on winter mornings when their fingers were cold.
“OK, that’s all I got,” said Jack. “I’m afraid it ain’t a lot.”
“I’m sure it will prove sufficient, General,” Gottfried assured him.
“Good.”
“So, then, just to recap, sir. A girl called Polly, Greenham peace lady. Seventeen years old in 1981. Find her and kill her.”
“That’s right…
“I’m sorry, sir, I just assumed-”
“Yeah, well don’t. Just find her, OK? Get her address, hand it over to me and then forget we ever had this conversation.”
32
“God help the American taxpayer,” Polly said with some feeling.
Jack acknowledged that it had been a questionable use of public funds, but what was the point of power if you couldn’t abuse it?
“Fuck the American taxpayer. I’ve given them twenty-eight years of my life. Uncle Sam owes me.”
“He doesn’t owe you anything. You love being a soldier.”
“Murderer, you used to say.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s because I’m a soldier that I lost you.”
“You didn’t lose me, Jack, you discarded me and I don’t think it was because you were a soldier. I think it’s because you were a gutless bastard. In fact, I think you still are, since you seem to think that calling or writing to an old flame would result in a court-martial for treason.”
“I told you, Polly, I couldn’t.”
Polly didn’t understand and she wasn’t likely to. Of course he had lost her because he was a soldier. The army would not have accepted his and Polly’s relationship in a million years. Jack had been faced with a straight choice and he had chosen his career. That did not mean he liked it, it did not mean that a part of him had not regretted the decision every single day since.
“Why did you have me traced, Jack? Why are you here?”
“I thought you already had your answer. I already told you how I found you.”
“This is a subclause. Why did you find me?”
“Why do you think? To find out what I’d let go. To find out what you’d become.”
“Jack, we knew each other for one summer in a totally different decade and you dropped me. That was it, end of rather stupid story. Now you turn up out of the blue talking about us like we were a Lionel Ritchie lyric. What is this about?”
“That summer was the best summer of my life, Polly. The best anything of my life.”
“You just miss the Cold War, that’s all.”
“Well, hell, who doesn’t?” Jack laughed. “And what’s happening with you in the new world order, then? I noticed when I met him that you weren’t the prime minister yet.”
“I never wanted to be prime minister, Jack. I wanted there not to be any prime ministers. I wanted the nation state with its hierarchies to be replaced by an organically functioning system of autonomous collectives.”
“With you as prime minister.”
“Not at all, although obviously some kind of non-oppressive, non-authoritarian body of governance would be required.”
“And anybody who didn’t like your non-oppressive, non-authoritarian governance could get shot.”
“That wouldn’t happen.”
“Polly, it always happens when you fucking idealists get to defending your revolutions. You always start shooting people. By any means possible, as Lenin said. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao. The most pious murderers in hell…”
Polly very nearly rose to it. Very nearly slammed her fist on the table and launched into the ancient and terminally tedious arguments of the left. Just in time, she hauled herself back from the brink.
“Jack, this is ridiculous! Are you out of your mind! I’m a completely different woman now, twice as old, for a start, and you turn up after nearly twenty years quoting Lenin and trying to continue the conversation we were having.”
Jack smiled. She was just the same. The same passion, the same beauty.
“I don’t know. I just thought it might have been kinda fun, you know, for old times’ sake. Like the first time we talked.”
“Fought.”
“Yeah, fought. In that hellhole on the A34.”
“Except then, of course, we ended up in…”
Polly did not finish the sentence. She did not need to. Her eyes gave the thought away. She did not need to say “bed” because there it was, right there, not ten feet from either of them. Her bed, unmade and inviting, the duvet tossed aside, the deep impression of Polly’s head still there upon the pillow. A bed just climbed out of. A bed ready to be climbed back into.
“I’ve never been in one of those restaurants since,” Polly said.
Jack fixed his stare on hers. She could feel herself going scarlet.
“That day changed me too, Polly. I’ll never forget it.”
“They’re just so disgusting. I mean, how do you ruin tomato soup?”
“I didn’t mean the restaurant, Polly, I meant…” Jack’s tone spoke volumes, but Polly was trying not to listen. She stuck resolutely to her topic.
“Putting a stupid hat on a sixteen-year-old school-leaver does not constitute training a chef.”
“Polly, how long can you stay angry at a bowl of soup?”
“No, but really. How do you mess up tomato soup? It was hot on the top and cold in the middle. With a skin on it! That has to be deliberate,” said Polly, once again reliving the horror of that gruesome cuisine.
“Forget the soup,” Jack pleaded. “Walk away. It’s been sixteen years, you have to let it go now. We weren’t bothered about eating, anyway. We went to that little hotel. Do you remember?”
Polly looked puzzled. “A hotel? Are you sure? I don’t remember that.”
Jack could not conceal his disappointment. “Oh, I thought you would-”
“Of course I fucking remember, you fucking idiot,” Polly said as loudly as she dared without provoking the sleeping milkman downstairs. “I lost my fucking virginity, didn’t I!”
Jack got it. “Oh, right,” he said. “British sarcasm.”
“Irony.”
He hated that. That was a British trick, the sarcasm and irony trick. Earlier in the evening the senior British officer had tried to make the same distinction.
“Oh, yes,” the pompous little khaki shit had said, having cracked some particularly weak sarcastic put-down or other. “You American chaps aren’t big on irony, are you?”
Jack thought it was pathetic the way the British aggrandized their penchant for paltry sarcasm by styling it “irony”. They thought it meant they had a more sophisticated sense of humour than the rest of the world, but it didn’t. It just meant that they were a bunch of pompous smartasses.
“So you do remember,” he said.
“Of course I bloody remember,” Polly replied. “I remember every detail. The soup-”
“Forget the soup.”
“The pie-”
“Forget the pie.”
“I wrote to the restaurant, you know.”
