Blast From the Past Read online

  Blast From The Past

  Ben Elton

  Black Swan

  ©1998

  ISBN: 0-552-99833- 8

  BLAST FROM THE PAST

  Ben Elton

  For Sophie

  1

  It was 2.15 in the morning when the telephone rang. Polly woke instantly. Her eyes were wide and her body tense before the phone had completed so much as a single ring. And as she woke, in the tiny moment between sleep and consciousness, before she was even aware of the telephone’s bell, she felt scared. It was not the phone that jolted Polly so completely from her dreams, but fear.

  And who could argue with the reasoning powers of Polly’s subconscious self? Of course she was scared. After all, when the phone rings at 2.15 in the morning it’s unlikely to be heralding something pleasant. What chance is there of its being good news? None. Only someone bad would ring at such an hour. Or someone good with bad news.

  That telephone was sounding a warning bell. Something, somewhere, was wrong. So much was obvious. Particularly to a woman who lived alone, and Polly lived alone.

  Of course it might be no more wrong than a wrong number. Something bad, but bad for someone else, something that would touch Polly’s life only for a moment, utterly infuriate her and then be gone.

  “Got the Charlie?”

  “There’s no Charlie at this number.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, arsehole.”

  “What number are you trying to call? This is three, four, zero, one …”

  “Three, four, zero? I’m awfully sorry. I think I’ve dialled the wrong number.”

  That would be a good result. A wrong number would be the best possible result. To find yourself returning to bed furiously muttering, “Stupid bastard,” while trying to pretend to yourself that you haven’t actually woken up; that would be a good result. Polly hoped the warning bell was meant for someone else.

  If your phone rings at 2.15 a.m. you’d better hope that too. Because if someone actually wants you you’re in trouble.

  If it’s your mother she’s going to tell you your dad died.

  If it’s some much-missed ex-lover who you’d been hoping would get back in contact he’ll be calling drunkenly to inform you that he’s just been diagnosed positive and that perhaps you’d better have things checked out.

  The only time that bell might ring for something good is if you were actually expecting some news, news so important it might come at any time. If you have a relative in the throes of a difficult pregnancy, for instance, or a friend who’s on the verge of being released from a foreign hostage situation. Then a person might leap from bed thinking, “At last! They’ve induced it!” or, “God bless the Foreign Office. He’s free!” On the other hand, maybe the mother and baby didn’t make it. Maybe the hostage got shot.

  There is no doubt about it that under almost all normal circumstances a call in the middle of the night had to be bad. If not bad, at least weird, and, in a way, weird is worse. This is the reason why, when the phone rang in Polly’s little attic flat at 2.15 a.m. and wrenched her from the womb of sleep, she felt scared.

  Strange to be scared of a phone. Even if it’s ringing. What can a ringing phone do to you? Leap up and bash you with its receiver? Strangle you with its cord? Nothing. Just ring, that’s all.

  Until you answer it.

  Then, of course, it might ask you in a low growl if you’re wearing any knickers. If you like them big and hard. If you’ve been a very naughty girl. Or it might say …

  “I know where you live.”

  That was how it had all begun before.

  “I’m watching you right now,” the phone had hissed. “Standing there in only your nightdress. I’m going to tear it off you and make you pay for all the hurt you’ve done to me.”

  At the time Polly’s friends had assured her that the man was lying. He had not been watching her. Pervert callers phone at random. They don’t know where their victims live.

  “He knew I was wearing my nightie,” Polly had said. “He got that right. How did he know that? How did he know I was wearing my nightie?”

  “It was the middle of the night, for heaven’s sake!” her friends replied. “Got to be a pretty good chance you were wearing a nightie, hasn’t there? Even a fool of a pervert could work that one out. He doesn’t know where you live.”

  But Polly’s friends had been wrong. The caller did know where Polly lived. He knew a lot about her because he was not a random pervert at all, but a most specific pervert. A stalker. That first call had been the start of a campaign of intimidation that had transformed Polly’s life into a living hell. A hell from which the law had been unable to offer any protection.

  “Our hands are tied, Ms Slade. There’s nothing actually illegal about making phonecalls, writing letters or ringing people’s doorbells.”

  “Terrific,” said Polly. “So I’ll get back to you when I’ve been raped and murdered, then, shall I?”

  The police assured her that it hardly ever came to that.

  2

  He’d been a client of hers. At the council office where she worked, the office that dealt with equal opportunities and discrimination. His was one of those depressing modern cases where sad white men who have failed to be promoted claim reverse discrimination, saying that they have been passed over for advancement in favour of less well qualified black lesbians. The problem is, of course, that often they are right: they have been passed over in favour of less well qualified black lesbians, that being the whole point of the policy. To positively discriminate in favour of groups that have been negatively discriminated against in the past.

  “But now I’m being negatively discriminated against,” the sad white men inevitably reply.

  “Specifically, yes,” the officers of the Office of Equal Opportunity (of whom Polly was one) would attempt to explain. “But not in general. Generally speaking, you are a member of a disproportionately successful group. There are any number of sad white men who achieve promotion. It’s merely that you are not one of them. You’re being negatively discriminated against positively, and you’ll feel the benefits in a more socially cohesive society.”

  Not surprisingly, this argument was never much of a comfort, but Polly’s failure to help her client did not cause the man to do as so many disappointed clients had done before him and dump the entire weight of his confusion and impotent anger on top of Polly’s innocent head. He had not called Polly a communist slut and stormed out of her office. He had not threatened to bring death and pestilence upon her. He had not promised to starve himself to death on the steps of the town hall until he got justice.

  If only the man had behaved like that. How much better it would have been for Polly. Instead, he had become infatuated with her.

  At first she had not been unduly alarmed. He sent one or two cards to her office and one day, on discovering that it was her birthday, he went out and returned with a single rose. On their final consultation he had given Polly a secondhand book, an anthology of post-war poetry, rather a tastefully chosen selection, Polly thought. He’d inscribed the book, “To dearest Polly. Beautiful words for a beautiful person.” Polly had not much liked that, but since the gift could not have cost more than a pound or two she had felt it would be more trouble to refuse it than accept. Particularly considering that it was, she thought, to be the last time they would meet.

  But the following evening the man knocked on the door of the house where she lived and greeted her as if he was a friend.

  “Hi, Polly,” he said. “Just thought I’d drop round and see what you thought of the book. Hope it’s not inconvenient. I mean, if it is, just say.”

  Of course, Polly knew then that she had a problem. She just did not know how big. “Wel
l, yes, it is inconvenient, actually, besides which …”

  “Don’t worry, don’t worry at all. How about later? Maybe we could have a drink?”

  “No, Peter,” she said. Peter was the man’s name. “That’s not a good idea at all. Now I don’t know how you got my home address, but you mustn’t come here again. What you’ve got to understand is that we have a professional relationship. It’s not at all acceptable for you to try to enter my private life.”

  “Oh dear.” Peter looked surprised. “Sorry.” And he turned and scurried off.

  Five minutes later he was back.

  The change in the man was shocking. His face seemed to have been physically transformed. The muscles and the contours appeared to do different things, point in different directions. He still looked pathetic but now he also looked demonic.

  “And what you’ve got to understand, Polly, is that you can’t just be fucking friends when you want to! All right? You can’t just fucking use me – talk to me at the office and then refuse to speak when I call.”

  Now Polly knew who had been phoning her. The tone, the voice, they were unmistakable. Polly wondered how she’d failed to notice it before, but then he’d always been so mild to her face.

  He was mild to her face no longer.

  “You can’t just take my fucking presents and then think you can make all the rules! A relationship cuts two ways, you know!”

  That was the thing. The terrible, terrible thing. Right from the very beginning Peter had thought he and Polly had a relationship. His anger at her rejection was the vicious, righteous anger of one who felt betrayed. Peter had invested so much in his fantasies of Polly that it was impossible for him to believe that his feelings were not in some way reciprocated. Everything Peter did he did with Polly in mind, and in his unbalanced state he had come to believe that despite her denials Polly was equally conscious of him.

  “Dear Polly,” he would write, “I watched you at the bus stop. Thank you for wearing that blue jumper. I was so thrilled to think that you had remembered I liked it.”

  And Polly would rack her brains and remember the time back in her old life, when Peter had been just another sad case, when he had remarked on how much he liked the top she had been wearing.

  The appalling thing was that after only a short period of harassment Polly did of course have a kind of relationship with Peter. Everything she did she did with Peter in mind. Thus the stalker feeds his need, becoming central in the life of someone who should be a stranger to him. For the victim – Polly – it was like being in love, except the emotion she felt was hate. Like a besotted lover, she thought about her torment the whole time. Of course to Peter this was only right. For he was giving everything – his time, his passion, his every living breath – so why should not the person he loved give something back? Surely a true and deep love is worth that at least?

  Eventually Peter got his wish. He and Polly were brought together, if only in court. Bringing matters to such a pass had not been an easy process for Polly. Naturally the law had been as concerned for Peter’s rights as it had been for hers and, as the police had pointed out, you cannot prosecute people for being annoying and rude. The law at the time did not even recognize stalking as a crime.

  Neither did it recognize the fact that Polly was being driven mad.

  It was not, it seemed, illegal for Peter to repeatedly write to Polly expressing his wish that she would get AIDS (which was all a bitch like her deserved). It was not illegal for him to stand outside her house and stare up at her window until late into the night. It was not even illegal for him to ring her front doorbell in the small hours of the morning. Polly’s distress was in fact almost irrelevant to the courts. What they wanted to know – what Polly was required to show – was that Peter’s actions had dealt her material harm. Money, it seemed, was the bottom line. The law required Polly to establish that Peter’s activities had left her out of pocket. Had the mental torment she was suffering rendered her unfit to work? Could she demonstrate that Peter was preventing her from making a living?

  If she could, the law would be in a position to act; otherwise she would simply have to learn to live with her problem.

  Polly produced her doctor’s letter, her employer’s testimonial, the diary of harassment the police had advised her to keep. She told of her sleepless nights, her clouded days, the tears and the anger that blighted her life.

  Across the courtroom Peter luxuriated in every detail, thrilled, finally, to have proof that she was as obsessed with him as he was with her.

  When it ended Polly had won a victory of sorts. The judge granted her an injunction. Peter was to neither approach nor contact Polly for an indefinite period, and should he try to do so he risked a custodial sentence. It did not stop him completely, but after further warnings from the police his hysterical intrusions on Polly’s life slowly began to diminish and for Polly life started to resemble something like a nervous normality.

  He was still with her, of course. She felt he always would be. She still glanced up and down the street when she left the house in the morning, still checked in the communal hallway when she got home at night. Still wondered as she had always wondered whether one day he would try to stick a knife into her for betraying his love.

  “Actually, I don’t think he would ever have turned violent,” Polly would say to her friends.

  “No, definitely not,” they would reassure her.

  “Actually I read that those type of people almost never do.”

  But she always wondered.

  And now, three months since he had last surfaced, it was 2.15 in the morning and Polly’s phone was ringing.

  3

  On the previous evening, as the dark clouds had gathered over the grim hangars of RAF Brize Norton and an invisible sun had set behind them, a small party of military men (plus one or two civil servants) assembled in the grizzly, drizzly gloom. They were awaiting the arrival of an American plane.

  Inside that plane, suspended high over England, sat a very senior American army officer, deep in thought. So preoccupied was the general that he had scarcely uttered a word in the five hours since his plane had left Washington. The general’s staff imagined that he was considering the meeting that lay before him. They imagined that the general had been wrestling with the delicate problems of NATO, the ex-Soviet states and the New World Order. After all, it was to debate such weighty issues that they had crossed the Atlantic. In fact, had the general’s staff been mind readers, they would have been surprised to discover that their commander was thinking about nothing more momentously geopolitical than a young woman he had once known; scarcely a woman – almost a girl, in fact, a girl of seventeen.

  Back on the ground the British coughed and stamped and longed for the bar. There were always mixed emotions involved for British officers when dealing with their American cousins. It was a thrill, of course. The undeniable thrill of being on nodding terms with such unimaginable power. Most of the officers standing waiting, shuffling their feet on the tarmac at Brize Norton, thought themselves lucky if they got the occasional use of a staff car. Their professional lives were couched in terms such as “limited response”, “tactical objective” and “rapid deployment”. When they described themselves and their martial capability they spoke of “an elite force”, a “highly skilled, professional army”. Everybody knew, of course, that these phrases were euphemisms for “not much money”, “not many soldiers”.

  The Americans, on the other hand, measured their budgets in trillions.

  “Can you believe that, old chap? Trillions of dollars. Makes you weep.”

  Their ships were like cities, their aeroplanes not only invincible but also apparently invisible. They had bombs and missiles capable of destroying the planet not once but many times over. Traditionally within the scope of human imagination only gods had wielded such mighty influence on the affairs of men. Now men themselves had the capacity, or at least some men, men from the Pentagon.

  There wa
s no denying that to other soldiers, soldiers of lesser armies such as the British who stood waiting on the cold, damp tarmac, such power was attractive. It was sexy and compelling. It was fun to be around. Fun to tell the fellows about.

  “I read somewhere they were developing ray guns.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  But alongside the sheepish admiration there was also jealousy. A deep, gnawing, cancerous jealousy born of grotesque inequality. The difference in scale between the American armed forces and those of its principal and most historically are so great as to render Britain’s military contribution to the alliance an irrelevance. In truth, Britain’s role is nothing more than to add a spurious legitimacy of international consensus to US foreign policy. That is why Britain has a special relationship. That is why Britain is special and why the Americans let it remain special. They certainly can’t trust the French.

  The general’s plane was beginning its descent. Looking out of the window, he could just make out the fields below. Grey now, nearly black. Not green and gold as he liked to remember them, as indeed they had been on that fabulous summer’s day half an army lifetime ago. Before he’d blown his chance of happiness for ever.

  He took from his pocket a letter he had been writing to his brother Harry. He often wrote to Harry. The general was a lonely man in a lonely job and he had few people in whom he could confide. Over the years he had got into the habit of using his brother as a kind of confessional, the only person to whom he showed anything like the whole of his self. His brother sometimes wished that he would unload his woes onto someone else. He always knew when he saw an airmail letter in his mailbox that somewhere in the world his celebrated and important brother was tormented about something.

  “The little shit never writes to say he’s happy,” Harry would mutter as he slipped a knife into the envelope. “Like I care about his problems.” Although of course Harry did care; that’s what families are for.