Ben Elton - Blast From The Past

General Kent looked at the face in the pictures. Such a nice face. A little careworn, perhaps, but very pretty. Not everyone would have thought the woman beautiful, but General Kent did, ravishingly so.

The file also contained a telephone number.

Kent carried a mobile phone, but this he left in his pocket. Instead he took up the little stock of ten-pence coins that his security contact had furnished him with and got out of the car. Nearby was a public phonebox. Not one of the solid red ones that Jack remembered, but a phonebox none the less, not merely a phone in a hood on a pole.

It was very late and the street was quiet. Empty almost, save for one other man, a nervous-looking fellow loitering further up the street. The other man appeared to have been making for the phonebox himself, but when he saw Kent he stopped.

Kent wondered whether the man had been planning to call one of the extraordinary number of girls who advertised their sexual services on little cards inside the phonebox. Judging by the pictures on the cards, some of the most impossibly glamorous and attractive women in Britain were advertising cheap fucks in Stoke Newington. Kent suspected that if the fellow ever did pluck up courage to call he would be disappointed.

He pushed twenty pence into the machine and dialled. It was 2.15 a.m.

The phone was on its fifth ring. After the next one Polly’s answerphone would start. She sat on the floor and assumed the lotus position. When the Bug spoke she wanted to be ready.

Polly’s yoga teacher, a Yorkshireman called Stanley, had said that yoga was the process whereby the superior, conscious element in a person was freed from involvement with the inferior material world. A tough trick to pull when you’re being stalked in the small hours of the morning, but Polly was determined to give it a go. And so she sat, as the answerphone began to clunk, her feet crossed, her knees spread like a wing nut, her elbows on her knees and her fingers and thumbs set in the required position.

She was calm, she was at ease, she was relaxed.

Her bottom was freezing.

The problem was her nightie. It was an old shirt of her father’s, and was too short for the situation; it did not properly cover her backside from the cold floorboards on which she sat. She did not wish to break position at this crucial moment of calm; on the other hand the whole point was to be comfortable, and a cold bum was not comfortable. Besides which, some ancient memory was whispering to her that this was the best way of getting piles. It was no good, she would have to move onto the rug. While remaining absolutely calm, at one with herself and in the lotus position, Polly shuffled over to the rug using only her buttock muscles to motivate her.

“Hello,” said Polly’s voice as Polly shuffled. “Nobody’s answering at the moment, but please leave a message after the tone. Thank you.”

A defiantly unfunny and matter-of-fact message. Polly’s days of using music, cracking gags and pretending to be the Lithuanian Embassy had ended the day that the Bug had first discovered her phone number. During the worst period of harassment she had got a male friend to record her outgoing message, but this had just made genuine callers think they had the wrong number.

There was no incoming message.

The caller hung up and the answerphone clicked and clunked accordingly. Furious, Polly leapt up from her lotus position (an effort which nearly broke both her ankles), grabbed the phone off its cradle and shouted, “Fuck off!” at the dialling tone. Stanley would not have been pleased.

“Now, d’you think ’indu philosophers’d go abaht ’ollering ‘Fook off!’ into’t pho-an?” he would have enquired. “No fookin’ way.”

Polly struggled to prevent her blood from boiling. Calm was required. Calm. She had work in the morning.

Perhaps it had been a wrong number after all.

Perhaps the drug baron on the other end of the line had heard Polly’s voice on the machine, realized his mistake and had gone on to deliver his threats elsewhere.

Inside the phonebox Jack put down the phone. He had been expecting her to answer personally; he hadn’t prepared himself for an answerphone. She couldn’t be out. He’d specifically had that checked. She must be screening her calls. Or else she had become a heavy sleeper over the years.

A little further up the street Peter was watching Jack. For a moment he thought that the man must have finished his calls but then, to Peter’s fury, the man picked up the phone a second time.

Polly was just about to return to bed when the phone rang again. This time she didn’t bother with the lotus position; she just stood in the middle of her room, shaking with anger and fear, and waited.

“Hello,” said Polly’s voice again. “Nobody’s answering at the moment, but please leave a message after the tone. Thank you.”

This time the machine did not clunk to a halt. Polly could hear the faint electric hiss of an open but silent line. He was there but he wasn’t speaking. Standing there, alone in the night, Polly watched the phone like it was a hissing snake. Like it was going to pounce. She itched to grab up the receiver again and scream further obscenities, but she knew that she mustn’t. If there was one sure way to give the Bug satisfaction it was to share her emotions with him. Do that, shout at him, let him hear your fear and he would be nursing an erection for a week.

“Polly?”

It wasn’t the Bug. She knew that within those first two syllables.

“Polly. Are you there?”

Within four words she knew who it was.

“Are you there, Polly?”

It was the last voice in the world that she had expected to hear.

“Listen, don’t freak out,” said General Kent. “It’s Jack, Jack Kent.”

Jack and Polly had met many years before, in a roadside restaurant on the A34 near Newbury. Jack was a captain, serving with the American forces in Britain. Those were the days when the Cold War was still hot, which was more than could be said for most of the food in the restaurant. The moment he’d walked in, Jack had regretted his decision to stop off for a cup of coffee, and as he brushed the crumbs from the orange plastic seat he very nearly turned around and walked straight out again. His uniform had already attracted attention, however, and he did not wish to appear foolish. He was, after all, an ambassador for his country.

Jack cleared a space for his newspaper amongst the debris left by the previous occupants of his table. There was an election on, not that he cared much about British politics. Mrs Thatcher was in the process of pulverizing some whitehaired old boy in a donkey jacket. It didn’t look like a very equal contest to Jack; he’d been under the impression that the Brits believed in fair fight.

A hormonally imbalanced teenaged lad approached Jack’s table and offered him a menu.

“Just coffee, please,” Jack said.

“Coffee,” the lad repeated, and Jack knew immediately that he would not be brought coffee. He would be brought that beverage the British chose to call coffee but which the rest of the world recognized as the urine of the devil’s dog. This dark and bitter brew would be accompanied by a small, sealed plastic pot of white liquid marked “UHT Cream”, which Jack knew to have been squeezed straight from the colon of a sick seagull.

Jack took in his surroundings. Great Christ, what hellish imagination had conceived of such places? These “Little Shits” and “Crappy Cooks” and “Happy Pukers”? These pale imitations of another, more vibrant culture plucked from the highways and byways of America and dumped down, dowdy and deflated, upon the A roads of Britain? In the three years that Jack had been in the United Kingdom he had viewed the inexorable advance of these gastronomic ghettos with increasing alarm. They were everywhere. Every turn in the road seemed to reveal another ghastly vision of red, yellow and orange identikit architecture plus a huge plastic elephant for the kiddies. Any day now Jack expected to find one of these cheery hellholes installed at the gates of his base, possibly even outside his office door.