Blast From the Past Read online

  As the plane began slowly to drop towards England and its undercarriage emerged, rumbling and shaking from its belly, noisily pushing its way into the gathering night, the general took up his pen. Contrary to all accepted safety practices, he also lowered the tray table in front of him and laid the unfinished letter out before him.

  “Olde England is outside of the window now, Harry,” he wrote. “‘Funny, me returning this way. Back in those sunny, glory days when I was last in this country, all I could think about was becoming a general. All I wanted was my own army. Now I’m a general, a great big general, the biggest fucking general in the European Theatre. Strange then that all I can think about is those sunny, glory days. And her. I’ll bet you’re laughing.”

  General Kent paused, then put down his pen and tore the letter into pieces. He had never lied to Harry and he did not wish to start now. Not that anything he had written was untrue. Quite the opposite. His thoughts were indeed filled with memories of halcyon days long gone and the girl with whom he had shared them, and he was certainly cursing the army that had torn them apart. But that was only half the story of what was on General Kent’s mind, and Harry would see that immediately. With Harry, omission was tantamount to deceit. Harry would know that his brother was holding out on him, as he always did. Harry had known that Jack wanted to be a soldier even before Jack had known it himself. It had been Harry who had broken the news to their parents after Jack had chickened out and left home without a word. Christ, what a scene that must have been.

  The general stuffed the torn pieces of his letter into the ashtray that was no longer allowed to be an ashtray and returned to staring out of the window.

  Down below, the chilly Brits were assuring each other that, despite its undisputed position of global dominance, the American army was not what one would call a proper army.

  “They’re either screaming abuse at each other, singing silly spirituals or bonding in a big hug. I mean really, I ask you, what a way to run a show.”

  The Brits all agreed that, despite having more fire power than Satan and more influence than the God in whom they trusted, the armed forces of the United States were not what one would call a formidable fighting machine. No, no, the damp, miserable, khaki-clad figures felt, much better to be lean. Lean and hungry, like the British forces. Much better to be underfunded, undermanned and undervalued, like they were. That was character-building. That was what made a soldier a soldier.

  “They can’t even get the uniforms right,” the jealous Brits assured each other. “They seem to be dressed either as hell’s angels in leather jackets and sunglasses or as Italian lift attendants with more brass and braid than a colliery band.”

  Everybody agreed that it was a shocking state of affairs, but in truth there was not a man amongst them, itching in his damp khaki blouse, who would not have dearly loved to swap places and be dressed half as stylishly as the Americans.

  A far-off noise in the gloomy sky announced the imminent arrival of the loved and hated allies.

  “On time, at least,” remarked the senior British officer in his best patronizing drawl. “Thankful for small mercies, eh?”

  It started to rain.

  “Look at them,” said the general, staring out of the drizzle-dotted window as his plane taxied towards the little RAF terminal and the forlorn-looking British reception committee. “Nothing ever changes in the British army, you know that? They’re actually proud of it.”

  One of the crew handed the general his coat.

  “They always look the same. Down at heel but defiant. Like they just got off the boat from Dunkirk. The worst thing about being a great power is when you’re not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it. Look at the Portuguese. They just gave up altogether.”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” said the young airman, not having the faintest idea what the general was talking about.

  Jack turned to General Schultz, his chief of staff, who was sitting respectfully two seats behind, playing on a gameboy.

  “Let’s make this piece of bullshit as quick a piece of bullshit as any bull ever shitted. OK?”

  4

  Polly turned on her bedside lamp and felt her irises scream in protest at the sudden light.

  The phone was on her desk, on the other side of the room. Polly had put it there so that if ever she booked an alarm call she would have to get up in order to answer it. It was too easy to just reach out from under the duvet and clunk the receiver up and down in its cradle. Polly had missed trains that way. You didn’t wake up, your dreams just changed gear.

  The phone rang again. Somehow it seemed to be getting louder.

  Through Polly’s watery eyes the room looked strange. The phone, her desk, the crumpled shape on the floor that was her jeans, everything looked different. It wasn’t, of course, just as the phone wasn’t getting any louder. Everything was exactly the same as it had been when she’d gone to sleep the previous evening.

  The phone kept ringing.

  Polly got out of bed and padded across the room towards it. Across almost her entire home, in fact. Polly’s landlord claimed that Polly lived in a studio-style maisonette and had set the rent accordingly. Polly thought she lived in a bedsit and that she was being ripped off.

  The phone was set to ring six times before the answerphone kicked in. Polly watched the machine as it completed its cycle.

  She was more angry than scared.

  Very angry, terribly angry. Anger had seized hold of her whole body, which was the one thing she knew she must not let it do if she wished to get back to sleep before dawn. In vain she struggled to regain control of herself, but it was too late. The anger had released its chemicals and they were surging through her nervous system like a drug, making her muscles twitch, her stomach squirm and her heart expand like a balloon against her ribs. An anger so powerful because it was born of fear.

  The Bug was back. Great holy shit, hadn’t the bastard had enough?

  “The Bug” was what Polly called Peter. She had given him that title in an effort to depersonalize him. To resist the relationship that was growing between them. Polly had realized from the beginning, as every victim of an obsessive does, that the more she knew about her tormentor the more difficult it became to remember that he had absolutely nothing to do with her. Every extra detail that she accumulated of the man’s hated existence clouded the basic fact that he had absolutely no business in her life at all. He was a stranger, an aggressive stranger of course, but that did not mean she had to get to know him.

  Even when the whole ghastly business became a matter for the police and solicitors, Polly had strenuously avoided sharing in the information that was unearthed about her foe. She did not want to know what he was like or where he came from. She did not want to know if he had a job or friends. She had learnt the bitter lesson that the more she knew about this man the more there was for her to think about, and the more she thought about him the greater was her sense of violation.

  Which was why Peter had become the Bug. A bug is a thing that annoys you. It buzzes into your life and is difficult to get rid of, but it can’t hurt you or kill you; all it can do is buzz. A bug is also a minor virus, a thing you accidentally pick up, like a cold or the flu. It could happen to anybody. If you catch one you’re just unlucky, that’s all. It has nothing to do with you.

  Above all, it is not your fault.

  A bug is something that you shake off. That you determine will not ruin your day and if you cannot shake it off you accept your misfortune philosophically and cope the best you can. You do not become obsessed with a bug. It does not cloud your thoughts and bleed an undercurrent of tension and unhappiness through your every waking moment.

  A bug cannot own you.

  The “thing” that was Peter was not a friend or an enemy, or an acquaintance, or even a man. He was a bug and only a fool rails and rants and weeps over a bug; only a fool feeds its malignant symptoms with their anger and hurt.

  Polly stood waiting for her answ
erphone message to start and struggled to control her fury.

  She scarcely even noticed that she had begun to cry.

  5

  General Schultz, General Kent’s chief of staff, was not a very good hustler and there followed what seemed to be an interminable period of introductions and handshaking as the British and American parties greeted each other on the tarmac. Eventually, just when Kent was beginning to suspect that he would be expected to bond even with the man who waved the ping-pong bats, he found himself sitting alongside the senior British officer in the first of a convoy of army staff cars heading for London.

  Kent was silent, preoccupied, deep in thought. Despite this, however, his host felt obliged to make some effort at conversation.

  “I had the privilege of serving under a colleague of yours,” the senior British officer said. “During the Gulf War. I was seconded to the staff of General Schwarzkopf. Your famous Stormin’ Norman.”

  Kent did not reply.

  “Splendid name, don’t you think?” Actually the senior British officer thought it an absolutely pathetic name. He despised the way Americans felt the need to attach silly macho schoolboy nicknames to their leaders. “Iron” this, “Hell bugger” that; it was bloody childish.

  General Kent knew exactly what his host was thinking and in his turn thought it was pathetic the way the British compensated for their massive inferiority complex by forever sneering at the Yanks. There had once been a time when British soldiers were equally world famous and equally popularly revered, “Fighting Bobs Roberts” of the Boer War, the “Iron Duke” of Wellington himself, but that had been in another century, when … General Kent stopped his train of thought. He did not wish to be pondering the inanity of his companion’s comments. He wished to be left alone to concentrate on his own deep and tormented feelings. To dwell once more upon the summer of his love.

  What would she be like? Would she remember? Of course she would remember. She would have to be dead to have forgotten, and he knew she wasn’t dead.

  “Not your first trip to Britain, I imagine.” Once more the senior British officer’s voice crashed into Kent’s thoughts. The man was not giving up. He had been instructed to make the American feel welcome and by hell he was going to make him feel welcome even if that also meant annoying him utterly.

  “I said, not your first trip to Britain, I imagine …” he repeated loudly. “Been here before, I suppose.”

  He had blundered into General Kent’s very train of thought. General Kent had been in Britain before and it had changed his life for ever.

  “Yeah,” Kent acknowledged at last. “I was here before.” But his tone suggested that he did not wish to elaborate.

  “I see. I see. Here before, you say? Well, I never. Splendid. Splendid.”

  Another few cold, dark miles slid by outside the windows of the car.

  “Plenty of friends this side of the pond, then, I imagine. People to look up and all that. Old pals to visit?”

  Again the Englishman had got it right. There certainly was an old pal to visit, but General Kent did not choose to discuss it. He had never once in over sixteen years discussed the one love of his life with anyone apart from his brother Harry, not a soul, not ever and he certainly did not intend to start now. After this the British officer gave up and the conversation, such as it was, lapsed completely until the Englishman delivered his American through the gates of Downing Street.

  “Well, goodbye, General. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to meet you,” said the senior British officer.

  “Yes, it’s been very real,” replied General Kent. “Thank you so much for the trouble you’ve taken.”

  “Not at all. Goodbye, then.”

  “Goodbye.”

  The two soldiers shook hands and parted.

  “Surly bastard,” thought the senior British officer.

  “Pompous creep,” thought General Kent.

  Kent stood outside the famous front door for as long as he dared, breathing in the cold night air, attempting to marshal his thoughts. He must pull himself together. He had an important meeting ahead of him. It was his job to brief the British on White House plans for the eastward expansion of NATO. He needed to be thinking about Poland and the Czech Republic, not about making love in a sundrenched field to a seventeen-year-old girl. He stamped his feet; he must concentrate! It was time to put away the past and think about the present. The past could wait. After all, it had waited these many long years; it could stand another few hours.

  “General?”

  Kent’s party had now all assembled on the pavement and were awaiting their commander’s lead. A bobby was standing expectantly, ready to open the door.

  “OK, let’s do it,” Kent said and led his officers across the familiar threshold.

  6

  Polly was smiling.

  Polly was frowning.

  She was yawning. She was walking. She was standing.

  She was walking to her bus stop. She was standing at her bus stop. She was walking away from her bus stop. She was standing at her front door searching for her key.

  A hundred tiny, near-identical moments from Polly’s life, frozen in time, developed, printed and stuck on Peter’s wall.

  “Well, I don’t see as how it can do any great harm really,” Peter’s mother would say, more for her own comfort than that of the next-door neighbour with whom she would share the occasional pot of tea. “Lots of boys have pictures of their favourite women on their bedroom walls. Pamela Anderson or Playboy girls, stuff like that. In fact, I think Peter’s more normal than those other boys because at least he’s gone all funny over a real woman. Not just some fantasy figure.”

  Peter had taken the pictures in defiance of the court injunction against him.

  He had not begun to lose interest over the previous three months as Polly had been hoping. Quite the opposite. He had acquired a different car from the one known to the police and he would park it in Polly’s street at about seven in the morning. There he would wait, hiding behind a copy of the Daily Mirror until he could watch and photograph Polly beginning her journey to work. Once she had boarded her bus he would start up his car and follow it until it got into the local high street, where Polly got off. Peter could not take any photographs at this end of her journey because there was too much traffic and too many people, and it was a red route, anyway, so he couldn’t stop his car.

  Once when Polly got off the bus Peter saw her throw a sucked-out Just Juice box into a dustbin.

  Of course, he had to have that box, even if it meant getting a ticket. He put on his hazard lights, pulled over and pushed his way across the crowded pavement towards the rubbish basket. When he got there a homeless person was already inspecting the contents of the bin in the hope of finding something to eat or read. The homeless person was not interested in Peter’s box. Fortunately for him.

  Sometimes before he went to sleep Peter caressed the box, putting his fingers where hers had been in that moment when she had squeezed it and crushed it up. He imagined her delicate fingers squeezing and crushing at him in the same way.

  Then he would put his lips to the little bent straw and gently suck at it.

  “I think she’s still on his mind a bit,” Peter’s mother would tell her friend, “but he’s not made contact, not since, not since …” Peter’s court appearance remained a painful memory for his mother. Whenever she thought of it she became angry. Angry with Polly.

  “That bitch. She didn’t need to tell the police, did she? She could have come to me, talked to me. I could have stopped him. And anyway, what harm was he doing? He loved her, didn’t he? It’s not as if she had anything to be afraid of.”

  In fact, Peter’s mother knew very well that from the tone of Peter’s letters and messages Polly had had every reason to be afraid of him. He had never actually threatened her directly but the things he said about her and wished upon her would have scared anyone. Peter’s mother had rationalized this. She reasoned that if the Bitch had
only been pleasant – just said hello to her son and smiled occasionally, perhaps replied to one or two of his letters – then he would not have become upset. Peter’s mother felt, as Peter did himself, that devotion such as Peter’s deserved some sort of reward. After all, it isn’t every girl who’s worshipped the way Peter worshipped Polly.

  “He brought her presents. Flowers and CDs. She never said thank you, not once. Not so much as an acknowledgement. Well, of course he was hurt. Of course he was upset. I don’t blame him. I nearly wrote to the Bitch myself.”

  As far as the Bug’s mother was concerned, Polly wasn’t Polly any more. She was “that woman” or, when she felt particularly distressed, “the Bitch”.

  “Anyway. He’s promised me he’ll let it go now, stop approaching her and all that. Well, he has to. Otherwise it’s prison, and what would I do then? It’s her loss, anyway. She doesn’t deserve a boy like my Peter.”

  But Peter could not let it go. How could he? You can’t just let love go. Love is something beyond a person’s control. You don’t ask it to come and and you can’t make it leave. Only iron discipline can control an obsession, and Peter had none.

  Even as his mother spoke Peter was at his computer. Inside his computer, like the bug he was. It was exciting to reach out to her through the silence of cyberspace. He was banned from e-mailing Polly, but that didn’t stop him making a connection. A palpable physical connection. His fingers touched the keyboard, the keyboard touched the modem, the modem touched the Telecom network, the network touched Polly’s phone, and so he touched her!

  He could hack into her.

  He had read her Sainsbury’s loyalty card account. He knew that she had bought most of her furniture at IKEA; he even knew the styles and colours she’d chosen. Likewise he knew the brand of abdominizing exerciser that she’d ordered in an insane moment of optimistic piety from the back of a colour supplement. He imagined her rolling back and forth upon it in a leotard, though he’d got that wrong; she’d never even assembled it. He even knew her ex-directory telephone number. Sitting in his bedroom reading Polly’s Telecom account on his computer screen had felt so good. It was a little invasion of her privacy, a violation of her secrets. Finding out the things she did not want him to know.