When they took away James Bond's licence to kill,
he started waving his gun around in public,
as if to prove he hadn't lost it.
It was a small gun, a Biretta,
a lady's gun, they said,
but it was his and he felt comfortable with it.
They'd said he should have a larger one,
and he'd tried them on for size,
even carrying for a time the forty-five Magnum
favoured by his friend “Dirty” Harry Callahan,
but it weighed him down
and he couldn't get it out quick enough in an emergency.
He took to enjoying his Biretta in private,
dismantling it, cleaning it,
thrusting the magazine home in the grip
with that satisfying clunk,
whirling round and pointing it at himself in the mirror
and pulling the trigger;
but the only sound was the disappointing click of an empty chamber.
He no longer had any bullets for his weapon.
He tried practising displacement therapy upon himself,
pushing his Aston dangerously round the hairpins and through the chicanes
of the Grande Corniche,
placing ridiculously high bets in the casino,
over-generously over-tipping the female croupieres,
responding to their seductive smiles
with a non-commital rise of one eyebrow.
He stirred his Martinis so vigorously the delicate herbs were bruised to death.
He gave away his Huntsman suits to charity shops
because he could no longer button them over his beer belly
and he dressed himself at Jeans Junction.
He wore T-shirts decorated with designer logos.
Old colleagues passed him in the street without recognising him.
Sometimes he appeared as a tame expert on the Today show,
until they realised he knew nothing about the whereabouts of Bin Laden.
His hands shook.
He could no longer afford Romeo y Juliettas and started smoking Hamlets.
He developed a smoker's cough.
He lived in a bedsit in Earls Court
and hung out with Australian temporary typists
who found his stories of past exploits boring.
They laughed at him behind his back
when he made his frequent visits to the toilet,
wincing as he pissed away the fizzy Fosters they all drank
as if were Holy Communion wine.
One day he bumped into Moneypenny
and found even she would no longer flirt with him.
Eventually, he died.
There was no obituary in The Times.
His old enemies from the days of SMERSH shredded his file.
But Harry Palmer raised a glass for him in the country pub he'd bought with his redundancy money,
and sold a pint of warm beer to an American tourist in a hacking jacket and foxes on his foulard tie,
trying to discover what it must have been like to have been English.
June 8, 2003
