Blast From the Past by Ben Elton

Author:Ben Elton [Elton, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Man-woman relationships, Humorous, Fiction - Espionage, Political, Contemporary, Fiction, Romance, Suspense, Thriller, Thrillers, General, Intrigue, Espionage, Romance - General
ISBN: 9780385334525
Publisher: Delta
Published: 2000-10-09T11:00:00+00:00

29

Polly left the squat in Acton in the late summer of 1991 and with a little money borrowed from her parents she took up her first entirely legal abode since leaving home eight years previously. A proper rented room in a shared house in Chiswick. From there she enrolled in a part time A-level course at the local college of further education and set about picking up her life where she had left it before the summer of Jack’s love.

It was a new decade, a new prime minister (if still a Conservative one) and a new beginning for Polly, who believed that she had finally really and truly got over Jack. Seeing him on the television had helped, a shock though it had been. Until then he had remained vigorously alive in her memory as her first, her most complete and special love. His sudden devastating departure had been the watershed of her young existence, marking the point at which she had lost a grip upon her life. Then all of a sudden he was on the TV and he was a stranger. A creature from another planet. An anonymous member of a hateful, sand-coloured army of half a million men. He had nothing to do with her. It seemed extraordinary and unreal that he ever had.

The news broadcast had been repeated a number of times that evening, the same footage being shown again and again. Polly nearly told the story, she nearly pointed at the screen and stunned her friends by saying, “See that bloke standing in front of the tank? I’ve had him,” but she didn’t. It was all too strange. Polly no longer really believed it herself.

During her A-level year Polly worked part time as a waitress in an upmarket burger joint called New York New York (address, Chiswick High Street). The hours were unsociable but the tips were good and Polly shocked herself by discovering that with a judicious smile and a flirty manner she could make the tips even better. It did not take long for her to find out that shorter skirts meant more generous gratuities. She occasionally wondered what Madge and the girls from the camp would have made of that, but then she reasoned that if lads wanted to be wankers it seemed silly not to profit from it.

Feminism was changing anyway, at least that was what the style sections of the Sunday papers were saying. It was the year that saw the beginning of what was to become known as the new lad/new laddette trend, a period when it was pronounced all right to be a yob and behave badly. Of course in pubs and clubs up and down the country life simply went on as usual. The lads carried on drinking beer and fighting, while the girls continued to discuss male member size loudly over bucketfuls of vodka and orange. To the metropolitan style media, however, the new lad trend was a revelation. It appeared that boys and girls had

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