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“After all,” Steve said to himself, as he paused in the doorway of the classroom and stiffened his back in order to face up to the mute hostility of his colleagues and the patronizing smile of the instructor, “it can’t do any harm, can it?”

  * * * *

  Steve was able to book a two-hour appointment with Sylvia Joyce for the following Tuesday evening. She talked him through a relaxation procedure by way of demonstration, and suggested that he ought to make a personalized relaxation CD on his PC, which he could play to himself whenever he went to bed alone, in order to practice the technique. “Can you do that?” she asked. “It works best if you lay down a backing-track of soothing music, then put on a voice-track taking you through the various stages I’ve mapped out for you.”

  “Sure,” Steve said. “I’ve got mixing software, and a huge collection of MP3s. Ambient chill-out isn’t really my thing, but I can find enough to make a long lullaby, and I think I can do the sonorous voice.”

  “Eventually,” she said, “you’ll internalize the CD, so that you can play it to yourself in your imagination, as it were—you can summon it up in the classroom, or if you’re in a queue, or any other time you feel tension building up.”

  “Would that help to combat a panic attack, if I happened to be having one? Steve asked.

  “It might,” the therapist told him. “Why—do you often have panic attacks?”

  “Not often,” Steve said—and then shut up.

  “We’re supposed to be compiling an issue-profile here, Steve,” Sylvia said, maternally. “I can’t help you with your problems unless you tell me what they are. When do you have panic attacks?”

  “Mostly when I go over bridges,” Steve admitted. “But that’s only because I never travel by air or look over the edges of cliffs and tall buildings.”

  “You mean that you suffer from acrophobia.”

  “Yes. I get panicky about heights, especially if they involve airplanes and rivers. Viaducts aren’t so bad. I’m not helpless, mind—I can do short spans with little more than a slight shiver. If I can learn your relaxation techniques well enough to reduce the shiver, and maybe let me get on a plane once in a while without tranquilizing myself into oblivion, that would be useful.”

  “Well, you’ll certainly find that the relaxation techniques will help. If you really want to get to grips with the phobias, though, I can do much more than that. If we could search out the cause, by investigating your childhood....”

  “Regression, you mean?” Steve said. Psychology wasn’t one of the sciences Steve taught—he’d done chemistry and physics along with biology at A level before going to university to train as a teacher—but he wasn’t entirely a stranger to psychological theory. He’d read a fair amount in his time, although he didn’t read nearly as much now that he’d got so heavily into the internet. He was vaguely familiar with the notion of hypnotic regression, and with the Freudian notion of abreaction, whereby repressed memories had to be dredged up and confronted in order to obtain release from the irrational anxieties they transmitted from the unconscious to afflict everyday behavior.

  “Regression’s one term we use,” Sylvia confirmed. “It’s not so different from what any psychotherapist would do, though. It’s all a matter of getting you into a state of mind to skip back in time, to recover the full sensation of your early memories. Think of it as a further stage of relaxation—that’s all it is, really, although some people call it a trance.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Steve said. “It might be opening a can of worms.”

  “That’s the whole point of it,” Sylvia told him. “Better a can of worms than a can’t of worms, I always say. Sometimes, you have to regress before you can progress. The recovered memories can be painful—they probably wouldn’t have been repressed in the first place, and wouldn’t be causing you difficulties now, if they weren’t—but it’s not a good idea to let them fester indefinitely. This is as safe an environment as you’re likely to find to reach out and touch them, I can do a swift demonstration now, if you like. Nothing heavy—I’ll just send you back five or ten years, if you like, so we won’t risk touching on anything too stressful, and you can see how it works. Then, if you’re agreeable, we can try to go deeper next time I see you.”

  Steve hesitated. “I’m not sure I believe in that whole thing,” he said. “It would be convenient, I suppose, if all our problems could be traced back to childhood traumas, and then surgically excised by confronting the relevant horrors, but I really don’t think my phobias have that sort of cause. I think they’re jut some sort of random neurophysiological accident—so I’m more interested in treating the manifest symptoms than going in search of potentially illusory causes. People start coming out with all sorts of rubbish when they’re regressed, don’t they? Past lives and false memories of being abused as children, and all that sort of crap. There’s a risk of increasing the problems instead of solving them, I think.”

  “Memories of child abuse aren’t necessarily false,” the hypnotherapist told him, “even if the people cast as abusers deny it. I don’t agree that there’s any risk of increasing your problems, although it’s true that people who do begin to remember traumatic things sometimes find recovered memories hard to deal with. Can of worms or not, I believe it’s best to get such things out in the open.”

  “I’m not sure that I can agree,” Steve said. “You might be right about memories of child abuse—but memories of past lives are certainly false. If delusions as blatantly ridiculous as once having served in Nelson’s fleet at Waterloo or as one of Cleopatra’s handmaidens can carry as much conviction as they’re said to do, how can anyone trust recovered memories of any sort? Regression can’t help me if it turns out to be nothing but an invitation to fantasize, and I sucker myself into believing my own fantasies.”

  “You don’t have to believe anything you might recover, Steve,” Sylvia assured him, “and the recovered imagery might be revealing and helpful, even if it’s a blatant fabrication. The unconscious mind doesn’t send us these messages unless it’s trying to help. What do you have to lose?”

  Steve didn’t know what he had to lose, and that was what worried him. He didn’t like taking leaps in the dark.

  “Maybe it’s time to bite the bullet, Steve.” Sylvia Joyce said, gently. “Maybe the time has come to stop procrastinating. You’re here, aren’t you? Why not make the most of it? You can stop at any time.”

  “Okay,” Steve said, eventually. “It can’t hurt to give it a go, I suppose, Give me a gentle introduction, mind. Just a brief trip into a safe and familiar yesteryear. That can’t do any harm.”

  Ten minutes later, those had come to seem like famous last words. As promised, once he had begun to drift away with the fairies, Sylvia had asked him, in her most soothing and reassuring tone, to go back to the age of twenty-one, when he’d been in his third year at university, and as happy and carefree as in any period of his life before or since. The last thing he’d expected was to go into a fullblown panic attack—but that was what happened.

  He felt the physical symptoms first—the cold sweat, the nausea, the dizziness. If he’d been able to faint, he probably wouldn’t have obtained any conscious sensations at all—but he was lying down on Sylvia Joyce’s couch, and the blood couldn’t drain away from his head under the pull of gravity. After the horrid physical sensations came the horrid psychological ones: a fully-fledged hallucination; a waking nightmare such as he’d never experienced before...or never, at any rate, allowed himself to remember after he awoke.

  “Wow,” said Sylvia, after sitting him up giving him a glass of water from which to sip. “You really do suffer from phobias, don’t you? I’ve seen reactions like that before, but never in a first session and never in response to such a minimal regression.

  “It was just a dream,” Steve said. “A nightmare. I don’t remember having suffered from nightmares like that at uni, but I suppose I must have. It was crazy.”

  “Can you remember any of the imag
es?” the therapist asked.

  “I can now,” Steve told her, accusingly. “I was aboard some sort of spaceship, looking down at the Earth from a great height—from orbit, I suppose. The Earth was dark, devastated. I think the sun was about to explode. I was up so high...higher than I could ever go in real life. I felt such an awful vertigo....” He handed the glass of water back, and lay down again, to armor himself against the possibility of fainting.

  “That’s okay,” Sylvia said. “It’s enough, for now. You’re going to have to deal with it, though, if we’re to get on the root of your phobias—not just this nightmare, but others, maybe even worse.”

  “A can of worms,” Steve murmured. “Just like I said.”

  “And we can work on it,” the therapist insisted. “It’s not insuperable. It just needs time.”

  “It was only a dream,” Steve said, sharply. “It wasn’t real. It can’t have anything to do with the cause of my phobias. It’s just one more stupid symptom.”

  “It would be a mistake to back away from it,” Sylvia advised him. “Even if it was only a dream, it might well have significant meanings wrapped up in it. You really need to recover more of it, and get a better grip on it—and you probably will recover more, now, even if you try to put it back in its mental box and throw away the key. In my experience, once these things begin to resurface, they usually continue to bubble up. It’s far better to control that process, to the extent that we can, so that we can try to make some sense of it. If you resist, you’ll just make it more difficult for you to deal with it.”

  “No way,” Steve said, remembering the flight to the Canaries and the crossing of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. “No more regression. Not now, not ever.”

  “I don’t want to abandon you, Steve,” the hypnotherapist told him, presumably meaning that she didn’t want him to abandon her. “You need to deal with this. I won’t regress you again, if you don’t want me to, but you may be in greater need now of learning to relax properly than you were before.”

  “Is this how you drum up business?” Steve asked, angrily. “Is this why Rhodri Jenkins has been coming to you for donkey’s years—because he’s getting further and further away from a cure for whatever ails him with every visit?”

  “I can’t discuss another client, Steve,” the therapist said, soothingly. “And I don’t drum up business. I don’t have to. The world does that for me. You’re not further away from finding an answer to your problems than you were before—you’re closer. You just need a little more help in completing the journey.”

  “No more regression,” Steve repeated. “I won’t bin the relaxation treatment, but that’s all I need from you, okay? I don’t need to be cured, in the way you think I can be—I just need to get my head into a state where I can step on a plane, if need be, or cross the Severn Bridge, without being reduced to a gibbering idiot. That’s all. We need to focus on that. Management, not cure. Forget about hypothetical causes, let’s just treat the symptoms.”

  “If that’s what you want,” she told him, “We can do that. You’re the client.”

  As long as you get your money, he thought, it doesn’t really matter which particular brand of old rope I buy, does it? Aloud, though, he only said: “Just a couple of sessions more, mind. No point in throwing money away if it isn’t working.” The reason he said that was because he thought there was just a possibility that she might be right, if only about more bits of the “recovered memory” resurfacing. If that proved to be the case, he might need someone to talk to about them—and who else could he possibly tell, apart from his therapist?

  “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 coul
d 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.