by Ben Elton
“Yeah?” Jack said. For a moment he was unsure why she was dwelling on this point.
“Which must have meant that you’d already made your preparations,” Polly explained. “That you’d known you were leaving. That when you made love to me on that last night you knew what you were going to do. Your fucking bags must have been already packed, you bastard!”
“It hurt me too!”
“Good. I wish it had killed you!”
Polly did not believe Jack. She did not think he could have felt remotely what she’d felt. He would never have done what he did. She had been so completely in love with him. She’d trusted in him so absolutely and he’d left her all alone. For weeks afterwards she had been quite literally sick with the pain. Unable to keep food down, she’d scarcely eaten for months. She lost two and a half stone, which left her dangerously underweight, and eventually she had had to see a doctor. At seventeen Polly discovered that it is not just the heart that aches when love is lost, but the whole body. Particularly the guts; that’s where a person’s nervous system really makes itself felt.
“It’s not pretty,” said Polly. “It’s not romantic. It wouldn’t look so good on the Valentines cards. A stomach with an arrow through it.”
Jack thought about saying he was sorry again but decided against it.
“So did you stay there long?” he asked instead. “After?”
“I stayed there until after you people delivered the missiles; three years, in fact, with a gap for the miners’ strike.”
Jack was amazed. “Three years? In that camp? In that toilet? You spent three years singing songs through a fence! You stayed there till you were twenty? I thought you were there for the summer. That’s what you said. What about your … what were they called? … your A-levels?”
“I didn’t take them, not then, and I never went to university, either.”
Jack whistled in disbelief, scarcely able to believe it. In his view, Polly had wasted the three best years of her life.
Polly knew what he was thinking. “I was waiting for you, Jack! I loved you.”
“Three years! That’s not love, that’s psychosis. That’s an illness.”
He was right there, it had been an illness.
“I thought I saw you a thousand times. It was pathetic. There I’d be, screaming abuse at these people, and all the time I was hoping they were you so that I could tell you I loved you.”
“Jesus, Polly, nobody takes three years to get over being dumped.”
“It took me a lot longer than that, not that I’d have admitted it at the time. I believed in what we were doing. That camp was my home. But always, at the back of my mind, especially when there were new faces, new Americans on the other side of the wire, I’d think to myself, Maybe this time he’s come back? Surely not everything he said was lies.”
“You were so young, Polly. I thought you’d forget me in a week.”
“I think young people are the most vulnerable in love. They haven’t learnt their lessons yet. You certainly taught me mine.”
“I’m sorry,” said Jack quietly.
“Is that why you’ve come back? To say sorry?”
“Sure, if it will help, if that’s what you want to hear.”
The old wound was aching badly for them both.
“I don’t want—” Suddenly Polly was shouting. She stopped herself. Even in this highly charged emotional moment she knew she must not forget the milkman. She dropped her voice to a harsh whisper. “I don’t want to hear anything! I don’t want anything from you. I was asleep an hour ago. Why have you come back, Jack?”
Again the question he did not want to answer.
“Well … why not? Like you said, we never officially split up, technically you’re still my girlfriend …” Jack laughed rather woodenly. “You always used to say that you weren’t into conventional relationships.”
“A relationship with a sixteen-year pause in it is not unconventional, it’s over.”
“I thought you’d be pleased to see me.”
Why he thought that she could not imagine. Except that she was pleased to see him. Despite everything, she was very pleased. Looking at Jack it struck her that he looked tired, almost careworn.
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “Do you want something to eat?”
“Not really, no,” Jack replied.
“That’s good, because I don’t have any food. Well, I do have food, sort of, just not real food. Frozen meals, serves two. That sort of thing.”
“Serves two?” Jack’s interest picked up.
“No. I told you there isn’t anybody.”
Jack looked hard at Polly, and for some reason she felt that some sort of explanation was required.
“They say ‘serves two’, but they mean one, in fact not even quite one, really. You have to pad them out with toast and chocolate biscuits. They put ‘serves two’ on it so you don’t feel so pathetic when you buy them in the shop … So you can pretend you’re not alone.”
It sounded so sad. Polly admitting that she was alone. Not positively and self-sufficiently alone, but alone because she had no one with whom to share her life. Lonely alone. The revelation hung heavily in the air between them. Polly smiled reassuringly and tried to make light of it.
“It fools the shopkeeper every time you buy one. Frozen meal for two, madam? Oh, yes, certainly. I’ll be sharing this with my enormous, passionate and deeply sensitive lover. We always like to share eight and a half square inches of microwaved lasagne after an all-night shagging session.”
“How the hell does a beautiful woman like you come to be on her own?” Jack was genuinely surprised.
“Men are nervous of single women in their thirties. They think she’s either got a child already, or that halfway through the second date she’s going to glance at her biological clock and say, ‘My God, is that the time? Quick, fertilize me before it’s too late.’”
“You don’t have to be alone. You’re just being lazy. Not making any effort.”
Who did he think he was? Her mother? He’d be telling her she had lovely hair and a super personality next.
“Not making any effort! What do you suggest I do? Stand naked on the pavement with my tongue hanging out and a large sign saying ‘Get it here’? I go to pubs, parties. I even joined a dating agency.”
Polly said this last defiantly. It had taken her a lot of courage to join a dating agency. It was another of those things that only a short while ago she would never in a million years have imagined happening to her. She knew what Jack would think. The same thing that everybody thought. How sad. How surprising. How pathetic. Never thought she would be so desperate. For months after Polly had approached “Millennium Match” she had kept the fact as a dark and shameful secret, never telling a soul. Then one day she had decided to come out. Come out as a lonely person. A lonely person who was trying to do something about it. Since then Polly had made a point of telling people at the first chance she got.
In shops. “Two kilos of carrots, please, a grapefruit, oh, and by the way, I’ve joined a dating agency.”
At work. “Right, so before we address the issue of gender discrimination in nursery teaching, is everybody aware that I’ve joined a dating agency?”
The idea had been that Polly would overcome her embarrassment and shame by confronting it head on. That her proud honesty would educate people to see her decision for what it was, a legitimate effort to cope with the social challenges of an increasingly fragmented society. It hadn’t worked yet, but she was persevering.
“A dating agency,” said Jack in the same tone her mother had used. “That’s insane. You’re a babe.”
“You don’t have to have three heads, garlic between your teeth and a season ticket to Riverdance to be lonely, Jack. All you need is to be alone. To have met all the people that your circumstances are likely to bring you into contact with and not be in a relationship with any of them.”
Polly knew that she wasn’t unattractive, she wasn’t
socially inept; she was just alone. And, to her surprise, the men the agency had introduced her to were much the same. Just alone, like her. The problem was that this fact hung over every new meeting like a cloud of slightly noxious gas. Polly would sit there toying with her food thinking, not bad looking, good manners … but he’s alone. Why is he alone? Finding herself unable to dismiss the unworthy suspicion that, unlike herself, this man was not merely an innocent victim of fickle fate but somebody who was alone for a reason.
Of course, Polly was sufficiently realistic to know that the object of her doubt was almost certainly thinking the same thing about her. Even the lonely stigmatized the lonely. The very people who knew best that you do not need to be a psychopath or a gargoyle to be lonely were the most wary of other lonely people. Like outcasts everywhere, they learned to despise their own kind.
“Polly,” said Jack. “It’s insane that you went to an agency. The world is full of eager single guys your age.”
“I’m the same age now that you were when we were together, Jack. You think about that. When you were an eager single guy of my age you weren’t seeking out lonely insecure women of your age, you were seducing a seventeen-year-old girl.”
Well, she had him there, smoking gun and all, no doubt about that. He drained his glass and poured himself another large one.
“Jesus, Jack, I hope you’re not driving.”
He was, but he was going to risk it. Jack’s courage and resolve were deserting him. The revelation that Polly was so lonely had been a shock. For years he had thought that he was the lonely one. He had always imagined Polly settled and happy in some gloriously perfect relationship. Living with a university lecturer, perhaps, or a Labour MP. Of course, his spy had revealed that she lived alone, but not that she was lonely.
Oh, how he would have loved to cure her of her loneliness. To whisk her away right there and then and make her happy for ever. He couldn’t, though, for exactly the same reasons that he had left her in the first place. He had had his chance and he had chosen his path.
“I like to drink,” he said. “It helps with moral decisions.”
“Moral decisions? What moral decisions?”
Jack did not wish to say. “Nothing,” he said.
“What moral decisions?” Polly insisted. Morality was a topic that Jack had never been interested in discussing in the past.
“Well, hey, every breath a person takes is a moral desicision, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“I think it is.”
Polly could not imagine what Jack meant.
“Well, it’s ‘to be or not to be’, isn’t it?” he explained. “I mean, that has to be the question.”
“I don’t really see why.”
Polly would have been surprised to know that Jack had been thinking a lot about morality of late.
“I don’t see why you don’t see why,” he said, “considering what a morally minded person you always set yourself up to be.”
“I never set myself up to be anything.”
“Every moment we decide to remain alive we are making a moral choice. Because our existence has repercussions, like a pebble in a very polluted pond. Everything we eat, everything we drink, everything we wear, is in one way or another a product of exploitation.”
Polly knew that, of course, but she was most impressed that it had occurred to Jack.
“You don’t have to be a sex tourist to abuse children in the Third World,” Jack continued. “All you have to do is buy a carpet or a sports shirt. Or open a bank account. Or fill your car with gas.”
“Well, yes, of course,” said Polly, “and it’s the duty of every consumer to confront and minimize that exploitation …”
Jack laughed. It was a laugh with a sneer at the back of its mind. “Confront and minimize? That’s for wimps. It seems to me that the only truly moral thing a person could do in these sad circumstances is kill himself.”
41
Got it! The knife was finally hooked.
Slowly, gently, with infinite care, Peter reeled in his prize, inch by inch hoisting the wire retriever back up through the grid, watching his beloved blade ascend.
Then he had it. It was in his hand once again where it belonged. He sat on the wet kerb and studied it, carefully closing its blade and cradling it in his hands as if it were a tiny pet. Then he tried the catch. It worked perfectly; the blade sprang out of the hilt as if it were alive, snapping into place with the usual satisfying click. Peter’s little pet was clearly none the worse for its time in the underworld.
Another car came round the corner, but Peter did not bother to move this time. He remained where he was, kneeling in the gutter. Now that he had his knife back he felt invulnerable.
42
In the chilly atmosphere of the formal but faded grandeur of her dining room, Nibs held her knife also. It was a cheese knife, but she was gripping it just as hard as the Bug gripped his.
The full story of her husband’s most recent philandering, or as much of it as he had felt forced to tell her, had made grim listening. The dessert had been delivered and she had pushed hers away untasted; he’d eaten his, of course – he could always pig down pudding – and now the cheese had arrived. Nibs took a little English red Leicester but she couldn’t eat it. They were both drinking quite hard and a third bottle of wine had been opened, but neither of them felt at all drunk.
“So I suppose you want me to stand by you,” said Nibs.
“I want you to forgive me.”
Nibs was not in a forgiving mood. Her fate was sealed. She knew that, but she was not under any obligation to be magnanimous about it. She was doomed to become one of the “women who stand by her man”. They were a common type these days; you saw the famous ones on the television all the time. Politicians’ wives, pop stars’ wives – sad, trembling, red-eyed victims whom the press had hounded from their hiding places, baited onto their doorsteps and forced by circumstance to lie through their teeth before a baying mob. The clichés never varied.
“My husband and I have talked things over and decided to put this incident behind us … We remain very much in love … Miss so-and-so is no longer a part of my husband’s life,” etc., etc.
All this actually meant was that the poor woman had nowhere to go, her position, her possessions, her children, her life in general, all being tied up with the mumbling apologist to whom she was married. He had taken her youth and her potential and now she had no obvious life options of her own. Nowhere to go except her doorstep, to assure the world that she was standing by her husband.
Nibs knew that she too would stand by her man. It was true that she was an accomplished professional woman in her own right. She would not be entirely lost on her own. None the less, after twenty-five years and with children still in their teens, her life was inexorably tied up with her husband’s. Her career had always been just a little bit secondary to his; his business had become her business too, she’d worked hard for it. His status was hers. Like many a woman before her, Nibs was caught between a rock and hard place and the hard place was her husband’s dick. She did not like being betrayed, but on the other hand she did not wish to have to rebuild her life from scratch just because she was married to a man who couldn’t keep it to himself.
“I’ll stand by you,” she said, “but I’m not going to lie for you.”
“I wouldn’t ask that,” he replied.
But they both knew that in the end if she had to she would.
43
It occurred to Polly that although they had been talking for nearly an hour she still knew almost nothing about Jack’s life. She realized with a tinge of resentment that she seemed to have been giving most of the information.
“So how about you?” she asked “Are you in a relationship?”
“No, I’m married.”
It was a joke, the sort of sexist little put-down in which Jack specialized. Normally Polly despised men who put their wives down behind their backs. She heard that stuf
f a lot. Scarcely a month went by without some married man or other telling her what a mistake he’d made with his life and how all he wanted was to be able to give his love to someone who would appreciate it. Experience had taught Polly to react to that sort of thing with nothing but feelings of sisterly solidarity.
This time, however, she scarcely noticed Jack’s blokey humour. The knowledge that he was married had taken her completely by surprise. There was no reason for it to have done so, of course. Jack was an establishment man in an establishment job, he was almost bound to be married. She felt deflated. She knew she had no right to feel that way, but none the less she did. The truth was that deep deep down, without acknowledging it even to herself, Polly had been toying with the exquisitely exciting possibility that Jack might have come back for her. From the first moment she had heard his voice over the answerphone something in her most private self had hoped that he had come back to stay. It was nonsense, of course, a ridiculous notion, and she knew that now for sure. He was married, he had a life. All he had come back for was some easy sex. Perhaps not even that, perhaps he had been motivated by nothing more than curiosity.
“Oh yeah, I’m married all right,” Jack mused into his bourbon. “But whatever we had died a long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Polly said, although she wasn’t particularly.
Jack performed his favourite shrug. “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Literally nothing. I can’t remember the last time we made love. She has a Dutch cap which ought to have been an exhibit in a museum of gynaecology. The spermicidal cream is years past its fuck-by date.”
“So why haven’t you left her?”
“I don’t have the guts.” Which was a silly thing to say to Polly.
“You had the guts before.”
“That was different.”
“How was it different?” Polly asked angrily.
“We were together three months, Polly! We weren’t married! Did you ever try to leave someone you’ve been with for years? It’s like trying to get off the Time Life mailing list. I torment myself. Would she kill herself? Who would get custody of the credit cards?”