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, but they like people to be prompt.”
“Right,” said Steve, uncertain whether to be mildly annoyed because the decision had been take out of his hands or mildly pleased because Janine seemed to have forgotten all about his reasons for seeking hypnotherapeutic assistance. “I guess that’s a date, then.”
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,
