made it worse.
“Leave it,” said Jack irritably. “We’re paying.”
“I hate that kind of attitude,” Polly snapped. “We’ve paid so we can act irresponsibly. And I hate this sneaking about too, this constant tension.”
“I do not have a choice but to sneak about. I have to be discreet, which is something, incidentally, you have made considerably more difficult by your decision to dye your hair puke colour.”
In her heart of hearts Polly had to admit that the orange and green highlight effect she had tried to create had not really worked.
“If you don’t like sneaking about, baby,” Jack continued, “go hang out with one of your own kind.”
“You don’t choose who you fall in love with, Jack, and don’t call me baby.”
Polly was starting to look a little teary. She didn’t like it when he referred to their relationship in such a casual manner.
“Oh, come on, Polly, not the waterworks.”
All her life Polly had cried easily. It was her Achilles’ heel. She wasn’t a crybaby; it was just that strong emotions made her eyes water. This was actually quite debilitating in a minor sort of way. It made her look a fool. It would happen in the middle of some particularly frustrating political argument. There she would be, banging her fist on the pub table, struggling to find words to express her deeply held conviction that Mrs Thatcher was a warmongering fascist and suddenly her eyes would start getting wet. Instantly Polly would feel her image transforming itself from passionate feminist revolutionary to silly overemotional little woman.
“Well, there’s no need to cry about it,” Polly’s dialectical opponents would sneer.
“I am not bloody crying,” Polly would reply, tears springing from the corners of her eyes.
The tears were there now and Jack did not like emotionally charged situations. He liked to pretend that life was simple. Polly thought him repressed and out of touch with himself. Jack just felt he had better things to do with his time than get worked up about stuff. But the truth was that he was worked up, terribly worked up. Beneath his highly cool exterior he was anguished and distraught. Because Jack was in love with Polly and he knew that he would have to leave her.
“Jack,” said Polly, “we need to talk about where we’re going.”
Jack did not want to talk about this at all. He never did want to talk about it, because deep inside he knew that they were not going anywhere.
“You know why people smoke after sex?” he said, dragging at his cigarette. “It’s an etiquette thing. It means you don’t have to talk.”
“What?”
“People smoke after sex to avoid conversation. I mean, in general post-coital is a socially barren zone. Particularly that difficult first time. You’ve known somebody five minutes and suddenly you’re removing your horribly diminished dick from inside of their body. What do you say?”
Sometimes Polly found Jack’s crude, abrasive style sexy and exhilarating. Other times she just found it crude and abrasive.
“We didn’t say anything after our first attempt, did we? Because we were hiding in a field trying to avoid large insects and the police.”
“Yeah, well let me tell you, it saved us a lot of embarrassment. Any diversion is welcome in such a situation. Even the cops. Think about it. You’re naked with a stranger. What do you say?”
“A stranger?”
“Sure, a stranger. The first time you sleep with someone ten to one they’re going to be a stranger. How many times do you have sex with someone for the first time whom you’ve known more than a few hours?”
“Well, there’s not much point asking me, is there?”
“Yeah, well take my word for it, babe.” Jack did not like to be reminded of Polly’s lack of sexual experience. It made him feel even more responsible for her than he already did.
“The first time you screw a person all you’ve been thinking about since you met them is screwing them. Then suddenly it’s over and you don’t have that agenda any more. What can a guy say? ‘That was fun.’? ‘That was nice.’? It’s so weak, so dismissive, like the girl’s body was a cupcake and you took a nibble. On the other hand, ‘That was awesome,’ is too much. She knows you’re bullshitting. ‘Oh yeah, so awesome it lasted two whole minutes and you shouted out some other girl’s name.’”
Jack took another long drag on his cigarette and developed his thesis.
“So people smoke. The human psyche is so pathetically insecure that we would rather die of lung cancer than confront an uncomfortable situation. I don’t know what will happen now everybody’s giving up. Maybe they’ll share a small tray of canapes.”
“I thought ‘How was it for you?’ was considered the correct inquiry.”
“Nobody ever asked that. That question is a myth. How could you ever ask, ‘How was it for you?’? No answer would be good enough.”
“Why not?”
“Well, just now, for instance, when we made love. How was it?”
Jack had caught Polly off her guard.
“Well, it was fine… great, in fact, really great.”
“You see,” said Jack, as though his point were proved. “Already I’m thinking, ‘fine’? ‘great’? Why doesn’t she just come right out and say ‘pathetic’? That’s what she means. Why doesn’t she just say, ‘Your dick is a cocktail sausage. I get more satisfaction when I ride my bicycle over a speed hump.’”
“Oh well, if we’re taking puerile macho paranoia into account…”
“Got to, babe, it’s what makes the world go around.”
Polly took another cigarette and lit it from her previous one.
“Well, I’m definitely giving up soon. Tomorrow, in fact; certainly this month or by the end of the year.”
They smoked in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was setting. When it was dark they would leave, Polly knew that. Jack rarely consented to spend a whole night with her. She got out of bed and began to search for her clothes.
Polly never ceased to be amazed at the way her clothes disappeared while she was making love. Particularly her bra and knickers. It was a side of sex that had come as a complete surprise to her. It wasn’t as if she hid them or anything. She did not deliberately secrete them behind the washbasin in the bathroom or between the sheet and the mattress, or hang them from the picture rail. None the less after lengthy searching it was in such places that they would be discovered. On this particular occasion she eventually found her knickers wedged inside the Corby trouserpress.
This was Jack’s favourite part of Polly’s dressing process. He loved her naked, of course, he worshipped her naked, but somehow near nakedness was even more endearing. There was something he found particularly moving about Polly wearing only her knickers. Polly said that it was because like all men he was subconsciously afraid of vaginas and preferred to see them sanitized with a neat cotton cover, which Jack thought was quite literally the stupidest thing he had ever heard anybody say in his entire life.
The gathering gloom within the room was making Polly feel sombre. When the sun was shining and Jack and she were making love she could forget the circumstances of their relationship. Forget that he was a killer and she was a traitor. Forget the police and the soldiers. The razorwire and the searchlights. Forget her life in the camp. Forget the Cold War. Then night would fall and Polly would remember that it was life with Jack that was the dream. Outside was the deadly reality.
“It would be so lovely to be normal,” she said, rescuing her bra from inside the hotel kettle (the lid of which she’d have sworn had not been removed even once since they had entered the room). “To be able to walk down a street together, go to the pub.”
“Don’t even think about it.” Jack shivered at the very thought.
“I was arrested again yesterday,” said Polly. She and her comrades had been attempting to prevent the missile transporters from leaving the camp. In the event of war the strategic plan for the missiles was that they would be bussed about to various parts of the county on mobile launchers, making them less of a target for the enemy. Every now and then the army practised this deployment, using empty transporters. It was to one of these that Polly had been attached when the police arrived.
“Arrested?” said Jack casually. “You didn’t say. How’d it go?”
