Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  By a strange twist of fate it was because of Saddam Hussein that Polly came to see Jack again, if only for a moment and only on the television, but it was a painful shock none the less. It was in January 1991 and Polly and friends were lying around their squat on their damp mattresses watching the military build-up in the Gulf through the window of their tiny black and white portable television screen. John Major had just been speaking about the need to stand up to aggression and tinpot despots wherever they reared their heads.

  “Ha!” said Polly earnestly. “If Kuwait dug potatoes instead of oil we wouldn’t give a toss about them. We didn’t mind about tinpot despots in Chile and Nicaragua, did we? And why? Because they were our tinpot despots, weren’t they?”

  Polly was just working herself up into a fair state of righteous anger when it happened. Suddenly, Jack was in the room. Standing in front of a tank, now a full colonel, and giving it as his opinion that Saddam’s men were lions led by donkeys.

  “We don’t want to have to kill these soldiers,” Jack said from within the tiny TV, “but let the butcher of Baghdad be under no illusions that we will kill them, and we will kill them quickly and efficiently.”

  Polly felt like she had been kicked. It was so unexpected and over so soon. While her companions continued to argue with the talking heads on television she retreated to the kitchen, all the anger and hurt welling up inside her once again.

  And the love.

  He still looked beautiful to her. Achingly so. Even in one of those awful Wehrmacht-style helmets that the Americans had taken to wearing at that time. He looked so commanding and so confident, so strong, forceful and fit. All of a sudden Polly found that she did not just miss Jack, she was jealous of him. Jack knew what he wanted, he knew where he was going, he always had and he was still on the winning side. Polly wiped the silverfish off the breadboard and started to cry.

  23

  Jack stared at Polly and smiled.

  She was still lovely. Her home might be dowdy and her possessions rather run down and few, but she lit up that room like a searchlight, like a bright star. Jack swallowed hard. He had not expected it, he really had not expected her still to be so very beautiful. As far as Jack was concerned, the passage of time had completely failed to dull her loveliness.

  “I don’t think you changed, Polly,” he almost whispered. “You didn’t age a day.”

  “Bollocks, Jack.”

  Jack laughed. “Now there’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time. But really, how did you do it? Is it some face cream made out of dead whales, or do you have a portrait in your attic of some terrible dissipated old hag?”

  “This is my attic, Jack. I live in it.”

  Now that Polly had got over the initial shock of Jack’s arrival it was beginning to dawn on her how strange the situation was.

  “I don’t know why I’ve let you in. I was asleep … The place is a mess … Why have you come back?”

  “Why do you think, Polly? Why do you think I’ve come?”

  “How the hell would I know? I don’t even know you.”

  “You know me, Polly.”

  “I know you’re a bastard!”

  Jack shrugged.

  “It is nearly two thirty in the bloody morning, Jack!”

  “I do unusual work,” said Jack, shrugging again. “Where I come from we keep strange hours.”

  He was just the same. Still arrogant, still forceful.

  “Yes, well, back here on earth we tend to sleep in the middle of the night!”

  “May I take off my coat? May I sit down?”

  It was the small hours of the morning. He’d been gone for donkey’s years and he wanted to take off his coat and sit down. Polly’s mind reeled.

  “No! This is absurd. I don’t know why I let you in at all. I think you should go. If you want to see me you can come back in the morning.”

  “I’ll be gone in the morning, Polly.”

  This was too much for Polly. It was hardly what might have been called a tactful thing to say, considering how they had parted the last time they’d been together.

  “Yes, well, some things don’t change, then, do they, you … You …”

  Polly bit her lip and fell silent. Of course she was angry with him, angry with him for leaving her and angry with him for coming back in such a strange manner. But, for all that, she was so very glad that he had come back.

  “It’s just I’m only in Britain for a few hours, Polly. This was the only time I could come.”

  “Jack, it’s been, it’s been … I don’t know how long it’s been …”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “I know how long it’s been!”

  As if she could forget. As if she didn’t remember every moment of that summer and every day that had passed since.

  “Sixteen years and two months, to be precise,” said Jack, who seemed also to have been carefully marking the passage of time.

  “Exactly! Exactly. Sixteen years and two months, during which time it appears that you have been more than capable of getting by without seeing me, and you want to visit me now!”

  “Yes.”

  “And seeing as how it’s only been sixteen years and two months, seeing as how it’s only been the merest decade and a half since we last set eyes on each other, you have to visit immediately, not a moment to lose, at two fifteen in the morning!”

  “I told you. I’m only in town for one night.”

  “Well, why not drop by when you have a little more space in your diary! Heaven knows, we might even arrange a mutually convenient appointment.”

  “I’m never in Britain, Polly. This is the first time I’ve been here since we … since I … since then,” his voice trailed off rather weakly.

  They were both remembering the chill dawn when he had left.

  “Why didn’t you come back before?” asked Polly.

  “I couldn’t. I go where I’m told.”

  Weak. He knew it, and so did she.

  “That is pathetic.”

  “Polly, I take orders.”

  “That’s what they said at Nuremberg.”

  Jack bridled somewhat. He knew he was in the wrong but he was not the sort of person who found contrition easy and he certainly wasn’t having Nuremberg thrown at him. All his life he had been deeply irritated at the way people, particularly people of a liberal persuasion, particularly his father and mother, had got into the habit of using the Nazis as some kind of ready benchmark for things of which they disapproved. If somebody wanted to cut welfare benefits they were a Nazi, if somebody wanted to raise the busfares they were a Nazi, if they objected to graffiti they were a Nazi. It was just puerile. Jack was prepared to put up his hand to the fact that he may have acted like a swine but he had not murdered six million Jews.

  “Oh, please, Polly. Is everybody still a fascist? Didn’t you grow out of that yet?”

  “Didn’t you grow out of not having a personality?” Polly’s withering contempt almost singed Jack’s eyebrows. “‘I take orders,’” she snarled in a mock American accent. “What? And they ordered you never to write? Never to call? To disappear off the face of the planet and ignore every telephone in the USA for sixteen years!”

  “They would not have approved.”

  “And if they ordered you to stick an umbrella up your arse and open it? Would you do that?”

  “Yes, I would.” Of course he would. What did she think he was? He was a soldier; did she think soldiers only did things they wanted to?

  “Well, then, I hope they do. A fucking great Cinzano beach umbrella with a pointy end and a couple of twisted spokes.”

  Jack glanced at his watch. It was nearly 2.30. He had to be in Brussels for a lunchtime meeting the next day. That meant flying out at 10.30 at the latest.

  Polly caught his look. “I’m sorry if I’m boring you!”

  Jack hated that. Ever since Jack could remember, women had been offended with his checking his watch. As if his desire to know the time and keep
his appointments was some kind of deathly insult to the power of their personalities.

  “I like to know the time, that’s all.”

  “It’s two fifteen in the fucking morning, Jack! We established that.”

  It wasn’t, it was already 2.30 and Jack was on a schedule.

  “Polly, believe me,” he said. “I know I should have contacted you before. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t think about you. Not a single day.”

  Polly did not know whether to believe him or not. It seemed unlikely, but if it was true it was a wonderful thing. That through all those years, especially those early ones when she had hurt so much at her loss, he had been thinking about her.

  “They just never sent me back to Britain before, that’s all,” Jack continued.

  “Even you get holidays.”

  What did she know? She didn’t know anything. He got time off, certainly. Time when he was not required to spend the day planning the deaths of thousands of enemy soldiers. Time when he was at liberty to go fishing or take a drive along the coast. But men in his position did not get holidays, not real holidays, holidays from who and what they were. Jack was never just Jack, not for a single moment, he was General Jack Kent, one of the most senior figures in the defence systems of the United States. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

  “I’m always on duty.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I tell it like I see it.”

  “Yeah, well, so do I, and what I see is a coward and a shit.”

  “Hey, Polly … I’m not a coward.”

  He could always make her laugh. That effortlessly cool self-deprecating humour that only strong, confident people can pull off. Polly almost weakened and laughed with him. For a moment a tiny smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. He saw it, and she knew he saw it, but she wasn’t giving in that easily.

  “So now, after nearly seventeen years your ‘duty’ brings you back to Britain for a night?”

  “Yes. One night.”

  “And you couldn’t warn me? You couldn’t call from the airport?”

  “No. I couldn’t warn you. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. All I could do was come and I did. I got into Brize Norton tonight and I came straight here.”

  It was a lie, of course, but Jack sort of felt that it was true. He had after all wanted to come straight to Polly. He had certainly come the moment his circumstances allowed him to, the moment he had made his presentation to the Cabinet and said farewell to the ambassador.

  The lie worked. Polly stared into Jack’s eyes. He had come straight to her. That was certainly something, something exciting she could not deny. Nor could she deny how handsome he had remained. More handsome than ever, even. She liked the grey at his temples and she preferred him without the early eighties Burt Reynolds moustache. He seemed leaner somehow, tougher. He had certainly not gone old and soft over the years.

  Then she remembered that she hated him. That he had dumped her without a word, without so much as a goodbye. He was a shit.

  “This is absurd, Jack. I’m bloody dreaming. What are you saying? You came straight here! Why? Why did you come straight here? I was seventeen years old. It was nearly twenty years ago—”

  “Sixteen years and two—”

  “I know! I know how long it was! It was another life. We are total strangers now! I ought to throw you out.”

  Jack fell silent and looked at Polly. He said nothing, but his stare grew in intensity until Polly began to feel quite uncomfortable. It was as if Jack was preparing to unburden himself, to share his secrets with her. Then his spirit appeared to desert him, his shoulders sagged, his eyes dropped and he sighed.

  “You’re right,” he said. “This is dumb. Completely dumb. Insane. I should go.”

  Jack turned wearily towards the door, deflated and lost, a man whose poor, sad, hopeless dreams had been exposed as just that. It worked, of course.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! You can’t just go!”

  “I thought you wanted me to.”

  “No! That’s not fair! You can’t wait sixteen years and two months, wake me up in the middle of the night, barge in and then barge out again.”

  Again a pause. “So you don’t want me to go?”

  “I don’t know what I want.”

  Polly took up a packet of slightly milder than full-strength cigarettes from the kitchen table. As she bent over the gas stove to light one, the stiff plastic mac she was wearing stood out from her thighs and revealed a little more of her bare legs. She still had wonderful legs, fabulous legs. Jack had always loved Polly’s legs, but then he had always loved everything about Polly. She turned back towards him, leant against the stove and inhaled deeply. Jack almost laughed, remembering the long evenings they had spent lying together after making love, watching the glowing ends of their cigarettes in the darkness, talking, disagreeing on every single thing under the sun except their desire to be together.

  24

  Peter’s whole being reeled with hatred. He had watched from the shop doorway as the American man entered Polly’s house and had stood for five minutes or so as if in a trance. The jealousy and sense of betrayal were so all-consuming that he had found himself unable to move. She was seeing other men! Sneaking them in in the middle of the night so that he wouldn’t see them! Tricking him into thinking she was being good when in fact she was nothing but a lying, cheating slag. And as for him. As for that American bastard. Peter had no vocabulary in his head with which to encompass the scope of his loathing for that man. It sat in his consciousness as a sort of red blur.

  However, once Peter had come round from his state of shock he knew absolutely that he must retrieve his knife at once. If ever he needed it he needed it now. He rushed back up the road to the phonebox, back to the drain down which the hated American had kicked his knife. Peter had seen that it had lodged on a jutting brick before he had run away. The question was, would it still be there?

  Of course it was. How could it not be; it was Peter’s precious knife and it would not be taken from him so easily. Kneeling in the gutter he could see it, lodged still, awaiting his retrieval. Peter went off to find a suitable tool with which to recover the knife and soon returned with an old wire coathanger picked from the rubbish in a nearby skip. Out of this he fashioned a long hook. He knew that the knife had a little hinged curve of metal attached to its innocent end by which a person might fasten the weapon to their belt. It was into this that Peter planned to place his hook. His challenge was to do this without dislodging the knife and causing it to fall further out of reach. So he knelt down in the sodden gutter and set to his task, dangling his hook into one of the numerous gaping mouths that fed and watered subterranean London with rubbish, effluence and rain.

  “Bastard. Fucking bastard. I’ll get you. I’ll get you,” mumbled Peter under his breath, and he was not referring to the knife.

  25

  “You still smoke?” Jack enquired.

  “I’m giving up soon,” Polly replied defensively, “in a week or two, this month, I hope. Certainly by the end of the year. Don’t tell me you quit?”

  Jack hadn’t wanted to give up smoking, but he’d been forced to. He worked for the government; it was either give up or become a pathetic non-person. Quite apart from anything else, smoking had got too tiring. The smoke exclusion zones around public buildings had been getting wider and wider since Clinton got in. In vain had he argued at the highest level that to make the Pentagon a no-smoking area was something of a sick joke. He and his colleagues had pointed out to their political masters that since the Pentagon was a building in which mass chemical and nuclear genocide was planned daily, it seemed almost tasteless to introduce a health code.

  Polly was surprised. Jack had always been so gungho about his smoking.

  “You said you’d never give up. You said you’d rather die.”

  “Yeah, well I didn’t know then that the greatest country in the world would end
up getting run by a bunch of killjoy liberal fucking pussies, did I?”

  That was the other side of Jack, of course. Polly remembered it well. The unreconstructed reactionary. The bullying, bigoted, yobbo soldier with the sexual and political sensitivity of Ghenghis Khan’s hordes on an angry and randy day. The strange thing was that she had always secretly found conservatism rather attractive. He was so honest and unashamed about being a right-wing bastard. As a deeply confused liberal herself, Polly found that kind of confidence rather compelling.

  “Nice to know you haven’t changed,” she said. “The kinder, gentler America passed you by, then?”

  “Oh yeah? Maybe we should start trying to be a little kinder and gentler to the guys who like to drink and smoke and read Playboy magazine now and again! It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand. They had their fun. Fifteen years ago those same star fucking Democrat assholes that are banning smokes were taking cocaine in their coffee. Now coffee carries a health warning.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re lucky. I’d love to kick the fags,” Polly replied. “Sometimes I buy one Mgs, but then I just smoke them six or seven at a time.”

  Polly leant against the table, placed her fingers over the little airholes in the filter that were supposed to dilute the tar and inhaled deeply. Jack watched her chest rise as she did so and he longed to fall upon her as of old. She walked around the table to pick up an ashtray and again Jack could not help but notice how attractive her legs were. As good as ever, he thought; better, in fact. Now how could that be? He had it! They were shaved! Polly had shaved her legs, and recently, too. They were smooth and shiny, the skin bright in the light of the overhead lamp.

  The old Polly, the young Polly, would on principle never have shaved her legs. She would have considered leg shaving to be a disgusting capitulation to sexist male stereotyping of the female form, a very short step from having four kilos of silicon pumped into her tits and appearing naked in Hustler. Not that Polly’s legs had been particularly hirsute in the old days. No hairier than most girls, but then most girls actually do have quite hairy legs if they let it grow free, even seventeen-year-olds. At the time Jack had sort of liked it because he loved her. She had been so different from the plucked, waxed and sanded-down, cheerleading Barbies whom he had dated previously, but even then he had only sort of liked it. Jack was in many things a traditionalist. He liked his petrol leaded and his ladies smooth and there was no denying that Polly’s shapely calf muscles were all the finer without the fuzzy edges.