Blast from the Past

17

“Oh, God!” Polly shrieked.

“Oh, God. Oh, sweet Jesus! Oh, God!”

Strange how some people discover their religious side whilst orgasming. Polly never bothered God at all as a rule, in fact she was an agnostic, an atheist, even, if she was feeling brave. Yet while in the throes of carnal climax Polly could make the very heavens ring with her piety and devotion. In fact since that day, only a few weeks earlier, when Polly had discovered sex, the Almighty had scarcely had a moment’s peace.

“Oh. Oh. Yes… yes, that’s it, that’s it! Oh God, Oh God, oh please, harder, longer, longer, harder… oh yes, oh please… Please… Yes yes yes yes!”

And then finally it was over. A quite spectacular orgasm, fuelled with love and lust and all the gay abandon of youth, had run its noisy course. Slowly the room returned to normal, the overhead light stopped swinging on its flex, the teacups on the bedside table ceased to rattle and the plaster clung less desperately to the walls and ceiling. Jack rolled off Polly’s quivering body and reached for his cigarettes.

“So, did you come?”

Jack could joke at a time like that. He was older, experienced. Confident and witty. American in the way Americans are supposed to be. Sexily sardonic and capable of sparking a Zippo cigarette lighter into life using only one hand.

“Just fooling,” he said. “I imagine that there are people in other parts of the country who know you came. Certainly the only people within this hotel who didn’t know you came are either deaf or dead.”

“Sorry. Was I too noisy?”

“Not for me, I’m used to it. I used earplugs.”

Polly laughed, but she was embarrassed. Most people feel a little awkward and exposed when it comes to the noises they make during sex and it’s even worse when you’re only seventeen.

Jack lit two cigarettes and gave one to Polly.

“Don’t worry, I’ll call reception and tell them you’re a Christian fundamentalist seeking enlightenment, asking God to give it to you longer and harder.”

Polly felt that Jack’s joke had run its course. She might have been young, but she was a woman out of whom only so much piss could be taken.

“Look, I was enjoying myself, all right? And to do that I need to express myself. People should express themselves more. People are too uptight. If people recognized their true feelings a bit more and let them out occasionally there’d be a lot less anger and violence in the world.”

“OK, OK. Fine. I’m glad to have been a part of your personal fulfilment programme. There was me thinking we were having sex and it turns out you were making a contribution to world peace.”

Polly and Jack smoked in silence for a few moments. Polly wasn’t really angry. In fact she loved fighting with Jack. She loved everything about Jack with the exception of his “Death or Glory” tattoo. Never before in her short life had she experienced such emotions, such passion. Every atom of her physical self tingled with it. The tips of her toes were in love, the hair on her head was in love, the backs of her knees were in love. And such exciting love, dangerous and wrong. Illicit love, forbidden fruit.

Polly stretched out under the covers and felt the crisp clean hotel sheets against her body. What luxury. Only rarely did Polly experience such exotic delights as clean sheets, let alone fresh soap and towels. And a lavatory! Her own personal lavatory. With a door! Only a person who does not normally have the use of one can understand just how wonderful having a lavatory is. Polly would sit on it for half an hour and read the hotel brochures, never tiring of news of mini-breaks for two in the Cotswolds, the Peaks and the heart of England’s glorious Lakeland. Jack said he sometimes felt that Polly only slept with him in order to use the toilet.

“That’s not true, Jack,” Polly assured him. “You’re forgetting the little chocolate mints the maids leave on the pillows.”

Jack got out of bed, crossed the room, drew back the curtain slightly and looked out.

“Can’t we have the curtains open occasionally?” Polly asked. “It feels so claustro’.”

“No,” Jack replied. “It makes me feel too exposed. I mean, if we were caught together…”

Why did he have to remind her about that? Just when she was so happy. He was always reminding her about that.

“I know. I know! You don’t have to go on about it.”

“Hey, baby, I do have to go on about it because that’s how I stay careful. And I have to stay careful because if my colonel ever found out about us my career would be over, you hear that? Everything I’ve worked at since I was seventeen would be gone. You’re only seventeen right now, Polly. You don’t have a life to throw away yet, but I do. They’d court-martial me, you know that? They might even throw me in the hole.”

Jack returned to bed. Some ash from Polly’s cigarette fell onto the sheet. She tried to brush it off but only made it worse.

“Leave it,” said Jack irritably. “We’re paying.”

“I hate that kind of attitude,” Polly snapped. “We’ve paid so we can act irresponsibly. And I hate this sneaking about too, this constant tension.”

“I do not have a choice but to sneak about. I have to be discreet, which is something, incidentally, you have made considerably more difficult by your decision to dye your hair puke colour.”

In her heart of hearts Polly had to admit that the orange and green highlight effect she had tried to create had not really worked.

“If you don’t like sneaking about, baby,” Jack continued, “go hang out with one of your own kind.”

“You don’t choose who you fall in love with, Jack, and don’t call me baby.”

Polly was starting to look a little teary. She didn’t like it when he referred to their relationship in such a casual manner.

“Oh, come on, Polly, not the waterworks.”

All her life Polly had cried easily. It was her Achilles’ heel. She wasn’t a crybaby; it was just that strong emotions made her eyes water. This was actually quite debilitating in a minor sort of way. It made her look a fool. It would happen in the middle of some particularly frustrating political argument. There she would be, banging her fist on the pub table, struggling to find words to express her deeply held conviction that Mrs Thatcher was a warmongering fascist and suddenly her eyes would start getting wet. Instantly Polly would feel her image transforming itself from passionate feminist revolutionary to silly overemotional little woman.

“Well, there’s no need to cry about it,” Polly’s dialectical opponents would sneer.

“I am not bloody crying,” Polly would reply, tears springing from the corners of her eyes.

The tears were there now and Jack did not like emotionally charged situations. He liked to pretend that life was simple. Polly thought him repressed and out of touch with himself. Jack just felt he had better things to do with his time than get worked up about stuff. But the truth was that he was worked up, terribly worked up. Beneath his highly cool exterior he was anguished and distraught. Because Jack was in love with Polly and he knew that he would have to leave her.

“Jack,” said Polly, “we need to talk about where we’re going.”

Jack did not want to talk about this at all. He never did want to talk about it, because deep inside he knew that they were not going anywhere.

“You know why people smoke after sex?” he said, dragging at his cigarette. “It’s an etiquette thing. It means you don’t have to talk.”

“What?”

“People smoke after sex to avoid conversation. I mean, in general post-coital is a socially barren zone. Particularly that difficult first time. You’ve known somebody five minutes and suddenly you’re removing your horribly diminished dick from inside of their body. What do you say?”

Sometimes Polly found Jack’s crude, abrasive style sexy and exhilarating. Other times she just found it crude and abrasive.

“We didn’t say anything after our first attempt, did we? Because we were hiding in a field trying to avoid large insects and the police.”

“Yeah, well let me tell you, it saved us a lot of embarrassment. Any diversion is welcome in such a situation. Even the cops. Think about it. You’re naked with a stranger. What do you say?”

“A stranger?”

“Sure, a stranger. The first time you sleep with someone ten to one they’re going to be a stranger. How many times do you have sex with someone for the first time whom you’ve known more than a few hours?”

“Well, there’s not much point asking me, is there?”

“Yeah, well take my word for it, babe.” Jack did not like to be reminded of Polly’s lack of sexual experience. It made him feel even more responsible for her than he already did.

“The first time you screw a person all you’ve been thinking about since you met them is screwing them. Then suddenly it’s over and you don’t have that agenda any more. What can a guy say? ‘That was fun.’? ‘That was nice.’? It’s so weak, so dismissive, like the girl’s body was a cupcake and you took a nibble. On the other hand, ‘That was awesome,’ is too much. She knows you’re bullshitting. ‘Oh yeah, so awesome it lasted two whole minutes and you shouted out some other girl’s name.’”

Jack took another long drag on his cigarette and developed his thesis.

“So people smoke. The human psyche is so pathetically insecure that we would rather die of lung cancer than confront an uncomfortable situation. I don’t know what will happen now everybody’s giving up. Maybe they’ll share a small tray of canapés.”

“I thought ‘How was it for you?’ was considered the correct inquiry.”

“Nobody ever asked that. That question is a myth. How could you ever ask, ‘How was it for you?’? No answer would be good enough.”

“Why not?”

“Well, just now, for instance, when we made love. How was it?”

Jack had caught Polly off her guard.

“Well, it was fine… great, in fact, really great.”

“You see,” said Jack, as though his point were proved. “Already I’m thinking, ‘fine’? ‘great’? Why doesn’t she just come right out and say ‘pathetic’? That’s what she means. Why doesn’t she just say, ‘Your dick is a cocktail sausage. I get more satisfaction when I ride my bicycle over a speed hump.’”

“Oh well, if we’re taking puerile macho paranoia into account…”

“Got to, babe, it’s what makes the world go around.”

Polly took another cigarette and lit it from her previous one.

“Well, I’m definitely giving up soon. Tomorrow, in fact; certainly this month or by the end of the year.”

They smoked in silence for a while. Outside, the sun was setting. When it was dark they would leave, Polly knew that. Jack rarely consented to spend a whole night with her. She got out of bed and began to search for her clothes.

Polly never ceased to be amazed at the way her clothes disappeared while she was making love. Particularly her bra and knickers. It was a side of sex that had come as a complete surprise to her. It wasn’t as if she hid them or anything. She did not deliberately secrete them behind the washbasin in the bathroom or between the sheet and the mattress, or hang them from the picture rail. None the less after lengthy searching it was in such places that they would be discovered. On this particular occasion she eventually found her knickers wedged inside the Corby trouserpress.

This was Jack’s favourite part of Polly’s dressing process. He loved her naked, of course, he worshipped her naked, but somehow near nakedness was even more endearing. There was something he found particularly moving about Polly wearing only her knickers. Polly said that it was because like all men he was subconsciously afraid of vaginas and preferred to see them sanitized with a neat cotton cover, which Jack thought was quite literally the stupidest thing he had ever heard anybody say in his entire life.

The gathering gloom within the room was making Polly feel sombre. When the sun was shining and Jack and she were making love she could forget the circumstances of their relationship. Forget that he was a killer and she was a traitor. Forget the police and the soldiers. The razorwire and the searchlights. Forget her life in the camp. Forget the Cold War. Then night would fall and Polly would remember that it was life with Jack that was the dream. Outside was the deadly reality.

“It would be so lovely to be normal,” she said, rescuing her bra from inside the hotel kettle (the lid of which she’d have sworn had not been removed even once since they had entered the room). “To be able to walk down a street together, go to the pub.”

“Don’t even think about it.” Jack shivered at the very thought.

“I was arrested again yesterday,” said Polly. She and her comrades had been attempting to prevent the missile transporters from leaving the camp. In the event of war the strategic plan for the missiles was that they would be bussed about to various parts of the county on mobile launchers, making them less of a target for the enemy. Every now and then the army practised this deployment, using empty transporters. It was to one of these that Polly had been attached when the police arrived.

“Arrested?” said Jack casually. “You didn’t say. How’d it go?”

Jack always tried to act as if things were not important.

“Not great. You know the good cop, bad cop thing? I think there must have been an administrative cock-up. I got bad cop, bad cop. No fags, no cups of tea, just a lot of abuse.”

“That’s cops.”

The police, who for a while had been friendly, had begun to tire of the Greenham women’s disruption and vandalism and had started to get tough.

“I was thinking while they were both shouting at me that perhaps down the corridor someone else had got good cop, good cop. Constant tea, endless cigarettes, keep the coupons…”

The sun was nearly gone. Inside, the room was almost completely dark.

“Polly, are you sure you’ve never told anybody about us?”

“Jack, you always ask that.”

Jack got out of bed and went to the toilet. He left the bathroom door open, which Polly hated. She liked to keep a little mystery in a relationship where possible. Having a toilet door was such a luxury for her that it seemed deeply decadent not even to bother using it.

“You’ve told nobody?”

Jack raised his voice above the tinkling and flushing. His tone was firmer, as well it might have been, since the whole course of his life depended on Polly’s discretion. He returned to the room, as always utterly unselfconscious about his jiggling, dangling, bollock-hanging nakedness. This was a side of male bedroom manners that Polly would never get used to.

“Of course I haven’t told anybody,” said Polly. “I know the rules. I love you…”

Polly waited, as countless women had waited before her, for the echo of that phrase, and, like the vast majority of those women, she was eventually forced to ask for it.

“Well?”

“Well what?” said Jack, lighting another two cigarettes.

“Well, do you love me too?”

Jack rolled his eyes ceilingwards. “Of course I love you, Polly, for Christ’s sake.”

“Well say it properly, then.”

“I just did!”

“No, you didn’t. I made you. Say it nicely.”

“OK, OK!”

Jack assumed an expression of quiet sincerity. “I love you Polly. I really love you.”

There was a pause.

“But really really? Do you really really love me? I mean really.”

This is, of course, the reason why so many men don’t like to get into the “I love you” conversation, because it is open-ended. Very quickly degenerating into the “How much do you love me?” conversation, the “I don’t believe you mean it,” conversation and finally the dreaded “Yes, and I’m sure you said the same thing to that bitch you were going out with when I first met you,” conversation.

“Yes, Polly. I really really love you,” Jack said in a tone that suggested he would have said he loved baboon shit on toast if it would keep the peace.

“Good,” said Polly. “Because if I thought you were lying I think I’d kill myself…”

The room was now almost pitch black save for the glowing ends of their cigarettes.

“Or you.”