“E, a place that, they afterwards
learned, bore a v,” :
This bit of “found poetry” was the “subject”
line for some spam that came through my e-mail recently. I thought it might
make for an interesting starting line for a writing prompt, as recommended by
Natalie Goldberg. Here’s what has come of it.
E, a place that, they afterwards learned,
bore a v, was a most private and unassuming address in a rather ordinary
looking gated community. The “v” E bore was its mark of distinction, engraved on
the address plate on the front of the house above and to the left of E’s upper --,
in order to distinguish vE from its cross-town suburban counterpart,
E2. Where E2 was a
lab devoted, so far as the public was even interested, to arcane things to do
with particle string theory, v-bearing E was the office away from the office for
several of Bond’s employer’s weapons and special effects masters. It looked on
the outside like an over-sized bungalow made of brick, but it was built onto a
hillside, and its basement went in and down several steel and titanium sheathed
storeys, emptying out into something that would have embarrassed the Bat Cave:
A toyshop of destruction, right beside a full-sized, fully equipped gymnasium
and firing range.
But that was not vE’s most
interesting feature. To get there, without a high security clearance or a
licence to kill, you had to have dated or caught the amorous attention of M,
James Bond’s boss. Because right across the hall from the weapons lab and
fitness centre was a fully stocked boudoir, in which M entertained – well, whomever
she pleased. Or more to the point, whoever pleased her. Though as she got
older, that list grew shorter, along with her temper.
Unlike the employers of the director of
the CIA, M’s bosses were not prudes. If she wanted to dally, even at her age, she
had their full co-operation. They had, after
all, recruited her years ago for her talents at dalliance. With her relaxed,
elegant beauty and her Oxford Ph.D. in the history of applied sexual
anthropology, she had been one of their best agents for seducing cold-war enemy
agents to reveal more than their physical skills under the covers, back in her
younger, less acerbic, days.
All those years of whoring for Queen and
country had pretty much used up her patience with fumbling twits, impressive
mostly for the fact that higher-ups believed they could be trusted with
information, when they were just men, after all. Well—most of them. Some of
those Russian agentesses had been spectacular. Almost as spectacular as M in
her prime. Almost as spectacular, and a little harder to impress—the only real
challenges to her inventiveness, but ultimately the key to her advancement up
the ranks.
None of M’s guests, for reasons best left
to the imagination, ever took note of the v on the way in—only on
their exhausted way out, their senses a tuned a bit higher to the finer
details. But it was the thing they recalled ever after—maybe ruing, maybe
relishing, the realization they had just become another notch on her headboard.
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Now—where did that come from? Probably
the fact that the newest Bond movie came out this last week, though I haven’t
seen it yet. But I’ve sure never wondered what M’s back story was. Not until
that weird V-bearing E opened the gate. Does this mean I am to become a
knocker-off of Bond prequels? Something to look forward to in my retirement.
Something even to retire to pursue—a career as a soft-core cold-war espionage
pornographer. Who knew?
