Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

“Shut up, Jack! I mean it. Stop talking like that, it’s horrible.”

Jack shrugged and went to fix more drinks. “OK, OK,” he said. “If you don’t have the courage to defend yourself. If your precious principles have so weakened you that you don’t have the guts to make your own personal decision about what’s right. Lenin knew what to do, didn’t he? If you have something you believe in you defend it by any means necessary. Don’t you believe in your right to happiness, Polly?”

“Of course I believe in it!”

“Then have the courage to defend it.”

Jack poured Polly another huge Bailey’s and Coke and she gulped it down hungrily.

“Polly, I have to do something to help. This guy is truly a terrible thing. We can’t just let him carry on abusing you.”

Even in her distress Polly thought about asking at what point Jack had suddenly become so concerned about her wellbeing, but she didn’t. For the first time someone was genuinely trying to help her with the problem that had been destroying her life.

“Come on,” said Jack. “Maybe I wouldn’t even have to kill him. I could just scare him a little. It’d be very easy to scare him.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. He’s too mad.”

“Polly, believe me. I know how to scare people and I know how to hurt them. When I do it they’re scared and they stay hurt… Come on. You have a right to defend your life. Not in the law, maybe, but under any concept of natural justice. Tell me where he lives.”

Polly did not believe in violence of any sort.

She absolutely did not believe in violence.

That fact was a mainstay of her life.

On the other hand…

She had suffered at this man’s hands for so very long. If anybody deserved to be punished it was him… And if it worked? If the Bug could be scared off, not killed but scared off, for ever? The prospect of liberation rose like a new dawn before Polly’s eyes.

Jack could see that she was weakening. “Where does he live, Polly?” he asked once more in his friendly, gentle tone.

Polly made her decision. She would act in her own defence. She would empower herself and defend her life. She would give Jack the Bug’s address and she was glad. Why the hell should she suffer any more if she had the means to fight back? She had never done anything wrong and she did not deserve to be persecuted. That bastard deserved everything he got. Polly was fed up with being a victim. Let the other guy be the victim for a change.

The Bug’s details were written on the court papers. Papers Polly had always studiously avoided studying for fear of becoming further connected to her persecutor. She retrieved them from the file which she kept under a pile of dirty clothes, some books and a pair of running shoes and handed them over to Jack.

“Do anything you like,” she said firmly, “but please don’t kill him.”

The milkman’s radio alarm went off, wrenching the milkman from his slumbers. He was surprised to discover that he had nodded off again after all. He had not imagined that he would do so what with all the talking and walking that was going on upstairs. However, the milkman resolved not to let the fact that he had been back to sleep diminish his righteous anger. He still had his notebook cataloguing the disturbances of the night and he decided that he would add a couple of instances more, since he was sure that the noises must have continued while he slept.

Upstairs they heard the music too.

“What the fuck?” Jack enquired.

“It’s the milkman,” Polly explained. “He gets up at four, the radio will stop at four twenty-five, then his door will bang.”

Three floors down in the stairwell Peter also heard the music. He imagined that it must come from Polly’s room. Were they dancing? Or maybe they were doing “it” to music? Either way, Peter’s jealousy and resentment were amply fed. What should he do? How could he douse the fire of hatred that was burning inside him? Peter had never thought of himself as having a murderous disposition, but that American certainly deserved to die. Peter put his hand to his injured nose and nearly yelped in pain. He wondered if it was broken; it was certainly swollen. Now he had made it bleed again, a steady flow of drops falling onto his trousers. Peter spread his knees and allowed the blood to drip between his legs and stain the stair carpet. Her stair carpet; she would be walking over his blood. Then Peter positioned the blade of the knife under his bleeding nose and watched the metal turn red.

Upstairs in Polly’s flat Jack was a little anxious. The milkman’s alarm call, unusually early though it was, had reminded Jack that the night would not last for ever. Dawn was to be at seven fourteen that morning and Jack wanted to be away long before then. He had found out the things he needed to know. He was reasonably certain that his history with Polly was a private one, and he knew the whereabouts of Polly’s stalker.

One thing Jack was certain about: this man Peter would have to die. Whether Polly liked it or not, Peter was a dead man.

“I have to leave quite soon,” Jack said, taking another slug of his drink.

It was like cold water. Somehow Polly had stopped thinking about Jack’s leaving.

“I want you to stay,” she said.

“I can’t, not for much longer.”

Polly felt desperate. All those familiar emotions were back, all those painful old feelings, the ones it had taken so many years to get over. Why had he returned if only to tease her and then leave her again? Now she must suffer the pain of rejection a second time and live with a newly broken heart.

“I got promoted recently,” said Jack.

Polly did not know what to say to this. It was such a non sequitur. Did he think she was still interested in making polite conversation?

“I’ve been promoted quite a lot over the last few years, actually. I’ve done very well.”

What was he talking about? Was he still fighting himself? Perhaps he really did want to stay. Perhaps he really wanted to make love. Perhaps this chattering was just a way of avoiding making a decision.

“Congratulations,” said Polly. “You certainly never let anything stand in your way, did you?”

Everything Jack said reminded Polly of his desertion.

“You do not make four-star general just by avoiding ruinous love affairs. Nor by working hard or being talented. You have to get lucky. Very lucky.” Jack paused for a moment and then said, “Sex.”

“What?” Polly asked.

“That’s what got me where I am today.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Sex is what made me, Polly. What brought me to my current elevated status.”

“I’m not interested, Jack,” said Polly wearily.

“I need to tell you what brought me here today,” Jack insisted.

Polly sat back. It was pointless to resist. Whatever Jack wanted to do or say he would do or say in his own good time. She tried to concentrate as he spoke.

Jack began. By the end of the Gulf War, he said, he’d been a full colonel, one of the most successful soldiers of his generation, but despite this his prospects for future advancement had not looked particularly good. Traditionally, war was the way to get promoted in the army and despite Saddam’s honourable efforts real wars, proper wars, were becoming less and less likely. There was, according to George Bush, a new world order. The Soviet Union had collapsed, taking with it the Warsaw Pact, thus depriving the Western allies of their best available enemy. The Chinese, who had always been next in line to fight, were embracing capitalism and waging war on the stock market. MacDonald’s was opening up in Beijing, and the US was importing gangsters from Moscow. The West had won. For career soldiers like Jack it was a depressing time. All those weapons and nobody to kill. It just wasn’t fair.