Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

Kent’s party had now all assembled on the pavement and were awaiting their commander’s lead. A bobby was standing expectantly, ready to open the door.

“OK, let’s do it,” Kent said and led his officers across the familiar threshold.

Polly was smiling.

Polly was frowning.

She was yawning. She was walking. She was standing.

She was walking to her bus stop. She was standing at her bus stop. She was walking away from her bus stop. She was standing at her front door searching for her key.

A hundred tiny, near-identical moments from Polly’s life, frozen in time, developed, printed and stuck on Peter’s wall.

“Well, I don’t see as how it can do any great harm really,” Peter’s mother would say, more for her own comfort than that of the next-door neighbour with whom she would share the occasional pot of tea. “Lots of boys have pictures of their favourite women on their bedroom walls. Pamela Anderson or Playboy girls, stuff like that. In fact, I think Peter’s more normal than those other boys because at least he’s gone all funny over a real woman. Not just some fantasy figure.”

Peter had taken the pictures in defiance of the court injunction against him.

He had not begun to lose interest over the previous three months as Polly had been hoping. Quite the opposite. He had acquired a different car from the one known to the police and he would park it in Polly’s street at about seven in the morning. There he would wait, hiding behind a copy of the Daily Mirror until he could watch and photograph Polly beginning her journey to work. Once she had boarded her bus he would start up his car and follow it until it got into the local high street, where Polly got off. Peter could not take any photographs at this end of her journey because there was too much traffic and too many people, and it was a red route, anyway, so he couldn’t stop his car.

Once when Polly got off the bus Peter saw her throw a sucked-out Just Juice box into a dustbin.

Of course, he had to have that box, even if it meant getting a ticket. He put on his hazard lights, pulled over and pushed his way across the crowded pavement towards the rubbish basket. When he got there a homeless person was already inspecting the contents of the bin in the hope of finding something to eat or read. The homeless person was not interested in Peter’s box. Fortunately for him.

Sometimes before he went to sleep Peter caressed the box, putting his fingers where hers had been in that moment when she had squeezed it and crushed it up. He imagined her delicate fingers squeezing and crushing at him in the same way.

Then he would put his lips to the little bent straw and gently suck at it.

“I think she’s still on his mind a bit,” Peter’s mother would tell her friend, “but he’s not made contact, not since, not since…” Peter’s court appearance remained a painful memory for his mother. Whenever she thought of it she became angry. Angry with Polly.

“That bitch. She didn’t need to tell the police, did she? She could have come to me, talked to me. I could have stopped him. And anyway, what harm was he doing? He loved her, didn’t he? It’s not as if she had anything to be afraid of.”

In fact, Peter’s mother knew very well that from the tone of Peter’s letters and messages Polly had had every reason to be afraid of him. He had never actually threatened her directly but the things he said about her and wished upon her would have scared anyone. Peter’s mother had rationalized this. She reasoned that if the Bitch had only been pleasant – just said hello to her son and smiled occasionally, perhaps replied to one or two of his letters – then he would not have become upset. Peter’s mother felt, as Peter did himself, that devotion such as Peter’s deserved some sort of reward. After all, it isn’t every girl who’s worshipped the way Peter worshipped Polly.

“He brought her presents. Flowers and CDs. She never said thank you, not once. Not so much as an acknowledgement. Well, of course he was hurt. Of course he was upset. I don’t blame him. I nearly wrote to the Bitch myself.”

As far as the Bug’s mother was concerned, Polly wasn’t Polly any more. She was “that woman” or, when she felt particularly distressed, “the Bitch”.

“Anyway. He’s promised me he’ll let it go now, stop approaching her and all that. Well, he has to. Otherwise it’s prison, and what would I do then? It’s her loss, anyway. She doesn’t deserve a boy like my Peter.”

But Peter could not let it go. How could he? You can’t just let love go. Love is something beyond a person’s control. You don’t ask it to come and and you can’t make it leave. Only iron discipline can control an obsession, and Peter had none.

Even as his mother spoke Peter was at his computer. Inside his computer, like the bug he was. It was exciting to reach out to her through the silence of cyberspace. He was banned from e-mailing Polly, but that didn’t stop him making a connection. A palpable physical connection. His fingers touched the keyboard, the keyboard touched the modem, the modem touched the Telecom network, the network touched Polly’s phone, and so he touched her!

He could hack into her.

He had read her Sainsbury’s loyalty card account. He knew that she had bought most of her furniture at IKEA; he even knew the styles and colours she’d chosen. Likewise he knew the brand of abdominizing exerciser that she’d ordered in an insane moment of optimistic piety from the back of a colour supplement. He imagined her rolling back and forth upon it in a leotard, though he’d got that wrong; she’d never even assembled it. He even knew her ex-directory telephone number. Sitting in his bedroom reading Polly’s Telecom account on his computer screen had felt so good. It was a little invasion of her privacy, a violation of her secrets. Finding out the things she did not want him to know.

Peter’s mother sometimes opined that Peter seemed to love that computer more than he loved the Bitch. She did not understand that to Peter his computer was an extension of Polly, a means of penetrating her.

General Kent’s meeting had long since finished and he was alone, sitting at the wheel of a car parked in a small residential street in the Stoke Newington area of London. The car was unmarked, there were no military or diplomatic plates, no official driver, no bodyguard. Just Jack and the girl on his mind.

On Kent’s lap was a file marked, “General Kent: For sight of. Secure file. Absolute discretion required. No non-authorized viewing whatsoever”.

A few years before, it would have simply said, “General Kent: Private”. Kent reflected that military industrial complex bullshit was now expanding at such a rate that soon there would be no room on a file for the description of what was in it and they would have to attach extensions to the cover.

The contents of the file were biographical. Details about the life and current circumstances of a thirty-four-year-old Englishwoman: Polly Slade. There were photographs too, old ones and new. The new ones were very similar to those that had been taken by the Bug. Polly walking, Polly standing, Polly at the bus stop, etc. The pictures in the file were rather better than the Bug’s blurry efforts, having been taken by professionals, but they were no more revealing. Just a woman in a street. That was all. Of course the Bug did not know of the general’s photographs and the general did not know of the Bug’s. How astonished they would have been to find out the other’s existence. After all, the chances of the same woman being covertly photographed at the same time and in the same place by two completely separate and unconnected people must be millions to one. But that is what had happened.