Blast from the Past

30

Jack reached into the bag he’d brought with him.

“I brought some Bailey’s and some Coke. Is that still what you drink?”

“Young girls drink stuff like that, Jack. It’s like eating sweets but with alcohol. We give it up when we discover gin.”

Jack began to put his bottles away.

“Oh, all right, go on, then. I’ll get some glasses.” Polly’s resistance had lasted all of ten seconds. “I haven’t got anything to offer you, I’m afraid,” she said.

Polly had stopped keeping booze in the house. She only drank it. Not that she was an alcoholic, but if there was alcohol around she would certainly have it. After all, how could a girl come home from the sort of job she did and ignore a nice big treble gin and tonic if it was standing on the sideboard? And once you’ve had one treble gin it seems slightly absurd not to have another. If there was a halfway decent late film on the telly or she’d rented a video, Polly could do half a bottle in an evening. She would pay for it, of course, with a saucepan by the bed all night and a slightly spacy nausea to follow, which sometimes lasted for two whole days. As Polly got older she had begun to find it safer to drink only in the pub.

Jack had also brought some bourbon for himself. Polly went into her little kitchen and rinsed out two glasses, being careful to thumb off the lipstick on the rims. A girl did, after all, have standards.

Jack poured the drinks long, alarmingly so. Polly was not sure that she could handle a quarter of a pint of Bailey’s.

“But you aren’t married?” Jack enquired casually. “I mean, you’ve never been married?”

“No, I think marriage is an outmoded and fundamentally oppressive institution, a form of domestic fascism.”

“Still sitting on the fence, then?”

Polly laughed despite herself.

“And you live alone?” Jack added.

“Yes, Jack, I live alone in Stoke Newington, which is, incidentally, a long way from the Pentagon. How the hell did you find me after all these years?”

Polly reminded herself that it should be her setting the conversational agenda not him. Jack had no reason to be in her flat and certainly no right to be asking her about her personal life.

“Why are you here, Jack?”

“This guy, the married one. Did you ever tell him about us?”

“I said, why are you here?”

There were so many reasons why Jack was there. “I told you. To visit.”

“Jack, that is not a good enough answer.”

“You want me to go?”

He had her there and they both knew it. She did not want him to go, so she remained silent.

“Did you ever tell your boyfriends about us?” Jack continued.

“Why would you care?”

“I’m curious. You know… about what you thought of me after… if you thought of me at all. How you ended up describing me, to your friends and stuff… Did you tell them?”

“What possible business is it of yours whom I tell about any aspect of my disastrous life?”

“Well, none, I guess. I just wanted to know.”

“I’ll tell you,” said Polly, “if you tell me how you found me.”

Jack laughed. Finding people was no big deal to him. “That’s easy. I’m an army general. I can get things found out.”

“You mean you had me traced?”

“Sure I had you traced.”

Now it was Polly’s turn to laugh. “What? By secret intelligence or something? Spies?”

“Well, you know, it’s not exactly James Bond. I mean nobody died or anything or used a pen that’s also a flamethrower. I just had you traced. Any decent clerk can do it. You start with the last known address.”