Blast From the Past (12 page)

That was what she told herself, anyway, but the fact that for the first month after her return she scrutinized every American face that came or left the camp suggested that Polly’s heart had not yet healed. Madge could see that Polly was still troubled, but of course she thought the whole problem was lack of roughage.

But it would take more than a high-fibre diet to cure Polly’s pain. Only time would do that and time moved slowly at the Greenham camp that spring for Polly. She had not told Madge about Jack, or any of the women with whom she began again to share her life. They would not have understood. Polly did not understand it herself, except to know that love is blind. Everything Jack stood for Polly truly did despise, and she despised herself for having fallen in love with such a man. What was worse, she despised herself for not having the strength to forget him.

When the missiles finally did arrive, Polly was amongst that briefly celebrated group of women who managed to breach the perimeter fences and carry their protest on to the base itself. Polly’s poor, horrified
parents
opened their newspaper one morning to discover that she and her comrades had reached the landing runway and had very nearly forced the huge US Air Force transport planes to abort their landings. It was a great propaganda triumph, which in the opinion of the USAF very nearly caused a nuclear disaster. In court Polly pleaded guilty to criminal trespass but stated that she had acted in order to prevent the greater crime of millions of people being vaporized in nuclear explosions. The magistrate declined to accept global geopolitics as mitigating circumstances and Polly was bound over to keep the peace.

‘Ha!’ said Polly. ‘Keeping the peace is what I was doing anyway.’

Which she thought was rather a clever thing to say.

21

POLLY WAS NOT
the only one still grieving for the past. Jack too found himself unable to step out from under the long shadow of their relationship. With Jack, however, the effect was more positive; the memory and continuing presence of Polly in Jack’s heart was to prove a considerable influence on his life and career.

After leaving Greenham Jack spent most of the rest of the eighties stationed in the lovely old German city of Wiesbaden, a part of the vast American military presence that had been camping in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Wiesbaden was the headquarters of the US Army in Europe. Over the years the local German community had grown accustomed to the presence of hordes of young foreign men in their midst and an uneasy relationship had grown up between the military and its host community. Of course, there were tensions and conflicts, but discipline was strict and scandals were rare. Rare but not unknown. One night in a bierkeller in Bad Nauheim, a town a few miles up the autobahn from Wiesbaden, there occurred an incident which the army subsequently quickly tried to forget.

Normally Jack would not have been in a bierkeller at all. He was not much of a pub man. Being extremely ambitious, he tended to reserve his spare time for study or sports. However, on this particular night Jack was ready to relax. He had been out on a week’s field training, a week of camp food and camp beds, during which time he had been cold and wet for twenty-four hours a day. Jack was ready to spend an evening drinking the German winter out of his bones.

Being a little tired of Wiesbaden, he took the army bus to Bad Nauheim, where he very soon fell in with some fellow officers.

‘Hey, Jack, come over here and have a beer, you enigmatic bastard,’ a captain known as Dipstick shouted as Jack entered the bar. Dipstick was so called because he was a mechanical engineer and also because he liked to talk about how much sex he was getting. He shared an offbase house in Bad Nauheim with another army captain called Rod. Dipstick and Rod were a real couple of good ol’ boys and were already half full of beer. Between them sat a German girl called Helga. Helga was the sort of girl who liked soldiers and in particular getting drunk and having sex with them. Had Helga been a man she would have been called a good ol’ boy too, just like Dipstick and Rod, but because she was a woman it was well known that she was a scrubber.

Helga had been seeing quite a lot of Dipstick in the weeks preceding the night in question, but on one occasion she had also slept with Rod. Originally, the
evening
had been planned by Dipstick and Rod as a threesome. They had brought Helga to the bar in the hope of persuading her to have sex with them both. Rod and Dipstick had every reason to think that Helga would be amenable to this idea, because they had laughed about the possibility together on a number of occasions. Helga had even boasted that it would take at least two of them to handle her properly. A threesome was just the type of dangerous game that Helga was likely to get herself into because beneath her bravado she was a lonely, insecure girl and what she craved most was attention. A psychologist might have made much of Helga’s exhibitionism and lack of any real sense of self-worth. Dipstick and Rod just thought that she was a crazy, horny bitch.

Also at the table when Jack arrived were Brad and Karl, two young lieutenants who had been in Germany for only three months, and Captain Schultz, Jack’s characterless, ineffective acquaintance from the Greenham base. Schultz had been dropping his wife off at her bridge club and had popped into the bar for a Coke and some food. True to form, Schultz was dithering over the bar menu, unable to decide between the roast pork sandwich and the wiener schnitzel with sauerkraut.

Jack got some drinks and joined the group, which meant that there were now six men at the table and one woman.

‘We’re kind of guy-heavy here, babe,’ Dipstick remarked to Helga. ‘Could you call a friend?’

‘OK, baby,’ said Helga and went off to make a call.

Sure enough, in a short while a girl called Mitti turned up. It was fun for the older men to watch Karl and Brad’s eyes pop out as Mitti joined their table. Her tiny waist and substantial bosom turned heads right across the bar. Mitti and Helga were both good-looking girls who were skilled at making the most of what they had, the fashions of the time being well suited to advertising one’s wares. Both women wore short, ballooning ra-ra skirts and cowboy boots. Helga had on a denim jacket encrusted with glittering fake diamonds and with a picture of Los Angeles painted on the back and the words ‘Hot LA Nights’ picked out in twinkling studs and costume jewels. Under this she wore a pink shining spandex boobtube, from which her bosom seemed permanently in danger of escaping. Mitti wore a wetlook leather jacket, also jewel encrusted, with a collar that stood up round her ears and shoulders that jutted out about a foot and a half both ways, making it necessary for her to go through narrow doors sideways. Both Helga’s and Mitti’s hair was astonishing in a way that only mid-eighties hair could be; it was ‘power’ hair, ‘me’ hair, ‘fuck you’ hair and ‘will you fuck me?’ hair all rolled into one. Two great tousled blonde manes with platinum highlights. Gelled, sprayed, teased, streaked, glittered and glued and no doubt sheltering enough CFCs to bash a hole in the ozone layer the size of Germany. These were young women with lovely skin, but they had covered their faces in make-up, tan foundation,
laden
lashes and great bruises of purply blusher dusted across each cheekbone as if both women had been punched on the sides of their faces. They spoke through smoke-filled mouths, their glossy shining baby-pink lips edged with dark liner which made them look hard and vain.

Drinks were poured and then more drinks, and the conversation got dirtier. That old favourite, swearing in different languages, came up and caused roars of laughter as Helga regaled the soldiers with the various German words for a blowjob.

Karl and Brad were loving it. It felt great being real soldiers, hanging out with the older guys, talking dirty with the Kraut tarts. Even Jack was enjoying himself; it was all harmless enough, the girls were witty in an obscene, streetwise sort of way, and Dipstick as always knew the latest gags from the States.

‘Why does Gary Hart wear underpants?’ he asked. ‘To keep his ankles warm!’

The Democratic primaries were underway back home and Gary Hart, a promising, charismatic politician who had at one time been frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, was now in deep trouble over what were coming to be known as ‘bimbo eruptions’. Hart had a reputation as a womanizer, a reputation that had been confirmed when he had been caught on a yacht canoodling with a bikini-clad girl who was in no way his wife. Most of the guys on the base were aghast that such a thing could be enough to fatally wound the man’s professional aspirations.

‘He’d get my vote,’ Dipstick assured the company. ‘What do we want in the White House? Faggots?’

The two young men roared their approval at this comment and slapped their thighs to show what regular guys they were. Schultz felt a little differently.

‘Well, I don’t know. I think we have a right to expect the very highest standards from those in public life,’ he said. ‘After all, if a man lies to his wife, how can we tell he’s telling the truth to us?’

‘Bullshit, Schultz,’ said Dipstick. ‘If a man says he doesn’t lie to his wife then he’s a liar anyway.’

Jack realized that Mitti was looking at him intently. He returned her stare and smiled, thinking to himself that she was probably very attractive underneath all the hair and make-up. Mitti’s lips fell open slightly in the orthodox manner of the
femme fatales
of
Dynasty
. Her lips and teeth glistened, and slowly the pink, wet, pointy tip of her tongue gently journeyed from one corner of her hard-looking but soft mouth to the other. Mitti was not a subtle girl. She could not have made her intentions more clear if she had sent Jack a note asking for sex. She liked the look of Jack. She had quickly realized that he was a cut above the other men at the table. He roared less loudly, he leered less obviously and he was not forcing his legs against hers under the table.

Jack was surprised to find that he was interested too. It had been a long time since he had made love. He had not been entirely celibate since running out on Polly four years before, but he’d not been very active either. He still thought of Polly every day. He wanted her every
day
and no girl he had met since had remotely matched up to her. Certainly not this tawdry, brassy, blousey woman waggling her tongue at him across the table. She was everything that Polly had not been and vice versa. Yet there was something in Mitti’s eyes, something behind the silver eyeshadow, the thick liner, the great caked mascaraed lashes, that Jack recognized. Perhaps it was honesty, or a sense of humour; it might well have been loneliness. Jack found himself returning Mitti’s stare.

‘This dump’s getting kinda crowded,’ said Dipstick, a white moustache of beer froth on his upper lip. ‘How about we all go drink champagne at the American?’

The Hotel American was a favourite venue for one-night stands among the more discerning members of the Allied Armed Forces in the area. It was not sleazy, being rather well appointed and expensive, but neither did it object to partying. Its two suites boasted whirlpool baths in which three could sit comfortably and four even more so. This was a time when the almighty dollar was so strong that other currencies cowered before it; even the not unmuscular German Mark doffed its cap respectfully in the face of the purchasing power of the US buck. Americans overseas were far better off than they were at home and suites at the Hotel American were well within the budgets of discerning US officers.

Helga said she was happy to drink champagne any time, Rod was of course enthusiastic about the idea, and Brad and Karl could hardly believe their luck. Mitti
just
shrugged. She shrugged directly at Jack, a shrug that suggested that she would like the idea a whole lot better if he was in on it. All eyes turned to Jack. Nobody considered Schultz. Even the young officers ignored him; he was just that kind of invisible person.

Jack sucked at his beer and laughed. ‘So you guys are planning a party?’ he said.

‘Didn’t you hear?’ Dipstick replied. ‘Life’s a party.’

It was decision time. Jack wondered what he wanted. What he wanted, of course, was Polly but he couldn’t have her, so perhaps he wanted Mitti. He was drunk and she was getting more attractive by the minute. Maybe he should go along with it. Have a few laughs. He was so hard on himself most of the time; perhaps it would be fun. He looked at Mitti and her eyes were welcoming.

‘Well hey, no rush,’ said Dipstick. ‘We’ll just all sit here getting old while you think about it.’

Jack pulled himself together. He was dreaming. Orgies were not for him. It was a strange thing, but Polly, or at least the memory of Polly, had come to act as a sort of censor on Jack’s life. He often found himself wondering what she would make of the things he said and the things he did. Of one thing he was sure: she would not think much of his cavorting at the Hotel American with drunken girls. It was almost as if having betrayed her utterly he was trying to make it up by not betraying her memory.

‘No thanks. I’m going to get something to eat,’ Jack said, rising from the table.

‘Hey, come on, Jack,’ Dipstick protested. ‘You can’t break up the party.’

‘You don’t need me, Dip,’ Jack laughed, and as he did so he caught Mitti’s eye and the disappointment there. He could not help but smile at her and that was enough. Mitti got up too.

‘I’m coming with you,’ she said boldly.

‘
Nein, Mitti
,’ Helga said.

‘Yeah,
nein
,’ Dipstick added.

Helga and Dipstick could both see the ratio of the sexes changing from six:two to five:one and neither of them liked it.

‘C’mon, Jack. You and Mitti have gotta stay.’

‘Mitti can do what she likes, Dipstick, but if you think I want to see your white hairy ass in a spa bath you’ve been in the army too long,’ Jack said, putting on his coat.

‘I don’t think I’ll bother either, guys,’ said Schultz. ‘I have an early appointment at the chiropodist tomorrow and I’d hate to be all bleary for it. Thanks, anyway.’