Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

Peter’s whole being reeled with hatred. He had watched from the shop doorway as the American man entered Polly’s house and had stood for five minutes or so as if in a trance. The jealousy and sense of betrayal were so all-consuming that he had found himself unable to move. She was seeing other men! Sneaking them in in the middle of the night so that he wouldn’t see them! Tricking him into thinking she was being good when in fact she was nothing but a lying, cheating slag. And as for him. As for that American bastard. Peter had no vocabulary in his head with which to encompass the scope of his loathing for that man. It sat in his consciousness as a sort of red blur.

However, once Peter had come round from his state of shock he knew absolutely that he must retrieve his knife at once. If ever he needed it he needed it now. He rushed back up the road to the phonebox, back to the drain down which the hated American had kicked his knife. Peter had seen that it had lodged on a jutting brick before he had run away. The question was, would it still be there?

Of course it was. How could it not be; it was Peter’s precious knife and it would not be taken from him so easily. Kneeling in the gutter he could see it, lodged still, awaiting his retrieval. Peter went off to find a suitable tool with which to recover the knife and soon returned with an old wire coathanger picked from the rubbish in a nearby skip. Out of this he fashioned a long hook. He knew that the knife had a little hinged curve of metal attached to its innocent end by which a person might fasten the weapon to their belt. It was into this that Peter planned to place his hook. His challenge was to do this without dislodging the knife and causing it to fall further out of reach. So he knelt down in the sodden gutter and set to his task, dangling his hook into one of the numerous gaping mouths that fed and watered subterranean London with rubbish, effluence and rain.

“Bastard. Fucking bastard. I’ll get you. I’ll get you,” mumbled Peter under his breath, and he was not referring to the knife.

“You still smoke?” Jack enquired.

“I’m giving up soon,” Polly replied defensively, “in a week or two, this month, I hope. Certainly by the end of the year. Don’t tell me you quit?”

Jack hadn’t wanted to give up smoking, but he’d been forced to. He worked for the government; it was either give up or become a pathetic non-person. Quite apart from anything else, smoking had got too tiring. The smoke exclusion zones around public buildings had been getting wider and wider since Clinton got in. In vain had he argued at the highest level that to make the Pentagon a no-smoking area was something of a sick joke. He and his colleagues had pointed out to their political masters that since the Pentagon was a building in which mass chemical and nuclear genocide was planned daily, it seemed almost tasteless to introduce a health code.

Polly was surprised. Jack had always been so gungho about his smoking.

“You said you’d never give up. You said you’d rather die.”

“Yeah, well I didn’t know then that the greatest country in the world would end up getting run by a bunch of killjoy liberal fucking pussies, did I?”

That was the other side of Jack, of course. Polly remembered it well. The unreconstructed reactionary. The bullying, bigoted, yobbo soldier with the sexual and political sensitivity of Ghenghis Khan’s hordes on an angry and randy day. The strange thing was that she had always secretly found conservatism rather attractive. He was so honest and unashamed about being a right-wing bastard. As a deeply confused liberal herself, Polly found that kind of confidence rather compelling.

“Nice to know you haven’t changed,” she said. “The kinder, gentler America passed you by, then?”

“Oh yeah? Maybe we should start trying to be a little kinder and gentler to the guys who like to drink and smoke and read Playboy magazine now and again! It’s the hypocrisy I can’t stand. They had their fun. Fifteen years ago those same star fucking Democrat assholes that are banning smokes were taking cocaine in their coffee. Now coffee carries a health warning.”

“Yeah, well, you’re lucky. I’d love to kick the fags,” Polly replied. “Sometimes I buy one Mgs, but then I just smoke them six or seven at a time.”

Polly leant against the table, placed her fingers over the little airholes in the filter that were supposed to dilute the tar and inhaled deeply. Jack watched her chest rise as she did so and he longed to fall upon her as of old. She walked around the table to pick up an ashtray and again Jack could not help but notice how attractive her legs were. As good as ever, he thought; better, in fact. Now how could that be? He had it! They were shaved! Polly had shaved her legs, and recently, too. They were smooth and shiny, the skin bright in the light of the overhead lamp.

The old Polly, the young Polly, would on principle never have shaved her legs. She would have considered leg shaving to be a disgusting capitulation to sexist male stereotyping of the female form, a very short step from having four kilos of silicon pumped into her tits and appearing naked in Hustler. Not that Polly’s legs had been particularly hirsute in the old days. No hairier than most girls, but then most girls actually do have quite hairy legs if they let it grow free, even seventeen-year-olds. At the time Jack had sort of liked it because he loved her. She had been so different from the plucked, waxed and sanded-down, cheerleading Barbies whom he had dated previously, but even then he had only sort of liked it. Jack was in many things a traditionalist. He liked his petrol leaded and his ladies smooth and there was no denying that Polly’s shapely calf muscles were all the finer without the fuzzy edges.

Polly exhaled again. The smell of smoke had filled the room by now and Jack breathed it in greedily.

“I’d love to take up smoking again,” he said, “but I just don’t have the guts. I fought the Iraqis, but the American anti-smoking lobby scares the shit out of me. If you light up in New York some mom in California will sue you for murdering her unborn child. It’s insane. Guys who operate nuclear missiles for a living are getting sacked for perpetrating secondary lung cancer.”

Polly realized that they were having a conversation. It had happened so easily she hadn’t even noticed. After sixteen years and two months of pain and resentment, there they were, just having a conversation.

“Well, since you’re here, Jack, you’d better give me your coat.”

Jack took off his coat and Polly gulped with surprise. Underneath the coat Jack was resplendent in the dress uniform of an American four-star general. Polly laughed. It seemed the only thing to do. Jack could not have looked more out of place if he’d been a Baywatch babe in a nunnery. His epaulettes glinted, his belt buckle sparkled, his buttons shone, his shoulder braid strutted grandly and his medal ribbons competed for attention upon his splendid chest. Anybody who had known Jack a decade or so earlier when he had believed his career to be grinding to a halt would have gasped to see him now. In the cabinet room at Ten Downing Street Jack had looked superb. The creaky, threadbare, down-at-heel members of Her Majesty’s Government had provided a more than fitting setting for this splendid warrior from the New World. But context is everything and in Polly’s bedsit he looked like the conductor in a rather tasteless brass band.

“Jesus, Jack, what are you? John Wayne? Did you come back to Britain to invade it?”

It had not occurred to Jack until that point that he was dressed in a manner that some might consider unusual. In Jack’s position he was expected to wear dress uniform all the time, and on the whole he rather enjoyed it. Now, however, he felt self-conscious. Like a person who has proudly put on a black tie to attend a very special function but still has to get to the event by bus. It feels great while you are attaching the bowtie and the cufflinks. It’ll feel great again when you’re greedily plucking the first flute of Italian sparkling from a passing tray. The period in between, however, is not so good, when one is forced by circumstance to mix with the less exalted, the ordinarily dressed. At this point, frankly, one feels a bit of a prick.