Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  “I mean, if I’m going to do this thing I need to be sure that there’s nothing to connect me with you. Is there anything?”

  Polly spoke as if in a trance. “I only told the whole story once, to a guy called Ziggy, in a VW camper near Stonehenge, but he was stoned and didn’t hear me.”

  “Anybody else?”

  “A few people, you know, over the years. Every now and then I get drunk and say that I once fucked a soldier at Greenham, but I never go into details. I don’t like to remember, Jack.”

  Polly was speaking, but it seemed like she was listening to someone else. She could hear herself reassuring Jack. “There is no way on earth anyone could connect me with you, Jack.”

  They stared at each other for a moment. Jack was grinning.

  “Well, there you are, then,” he said breezily. “Where do I find him?”

  He wasn’t joking, she could see that. She was in a dream, but it was rapidly becoming reality. Polly drew herself back from the brink. It was time to put an end to this dangerous fantasy.

  “You can’t kill him. I don’t want you to kill him. I don’t want you even to talk about it. No matter how much I hated someone I would never ever want to kill them.”

  Jack just kept grinning, his handsome eyes sparkling and his voice light. “People die all the time. It’s no big deal.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Just try to think of this guy as an exploiter of the planet. You remember what I was saying before? About how every breath we take we’re doing damage to others? Consuming the world’s resources, abusing the world’s peasants. Why not let me reduce the abuse?”

  “Shut up!”

  “This man is an evil, useless, pointless waste of food and air. Let me take him out. We’ll all breathe easier. You’ll be doing the world a favour.”

  Jack was still smiling; it was such a friendly smile. “Tell me where he lives.”

  “No!” said Polly, deeply shocked at the sincerity of Jack’s tone. He really did mean it. He really did believe that murdering people could be justified just because you didn’t like them. She was horrified at the thought. No matter what a person’s crimes, the death penalty was never justified. No one had the right to take a life. The fact that she was the victim did not change that fact.

  “Shut up, Jack! I mean it. Stop talking like that, it’s horrible.”

  Jack shrugged and went to fix more drinks. “OK, OK,” he said. “If you don’t have the courage to defend yourself. If your precious principles have so weakened you that you don’t have the guts to make your own personal decision about what’s right. Lenin knew what to do, didn’t he? If you have something you believe in you defend it by any means necessary. Don’t you believe in your right to happiness, Polly?”

  “Of course I believe in it!”

  “Then have the courage to defend it.”

  Jack poured Polly another huge Bailey’s and Coke and she gulped it down hungrily.

  “Polly, I have to do something to help. This guy is truly a terrible thing. We can’t just let him carry on abusing you.”

  Even in her distress Polly thought about asking at what point Jack had suddenly become so concerned about her wellbeing, but she didn’t. For the first time someone was genuinely trying to help her with the problem that had been destroying her life.

  “Come on,” said Jack. “Maybe I wouldn’t even have to kill him. I could just scare him a little. It’d be very easy to scare him.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. He’s too mad.”

  “Polly, believe me. I know how to scare people and I know how to hurt them. When I do it they’re scared and they stay hurt … Come on. You have a right to defend your life. Not in the law, maybe, but under any concept of natural justice. Tell me where he lives.”

  Polly did not believe in violence of any sort.

  She absolutely did not believe in violence.

  That fact was a mainstay of her life.

  On the other hand …

  She had suffered at this man’s hands for so very long. If anybody deserved to be punished it was him .. . And if it worked? If the Bug could be scared off, not killed but scared off, for ever? The prospect of liberation rose like a new dawn before Polly’s eyes.

  Jack could see that she was weakening. “Where does he live, Polly?” he asked once more in his friendly, gentle tone.

  Polly made her decision. She would act in her own defence. She would empower herself and defend her life. She would give Jack the Bug’s address and she was glad. Why the hell should she suffer any more if she had the means to fight back? She had never done anything wrong and she did not deserve to be persecuted. That bastard deserved everything he got. Polly was fed up with being a victim. Let the other guy be the victim for a change.

  The Bug’s details were written on the court papers. Papers Polly had always studiously avoided studying for fear of becoming further connected to her persecutor. She retrieved them from the file which she kept under a pile of dirty clothes, some books and a pair of running shoes and handed them over to Jack.

  “Do anything you like,” she said firmly, “but please don’t kill him.”

  48

  The milkman’s radio alarm went off, wrenching the milkman from his slumbers. He was surprised to discover that he had nodded off again after all. He had not imagined that he would do so what with all the talking and walking that was going on upstairs. However, the milkman resolved not to let the fact that he had been back to sleep diminish his righteous anger. He still had his notebook cataloguing the disturbances of the night and he decided that he would add a couple of instances more, since he was sure that the noises must have continued while he slept.

  Upstairs they heard the music too.

  “What the fuck?” Jack enquired.

  “It’s the milkman,” Polly explained. “He gets up at four, the radio will stop at four twenty-five, then his door will bang.”

  Three floors down in the stairwell Peter also heard the music. He imagined that it must come from Polly’s room. Were they dancing? Or maybe they were doing “it” to music? Either way, Peter’s jealousy and resentment were amply fed. What should he do? How could he douse the fire of hatred that was burning inside him? Peter had never thought of himself as having a murderous disposition, but that American certainly deserved to die. Peter put his hand to his injured nose and nearly yelped in pain. He wondered if it was broken; it was certainly swollen. Now he had made it bleed again, a steady flow of drops falling onto his trousers. Peter spread his knees and allowed the blood to drip between his legs and stain the stair carpet. Her stair carpet; she would be walking over his blood. Then Peter positioned the blade of the knife under his bleeding nose and watched the metal turn red.

  Upstairs in Polly’s flat Jack was a little anxious. The milkman’s alarm call, unusually early though it was, had reminded Jack that the night would not last for ever. Dawn was to be at seven fourteen that morning and Jack wanted to be away long before then. He had found out the things he needed to know. He was reasonably certain that his history with Polly was a private one, and he knew the whereabouts of Polly’s stalker.

  One thing Jack was certain about: this man Peter would have to die. Whether Polly liked it or not, Peter was a dead man.

  “I have to leave quite soon,” Jack said, taking another slug of his drink.

  It was like cold water. Somehow Polly had stopped thinking about Jack’s leaving.

  “I want you to stay,” she said.

  “I can’t, not for much longer.”

  Polly felt desperate. All those familiar emotions were back, all those painful old feelings, the ones it had taken so many years to get over. Why had he returned if only to tease her and then leave her again? Now she must suffer the pain of rejection a second time and live with a newly broken heart.

  “I got promoted recently,” said Jack.

  Polly did not know what to say to this. It was such a non sequitur. Did he think she was still interested in making polit
e conversation?

  “I’ve been promoted quite a lot over the last few years, actually. I’ve done very well.”

  What was he talking about? Was he still fighting himself? Perhaps he really did want to stay. Perhaps he really wanted to make love. Perhaps this chattering was just a way of avoiding making a decision.

  “Congratulations,” said Polly. “You certainly never let anything stand in your way, did you?”

  Everything Jack said reminded Polly of his desertion.

  “You do not make four-star general just by avoiding ruinous love affairs. Nor by working hard or being talented. You have to get lucky. Very lucky.” Jack paused for a moment and then said, “Sex.”

  “What?” Polly asked.

  “That’s what got me where I am today.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sex is what made me, Polly. What brought me to my current elevated status.”

  “I’m not interested, Jack,” said Polly wearily.

  “I need to tell you what brought me here today,” Jack insisted.

  Polly sat back. It was pointless to resist. Whatever Jack wanted to do or say he would do or say in his own good time. She tried to concentrate as he spoke.

  Jack began. By the end of the Gulf War, he said, he’d been a full colonel, one of the most successful soldiers of his generation, but despite this his prospects for future advancement had not looked particularly good. Traditionally, war was the way to get promoted in the army and despite Saddam’s honourable efforts real wars, proper wars, were becoming less and less likely. There was, according to George Bush, a new world order. The Soviet Union had collapsed, taking with it the Warsaw Pact, thus depriving the Western allies of their best available enemy. The Chinese, who had always been next in line to fight, were embracing capitalism and waging war on the stock market. MacDonald’s was opening up in Beijing, and the US was importing gangsters from Moscow. The West had won. For career soldiers like Jack it was a depressing time. All those weapons and nobody to kill. It just wasn’t fair.

  Of course there were the various UN, humanitarian and peacekeeping missions around the world, but that wasn’t soldiering, and it certainly wasn’t the way to make a four-star general. As Jack and the guys moaned to each other over bourbon in the mess, it was a very tough call to set your career alight dropping powdered milk on dead African people. Or digging up football pitches full of skulls in Bosnia.

  Jack had seen the way the wind was blowing when Bush wimped out of going all the way to Baghdad.

  “We should’a had Saddam’s ass hanging on the Pentagon flagpole,” he and his comrades had assured each other through mouthfuls of beer and chili fries. “But Old Man Bush listened to Pussy Powell. What kind of soldier was he? Too scared to risk his men. For Christ’s sake, what is happening to the world? We have an army that thinks it has a right not to get killed! Powell was probably worried his men would sue.”

  In Polly’s flat Jack was pacing up and down telling his story, almost ignoring her. She wondered what on earth he could be getting at. Whatever it was, she wasn’t interested.

  “Pussy Powell?” she asked.

  “Lots of men left the service,” Jack continued. “But I couldn’t. I didn’t know any life other than soldiering. I had nowhere else to go. Besides, I’d sacrificed too much to give it up.”

  They looked at each other. Polly might have spoken but Jack continued.

  “Then something strange happened. Just when everybody thought they’d never get promoted again, sex came along. Sex is what saved the entire US military career structure from stagnation. Sex replaced war. Funny, huh? Kind of what you guys always wanted in a way. Make love not war and all that bullshit.”

  “What are you talking about, Jack?”

  Polly had resigned herself to the evening’s going round in circles for ever.

  “Remember Tailgate?” he continued. “Bunch of navy flyers couldn’t hold their brew and started waving their dicks at some lady sailors?”

  Polly did recall it. The scandal had been big enough to be reported in the British media. There had been an appalling display of drunken brutality at a US naval conference.

  “As I recall, it was all a little more serious than dick waving,” Polly remarked.

  “Jesus, did the shit hit the fan. They court-martialled everybody! ‘Sir! Yes, sir! I waved my dick, sir!’ Dishonourable discharge! ‘Sir. Yes, sir! I waved my dick too!’ Out goes another one. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars’ worth of training – gone! The brass thought they could calm things down by throwing a few minnows to the sharks. They couldn’t. The shit flew upwards. ‘Yes, I failed to ensure that dicks were not waved.’ ‘Yes, I allowed a dick-waving culture to develop …’ You want to know how many admirals were eventually implicated?”

  Polly did not. She was not even slightly interested.

  “Thirty-two, Polly! That’s a historical fact. Thirty-two admirals. Our attack readiness was compromised. Navy morale was shot to ribbons. Comfort was given to our enemies. And all because we live in a world that thinks it can legislate against guys acting like assholes.”

  Polly could scarcely believe it, but even at this point in the evening Jack still seemed to be anxious to compare their political points of view and yet again, despite herself, she could not help but oblige.

  “You can legislate against rape and intimidation and harassment.”

  “Jesus!” Jack snapped. “These guys were sailors! The navy never should’a let those women anywhere near them. There was a time when being a disgusting fucked-up maniac was a military career requirement!”

  “Change hurts sometimes,” Polly snapped back.

  “Oh yes, it does, Polly, it sure does. Change hurts all right. I’ve seen men cry. I’ve seen marines cry because they’ve just discovered that when they pinched some secretary’s ass at the Christmas party they were in fact making a career decision.”

  Perhaps Jack had been right earlier when he’d spoken to Polly of “her kind”. She could certainly empathize with this situation and her sympathies were not with the weeping marine. At her work Polly was called upon to deal with similar situations all the time and she knew all about the sort of activities that guys called “just bum-pinching”.

  “Well, perhaps your friends shouldn’t go round pinching people’s bums, then,” she said.

  Jack threw his arms into the air in frustration, spilling his whiskey as he did so.

  “Hey! We all know that now, honey! Oh, we sure do know that now! Our learning curve has been real steep! Problem was, nobody told some of these guys till they were in court! Nobody told that poor tearful marine that the way he had always acted, the way his daddy and his grand-daddy had acted, was suddenly criminal behaviour. Nobody ever warned that twenty-year-service marine that it wouldn’t be any Soviet commando that’d take him out in the end but some little girl with a grudge.”

  “Yes, well, maybe that marine should give some thought to all the little girls who’ve done the crying over the years.”

  “Well, maybe he should,” Jack conceded, although he did so rather aggressively. “And he’s certainly going to have plenty of time to reflect on it, because suddenly there’s been an awful lot of vacancies in the military. I didn’t get these four stars defending democracy, I got them for keeping my dick in my pants.”

  “So no female rookies raped on your watch, then?”

  “I never was much of a party animal, Polly. In a way I owe that to you.”

  Jack was thinking of the poor German girl, Helga, and that bleak night in Bad Nauheim in the early eighties. He knew what men were capable of when they were drunk and in packs. Particularly soldiers. He had been with the UN in Bosnia, had seen what gangs of men could do when no civilizing factor restrained them.

  “You may not believe it, but you changed me,” Jack explained. “All that stuff you told me all those years ago. It genuinely affected my outlook, made me see the other point of view. I truly believe that you in
fluenced me for the good, Polly. I believe I’ve been a better soldier because of you.”

  The irony of this was nearly too much for Polly.

  “And over the years,” Jack continued, “I’ve always asked myself what you would say about stuff. It was almost as if you were still there with me and I didn’t want to make you angry.”

  It was true. Jack could not be sure, but perhaps his unfinished love for that passionate, idealistic seventeen-year-old girl he had once known had refined him and caused him to avoid the mistakes made by other soldiers. He wasn’t thinking about terrible incidents like the brutalization of Helga – mercifully such events were rare – but the smaller invisible pitfalls that so many of his colleagues had fallen into. The sort of thing they now called harassment. The comments, the pinchings, the endless catalogue of minor sexual impositions that men had for so long practised with impunity. Jack had avoided them all. He was recognized universally as a gentleman and, while others of his generation had found themselves demonized by the new morality, Jack had prospered.

  “I’ve always loved you, you see, Polly,” he said. “I still do.”

  Again the circle came round. Polly could see that Jack was struggling with something inside himself but she did not know what it could be. Perhaps it was just the fact of an unhappy and unfulfilled life. Perhaps he was not so different from her, after all.

  “What about your wife?” she asked gently. “You must have loved your wife when you married her. Did you love us both?”

  “I thought I loved her, Polly. God help me, I thought I did, but now my true belief is that I married her because I was trying to get away from you.”

  It was cruel, so very cruel for Polly to hear this now, after so many years of having lived under the shadow of Jack’s rejection. Yet difficult though it was, her heart soared at the dawning realization that he had suffered as much as she had. That perhaps, after all, he had truly reciprocated her love.

  “Jack. Oh, Jack. You tell me all this now. After all the years I’ve grieved for you.”

  “I have to, Polly. Because …”