The Henchmen's Book Club (12 page)

“You’re welcome my boy. And if that
sniper scope view design becomes available again, I’ll let you know,” he
replied.

“That would be great.”

Nurse Parker re-entered after a quick
fingering of the doctor’s buzzer and invited me to retake my wheelchair for the
ride back to my room.

“Remember Mr Jones,” Doctor Jacob said,
just before I reached the door. “Look after your new eyes and they’ll look
after you.”

I nodded my appreciation and was swept
from the room by Nurse Parker, already wondering if I shouldn’t just throw it
all in and upgrade my arms and legs while I was here.

15.
A BLINDING NIGHT’S SKY

I looked out across a crystal blue sea and watched the gulls circle and squawk
above the crashing waves. I’d been recuperating here just short of six weeks
and my strength and confidence had come back to me a little more each day. The
surroundings had helped, naturally. It wasn’t an accident that The Agency had
one of its primary trauma hospitals in such an idyllic location. Your heart
couldn’t help but soar at the sun, the sea and the scenery. A little oasis of
tropical paradise – that’s what this was. Paradise. The guys in here had
been to hell and back, seen and done things no man should be burdened with, and
suffered injuries they had no right to survive. Yet here we all were, in
heaven.

And hell’s a little easier to forget when
heaven’s so beautiful.

I returned my healthy eye to the John
Wyndham on my lap and soaked up a few more words.
The Day of the Triffids
. I’m not normally into science fiction
– space ships, aliens, foreign worlds and “what is this thing you call
kissing, Captain?” I find it all a bit of a yawn. Perhaps it’s because I have
trouble relating to it. Spaceships. Other worlds. Runaway robots. The
situations and settings feel too artificial to me. But then again, I haven’t
read that much sci-fi in my time, especially “quality sci-fi”, so maybe I
wasn’t giving the genre a fair shout. Perhaps I should take the plunge and get
an Isaac Asimov or a Robert A. Heinlein as my next book? But then again why
should I if I didn’t enjoy sci-fi? There were thousands of books out there.
Maybe millions even. I could read a book a day for the rest of my life and
never have to worry about sci-fi.

If I’d still been with Linda, and if
she’d been here with me today, she would’ve made me read an Isaac Asimov next.
She wasn’t into sci-fi either, she just liked making me do whatever I didn’t
want to do. It was the same with everything; food, clothing, movies or
haircuts: if I hated it, didn’t suit it or was allergic to it, she’d make me
wear it, watch it or eat it. Naturally she claimed she did these things to help
me broaden my horizons, but really she just liked making me do the things I
didn’t want to do. And each time she got her own way she’d see it as a
vindication of her own righteousness. And every time she didn’t, she’d see it
as a confirmation of my stubbornness and turn it into a fight about my
drinking.

I looked out at the sea again and let a
warm breeze carry these thoughts away before returning to my book.

As it happened I was quite enjoying
The Day of the Triffids
. It was the sort
of sci-fi I could live with: fantastical and a bit of a stretch, but still
within the realms of my imagination. Most of it was set in London or on the
South Downs, where I lived, which was a big help. And the odd walking vegetable
asides, there was nothing too implausible about the story. The circumstances
were incredible I’ll grant you, but the ways in which the characters analysed
and reacted to their situations were always fair and believable.

Basically, this is what happens.
Somewhere in the future (and bearing in mind this book was published in 1951,
so the future in question here is the early 1960s) scientists develop an
extraordinary plant whose oils are radically superior to anything on the
market. This has global implications as far as world hunger, engineering, trade
and peace are concerned, so you’d think everyone would be happy about it,
wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, there’s a downside. The Triffids are deadly
meat-eating plants that can walk around on their roots and kill people with a
single flick of their stingers. But that’s okay, because they are only plants,
after all, not poisonous elephants, so they’re kept in check, behind electric
fences and farmed by experts for their oils. Then one evening, a spectacular
meteor shower lights up the night’s sky across the entire globe. Everyone
rushes to watch it, only to wake up the next morning blind. Only a handful of
people escape, our hero Bill Masen being one of them, because he’d been in
hospital with his eyes bandaged up (like all good heroes have from time to
time) so he missed the cosmic light show, which is lucky for him.

Things are naturally chaotic at first,
with whole populations crying out for help in the darkness, and the sighted do
what they can for the blind, but soon realise the situation’s utterly hopeless.
There are simply too many blind to look after, feed and care for, and too few
sighted. They can’t save everyone and disease and death are soon filling the
cities, so the few sighted survivors take to the countryside and start afresh.

The Triffids don’t actually come into it
very much at first. Bill and his chums have a hundred and one other things to
worry about in the early chapters, but as the book goes on, and the Triffids
escape their captivity and start feeding like crazy on the bumbling blind.

Anyway, like I said, the situation’s a
bit contrived, but the characters are very plausible. Wyndham himself called
his books “logical sci-fi” and usually made his central characters sensible men
or women who used logic and reason to negotiate their way through extraordinary
circumstances.

I liked this. And because Wyndham didn’t
feel the need to keep sending his characters out in the middle of the night in
open-topped cars with empty fuel tanks simply because no one had been stung in
a while, it made the whole story more palatable. I just wished half the blokes
who hired us made some of the same decisions.
 

As a lifelong proponent of “common sense”,
I figured Bill might like this book too, so I made a mental note to recommend
it to him when I got back to Sussex and dipped my eye into the next paragraph.

“Ah Mr Jones, here you are,” a sweet
American voice declared from across the lawn. Nurse Parker strode towards me
with a little tray of drugs and handed me a cup of tablets.

“Margarita time already,” I said,
knocking them back and chasing them down with a paper cup of water. “Any chance
of a beer?”

“Any chance of one-forty over eighty?”
she replied, to the amusement of the assorted disabled villains lounging
nearby.

“You’re leaving us soon I hear.”

“End of the week they say,” I confirmed.

“Well take care out there, Mr Jones. We
do good work, but we don’t do miracles.”

“I will,” I promised, which wasn’t so
much a lie, more an accepted response to such an undeliverable request.

Nurse Parker looked at the book in my
lap. “You too, huh? Why is everyone reading that same book?”

“Everyone?” I said.

“Well, everyone here. Mr Collins and Mr
Mihailov were reading it yesterday, or the day before,” Nurse Parker reckoned.
“And I saw Mr Hu with it last week.”

“Well, you know how it is, one guy sees
another reading a book and before you know it we’re all reading it. We’re a
bunch of sheep really don’t you know?”

“Clearly,” Nurse Parker agreed, unsure
what to make of the explanation and even less so the phenomenon. She shrugged
the concern from her shoulders and made do with telling me that I shouldn’t
read for too long as I was putting a strain on my eye, so I switched my eye
patch between eyes and asked her if that made her happier.

“Much,” she replied with a giggle, then
went about her drug peddling.

I returned the patch to its rightful eye
and watched Nurse Parker go, before glancing over at Mr Collins relaxing in the
shade of the palms. He seemed unfazed to have had his name mentioned by Nurse
Parker and simply reached for his lemonade. The tall glass instantly shattered
between his Tungsten fingers, once again making everyone laugh.

“Bollocks!” Mr Collins growled, his third
such accident in as many days. “Fucking hand.”

Well, we were all having trouble
adjusting to our new accessories.

After another hour I came to the end of
the book and slowed up my reading pace to soak in the last few words until the story
finally gave way to blank paper. The last page of a book is like that for me.
It’s a curiously affecting experience, particularly if I’ve enjoyed the book,
as I had with this one. I always made sure I read every single word to prolong
the experience; the biography, the acknowledgements, the “also published by…”
and even the legal guffins, probably because I didn’t want it to be over. I
didn’t want to let go. For me, the end of a book is like the end of a journey,
or like saying good-bye to an old friend whose company you’d particularly
enjoyed. And when that final page was turned and you closed that book for the
last time, all you were left with were the memories. And possibly a shit movie
if they made one. Occasionally I’d turn back to the beginning and reread the
first couple of pages, just to remind myself of where it had all begun, but
it’s ultimately a futile exercise because you can never retrace footsteps of
discovery. You can only ever trample over them.

I closed the book, ran a grateful eye over
the cover one last time, then slipped my feet into my slippers below the deck
chair.

The sun was now dipping into the west,
casting shadows across the lawn and freshening the breeze. Most of the guys had
gone inside for dinner, or treatment, or for rest. Only Mr Gerber remained, his
feet in his slippers, despite his slippers being nowhere near the rest of his
body.

“Are you finished now, Mr Jones?” Mr
Gerber asked, between breaths, as he back stroked lengths of the pool with his
remaining limbs.

“Almost,” I replied with a nod, setting
the book down on the table at the end of the row from his, then heading off to
the comm link office. In the reflection of the glass door, I saw Mr Gerber look
about then haul himself out of the water and walk on the flattened palms of his
hands towards where I’d left
The Day of
the Triffids
. Nurse Parker had been right when she’d said that she’d seen
Mr Collins and Mr Mihailov reading it on previous days, and Mr Hu reading it
last week. We’d only had one copy between us, so we’d been taking it in turns
to read. It worked out cheaper that way.

It also made it easier to disguise the
fact that we were part of a book club.

Surprisingly, no one who’d joined us so
far had questioned the need to do things this way. I suppose we were all from
covert backgrounds, so why shouldn’t we? Secrecy was kind of habit forming.

I watched Mr Gerber haul himself up into
the deck chair next to where I’d made the drop and wipe his hair and body with
his towel, before reaching for the book. I envied Mr Gerber for the journey he
was about to take and the characters he was about to meet. Bill Masen, Josella
Playton, Will Coker and of course, those terrible implacable Triffids, forever
wandering the Sussex Downs and laying siege to the last few pockets of
humanity. He was in for a real treat.

Still, I wasn’t quite done with them yet
and entered the ice-cold comm link office through the tinted glass doors.

Mr Martin was on duty and turned to greet
me when I entered.

“Email?” he asked.

“Internet,” I replied.

He tapped a few keys on his keyboard
while I filled out the access form and topped it off with an inky thumb print.

“Let me see,” he instructed once I’d
cleaned my thumb. He studied it for a moment, pricking my thumb to draw blood
to ensure I wasn’t wearing a latex fingerprint, then asked me what machine I
wanted. “Do you require privacy?”

“Will I get it?” I almost laughed.

“What I mean is, do you want a booth or
are you okay with one of the table monitors?”

I looked around the empty comm link office,
then back at Mr Martin.

“Give me a booth.”

Mr Martin managed to hide most of his
smirk while he tapped a few more keys then told me to take the first booth on
the left. I closed the door behind me and settled in front of the machine as it
clicked and whirled to life.

I opened up the internet and searched a
few sites: big boobs, girl-on-girl, anal sluts, that sort of thing, before
selecting something suitably eye-popping for Mr Martin to get distracted by
while he monitored my surfing from his own computer. It was rumoured that he
had a penchant for interracial sex, particularly two or more big black
gang-bangers ambushing a slender young white girl, which many of us thought was
something of a cipher into Mr Martin’s own desires seeing as he was neither big
nor black.

I flipped my eye patch up, dug my fingers
into my socket and popped my eye out into my hand. I gave it a quick wipe, then
extended the jack and slotted it into the USB portal of the machine.

A little window opened up in the corner
of my screen and piggybacked buttfuckers.org to our own website. This window
didn’t appear on Mr Martin’s computer and what’s more no trace of it would
remain once I’d pulled the scrambler. You could argue that these precautions
were a tad OTT for a bunch of swotty book worms and you’d probably be right,
but the fact remained that ours was an affiliation outside of the normal bounds
of Affiliating and as such, it would be regarded with suspicion if The Agency
or any of our employers were to find out about it.

Eight books had already been posted, with
usernames and scores beside each.
The Day of the Triffids
had been read by sixteen guys
so
far, only seven of which were residents of this hospital. The others were Mr
Smith over in Tajikistan (username:
Fail
Safe
), who’d given it a four, stating the fact that he thought it had
drifted a little towards the end. Someone called
Cyber Guy
, also on the Tajikistan job, who’d given it a three;
Mr Mumbo
in Sri Lanka, who’d given it a
four;
Captain Electric
in Belize,
who’d given it a four;
Sergeant Ardent
also in Belize, who’d given it a five;
Snowman
,
Ice Man
and
Snow Flake
, all of whom were somewhere inside the Arctic Circle,
who’d given it a four, a four and a five respectively, and
The
Rt
Honourable Baron Bean Boner
in
Swindon, who’d given it a two. Who’d invited that guy to join?