Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

“I’m sorry, Nibs,” he said. “What more can I say? I don’t want to do it but sometimes it just happens. I just can’t help myself.”

“Nibs” was the man’s private name for his wife. It was what he always called her when they were alone, their little secret, a token of his affection. These days they were alone together less and less. Their professional lives had grown so complex that dining together had become a matter for diaries, and when his work took him away she could no longer go with him. Perhaps it was that, she thought. Perhaps her career had driven him into the arms of other, stupider, more available women. She wondered if he had special names for them. Perhaps he had called them Nibs also, for convenience and to avoid embarrassing mistakes. At the thought of this Nibs’ eyes grew misty and briefly she took refuge in her napkin.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again, “but it meant nothing, it was meaningless.”

“What does she do?” Nibs enquired, attempting to make her voice sound calm.

“She works at the office. She’s with the travel department. She books cars and flights and stuff,” he replied.

“Fascinating,” she said bitterly. “You must have so much to talk about.”

“The point is, Nibs…”

“Don’t call me Nibs,” she snapped. “I don’t feel like being your Nibs right now.”

“The point is…”

His voice faltered. The point was that he was in trouble. That was the only reason he’d arranged the dinner, the only reason they were having the conversation. If he hadn’t been in trouble he would never have told her about the girl, just as he hadn’t told her about any of the other girls. Unfortunately, this current girl had not taken kindly to the brevity of their affair and had decided to hit back.

“She says she’s going to accuse me of harassing her.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. Did you?”

“Not unless taking a girl to bed a couple of times is harassment.”

Nibs bit her lip. Why had he done it? Why did he keep doing it? He thought she didn’t know about the others but she’d heard the rumours. She knew about the jokes they told at his office. She’d caught the expressions of those dumb booby women when she accompanied him to business functions. She knew what they were thinking. “You may be a fancy lawyer, lady, but when your husband needs satisfying he comes to me.”

“I have plenty of enemies,” he said. “If this thing gets any kind of heat under it at all it could be very bad for me at work. I could lose my job.”

“You fool!” Nibs snapped. “You damn stupid fool.”

Jack swallowed half his drink down in one.

“Do you ever see any of the girls these days?”

“One or two,” Polly replied, crossing one leg over the other as she sat. She could see Jack’s eyes had been caught by the movement.

“You should organize a reunion,” he said, smiling. “You’d have a blast. Go stand in a field somewhere, paint each other’s faces, make some puppets. Eat mud sandwiches and dance to the subtle rhythms of your female cycles.”

He was teasing her now. The anger had gone.

“Yes, and we could invite the American army along,” Polly replied. “You could all drop your trousers and show us your arses. We used to love it when you did that. It was such a subtle gesture and so intellectually stimulating.”

In fact it had been the British guards who did most of the arse-showing. The Americans were mainly technical advisers, a cut above that sort of oafishness, and were anyway on their strictest best behaviour. Jack did not argue the point, though. He had always fully supported the British soldiers in their arse-showing and he would not deny them now.

“It was a clash of cultures. We were never going to get along.”

“Except us.”

“Yeah,” said Jack, trying not to stare. “Except us.”

They were so close. He in the easy chair, she perched on the bed. Two strides and they would be in each other’s arms. The room crackled with the suppressed tension.

“Let’s face it,” said Polly. “You can put up with anything if the sex is good enough.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jack replied with great enthusiasm, his voice and his wandering eyes betraying his thoughts.

Polly was torn. Should she sleep with him? She felt confident that she could if she wanted to. Of course she could. She knew what men were like, they always wanted it. Scratch a man and you find a person who fancies a fuck. Sex had to be the reason that Jack had come back. It was obvious. He felt like a little nostalgic adventure. A little blast from the past. He had been sitting in the Pentagon one night thinking, “I wonder what happened to her?” and then he had thought, “I know. I’m a powerful man. I’ll have her traced and the next time I’m in London I’ll pop round and see if I can still fuck her.” By rights Polly should be offended, she should throw him out. The feminist in her told her that if she screwed Jack she would be doing exactly what he wanted. Literally playing into his hands. But, then again, so what? She would be using him too. It wasn’t as if she’d been exactly sexually satiated of late. Quite frankly, she could really do with a little passion herself. But could she trust her emotions? After what he had meant to her, after how he had behaved? Would she suddenly find herself hopelessly in love again or would she just want to kill him? Polly could not quite decide whether in the final analysis having sex with Jack would make her happier or sadder.

In her mind’s eye the good memories were gaining the ascendancy.

“I nearly didn’t go through with it, you know,” she said. “That first time. When I saw that disgusting tattoo of yours. Kill everyone and everything horribly or whatever it said.”

“Death Or Glory,” Jack corrected her. “I know you thought it was juvenile, Polly, but I’m in the army. It’s our regimental motto.”

“I used to work for Tesco’s but I haven’t got ‘Great quality at prices you can afford’ written across my arse.”

Jack laughed and topped up his drink. He could certainly put the booze away, but then he had always been able to do that.

“I had a tattoo done too, you know, after you left,” Polly said, pulling at the collar of her raincoat and nightie to reveal the blurred decoration that her parents had found so unpleasant. Jack inspected it.

“It’s the female symbol with a penis in it,” he said.

“It’s not a penis, it’s a clenched fist, for Christ’s sake!” Polly snapped. “Why does everybody say that? It’s so obviously a clenched fist.”

Jack leant in a little to inspect the design more closely. “Yeah, well, maybe.”

Except, of course, he wasn’t looking at the tattoo. By now he had shifted his gaze and was using his position of advantage to drink in Polly’s partially exposed breasts. Polly had been aware when she pulled down her clothing to show her tattoo that she was displaying rather more of her bosom than was decorous, and she knew that Jack was looking at it now. Polly was rather vain of her breasts. She thought them perhaps her best feature. They were not particularly large or anything, but they were very shapely, cheeky almost. Age had not yet wearied them; they were well capable of standing up for themselves, so to speak.

Polly could feel Jack’s breath upon her shoulder. It was hot and damp and seemed to be coming quicker now. He wasn’t exactly panting, but he wasn’t breathing easily either. Polly knew that she too was breathing more quickly and that her breasts were trembling slightly beneath Jack’s gaze. She also knew what would happen to her body next. Spontaneously, involuntarily, her nipples began to harden under the nightshirt. It always happened when she felt aroused, and Jack, of course, knew that.