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.