Blast From the Past (6 page)

Having overcome her initial shock, Polly asked Jack to sit down. She was certainly not going to let an opportunity like this go by. Here was her chance to convert the enemy. Jack ordered the coffee and asked if she’d eaten. Polly said that although she had, she’d be
happy
to do so again. In fact she was starving, having only allowed her parents to order a snack lest they think she was not eating properly at the camp.

If Jack had been at all concerned that his impulsive gesture would result in an awkward silence he need not have worried. While ordering the food the girl managed to call him a fascist, a mass murderer and a zombie-brained automaton. She also asked him if he ever thought about what he did, appealed to him to desert the army and enquired whether he knew the temperature at which a human body combusted. From there it was, of course, a short step to a detailed description of the Hiroshima shadows.

‘Those people were burned into the walls, you know. Babies’ skin peeled away like parchment while their eyeballs literally melted.’

Vainly did Jack protest that he too wished only for a peaceful world and that it was his opinion that the vigilance and armoured might of NATO’s forces had prevented such horrors occurring more often.

‘Oh, sure,’ Polly sneered. ‘You want to stop nuclear war so you build more bombs. Brilliant. That’s like fucking for virginity. You’re just a bunch of sweet old peace-loving hippies, aren’t you? Do you realize that one day’s budget for the US military would feed the entire Third World for an entire year?’

Polly had ordered a three-course meal at Jack’s invitation and at this point the tomato soup arrived. Jack was impressed to discover that this girl could even be furious about that. She had good cause to be. This was
the
time when microwave ovens were still a relatively recent invention, when the microwaves actually continued to be generated even when the door was open, thus making it possible for teenage wage slaves to contract bone cancer while at the same time failing to heat up the food.

‘It’s hot on the top and cold in the middle. With a skin on it! I mean, how do you do that? It’s almost as if it was deliberate.’

Jack just nodded and stared. He simply could not get worked up about the soup. He was feeling too happy. She really was beautiful, this wild English rose, and so angry. He loved how angry she was, passionately angry, angry about everything. Angry about nuclear bombs, angry about soup. ‘The system’ certainly had a lot to answer for.

How astonished would Polly’s parents have been had they returned at this point. Polly had found a boy, after all. Or, rather, a man, and no punk or hippy either but an American army captain. Their daughter would, of course, have explained that she had only just met the bloke. That he had nothing to do with her at all. But something in the eagerness of her manner, and the way she was blushing beneath the female gender symbols on her cheeks, would have warned them that this was to be no brief encounter.

And how astonished would Jack’s parents have been to see their deeply conservative son hanging upon the lips of such a strange-looking girl. A radical girl, a hippy girl, a girl not so different from the students
whom
Jack Senior had taught in the sixties and whom Jack Junior had despised as traitorous apologists for Hanoi. How they would howl with laughter when, later, they heard from Harry the extraordinary news that their little soldier son had fallen for a subversive! A peacenik! Their Reagan-loving, Red-bashing, Liberal-hating offspring, for whom it was and always would be hip to be square, had come under the spell of the enemy.

Because that is certainly what happened. Jack fell for Polly like a man with no parachute. Even at that first meeting he was already half besotted. He wanted their lunch to go on for ever. He could not remember having ever been in the company of such an exuberantly free spirit. This girl was the opposite of everything he wanted in his life, and yet he loved it. She was rude, untidy, undisciplined, unfettered and anarchic, and he loved it. How happy Polly made him feel, how liberating it was just talking to her. Of course Jack knew that he was taking a considerable risk sitting openly in a restaurant with her. She was quite definitely not a suitable dining companion for an army officer, and were he to be spotted it would mean a severe reprimand. But on that special day Jack did not care. In fact, he gloried in the risk he was taking. Polly was making him feel as free-spirited as she was herself.

Polly’s second course arrived: chips, baked beans, peas and carrots. She had asked if they had anything vegetarian but this being the days before that type of option was common in British catering the unpleasant youth in
the
silly hat had said the best he could do was to take the meat out of a meat and potato pie for her.

Polly squirted red sauce out of a large plastic tomato all over her food and seethed at the fascistic, Thatcherite injustice of it all.

‘They might at least offer something that isn’t dripping with blood. I think we should protest.’

‘I thought you just did,’ Jack replied. After all, Polly had announced loudly that she resented being forced to eat in a fucking charnel house. This had sounded like protest to Jack. The manager (who had enough to worry about what with having arrived at puberty only that morning) scuttled over and told Polly that she was not being forced to eat anywhere and that she was welcome to leave at any time, the sooner the better, in fact.

Polly told the manager that in fact she was being forced to eat in his establishment because multinational capitalism had ensured that the only food available on the roads of Britain was supplied by the owners of the dump in which they sat.

‘And when I say food,’ Polly added, ‘I mean of course shit.’

A pretty comprehensive protest, Jack thought. Certainly enough to be going on with. Polly, however, had other ideas and, taking out the superglue with which she was wont to block up police padlocks and car doors, she glued the sauce bottles to the table.

‘Well, that’ll certainly show them,’ said Jack.

‘Non-violent direct action. Anarchy, mate. You have to do it,’ Polly assured him.

‘Yeah. I’ll bet they’re really gonna rethink their policy on animal welfare once they find out you vandalized their ketchup.’

‘Protest is accumulative,’ Polly assured him.

‘Protest is self-indulgent and pointless, pal,’ said Jack. ‘Believe me, I know. My parents tried it. They spent the sixties knocking their country over dinner and waving banners at a liberal president. What did they get for their trouble? Richard Nixon. Ha! That showed them. Now they’ve got Reagan! Jesus, are they pissed. I phone them every time he cuts welfare just to rub it in. They’re a couple of sad, fucked-up anachronisms who don’t have the sense to see that God is a Conservative and the Gospel is money. The only way you’re ever going to change anybody or any institution is to hit ’em in the head or hit ’em in the pocketbook. If you want to hurt these people you take their money.’

‘Well, ye-es,’ said Polly, slightly confused.

Jack looked about him. ‘So, let’s go.’

‘What?’ Polly enquired, not yet catching on.

‘When I say run,’ said Jack, ‘we run.’

‘You don’t mean …’ Polly began.

‘Run!’ said Jack.

12

IF JACK HAD
been trying to find a way to impress Polly he had hit the nail on the head.
This is the stuff!
Polly thought as they charged out of the restaurant and ran for Jack’s car. She could scarcely believe that her despised enemy, a member of the US military, could ever do anything so cool as to run out of a restaurant without paying. Never judge a book by its cover, she might have reflected, had she not been so breathless with excitement.

They tumbled into the car and as Jack hit the ignition the sound system leapt into life along with the engine. It was playing Bruce Springsteen, Jack’s preferred driving companion, and by a happy chance the tape was cued up on ‘Born To Run’. Suddenly Polly found herself bang in the middle of the Boss’s runaway American dream and she shouted with delight as, with tyres screeching and Bruce pumping, Jack pulled out of the carpark and onto the road.

‘This is brilliant!’ Polly shouted as Jack kicked down the accelerator, hammered through the gears, cranked up the Boss and left any pursuers to eat his dust.

About a mile along the road, which they seemed to
cover
in about fifteen seconds, Jack slammed on the brakes and executed a spectacular handbrake turn off the main road, which nearly threw Polly out of the car. Suddenly they found themselves bumping along what was little more than a dirt track.

‘Think I’ll give the main roads a miss for half an hour,’ he remarked casually. ‘That manager kid is bound to have called the cops by now. Wish I had my off-road jeep four by four. Then we could have some fun.’

‘Four-wheel drive cars are destroying the countryside,’ said Polly.

‘Yeah. So?’ Jack enquired.

They soon arrived at a gate that led into a field and Jack was forced to stop. After that it was all rather spontaneous. They scarcely spoke, just grabbing each other with passionate fury and feeding on each other’s mouths and faces, tearing at each other’s clothes. Later on, Jack would remember thinking that Polly even kissed angrily or at least with the same kind of serious commitment that she seemed to put into everything else she did. Polly was not thinking anything at all. Her mind had been emptied by this sudden and completely unfamiliar surging physical desire. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. She had often wondered over the past three or four years what true passion felt like and whether she would ever experience it herself. She would wonder no more.

Then had come the inevitable environmental frustrations. It just isn’t easy to make love in cars. In his
efforts
to get to Polly Jack very soon found himself with his knee in the glove compartment and his stomach impaled upon the gear stick. It was most frustrating. Jack had not experienced anything like it since high school and his body had been suppler then. He was halfway to being on top of Polly but he could get no further, not without major organ removal.

‘Fucking gear stick,’ Jack growled, speaking for the first time since they had fallen upon each other.

‘It’s your own fault for driving a TR7,’ said Polly, feeling rather self-conscious because Jack had one of her breasts in his hand. ‘Everyone knows a TR7 is a wanker’s car.’

‘Well, it would need to be,’ Jack replied, extricating himself. ‘You certainly can’t fuck in one.’

It was no good. They would have to go elsewhere. Then, as if by magic, the sun burst through what had until then been a rather grey day. The field beyond the gate turned golden. A glorious meadow carpeted with long, swaying grass with butterflies hovering lazily above it. Had that field been candlelit, strewn with red velvet cushions and with Barry White’s greatest hits wafting softly from speakers hidden in the hedges, it could not have seemed more like a good place for sex.

‘Come on,’ said Jack.

They climbed the gate and fell together into their five-acre bed.

Deflowered amongst the flowers, Polly thought to herself, being not quite out of her teenage poetry stage.

It was a disaster. Making love in a field is almost as
difficult
as doing it in a car, especially if it’s been raining the night before and you have a problem with pollen and what looked like soft grass turns out to be some kind of organic barbed wire. It’s probably just about possible if you’ve brought a groundsheet, a mattress, a blanket, some DDT and a scythe. Otherwise, forget it. Pretty soon Jack’s elbows and knees were in cowpats, Polly’s knickers were in shreds and something with two hundred legs and fifteen sets of teeth had crawled up his backside.

For the second time since they had begun their desperate groping Polly and Jack were forced to put their passion on hold. With Polly’s virginity still pretty much intact, Jack suggested a hotel.

‘OK,’ said Polly, getting up and putting what was left of her knickers back on. ‘But I haven’t got much money, so I’ll have to pay you back later for my half of the bill.’

Jack laughed, feeling a tremendous wave of affection sweep over him for this strangely intense girl. At that point the sun, which had disappeared into some clouds, came out again behind Polly and all of a sudden she was bathed and silhouetted with an almost luminous golden glow. She looked like some kind of pure and lovely teenangel and Jack’s conscience began to trouble him.

‘Polly, how old are you?’ he asked.

‘Seventeen,’ said Polly defensively.

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Jack.

‘But I’m a lot more mature than you, mate,’ Polly added. ‘I know that it’s dangerous to play with guns.’

Seventeen. Jack had been hoping for at least nineteen, possibly twenty, although he knew that twenty would be the absolute limit.

‘Polly. I’m thirty-two. I’m fifteen years older than you.’

Polly shrugged.

‘Are you a virgin?’ Jack asked.

‘What if I am?’

It was worse than Jack had thought.

‘I can’t do this to you,’ he said.

Suddenly it was not the sunlight that made Polly glow but righteous indignation. Her cheeks reddened and her eyes took on a fiery glint.

‘Listen, you patronizing bastard,’ she said. ‘You aren’t doing anything
to
me. I do things for myself, all right? If I choose to go to bed with you – or in this case to a field with you – if I choose to use your body for my pleasure, then that’s my business. I am a woman and males do not have a say in my life. In fact, emotionally and politically I’m a lesbian. It just happens to be my misfortune that I fancy men, that’s all.’

Jack had never been overly receptive to radical feminism in the past, but he was warming to it. ‘OK,’ he said.

They got back into the car and drove to a nearby hotel. It was a large, redbrick, eighties place, built on a roundabout in the middle of nowhere with toytown turrets and pastel-coloured Roman pillars in the foyer. Polly wanted to hate the place as a prime example of the reckless urbanization of the countryside, but she
could
not because in fact she found it all desperately romantic. This, considering that the hotel was really just a large carpark with a leisure complex, conference centre and executive miniature golf course attached, Jack found very touching.