Alchemisland

They sent Harpenden. Him, of all people, conversation with whom was a form of punishment so cruel and unusual the Khmer Rouge would rat you out to Amnesty. He was a posh Australian who drank Fosters, called evening arvo, and who disliked foreigners to a confederate degree. He looked like a cross between the muscular, bald body in which Krang from Turtles broods, and Succulent Chinese Meal guy, but not as handsome as either.

Byron knew the fat cunt had clocked him but he waited until he was in earshot to wave. Byron looked down at his shoes as he walked, hoping to repulse potential psychic insurrections, disarm evil-charged eyes. 

Harpenden had signed into his hotel under Dr Harpoglopolyusygus, that was the only thing he said so far. He sat across from Cobalt unpacking him, wrinkling his chin with triangled fingers. He raised one finger as if testing the wind before whistling shrilly. Every rostered waiter scurried toward their undrinked outside table. The gesture made Cobalt shudder. 

To treat servers like actual dogs was bad but it was worse garishly divulging needs. Cobalt abhorred the need for things. His requirements were slim and self-served, seen to privately with minimal fuss. He kept habits, liked things just so. He found it difficult to eat with others who didn’t do things the way he did them, and he loathed when those he ate with didn’t show the waiting staff what he felt to be due deference. One never made a scene. One nodded and smiled. One made life easy for those around them, ate then left with life still in the old conversational candle. Mr Harpenden was the opposite sort of a man. An old fusspot who made bother, who exuded conflict, who, unsatisfied with what was, sought to change what was was. 

One patiently and one impatiently, they awaited the arrival of their complicated drinks, more alchemical elixir than cocktail. The sweating chalkboard above the carvery hotplate’s blurred green and blue lettering suggested all the best cocktails contain hyphenated ingredients. Their lap-spread menus propped against the tableside were angled to obscure their faces’ bottom halves from one another. 

Cobalt watched Harpenden’s eyes when he could, stealing glances like a chaste princess peering around a tower’s rounded corner at a bathing knight’s love-scoured flank; when detected, he feigned keen interest in an hitherto undiscovered esculent on the menu. 

Harpenden scrutinised his own menu. He furrowed his brow, puzzling over and about each vexing character. He had the look of a man who had seen a host of impossible happenings, wide-eyed and newly awakened; an archaeologist weeping at the death of all dogma as his diggers haul a dirt-caked supercomputer out of an Aztec souterrain. 

He was Australian but a British sounding one, with a puffed up rage-pinched face like Lord Ashfordley from Heartbeat. He talked like his neck and belt were suffocating him. Words seemed to flounder leaving his chest, as if the countless Bensons he smoked still lived inside him as tar-armed wisps of animate smoke bent on dampening his rhetorical abilities. His voice, though battling now a permanent catarrh which made his sleep sounds like those of a man drowning within his own lungs, carried powerfully and demanded obeisance. That voice which suited well a whip-wielding hand held a whip’s sting; a speed of barb and jest which his sluggish exterior did not betray. Harpenden’s was a voice made for hastening the picks of dying slaves, a voice made not for choir but for overseeing; a foreman by birth who through successive ignorant acts ensured to meet his fated work. 

Harpenden: Been a while, mate

Byron: It has

H: Growing your hair, are you?

B: Growing your belt, are you? 

H: Git

B: Cunt

Byron gozzied, mustering phlegms as a dragon must his flames, and spat on the sand beside Harpenden’s snakeskin shoes. When Harpenden leant to see whether he had been insulted, Byron was afraid that he had slumped over dead, his burger-besieged heart finally spent. Harpenden saw green saliva pooled a half inch from his squared snakeprint vamp and said ‘Such control, always a deadeye.’

Byron lit a fag and through smoke said ‘I missed’

H: Where’ve you been?

B: Around. 

H: Round Robin. A round of drinks? What round?

Idiot didn’t even think to say Round Table. Shows his culture. Byron gestured around him, at the jungle and the sky and the sky-topped bowl they floated in, his vee’d arms reposed in an inviting shrug like a waiter holding platters at shoulder height. He said ‘Around Lemnos. You know how it is, old chum. Not all who wander are lost. You take the high road, I’ll take the low r-’

H: …Let’s talk the Cairo-ad. 

B: Well segued. Cairo, eh? Thought you’d never mention it. Well, what to say about Cairo that Pharaoh hasn’t said already? Eh? I’m here all week, folks. Cairo was… let me think of the right word. Cairo was protracted.

Byron paused at a waiter’s approach who, sensing Harpenden’s ill temper, moved ginger as a rabbit across a hawk sentry’d moor. No sooner than his drink alighted the tray, H’s arm snapped out like a frog’s tongue at a fly’s test and fetched it back to his greedy lips. He guzzled a half, exclaimed, then another. 

H (to waiter): Keep them coming, extra Velocet. (To Byron) Continue.

B: Well, what else do you want?

Harpenden wiped himself brow to breastbone. The top three buttons of his sweat-hoary shirt were opened to reveal a neck like a pig’s back. Each time he pulled away his now-sodden monogrammed kerchief, his brow seemed somehow wetter.

H: Are you shitting me, Byron? If I wanted protractors I’d have rooted out my old tin technical graphics kit. Tell me what happened in Cairo, from the top

B: Who’s asking?

H: I am

B: On whose behalf?

H: My behalf. Forget half, on my befull.

B: I hate you, Harpenden. Is this debriefing? This on the record?

H: What isn’t?

B: This. This isn’t on the record. I’m on holiday right now. Officially sanctioned bureau holidays, having completed my Egyptian assignment. I’d be happy to furnish you with details of that adventure in an informal capacity. It’s a boy’s own rollick you’re hunting, right?

H. Sure, pal. 

B: I want to ask you something.

H: Sure, pal.

B: I wasn’t asking for permission. What do you know about Cairo?

H: A little. Definitely not as much as you know. 

B: I just don’t understand why you care so much if this isn’t an official conversation. You’ve never previously made inquiries regarding particulars, my ways and methods. I am a trusted agent of the bureau, licensed to carry about my objectives in whatever manner I deem both feasible and plausibly deniable at the State level. I feel like my actions in Cairo do not abjure these tenets, nor any other which should see that State which I have so loyally served eliminate me, as if I were no different to the terrorists they would have me destroy. 

H: Christ, I would never have asked had I known you’d talk so much. I don’t want memoirs, James Joyce proof copy with every feeling and flash of psychological lightning painted in minute detail. I want to know what the fuck happened in Cairo. I want to know because it’s all anyone back in HQ can talk about. Canteen awhisper with contrary tales of mythic heroism and dastardly, even treasonous, misdemeanour. I want to know as a friend concerned for your wellbeing, as a colleague concerned about being in the know conversationally, and as a fellow agent interested in hearing the truth.

B: What is the truth? If this conversation was on the record, if we were conducting this as a formal, taped interview in some mirrored oubliette below the Thames, would that make my words more true? It is the truth because I am telling you what happened. It is not the truth because it is me saying it. However, it is a lie that they are telling you about what happened; it is a lie distinctly because they are saying it.

H: Hey, defensive much? Who mentioned anything about a lie? Keep your wig on, Samson.

B: Keep your frothing cunt wiped dry, Delilah. You mentioned a fucking lie. You don’t come to a deserted island in its off-season seeking a truth from the horse’s mouth if you’ve already had ten helpings of truth pie at home. Do you, Harpenden? 

H: I do. There’s not one truth, mate. Not in this thing, this Cairo business, nor out in the fucking world. Order, like Time, is a pair of glasses worn by the human brain, and we can’t see but what images those glasses serve us. In the world of chaos, there are quintillions of truths of equal validity

B: Christ, is that what talking to me sounds like? Keep your turban on

H: So, mate, you think the agency is lying about Cairo? About which bit?

B: You know which bit. The bit where they probably make me out like a cunt and say I’m gone rogue and anyone who sees me is free to shoot me

H: You couldn’t be wronger, guv. You’re like Cain or MC Hammer, can’t be touched or its sevenfold vengeance returned ya and your sprogs. They want to talk to you, sure, probably for the same reasons I do; they just want to know the truth about what went down in Cairo. If there was a bounty out I’d tell you. Don’t look at me like that, ya eyebrows prick. I would! Give ya me word. Scout’s honour. Christ, mate, you’re slippier than an oiled floppah. 

B: I know how it works. No such thing as former agents, is there?

H: Lower your voice, man! Can’t you see there are kids around? Sometimes, an agent we love very much, whom we have raised from a pup, gets sent away to a gorgeous farm full of other old agents where they frolic through golden pastures redolent of elusive Elysium. 

B: Fuck you. 

H: You’re paranoid, Byron. Have you been using drugs? It looks like you have. It smells like you have. I know the smell of drugs, I was twenty years a Narco. What were you doing twenty years ago, Byron? Getting your second nose ring and spending your dad’s celtic tiger money on Smashing Pumpkins CDs? Agents are absolutely, unequivocally, allowed to retire from our agency. I won’t bullshit you and tell you that we haven’t had to eliminate some people in the past. Bad eggs mostly but a few good eggs who knew too much, who were too dangerous alive because of their supreme value to our enemies. Some people can be like nuclear bombs wearing skin and blazers, they cannot be let fall into the wrong hands.

B: Hell, I killed a few rogues myself. If I was doing an inside hit right now I’d do it like this. Very informal. Relax my mark by plying him with booze until he lowers his guard then plug him full of bores.

H: You know how it is then. Don’t throw baby out with bathwater. Some get clipped, most get out. You’ve done a good job and, not to throw salt, but you’ve not seen anything so special that the powers that be wanna clip you. Unless they showed you aliens? If they showed you aliens, I’m asking that you come totally clean there because I have had suspicions. Ever read Pale Horse?

B: I’ve read Pale Fire and the fires of my enthusiasm for this conversation are paling indeed. I know how this shit works, Harpenden. You’re a fat, useless bastard but you’re dogged and you’re a killer and you don’t attract much attention because you look like a substitute woodwork teacher the inner city students would abuse into a breakdown before lunchtime on the first day.

H: Pale Horse is quality. The bloke who wrote it went down in a blaze of gunfire when the taxmen came to get him in his mountain redoubt, as he had prophesied they would. They got him for taxes but he knew a lot of crazy things and the truth is way deeper than we suspect. It’s like when they nabbed Al Capone. 

B: Pale Horse is a prose poem by Nabokov.

H: Is he the pedo?

B: Are you?

H: Tell me about Cairo.

B: Fuck off, Harpenden. You’re clearly still a spook. You’re here in an official capacity. No chance you’d offer me lunch if you couldn’t expense it afterwards, you miserly australian fuck. Your ancestors were probably Ireland’s worst rapists. You’ve got inside you a seed so evil that you have to wear your treachery as a veil of ugliness, like a ward to the innocent. You’re here to clip me.

H: I’m not here to clip you, we don’t clip here. This is a lunch, lunch between friends and afterwards I’ll pay in cash and burn the receipt in front of you so I can’t expense it back. Happy?

B (to the waiter): Caramel latte

Waiter, checking his watch: Sir, do you know the ti-

B: Caramel latte, thank you

Waiter, dismayed: Whatever you say, sir, but please do not come registering complaint tomorrow morning after a sleepless night!

B: Tell me one thing you know about Cairo

H: Capital of Egypt

Byron’s joyless, sucked-lemon face answered for him. A volume-screaming silence.

H: OK, you were there on behalf of Latsi.

Byron nodded, Harpenden wasn’t sure whether in acknowledgement or approval.

H: On behalf of Latsi, they sent you to Cairo to investigate Hassan Tymir Lotfi

B: Investigate is an interesting word, perhaps too grand a descriptor for the act at hand.

H: Latsi commissioned you to retire Lotfi because he knew something about nukes.

B. Sounds like you know everything already. Yes, sir, you have it all tied up now. 

H: I like to imagine the stories I hear. In order to do that, I need vivid images. C’mon, you’re Irish, Byron. I know you love to spin a yarn, isn’t that what you say? 

B: I’ll spin your head with a puck now in a second, amadán. Go on ta fuck.

H: You killed Lotfi during a lecture in front of a classroom full of first year medical students.

He waited for a reply that never came, continued; Lotfi lectured in physics at Cairo Uni. During the introduction of a lecture, reportedly the professor was still aligning the ends of his sheets of paper against his desktop and clearing his throat when a suave agent with hair like a Teddy Boy strode up and shot him dead to rights. Boom, his head went like a cherry tomato in the microwave. I wager those students want a discount. They asked for physics lectures not biology lessons eh? Students riotous, chaos, discord, escape, presumably undetected, now here, the Lemnian cafe and not a wanton woman in sight. Robert Graves was wrong about this place.

B, his voice a lancet as ever but quivering, betraying his risen emotion: Robert Graves was wrong about basically everything!

H: Is that all you have to say? You utter pedant

B: Don’t call me a pedo. I’m not Nabokov I just read him

H: I didn’t call you –

B: I know you didn’t. I’m calling you one though, pedo

Harpenden slammed his stuffed turkey fists down on the table, like he was a gargantuan avatar of poultrykind demanding order at the adjournment of his meaty courts. The table well balanced and made of metal scarcely budged an inch, though his half-emptied glass had jumped. His always red face now resembled a plate of blood with eyes, Byron actually wondered whether he might be having a heart attack: TELL. ME. ABOUT. CAIRO.

B: Clearly, you told me about Cairo. I never said I was in Cairo. I said it was-

H: Protracted

B: Right

H: Meaning?

B: I heard it was a mad thing, totally out of hand

H: You heard that?

B: I did yeah, at the base from various lads

H: You heard it? Mad. Are you sure now that you didn’t see it and do it and smell it and taste it and fucking plan it and execute it and escape from it, you mad fucking Irish cunt?

B: Woah there, summer heights high. Way I see things I’m on holidays now and you’re bothering me about work in a way my Union would go fucking spare over. You come here to Greece, fucking Greece, and start asking me questions about Egypt like I’m Irving Finkel. I didn’t once say I was in Cairo. I said it was protracted, referring to the breadth of its history and its various prolonged historical religious and ethnic conflicts. You are the one talking about Cairo. You know all about this assassination. I’m having a caramel latte and you’re skulling cocktails providing me with vivid descriptions of a lad’s head exploding. What the absolute fuck are you on about, man? I was back in the agency before I went on holiday and everyone was freaking out about something you had done in Cairo.

H: Drop the game, cunt. Your CIA mind bullshit doesn’t work on me. I am immune to fuckheads. My ancestors were all fuckhead proof, genetically immune to it. Don’t fucking try and mince words to get out of this. You were in Cairo, it’s you they’re talking about back at base. You killed Lotfi during a lecture, didn’t you? And by the way, you did confirm earlier that you had completed quote an Egyptian assignment. Remember what you say, keep up with all your lies. Pfft, some agent you are. Look, we’re wrongfooting here. Obviously, I’m gonna tell the agency what you say but doesn’t that make me one of the good guys? Are you one of the good guys? If you think our guys are the bad guys, surely you wanna tell me why so I can be about getting free of them? Let me get cooled down a bit, it’s fucking roasting. Another one of these too, fuck me they’re good. Have you tried this?

Harpenden swigged heroically from his second drink, which arrived in duer course than the first had. The waiter upon seeing this didn’t wait to be asked again and nodded across the room to the barman, who held the shaker around the top like he was holding a spray paint can. 

Harpenden’s rasher-slowed mind moved faster than his fast-moving mouth. His eyes fastest of all darted from thing to thing; what he settled on perhaps only what he wanted you to look towards, while he took advantage of some occulted primary objective outside purview. Then again, only the lie-addled spy thinks in such terms. Sometimes, a man observes a sugarbowl simply to anchor his gaze that he might better pleat the stalks of daisy chains which were his words. 

Cobalt was right to suspect misdirection. No sooner than his own eyes had fixed to the sugar bowl, the fat Australian’s shark eyes alighted it and darted to fix on something directly over Byron’s right shoulder. Byron first resisted, taking in the mound of man sat before him; Harpenden looked like an alien from Bad Taste, a big mutant lightbulb sewn up in a lizard mask. Something off in the mould he was cast from, someone tell the blacksmith to throw it out. 

However, Harpenden not only continued to stare where Byron couldn’t see but started audibly expressing wonderment and feigning an awed countenance at what he beheld there until Byron, unable to resist, turned one hundred eighty degrees. A shot rang out. Phantom hits all over his body. An image of his own bubbling face, his head coming apart, a big red art attack blob like someone slammed a door onto a soup-filled bag. 

Cobalt’s hips shifted, knocked his chair sideways. He wondered if he was dead and in pondering found his answer. With awareness of life’s continuance came its many pricks and prods: pain where he had broken his sudden fall with the point of his elbow, grazes numerous as Venetian grates, worse pain astride his head. 

One of the bullets had grazed his upper ear, he thought the first one Harpenden had fired maybe, exploding his cartilage and possibly deafening him. It had barely missed him. In fact, it hadn’t missed him at all, and that was just what people said and thought after they had been shot because of films. It had, however, failed to kill him; as had the subsequent leaden spray which cleft the shack’s bamboo palisade, as if Gauls with gatling guns were laying waste to a Roman fort. Alert now to the ongoing danger he sprinted low, dodging between hole-ridden umbrellas and the shielden faces of the upturned tables they had fallen from. Bullets pinged against metal, fffftffted through brolly fabric, hissed through the open air. He felt them denting against the table his back was fixed to. He hid, like a man cravenly sneaking behind his curtains to evade the moral judgement of the tall, bald charity volunteer on his doorstep, who he’s fobbed off twice already and to whom he’s promised a tenner. It was hard to hear pings and not expect rebounding pongs, and indeed it was hard to clear the mind of such frivolous thoughts in moments of peril but he was relaxed almost by the rhythm of the bullets. Metronomic thunking, muscled chuck thwuck ppppchhhhhhhh sounds, deadly lullabies. 

A thud behind his head so close the table nudged him. Jarred back to his senses, the tattoo of bullets sounded now like a reveille stirring him from inaction. He prayed to the little bit of cocaine in his system like it was the god-given spirit inside him, begging it for preternatural experience. Perhaps Harpenden was reloading, perhaps Cobalt Byron had gone deaf in both ears, but the sounds had stopped so he made a break from it, bounded through the dangerous wedge of open space, reached the edge to adequate cover and dove to safety. 

He sat to his haunches with his back spirit levelled against another upturned table. He reached back, produced his firearm, cocked it and turned most gracefully. He didn’t await a target but shot fiercely three times in rapid succession, spreading his fire in a wide arc, before ducking back into cover. A returning volley tested that cover. His raw ear burned and he swore as if freshly shot. Ping ping ping ping ping ping ping ping he forgot about his ear. 

He rose primed to fire but hesitated before shooting. He ducked like a spritely pugilist at the flaring muzzle flash he was waiting for then sprang back to full height guns blazing. He unleashed a salvo in the direction the bullets had come from, four five six twelve bullets until his wrist and thumb web were black with charge like a pirate’s jacket. When the smoke cleared he was still standing, his gun trained on the bulkhead of lounge furniture. 

B: Harpenden, I fucking got you didn’t I? Sound off. 

Nothing. Byron dared forward an inch, his gunsight moving liquid with the turn of his neck, adrenaline rendering it a Cronenbergian extension of his being. 

When no returning fire came, Byron emerged from his defensive position. Harpenden leapt out from a hidden fastness, two metres right of where Byron expected to find then quip over his clip-cured corpse. Harpenden, like a simian enraged at a Chinese tourist’s Nikon flash, threw himself clean over the wall of debris, landed on his feet and began sprinting towards Byron. Byron, who, in hubris, failed to replace his gun’s empty clip, sought to brandish it like a cudgel, swung a denting blow. Harpenden ducked, his rugby instincts undulled, and fastened his meat claspers around Byron’s narrow waist. Like when Herakles fought the guy he could only beat up whilst in the air, Harpenden tossed Byron skyward and, when he landed, fell atop him forcing the breath out of his already-struggling respiratory system. Through this Nurmagomedov smashing, Byron somehow managed to maintain hold of his firearm, though its handle was slick with what could be anyone’s blood. He ejected the spent clip in midair. He neglected a good opportunity to regain full guard but in doing so loosed the hidden clip from his boot. Now, it remained only to load the clip into the firearm and discharge it rudely and sharply into the face of his gutless, antipodean opponent. 

What Byron knew of Australia he knew from The Simpsons and Round the Twist, two things he liked so it saddened him that he would soon bring an end to his only Aussie mate. What Harpenden knew of Ireland he could not recount, even through the omniscient narrator who sketched him inside and out, because he was shot in the face badly. No chance he would recover. None at all. Face clean off. Kennedy job. King King 33 2.0 dungeon pack.