Blast From The Past

“What is it they say?” she said softly. “Opposites attract.”

And so they were back at the point at which they had been a moment before. Looking at each other, the bed beckoning. The tender tension of love in the air. Jack’s knuckles whitened on his glass. Polly wondered if it would shatter. She could see that he was struggling to control his desires. She did not know why he was struggling, but she decided that she hoped he would lose.

“You look great, Polly,” said Jack, his heart thumping.

“Thanks.” Polly met his gaze. “You too.”

Jack did not reply. He could not think what to say. He knew what he ought to say. He had business to get through, that was why he had come. There were things about his past which only Polly knew, which only Polly could help him with. What Jack needed to do was ask the questions he had come to ask. But what he wanted to do was to make love.

“I’m glad you came back,” said Polly.

37

Polly was smiling.

Polly was frowning.

She was yawning at the bus stop. Peter’s mother knew those photographs almost as well as Peter did himself. Often when he was out she would find herself drawn to his room, where she would stand, surrounded by images of the woman whose existence had so infected her own. She knew what a terrible thing it was to be the mother of a child gone wrong, to be always looking back on life, searching for the moment when the change had come, when the damage had been done.

It seemed to Peter’s mother that her whole life had been a preparation for this current despair. Every moment of her past had been rewritten by the present. Peter’s boyhood, which had brought her such happiness, was now forever tainted by what he had become. Every smiling memory of a little boy in shorts and National Health Service glasses was the memory of a boy who had turned into a deceitful, sneaking pervert. Every innocent hour they had spent together was now revealed as an hour spent in the making of a monster. Could she have known? Could she have prevented it? Surely she could and yet Peter’s mother could not see how. It was true that he had never had many friends but she had thought him happy enough. After all she was lonely too and so they had always had each other. Perhaps if his father had stayed… but that swine had gone before Peter had even been born. She could scarcely even remember him herself.

Seeing Peter that night, her own son, the flesh of her womb, squatting in a filthy gutter like a rat, had torn at her heart. He was sinking back into madness, she could see that, and this time it would be deeper and more terrible than the last. Peter needed help, that was obvious, help that clearly she could not give him. She was the problem, she had made him in every sense. The help he needed lay outside their home, but to reach it Peter’s mother knew that she would have to betray her son.

38

Once more Jack hauled himself back from the erotic adventure his whole being craved. It was not the time. He had things to do. The key to his future lay in his past and it was Polly who held it.

“Opposites may attract, Polly, but they’re still opposites,” he said, hiding behind his drink. “I guess we’re lucky we didn’t last too long, huh?”

This comment, rather brutal in the circumstances, brought Polly back to earth with a jolt.

“Oh yes, very lucky. You probably did us both a favour,” she said bitterly. “When you had your final screw and then snuck off while I lay sleeping. You bastard.”

Suddenly her eyes glistened. Polly’s old enemy. Her tear ducts were responding as they always did when her emotions bubbled up. Although on this occasion some of the tears were for real. Jack was surprised to see Polly become so quickly upset, surprised to discover that the wound was still so raw, even after all the years. It made him feel ashamed. She had been the last person on earth he had ever wanted to hurt.

“It was my job, Polly.”

“What? Fucking and leaving? Nice work if you can get it,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a teatowel.

Jack studied the carpet. “I had to leave. I get orders. It’s a security thing.”

“A security thing? Not to say goodbye? Oh yeah, of course, because World War Three would probably have started if you’d said goodbye.”

What could Jack say? It had not been possible for him to say goodbye, that was all, but he knew that there was no point in saying so now.

“I mean, a note or a call to tell me our affair was over,” Polly continued bitterly. “That might have been just the excuse the Russians had been waiting for to wipe out the free world.”

All the intimacy that had existed between them a moment before had now evaporated. Polly was suddenly cold.

“I’m sorry,” Jack pleaded, “I couldn’t.”

“You were too fucking gutless to face up to the fact that you were betraying the trust of a seventeen-year-old girl and, what’s more, over sixteen years later you’re still too fucking gutless to admit it. ‘It’s my job.’ Pathetic!”

She was right, of course. He’d been too scared to say goodbye. Scared of seeing her hurt, scared of a scene, but most of all scared that had he woken her and seen once again that adorable, trusting, innocent love light in her eyes he would not have been able to go through with it. He loved her too much to risk saying goodbye.

Polly, of course, had known nothing of Jack’s tortured emotions. To her his departure had come like a cruel thunderbolt. She had no more expected the relationship to end than she had expected it to begin. She never dreamt that Jack had in fact tried to leave her many times during the latter part of their time together. In fact, from the moment he realized that he was in love with her he had been trying to find a way out.

“What can I do, Harry?” Jack wrote in anguish to his brother from the camp. “How do I find the courage to end this? How do I find a way to leave?”

In vain did Harry advise that if the army was forcing Jack to break his own heart and also the heart of an innocent, idealistic girl then maybe it was the army that he should be leaving and not the girl. Jack screwed up Harry’s letter in fury. Harry was a furniture maker, he did not understand the soul of a fighting man, he did not understand the all-encompassing power of truly vaunting ambition. Harry had never dreamt of being a leader of men.

“What do you know, you flake? Nothing,” Jack wrote back “Try to understand that your weak sensibilities mean nothing to me. Try to understand that I would break the heart of every girl in the world. That I would tear out my own and feed it to a dog in the street if just once I could get the chance to lead an American army into a battle. Any army into battle. You think that’s sick, I know. You think somehow Mom got inseminated by the devil, but it is what it is. I’m a soldier, first, last and only.”

“Bullshit, Jack!” was Harry’s reply. “You call me a flake! You’re the damn flake! You want to lead an army? You want to fight the world? You can’t even find the courage to hurt one seventeen-year-old girl.” Except in the end, of course, Jack did find the courage.

39

She sat waiting for him, as she always did, hiding in the darkness afforded by the bus shelter. Her heart thumped with excitement, her ears strained at the approach of every car. She was used to waiting for an hour or