And how astonished would Jack’s parents have been to see their deeply conservative son hanging upon the lips of such a strange-looking girl. A radical girl, a hippy girl, a girl not so different from the students whom Jack Senior had taught in the sixties and whom Jack Junior had despised as traitorous apologists for Hanoi. How they would howl with laughter when, later, they heard from Harry the extraordinary news that their little soldier son had fallen for a subversive! A peacenik! Their Reagan-loving, Red-bashing, Liberal-hating offspring, for whom it was and always would be hip to be square, had come under the spell of the enemy.
Because that is certainly what happened. Jack fell for Polly like a man with no parachute. Even at that first meeting he was already half besotted. He wanted their lunch to go on for ever. He could not remember having ever been in the company of such an exuberantly free spirit. This girl was the opposite of everything he wanted in his life, and yet he loved it. She was rude, untidy, undisciplined, unfettered and anarchic, and he loved it. How happy Polly made him feel, how liberating it was just talking to her. Of course Jack knew that he was taking a considerable risk sitting openly in a restaurant with her. She was quite definitely not a suitable dining companion for an army officer, and were he to be spotted it would mean a severe reprimand. But on that special day Jack did not care. In fact, he gloried in the risk he was taking. Polly was making him feel as free-spirited as she was herself.
Polly’s second course arrived: chips, baked beans, peas and carrots. She had asked if they had anything vegetarian but this being the days before that type of option was common in British catering the unpleasant youth in the silly hat had said the best he could do was to take the meat out of a meat and potato pie for her.
Polly squirted red sauce out of a large plastic tomato all over her food and seethed at the fascistic, Thatcherite injustice of it all.
“They might at least offer something that isn’t dripping with blood. I think we should protest.”
“I thought you just did,” Jack replied. After all, Polly had announced loudly that she resented being forced to eat in a fucking charnel house. This had sounded like protest to Jack. The manager (who had enough to worry about what with having arrived at puberty only that morning) scuttled over and told Polly that she was not being forced to eat anywhere and that she was welcome to leave at any time, the sooner the better, in fact.
Polly told the manager that in fact she was being forced to eat in his establishment because multinational capitalism had ensured that the only food available on the roads of Britain was supplied by the owners of the dump in which they sat.
“And when I say food,” Polly added, “I mean of course shit.”
A pretty comprehensive protest, Jack thought. Certainly enough to be going on with. Polly, however, had other ideas and, taking out the superglue with which she was wont to block up police padlocks and car doors, she glued the sauce bottles to the table.
“Well, that’ll certainly show them,” said Jack.
“Non-violent direct action. Anarchy, mate. You have to do it,” Polly assured him.
“Yeah. I’ll bet they’re really gonna rethink their policy on animal welfare once they find out you vandalized their ketchup.”
“Protest is accumulative,” Polly assured him.
“Protest is self-indulgent and pointless, pal,” said Jack. “Believe me, I know. My parents tried it. They spent the sixties knocking their country over dinner and waving banners at a liberal president. What did they get for their trouble? Richard Nixon. Ha! That showed them. Now they’ve got Reagan! Jesus, are they pissed. I phone them every time he cuts welfare just to rub it in. They’re a couple of sad, fucked-up anachronisms who don’t have the sense to see that God is a Conservative and the Gospel is money. The only way you’re ever going to change anybody or any institution is to hit ’em in the head or hit ’em in the pocketbook. If you want to hurt these people you take their money.”
“Well, ye-es,” said Polly, slightly confused.
Jack looked about him. “So, let’s go.”
“What?” Polly enquired, not yet catching on.
“When I say run,” said Jack, “we run.”
“You don’t mean…” Polly began.
“Run!” said Jack.
12
If Jack had been trying to find a way to impress Polly he had hit the nail on the head. This is the stuff! Polly thought as they charged out of the restaurant and ran for Jack’s car. She could scarcely believe that her despised enemy, a member of the US military, could ever do anything so cool as to run out of a restaurant without paying. Never judge a book by its cover, she might have reflected, had she not been so breathless with excitement.
They tumbled into the car and as Jack hit the ignition the sound system leapt into life along with the engine. It was playing Bruce Springsteen, Jack’s preferred driving companion, and by a happy chance the tape was cued up on “Born To Run”. Suddenly Polly found herself bang in the middle of the Boss’s runaway American dream and she shouted with delight as, with tyres screeching and Bruce pumping, Jack pulled out of the carpark and onto the road.
“This is brilliant!” Polly shouted as Jack kicked down the accelerator, hammered through the gears, cranked up the Boss and left any pursuers to eat his dust.
About a mile along the road, which they seemed to cover in about fifteen seconds, Jack slammed on the brakes and executed a spectacular handbrake turn off the main road, which nearly threw Polly out of the car. Suddenly they found themselves bumping along what was little more than a dirt track.
“Think I’ll give the main roads a miss for half an hour,” he remarked casually. “That manager kid is bound to have called the cops by now. Wish I had my off-road jeep four by four. Then we could have some fun.”
“Four-wheel drive cars are destroying the countryside,” said Polly.
“Yeah. So?” Jack enquired.
They soon arrived at a gate that led into a field and Jack was forced to stop. After that it was all rather spontaneous. They scarcely spoke, just grabbing each other with passionate fury and feeding on each other’s mouths and faces, tearing at each other’s clothes. Later on, Jack would remember thinking that Polly even kissed angrily or at least with the same kind of serious commitment that she seemed to put into everything else she did. Polly was not thinking anything at all. Her mind had been emptied by this sudden and completely unfamiliar surging physical desire. Nothing like it had ever happened to her before. She had often wondered over the past three or four years what true passion felt like and whether she would ever experience it herself. She would wonder no more.
Then had come the inevitable environmental frustrations. It just isn’t easy to make love in cars. In his efforts to get to Polly Jack very soon found himself with his knee in the glove compartment and his stomach impaled upon the gear stick. It was most frustrating. Jack had not experienced anything like it since high school and his body had been suppler then. He was halfway to being on top of Polly but he could get no further, not without major organ removal.
“Fucking gear stick,” Jack growled, speaking for the first time since they had fallen upon each other.
“It’s your own fault for driving a TR7,” said Polly, feeling rather self-conscious because Jack had one of her breasts in his hand. “Everyone knows a TR7 is a wanker’s car.”