The Joy by Paul Howard

Author:Paul Howard [Paul Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847175106
Publisher: The O'Brien Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

REFLECTIONS: JAMES BOND AND BRISTLE-HEAD

Usually, I was a shrewd enough judge of character, but I totally misjudged that Doctor Kananga fella. Fair enough, he had his faults but he wasn’t all bad. He was after telling that James Bond about his master plan to cultivate these massive poppy plantations on his island down in the Caribbean, manufacture a couple of million tons of smack and then give it away free of charge to people in America. The unfortunate downside of Doctor Kananga’s plan was that fifty or sixty million Americans would have become addicts by the time all the free gear ran out and then they’d be expected to buy it off him. All right, it wasn’t exactly infallible, right? But a welfare state for junkies is a great idea. If Charlie Haughey or Garret FitzGerald had had that kind of foresight, then most of us would never have been locked up in the first place.

I was alone in me support for him, though. The other lads in the borstal with me – servile bastards that they were – had fallen for auld Roger Moore’s death-defying heroism, Brylcreamed slickness, repertoire of sickening chat-up lines and the watch that Q was after giving him with the hyper-intensified magnetic field powerful enough to deflect a bullet at long range. The roar that went up when he used it to unzip the back of some bird’s dress was deafening. “Sheer magnetism,” the smarmy bastard said, raising one eyebrow. All the boys laughed. Cunts.

Not me, though. See, I’m more broad-minded than that. Prepared to see both sides of an argument, to consider the possibility that maybe Doctor Kananga has his heart in the right place after all.

The Big Movie Night was one of the few things that made the teenage years we spent in Pat’s bearable. This particular night, though, I had one eye on Live and Let Die and the other on Squirrel, who was sitting beside me. Squirrel was a messer who was guaranteed to get you into trouble if you went anywhere near him. Forget any of the gadgetry you’ve ever seen Bond get off Q. Squirrel was a bastard for throwing the ping-pong smoke bomb and I was sitting next to him the first night he detonated the fuckin thing. He had a table tennis ball in his hand, burned a small hole in it with the tip of a cigarette and spent the first twenty minutes of the film blowing smoke into the opening, which he then covered over with his thumb. Just before the heat perished the plastic, he dropped the ball in the aisle and stamped on it. There was a loud bang, a huge cloud of white smoke and all hell broke loose. I’d avoided sitting near him ever since, but this was the only seat available when I arrived this night, so I didn’t have the luxury of choice. I tried not to become too engrossed in the film, though.

I couldn’t believe it. Doctor Kananga was after catching Bond rapid torching his poppy fields and he had the chance to kill him.

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