Blast From the Past

by Ben Elton

“My God, you’re a new man and you don’t know it,” Polly laughed.

  Having cleared up the drinks Jack took a look around the room. He seemed to be checking that everything was in order.

  “So General Ralston dropped his candidacy for the chair of the joint chiefs,” he said. “The Kelly Flinn scandal had put so much heat under the issue of sexual morality in the military that he had to withdraw rather than further provoke the liberal feminist lobby.”

  Polly went and got Jack’s coat. “Goodbye, Jack.”

  He put on the coat, still talking, still explaining. “Since then they had two other tries to find the right guy. An air force guy and a marine. Both superb officers, both unacceptable. I don’t know why. Probably stomped on a bug during basic training and offended the Buddhist lobby. We have a world so full of people ready to take offence it’s tough to find a fighting man, any man, who never offended anybody.”

  Polly was trying not to listen, but she could not ignore the significance of what Jack was saying.

  “I presume what you’re getting at is that they’re going to ask you to stand,” she said, impressed despite herself. “That you are going to be chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Is that what you came here to tell me? Am I supposed to congratulate you?”

  Jack stood staring at Polly. He was gathering his thoughts. Then he stepped across the room to where Polly’s answerphone was still blinking out news of the various messages of the evening. Jack pressed the erase button. The machine clunked and whirred in response, wiping clean the tape upon which Jack had announced his rearrival in Polly’s life.

  “What are you doing, Jack?” Polly felt a chill of fear shiver across her body, enveloping her like an icy cloak.

  “Surely you know now why I’m here, Polly,” he said.

  “No, Jack, I don’t,” Polly replied although suddenly she was not so sure.

  “People die every day.”

  Polly was cold to the bone now. “What do you mean?”

  “What I say. People die every day. Famine, war, accident, design. Death is commonplace. A modern fiction has developed that life is precious, but we know it isn’t so. Governments sacrifice thousands of lives every day. At least in the old times they were honest about it. There was no hypocrisy. To be a king or a conqueror you had to kill; no one ever got to the top any other way. Sometimes you even had to kill the things you loved, wives, children … many kings and rulers did that. They still do.”

  Polly could not credit the suspicions that were beginning to flood into her mind. Surely this would turn out to be just another monologue, going nowhere.

  “Jack—”

  “You were an anarchist, Polly,” Jack continued. “A sworn enemy of the state. When I met you your life was dedicated to the confusion of the military policies of your own country and also those of the United States. You were, to put it as I fear the press will put it, as my detractors in Congress and the Senate will put it, a foreign red. An enemy of the US.”

  Jack could not be implying what it sounded like he was implying.

  “I was seventeen, Jack! A teenager! It was so long ago.”

  “Exactly. Seventeen, that’s four years underage in my home state. An anarchist and a child to boot! Twenty years ago people would have laughed and said I was a lucky guy. These days you get burned at the stake for that stuff. If our affair ever came to light it would finish me for good and ten times over. You know it would. A soldier on active duty consorts with juvenile pacifist anarchist? I wouldn’t last ten seconds in a Senate hearing.”

  Polly struggled to come to terms with what Jack was saying.

  “But only you and I know, Jack!”

  Jack had taken his gun from his pocket and was attaching some kind of metal attachment to the end.

  “That’s right, Polly. Nobody else knows about us and nobody knows I came here tonight. I’m a NATO general, in Britain for a few hours, asleep in his hotel room. There is a spook called Gottfried, the guy who traced you for me, but he got promoted to our station in Kabul. Nice job for him, convenient for me – the Taliban don’t tend to take the London Evening Standard.”

  Jack levelled his gun at Polly’s head.

  “I love you, Polly, but I’m leaving you again. This time for good.”

  “Peter!” Polly shouted.

  “Who?”

  “The stalker! He knows, he knows an American was here. He saw you! He could describe you!”

  “That’s right. He could, Polly, which is a pity for him because you told me where he lives.”

  Jack’s finger was taut on the trigger.

  “Jack, no,” Polly whispered.

  “I’m sorry, Polly, but you do see I have no choice, don’t you?”

  Jack meant it too. As he saw it he had no choice. In fact it was his duty. He saw himself as the best remaining candidate to lead the army he loved, and it was his responsibility to ensure that nothing compromised his ability to command. Jack had already sacrificed Polly once to the oaths he had made when he had joined the service. Now he had to find the courage to do so again. And this time he would have to do it while looking Polly in the eye.

  Polly was still sitting on the bed. Jack stood before her, his arm outstretched, the gun levelled between them, his target pale but somehow calm, calmer than Jack had expected.

  “We have a child,” she said.

  55

  Jack had been about to shoot. At the very moment that she said it he had been about to shoot.

  “What?”

  “When you left me I was pregnant, Jack.”

  Every well-honed instinct of self-preservation within Jack’s icy soul told him to shoot and shoot immediately, but somehow he could not, not yet, not for a moment.

  “I don’t think so, Polly.”

  “Well, what the fuck would you know, you bastard!” Polly snarled. “You left me pregnant! That was why I always waited for you … That was why I couldn’t forget you. How could I?”

  If she was acting, and Jack was almost sure she was, then she was very good at it; the sudden and bitter venom of her statement was uncomfortably convincing.

  It was convincing because it was true. Jack had left Polly pregnant. She realized about three weeks after he had walked out on her. It was not his fault. He could not have known; those had been in the days before AIDS, and Jack had never used condoms because Polly had been on the pill. Unfortunately, like many a young girl before her, Polly had been made careless by love and the result was that she suddenly found herself alone and carrying the child of a man who had had his way with her and then gone.

  Polly stared at Jack over the vicious snout of his pointing gun, her eyes teary with angry memories.

  “How could I have got over you, Jack?” she said. “You were still there with me, growing inside me every day.”

  Jack knew that this was nonsense. He tried to shoot, but still he could not. Because if it were true, although it could not be, but if it were true, it would be so … Jack shut the thought from his mind. He had come to kill this woman.

  “It was a boy, Jack,” Polly whispered. “We have a son.”

  All Jack’s life he had wanted a child, and being a soldier, of course, he had particularly wanted a son. He and Courtney had not had children; she’d been young and ambitious for her career and they’d grown apart so quickly. But to have a son with Polly! Jack had often daydreamed of exactly that, imagining what a wonderful spirited boy such a union might create. Jack struggled to regain control. He had no business to be indulging in fantasies of this sort at such a time. Imagining Polly as the mother of his child reminded him of how much he was still in love with her, but he could not afford to be in love with her. He had a higher love to answer to – his love of power, of ambition, his love of self.

  Yet still he could not pull the trigger.

  “What’s his name?” Jack asked, allowing himself to relish the dream.

  “Misty Dawn,” Polly replied instantly.

  “Misty fucking Dawn? You called a
boy Misty Dawn?”

  “He changed it to Colin when he was at school.”

  “What was wrong with Jack?”

  “Everything was wrong with Jack, you bastard.”

  Jack knew that he was talking too much. He knew that it was time to get on, time to do the deed. The deed that was the heavy duty of men who would be leaders of men; those who sought to command must know how to sacrifice.

  Polly could see Jack’s hesitation. “You can’t kill me, Jack,” Polly said slowly and clearly. “I’m the mother of your child.”

  This was madness. Jack knew it was madness. “You were on the pill,” he said.

  “I lied to you. I knew you were paranoid about anything that might damage your precious career, so I lied. I don’t approve of putting chemicals into my body. I was using a natural sea sponge and it leaked.”

  That sounded convincing. Polly had been just the sort of over-confident, illogical, ideological young nut who would have deployed a sponge as a barrier to a liquid. Just the sort of cocky idiot who would have considered her principles more powerful than the laws of physics. On the other hand, she had not mentioned anything before. Jack struggled to think, not an easy thing with Polly’s eyes burning into him, pleading for her life, a life he held so dear.

  “Fifteen years old, Polly,” Jack said. “That’s all he’d be.”

  “That’s right, he’s fifteen.”

  With a tremendous effort of concentration Jack began to get over his initial shock and doubt, and began to regain control.

  “Then where is he?” Jack asked. “Doesn’t a young boy need his mom?”

  “He’s at his gran’s!” Polly replied, perhaps a shade too quickly, too desperately. “She spoils him. Lets him drink alcopops.”

  Jack knew now. “One photograph, Polly,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t see one photograph. Not one. Show me a photograph of our son, Polly. As a baby, as a toddler, now. One photograph, Polly.”

  Polly could see that the game was up. She’d known that she could not keep up the lie for long, long enough for a course of action to present itself, long enough perhaps for her to find a way to reach across her bed and press the panic button on the wall. But it was not to be.

  “I … I don’t have any,” she replied.

  Polly had not wanted the abortion. She’d loved Jack so much and suddenly she had found herself still carrying a part of him. But at the time she’d felt that she had no choice: a seventeen-year-old girl with a fatherless baby? There’d been a girl like that in the year above Polly at school. How Polly had pitied that girl, old before her time, her whole youth sacrificed for a single moment of passion. Polly loved Jack, despite what he had done to her, and she had wanted to keep his baby, but not in exchange for her life and that was how she had seen it at the time. At seventeen she had thought that having a baby would be the end of her life. What cruel and terrible irony to know now that had she kept it, it might have saved her life.

  “I’m sorry, Polly,” Jack said.

  And he was sorry, so very sorry that she had no child to give him. Sorry that they had not shared their lives together, sorry that he had ever left her in order to serve a cold, ungrateful country. Most of all, sorry that despite all that, he would still have to kill her.

  Polly sensed his resolve hardening, sensed her life slipping away.

  “You said you still loved me,” Polly pleaded, dropping to her knees.

  “I do still love you,” Jack replied and for the second time that evening there were tears in his eyes.

  “Then you can’t kill me,” she begged.

  “Polly,” said Jack, and it was almost as if it was he who was doing the pleading. “Try to understand. If I make chairman of the joint chiefs, do you know what the next step could be for me?” Polly had started to sob. “President. Yes, president. Leader of the world’s only superpower. There was a time when men waged war all their lives over a few square miles of mud and huts. They sacrificed their sons and grandsons to defend a paltry tribal crown. People have fought and murdered in pursuit of power since the dawn of time. Rivers of blood have flowed for it. For little power, for nothing power! I have before me the possibility of being the leader of the world! The world, Polly! Your existence severely compromises that possibility. Are you seriously suggesting that with such a destiny within my grasp I should shrink from the killing of just one single soul?”

  Well, there was a foolish question. Polly could see that, even through the blind terror of her tears.

  “Of course I am, you bloody fool.”

  “Because I love you?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t care why.”

  “Love is the enemy of ambition, Polly,” Jack said. “I made that decision sixteen years ago, in the early hours of the morning in a hotel room. There’s no point going back on it now.”

  “Jack!”

  But Polly could see in Jack’s eyes that her time was up.

  “Like I said,” and his voice seemed to come from somewhere else, “people die every day.”

  Jack was a stranger to Polly now. She no longer recognized him. Whatever it was that she had loved in him had simply disappeared; all that remained was pride and ambition. It was as if he had shut down his heart and soul, had removed himself emotionally from the scene. He had gone over this moment in his mind a thousand times and knew that he could not trust himself to say goodbye, he never had been able to say goodbye to Polly.

  And so in his mind at least he stood apart. It was not his finger squeezing the trigger but some other self, a separate personality too strong to be denied. He watched himself as the story unfolded, knowing the sequence of events exactly, like a series of stills from an old movie.

  The soldier shoots the girl in the forehead. The girl falls back upon her bed, stone dead. The soldier wipes his eyes on the sleeve of his coat (he is surprised to discover how upset he is) and takes a last look round. Confident that there is nothing of his left in the room save for a single bullet, he picks up his bag and without looking again at the dead girl he lets himself out of her flat. Ensuring that his overcoat entirely covers his uniform, the soldier descends to the front door and, having checked that there is nobody about in the street outside, he quietly leaves the house. He then drives himself back to the private hotel in Kensington in which he has been staying, parks his plain hirecar in the private car park, and returns to his bedroom. The following morning he is collected in an army car and begins his journey to Brussels in order to continue with the business of NATO.

  That was what was supposed to happen, anyway.

  One bullet between the eyes and leave.

  But Jack did not shoot. He had meant to, he had been about to, but he had talked too long and he had missed his chance. Because in what was to have been Polly’s final second on earth, at the point when Jack began to draw his finger back on the flimsy resistance of the trigger, there was a knock at Polly’s door. More than a knock – a bang, a thud, the crash of a body throwing itself against the solid panels.

  56

  The Bug had remained frozen for some time after killing the milkman. He had stood on the sodden, sticky stair carpet, gaping at the corpse that he had made, wondering what on earth he could do now. He could, in fact, do anything, because it was all up for him. He had stabbed a man to death and there was no hope of escape from the consequences. The police knew that he was about and that he had a knife; his mother had made sure of that. They would put him away now, that much was sure, not just for a month or two but for ever. His life was over and it was so unfair. All he had been trying to do was protect her. He had acted always out of love.

  And now he would never have her, not even once. He would be locked away from her, never again to feast his eyes upon her beauty. Even if they ever did let him out, which he doubted, she would have long since grown old and ugly.

  Then a wicked thought began to grow in Peter’s mind. He would have her, he would have her that very night, before the polic
e arrived. He would go upstairs, kill the American and make love to Polly, rape her if she resisted. Why not? He had nothing left in the world to lose now. He was a murderer already and hadn’t he earned his moment with her, earned it with his love? Surely even her cold heart would not expect him to go to prison without even once knowing that for which he had sacrificed his life.

  Peter turned away from the dead milkman and bounded up the stairs, all caution forgotten. He knew that the corpse could be discovered at any moment and the alarm raised. He knew that if he was to act it must be immediately. If he was to have time to force himself upon Polly and justify the life of incarceration that he faced then it must be now.

  At the top of the stairs the door to Polly’s flat was closed as Peter had known it would be. He hurled his body against it, hammering with the fist of his left hand. In his right hand he still held the knife, his fingers clenched around the bloody hilt, sticky with his own blood and that of the milkman. Peter was no longer afraid of the American. He had killed once, he could kill again. The moment the door opened he would stab his hated rival and then force Polly to his will.

  “Let me in, you slag!” he shouted. “You’ve let him do it to you! Why not let me?”

  Inside the flat Jack leapt to the door. Whatever it was that was going on outside the noise would surely wake the whole house. There would soon be irate figures in the stairwell and one of them would be bound to ring the police. Jack had only moments in which to silence this new menace.

  He flung open the door. Outside stood the Bug, knife in hand. Peter was caught momentarily by surprise, but then lunged forward with a shout of triumph. But the Bug was no more of a threat to Jack than if he truly had been a bug. Jack stepped neatly aside and Peter stumbled forward into the room. In some ways even this pathetic circumstance was a small triumph for Peter. He was inside Polly’s home for the very first time. He glanced round, trying to take it in, store it up, memorize more of Polly’s life.

  But Peter had no more need of memories.

  Jack raised his pistol and shot the Bug, as he intended to shoot Polly, straight between the staring, gaping eyes. Peter was dead before he hit the floor. Jack then turned back to Polly in order to complete his self-appointed mission.