Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  Jack sucked at his beer and laughed. “So you guys are planning a party?” he said.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Dipstick replied. “Life’s a party.”

  It was decision time. Jack wondered what he wanted. What he wanted, of course, was Polly but he couldn’t have her, so perhaps he wanted Mitti. He was drunk and she was getting more attractive by the minute. Maybe he should go along with it. Have a few laughs. He was so hard on himself most of the time; perhaps it would be fun. He looked at Mitti and her eyes were welcoming.

  “Well hey, no rush,” said Dipstick. “We’ll just all sit here getting old while you think about it.”

  Jack pulled himself together. He was dreaming. Orgies were not for him. It was a strange thing, but Polly, or at least the memory of Polly, had come to act as a sort of censor on Jack’s life. He often found himself wondering what she would make of the things he said and the things he did. Of one thing he was sure: she would not think much of his cavorting at the Hotel American with drunken girls. It was almost as if having betrayed her utterly he was trying to make it up by not betraying her memory.

  “No thanks. I’m going to get something to eat,” Jack said, rising from the table.

  “Hey, come on, Jack,” Dipstick protested. “You can’t break up the party.”

  “You don’t need me, Dip,” Jack laughed, and as he did so he caught Mitti’s eye and the disappointment there. He could not help but smile at her and that was enough. Mitti got up too.

  “I’m coming with you,” she said boldly.

  “Nein, Mitti,” Helga said.

  “Yeah, nein,” Dipstick added.

  Helga and Dipstick could both see the ratio of the sexes changing from six:two to five:one and neither of them liked it.

  “C’mon, Jack. You and Mitti have gotta stay.”

  “Mitti can do what she likes, Dipstick, but if you think I want to see your white hairy ass in a spa bath you’ve been in the army too long,” Jack said, putting on his coat.

  “I don’t think I’ll bother either, guys,” said Schultz. “I have an early appointment at the chiropodist tomorrow and I’d hate to be all bleary for it. Thanks, anyway.”

  Dipstick ignored Schultz.

  “Who said anything about a spa bath, Jack?” he protested. “We’re just going to get some booze.”

  “Yeah, sure, Dip. Absolutely,” Jack replied and, nodding his farewell to the table, he turned and headed for the door, but not before casting a questioning glance at Mitti. There followed a brief exchange between Mitti and Helga in German, the gist of which was Mitti asking Helga if Helga minded being left. Helga was not particularly delighted about it, but she was a grown-up girl and it was a well-established rule that in such pickup situations it was every woman for herself. Helga told Mitti that if she wanted to go with Jack then she should do it, but she was to be sure to phone her in the morning and give her a full report.

  “You too,” Mitti replied in English, “but not too early.”

  Jack was waiting at the door. Mitti grabbed her jacket and the two of them left. Outside Mitti put her arm through Jack’s and they walked together through the snowy streets. She was shivering, her little ra-ra dress and wetlook leather jacket being little protection from the cold. Jack put his arm around her. Most places were shut, but after a while they found a small Moroccan restaurant in a basement called the Kasbah. The only other clientele were North Africans, economic immigrants, the subject of much resentment in the town.

  That night, however, everything was smiles between the nervous black men and their unexpected guests, and Jack and Mitti sat down to couscous, lamb stew and beer.

  “So you really did want to eat,” Mitti enquired.

  “Sure, what else?”

  They both knew what else. Mitti did not reply, but glanced coyly down at her food and then up again at Jack, which was reply enough. She did in fact have lovely eyes and without her ridiculous jacket she seemed much less hard and aggressive; even the huge hair appeared to be getting softer and less assertive.

  They finished their meal and went to a small hotel where they made love. Even as they began, Jack wished that he had not. He liked Mitti; she was a nice girl and very pretty underneath the make-up, but the truth was that she was not his type. It was partly the smell. There was no part of Mitti’s person that was not scented and treated with anti-perspirant. She could have fucked for a year and not broken into a sweat. Every inch of her both reeked and tasted of chemicals, her scratchy, brittle hair, her sour-tasting neck, the soapy gloss on her lips, the all-over body spray on her breasts, even her crotch had been deodorized, her natural sexual scent bludgeoned into submission by some cloud of musky napalm. Merely undressing Mitti had given Jack a headache and a blocked-up nose. It was like trying to have sex on the cosmetic counter at Macy’s. His throat hurt and he felt sick for a day afterwards, like he had swallowed a bottle of aftershave.

  Jack was a gentleman and he did his best, but they both knew that his heart wasn’t in it.

  After a while they gave up, got dressed and Jack took Mitti home in a cab.

  He kissed her goodnight and headed back to base feeling lonely and sad.

  At about lunchtime the next day Mitti rang Helga to find out how her night had gone.

  Helga said it had been fine, but she had sounded strange. After that Mitti did not see Helga for a week, by which time Helga had been to the police to report having been raped.

  There were two stories of what happened to Helga after Jack and Mitti had left the bar that night.

  Nobody disputed that Dipstick, Rod, Brad, Karl and Helga had all left the bierkeller in Bad Nauheim together, leaving Captain Schultz to his sauerkraut. Likewise, there was general agreement that the party had removed itself to the Hotel American where Dipstick had taken the best rooms available, a suite that boasted its own bar and a whirlpool bath. After this the stories begin to diverge. Helga admitted that they had all stripped off and squeezed into the hot bath together. Also she admitted, under police questioning, that she had then voluntarily had sex in the spa with Dipstick while the other men looked on. She also conceded that she had briefly masturbated certainly one other man, Rod, she thought, and possibly one of the others, too. After this Helga claimed that Rod had suggested that she now have sex with him and then also with the two younger officers. Helga said that at this point she had become nervous, as the men were beginning to get noisy and raucous. She declined Rod’s request for sex, saying that she had now had enough, and attempted to leave the spa bath. After this she claimed that Rod and Brad had raped her in turn while Karl and Dipstick sat by and continued to drink.

  The men, on the other hand, all swore under oath that Helga had consented to all the sexual acts that had happened that night. They swore that there had been no difference at all between Helga’s attitude to having sex with Dipstick and then having sex with the other two men. They pointed out that Helga had not cried out and that afterwards she had not left the hotel until the following morning, even accepting a cup of coffee from Karl. Everyone admitted to having been very drunk.

  Helga could not explain why she had not cried out, except to say that she thought she might have been too scared. She was also not entirely sure why she had remained in the hotel for some hours after the incident, apart from the fact that she had felt weak and sick and upset. When asked why it had taken her five days to report the alleged attack, she said that she had prevaricated because she knew very well how the whole incident would look. The only thing of which Helga was absolutely certain was that the last two men who had had sex with her had known that she was no longer a willing participant.

  The courts decided in favour of the men. The fact that Helga had had a previous sexual relationship with both Dipstick and Rod and the fact that she had gone voluntarily for sex at the hotel told heavily against her. Besides which, in the long run it came down to the word of four people against one.

  Helga moved away from Bad Nauheim almost immediately following the co
urt case. She wrote home once or twice and Mitti heard that she was living in Hamburg, but after that she seemed to disappear.

  The careers of the four soldiers never recovered. Whatever the courts may have decided, such a sordid incident was too much for the army to ignore and they were marked men. One by one they returned to civilian life in the States, angry and bitter and having learnt nothing from their experience. Quite the opposite, in fact. All four men came to believe absolutely that their treatment had been grossly unfair and that the woman Helga had set out viciously to destroy them for no better reason than feminine pique.

  The case shocked and disturbed both the army and the local community. Jack, who was called as a witness to recall the course of events during the early part of the evening, found his emotions and his principles confused and divided. He engaged in a heated correspondence with his brother Harry on the issues raised by the awful affair. Harry felt that it was obvious that the four soldiers were in the wrong and that they had got off far too lightly. Jack could not see things so clearly. He remembered the sight of the young man Brad crying in the witness box, pleading that he had really thought that the sort of girl that Helga was did not care much about one man more or less.

  “And what about you, Jack?” Harry wrote back furiously. “Is that what you think? Does being a soldier make a guy so dumb that he can rape a woman by mistake?”

  No, Jack knew that he could never do that, but he wondered. He wondered what he would have been like as a man if he had never met Polly. Would he have been like Brad? Would he too have been capable of getting drunk and seeing a woman not as a whole and complex person, confused and in pain, but just as some kind of two-dimensional sexual animal? It was possible, of course it was possible. All men had a darker side; that was what made them capable of killing. Jack was a soldier and he knew that very well. To Jack what the Bad Nauheim case had shown was what that dark, uncivilized side of man was capable of when it gained the upper hand. It was a lesson he was not to forget.

  Jack may have betrayed Polly’s love but Polly’s love had not betrayed him.

  22

  Polly finally left the peace camp with the gap that Jack had left in her heart and soul still not filled. She was unsettled and restless. She could not return to her old life, the one she had known years before; it had moved on without her. All her friends from that time were already in their second year at university. She saw them occasionally but she no longer had anything in common with them. She knew that deep down they felt sorry for her.

  “But what are you going to do after all this?” they asked. “You can’t just be a protester all your life.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I can,” Polly replied, but she knew that it sounded stupid.

  Still looking for something and nothing she became a traveller, a member of one of the New Age convoys that roamed the country at the time. Polly liked living on the move. It gave her the impression that she was going somewhere. She started seeing a casual dope dealer called Ziggy who owned a Volkswagen Camper. Polly was fond of Ziggy. He was thirty-six and painfully handsome with deep, piercing blue eyes. He had a Ph.D. in Ergonomics and was an extremely bright and interesting conversationalist, when he was not stoned. Unfortunately this was only for about fifteen minutes each morning. For the rest of the day Ziggy tended to merely giggle a lot.

  It was fun for a while, rejecting hierarchy and property, but it couldn’t last. Slowly but surely Polly began to long for a more structured life, a life where she could watch television without having to stare through the window at Dixons and go to the toilet without taking a spade. She was twenty-one, Mrs Thatcher had just won yet another election, and Polly had not been entirely clean since Duran Duran had been at the top of the charts.

  She left Ziggy, which hurt him badly.

  “But why, Poll?” he asked. “I thought we had a scene going.”

  “It’s the giggling, Ziggy. I just can’t handle the giggling.”

  “I’ll giggle less,” he pleaded. “I’ll start smoking hash instead of grass. It’s a much mellower high.”

  But it was no use. Polly left the convoy and moved to London, where she virtually became a street person, spending two months standing on the never-ending picket outside the South African Embassy. It was while on the anti-apartheid picket that Polly met an alternative comedian called Dave, whose opening line was “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would you like to see my bollocks?” Dave was nice, but he was, in his own words, “Not into monogamy, right?” In truth, he saw his gigs as no more than a good way of pulling girls. There might have been a time when Polly would have turned a blind eye to such behaviour, but these were the great days of AIDS paranoia so Polly took one last look at Dave’s bollocks and moved on again.

  It was around this time that Jack also moved on, leaving his regiment in Germany and returning to the US to take up a post at the Pentagon. He, like Polly (and Bono) hadn’t found what he was looking for either, but, unlike Polly, he had a good idea of what it was and where it might be found. What Jack was looking for was success and, for a soldier without a war to fight, that meant going to Washington. In Washington promotion prospects were, if not good, certainly better than on the Rhine.

  It was a frustrating time for an ambitious soldier, although paradoxically the military had never been held higher in the nation’s esteem. Reagan, who had never served in the forces himself, was a soldier’s president. He believed in big defence budgets and plenty of parades. US prestige could not have been greater, the Soviet Union was haemorrhaging in Afghanistan and the corridors of power buzzed with news of the famed Star Wars initiative with which the Pentagon intended to militarize space. Public interest in the army was unprecedented, with gung-ho movies like Rambo and Top Gun filling the cinemas. Things had improved considerably since the dark days of twenty years before when an adolescent Jack had refused to accompany his parents and his brother Harry to see MASH and Catch 22, a terrible, demoralizing time when America had been briefly ashamed of its fighting men.

  None the less, for all the celluloid mayhem, real soldiers do actually need real wars in order to be promoted. If the fellow above you does not get shot, then you have to wait twenty years for him to retire and the same goes for the fellow above him. Jack was thirty-six and getting frustrated.

  “I’m middle-fucking-aged and still a captain!” he wrote to Harry. “I was one of the youngest captains ever. You remember that? It was in the local paper and everything.”

  Harry did indeed remember it. Their father and mother had been furious with embarrassment.

  “Not only does he have to be a soldier,” Jack Senior had lamented over his muesli and fat-free organic yogurt. “He has to be a successful soldier. Why didn’t we just bring up a fascist and be done with it! I just hope that none of my students get to hear about this. Every day I bust my ass trying to civilize young people and now my own son is the youngest damn captain in the army!”

  At the time Jack had been delighted at his father’s discomfort, but as the years went by and he felt himself sinking into career doldrums Jack felt less inclined to crow.

  “The youngest captain, Harry!” Jack wrote from Washington. “That was what I was for a couple of years, and by hell did I rub Pa’s face in it? Then for a while I was a youngish captain, now I’m just a reasonable age to be a captain. It won’t be long before I’m an old captain. Then like thousands of other captains I’m going to have to decide whether to retire and strike out in civilian life, fifteen years behind all the other guys (with you and Dad laughing in my face), or stay on and face the possibility of a very sad career indeed. Jesus, when Napoleon was my age he’d conquered the world once and was thinking about making a comeback! When Alexander the Great was my age he was dead! I know I’m a good soldier, Harry, but there’s no way of showing it. On parade I just look the same as all the other guys. You remember Schultz? The geek nerd I told you about before? He’s in Washington too and he has equal seniority with me!! Equal!! I mean, he’s a dece
nt guy and all that, but Jesus! He has the strategic instincts of a lemming!”

  Harry was in no doubt what Jack should do. He told him to cut his losses and get out.

  “Never,” Jack wrote back. “The army is my life and I will never give it up, no matter how badly it treats me.”

  The truth was that Jack had already cut his losses. He had given up Polly in pursuit of military glory and whether he found that glory or not, he could never get back what he had lost.

  As for Polly, she was in a much worse position than Jack. As the eighties turned into the nineties she was without a proper home, without possessions, without qualifications or security of any kind, and she was lonely.

  She went to live in a squat in Acton, a sad house with boarded-up windows that had been repossessed by the council because they were widening the A40 to Oxford. It was occupied mainly by the warriors of Class War, a loose collective of malcontents made up principally of Oxbridge graduates who wanted to destroy the state, probably because unlike most of their friends they had failed to get high-ranking jobs at the BBC.

  At twenty-five Polly knew that her life was twisting downwards, out of control, but she did not know how to stop it. All her old friends were young professionals with incomes. Polly no longer saw them, but her mother, of course, kept her informed about their huge successes. Most of Polly’s more recent friends were either stoned, in prison or chained to lumps of concrete in tunnels underneath the roadworks on Twyford Down. The new decade had also brought with it the threat of war in the Middle East, which was most depressing for Polly, since if there was one meaningful thing she had tried to do over the previous eight years it was fight for peace.