Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

  They did not find Peter, but they did notice that the light was burning in Polly’s flat. This struck them as strange, seeing as how it was only just after four in the morning. They concluded that either the milkman had woken her up again (they knew most things about Polly’s life by now) or Peter was about and had already been pestering her.

  They decided to check that Polly was all right.

  From his position in the hall Peter could see the silhouettes of the police officers through the window panels of the front door. He had retreated to the bottom of the house after his shock at nearly being discovered and had been sitting on the bottom stair considering how best he could attack the American. Seeing the shadows on the window, Peter thought that the game was up. The hated peaked caps outlined clearly by the streetlights surely meant his arrest. He was, after all, inside her house, caught redhanded. For a moment Peter thought about using his knife, but there was no way he was going to stab a policeman. There were a couple of bicycles leaning against the wall. Peter leaned forward and put his knife into the saddlebag of the nearest one. If they found him with that it would be prison for sure.

  Upstairs in Polly’s flat the intercom buzzer went. Someone was at the front door.

  Jack was on his feet in an instant. “It’s him. He’s back,” he said. “And this time he isn’t going to get away.”

  “What do you mean?” said Polly “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to deal with him.”

  The buzzer went again.

  “You keep him talking,” Jack continued. He was at the door now. “I won’t be long.”

  “No, Jack, I don’t want you to—”

  The buzzer was insistent. Not for the first time that evening Polly was torn. So much of her wanted to let matters take their course. If Jack wanted to confront the Bug then why not let him? On the other hand, what if Jack got carried away? What if Jack killed him? The buzzer sounded again. Gingerly Polly picked up the receiver, half resolved to shouting a warning to her hated enemy below.

  “Polly, it’s Constable Dewison,” the receiver said.

  Jack stopped dead, his hand on the door. “Cops?” he hissed.

  “Oh, hello, Frank,” said Polly. “This is a surprise.”

  “We had a call from your admirer’s mum, Polly. She said he was hanging about. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, but she did say that he had a knife. We just wanted to check that you were all right.”

  Polly assured the officers that although the Bug had indeed been about earlier in the night she had heard nothing from him for an hour or so. Constable Dewison asked if she would like them to come up and take down the details of the harassment for an official complaint in the morning. Polly glanced at Jack. Somehow she felt that the presence of a four-star American general in dress uniform in her flat was a conversation that she did not wish to have.

  “No, it’s all right, officer. I think I’d rather try and get some sleep.”

  Downstairs in the hall Peter watched as the silhouettes of the policemen retreated. His relief at escaping arrest was entirely overshadowed by the fury that was consuming him. Peter had heard every word that the policemen had said. He could scarcely believe it! His own mother had grassed him up! She’d even told them about his knife! Peter’s blood boiled at her betrayal. Well, she’d regret it, that was for sure. Peter would deal with his mother later.

  For now, however, he was still inside the house. Inside her house. Even the police hadn’t found him out! Surely this was a sign that fortune was on his side. Surely now he could do exactly as he liked.

  52

  Polly laughed. It seemed the only thing to do. “I wonder who’ll turn up next,” she said.

  But Jack was not laughing. Quite the opposite, in fact. His face was like stone. The last thing he had expected was to find the police at the door. It reminded him as nothing else could of the vulnerability of his situation.

  Polly caught the look on his face and stopped laughing. She remembered the last thing that Jack had said, before the police had called.

  “Jack,” she said. “What did you mean before, about what you have to do?”

  Jack could not look at her. “Did you ever hear about an army general named Joe Ralston?” he asked. “He was in the news a year or two back.”

  Polly did not want another endless, pointless conversation. “Tell me what’s on your mind or bugger off.”

  “I am telling you,” Jack said quietly. “Joe Ralston was all set to become the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff. The most powerful soldier on earth. Employing about half a million people and spending an annual budget of trillions of dollars.”

  “Which is totally obscene,” said Polly, unable to restrain herself.

  “You know where he is now?” Jack continued.

  “No, and I don’t care.”

  “Well, I don’t know either, because he never stood for that top job. He withdrew his candidacy and retired from the army. Because fifteen years ago he had an affair. Fifteen years ago, while separated from his wife whom he subsequently divorced, General Joe Ralston had an affair. That is why the best soldier in America could not pursue his destiny.”

  Polly remembered the case. It had indeed been on the news in Britain.

  “Your people made that happen, Polly,” said Jack.

  “My people? Which people would those be, then?”

  “Your people, your kind. You see, around the same time that Joe Ralston was considering his application, a young lady combat flier called Kelly Flinn got caught fucking the civilian husband of an enlisted woman. She was forced to resign her commission, but not before the whole damn country had had a crisis about whether the army would have hit her so hard if she’d been a man.”

  Polly recalled this case also. The British press always gleefully reported any example of America in the throes of self-torture. But she still could not see what it had to do with her.

  “You know what you people have done, don’t you, Polly?” Jack continued. “You’ve created an ungovernable world.”

  Polly had had enough of this.

  “What people? Who are ‘my people’?”

  “Your kind. Liberals. Feminists.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, don’t be so pig ignorant!”

  Jack poured himself more whiskey and tried to refill Polly’s glass, but she had had enough to drink. He took a gulp of bourbon and continued.

  “They tried to indict the president of the United States for dropping his trousers! Are you pleased about that?”

  “I don’t care, Jack! I don’t give two tosses! What does any of this have to do with me? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Jack took a breath. He did not want to shout. He wanted her to understand what he was saying.

  “The president of the United States, Polly. The most powerful man on earth. The commander in chief of the most formidable army ever known. The person responsible for weapons of destruction that could obliterate life on this planet a thousand times over. That man had put the world on hold, in order that he could prepare to be taken to court to decide whether or not one night six years ago he showed his dick to a female employee. Do you think that is a good thing or a bad thing?”

  Polly shrugged. “If the president’s a nasty little shag-rat that’s his problem.”

  “Plenty of guys are nasty little shag-rats.”

  “Yes, well maybe it’s time they started facing up to the consequences.”

  Despite his efforts to remain calm and reasonable Jack’s frustration bubbled over and he banged his fist down on the table.

  In the room below, the milkman looked up from his cornflakes.

  Four twenty: Shouting and banging, he noted piously in his little book.

  “Traditionally women have been aware of what men are like,” Jack continued, “which is why they didn’t tend to go into guys’ rooms in the middle of the night!”

  “A woman should be able to go where she damn well pleases!” Po
lly snapped back, unwilling to be lectured on gender behaviour by the likes of General Jack Kent.

  “That’s right!” Jack snapped back. “And on this occasion one did and in the process she claims she got to see the then governor of Arkansas’s dick! Late one night she accepted an invitation to his hotel room, he proffered his penis, she declined, retreated and there the matter rested for six years! He didn’t beat her up, he didn’t rape her, he showed her his dick. Then suddenly the whole world was discussing this episode, the whole world! My God, there was a time when a girl would have been proud to see a future president’s dick! She would have told her grandchildren! ‘Hey, kids, did I ever tell you about the time the president showed me his dick?’”

  “Yes, and there was a time when millions of women suffered endless abuse and harassment in silence.”

  “For Christ’s sake, can we get a sense of proportion here? It’s like a witch hunt! Oh yeah, except we deserve it, don’t we, we guys? Because every horny guy is a rapist, isn’t he? I forgot that.”

  Jack could still remember vividly how during the Helga trial in Bad Nauheim it had seemed as if the whole army was on trial, like they had all gone to that hotel together.

  “Jesus! There are women in the States – college professors! – saying wolf whistling is rape! That seduction is rape with flowers!”

  Polly pointed her finger straight at him. “I don’t know anything about that, Jack,” she said, “but I do know that you know something about rape.”

  For a moment he could not believe what she had said. It was just too surprising.

  “What?” was all he could say. “What?”

  Polly’s voice was suddenly quiet again. “That last night, the night you left me. In that guesthouse. You made love to me like your life depended on it. You made love to me like a beast …”

  Jack could scarcely believe what she was suggesting.

  “You too! You wanted it! You were totally involved! What are you saying here? That I raped you? When you wanted it every bit as much as I did?”

  Polly nodded quietly. “Yes, of course I wanted it, Jack. I gave myself utterly and completely and happily.”

  “Thank you!” said Jack.

  “But do you think I would have done that if I’d known? Known that you were leaving? That your ticket was booked? If you’d taken me to your little hideaway that night, a seventeen-year-old girl, Jack, and said, ‘What I’m going to do now is fuck you for two hours and then walk away without a word and never see or speak to you again,’ do you think I’d have let you have me?”

  There was silence for a moment. “Well, no, but—”

  “That’s rape, Jack. Not big rape, maybe, but rape of sorts. You took me by deceit and manipulation. You took something I would never have given had I known the truth.”

  For a moment it almost sounded convincing. Except that it wasn’t – it couldn’t be. Jack did not believe that the world could be run that way.

  “Hey, Polly, people get dumped. It happens, you know. Get the fuck over it. What, you think you have a right not to be hurt? Not to be unhappy? I was a shit, I admit it, but a guy sweettalking a girl into bed is not rape. Little girls getting gangbanged in alleyways, that’s rape.”

  Polly smouldered for a moment and then gave it up.

  “Get out, Jack. You just don’t get it and you never will.”

  “No! No!” Jack simply would not let the argument end. “You don’t get it! The world is not civilized and you can’t make it so.”

  There was nothing Polly could do. If Jack did not want to leave she could not force him. She could call the police, of course, but she had no desire to do that. Besides which, despite herself Polly was beginning to become rather interested in Jack’s obsessions. It was obvious to Polly that Jack had some deep, deep problem inside himself. A problem which for some reason he had sought her out in order to deal with. In some ways it was quite fascinating.

  “They let the first women into the Citadel this year,” Jack said, producing what appeared to be a non sequitur.

  “The citadel?” Polly enquired.

  “It’s a military training facility. They let in forty women who want to be turned into shaven-headed, desensitized grunts.”

  “How depressing.”

  “Is that what you wanted, Polly?” Jack snapped. “For women to turn into men?”

  “Why are you asking me this stuff? Don’t you have therapists in the army?”

  But Jack was not listening to Polly. “Truth is they can’t do it,” he continued, almost to himself. “They’re not up to it. Ladies can’t run as fast, punch as hard or lift as much as men. At the Parris Island training centre forty-five per cent of female marines were unable to throw their grenades far enough to avoid blowing themselves up. Female trainees are twice as likely to get injured, five times as likely to be put on limited duty! These are the facts, Polly. But facts don’t matter, because this is politics. Politics decides on its own reality, and if anybody objects they will be condemned as sexist Neanderthals and their careers will be over. It is a witch-hunt, Polly. Leftist McCarthyism. We’re living through the fucking Crucible.”

  “And you see my problem, Jack, is that I don’t care,” Polly replied. “Don’t you understand? I don’t care!”

  Jack was pacing the room now. “The US military manual has been changed to accommodate the equality lie. It’s called ‘comparable effort’. Women get higher marks for doing less. They do six press-ups, the guys do twenty; they only climb halfway up the rope. Assault courses are called ‘confidence courses’ and you get to run around the walls if you can’t get over them. What happens when there’s a war? You think the enemy will say, ‘It’s OK, you’re a girl, we’ll go easy on you’?”

  Polly tried once again to get at whatever it was Jack was trying to tell her.

  “Why are you projecting all this onto me, Jack? This is pathological. I’m an ordinary Englishwoman living somewhere above the poverty line in Stoke Newington. I knew you when I was seventeen! This has nothing to do with me! Yet it’s almost as if you’ve come to me tonight to blame me for what you think is wrong with the world—”

  “Well? Well! Aren’t you pleased we’re falling to bits? Aren’t you pleased we don’t know who the fuck we are any more? Gender politics is rendering the Western world ungovernable!”

  Polly had been interested for a moment, but her interest was over.

  “It isn’t, but if it was I wouldn’t care! Do you understand? I don’t care about it either way, all right? What happens to your army and who you choose for president is a matter of supreme indifference to me! Because tomorrow morning I have to go to work and wade back into a sea of people who have been abused, cheated, demeaned and destroyed all for reasons of race, sex, sexuality and poverty. They don’t have much hope, but if they have any I’m it, so please, Jack, leave, because I have to get some sleep.”

  “OK, OK, I’m going.”

  Jack got up and started to put away his bottles, and Polly sat back down on the bed feeling terribly, terribly sad.

  53

  The milkman had finished his breakfast and brushed his teeth. It was time to go to work. He wondered about going upstairs on his way out and speaking to the woman above. He decided against it. She still had someone with her; it would be embarrassing. He’d have a word that evening, just to let her know that two could play at the complaining game.

  He turned off his radio, switched off the lights and let himself out into the hall.

  At the bottom of the house, sitting in the hallway, Peter heard the door open and close and then the sound of a heavy footfall on the stair. This Peter knew was his best chance. The man above him, the man coming down the stairs, was the American. It was only minutes since Polly had ordered him to go, and now that was what he was doing. Besides which, who else would be walking out of the house at four thirty in the morning?

  Silently Peter retreated into the shadow behind the stair. His enemy was on the floor above him now, the footsteps des
cending fast. The dark shape of a man appeared at the bottom of the stairs. Peter leapt out of the darkness and plunged his knife deep into the man’s back. He heard the man try to cry out, but there was only a muffled, gurgling sound.

  The milkman sank to the floor without a word and lay there gulping his last blood-sodden, strangled breaths beside the bicycle. Looking down at him, Peter noticed that one of the tyres of the bicycle was flat. He also noticed that whoever he had killed it was not the American.

  54

  Jack and Polly had also heard the milkman leave. Jack was relieved; he had no wish to encounter the other residents of the building. He finished putting away his bottles, then collected Polly’s glass from the bedside table where she had left it and drained his own.

  “I’m sorry about going on so much,” he said. “It’s just that I had to tell you all that stuff.”

  “That’s OK,” Polly assured him. “Actually I’m glad. I’m glad you did.”

  Jack did not ask her why, and Polly did not tell him. The truth was that the things Jack had talked about, the feelings he had displayed, had made Polly feel better about herself and, more important, better about not being, or wanting to be, any part of Jack’s life. It seemed to her that he had been right in a way about linking her with the ideological struggles he found so frustrating. The world had changed a little and for the better. Big tough guys like Jack couldn’t quite have it all their own way any more. Power was no longer an absolute defence against bad behaviour. Bigotry and abusive practices were not facts of nature; they could be challenged, they could be redressed. And perhaps, in her own small way, Polly had been a part of that change. She and a few million other people, but a part none the less.

  Jack had stepped through into the kitchen area and was washing up the glasses.

  “Jack, please, you don’t have to wash up,” Polly said.

  “Yes, I do, Polly. I have to wash up,” Jack replied, drying the glasses thoroughly with a teatowel.