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.
Jonathan was scared because he didn’t understand why he was where he was. He didn’t understand why he was looking at a new poster advertising a film which had been released nearly fifty years ago. He didn’t understand why he was no longer in his flat in Bayswater. He didn’t understand why his coffee was close to freezing, given that he had boiled the water just a few minutes ago. He skimmed his gaze downward from the movie poster to a street; he was on the first floor of a building that he didn’t know. He pressed his forehead against the window pane and swivelled his eyes again to look one way up the street, to his right, and saw nothing other than more characterless buildings which he presumed looked the same as the one he was now in. He also saw a T-junction. He looked the other way, to his left and saw that the street came to sudden halt against a high red brick wall. He imagined that it looked like a street that had been cut in half when the Berlin Wall had been erected in 1961. Jonathan was born in 1969. He pulled his head back from the window and saw that his skin had left a small grease mark on the glass. He was momentarily fascinated by the exact impression of his skin that was left there. His DNA was there as well. The nucleic acid that contained the recipe for soup of his life.
Deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, consists of two long polymers of simple units called nucleotides, with backbones made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds. These two strands run in opposite directions to each other and are therefore anti-parallel, forming the classic helix configuration. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of molecules called bases. It is the sequence of these four bases along the backbone that encodes information. This information is read using the genetic code, which specifies the sequence of the amino acids within proteins. The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA, in a process called transcription.
Within cells, DNA is organised into long structures called chromosomes. These chromosomes are duplicated before cells divide in a process called DNA replication. Within the chromosomes, chromatin proteins such as histones compact and organise DNA. These compact structures guide the interactions between DNA and other proteins, helping control which parts of the DNA are transcribed.
Jonathan considered his grease mark again and then involuntarily shivered. He was out of place and didn’t understand why. And he was scared. He ran through the Greek alphabet in his head. Something he did when he was confused or stressed. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa… kappa… lam… fuck, fuck, fuck. Why couldn’t he remember what came next?
Jonathan set his blue and white striped mug down on the windowsill, relieved to be free of the iciness, and turned to face the room he was in. He didn’t recognise it but that didn’t surprise him. He walked into the middle and took in the contents of the room as he turned through three hundred and sixty degrees. The room was completely retro in the detail of its design and furnishing; someone had gone to a great deal of trouble in here to get the right pieces. Everything screamed of the late fifties or early sixties. He looked at the floor. A red carpet with a swirling diaspora pattern in black. Blackening spirals disappearing into ever reducing vortices of dark infinity. Looking at the carpet made him feel vaguely ill. It was a carpet that you would simply not find in any shop, anywhere, any more. There was a sofa of white but worn leather which ran alongside one wall. He studied it more closely and saw that many of the creases in the leather had some ingrained black dirt. It was actually tatty. To his right, there was a bookcase with rows of books leaning at random angles against one another. He looked briefly at the spines; mostly classics: Austen, Dickens, Hemmingway, Steinbeck, Twain, Kipling, Salinger and many more. Different colours, different heights and spine thickness. Nothing modern. Nothing that he recognised anyway. He was momentarily offended by the randomness of the book placing but, for once, his need to organise stuff was overwhelmed by his situation – there was something more important than the descending height of books on a shelf.
There was a television but it was an old looking one; it was in a walnut cabinet and was clearly a black and white model manufactured by Baird. There was a matching sideboard upon which sat, imperiously and strangely in charge of its technological relevance, a record player; he recognised the make as a Dansette in a red and white leatherette case. Beside the Dansette was a stack of old 45 rpm singles in paper covers. He walked over to them and looked at the single on the top of the stack; the label said My Love performed by Petula Clark. For no reason he read the release number Pye 7N 17038. It looked new, in mint condition in fact, which was true of all the records in the pile. Jonathan ran a finger along the Dansette record player and again spun through a full circle. Everything about this room was so damned… sixties. The wallpaper was white with a repeating pattern of large and disagreeable black leaves.
Also to his right was a door which he could see led off to a narrow galley kitchen. Jonathan looked into the kitchen from where he stood but decided not to go into it. To his left was another door to another room, which was not open. He didn’t want to open it. He couldn’t decide why he has no desire to explore this flat further other than it made him feel distinctly uneasy. It was as if his very presence was a direct affront to the environment. He felt that the very fabric of the room realised he didn’t belong there and like antibodies attack a virus, it was mustering its molecules to force him from the space he was occupying. There was a gathering cloud of malevolence that was palpable and it did nothing to calm the rising panic that Jonathan was aware was brewing.
Immediately in front of him was a door which looked like a front door; it had a letter box flap and a chain which was not engaged. He walked toward it without investigating whatever was to his left or his right. He needed to be out of the room; he needed some perspective. He needed balance. He needed rationale. The vindictive spirit of the place was gaining a form and Jonathan had an awful feeling that something was behind him and was preparing to pounce onto his back with bared flesh-ripping teeth. He hurried his pace and then slowed knowing that he was being foolish. There was nothing behind him.
He looked at his cold watch. Jonathan was dumbstruck and perplexed in equal measure. Frightened. The minute hand was moving around the dial too fast to understand. It was moving as fast as the hand that counts the seconds. The hour hand was moving slower but was in the correct ratio of revolutions to the minute hand. The second hand was not moving. He stared at his watch. Not comprehending anything. He reached for the brass handle of the front door; it was hard and metallic to his touch. He opened it and stepped out into a hallway and realised he was in a block of flats as there were several other doors like the one from which he had just emerged. The hallway smelled of something he couldn’t quite place. Something that smelled old. Gone. Perhaps lifeless. Dead even. Where was here? Why was he where he was? Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, theta, iota, kappa…. His memory of the Greek alphabet had not returned.
He saw concrete steps that led to the ground floor of the block of flats and he walked toward them, starting slowly down them. Noiselessly in his new bright white Converse sneakers with coal black trim. There was no sound from anything or anywhere. He was descending toward a street, which he presumed was in London. Where he lived. There should be some sounds. Some sounds. Any sounds; people, busses, taxi cabs, road drills, shouts, whistles, chattering… anything. Ambient London street noise. There was an absence of sound, though. And that wasn’t any kind of right. Not in London. He wondered if he was in some sort of waking dream. Or had fallen in his flat in Bayswater and was having a delusion as a result of a head trauma. Perhaps he had walked in his sleep. Perhaps... alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon… shit and fuck; now he had nothing beyond that. He had learned the Greek alphabet at school when he was ten. He knew it backwards. He tried to say it to himself backwards; he could not remember how to start it. A word beginning with O was all he now knew. Head trauma. It must be.
Then someone or rather something wailed and screeched far away. The sound froze his blood and his step faltered. The sound was of anguish; of the end of life; of something inhuman raging against something inevitable. The sound rose and fell in pitch, making it seem close and then far, he thought. Then, as he had descended two or three steps, something seemed to rush at him in the half lit dimness of the stairwell. Something invisible but pushing a bow wave of air before it. He felt the force of it as it came up the stairs toward him. The energy, the presence, ghostly, ethereal, passed through him and for an instant he was full of lifelessness and despair. Fear was a claw twisting his entrails into a Gordian knot. He felt bile rise in his throat.
Jonathan didn’t want to be in this building any longer and he ran down the rest of the stairs and burst out from a pair of glass doors into the street he had been viewing from above. He saw the Thunderball poster again. It was new. He was certain of that. New. Fucking new? It shouldn’t have been new. It did not belong there. It was extraordinary. Out of the ordinary. It was out of time. Had the film been recently re-released? No, he knew it hadn’t.
He looked to the T-junction to his right and walked toward it. He expected to see life at any moment. He didn’t. He could still hear the wailing. It was a human wail. It sounded hopeless and full of despair, like someone keening over the body of a dead child and then the sound played backwards. There was that noise and only that noise. He thought if he had to hear it for a long time, it would make him insane. There was nothingness in the street. Not just an absence of things but an absolute absence of anything. An absolute zero of existence. All that was here was air and that fucking Thunderball poster.
Suddenly, the wailing became a high pitched scream and seemed to have started to move. Toward him. A few hundred feet around the T-junction. His bowels loosened. Sweat seeped immediately from back and into the fabric of his shirt. He was filled with dread; cold, inflexible, profound dread. It was the sheer venom of the sound and the fact that seemed to be directly absolutely at him; for him, about him; at his very existence in this place.
He backed quickly away from the sound and spun around to run in the opposite direction. But there was the Berlin Wall. He wanted to get back into the block of flats but when he tried the doors, they had become locked. They only opened freely for people who wanted to leave the building – to get back in he could see that he would need a key. The screaming banshee was about to turn the corner of the T-junction and he would see what horror was making the appalling noise. He was so very scared. Jonathan’s world was no longer his own. His mind was no longer his own.
The scream turned into a high pitched voice forming a sentence, ‘I can hear you! I can smell you! Stay where you are.’ The owner of the voice sounded demented. He could not even tell if it was male or female. Jonathan’s stomach fell a thousand feet; he had nowhere to run. He steeled himself and from somewhere deep inside his psyche he found the courage to turn and face what was about to come at him.