The very concept of a “support group” had always sent a vague shiver through Steve’s body, and the notion that someone like him might be in need of an institution like AlAbAn was slightly horrifying. Under the circumstances, though, he was able to justify his impending attendance at the AlAbAn meeting as a means by which Janine could introduce him to one of her closest friends, and thus move their relationship forward by one more small but vital step.
As Janine had mentioned. Milly lived in one of the brand new flats that had been built near the city centre, in one of the smaller ones reserved for occupancy by “key workers”. It was a nice flat, with central heating—which Steve’s flat didn’t have, being reliant on an old-fashioned gas fire for winter heat—but it was rather tiny. Milly was, indeed, built on a more generous scale than Janine, but she was wearing flat heels, so she was still a comfortable inch shorter than Steve. She wasn’t as exquisitely beautiful as Janine, but the relative boldness of her features was matched by a boldness of attitude and manner that chimed in perfectly with the style of her looks. Steve wouldn’t have cast her as Helen of Troy—although he could see Janine in that role—but he reckoned that she would have made a strikingly imperious and satisfyingly voluptuous Cleopatra. She greeted Steve warmly, telling him that she’d heard a lot about him.
“All good, I hope,” Steve said, lazily falling back on the conventional cliché rather than trying to improvise something wittier.
“Oh yes,” Milly said. “Quite an ad, really—but Jan’s always polite about her boy-friends. Ali’s the one who always runs them down. Jan always thinks she might have got hold of a good one at last—but in your case, she’s certainly not mistaken about your boy-band looks. You’d make a very handsome couple if you weren’t so much taller than she is.”
“Don’t mind Milly,” Janine put in. “She’s a past master of the back-handed compliment. It’s me she’s insulting, in what she thinks is a subtle fashion, not you.”
“I like to think of myself as a connoisseur of delicacy as well as beauty,” Steve said, ostensibly to Milly. “I like Janine’s perfect economy of form as much as I like her perfect facial symmetry. She’s practically my ideal.”
“Oh dear,” Milly said. “Practically your ideal. And Jan thinks I’m one for back-handed compliments. You’ll have to watch out for that margin, Jan—the next thing you know, he’ll be referring to your almost perfect economy of form and your almost perfect facial symmetry, and it’ll all be downhill from then on. I’m all ready—we can go.”
Fortunately, Milly didn’t have time to quiz Steve about why he was going to the AlAbAn meeting during the journey to East Grimstead, because she was too eager to instruct both her companions in the nature and etiquette of the group. “They’re not at all doctrinaire,” she told them, wriggling slightly to settle her backside more comfortably into the rear seat of Steve’s Citroen. “It’s not in the least unusual for the stories they tell to be wildly different, even mutually contradictory, but everyone’s supposed to be supportive, no matter what improbabilities they’re faced with, and everyone is. You mustn’t challenge anything anyone says, even if you think you’ve found some crucial logical flaw or elementary violation of the laws of physics. It’s taken for granted that everyone’s experience is valid, no matter how peculiar it might be, and that everyone’s equally deserving of trust and moral support. If you listen quietly for two or three meetings, you’ll find yourselves slipping into it very easily.
“Amelia, the hostess, is one of those incredibly polite and pleasant old dears that everyone wishes they had for a granny, and Walter, the chairman, has a remarkable way with people. If anyone steps out of line, he just eases them back into it with the utmost gentleness. I never knew anyone so good at compelling politeness. He’d probably have been the greatest traffic warden the world has ever seen, instantly quelling the worst road rage with a slight frown and a few soothing words, but I’m not absolutely certain what he actually did before he retired—something to do with insurance, I think. You’ll find that a lot of the crowd are pretty old, although all age-groups are fairly represented.
“Walter and Amelia have been running the group for more than forty years, since the 1960s—although it wasn’t always called AlAbAn. Walter reckons that everyone in the world has been abducted at least once, but that the aliens have some kind of device for blanking out the memories. He thinks that the people who remember what happened are a tiny minority, who often need help to bring the buried memories back to the surface as well as help in coming to terms with them, but he also thinks they’re enormously privileged, because they obtain glimpses of possibilities far beyond those available to our narrow lives. He considers AlAbAn members the most privileged of all, because they have the chance to see how their glimpses fit in with others. Not that there’s any overall pattern that I can see, although you often catch echoes of one person’s story in another.”
This last item of news didn’t surprise Steve in the least. He figured that the real purpose of the group, for most of its members, must be to assist in the elaboration of individual confabulations. People went there, he assumed, in order to plagiarize bits of other people’s delusions to make their own more detailed, and perhaps more satisfactory. He hoped that by forewarning himself of this fact he might forearm himself against any similar effect, although he didn’t think that it would do him any great harm to start dreaming about other people’s supposed alien abductions, or even projecting himself into such dreams, provided that he remained fully conscious of the fact that dreams were what they were. He was confident, as a man of science—even the second-rate kind who taught science to school kids rather than actually doing it—that he could resist the temptation to start believing in nonsense simply because it was sometimes spouted by people who had the gift of the gab, capable of sweetening the tempers of road hogs and selling ice to Eskimos.
Before picking Milly up, Steve had vaguely assumed that the AlAbAn group would meet in East Grimstead’s village hall, but by the time they had passed through West Grimstead Milly had disabused him of that notion and had given him fair warning that the front room of Amelia Rockham’s so-called cottage could get a little crowded.
Steve was surprised to find, when he, Janine and Milly arrived, that there were already twenty-five people gathered, most of them perched on folding chairs with no space to stretch their legs. There were more than enough tea-cups to go round, though; Mrs. Rockham was obviously used to catering for such numbers. She greeted the newcomers warmly, and told them not to be shy about grabbing their fair share of the biscuits, because no one else would be.
When Milly introduced Janine and Steve to the chairperson, Walter Wainwright—who was even older than Mrs. Rockham—Steve felt vindicated in his anticipations, because the old man seemed every inch a slick salesman, of the type who could easily transfer skills learned flogging second-hand cars or dodgy stocks and shares to the context of a church, a cult or a support group. Walter hardly glanced at him, though, before greeting Janine much more warmly, claiming to know her parents quite well. Steve immediately added “old lech” to the list of pre-prepared insults he had organized, but the conversation was brief because the old man had other people clamoring for his attention and there were other newcomers to be introduced to him.
Milly obviously had a seat reserved for her by the other regulars—an old armchair that had seen better days, and she only paused briefly before taking it, making an apologetic gesture to Janine because the folding seats to either side of it were already occupied. Janine nodded to indicate her appreciation of the situation, and drew Steve across the room so that they could sit together, almost directly opposite Milly’s position, on a settee that was even older than the armchair. It was upholstered in a synthetic fabric whose brief fashionability had evaporated before Steve was out of short pants. “It’s called Naugahyde,” he whispered to Janine. “My parents had one once. So sad.”
He looked around then, and tried to gauge the composition of the audience. He, Janine and Milly were probably the youngest people in the room, although there was one other man and one other woman who were probably under thirty, There were half