by Danny King
But I was talking about Sun Dju, wasn’t I?
The first time I laid eyes on her was in the unarmed combat gymnasium. All the cherries were sat around a big crash mat while Mr Sato walked them through a few basic moves – knocking away a dagger, throwing someone over your shoulder, holding your hand in front of your face to stop someone poking you in both eyes with two fingers, that sort of thing. Easy enough and occasionally even useful, but hardly kung fu, which was when I noticed Sun Dju skulking around behind us in that painfully provocative way I’d seen too many times before.
X3 was with her, smiling to himself because he knew what was coming, while I was desperately trying to avoid both of their eyes and keeping my fingers crossed that everyone else did the same.
Some hope. See, Sun Dju was one hell of a saucy bit of crumpet; six feet tall, as slender as a pack of Camels and peachy in all the best places. She also wore a red figure-hugging leather one-piece suit that was so tight you could make out what she had for breakfast. Yesterday.
I swapped my eye patch across from my bad eye to my good and carried on making out like I was monitoring the combat, hoping someone would give me a nudge when we broke for coffee. Big mistake. See, while I could no longer be temped to gawp at her delicious candy wrappings, I could no longer look away either when she wandered past, then back again, stepping up in her six-inch stiletto heels to ask what I was staring at. “You wanna fuck or fight me?”
When nobody answered I peeled my eye patch back to see everyone in the gymnasium suddenly staring at me.
“You what?”
Sun Dju’s face contorted into a deadly snarl and before I had a chance to explain my negligence, her utility belt hit the floor and her long painted nails were beckoning me onto the crash mat.
Mr Sato and Mr Nikitin bowed at each other then quickly fled the square to make room and all too quickly I had no place left to go – except the mat. It didn’t matter that I didn’t want to fight or fuck Sun Dju – at least, not without the benefit of a shin pads and a bottle of Rohypnol – I suddenly had no choice. As one of the combat instructors at the institution, I was expected to rise to any challenge. By the cherries, by my fellow instructor and by the Agency staff, who were now regarding me with raised eyebrows. See, X3 was hiring. And it seriously wouldn’t do to have members of the organisation they were hiring from chickening out and feigning back problems when challenged to a fight.
I slid the patch back across to my face, slipped my ‘eye.Pod out’ and dropped it into one of my shoes when I kicked them off at the edge of the mat.
Captain Bolaji looked up at me, as if to ask if I knew what I was doing, but unfortunately I did. And it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference. However, I did have one thing going in my favour. And that was that everyone to a man knew I was about to get the shit kicked out of me, including The Agency’s senior staff (it’s a done deal when one of these fruit-loops decides to prove themselves – you might as well kick your own head in and save them the trouble), so I didn’t have the weight of expectation on my shoulders. Just the problem of getting in there, getting hit and going down as quickly and as believably as possible, before she could do any real damage.
She shaped up before me on the mat.
I was savvy enough to know not to bow and sure enough one of her boots missed my head by millimetres as she aimed a vicious spin-kick into my coconut.
“Fucking cheating bitch…” I spluttered falling back on my arse and scrambling away to the peels of evil Mandarin laughter. It was then that I also noticed she’d kept her heels on, only the sheaths of her stilettos were now missing, exposing two glistening six-inch blades to slice the crash mat to pieces.
Well now, I hummed, that hadn’t been in the brochure.
She came at me fast, kicking and spinning furiously, throwing cartwheels and splits as she attempted to stab me with her ferocious footwear. I ran around in circles at first, backwards and forwards and from side to side trying to put as much distance between myself and Sun Dju’s killer heels. But when I felt them rake the backs of my calves and spiral upwards into my vulnerable buttocks, I realised I was setting myself up to be sliced little and often, until the weight of my wounds slowed me down and allowed her to land the big one, so after several more seconds of scrambling, I finally turned to face her.
Sun Dju saw my pained and desperate expression and cackled accordingly.
The cherries and staff lapped it all in too, transfixed by the spectacle, but guarded enough not to display their excitement lest they be next. Captain Bolaji gawked on with morbid disquiet, too fearful to look, too excited to blink. I was one karate kick from the mortuary.
Sun Dju finally dropped the laughter and came at me one last time, but far from fleeing, this time I darted straight at her, throwing myself between her whirling legs and engaging her at close-quarters. I made it with fractions of seconds to spare and planted a thrusting forehead into the epicentre of her surprise with as much force as I could muster. The resultant crunch almost made me sick, so appalling was the jarring thunk, and I staggered away with stars popping in my head and fell into the front row of cherries immediately behind me.
Still, if I think I’d caught it badly, this was nothing compared to Sun Dju, who was flat on her back and looking as if a grenade had just gone off in her face. Nose, mouth, teeth and eyes, they were all still in there somewhere, but now concealed beneath the geyser of blood.
“I think you got her there, Mr Jones,” one of my cherries pointed out helpfully.
“What have you done? What have you done?” X3 hollered, rushing to his comatosed lieutenant’s aid and bundling her up in his arms. The Agency seniors were also looking at me in displeasure, somewhat stunned by such an unprecedented turn of events and wondering where this left their lucrative supply contract. Well, I might’ve proved myself but I’d also just undermined X3 and Sun Dju’s authority in front of a batch of potential recruits. Not a good thing if you’re hoping to rule with an iron fist and a steel heel.
“What have you done?” X3 demanded again, but Captain Bolaji and a couple of the other cherries kept him at bay until I could wobble to my feet.
“She made me an offer,” I eventually told him, X3’s face now just inches from mine. “Well there’s my reply. Though if you don’t mind I think I’ll forgo the fuck if you don’t mind, I’m not really feeling up to it any more,” I groaned, hobbling off towards the medical bay.
X3 continued to piss and moan in my wake, calling me an “ant” to his “colossus”, the usual stuff, but his protestations were now only falling on deaf ears when The Agency’s senior staff reminded him where he was and who’d picked the fight in the first place. They eventually sent him packing in humiliation by asking the question that was dying to be asked; that was if he and his hard-boiled lieutenant couldn’t even defeat a mere “ant” like me, what chance did they have against Jack Tempest of the British Secret Service?
18.
LICENCE TO LITERATE
I was hauled over the coals the next day for upsetting the applecart, but not too severely because nobody could really blame me for trying to stay in one piece, no matter how much it had let the team down. Still I’d still cost The Agency a contract and could’ve potentially frightened away future business if word got around that they had some schizoid instructor who didn’t know his place, so they returned my status to operational and sent me packing too.
It was a shame because I’d been enjoying my time on the island, and what’s more I’d been earning. Not a lot, but it had been a regular wage and the odd fighty bitch asides, the only serious danger I’d experienced was when I’d come perilously close to losing my nominating rights following some scandalously low scores for The Kenneth Williams Diaries, which while it had admittedly been overly long and soul-sappingly tedious in large chunks, had thrown up a few interesting insights. It didn’t matter though, a new rule was collectively voted in banning all books over five hundred pages in length and anything even remotel
y Carry-On related.
I arrived back in Petworth later that night and wondered where I went from here.
I dropped by and saw Bill in Arundel after a couple of days, and was able to pay him back a couple of grand, which pleased Bill no end, but infuriated Marjorie beyond all volume control. I also took Bill for a pint and told him all about my recent adventures; my African excursions, my time in the West Indies, my stint as an instructor and even about book club.
Of all the things I talked about, the crocodiles, the nuclear blast, the run-in with Sun Dju, it was my book club that most unsettled Bill.
“They worry people they do,” he said, sitting forward and leaning on his walking stick with both hands in a manner that reflected his discomfort at such a revelation.
“Book clubs?”
“No. Well yes. Well more, organisations within organisations,” Bill responded.
“We’re only passing the time,” I told him. “They’re just books.”
“Yeah, and Opus Dei is just teaching the way to spiritual enlightenment. But they still get to open fifty-million dollar headquarters in New York and phone up Presidents in the middle of the night with their political Christmas lists so don’t go underestimating The Agency’s reaction should they ever get wind of it.”
“Well I can see what books you’ve been reading lately,” I deduced, reaching for my Guinness and knocking its head off it before setting it back down. “We’re hardly Opus Dei. There’s only two or three of us,” I lied, apt to downplay the extent to which we’d spread in light of Bill’s paranoia.
“Yeah, and so were Opus Dei when they first started out. What organisation’s not? Two blokes having a chat and starting a club. But these things spread. They’re fine if they spread independently in the outside world. That’s fair enough and good luck to them, but you don’t let a parasite lay its eggs in your brain just because they’re only eggs, do you? Eggs hatch.”
“And little Opus Deis are born,” I finished for him.
“Exactly,” Bill nodded, looking over his shoulder this way and that before figuring it was safe to take a sip of beer.
“So you don’t want to join us then?” I put to him.
“What?” he double-took.
“You don’t want to join our book club then?”
“Are you asking me?” Bill checked.
“Of course,” I said.
“What seriously?”
“Yes, seriously,”
“Honestly?”
“For fuck’s sake Bill, have a word with yourself.”
“Straight up?”
I decided to stop knocking the ball back across the net as I figured this rally could go on for some time and eventually Bill accepted that I was honesty, seriously, genuinely asking him to join. Straight up.
“Ah Mark, you’re a star,” Bill positively beamed, putting his stick to one side and shaking me by the hand as if I’d just announced I was having puppies.
“So you’ll join?”
“Absolutely,” he enthused.
“It’s just a book club, Bill,” I reminded him.
“Oh yeah, of course, no I understand,” he brimmed anyway. “It’s just nice to be asked,” he grinned. “Nice to be a part of something again after all these years; part of something with the boys.”
I gave him his USB stick, this one tailored to look like a Ladbrokes’ pen, which is where Bill spent most of his retirement these days, and Bill (or Pops as he was to be known) savoured every word of it as I instructed him on how to use it.
Like I said before Bill missed the life. He’d been an Affiliate from the late-sixties to the early-noughties and had been involved in some of the biggest and most spectacular heists the world had ever seen. Or not, as the case may be. Forget The Great Train Robbery, that was handbag snatching compared to the stuff Bill had been a part of – the plot to blow the Hoover Dam, the hijacking of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the underground germ warfare lab in Mount St Helens, the assassination of Henri Paul – Bill had led a life most men could only dream of. But it had all caught up with him in an abrupt fashion when a bullet in the back had finally ended his career in 2000. It had almost ended his life too, but I’d not given up on him. I’d worked on him non-stop until The Agency choppers had arrived, bundled him on board of the first one out of there and got him to the hospital ship just in time. By the skin of my teeth, I’d saved his life – but Bill’s fighting days were over. Despite being super-fit for his age, a partial paralysis to the right leg and the loss of a kidney meant Bill could never bear arms again. And a part of Bill died with his loss of operational status.
He’d kept his hand in by going back to the island as an instructor, but had lasted little more than a year after a new and painfully young Agency staffer was promoted to Overseer and did what all painfully young men do when they’re promoted to senior positions – he got rid of all the old guard.
So Bill was unceremoniously thrown on the scrap heap. He had precious few mementoes to remind himself of his past glories either – well you didn’t collect photos or visa stamps when one trawl of the family album could get you extradited to pretty much every country on Earth, did you? And unlike the veterans of legitimate armies, there were no days, no ceremonies, no medals and no obelisks to commemorate the campaigns we’d fought. Or the comrades we’d lost. Not when you were an Affiliate. No sir. When the fighting was over, we were expected to go away, keep a low profile and never speak of what we’d seen or done again. If we’d been lucky enough to see old age, of course. Which most Affiliates didn’t because the lure of signing up again was always there. With all the unfinished business and unrealised riches that came with it.
So Bill missed much about his former life. He missed the action. He missed the huff and the puff. He missed the exotic locations. And he missed the camaraderie. But most of all, Bill just missed making a difference; even if that difference was invariably a terrifying plot that threatened to destabilise the entire free world. But like Bill said, it was just nice to be a part of something.
So a USB stick disguised as a bookie’s biro and an invitation to join a reading circle might’ve seemed like a pretty poor proxy to most blokes, but Bill was made up with it all the same and couldn’t shake the smile from his battle-scarred face. It was good to see.
“Thanks again, Mark. I really do appreciate it,” he told me for the sixth or seventh time.
“It’s okay, Bill, glad to have you on board. Welcome to book club,” I said.
“And so, I just put this in the back of my computer do I?” he asked, popping the lid off his USB to examine it closely.
“Yeah, that’s it. Just stick it in your USB port, log on with your username and password and off you go. Oh, there are some rules on it too, so you should probably have a look at them first before you do anything else,” I remembered.
“And that’s it?” he said.
“Pretty much,” I replied. “Well, there is just one other thing.”
“What’s that?” Bill asked, his boyish enthusiasm exposing a vulnerable underbelly.
“The first book you have to read is by Russell Davies.”
“Russell Davies,” Bill noted. “Got it, no problem, what’s it called?”
“The Kenneth Williams Diaries,” I confirmed, figuring I might as well pay him back for letting that kid fall through the grinder at boot camp.
19.
THE DYMETROZONE COUNTERSTROKE
The weeks hang heavy when I’m not working. It’s not so much the inactivity that always gets to me, more the knowledge that my savings were plunging inexorably towards the red; and that when they were gone, they’d take my farmhouse and my comfortable life with them.
I can’t live in a town. I can’t live in a city. I’m a limbo man between lives. And as good as my documentation appeared to the naked eye, it wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. It couldn’t, because Mark Jones didn’t really exist. And all it would take was one nosey neighbour or one inquisitive bank manager to g
et the Easter Egg hunt under way.
I had to stay in the sticks. I had to keep myself to myself. I had to stay solvent.
So I lived to work and I worked to live. Most Affiliates did.
Still, there was nothing I could do until a suitable contract came up. I’d put my name down on the short and middle term contracts lists so now I just had to wait. Hopefully something would come along before the year was out. I had enough money to get by until then – if I tightened my belt and stopped buying Heinz brand baked beans.
To pass the days in the meantime, I’d managed to get a part-time job in a little second-hand bookshop in Petworth. This contributed a few pennies to the coffers and allowed me to read all the books I wanted for free. Naturally, I didn’t want to attract unnecessary attention or scare off customers, so I dispensed with the eye patch and wore my Sunday best cosmetic orb, though there was precious little I could do about the six inch scar that ran across my face, so I stuck to the backroom whenever possible.
And it was while working here that the oddest things began to occur.
The boss of the place was an inoffensive old stick called Stewart, who was probably only about five years older than me, but who dressed more like my granddad’s scoutmaster. Stewart was a remnant of the last century. He mistrusted anything that required batteries, refused to acknowledge more than four channels on his TV set and thought corned beef and pickled onion sandwiches were a pretty good thing. Not that Stewart spent much time watching his TV set mind. Books were his thing. They were his refuge, his passion and his livelihood. He bought them, sold them, traded them and consumed them. He even smelt like them and acquired great box-loads of paperbacks from house clearances and auctions and spent his afternoons going through them like lucky dips, occasionally cooing with delight when he’d find an early Graham Greene tucked in amongst several hundredweight of Mills & Boons.