inscribed the book, “To dearest Polly. Beautiful words for a beautiful person.” Polly had not much liked that, but since the gift could not have cost more than a pound or two she had felt it would be more trouble to refuse it than accept. Particularly considering that it was, she thought, to be the last time they would meet.
But the following evening the man knocked on the door of the house where she lived and greeted her as if he was a friend.
“Hi, Polly,” he said. “Just thought I’d drop round and see what you thought of the book. Hope it’s not inconvenient. I mean, if it is, just say.”
Of course, Polly knew then that she had a problem. She just did not know how big. “Well, yes, it is inconvenient, actually, besides which…”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry at all. How about later? Maybe we could have a drink?”
“No, Peter,” she said. Peter was the man’s name. “That’s not a good idea at all. Now I don’t know how you got my home address, but you mustn’t come here again. What you’ve got to understand is that we have a professional relationship. It’s not at all acceptable for you to try to enter my private life.”
“Oh dear.” Peter looked surprised. “Sorry.” And he turned and scurried off.
Five minutes later he was back.
The change in the man was shocking. His face seemed to have been physically transformed. The muscles and the contours appeared to do different things, point in different directions. He still looked pathetic but now he also looked demonic.
“And what you’ve got to understand, Polly, is that you can’t just be fucking friends when you want to! All right? You can’t just fucking use me – talk to me at the office and then refuse to speak when I call.”
Now Polly knew who had been phoning her. The tone, the voice, they were unmistakable. Polly wondered how she’d failed to notice it before, but then he’d always been so mild to her face.
He was mild to her face no longer.
“You can’t just take my fucking presents and then think you can make all the rules! A relationship cuts two ways, you know!”
That was the thing. The terrible, terrible thing. Right from the very beginning Peter had thought he and Polly had a relationship. His anger at her rejection was the vicious, righteous anger of one who felt betrayed. Peter had invested so much in his fantasies of Polly that it was impossible for him to believe that his feelings were not in some way reciprocated. Everything Peter did he did with Polly in mind, and in his unbalanced state he had come to believe that despite her denials Polly was equally conscious of him.
And Polly would rack her brains and remember the time back in her old life, when Peter had been just another sad case, when he had remarked on how much he liked the top she had been wearing.
The appalling thing was that after only a short period of harassment Polly did of course have a kind of relationship with Peter. Everything she did she did with Peter in mind. Thus the stalker feeds his need, becoming central in the life of someone who should be a stranger to him. For the victim – Polly – it was like being in love, except the emotion she felt was hate. Like a besotted lover, she thought about her torment the whole time. Of course to Peter this was only right. For he was giving everything – his time, his passion, his every living breath – so why should not the person he loved give something back? Surely a true and deep love is worth that at least?
Eventually Peter got his wish. He and Polly were brought together, if only in court. Bringing matters to such a pass had not been an easy process for Polly. Naturally the law had been as concerned for Peter’s rights as it had been for hers and, as the police had pointed out, you cannot prosecute people for being annoying and rude. The law at the time did not even recognize stalking as a crime.
Neither did it recognize the fact that Polly was being driven mad.
It was not, it seemed, illegal for Peter to repeatedly write to Polly expressing his wish that she would get AIDS (which was all a bitch like her deserved). It was not illegal for him to stand outside her house and stare up at her window until late into the night. It was not even illegal for him to ring her front doorbell in the small hours of the morning. Polly’s distress was in fact almost irrelevant to the courts. What they wanted to know – what Polly was required to show – was that Peter’s actions had dealt her material harm. Money, it seemed, was the bottom line. The law required Polly to establish that Peter’s activities had left her out of pocket. Had the mental torment she was suffering rendered her unfit to work? Could she demonstrate that Peter was preventing her from making a living?
If she could, the law would be in a position to act; otherwise she would simply have to learn to live with her problem.
Polly produced her doctor’s letter, her employer’s testimonial, the diary of harassment the police had advised her to keep. She told of her sleepless nights, her clouded days, the tears and the anger that blighted her life.
Across the courtroom Peter luxuriated in every detail, thrilled, finally, to have proof that she was as obsessed with him as he was with her.
When it ended Polly had won a victory of sorts. The judge granted her an injunction. Peter was to neither approach nor contact Polly for an indefinite period, and should he try to do so he risked a custodial sentence. It did not stop him completely, but after further warnings from the police his hysterical intrusions on Polly’s life slowly began to diminish and for Polly life started to resemble something like a nervous normality.
He was still with her, of course. She felt he always would be. She still glanced up and down the street when she left the house in the morning, still checked in the communal hallway when she got home at night. Still wondered as she had always wondered whether one day he would try to stick a knife into her for betraying his love.
“Actually, I don’t think he would ever have turned violent,” Polly would say to her friends.
“No, definitely not,” they would reassure her.
“Actually I read that those type of people almost never do.”
But she always wondered.
And now, three months since he had last surfaced, it was 2.15 in the morning and Polly’s phone was ringing.
3
On the previous evening, as the dark clouds had gathered over the grim hangars of RAF Brize Norton and an invisible sun had set behind them, a small party of military men (plus one or two civil servants) assembled in the grizzly, drizzly gloom. They were awaiting the arrival of an American plane.
Inside that plane, suspended high over England, sat a very senior American army officer, deep in thought. So preoccupied was the general that he had scarcely uttered a word in the five hours since his plane had left Washington. The general’s staff imagined that he was considering the meeting that lay before him. They imagined that the general had been wrestling with the delicate problems of NATO, the ex-Soviet states and the New World Order. After all, it was to debate such weighty issues that they had crossed the Atlantic. In fact, had the general’s staff been mindreaders, they would have been surprised to discover that their commander was thinking about nothing more momentously geopolitical than a young woman he had once known; scarcely a woman – almost a girl, in fact, a girl of seventeen.
Back on the ground the British coughed and stamped and longed for the bar. There were always mixed emotions involved for British officers when dealing with their American cousins. It was a thrill, of course. The undeniable thrill of being on nodding terms with such unimaginable power. Most of the officers standing waiting, shuffling their feet on the tarmac at Brize Norton, thought themselves lucky if they got the occasional use of a staff car. Their professional lives were couched in terms such as “limited response”, “tactical objective” and “rapid deployment”. When they described themselves and their martial capability they spoke of “an elite force”, a “highly skilled, professional army”. Everybody knew, of course, that these phrases were euphemisms for “not much money”, “not many soldiers”.
The Americans, on the other hand, measured their budgets in trillions.
