Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  Polly exhaled again. The smell of smoke had filled the room by now and Jack breathed it in greedily.

  “I’d love to take up smoking again,” he said, “but I just don’t have the guts. I fought the Iraqis, but the American anti-smoking lobby scares the shit out of me. If you light up in New York some mom in California will sue you for murdering her unborn child. It’s insane. Guys who operate nuclear missiles for a living are getting sacked for perpetrating secondary lung cancer.”

  Polly realized that they were having a conversation. It had happened so easily she hadn’t even noticed. After sixteen years and two months of pain and resentment, there they were, just having a conversation.

  “Well, since you’re here, Jack, you’d better give me your coat.”

  Jack took off his coat and Polly gulped with surprise. Underneath the coat Jack was resplendent in the dress uniform of an American four-star general. Polly laughed. It seemed the only thing to do. Jack could not have looked more out of place if he’d been a Baywatch babe in a nunnery. His epaulettes glinted, his belt buckle sparkled, his buttons shone, his shoulder braid strutted grandly and his medal ribbons competed for attention upon his splendid chest. Anybody who had known Jack a decade or so earlier when he had believed his career to be grinding to a halt would have gasped to see him now. In the cabinet room at Ten Downing Street Jack had looked superb. The creaky, threadbare, down-at-heel members of Her Majesty’s Government had provided a more than fitting setting for this splendid warrior from the New World. But context is everything and in Polly’s bedsit he looked like the conductor in a rather tasteless brass band.

  “Jesus, Jack, what are you? John Wayne? Did you come back to Britain to invade it?”

  It had not occurred to Jack until that point that he was dressed in a manner that some might consider unusual. In Jack’s position he was expected to wear dress uniform all the time, and on the whole he rather enjoyed it. Now, however, he felt self-conscious. Like a person who has proudly put on a black tie to attend a very special function but still has to get to the event by bus. It feels great while you are attaching the bowtie and the cufflinks. It’ll feel great again when you’re greedily plucking the first flute of Italian sparkling from a passing tray. The period in between, however, is not so good, when one is forced by circumstance to mix with the less exalted, the ordinarily dressed. At this point, frankly, one feels a bit of a prick.

  “You never did like uniforms much, did you?” he said with the tiniest hint of ill grace.

  “I think they’re a bit sad, that’s all. If you can’t express your authority without poncing about like a fascist, then you can’t have had much authority in the first place.”

  Again that childish fascist thing. Jack let it go.

  “Yeah, well, I had to wear this stuff,” he said instead. “It was required.”

  “What, for me?”

  Jack would have to be honest. “No, not you. When I said I came straight here, what I meant was that I came straight here when I could. I had a meeting earlier, that’s why I’m in Britain. Politicians like to see you in uniform. I think it makes them feel important. They’re the only kind of people who ever get to play with real soldiers.”

  Jack had calculated that this last comment would appeal to Polly, but if it did she ignored it.

  “Politicians? What politicians?”

  “Mainly your prime minister.”

  Polly gulped again in astonishment. When the phone had woken her a little while ago she’d been dreaming, of what she couldn’t remember, but being a dream it would no doubt have been fairly surreal, possibly containing marshmallow hippopotamuses in tutus and a great deal of falling. Since then her life had been a whirl of psycho-stalkers, old flames and ancient enemies and now casual references to visits with the highest in the land. Reality was proving far more bizarre than anything Polly’s subconscious mind had been conjuring up. The pink hippos were beginning to seem rather mundane.

  “The prime minister! The prime fucking minister! You’ve come here after seeing the prime minister!”

  To Jack this wasn’t such a big deal. He saw top people all the time. Certainly the prime minister of Britain was an important person, but there were any number of prime ministers dotted about the world, fifty at a minimum. They came and they went, sometimes before the newsreaders had even learnt how to pronounce their names properly. Jack had met most of them one way or another and Polly’s astonished reaction rather took him aback. He was about to say, “Yeah, the PM. So what?” but then decided it would be rude. To her, he supposed, it was as if he’d turned up at an apartment in the Bronx and casually remarked that he’d just been visiting with the president and first lady.

  “It wasn’t just me, you know, one on one,” he said, as if to downplay the grandeur of the situation. “There were the chiefs of staff … That’s the top guys in your …”

  “I know who the chiefs of staff are, Jack. Unless you’d forgotten, I once had the opportunity to study matters military at close quarters.”

  “Yeah,” Jack laughed. “I guess you were a combatant too, weren’t you? A soldier of the Cold War.”

  How many were there like her now? Ex-combatants of an ideological struggle that had simply faded away. All around the world were people hidden in flats and bedsits, eking out their lives, who had once been warriors. Who had once locked horns with superpowers. Soldiers, spies, resistance fighters, protesters. In her way Polly was such a one, another Cold War loser. For a time she had fought NATO with the same commitment that Jack had defended it. But it was over now and the battle that Polly had fought was fast fading in the memory of all but the people involved.

  Jack remembered it, of course, and suddenly he longed with all his heart to return once again to that golden time, the summer of his and Polly’s love. How he ached to see her naked once more. To be blinded afresh by her youth and beauty. A beauty that had been so pure and unencumbered by artifice. So naturally erotic, so effortlessly sexual. Jack longed to advance upon Polly then and there, as once he had, breathless and shaking with a dizzying, overwhelming passion, his entire being utterly and completely focused. No longer a whole and complex man but a desperate, straining sexual entity that knew no other time than the moment and no other purpose than to make love.

  Polly caught the look in Jack’s eyes as they journeyed downwards and then up again over her body, lingering for a moment on her legs, bare to just above the knee and again on the triangle of flesh visible at her open collar.

  “Look, if you’re staying,” she said, “I should get dressed.”

  “Why?” Jack replied.

  26

  Outside in the wet and empty street Peter knelt in the gutter, his fingers straining at the metal grid that covered the drain. His upper lip was crusted with blood from when the door of the telephone box had bashed his nose. The knees of his trousers were soaking up the filthy London water and the rain was falling on his head.

  Peter noticed none of these things.

  His whole being was concentrated on the black hilt and glinting steel blade that he could see lodged three feet or so below him. His precious knife, sitting precariously on the jutting brick within the wall of that water-bloated urban intestine. His precious weapon, teetering on the brink of the bowels of the city.

  “Bastard. Bastard. Fucking bastard,” he muttered through the soggy scabs of blood and the bitter-tasting rain.

  27

  Polly stared at Jack. What had he just said? Don’t bother getting dressed?

  His eyes had been awash with sensual longing and he had told her not to bother getting dressed. Now she scarcely knew what to think. Was he asking her to bed? That would be a bold move indeed. Had he burst back into her life in order to fuck her as quickly as possible? It was, after all, how it had happened the first time, in his TR7. They had been unable to keep their hands off each other. Looking at Jack as he looked at her Polly was shocked to discover that a substantial part of her was excited at the prospect of leaping in
stantly into bed with this man who had betrayed her. Her sensual self wanted to surrender instantly to whatever Jack wanted. Why not? She was a grown woman, she was entitled to take a bit of comfort as and when she pleased. Unfortunately for Polly’s sensual self, her intellectual and emotional self recoiled at the idea, feeling angry and abused. Her political self felt even worse about it; outraged would not be too strong a word for how her political self felt. Did Jack think that he could have it all? That he could shatter her life into tiny little bits and then pick up a piece when the fancy took him?

  “What do you mean?” said Polly, defiantly drawing herself up to her full height. A gesture which served merely to raise her plastic mac higher, thus revealing rather more of her legs than was already showing.

  Jack had not meant what Polly was thinking, in fact. Of course, to make love there and then would be nice, ecstatic in fact. Like Polly, a part of Jack longed to pick up where they had left off so many years before and go to bed. His sensual self would have delighted in spending the remainder of the night making the crockery rattle and furniture jump round the room. But also like Polly, Jack’s intellectual self was raising objections; sex was not what he had come for, or what he had expected. There were things he wanted to discuss, things he needed to know. Sex would get in the way and Jack did not have a limitless amount of time. He tried to correct any misunderstanding.

  “When I said ‘Why get dressed?’ what I meant, of course, was why get dressed when you’d only have to get undressed again?”

  Which of course did not correct any misunderstandings at all.

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  Jack tried again. “No, I don’t mean … What I mean is I can’t stay long … I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “Which is why you dropped round at two in the morning.”

  Polly had always had a caustic side. Jack could remember having found it rather cute. At this point he couldn’t quite remember why.

  “I don’t have long, that’s all.”

  “Well, thank you so much for giving me a whole five minutes out of your busy schedule after seventeen years without a word and at two thirty in the morning. I’m so grateful.”

  “Look!” said Jack, a little more firmly than he had intended. “I just don’t have all that long. I’m sorry, but it’s true. Anyway, why get dressed? You’re probably better dressed now than you were when we met the first time.”

  Both Polly and Jack were straddling two different times. Principally they were in the here and now and it was late and their relationship was edgy to say the least. But also, for a moment, they were back there and then and it was glorious summer and love was flowering in the very shadow of Armageddon. The first time that their paths had crossed, before their encounter at the restaurant on the A34, when they had met and did not know even that they were meeting. At the gates of the camp, when out of the valley of death had ridden a handsome soldier mounted on a jeep who had found his way obstructed by a beautiful golden maiden, a symbol of peace.

  “Yes, well, sartorial considerations tended to go out of the window in those days,” Polly replied.

  “Not that you had any windows,” said Jack.

  “No, I didn’t, that’s right. You can’t put windows in a woodland bender.”

  Jack had not expected that he would feel things quite this violently, that his emotions would be so very much the same as they had been before.

  “You were so beautiful, Polly,” said Jack. “So wild. I can see you now as if it was only a heartbeat ago. Like some kind of …” He struggled for words. Jack had never been big on flowery prose, but he had a go: “… like some gorgeous woodland creature running along the side of the road, tanned legs in the long grass, the sun in your hair.”

  “Screaming at you to fuck off and die.”

  It was true. To her shame (and the embarrassment of Madge), Polly had often chosen to ignore the non-aggressive principles of the peace camp and address the soldiers in most unpeaceful terms.

  “We love you! We want to understand you!” Madge would shout.

  “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” Polly would add.

  And in the evening around the fire the women would all agree that it was important to try not to give mixed signals.

  “You were perfect, Polly,” said Jack, his eyes half closed. “A vision. I remember the first moment I saw you exactly. I have it fixed in my mind like some kind of idyll … like an Impressionist painting.”

  “Jack, I was wearing a dustbin liner.”

  “You still like plastic, I see.”

  Polly remembered that she was wearing a rainmac and returned to the present with a bump.

  “I don’t have a dressing gown, I’m afraid.”

  In her punkier days Polly would not have thought twice about receiving guests in a nightie and a plastic mac, but times had changed. “I’m not used to entertaining under these circumstances. Sit down, Jack. I’d ask you to step through into the lounge, but I haven’t got one.”

  “Hey, you never used to have a roof.”

  “Yeah, haven’t I done well? I no longer sleep in the open.”

  Polly was embarrassed about everything. What she was wearing, her little flat, her stuff. Why couldn’t he have given her some warning of his visit? Just so she could have got herself together? She would not have needed long. Just enough time to move house and acquire some beautiful and glamorous possessions. Shift her career up ten or fifteen gears and have a little minor repair work done on the cellulite that was beginning to appear on her upper thighs.

  Instead Jack was seeing her life as it really was.

  “Still rejecting capitalist materialism, I see.”

  Jack had never been the most tactful of people.

  “No. These days capitalist materialism is rejecting me,” Polly replied. “Getting its own back for the years I abused it. Sit down. You won’t catch anything, you know.”

  There were two easy chairs for Jack to choose from, both, of course, already occupied with assorted stuff. Polly’s theory was that when you live in one room everything is a wardrobe. Chairs, tables, plantpots, casserole dishes. Everything is a place in or on which to put other things. In fact as far as Polly was concerned her whole flat was one big wardrobe and she was just one of the things in it. Jack could never have lived like that. Being a military man who had spent most of his life ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice, he knew that the key to comfort was organization.

  One of Polly’s chairs was clearly an impossible proposition in terms of sitting down. Jack could see that there was no point in even thinking about unloading the dazzling cornucopia of things it contained. There were jumpers, books, newspapers, magazines, a partially dissected Russian doll. Stuffed toys, a guitar, an old typewriter, videocassettes, a radio, a bicycle pump attached to a deflated inner tube, coffee mugs and a roll of rush matting. Also wedged onto the chair was a Fair Trade South American string shopping bag containing three cans of baked beans and a packet of chocolate digestives. Polly was quite good about putting away groceries, but only quite. She always dealt with perishable items like milk and frozen peas the moment she got in from the shops, but dry and tinned goods she tended to leave in the shopping bag. After all, what was a South American string shopping bag if not a bag-shaped cupboard made of string?

  On top of all of this was a strange, blue, plastic, tray-like object that Jack recognized immediately from the back of a thousand Sunday colour supplements. It was an abdominizer, a device for exercising the tummy. Polly had sent off for it two years previously. It had never been used, of course, and the unread instructions had long since been lost. The thing just drifted gently about Polly’s home from year to year, settling for a while before moving on silently and unnoticed. It had been on its current perch beside the shopping bag for about a month and was probably vaguely thinking about moving on. Perhaps to the clean clothes drawer, where there was always plenty of room. Apart from gathering dust the abdominizer’s only
contribution to Polly’s life was to cause her the occasional pang of guilt. Not, however, a pang sufficiently strong to cause her to lie down upon the thing and gently roll her shoulders upwards by means of contracting her stomach muscles (while keeping her knees raised and her feet flat on the floor).

  There was no way that Jack was ever going to be able to sit on that chair. That chair was like Doctor Who’s tardis. It was bigger on the inside; there was more stuff wedged between its arms than could possibly ever logically or physically actually fit. Jack could see that if he were to empty it into the room he and Polly would have to stand outside.

  On Polly’s other chair was a big plastic sack of fertilizer. Jack found this item slightly surprising.

  “Fertilizer, Polly?”

  “I have a windowbox.”

  Since the fertilizer was clearly a simpler proposition to clear than the contents of the other chair Jack lifted it to the floor. Not an easy task. This was a sack of fertilizer, not a bag but a sack.

  “Jesus. Some windowbox. What are you going to do? Grow a tree in it?”

  “I run a tight budget. Things are cheaper in bulk.” Jack thumped the sack down on the floor. Polly winced, thinking of the milkman below.

  In the flat below, the milkman stirred in his bed. He glanced at his radio alarm clock. 2.40.

  “Ha,” thought the milkman with sleepy satisfaction. The next time the upstairs woman asked him to turn down his morning radio, which he already had on so as you could barely hear it, he would be ready.