Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  This was Jack’s favourite part of Polly’s dressing process. He loved her naked, of course, he worshipped her naked, but somehow near nakedness was even more endearing. There was something he found particularly moving about Polly wearing only her knickers. Polly said that it was because like all men he was subconsciously afraid of vaginas and preferred to see them sanitized with a neat cotton cover, which Jack thought was quite literally the stupidest thing he had ever heard anybody say in his entire life.

  The gathering gloom within the room was making Polly feel sombre. When the sun was shining and Jack and she were making love she could forget the circumstances of their relationship. Forget that he was a killer and she was a traitor. Forget the police and the soldiers. The razorwire and the searchlights. Forget her life in the camp. Forget the Cold War. Then night would fall and Polly would remember that it was life with Jack that was the dream. Outside was the deadly reality.

  “It would be so lovely to be normal,” she said, rescuing her bra from inside the hotel kettle (the lid of which she’d have sworn had not been removed even once since they had entered the room). “To be able to walk down a street together, go to the pub.”

  “Don’t even think about it.” Jack shivered at the very thought.

  “I was arrested again yesterday,” said Polly. She and her comrades had been attempting to prevent the missile transporters from leaving the camp. In the event of war the strategic plan for the missiles was that they would be bussed about to various parts of the county on mobile launchers, making them less of a target for the enemy. Every now and then the army practised this deployment, using empty transporters. It was to one of these that Polly had been attached when the police arrived.

  “Arrested?” said Jack casually. “You didn’t say. How’d it go?”

  Jack always tried to act as if things were not important.

  “Not great. You know the good cop, bad cop thing? I think there must have been an administrative cock-up. I got bad cop, bad cop. No fags, no cups of tea, just a lot of abuse.”

  “That’s cops.”

  The police, who for a while had been friendly, had begun to tire of the Greenham women’s disruption and vandalism and had started to get tough.

  “I was thinking while they were both shouting at me that perhaps down the corridor someone else had got good cop, good cop. Constant tea, endless cigarettes, keep the coupons …”

  The sun was nearly gone. Inside, the room was almost completely dark.

  “Polly, are you sure you’ve never told anybody about us?”

  “Jack, you always ask that.”

  Jack got out of bed and went to the toilet. He left the bathroom door open, which Polly hated. She liked to keep a little mystery in a relationship where possible. Having a toilet door was such a luxury for her that it seemed deeply decadent not even to bother using it.

  “You’ve told nobody?”

  Jack raised his voice above the tinkling and flushing. His tone was firmer, as well it might have been, since the whole course of his life depended on Polly’s discretion. He returned to the room, as always utterly unselfconscious about his jiggling, dangling, bollock-hanging nakedness. This was a side of male bedroom manners that Polly would never get used to.

  “Of course I haven’t told anybody,” said Polly. “I know the rules. I love you …”

  Polly waited, as countless women had waited before her, for the echo of that phrase, and, like the vast majority of those women, she was eventually forced to ask for it.

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” said Jack, lighting another two cigarettes.

  “Well, do you love me too?”

  Jack rolled his eyes ceilingwards. “Of course I love you, Polly, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Well say it properly, then.”

  “I just did!”

  “No, you didn’t. I made you. Say it nicely.”

  “OK, OK!”

  Jack assumed an expression of quiet sincerity. “I love you Polly. I really love you.”

  There was a pause.

  “But really really? Do you really really love me? I mean really.”

  This is, of course, the reason why so many men don’t like to get into the “I love you” conversation, because it is open-ended. Very quickly degenerating into the “How much do you love me?” conversation, the “I don’t believe you mean it,” conversation and finally the dreaded “Yes, and I’m sure you said the same thing to that bitch you were going out with when I first met you,” conversation.

  “Yes, Polly. I really really love you,” Jack said in a tone that suggested he would have said he loved baboon shit on toast if it would keep the peace.

  “Good,” said Polly. “Because if I thought you were lying I think I’d kill myself …”

  The room was now almost pitch black save for the glowing ends of their cigarettes.

  “Or you.”

  18

  When Jack got back to the base that night he went straight to the bar and ordered beer with a bourbon chaser. The room was empty save for Captain Schultz, who was alone as usual, playing on the space invaders machine. Poor Schultz. He hated the army as much as Jack loved it, not that he would ever have admitted it to anybody, even himself. Schultz tried not to have strong opinions about anything, in order to avoid unpleasant arguments. He had joined the army because that was what the men (and some of the women) of his family had always done. The fact that he was entirely unsuited for military command, being incapable of making a decision, was irrelevant. There had never been any choice for Schultz.

  Jack had known him at West Point where Schultz had just scraped through with a combination of family connections and very hard work. Not too long afterwards, while billeted at the US base in Iceland, he had been made captain virtually by default. Schultz’s superior had found the posting rather cold and had attempted to warm himself up by trying to seduce every young woman in Reykjavik. After one too many dishonourable discharges the man was dishonourably discharged and Schultz found himself achieving early command. Jack had found it an interesting circumstance that he, the most successful student in his year at military academy, and Schultz, the least successful, should be advancing at much the same pace. Jack’s rise was due to his own excellence, Schultz’s to the frailty of others, but they were destined to shadow each other throughout their whole careers.

  That night in the bar Jack wanted someone to talk to. He was still thinking about the conversation he’d had with Polly and was in a rare communicative mood. He wished that Harry was there so that he could talk to him about the painful mixed emotions he was experiencing. But Harry was thousands of miles away in Ohio. There was only Schultz. Jack stood by the space invaders machine and watched Schultz lose all his defenders in a very short space of time.

  “Jesus, Schultz,” said Jack. “That must be the worst score anybody ever got on that machine.”

  “Oh no,” Schultz replied, giving up the game. “I’ve had much worse.”

  “What the hell are you like with a gun?”

  “As far as possible I try not to use one,” Schultz said, sipping at his soda.

  “Tell me something, Schultz,” Jack enquired. “Did you ever really really want something you couldn’t have?”

  Schultz considered for a moment. “Sure I did, Kent. Why, only tonight in the refectory I absolutely set my mind on the profiteroles and then they told me they just sold the last portion. I hate that. They should cross it off the board. Why do you ask?”

  “Forget it.”

  Jack finished his drink and returned to his neat little army cell.

  “Dear Harry,” he wrote. “What the hell is wrong with me? I’m in pain here and nobody hit me. When I started this thing with Polly I thought I could handle it. You know, I thought I could have some laughs, get my rocks off and walk away when I felt like it. Except now I don’t want to walk away. Even thinking about ending it makes me want to go and punch someone. This is ridiculous, Harry. I mean, what am I? Some kind of
soppy dick like you that lets himself get stupid over a girl? Never in my life did I get stupid over a girl. Suddenly I’m risking my career for one! I’m sneaking out of the camp with my collar turned up and my hat pulled down just so I can be with her! I must be out of my mind. In fact, I am out of my mind, because she’s in it! All day this woman is inside my head! I can’t do my job, I’m a safety hazard. I’m trying to monitor the arrival of nuclear warheads and I’m daydreaming about being in bed with Polly! Did you feel this way about Debbie? Of course you did. You still do, you lucky fuck. You and Debbie were made for each other. You fit, like one of those horrible kissing chairs you make. You’re allowed to love each other. Nobody ever said ‘A furniture maker can’t fall in love with a fire woman.’ But me! Jesus, my colonel would probably prefer it if I told him I was sleeping with the corpse of Leonid Brezhnev.”

  19

  Their embrace ended as suddenly as it had begun.

  Polly broke away. “I shouldn’t be hugging you, Jack. I shouldn’t be hugging you at all.”

  So much of her longed to continue, but a larger part remembered the hurt that this man had caused her.

  Jack stepped back too. He had not expected their embrace. It had confused him.

  “Yeah, well, like I said, it’s good to see you.”

  Polly wanted to look at Jack properly. She turned on the lamp on her desk. The extra light further illuminated her dowdy room and she regretted switching it on.

  “I’ve often wondered what your stuff would be like,” said Jack, looking around.

  Things were not at their tidiest. As a matter of fact, they never were. Things had only once been at their tidiest in Polly’s flat, for a single afternoon, shortly after Polly had moved in and her mother had come to inspect. In preparation for that visit Polly had tidied and cleared and cleared and tidied and polished and buffed and tidied again.

  Her mother had thought the place was a mess.

  She also thought that the plates should be in the pan cupboard, the pans should be where the mugs were and the mugs should go on little hooks of which there were none, but nice ones could be got at Habitat. Polly’s mother then set about effecting all of these changes with the exception of the mugs, because she did not have the hooks. The mugs she left on the draining board to await Polly’s DIY efforts and there they had remained (sometimes clean, more often dirty) ever since.

  Polly’s little life seemed suddenly small and depressing. Poky would have been a good word for it, or dingy. She felt embarrassed, which was really rather unjust because if anyone in that room had reason to feel embarrassed it was Jack, and yet Polly knew that it was she who was going red.

  Hurriedly she began to tidy up. Polly was a dropper of things and a leaver around of other things. She did not tidy up as she went along, she tidied up once every seven days on a strict routine and she was already nine days into the current cycle. There were knickers and tights on the floor, a dirty plate and various mugs by the bed, and magazines and books everywhere. Polly felt that at least the intimate clothing had to be hidden away; also anything that had mould growing on it, particularly if the two were one and the same thing.

  As Jack watched Polly scurrying about, stooping to pick up her knickers and bras, he could not help but remember Polly as a young girl, searching for her underwear in hotel rooms and the backs of cars. Once she had not been able to find the elusive garment at all and they had risked going down to dinner, not only in fear of being seen together but also in the wicked knowledge that Polly was naked beneath her little denim skirt. What a wonderful meal that had been. Jack had kicked off his shoe beneath the table and as they ate his bare foot had lain between Polly’s legs. In the long years since that glorious meal Jack had relived it in his memory a thousand times. He doubted that he had ever had a happier moment. Certainly not in a motel restaurant, anyway.

  “Bet you didn’t think things would look as shitty as this,” Polly said, stuffing dirty clothes into the clean clothes drawer.

  As he watched her moving about Jack knew that it was as he had feared. That he was still in love with her.

  “No, I didn’t. I thought it would be much more shitty than this.”

  Jack could see that virtually everything Polly owned was on view. Her furniture, her clothes, all of her stuff. It didn’t seem to him that she had changed very much either. There were her souvenir mugs from the 1984 miners’ strike. A poster advertising a concert at Wembley Stadium to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela. One of those plastic flowers that dance when music comes on (but only if the battery hasn’t been dead for five and a half years, which in this case it had). A poster of Daniel Ortega proclaiming “Nicaragua must survive”, a poster of Garfield the cartoon cat proclaiming that he hated mornings. A clipframed front page of the London Evening Standard from the day Margaret Thatcher resigned (Jack, like many Americans, could not understand how the Brits had ever let that one happen; anyone could see that she was the best thing they had had in years – it was like after the war, when they dropped Churchill). Polly had lots of books. A couple of IKEA “first home” easy chairs, a rape alarm, a small TV. Thirty or forty loose CDs and forty or fifty empty CD boxes.

  Everything was as Jack might have imagined it. The only thing that surprised him was how little Polly owned. You would have been lucky to get two thousand dollars for the entire contents of the room. Not a lot for a woman of thirty-four. Or was it thirty-five? Not a very impressive accumulation for a whole half-lifetime.

  Polly glanced up from her tidying. She knew what he was thinking. “Not very impressive, is it?”

  Polly still could not quite believe how spectacularly she had managed to screw up her life. Just how unlucky could a girl get? And why did it have to be her?

  No reason, of course. Some people are fortunate in life and love, some are not, and you can never tell how the chips will fall. At school nobody would have looked at Polly and thought, she’ll end up one of the lonely ones. She’ll be the one who screws things up. She had been bright and attractive in every way. She might easily have made a great success of her personal life had fate favoured her, but it had not.

  How cruel to reflect upon the wrong turns and unsought circumstances of an unlucky life. When Polly and her friends had sat laughing in the pub together at the age of seventeen it would not have been possible to look at them and say, “Second from the left with the rum and Coke, she’s going to have problems.” It would not have been possible to predict that Polly, who seemed so strong and assured, was very soon going to fall head over heels in love and then get devastatingly dumped. That she would then spend years drifting unsatisfactorily from brief affair to brief affair before suddenly towards the end of her twenties being seized by a sudden desperate fear of being alone. That Polly of all people would be the one to get caught up with a married man (separated, waiting for divorce) who would lie to her, cheat on her and eventually leave Polly for the ex-wife whom he had previously left for Polly.

  Every golden generation, every fresh-faced group of friends, must statistically contain those who will fall prey to the sad clichés of life. The things they never thought would or could happen to them. Divorce, alcoholism, illness, failure. Those were things that happened to one’s parents’ generation. To adults who no longer had their whole lives before them. It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks.

  20

  At the end of the summer, after Jack had left Polly, she decided to stay on at Greenham. Her parents did everything they could to persuade her to come home and go back to school but she was adamant. Her A-levels could wait, she explained, there was a planet to be saved. Polly told Mr and Mrs Slade that she had things to do, she had made great friends amongst her compatriots at the peace camp and was halfway through the construction of a ten-foot-high puppet of a She-God called Wooma, with which Polly and her friends intended to parade through Newbury. Of course, Polly d
id not tell her parents that she had spent the summer having a passionate fling with a man twice her age and that now he was gone her heart was utterly broken. She did not tell them that her whole being ached with sadness and that sometimes she thought she would actually go mad. She just told them about Wooma and that she was not coming home yet.

  In fact Polly never did go home. Instead she moved permanently into the camp, living in a caravan with an old granny called Madge. Madge had been widowed the previous spring and had decided that she wanted to do something useful with the rest of her life, so she had bought a little caravan and moved to Greenham to save the world. Madge was a good companion and Polly loved her, but she was obsessed with bowels, particularly Polly’s. She would enquire earnestly about the state of Polly’s stools, reminding her always to be sure to inspect what she had produced before shovelling on the soil. Madge never tired of assuring Polly that regular, punctual movements were the secret of longevity and constantly made bran muffins of such copious fibrousness that they could have prised open the buttocks of a concrete elephant.

  Polly kept in touch with her parents via postcards and the occasional photograph. It was through the latter that Mr and Mrs Slade kept up with the changes in Polly’s appearance, which was drifting from rather stylish anarcho-punk to depressing “who gives a fuck?” hippy grunge. Mrs Slade wondered how Polly washed her hair now that it was all in great shaggy dreadlocks with beads sewn into them and the terrible answer was, of course, that she didn’t. Mr Slade worried that food might get stuck in Polly’s new lip ring and rot there. He’d read somewhere that decaying meat was carcinogenic, then he remembered that Polly was a vegetarian and felt better. Neither of Polly’s parents liked the tattoo she had had done on her shoulder, depicting the female gender symbol with a clenched fist in the centre of it. Unfortunately the tattoo had been rather inexpertly applied by a stoned goth at the Glastonbury festival, and the fist looked like a penis, which was hardly a feminist symbol.