Blast from the Past

19

Their embrace ended as suddenly as it had begun.

Polly broke away. “I shouldn’t be hugging you, Jack. I shouldn’t be hugging you at all.”

So much of her longed to continue, but a larger part remembered the hurt that this man had caused her.

Jack stepped back too. He had not expected their embrace. It had confused him.

“Yeah, well, like I said, it’s good to see you.”

Polly wanted to look at Jack properly. She turned on the lamp on her desk. The extra light further illuminated her dowdy room and she regretted switching it on.

“I’ve often wondered what your stuff would be like,” said Jack, looking around.

Things were not at their tidiest. As a matter of fact, they never were. Things had only once been at their tidiest in Polly’s flat, for a single afternoon, shortly after Polly had moved in and her mother had come to inspect. In preparation for that visit Polly had tidied and cleared and cleared and tidied and polished and buffed and tidied again.

Her mother had thought the place was a mess.

She also thought that the plates should be in the pan cupboard, the pans should be where the mugs were and the mugs should go on little hooks of which there were none, but nice ones could be got at Habitat. Polly’s mother then set about effecting all of these changes with the exception of the mugs, because she did not have the hooks. The mugs she left on the draining board to await Polly’s DIY efforts and there they had remained (sometimes clean, more often dirty) ever since.

Polly’s little life seemed suddenly small and depressing. Poky would have been a good word for it, or dingy. She felt embarrassed, which was really rather unjust because if anyone in that room had reason to feel embarrassed it was Jack, and yet Polly knew that it was she who was going red.

Hurriedly she began to tidy up. Polly was a dropper of things and a leaver around of other things. She did not tidy up as she went along, she tidied up once every seven days on a strict routine and she was already nine days into the current cycle. There were knickers and tights on the floor, a dirty plate and various mugs by the bed, and magazines and books everywhere. Polly felt that at least the intimate clothing had to be hidden away; also anything that had mould growing on it, particularly if the two were one and the same thing.

As Jack watched Polly scurrying about, stooping to pick up her knickers and bras, he could not help but remember Polly as a young girl, searching for her underwear in hotel rooms and the backs of cars. Once she had not been able to find the elusive garment at all and they had risked going down to dinner, not only in fear of being seen together but also in the wicked knowledge that Polly was naked beneath her little denim skirt. What a wonderful meal that had been. Jack had kicked off his shoe beneath the table and as they ate his bare foot had lain between Polly’s legs. In the long years since that glorious meal Jack had relived it in his memory a thousand times. He doubted that he had ever had a happier moment. Certainly not in a motel restaurant, anyway.

“Bet you didn’t think things would look as shitty as this,” Polly said, stuffing dirty clothes into the clean clothes drawer.

As he watched her moving about Jack knew that it was as he had feared. That he was still in love with her.

“No, I didn’t. I thought it would be much more shitty than this.”

Jack could see that virtually everything Polly owned was on view. Her furniture, her clothes, all of her stuff. It didn’t seem to him that she had changed very much either. There were her souvenir mugs from the 1984 miners’ strike. A poster advertising a concert at Wembley Stadium to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela. One of those plastic flowers that dance when music comes on (but only if the battery hasn’t been dead for five and a half years, which in this case it had). A poster of Daniel Ortega proclaiming “Nicaragua must survive”, a poster of Garfield the cartoon cat proclaiming that he hated mornings. A clipframed front page of the London Evening Standard from the day Margaret Thatcher resigned (Jack, like many Americans, could not understand how the Brits had ever let that one happen; anyone could see that she was the best thing they had had in years – it was like after the war, when they dropped Churchill). Polly had lots of books. A couple of IKEA “first home” easy chairs, a rape alarm, a small TV. Thirty or forty loose CDs and forty or fifty empty CD boxes.

Everything was as Jack might have imagined it. The only thing that surprised him was how little Polly owned. You would have been lucky to get two thousand dollars for the entire contents of the room. Not a lot for a woman of thirty-four. Or was it thirty-five? Not a very impressive accumulation for a whole half-lifetime.

Polly glanced up from her tidying. She knew what he was thinking. “Not very impressive, is it?”

Polly still could not quite believe how spectacularly she had managed to screw up her life. Just how unlucky could a girl get? And why did it have to be her?

No reason, of course. Some people are fortunate in life and love, some are not, and you can never tell how the chips will fall. At school nobody would have looked at Polly and thought, she’ll end up one of the lonely ones. She’ll be the one who screws things up. She had been bright and attractive in every way. She might easily have made a great success of her personal life had fate favoured her, but it had not.

How cruel to reflect upon the wrong turns and unsought circumstances of an unlucky life. When Polly and her friends had sat laughing in the pub together at the age of seventeen it would not have been possible to look at them and say, “Second from the left with the rum and Coke, she’s going to have problems.” It would not have been possible to predict that Polly, who seemed so strong and assured, was very soon going to fall head over heels in love and then get devastatingly dumped. That she would then spend years drifting unsatisfactorily from brief affair to brief affair before suddenly towards the end of her twenties being seized by a sudden desperate fear of being alone. That Polly of all people would be the one to get caught up with a married man (separated, waiting for divorce) who would lie to her, cheat on her and eventually leave Polly for the ex-wife whom he had previously left for Polly.

Every golden generation, every fresh-faced group of friends, must statistically contain those who will fall prey to the sad clichés of life. The things they never thought would or could happen to them. Divorce, alcoholism, illness, failure. Those were things that happened to one’s parents’ generation. To adults who no longer had their whole lives before them. It comes as a shock when the truth dawns that every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks.