“You were perfect, Polly,” said Jack, his eyes half closed. “A vision. I remember the first moment I saw you exactly. I have it fixed in my mind like some kind of idyll… like an Impressionist painting.”
“Jack, I was wearing a dustbin liner.”
“You still like plastic, I see.”
Polly remembered that she was wearing a rainmac and returned to the present with a bump.
“I don’t have a dressing gown, I’m afraid.”
In her punkier days Polly would not have thought twice about receiving guests in a nightie and a plastic mac, but times had changed. “I’m not used to entertaining under these circumstances. Sit down, Jack. I’d ask you to step through into the lounge, but I haven’t got one.”
“Hey, you never used to have a roof.”
“Yeah, haven’t I done well? I no longer sleep in the open.”
Polly was embarrassed about everything. What she was wearing, her little flat, her stuff. Why couldn’t he have given her some warning of his visit? Just so she could have got herself together? She would not have needed long. Just enough time to move house and acquire some beautiful and glamorous possessions. Shift her career up ten or fifteen gears and have a little minor repair work done on the cellulite that was beginning to appear on her upper thighs.
Instead Jack was seeing her life as it really was.
“Still rejecting capitalist materialism, I see.”
Jack had never been the most tactful of people.
“No. These days capitalist materialism is rejecting me,” Polly replied. “Getting its own back for the years I abused it. Sit down. You won’t catch anything, you know.”
There were two easy chairs for Jack to choose from, both, of course, already occupied with assorted stuff. Polly’s theory was that when you live in one room everything is a wardrobe. Chairs, tables, plantpots, casserole dishes. Everything is a place in or on which to put other things. In fact as far as Polly was concerned her whole flat was one big wardrobe and she was just one of the things in it. Jack could never have lived like that. Being a military man who had spent most of his life ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice, he knew that the key to comfort was organization.
One of Polly’s chairs was clearly an impossible proposition in terms of sitting down. Jack could see that there was no point in even thinking about unloading the dazzling cornucopia of things it contained. There were jumpers, books, newspapers, magazines, a partially dissected Russian doll. Stuffed toys, a guitar, an old typewriter, videocassettes, a radio, a bicycle pump attached to a deflated inner tube, coffee mugs and a roll of rush matting. Also wedged onto the chair was a Fair Trade South American string shopping bag containing three cans of baked beans and a packet of chocolate digestives. Polly was quite good about putting away groceries, but only quite. She always dealt with perishable items like milk and frozen peas the moment she got in from the shops, but dry and tinned goods she tended to leave in the shopping bag. After all, what was a South American string shopping bag if not a bag-shaped cupboard made of string?
On top of all of this was a strange, blue, plastic, tray-like object that Jack recognized immediately from the back of a thousand Sunday colour supplements. It was an abdominizer, a device for exercising the tummy. Polly had sent off for it two years previously. It had never been used, of course, and the unread instructions had long since been lost. The thing just drifted gently about Polly’s home from year to year, settling for a while before moving on silently and unnoticed. It had been on its current perch beside the shopping bag for about a month and was probably vaguely thinking about moving on. Perhaps to the clean clothes drawer, where there was always plenty of room. Apart from gathering dust the abdominizer’s only contribution to Polly’s life was to cause her the occasional pang of guilt. Not, however, a pang sufficiently strong to cause her to lie down upon the thing and gently roll her shoulders upwards by means of contracting her stomach muscles (while keeping her knees raised and her feet flat on the floor).
There was no way that Jack was ever going to be able to sit on that chair. That chair was like Doctor Who’s tardis. It was bigger on the inside; there was more stuff wedged between its arms than could possibly ever logically or physically actually fit. Jack could see that if he were to empty it into the room he and Polly would have to stand outside.
On Polly’s other chair was a big plastic sack of fertilizer. Jack found this item slightly surprising.
“Fertilizer, Polly?”
“I have a windowbox.”
Since the fertilizer was clearly a simpler proposition to clear than the contents of the other chair Jack lifted it to the floor. Not an easy task. This was a sack of fertilizer, not a bag but a sack.
“Jesus. Some windowbox. What are you going to do? Grow a tree in it?”
“I run a tight budget. Things are cheaper in bulk.” Jack thumped the sack down on the floor. Polly winced, thinking of the milkman below.
In the flat below, the milkman stirred in his bed. He glanced at his radio alarm clock. 2.40.
“Ha,” thought the milkman with sleepy satisfaction. The next time the upstairs woman asked him to turn down his morning radio, which he already had on so as you could barely hear it, he would be ready.
“Twatting great thumping and banging at two thirty in the morning, love,” he would say. “Nearly jumped out of my twatting skin. Couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour after…”
That is what he would say, the milkman thought, as he drifted back to sleep.
“Sorry,” Jack said. “Damn thing slipped out of my hands.”
“Well, for Christ’s sake be careful,” said Polly. “I have to share this house with other people, you know.”
“Yeah, well, like I said, sorry.”
Jack looked down at the plastic sack and for some strange reason felt a momentary tremor of alarm. Something about that bag was wrong, or at least resonant of something wrong, but he couldn’t imagine what. Suddenly he felt uneasy, slightly threatened as if the bag was a warning. He had the distinct feeling that he ought to be making some kind of connection, but it was eluding him. Fertilizer? What could possibly be bad or sinister about that? Yet he wondered.
“Chemical, too,” Jack said, his tone betraying a slight hint of his unease.
“You have a problem with that?” Polly enquired.
“No, not at all.”
Of course he didn’t. What could possibly be wrong about fertilizer?
“Except,” he added, “it’s not quite the organic pastoral Utopia you and the girls used to talk about, is it? I would have thought you would have favoured natural fertilizer.”
“Yeah, well, it’s tough keeping an animal in a bedsit, Jack. I used to shit out of the window, of course, but the neighbours complained.”
Jack sat down on the chair he’d cleared. As he did so his mobile phone rang. Polly jumped nearly out of her skin. For a moment she imagined that the Bug was back.
But that was just silly. He was hardly likely to have Jack’s number.
28
“Excuse me,” said Jack. “I have to take this.”
Polly’s look assured him that he was not welcome.
“Yeah?” said Jack.
It was Schultz, General Kent’s number two. After all the years Schultz’s career was still shadowing Jack’s. It was astonishing to Jack that such a man could become a general, but he seemed to have always been in the right place at the right time. And of course he never gave offence to anybody. Being incapable of making a decision, he had never ruffled any feathers and that was an important part of promotion in a peacetime army. Schultz had appeared to simply float up the ranks in the wake of better men. For the sake of the soldiers in the field Jack prayed that Schultz never floated into a combat command.
