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 lie—not, at any rate, an unnecessary outright lie.
“Stress can really take its toll on teachers,” he said, earnestly. “It’s not a trivial matter. You’re fortunate to have a natural resistance to that sort of thing.”
“Oh, it’s not natural,” she 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
