bad that you’d have to seek professional help. Is there anything more I should know? If you’ve got dark secrets, I’d rather know about them sooner than later.”
Steve contemplated brushing the question off with a flippant remark, but he found himself in the unaccustomed position of not wanting to tell his girl-friend an outright