Blast From the Past by Ben Elton

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.’
    ‘Well, it would need to be,’ Jack replied, extricating himself. ‘You certainly can’t fuck in one.’
    It was no good. They would have to go elsewhere. Then, as if by magic, the sun burst through what had until then been a rather grey day. The field beyond the gate turned golden. A glorious meadow carpeted with long, swaying grass with butterflies hovering lazily above it. Had that field been candlelit, strewn with red velvet cushions and with Barry White’s greatest hits wafting softly from speakers hidden in the hedges, it could not have seemed more like a good place for sex.
    ‘Come on,’ said Jack.
    They climbed the gate and fell together into their five-acre bed.
    Deflowered amongst the flowers, Polly thought to herself, being not quite out of her teenage poetry stage.
    It was a disaster. Making love in a field is almost as difficult as doing it in a car, especially if it’s been raining the night before and you have a problem with pollen and what looked like soft grass