Blast From The Past

things that only a short while ago she would never in a million years have imagined happening to her. She knew what Jack would think. The same thing that everybody thought. How sad. How surprising. How pathetic. Never thought she would be so desperate. For months after Polly had approached “Millennium Match” she had kept the fact as a dark and shameful secret, never telling a soul. Then one day she had decided to come out. Come out as a lonely person. A lonely person who was trying to do something about it. Since then Polly had made a point of telling people at the first chance she got.

In shops. “Two kilos of carrots, please, a grapefruit, oh, and by the way, I’ve joined a dating agency.”

At work. “Right, so before we address the issue of gender discrimination in nursery teaching, is everybody aware that I’ve joined a dating agency?”

The idea had been that Polly would overcome her embarrassment and shame by confronting it head on. That her proud honesty would educate people to see her decision for what it was, a legitimate effort to cope with the social challenges of an increasingly fragmented society. It hadn’t worked yet, but she was persevering.

“A dating agency,” said Jack in the same tone her mother had used. “That’s insane. You’re a babe.”

“You don’t have to have three heads, garlic between your teeth and a season ticket to Riverdance to be lonely, Jack. All you need is to be alone. To have met all the people that your circumstances are likely to bring you into contact with and not be in a relationship with any of them.”

Polly knew that she wasn’t unattractive, she wasn’t socially inept; she was just alone. And, to her surprise, the men the agency had introduced her to were much the same. Just alone, like her. The problem was that this fact hung over every new meeting like a cloud of slightly noxious gas. Polly would sit there toying with her food thinking, not bad looking, good manners… but he’s alone. Why is he alone? Finding herself unable to dismiss the unworthy suspicion that, unlike herself, this man was not merely an innocent victim of fickle fate but somebody who was alone for a reason.

Of course, Polly was sufficiently realistic to know that the object of her doubt was almost certainly thinking the same thing about her. Even the lonely stigmatized the lonely. The very people who knew best that you do not need to be a psychopath or a gargoyle to be lonely were the most wary of other lonely people. Like outcasts everywhere, they learned to despise their own kind.

“Polly,” said Jack. “It’s insane that you went to an agency. The world is full of eager single guys your age.”

“I’m the same age now that you were when we were together, Jack. You think about that. When you were an eager single guy of my age you weren’t seeking out lonely insecure women of your age, you were seducing a seventeen-year-old girl.”

Well, she had him there, smoking gun and all, no doubt about that. He drained his glass and poured himself another large one.

“Jesus, Jack, I hope you’re not driving.”

He was, but he was going to risk it. Jack’s courage and resolve were deserting him. The revelation that Polly was so lonely had been a shock. For years he had thought that he was the lonely one. He had always imagined Polly settled and happy in some gloriously perfect relationship. Living with a university lecturer, perhaps, or a Labour MP. Of course, his spy had revealed that she lived alone, but not that she was lonely.

Oh, how he would have loved to cure her of her loneliness. To whisk her away right there and then and make her happy for ever. He couldn’t, though, for exactly the same reasons that he had left her in the first place. He had had his chance and he had chosen his path.

“I like to drink,” he said. “It helps with moral decisions.”

“Moral decisions? What moral decisions?”

Jack did not wish to say. “Nothing,” he said.

“What moral decisions?” Polly insisted. Morality was a topic that Jack had never been interested in discussing in the past.

“Well, hey, every breath a person takes is a moral desicision, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“I think it is.”

Polly could not imagine what Jack meant.

“Well, it’s ‘to be or not to be’, isn’t it?” he explained. “I mean, that has to be the question.”

“I don’t really see why.”

Polly would have been surprised to know that Jack had been thinking a lot about morality of late.

“I don’t see why you don’t see why,” he said, “considering what a morally minded person you always set yourself up to be.”

“I never set myself up to be anything.”

“Every moment we decide to remain alive we are making a moral choice. Because our existence has repercussions, like a pebble in a very polluted pond. Everything we eat, everything we drink, everything we wear, is in one way or another a product of exploitation.”

Polly knew that, of course, but she was most impressed that it had occurred to Jack.

“You don’t have to be a sex tourist to abuse children in the Third World,” Jack continued. “All you have to do is buy a carpet or a sports shirt. Or open a bank account. Or fill your car with gas.”

“Well, yes, of course,” said Polly, “and it’s the duty of every consumer to confront and minimize that exploitation…”

Jack laughed. It was a laugh with a sneer at the back of its mind. “Confront and minimize? That’s for wimps. It seems to me that the only truly moral thing a person could do in these sad circumstances is kill himself.”

41

Got it! The knife was finally hooked.

Slowly, gently, with infinite care, Peter reeled in his prize, inch by inch hoisting the wire retriever back up through the grid, watching his beloved blade ascend.

Then he had it. It was in his hand once again where it belonged. He sat on the wet kerb and studied it, carefully closing its blade and cradling it in his hands as if it were a tiny pet. Then he tried the catch. It worked perfectly; the blade sprang out of the hilt as if it were alive, snapping into place with the usual satisfying click. Peter’s little pet was clearly none the worse for its time in the underworld.

Another car came round the corner, but Peter did not bother to move this time. He remained where he was, kneeling in the gutter. Now that he had his knife back he felt invulnerable.

42

In the chilly atmosphere of the formal but faded grandeur of her dining room, Nibs held her knife also. It was a cheese knife, but she was gripping it just as hard as the Bug gripped his.

The full story of her husband’s most recent philandering, or as much of it as he had felt forced to tell her, had made grim listening. The dessert had been delivered and she had pushed hers away untasted; he’d eaten his, of course – he could always pig down pudding – and now the cheese had arrived. Nibs took a little English red Leicester but she couldn’t eat it. They were both drinking quite hard and a third bottle of wine had been opened, but neither of them felt at all drunk.

“So I suppose you want me to stand by you,” said Nibs.

“I want you to forgive me.”

Nibs was not in a forgiving mood. Her fate was sealed. She knew that, but she was not under any obligation to be magnanimous about it. She was doomed to become one of the “women who stand by her man”. They were a common type these days; you saw the famous ones on the television all the time. Politicians’ wives, pop stars’ wives – sad, trembling, red-eyed victims whom the press had hounded from their hiding places, baited onto their doorsteps and forced by circumstance to lie through their teeth before a baying mob. The cliches never