Blast From the Past (8 page)

‘It can’t be you, Jack. That’s insane,’ said Polly. ‘What, now? You want to visit now?’

‘Yeah, I’m in town.’

‘In town!’

He had said it like it explained everything.

‘This is insane.’

‘Don’t keep saying it’s insane, Polly. Why is it insane?’

There were so many reasons why it was insane that Polly couldn’t begin to answer that question adequately. It would have taken her all night, all week, the rest of her life.

‘I’m coming round,’ said Jack.

‘No! Where are you? How long will you be? How long is not long? Jack! Jack!’

But the line had gone dead.

Polly put down the receiver and slumped into her office chair, which was actually one of her kitchen
chairs
. Polly only had four upright chairs, one of which was kept permanently by her desk, except on the rare occasions when it was required for a dinner party. If Polly ever entertained more than three people at the same time someone had to bring their own chair.

Polly’s insides were doing somersaults. What could be going on? Why had Jack come back? Where had he come from? What could he possibly want with her now?

Such were the larger questions that tormented Polly as she sat there, shaking, in the shadowy half-light of her room, but they would have to wait. There were practical considerations to be dealt with and she must pull herself together. First and foremost she was in her night attire, if night attire was not too grand a term to describe the slightly ratty, threadbare old man’s shirt she was wearing. She must get dressed and quickly. No matter how weird the situation, Polly had standards. She did not receive visitors dressed only in a shirt.

Rushing to her knickers drawer she grabbed a vaguely current-looking pair and put them on. The jeans she had worn on the previous day were still concertinaed on the floor where she had stepped out of them a few hours earlier. She stepped back into them and began hurriedly to pull them up. Then she had second thoughts. With her jeans already lodged halfway up her legs, she waddled across her flat and, flinging open a cupboard, began pulling out dresses. She held one up to herself in the mirror and, finding it unsatisfactory, tried another. Then a third and a fourth.
Finally
she chose the shortest and most flattering of the selection. She told herself that it was simply the smartest and most practical choice, but actually it was the sexiest.

Polly was about to remove her nightshirt and put on the dress when the front door buzzer buzzed.

‘Christ’s buggery bollocks!’

Polly stepped back out of the jeans and rushed over to the front door of her little flat. She lived on the top floor of a large house, one of the thousands of houses that once were home to prosperous Mary Poppins families. Places built to house twelve people and which ended up providing for twelve households. ‘There’s room in this conversion for four decent-sized flats or six small ones,’ the property developers of the early eighties would say. ‘So what do you reckon? Fourteen? Or is that pushing it?’

That particular speculative bubble had, of course, long since burst, and there were now a mere six buttons on the front of Polly’s building. One of which led right up to the attic of the house, which was Polly’s home.

Polly gingerly took up the receiver of the entryphone intercom that hung on the wall beside her front door. Her hand was shaking. This was insane. Why had he come back? She was furious, of course, all the old emotions returning, the ancient wound exploding open, but she was thrilled as well. How could she not be? Never had she expected to hear his voice again, and yet here he was, only four floors below, standing at her own front door.

‘Hello,’ she said, attempting a noncommittal, matter-of-fact tone and failing entirely. ‘Is that you?’

Suddenly she was half her age. A young girl again, young and nervous and excited.

‘Is that really you?’

‘Your light was on. It’s never been on this late before.’

Polly stepped back as if she had received a blow. She nearly fell. The receiver dropped from her hand and bashed against the wall, swinging on its curly flex.

‘Can’t you sleep?’

The hated voice, the hated and shocking voice drifted up from the dangling receiver.

‘I thought you might want company. If you tell the police I came round my mum will say I was at home with her. Are you wearing any clothes, Polly? Have you got a bra on? What colour are your knickers? I bet you aren’t wearing any this late at night, are you?’

Polly’s eyes were full of tears now. Through the watery mist she focused on the red panic button that stood out upon the wall behind the door. It was so located that should an intruder ever push open the door, forcing Polly backwards into her flat, the button would then be in immediate reach. There was another one on the wall by her bed. Polly wanted to push those buttons, she wanted to alert the whole house to her persecution, to set alarm bells ringing there and in the local police station, but she knew that she must not do it. Her enemy was not at the gate, he was in the street and would no doubt soon scurry off as he always did. He
was
no physical threat. There was no justification in summoning a screaming squad car, and the police did not take kindly to having their services abused. One does not cry wolf with panic buttons. When you push them you need to be believed.

Blinking back her tears, Polly grabbed up the receiver.

‘I’m calling the police. I am calling the fucking police right now! Fuck off! Please fuck off!’

‘You use that word a lot, don’t you, Polly?’ said Peter. ‘Is that because you like it, Polly? Fucking? Is that what you like?’

15

DOWNSTAIRS THE BUG
turned and scurried away. He had taken a big risk ringing her doorbell like that. He’d certainly not intended to do it. He knew it would probably mean a police visit, more social workers, his mum in tears. But seeing her light shining so late, knowing that she, like him, was still awake in the small hours of the night, perhaps even thinking about him, that had been too much for him to resist. Now, however, he must retreat. If Polly did call the police and he were found in her street no denial from him or testimony from his mother would prevent his arrest.

Leaning against the wall beside her door Polly struggled to control her pounding heart and the tears that she could feel beginning to prickle up into her eyes. Her legs felt weak. Slowly she slid down the wall, her back cold against the plaster until she sat upon her haunches. Jack and the Bug? Within minutes of each other? What could be going on? What was happening?

Perhaps half a minute went by before the front door buzzer sounded again. She was waiting for it but it still made her jump. Like the phone, the buzzer seemed
much
louder than it did in the day. Even in Polly’s emotional state she found herself wondering if it could be heard in the flat below. She hoped not. She was currently in dispute with the man downstairs. He was a milkman who rose every morning at four and put on his radio, a habit which had caused Polly to voice numerous complaints. She did not want to arm the man with counter-accusations of late-night comings and goings.

The buzzer buzzed again.

She would not answer it. It would be the Bug again. Polly knew his pattern well enough. He tended to attack (which was how Polly privately described the Bug’s intrusions into her life), then attack once or twice more before disappearing, long before any policeman might deign to turn up. On the other hand, supposing it wasn’t the Bug? Supposing it was him, Jack? Unlikely, of course. After all, it was only a minute or two since Jack had telephoned, but he’d said he wouldn’t be long … If indeed it had been Jack at all … In her distraught state Polly found herself prey to the most paranoid of musings. Had the Bug found out about Jack? Was he somehow playing a terribly cruel trick on her? Had she merely imagined that the voice had been that of her former lover?

Buzz.

She had to answer it. So what if it was the Bug? She would call him a sad no-dick. What was more, if she did not feel justified in using her panic button she could certainly let off her rape alarm into the intercom. Sod
the
milkman, sod everyone else in the house if it woke them up. They weren’t being stalked. She would shatter the Bug’s eardrum. Polly went to her bedside table and took up the little alarm tube. Suitably armed, she returned to the intercom and picked up the receiver.

‘Yes?’ This time her voice was like steel. Fuck-off-and-die steel. Her thumb hovered over the rape-alarm button.

‘Polly. It’s me. It’s Jack.’

It was Jack. There could be no doubt. There was only one Jack.

The relief! The blessed relief. But what about the Bug?

‘Jack. Is there anyone else down there? A man?’

‘What?’

‘It’s a perfectly simple question! Is there anyone else there, Jack? Thin, pale, mousy hair?’

Down in the street Jack glanced about him. He did not know what he had expected Polly to say to him, but it was not this. The reunion conversation was not shaping up the way he had expected. First he had been forced to put her on hold, now she was asking him about other men.

‘There’s no one in the street but me, Polly. Can I come up?’

Polly struggled to become mistress of her emotions and her thoughts. It must be coincidence. Jack and the Bug could not be connected. It just so happened that on this very strange and crowded night the two men who, in their different ways, had hijacked Polly’s emotions
more
effectively than any other people in her life, should clash. The Bug had simply chosen this night to revert to form, the same night that Jack, Jack of all people in the world, had decided to drop by.

‘What is this about, Jack?’ she said into the mouthpiece.

‘Can I come up?’ Jack’s voice replied from three floors below.

Everything seemed to be happening at a breathtaking speed. ‘I’m in my nightie, Jack!’

Jack did not reply to this. He considered making some smart Alec comment but decided against it, opting to leave her protest hanging on the wire that connected them. The tactic worked. Polly realized that however inappropriate the time and the circumstances might be, she was never going to simply tell Jack to go away.

‘I’m on the top floor.’

Polly pressed the buzzer and let Jack back into her life.

16

WATCHING FROM A
little way along the street, in the pitch black shadows of a derelict shop doorway, Peter’s inner turmoil was the equal of Polly’s. He could not believe his anguished eyes. A man was entering Polly’s flat, and at 2.20 in the morning! It could only be Polly he was visiting. Hers was the only light that burned in the whole building. What was worse, the man who Polly was allowing into her home at such an hour was the vicious brute who had attacked him and, what’s more, attacked him with scarcely an ounce of provocation.

Peter could hardly begin to imagine what was going on. To his knowledge Polly had no current boyfriend. There had been a man a few months earlier but he didn’t seem to visit any more. Perhaps it was the bricks that Peter had thrown through the man’s car window on three separate occasions that had put him off. Recently Polly had always been alone. But now she wasn’t. Now she was entertaining a violent American in the middle of the night.

Peter slunk further back into the shadows. He must concentrate, decide upon a course of action. He dug into the pocket of his coat for the bag of sweets he had
brought
with him as a comfort against the lonely boredom of the night. Sucking noisily, he tried to think.

Upstairs, behind the glowing curtain, Polly was again acutely aware of her appearance. She was still wearing nothing more than an old shirt and a pair of knickers and there was a gentleman caller upon her doorstep; it would not do. She rushed to her bed and grabbed the dress she’d chosen and also some lipstick from her handbag. Catching sight of herself in the mirror she could only groan at her pillow hair and the slight reddening around her eyes caused by her crying.

An unbiased observer might have thought that despite the strangeness of the situation and despite everything that had happened in the past, Polly still wanted to look attractive for Jack.

Knowing that she had only the time in which it takes a man to walk up three flights of stairs, Polly attempted to brush her hair, wipe her eyes and pull off her nightshirt all at the same time. She soon realized that these activities were incompatible. Particularly if one is also attempting to apply lipstick and search the unsorted clean washing bag for an unladdered pair of tights.

‘Calm. Stay calm,’ Polly said to herself as her stomach executed a particularly startling element of the Olympic gymnastic routine, which it had been performing ever since Polly had been awoken scarcely five minutes before.

Outside Polly’s flat, in the well of the building, Jack was climbing the last flight of stairs.

So this is where she ended up, he was thinking.

There is always something rather depressing about the communal areas of multiple-household houses. The mounds of junk mail and local advertising freesheets behind the front door. The piles of letters addressed to long-since-departed occupants stacked on the rickety hall table. The bicycles obstructing the way, the unloved and unwashed stair carpet, the large and perplexing stain on the elderly wallpaper. The single framed print hanging on the wall on the first landing, the dead lightbulbs suspended pointlessly from their dusty flexes.

Such an extraordinary visit, thought Jack, and such ordinary surroundings. It was enough to quite depress a man.

Arriving at Polly’s door, Jack checked the number one more time against the information in his file and knocked. Inside Polly yelped and stubbed her toe against a chair.

It was too late to get dressed. Swearing quietly, she pulled her nightshirt back down (better an old shirt than topless, she reasoned) and snatched up her dressing gown from where she had left it on the floor. One glance told her that it was not acceptable. It was as old and stained and horrid as the stairwell outside. No eyes but hers should ever look upon it. Stuffing the offending gown under the bed, she ran to the cupboard from which she had taken her selection of dresses and, scrabbling inside amongst the Chinese puzzle of wire hangers, she located and pulled out another gown. It was a tiny fluffy one, a Christmas present, slightly
see-through
and trimmed with fake fur. She had never worn it and she certainly could not do so now. She would rather be stained and torn than completely ludicrous and slightly pervy.