CHAPTER ONE. Thunderball MCMLXV
Saturday 4th May 2014. Jonathan H stared out of a window, his eyes flicking from side to side as he examined the view; his observation finally settling on a large poster which was pasted to a hefty looking advertising board which, in turn, was fixed to the side wall of a building on the other side of the street, directly opposite where he stood. His gaze narrowed its sweep and flitted furiously to the four corners of the poster and then, more slowly, crawled all over it as he studied and considered it. Consumed it with sight. But he couldn’t understand it or the message it conveyed. It was a poster advertising a film. The advertisement was entreating the reader to visit a cinema called The Prince of Wales in Lewisham. The film being advertised was Thunderball. A James Bond movie starring Sean Connery. Look Up! Look Down! Look Out! Here comes the biggest Bond of all! Too many fucking exclamation marks, was his initial thought. Then he looked harder, straining his eyes to read the smaller text and noted the minutiae of the information on the poster. Presented by Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, Directed by Terence Young. Produced by Kevin McClory. Screenplay by Richard Maibaum. This was the information that immediately stood that stood out. He recognised those names. He noted the date on the poster which was in Roman numerals: MCMLXV. He knew that was 1965 which was the year the film was released.
Thunderball is the fourth film in the James Bond series of films (after Dr. No, 1962, From Russia with Love, 1963 and Goldfinger, 1964) and also the fourth to star Sean Connery as the fictional MI6 agent with the codename 007. For an instant, Jonathan mused on the most boring of James Bond related question which is: Who has been the best Bond? He maintained his usual argument that none of them can be considered the best; just greater or lesser degrees of not right. Fleming’s urbane and violent protagonist was none of those celluloid incarnations. In Fleming’s mind, Bond physically resembled the composer Hoagy Carmichael and none of the actors chosen to play Bond looked anything like Hoagy Carmichael. Well, maybe Pierce Brosnan, a bit. But Brosnan is Irish and not English which should have ruled him out from the start (as indeed it should have Connery, a Scot and George Lazenby, an Australian). Bond was also an unremitting misogynist, another fact not really represented in the movies. Although, to be fair, the movie version of Bond did have a cavalier attitude to women at the best of times. His mind briefly and unconsciously drifted onto the usual follow-up question to the one about the best Bond; Who has been the best Bond girl so far? Dianna Rigg – hands down and no arguments. That was Jonathan’s point of view.
However, James Bond trivia was not what intrigued Jonathan the most; not right now, as he stared out of the window. His fascination was with the sheer randomness of the poster; it simply did not belong there. Where it was, on the wall opposite, was distinctly out of place. That was the thing that resonated with him; it was a conundrum that clanged as a muffled and faraway bell in the back of his mind. It just did not belong there. In fact, he didn’t even know why he was looking out of this particular window in the first place. He had been drinking freshly brewed hot coffee in the kitchen of his flat in Bayswater, just a few moments ago. An instant ago, in fact. The detail was elegantly simple in its actuality; he had been standing in the familiar environment of his kitchen and then morphed into a mind-bendingly complex enigma in that he was now standing in … well, somewhere else altogether.
He was certainly no longer in his kitchen. He was still holding the coffee cup, but the coffee it contained was now rime cold. There was what appeared to be a light frost, of all damn things, on the outside of the blue and white porcelain mug and his fingers were becoming frozen to the handle.
Whoever had pasted the Thunderball to its advertising board had not done the job properly and a bottom corner of it lifted slightly with the passing of a breeze; he glimpsed the red background of a previous poster that had been there before. He wondered what that hidden poster was advertising and then snapped back to the riddle at hand. His black Levi jeans were cold against his legs, his white button-down shirt felt stony against his chest. His watch was cold on his wrist as if he was shackled with a bracelet of hard ice. It felt as if everything he wore had gained sentience and turned its back on him – rejecting him and communicating contempt by eliminating the comfort of warmth. He felt naked. His balls has drawn themselves up as far as possible and the skin of his scrotum was tight and hard. He was scared.
