Bond prodded at the round pebbles with his shiny boots while waiting for the traps to spring, shotgun resting on his arm. Waiting for the whirring targets to erupt one last time over the immaculate lawn.
To be or not to be?
He was a secret agent, licensed to kill, one of the elite. But did he have true warrior spirit? The kind of warrior spirit espoused by Dr Ngwako Sebopetša when teaching Hamlet, Socrates, Madiba and Yaa Asantewaa to a ragtag of students – including his boyhood self – squatting on the bare floor of a dilapidated classroom roasting under the African sun amidst the thorn trees and scuffed dust. That unstoppable conviction triggered at the whim of the gods in the unlikeliest of vessels.
Would he continue to suffer the slings and arrows, or take arms against?
It had been one of those invitations one cannot possibly refuse. From the Queen, addressed to M, requesting the pleasure of 007’s company at the Royal Skeet Cup at her Sandringham estate.
No matter how appealing the thought, mused Bond, one couldn’t really RSVP what he really would have loved the Service to say in reply – to please accept our apologies but 007 is unable to attend due to this being the day that he polishes his pistol.
“This is to do with your Congo caper I’d imagine,” M growled. “Don’t do anything stupid. And do try to let the Queen’s Gamekeeper win, won’t you.”
He re-entered his office, the door clicked quietly behind him.
Miss Moneypenny looked at Bond with doe-eyed adoration.
“What will you say when you meet her James?”
“How I admire her taste in jewellery I’d imagine,” said Bond drily.
The Congo caper, as M referred to it, had involved shutting down a nasty little extortion racket that was trying to capitalise on an ill-advised purchase by Buckingham Palace of diamonds that turned out to have been illegally mined.
“Will you let her Gamekeeper win?”
Bond picked up the invitation without answering and departed for the lift well, the frosted glass doors closing behind him.
There was a little comedy of misunderstanding at the gates of Sandringham, it taking some considerable back-and-forth on the gatekeepers’ radios before their dim minds were finally convinced that the huge black man in front of them with the jovial smile and Mike Tyson build was indeed one of Her Majesty’s double-O agents.
Their tyres crunched up the drive towards the so-called “House” with its 775 rooms including more than fifty bedrooms for Royalty and guests.
Morning tea was being served in an Edwardian stateroom on the ground floor. The mistress of ceremonies was a winsome lass with disobedient strands of red hair falling across her face, appraising eyes, a generous mouth and a nametag that read Skye impeccably positioned above her décolletage.
“007, how wonderful! Please allow me to take your knobkierie.”
There was a slight delay whilst Skye wrestled with the propriety of depositing the said item into the umbrella stand, before deciding at last to lay it across the top of the gleaming chiffoniere.
“I’ll take you over and introduce you to the others,” she said, her gaze lingering on him with brief but palpable longing. She had done her research. In addition to possessing a large and beautiful Gaboon viper, with which he occasionally envenomated enemy agents, and a penchant for intricate and decorative shibari rope tie that he extended not only to his enemies (dead) but also to his girlfriends (alive), he was reportedly endowed with a member of such girth as to leave women shaken but undeterred.
The Queen joined them for a quarter of an hour, the severity of her expression in greeting James revealing that she too may have been aware of some of the more flamboyant aspects of his background.
“007, as you know reputation is everything. Thank you for everything you did for us.”
Her three corgis looked upon this interloper with distaste, one of them, Muick, baring its lips slightly. Nasty little dogs.
James bowed.
“We’ll see you at the shooting. Good luck,” she said, before moving to the next in line.
Bond was on a perfect score. The Gamekeeper, hiding his impending humiliation behind a taut smile, needed Bond to miss both targets in the final round in order to win.
Skye came close, ostensibly to check James was on the right mark.
“You have to let him win,” she whispered, her sweet scent beguiling his senses.
“What if I don’t?” said James.
“Oh do, please do. It’s ever so important to keep the tradition.”
Tradition. The word levered open a chink in the chainmail surrounding Bond’s soul. Why was he here? Serving an inbred monarchy ruling over a colonialist prissy collection of anally-retentive deviates with their restraining censorious little coughs who wouldn’t know a full-bodied belly laugh if they tripped over one, who were always ever-so-polite and refined, yet behind their sleepless hooded eyes always evaluating and judging, feet rotting in their little country surrounded by the foggy Atlantic waters and blighted by the freezing damp, where you are measured by your accent, the clothes you wear, where you live, your money, the car you drive, or better still the car your driver drives, where men find football teams to get any sense of belonging and belt down beers for courage to go home to their whining kids and skeletal women unable to lift a calabash of water let alone carry a bed on their head, where faux adults stay in perpetual adolescence besotted with their little cracked phone screens until they suddenly get old and are tossed onto the garbage heap of mildewed old-age homes with their ever-hovering covetous offspring displeased with the slowness of their passing.
Why had he given up his Africa, his tribe full of joy, celebration, gratitude for life, voluptuous obliging women, why had he abandoned the spirit-haunting song of dance, proper veneration for the elders, the rites when a boy knows he has become man, and a girl woman, the children playing under the benevolent gaze of their aunties, the little boys laughing as they push their skeletal cars made of scraps of wire through the dust, the girls sitting demure in the shade stringing beads on necklaces but seeing everything, a handful of rondavels around a kraal, the bare earth beneath naked feet, the fierce hot rain of summer storms, the cry of the guinea fowl, the sonorous hoo hoop of the hoopoe, the throat-bubbling call of the head-bobbing red-eyed dove, the hadeda that says its own name and metallic klink-klink of the fork-tailed drongo, the roar of lion at night followed by the sycophantic simpering of hyena’s and cough of the trotting jackal, the indolent coils of the muddy river under morning sun replete with fish and hippos, overflying malachite kingfishers and overhanging weaver bird community nests, pythons stretched out in the scrub with a klipspringer bulging their belly, the chant of the women dancing around the fire, their hips swaying, the fierce stomping of the young warriors clutching shields and spears, decorated with a kaross of zebra skin or lion – ah yes warriors, fighting for the raw and the universal, not for some brittle pretence of superiority.
In the normal course of events, chinks like this one levered open by Skye’s reference to tradition, would self-anneal within seconds of opening, the rebellious thoughts being quickly doused by the surrounding proprietary of norms. On this occasion, however, with unfortunate timing, Muick, the self-same corgi that had shown its distaste during the morning tea line-up, chose this exact moment of Bond’s introspection to explode in a hissy fit of barking and rush towards him in a perfect whirlpool of snarling fearful hate.
On reflex, driven both by the temporary flux of mutinous self-loathing and the strict instructions to let the Gamekeeper win, Bond snapped the shotgun shut and discharged both barrels in less time than it would take you to blink an eye. One could argue that Bond had done Muick a favour. The corgi was old with bleeding gums, frequent bouts of epilepsy and stones in its urine tract.
Whatever. He had taken arms against the slings and arrows. He had freed his own soul.
Bond deposited the gun with ceremonial reverence into the astonished arms of a nearby bearer and stalked back towards the House.
One week later, he was on a plane to Lubumbashi, leaving behind that intricate edifice of so-called British civilisation heaving a collective sigh of relief.
The dog Muick, or what remained of him, was given a royal burial.
M received a reprimand and would have to wait a few more years for his MBE.
Skye took care of the Gaboon viper and knobkierie.