Blast From the Past (20 page)

‘Don’t call me babe.’

Polly was still sitting on the bed. Jack marched back across the room and sloshed more Bailey’s into her half-full glass before refilling his own with bourbon. He had not intended to discuss this issue but he felt too strongly about it to let it go. Besides, this night of all nights Jack wanted Polly to understand something of his point of view.

‘Christ, where do you people get off! Gays in the military. What does it have to do with you, anyway? You don’t care about the army, you hate it, you wish it would turn into a network of crêches for single mothers! But you still think you can tell us how to run it—’

Polly raised her hand for him to stop.

‘Hang on, hang on. Hang on! Me?’ she said. ‘Don’t lay your shit on me, mate. I’m a council worker from Camden.’

‘I’m talking about your kind, Polly. It doesn’t matter where you come from or what job you do. Your kind are international.’

‘My kind!’ Polly protested. ‘What the fuck do you mean, my kind?’

‘Your kind, Polly, that’s what the fuck I mean. Your kind.’

Jack was sick and tired of them. These liberals, these
feminists
, these gay activists. The army wasn’t a laboratory for social experimentation, it was the means by which the nation defended itself. He had tried to explain this point at the congressional hearings into sexual bias in the armed forces and what a waste of time that had been. It had been like Canute trying to turn back a tidal wave of bullshit. What an impotent fool he had felt, sitting there in front of that pious pulpit of political zealots and petrified fellow travellers. It was the scared ones Jack despised most. At least the true believers believed, insane utopians though they were, but the ones who knew he was right were beneath contempt. They just did not have the guts to risk offending the current sensibilities and so they nodded and sighed and stayed silent, mindful of their thin electoral majorities back home. It was McCarthyism in reverse. The liberals had become the witch-hunters: ‘Are you or have you ever been a homophobic?’ There was a terrifying new orthodoxy abroad and as far as Jack was concerned whether it was happening on Capitol Hill or in Camden Council it had to be confronted.

‘We take communal showers in the army, you know that, Polly,’ Jack said bitterly. ‘You think about that. In the field we live in the same dugouts, wash in the same puddles. I don’t want no queer grunt staring at my ass instead of the soap.’

Polly did not want to discuss this, but like Jack she simply could not let it go. His attitude was just too disgusting. Every liberal instinct in her body screamed to reply.

‘Gay men are not sexual predators, Jack.’

‘How the hell would you know? Straight guys are sexual predators!’

‘Well, yes, you certainly showed me that!’

‘Exactly,’ Jack said loudly, as if this proved his point.

‘Keep your voice down! There’s a milkman asleep downstairs.’

On the floor below, the milkman was not asleep. Jack’s voice had woken him up again and he was gleefully making a note of the time of the disturbance: ‘
Man’s voice: shouting: 3.06 a.m
.,’ he wrote. It wasn’t that the milkman enjoyed being disturbed, but the upstairs woman had complained so often about his radio, even threatening to involve the landlord, that the current disturbance was manna from heaven. Let her try and complain now.

Little did the milkman imagine that within a few hours his notebook would be in the hands of the police.

Jack reduced the volume but his tone remained combative.

‘If you think I’m a predator, well, let me tell you, honey, I ain’t the worst by a long country mile. I’m the norm.’

Jack was remembering Bad Nauheim and the night that the German girl Helga had pushed her luck too far. Not all men were of the type involved in that terrible incident, but all men were men none the less.

‘If you put any of the men in any unit I ever
commanded
in a showerful of women,’ Jack continued, ‘they are going to check them out for sure, and if they can they’re going to try and get with them.’

‘Well, then, they need to rethink their—’

Jack had just sat back down in his seat, but his frustration made him leap up again and take a step towards Polly.

‘
Followed by heavy footsteps: 3.07 a.m
.,’ the milkman wrote solemnly before rolling over and wrapping the pillow around his head.

Jack was standing over Polly now.

‘I know you don’t like it, Polly, but that’s what young men do! They check out babes and they try to have sex with them and you can make up all the laws you like but that won’t change.’

Polly rose from the bed and squared up to Jack. There was no way this man was going to win his argument with intimidating body language.

‘Yes, it can, Jack, it’s called civilization. It’s an ongoing process.’

‘Yeah well it’s got a long way to ongo.’

Polly checked herself. What was she doing? She did not want to have this discussion, she had work in the morning. In fact, it very nearly was the morning.

‘Look, Jack. I really don’t know what we’re talking about!’

‘We are talking about gays in the military.’

‘Well, I don’t want to talk about gays in the military!’

‘Well, I do! It’s relevant!’

‘Relevant to what?’

‘Relevant to me! I want you to understand me.’

The urgency of Jack’s tone subdued Polly for a moment.

‘You know what straight men can be like,’ he continued. ‘You feel I showed you that.’

Oh yes, Polly certainly felt he had done that.

‘So why not gays? What’s so different about them, huh? Are you going to tell me that if you put a healthy young homosexual in a showerful of young men who are in the peak of physical condition he is not going to check out their dicks?’

Polly tried to stop herself replying. She did not wish to be having this conversation. On the other hand she had to reply. Jack simply could not be allowed to get away with this reactionary bullshit.

‘Well, he might look, but—’

Jack leapt on the point. ‘And when he does he’s going to get himself beaten to a pulp.’

‘That’s not his problem—’

Jack laughed. ‘Excuse me? Getting beaten to a pulp is not his problem?’

‘Well, I mean, obviously it is his problem if he’s being beaten up.’

‘It’s encouraging that you spotted that.’

His attitude was unpleasant. Polly’s point was not an easy one to make. Particularly if Jack was going to take cheap shots.

‘But the problem originates with the people who are doing the beating!’

‘Great, next time I get shot I’ll take comfort from that. Hey, this is not my problem. The guy with the gun, he has the problem, he needs to get in touch with his caring side.’

How many times in how many pubs had Polly had discussions like this one? The reactionary point of view was always so easy to put, the complex, radical argument always so easy to put down.

‘Just because the world is full of Neanderthal morons doesn’t mean we have to run it for their benefit and by their rules.’

Jack searched his brain for a telling argument. Somehow it was important to him that Polly understood his point of view.

‘Listen, Polly, when the guy who digs up the street checks out your butt you’re pretty pissed, am I right?’

‘Well, yes—’

‘You’re furious. You’d like to knock that guy off his scaffolding and drive a dump truck into his asshole cleavage. Well, men don’t like having their butts checked out either, but unlike you they’re actually going to do something about it, they’re going to attack the guy who is checking them out and you cannot run an army with guys either sucking each other off or beating each other up.’

Of course it sounded reasonable. Polly had spent her life listening to reactionary arguments and they always sounded reasonable. Which was why it was all the
more
important to counter them. Even at nearly 3.15 in the morning. Even with a mysterious ex-lover who had turned up out of the blue after more than sixteen years’ absence. Polly had a policy. It was embarrassing at times and always boring, but her view was that casual racism, sexism and homophobia always had to be confronted.

‘People have to learn to restrain themselves,’ she said.

Jack had a rule too. It was that he would never suffer pious liberal bullshit in silence.

‘Says you, babe, and you and your people can keep on wishing!’

Polly was shocked at how bitter Jack’s tone had become.

‘Me and my people?’ she said. ‘What people, Jack? I don’t have any people! What are you talking about? Why are you bringing me into this? None of this is any of my business.’

Polly was not even sure that Jack heard her. He looked strange. There was a different look in his eye; she could see real anger there.

‘You know what’s coming next, don’t you? Pacifists.’

‘What about pacifists?’

‘In the fucking army! Why not? Some Congresswoman is going to announce that pacifists have a right to join the army. In fact, the army should be encouraging them! Running a programme to attract them! Because the constitutional rights of American pacifists are being denied by—’

Jack was becoming red in the face. For the first time
he
looked his age. A confused, middle-aged man with a chip on his shoulder.

‘I’m not interested in your paranoid ravings, Jack. I want to know why—’

But Polly might as well have been talking to herself.

‘Fucking constitution! It’s a sponge, it’ll absorb anything anybody wants. It’s like the damn Bible. Everybody can make it work for them. Well, the constitution can only take so much. One day the Supreme Court is going to rule that the constitution is unconstitutional and the United States will implode! It’ll disappear up its ass.’

‘Good! I’m glad.’ Polly felt tired. She had to leave for work at seven forty-five.

‘Jack, I can’t have this conversation with you now. I have to work tomorrow. Maybe we could meet some other—’

Jack lowered his tone. He spoke quietly and firmly. ‘I’ve told you, Polly, I only have tonight. I leave in the morning.’

He stared at Polly as if that was all he needed to say, as if Polly could like it or lump it, neither of which she was prepared to do.

‘Well go, then! Go! I don’t want you here. I didn’t ask you to come.’

Jack did not move at all. He just stood in the middle of the room, looking at her.

‘I’m staying, Polly,’ he said, and for the first time Polly began to feel a little nervous. Something about Jack had changed. He was being so intense.

‘OK, stay, stay if you want to, but … but you can’t just drop in after sixteen years and talk about sexual politics and the constitution, and … It’s … it’s stupid.’

Jack looked tired too now. ‘You always used to want to talk about politics, Polly. What’s changed? Is there nothing of value left for you people to fuck up?’

He seemed to say it more in sorrow than in anger. None the less Polly wasn’t having any of it.

‘I have nothing to do with you or your hangups, Jack,’ said Polly calmly. ‘We knew each other briefly, years ago. We don’t even live in the same country.’

‘Politics is international, you always used to tell me that,’ said Jack, and he smiled at the memory. ‘You read it me out of that damn political cartoon book you had,
The Start-Up Guide to Being an Asshole
…’

‘
Marxism for Beginners
.’

‘That’s the one.’

Polly blushed at the memory of how naïve she’d been. She had actually given Jack a copy of
Marxism for Beginners
. Not that she had ever been able to get through it herself, of course. Huge quotes from
Das Kapital
do not get clearer just because there’s a little cartoon of Karl Marx in the corner of the page. It had been a gesture, a nod towards civilizing him. All Jack ever admitted to reading was the sports pages, and Polly had dreamt of politicizing him. Fantasizing about walking into the peace camp one day with Jack on her arm and saying to the girls, ‘I’ve got one! I’ve converted him.’ She had imagined herself the toast of the peace movement, having persuaded a genuine baby killer to
see
the light. Polly had been going to make the world’s first vegetarian fighter pilot.

‘Wasn’t I the starry-eyed little pillock?’ she said.

‘Well, did you ever read Churchill’s
History of the Second World War
?’ Jack replied. The book-giving had, after all, been a two-way thing.

‘Be serious, Jack, it was about fifty volumes!’

‘Oh, and Marx is easy reading, is it?’

Now they were both laughing. Neither of them had changed at all. They were still a million miles apart in every way but one.

‘I wanted you to be a part of my world as much as you wanted me to be part of yours, Polly,’ said Jack. ‘You’re not the only person who got disappointed. I believe that in my own way I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.’

Jack was terrified to discover that he still did.

‘You can’t have done,’ said Polly quietly, avoiding Jack’s eye, ‘or you wouldn’t have left.’

‘That’s not true, Polly. I had to leave. I’m a soldier. I’m not good at love, I admit that. I don’t find it easy to live with. But whatever love there is inside me I felt for you, to its very limits and beyond.’

35

WHILE JACK AND
Polly were wrestling with their pasts in London, back in the States another drama of betrayal was being played out. A man and a woman were sitting alone together in the faded splendour of a dining room that had been beautifully decorated twenty years before. It was dinner time in the eastern states and the couple had been sitting at their evening meal for an hour or so, but neither of them was hungry. Their food had gone cold before them. Hers remained entirely untouched; he had had a stab at his, but really all he had done was play nervously with the cold, congealed gravy.

‘I’m sorry, Nibs,’ he said. ‘What more can I say? I don’t want to do it but sometimes it just happens. I just can’t help myself.’

‘Nibs’ was the man’s private name for his wife. It was what he always called her when they were alone, their little secret, a token of his affection. These days they were alone together less and less. Their professional lives had grown so complex that dining together had become a matter for diaries, and when his work took him away she could no longer go with him. Perhaps it was that, she thought. Perhaps her career had driven
him
into the arms of other, stupider, more available women. She wondered if he had special names for them. Perhaps he had called them Nibs also, for convenience and to avoid embarrassing mistakes. At the thought of this Nibs’ eyes grew misty and briefly she took refuge in her napkin.