said. “I got a lot of practice at home. My mother got upset over the slightest thing—so much so that she was almost impossible to live with. She loved me, I suppose, but I was such a worry to her that the love never got a look in—and Dad just armored himself by withdrawing into his obsessions. I’d never have believed that a man could treat a pub quiz like an Olympic final if I hadn’t seen him in obsessive action. I just went the opposite way. Shit happens—that’s my motto. Accept it and move on. That’s easy to say, mind, while I’m not put under too much pressure. I suspect that I’ve got my breaking point. Is it really so difficult to deal with stroppy children?”
“The A level groups aren’t so bad,” Steve said, “but the year elevens are awful. Most of them will reach the age of consent during the year. Combined with the fact that they’ll be sitting their GCSEs next May, that turns the classroom into a witches’ cauldron of seething hormones, fear of being left out, terror of not being in with the crowd, anxiety about not being able to cut it…you must remember the recipe from your own schooldays.”
“Sure,” Janine said. “Alison, Milly and I were witches all right, cackling away like the best of them. Gave our teachers hell, I suppose, although we didn’t think of their poor nerves at the time—or, if we did, only about how better to get on them in the hope of inducing a comprehensive breakdown. Okay, I take it back—stroppy adolescents probably are far worse than people complaining about their holidays from hell and whining about the inadequacy of the travel insurance they never wanted to buy. Can your hypnotherapist and your do-it-yourself relaxation CD take care of that, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Can’t hurt, at any rate. Shall I place our orders at the bar? What do you want?”
There must have been something in Steve’s tone that he hadn’t intentionally incorporated into it, because Janine picked up on the fact that there was something he wasn’t telling her.
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” she said, after she’d made her selection from the menu. “Either that, or there’s some other reason you went to the therapist. You don’t have to tell me, of course—but I really would prefer it if I didn’t discover some dark secret six months into our relationship that you could have come clean about much sooner. That wouldn’t be nice.”
Steve could have fenced that off by saying that six months was a long time, relationship-wise, and that maybe she was being over-optimistic, but he knew that wasn’t the right thing to do, in the circumstances. “I have a phobia,” he said, reluctantly, when he returned from the bar clutching a numbered ticket “I don’t think Sylvia will be able to do much about that, though, except maybe ameliorate the symptoms. Then, in the faint hope of deflecting the obvious question, he added: “She wanted to try regression, and persuaded me to agree, but it turned into a farce. I didn’t even get back to my childhood. I only remembered some stupid sci-fi nightmare. Sylvia took it seriously, though—she tried to persuade me to go to some support group for nutcases. Would you believe that there’s actually a group called Alien Abductees Anonymous, and that they have a branch in Wiltshire?”
Janine astonished him by saying: “Oh, I know all about that. My friend Milly goes regularly—she’s been trying to persuade Alison and me to go with her for ages. They meet over in East Grimstead—she must be serious about it, because she takes the bus.”
Steve seized upon the unexpected opportunity to draw the conversation into what seemed to be safer waters. “Your friend Milly thinks she’s been abducted by aliens?” he queried. “When? What happened to her?”
“Oh, she’s never confided in me or Alison,” Janine said, with a slight hint of bitterness. “I don’t even know whether she’s ever told her story to the group. She says there’s no pressure on people to talk about their experiences if they don’t want to, but that it helps just to listen. If you ask me, she just got addicted to support groups after the other one. That one cured her, after a fashion, so she’s being more careful this time—eking it out, so to speak.”
“What other one?” Steve asked, glad for he opportunity to take control of the conversational tempo. Even though he didn’t know Milly, he was fully entitled to ask about her, because Janine had brought the subject up and left the information she’d supplied tantalizingly incomplete.
“It was a group for people with Eating Disorders.”
“You mean she’s fat—or was.”
“No, the opposite. When we were at school she got very thin after GCSEs. She used to make herself sick after eating—even after school lunches. Mind you, that wasn’t so very unusual once we got to year eleven. Alison and I were never in the sick club, but there was quite a clique. The pressure of the A levels that we never got around to taking, I suppose. We could have—we were all clever enough, Ali especially, but none of us wanted to. Milly’s bulimia just gave us one more reason for resolving to get out. She never committed herself fully to the clique, mercifully; Ali and I remained her crucial connection to normality. As I said, she’s cured now, and had to move on from the Eating Disorders group. She eats normally, and works out a quite a bit at the police gym. Did you know that traffic wardens are allowed to use the police gym? She gets preferential treatment housing-wise as well—a special flat for key workers, Ali’s got one too, but travel agents don’t qualify.”
“Teachers do,” Steve said, “but I prefer my own place—I like older houses. So, is Milly contentedly plump now?”
“No. She’s bigger than me—nearly as tall as you, I suppose—so she can carry more weight that I can without looking fleshy. Actually, she looks very good—the broad shoulders and big bones give her an athletic look. Beside her, I look like a fragile doll. She needs that sort of appearance, mind—being a traffic warden’s definitely a high stress job. Victims of road rage are even worse than rebellious pheromone-crazed adolescents. Should I recommend your hypnotherapist to her, do you think?”
“Maybe,” Steve said. “Sylvia’s a fan of AlAbAn, at any rate. She’d approve of Milly going, even if you don’t.”
“I don’t disapprove,” Janine said. “I just prefer conventional girls’ nights out to support groups.”
“You get free tea and biscuits, so I’m told,” Steve rambled on, “although I don’t suppose that’s much of an attraction, if she’s paranoid about what she eats.”
“She’s not, any more,” Janine reminded him. “She’d really appreciate it if we gave her a lift, mind. The bus service is terrible. She doesn’t drive herself, you see—doesn’t think it’s becoming for a traffic warden to fraternize with the enemy.”
“I wasn’t actually thinking of going,” Steve said. “I know perfectly well that I haven’t really been abducted by aliens. The ones who think they have wouldn’t want someone like me there, sticking my skeptical oar in. Your Milly probably wouldn’t like it either. Hang on—that’s our number. Back in a sec.”
When he came back with the two plates and the cutlery, Janine was quick to take up the thread of the conversation. “They don’t mind skeptics, apparently,” she said. “According to Milly, they’re very tolerant—she says it’s a very supportive support group—much more so than the Eating Disorder group, which tended to be much stricter and more censorious. There are rules, though, that everyone has to follow. I don’t think you’re allowed to accuse the other members of the group of being deluded or telling lies. I think we should go, though; it might be fun.”
Steve gathered that Janine was at least slightly curious about her friend’s involvement with AlAbAn, and was not ungrateful for an excuse to relent in her refusal to attend the meetings. Steve wasn’t so sure that Milly would be pleased about it, but when Janine insisted on ringing Milly’s mobile there and then, without even finishing her food, she carried through her mission with irresistible aplomb.
“That’s settled, then” Janine said, as she put her phone back in her bag. “You’d better pick me up first, between six-thirty and six forty-five. I said we’d get to her before seven. The meeting starts at seven-thirty,