Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  “That’s not his problem—”

  Jack laughed. “Excuse me? Getting beaten to a pulp is not his problem?”

  “Well, I mean, obviously it is his problem if he’s being beaten up.”

  “It’s encouraging that you spotted that.”

  His attitude was unpleasant. Polly’s point was not an easy one to make. Particularly if Jack was going to take cheap shots.

  “But the problem originates with the people who are doing the beating!”

  “Great, next time I get shot I’ll take comfort from that. Hey, this is not my problem. The guy with the gun, he has the problem, he needs to get in touch with his caring side.”

  How many times in how many pubs had Polly had discussions like this one? The reactionary point of view was always so easy to put, the complex, radical argument always so easy to put down.

  “Just because the world is full of Neanderthal morons doesn’t mean we have to run it for their benefit and by their rules.”

  Jack searched his brain for a telling argument. Somehow it was important to him that Polly understood his point of view.

  “Listen, Polly, when the guy who digs up the street checks out your butt you’re pretty pissed, am I right?”

  “Well, yes—”

  “You’re furious. You’d like to knock that guy off his scaffolding and drive a dump truck into his asshole cleavage. Well, men don’t like having their butts checked out either, but unlike you they’re actually going to do something about it, they’re going to attack the guy who is checking them out and you cannot run an army with guys either sucking each other off or beating each other up.”

  Of course it sounded reasonable. Polly had spent her life listening to reactionary arguments and they always sounded reasonable. Which was why it was all the more important to counter them. Even at nearly 3.15 in the morning. Even with a mysterious ex-lover who had turned up out of the blue after more than sixteen years’ absence. Polly had a policy. It was embarrassing at times and always boring, but her view was that casual racism, sexism and homophobia always had to be confronted.

  “People have to learn to restrain themselves,” she said.

  Jack had a rule too. It was that he would never suffer pious liberal bullshit in silence.

  “Says you, babe, and you and your people can keep on wishing!”

  Polly was shocked at how bitter Jack’s tone had become.

  “Me and my people?” she said. “What people, Jack? I don’t have any people! What are you talking about? Why are you bringing me into this? None of this is any of my business.”

  Polly was not even sure that Jack heard her. He looked strange. There was a different look in his eye; she could see real anger there.

  “You know what’s coming next, don’t you? Pacifists.”

  “What about pacifists?”

  “In the fucking army! Why not? Some Congresswoman is going to announce that pacifists have a right to join the army. In fact, the army should be encouraging them! Running a programme to attract them! Because the constitutional rights of American pacifists are being denied by—”

  Jack was becoming red in the face. For the first time he looked his age. A confused, middle-aged man with a chip on his shoulder.

  “I’m not interested in your paranoid ravings, Jack. I want to know why—”

  But Polly might as well have been talking to herself.

  “Fucking constitution! It’s a sponge, it’ll absorb anything anybody wants. It’s like the damn Bible. Everybody can make it work for them. Well, the constitution can only take so much. One day the Supreme Court is going to rule that the constitution is unconstitutional and the United States will implode! It’ll disappear up its ass.”

  “Good! I’m glad.” Polly felt tired. She had to leave for work at seven forty-five.

  “Jack, I can’t have this conversation with you now. I have to work tomorrow. Maybe we could meet some other—”

  Jack lowered his tone. He spoke quietly and firmly. “I’ve told you, Polly, I only have tonight. I leave in the morning.”

  He stared at Polly as if that was all he needed to say, as if Polly could like it or lump it, neither of which she was prepared to do.

  “Well go, then! Go! I don’t want you here. I didn’t ask you to come.”

  Jack did not move at all. He just stood in the middle of the room, looking at her.

  “I’m staying, Polly,” he said, and for the first time Polly began to feel a little nervous. Something about Jack had changed. He was being so intense.

  “OK, stay, stay if you want to, but … but you can’t just drop in after sixteen years and talk about sexual politics and the constitution, and … It’s … it’s stupid.”

  Jack looked tired too now. “You always used to want to talk about politics, Polly. What’s changed? Is there nothing of value left for you people to fuck up?”

  He seemed to say it more in sorrow than in anger. None the less Polly wasn’t having any of it.

  “I have nothing to do with you or your hangups, Jack,” said Polly calmly. “We knew each other briefly, years ago. We don’t even live in the same country.”

  “Politics is international, you always used to tell me that,” said Jack, and he smiled at the memory. “You read it me out of that damn political cartoon book you had, The Start-Up Guide to Being an Asshole …”

  “Marxism for Beginners.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Polly blushed at the memory of how naive she’d been. She had actually given Jack a copy of Marxism for Beginners. Not that she had ever been able to get through it herself, of course. Huge quotes from Das Kapital do not get clearer just because there’s a little cartoon of Karl Marx in the corner of the page. It had been a gesture, a nod towards civilizing him. All Jack ever admitted to reading was the sports pages, and Polly had dreamt of politicizing him. Fantasizing about walking into the peace camp one day with Jack on her arm and saying to the girls, “I’ve got one! I’ve converted him.” She had imagined herself the toast of the peace movement, having persuaded a genuine baby killer to see the light. Polly had been going to make the world’s first vegetarian fighter pilot.

  “Wasn’t I the starry-eyed little pillock?” she said.

  “Well, did you ever read Churchill’s History of the Second World War?” Jack replied. The book-giving had, after all, been a two-way thing.

  “Be serious, Jack, it was about fifty volumes!”

  “Oh, and Marx is easy reading, is it?”

  Now they were both laughing. Neither of them had changed at all. They were still a million miles apart in every way but one.

  “I wanted you to be a part of my world as much as you wanted me to be part of yours, Polly,” said Jack. “You’re not the only person who got disappointed. I believe that in my own way I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.”

  Jack was terrified to discover that he still did.

  “You can’t have done,” said Polly quietly, avoiding Jack’s eye, “or you wouldn’t have left.”

  “That’s not true, Polly. I had to leave. I’m a soldier. I’m not good at love, I admit that. I don’t find it easy to live with. But whatever love there is inside me I felt for you, to its very limits and beyond.”

  35

  While Jack and Polly were wrestling with their pasts in London, back in the States another drama of betrayal was being played out. A man and a woman were sitting alone together in the faded splendour of a dining room that had been beautifully decorated twenty years before. It was dinner time in the eastern states and the couple had been sitting at their evening meal for an hour or so, but neither of them was hungry. Their food had gone cold before them. Hers remained entirely untouched; he had had a stab at his, but really all he had done was play nervously with the cold, congealed gravy.

  “I’m sorry, Nibs,” he said. “What more can I say? I don’t want to do it but sometimes it just happens. I just can’t help myself.”

  “Nibs” was the man’s private
name for his wife. It was what he always called her when they were alone, their little secret, a token of his affection. These days they were alone together less and less. Their professional lives had grown so complex that dining together had become a matter for diaries, and when his work took him away she could no longer go with him. Perhaps it was that, she thought. Perhaps her career had driven him into the arms of other, stupider, more available women. She wondered if he had special names for them. Perhaps he had called them Nibs also, for convenience and to avoid embarrassing mistakes. At the thought of this Nibs’ eyes grew misty and briefly she took refuge in her napkin.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said again, “but it meant nothing, it was meaningless.”

  “What does she do?” Nibs enquired, attempting to make her voice sound calm.

  “She works at the office. She’s with the travel department. She books cars and flights and stuff,” he replied.

  “Fascinating,” she said bitterly. “You must have so much to talk about.”

  “The point is, Nibs …”

  “Don’t call me Nibs,” she snapped. “I don’t feel like being your Nibs right now.”

  “The point is …”

  His voice faltered. The point was that he was in trouble. That was the only reason he’d arranged the dinner, the only reason they were having the conversation. If he hadn’t been in trouble he would never have told her about the girl, just as he hadn’t told her about any of the other girls. Unfortunately, this current girl had not taken kindly to the brevity of their affair and had decided to hit back.

  “She says she’s going to accuse me of harassing her.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Did you?”

  “Not unless taking a girl to bed a couple of times is harassment.”

  Nibs bit her lip. Why had he done it? Why did he keep doing it? He thought she didn’t know about the others but she’d heard the rumours. She knew about the jokes they told at his office. She’d caught the expressions of those dumb booby women when she accompanied him to business functions. She knew what they were thinking. “You may be a fancy lawyer, lady, but when your husband needs satisfying he comes to me.”

  “I have plenty of enemies,” he said. “If this thing gets any kind of heat under it at all it could be very bad for me at work. I could lose my job.”

  “You fool!” Nibs snapped. “You damn stupid fool.”

  36

  Jack swallowed half his drink down in one.

  “Do you ever see any of the girls these days?”

  “One or two,” Polly replied, crossing one leg over the other as she sat. She could see Jack’s eyes had been caught by the movement.

  “You should organize a reunion,” he said, smiling. “You’d have a blast. Go stand in a field somewhere, paint each other’s faces, make some puppets. Eat mud sandwiches and dance to the subtle rhythms of your female cycles.”

  He was teasing her now. The anger had gone.

  “Yes, and we could invite the American army along,” Polly replied. “You could all drop your trousers and show us your arses. We used to love it when you did that. It was such a subtle gesture and so intellectually stimulating.”

  In fact it had been the British guards who did most of the arse-showing. The Americans were mainly technical advisers, a cut above that sort of oafishness, and were anyway on their strictest best behaviour. Jack did not argue the point, though. He had always fully supported the British soldiers in their arse-showing and he would not deny them now.

  “It was a clash of cultures. We were never going to get along.”

  “Except us.”

  “Yeah,” said Jack, trying not to stare. “Except us.”

  They were so close. He in the easy chair, she perched on the bed. Two strides and they would be in each other’s arms. The room crackled with the suppressed tension.

  “Let’s face it,” said Polly. “You can put up with anything if the sex is good enough.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jack replied with great enthusiasm, his voice and his wandering eyes betraying his thoughts.

  Polly was torn. Should she sleep with him? She felt confident that she could if she wanted to. Of course she could. She knew what men were like, they always wanted it. Scratch a man and you find a person who fancies a fuck. Sex had to be the reason that Jack had come back. It was obvious. He felt like a little nostalgic adventure. A little blast from the past. He had been sitting in the Pentagon one night thinking, “I wonder what happened to her?” and then he had thought, “I know. I’m a powerful man. I’ll have her traced and the next time I’m in London I’ll pop round and see if I can still fuck her.” By rights Polly should be offended, she should throw him out. The feminist in her told her that if she screwed Jack she would be doing exactly what he wanted. Literally playing into his hands. But, then again, so what? She would be using him too. It wasn’t as if she’d been exactly sexually satiated of late. Quite frankly, she could really do with a little passion herself. But could she trust her emotions? After what he had meant to her, after how he had behaved? Would she suddenly find herself hopelessly in love again or would she just want to kill him? Polly could not quite decide whether in the final analysis having sex with Jack would make her happier or sadder.

  In her mind’s eye the good memories were gaining the ascendancy.

  “I nearly didn’t go through with it, you know,” she said. “That first time. When I saw that disgusting tattoo of yours. Kill everyone and everything horribly or whatever it said.”

  “Death Or Glory,” Jack corrected her. “I know you thought it was juvenile, Polly, but I’m in the army. It’s our regimental motto.”

  “I used to work for Tesco’s but I haven’t got ‘Great quality at prices you can afford’ written across my arse.”

  Jack laughed and topped up his drink. He could certainly put the booze away, but then he had always been able to do that.

  “I had a tattoo done too, you know, after you left,” Polly said, pulling at the collar of her raincoat and nightie to reveal the blurred decoration that her parents had found so unpleasant. Jack inspected it.

  “It’s the female symbol with a penis in it,” he said.

  “It’s not a penis, it’s a clenched fist, for Christ’s sake!” Polly snapped. “Why does everybody say that? It’s so obviously a clenched fist.”

  Jack leant in a little to inspect the design more closely. “Yeah, well, maybe.”

  Except, of course, he wasn’t looking at the tattoo. By now he had shifted his gaze and was using his position of advantage to drink in Polly’s partially exposed breasts. Polly had been aware when she pulled down her clothing to show her tattoo that she was displaying rather more of her bosom than was decorous, and she knew that Jack was looking at it now. Polly was rather vain of her breasts. She thought them perhaps her best feature. They were not particularly large or anything, but they were very shapely, cheeky almost. Age had not yet wearied them; they were well capable of standing up for themselves, so to speak.

  Polly could feel Jack’s breath upon her shoulder. It was hot and damp and seemed to be coming quicker now. He wasn’t exactly panting, but he wasn’t breathing easily either. Polly knew that she too was breathing more quickly and that her breasts were trembling slightly beneath Jack’s gaze. She also knew what would happen to her body next. Spontaneously, involuntarily, her nipples began to harden under the nightshirt. It always happened when she felt aroused, and Jack, of course, knew that.

  Even through the clothes Polly was wearing Jack could see the process beginning and it brought back such memories. How he longed to pull apart Polly’s shirt and press his lips once again to those glorious dark pink buds.

  But he didn’t. He drew away and gulped again at his drink.

  “Yeah, well, we both had some adjusting to do in those days,” he said.

  For a moment Polly did not know what he was talking about. She had lost the thread of the conversation they had been having. She readjusted her clothing, covering her shoulde
rs, slightly confused. She knew that he had wanted to touch her, she knew that she would have let him do it too and she knew that he knew that; her body had given it away. But he hadn’t touched her. Instead he was talking again. He had retreated across the room, clearly anxious to put distance between them. He was resisting his desires. Polly wondered why.

  “Oh, yes, that’s for sure,” Jack continued. “We both had to make allowances in those days.”

  “What allowances did you have to make, then?” Polly enquired rather sharply. “I seem to recall that it was you who called the shots.”

  “Well, for instance I cannot say I relished discovering your organic raw cotton sanitary napkins soaking in the bathroom basin.”

  The years had not blunted this point of contention. Once again the ancient row bubbled to the surface.

  “That’s because you fear menstruation!” she retorted. “You’re scared of the ancient power and mystery of the vagina.”

  “No, Polly, it’s because washing your sanitary towels in the bathroom is totally gross.”

  Polly still didn’t understand this point of view. She found it as offensive as he had found her hygiene arrangements.

  “What? Grosser than flushing great chunks of bleached cotton into our already filthy rivers?”

  That was easy. Jack could answer that. “Yes,” he said. “Much grosser.”

  “Are you seriously saying,” said Polly, rising to the bait as she always did, “that you find the idea of a woman disposing of her body’s byproducts in a responsible manner using sustainable resources more gross than dumping used tampons into the water system? Grosser than the seas being clogged up with great reefs of them knitted together with old condoms? Grosser than fish feeding on toilet paper? Grosser than tap water being filtered through surgical dressings and colostomy bags?”

  Jack had to admit that these questions were more difficult.

  “Uhm … maybe about as gross,” he replied.

  “Jesus!” Polly snapped. “You’re a soldier. I thought you were supposed to be used to the sight of blood.”