Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

And nothing of Jack, no trace of him, remained. Polly might always have been alone in that room. Jack had even plumped his pillow before leaving. The habits of a thousand bed inspections died hard.

Polly dressed herself in a daze and went downstairs to reception.

“Excuse me,” she said, her face burning with embarrassment, “but the man I was with… the American. Have you seen him?”

The woman inside the little reception hatch had had the face of Oliver Cromwell and the same glowering air of violent righteousness.

“The gentleman’s gone.” Her voice sounded as if it had been mixed with iron filings. She folded her arms menacingly, as if daring Polly to contaminate her house further. Even the woman’s hair was hard and unforgiving, having been set into an impenetrable helmet of red-tinted Thatcheresque waves that would have kept their shape in a hurricane.

“He left hours ago. Didn’t he say goodbye, then?”

Throughout the intervening years Polly would never forget the withering contempt of that woman’s tone.

No, he had not said goodbye. Polly stood before the hatch as if bolted down, not knowing what to say or do, not able even to think. Tears started in her eyes, further blotching the black smudged make-up that surrounded them. The hotel lady misunderstood her emotions.

“Well, he paid my bill, love,” she said.

Polly knew what the woman meant immediately. The woman thought Polly was a prostitute and that her client had done a runner.

This was indeed exactly what the woman had thought. What else would she think? When a smart-looking chap with money turns up late and signs in some grubby slip of a girl as his wife? A girl with bare legs, black eyeshadow and purple lipstick? When they go straight to bed without so much as ordering a toasted sandwich or spending money at the bar. When they keep the whole house up for hours with their disgusting grunting and when the noise finally subsides, after the man’s clearly had his fill, he sneaks off in the small hours leaving his “wife” to get her breath back.

“Unless there’s anything else?” the woman said, clearly anxious to rid the sanctified air of her house of Polly’s noxious presence. Polly turned to leave. She could not speak to the woman; she had been struck dumb. The enormity of what was happening to her was too much to take in. Adored, then dumped, now despised. Ecstatic, then distraught, now only numb, all within a few short hours. Polly was only seventeen.

“He’s paid for your breakfast, by the way,” the woman said as Polly headed for the door. “You can have it if you want, but there’s no more eggs and you’ll have to be fast because I want to set lunch.”

Never had an invitation to eat been offered with less enthusiasm. The woman could not have sounded more unwelcoming if she’d said that she would be serving turds instead of sausages.

“I should have had it, though,” Polly told Jack, “because when I got out of the hotel I realized I didn’t even know where I was and I only had about seventy-five pence on me and I hadn’t even had a cup of tea. It took an entire day of buses and hitching to get back to camp and when I did they’d finished supper. It didn’t matter, of course. I couldn’t have eaten anyway. You’d torn my insides out.”

Jack had no answer. There were no tears in his eyes, of course. There never had been, and Polly doubted that there ever would be such a thing, but none the less deep inside him he cried. Thinking about that unhappy morning had always been difficult for him, and at last hearing Polly’s side of the story made it more difficult still.

His own day had been scarcely happier. By the time Polly had awoken he was long gone, pointing his TR7 for the coast. Jack had planned it, as he planned everything, meticulously. Everything he owned was in the car. He would not be returning to Greenham. He had arranged for his leave to begin that morning and when his leave ended he was to go to Wiesbaden in Germany. There he would rejoin the regiment that he had left on being posted to Britain. Jack had already done three years at the base and it had not been difficult for him to persuade his superiors that he had earned the right to return to some proper soldiering.

“I thought about leaving some money for you,” Jack said in a quiet voice. “You know, to get back to camp and all, but you were such a feminist and all, I thought it… it…”

“Might make me look like a bit of a tart?” Polly demanded. “Yeah, well, no need to worry about that. That was already sorted.”

They relapsed into silence for a moment before Polly continued to unburden herself.

“I rang the camp, of course,” Polly said. “I didn’t betray you even then, not that they would have believed a mad peace bitch anyway, but I was still careful for your sake. I pretended I was a cab driver who’d overcharged you. They told me not to worry about it. They said you’d gone. They said you’d left the country! Can you imagine how that felt?”

Of course he could, although he knew that she would never believe him. The truth was that he knew how she felt because he’d felt it too. As evening fell that day and he’d leant on the rail of the car ferry, watching England disappear over the horizon, Jack had felt more desolate than he had ever felt. It had been no comfort at all that he had been the architect of his own unhappiness, or that he knew that it was the only thing he could do.

“You left that day!” The bitterness of Polly’s tone wrenched Jack back from his momentary reverie. “You left Britain the same fucking day you left me!”

“Yeah?” Jack said. For a moment he was unsure why she was dwelling on this point.

“Which must have meant that you’d already made your preparations,” Polly explained. “That you’d known you were leaving. That when you made love to me on that last night you knew what you were going to do. Your fucking bags must have been already packed, you bastard!”

“It hurt me too!”

“Good. I wish it had killed you!”

Polly did not believe Jack. She did not think he could have felt remotely what she’d felt. He would never have done what he did. She had been so completely in love with him. She’d trusted in him so absolutely and he’d left her all alone. For weeks afterwards she had been quite literally sick with the pain. Unable to keep food down, she’d scarcely eaten for months. She lost two and a half stone, which left her dangerously underweight, and eventually she had had to see a doctor. At seventeen Polly discovered that it is not just the heart that aches when love is lost, but the whole body. Particularly the guts; that’s where a person’s nervous system really makes itself felt.

“It’s not pretty,” said Polly. “It’s not romantic. It wouldn’t look so good on the Valentines cards. A stomach with an arrow through it.”

Jack thought about saying he was sorry again but decided against it.

“So did you stay there long?” he asked instead. “After?”

“I stayed there until after you people delivered the missiles; three years, in fact, with a gap for the miners’ strike.”

Jack was amazed. “Three years? In that camp? In that toilet? You spent three years singing songs through a fence! You stayed there till you were twenty? I thought you were there for the summer. That’s what you said. What about your… what were they called?… your A-levels?”

“I didn’t take them, not then, and I never went to university, either.”

Jack whistled in disbelief, scarcely able to believe it. In his view, Polly had wasted the three best years of her life.

Polly knew what he was thinking. “I was waiting for you, Jack! I loved you.”

“Three years! That’s not love, that’s psychosis. That’s an illness.”