Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

“You never did like uniforms much, did you?” he said with the tiniest hint of ill grace.

“I think they’re a bit sad, that’s all. If you can’t express your authority without poncing about like a fascist, then you can’t have had much authority in the first place.”

Again that childish fascist thing. Jack let it go.

“Yeah, well, I had to wear this stuff,” he said instead. “It was required.”

“What, for me?”

Jack would have to be honest. “No, not you. When I said I came straight here, what I meant was that I came straight here when I could. I had a meeting earlier, that’s why I’m in Britain. Politicians like to see you in uniform. I think it makes them feel important. They’re the only kind of people who ever get to play with real soldiers.”

Jack had calculated that this last comment would appeal to Polly, but if it did she ignored it.

“Politicians? What politicians?”

“Mainly your prime minister.”

Polly gulped again in astonishment. When the phone had woken her a little while ago she’d been dreaming, of what she couldn’t remember, but being a dream it would no doubt have been fairly surreal, possibly containing marshmallow hippopotamuses in tutus and a great deal of falling. Since then her life had been a whirl of psycho-stalkers, old flames and ancient enemies and now casual references to visits with the highest in the land. Reality was proving far more bizarre than anything Polly’s subconscious mind had been conjuring up. The pink hippos were beginning to seem rather mundane.

“The prime minister! The prime fucking minister! You’ve come here after seeing the prime minister!”

To Jack this wasn’t such a big deal. He saw top people all the time. Certainly the prime minister of Britain was an important person, but there were any number of prime ministers dotted about the world, fifty at a minimum. They came and they went, sometimes before the newsreaders had even learnt how to pronounce their names properly. Jack had met most of them one way or another and Polly’s astonished reaction rather took him aback. He was about to say, “Yeah, the PM. So what?” but then decided it would be rude. To her, he supposed, it was as if he’d turned up at an apartment in the Bronx and casually remarked that he’d just been visiting with the president and first lady.

“It wasn’t just me, you know, one on one,” he said, as if to downplay the grandeur of the situation. “There were the chiefs of staff… That’s the top guys in your…”

“I know who the chiefs of staff are, Jack. Unless you’d forgotten, I once had the opportunity to study matters military at close quarters.”

“Yeah,” Jack laughed. “I guess you were a combatant too, weren’t you? A soldier of the Cold War.”

How many were there like her now? Ex-combatants of an ideological struggle that had simply faded away. All around the world were people hidden in flats and bedsits, eking out their lives, who had once been warriors. Who had once locked horns with superpowers. Soldiers, spies, resistance fighters, protesters. In her way Polly was such a one, another Cold War loser. For a time she had fought NATO with the same commitment that Jack had defended it. But it was over now and the battle that Polly had fought was fast fading in the memory of all but the people involved.

Jack remembered it, of course, and suddenly he longed with all his heart to return once again to that golden time, the summer of his and Polly’s love. How he ached to see her naked once more. To be blinded afresh by her youth and beauty. A beauty that had been so pure and unencumbered by artifice. So naturally erotic, so effortlessly sexual. Jack longed to advance upon Polly then and there, as once he had, breathless and shaking with a dizzying, overwhelming passion, his entire being utterly and completely focused. No longer a whole and complex man but a desperate, straining sexual entity that knew no other time than the moment and no other purpose than to make love.

Polly caught the look in Jack’s eyes as they journeyed downwards and then up again over her body, lingering for a moment on her legs, bare to just above the knee and again on the triangle of flesh visible at her open collar.

“Look, if you’re staying,” she said, “I should get dressed.”

“Why?” Jack replied.

Outside in the wet and empty street Peter knelt in the gutter, his fingers straining at the metal grid that covered the drain. His upper lip was crusted with blood from when the door of the telephone box had bashed his nose. The knees of his trousers were soaking up the filthy London water and the rain was falling on his head.

Peter noticed none of these things.

His whole being was concentrated on the black hilt and glinting steel blade that he could see lodged three feet or so below him. His precious knife, sitting precariously on the jutting brick within the wall of that water-bloated urban intestine. His precious weapon, teetering on the brink of the bowels of the city.

“Bastard. Bastard. Fucking bastard,” he muttered through the soggy scabs of blood and the bitter-tasting rain.

Polly stared at Jack. What had he just said? Don’t bother getting dressed?

His eyes had been awash with sensual longing and he had told her not to bother getting dressed. Now she scarcely knew what to think. Was he asking her to bed? That would be a bold move indeed. Had he burst back into her life in order to fuck her as quickly as possible? It was, after all, how it had happened the first time, in his TR7. They had been unable to keep their hands off each other. Looking at Jack as he looked at her Polly was shocked to discover that a substantial part of her was excited at the prospect of leaping instantly into bed with this man who had betrayed her. Her sensual self wanted to surrender instantly to whatever Jack wanted. Why not? She was a grown woman, she was entitled to take a bit of comfort as and when she pleased. Unfortunately for Polly’s sensual self, her intellectual and emotional self recoiled at the idea, feeling angry and abused. Her political self felt even worse about it; outraged would not be too strong a word for how her political self felt. Did Jack think that he could have it all? That he could shatter her life into tiny little bits and then pick up a piece when the fancy took him?

“What do you mean?” said Polly, defiantly drawing herself up to her full height. A gesture which served merely to raise her plastic mac higher, thus revealing rather more of her legs than was already showing.

Jack had not meant what Polly was thinking, in fact. Of course, to make love there and then would be nice, ecstatic in fact. Like Polly, a part of Jack longed to pick up where they had left off so many years before and go to bed. His sensual self would have delighted in spending the remainder of the night making the crockery rattle and furniture jump round the room. But also like Polly, Jack’s intellectual self was raising objections; sex was not what he had come for, or what he had expected. There were things he wanted to discuss, things he needed to know. Sex would get in the way and Jack did not have a limitless amount of time. He tried to correct any misunderstanding.

“When I said ‘Why get dressed?’ what I meant, of course, was why get dressed when you’d only have to get undressed again?”

Which of course did not correct any misunderstandings at all.

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

Jack tried again. “No, I don’t mean… What I mean is I can’t stay long… I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

“Which is why you dropped round at two in the morning.”

Polly had always had a caustic side. Jack could remember having found it rather cute. At this point he couldn’t quite remember why.