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.
20
At the end of the summer, after Jack had left Polly, she decided to stay on at Greenham. Her parents did everything they could to persuade her to come home and go back to school but she was adamant. Her A-levels could wait, she explained, there was a planet to be saved. Polly told Mr and Mrs Slade that she had things to do, she had made great friends amongst her compatriots at the peace camp and was halfway through the construction of a ten-foot-high puppet of a She-God called Wooma, with which Polly and her friends intended to parade through Newbury. Of course, Polly did not tell her parents that she had spent the summer having a passionate fling with a man twice her age and that now he was gone her heart was utterly broken. She did not tell them that her whole being ached with sadness and that sometimes she thought she would actually go mad. She just told them about Wooma and that she was not coming home yet.
In fact Polly never did go home. Instead she moved permanently into the camp, living in a caravan with an old granny called Madge. Madge had been widowed the previous spring and had decided that she wanted to do something useful with the rest of her life, so she had bought a little caravan and moved to Greenham to save the world. Madge was a good companion and Polly loved her, but she was obsessed with bowels, particularly Polly’s. She would enquire earnestly about the state of Polly’s stools, reminding her always to be sure to inspect what she had produced before shovelling on the soil. Madge never tired of assuring Polly that regular, punctual movements were the secret of longevity and constantly made bran muffins of such copious fibrousness that they could have prised open the buttocks of a concrete elephant.
Polly kept in touch with her parents via postcards and the occasional photograph. It was through the latter that Mr and Mrs Slade kept up with the changes in Polly’s appearance, which was drifting from rather stylish anarcho-punk to depressing “who gives a fuck?” hippy grunge. Mrs Slade wondered how Polly washed her hair now that it was all in great shaggy dreadlocks with beads sewn into them and the terrible answer was, of course, that she didn’t. Mr Slade worried that food might get stuck in Polly’s new lip ring and rot there. He’d read somewhere that decaying meat was carcinogenic, then he remembered that Polly was a vegetarian and felt better. Neither of Polly’s parents liked the tattoo she had had done on her shoulder, depicting the female gender symbol with a clenched fist in the centre of it. Unfortunately the tattoo had been rather inexpertly applied by a stoned goth at the Glastonbury festival, and the fist looked like a penis, which was hardly a feminist symbol.
The Greenham camp was a bit like the Foreign Legion for Polly, a place to nurse a lost soul. She was relatively content there, apart, of course, from her aching heart and Madge going on at her all the time about her far too infrequent evacuations. Camp life was tolerable but, then again, if you consider yourself worthless and don’t care whether you live or you die, which was how Polly felt, pretty much anything is tolerable.