The Mentor. Steve Jackson
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in the myriad tunnels that snake through Piccadilly Circus tube station.
With my jacket pulled in tight to ward off the chill, I head down to the river, walking with purpose, owning the streets. I lean against a wall and block out the brown river stink. The water swirls below me, dark and mysterious and poisonous. For a while I watch, transfixed by the movement, the gentle waves rolling, rolling, concentric circles merging and separating in the murky dark. Rain runs across my face and drips from my nose.
My father was in MI6 back in World War II. I can remember him sitting on my bed telling me stories of the things he got up to. He’d sit with his back against the headboard, his long legs and stockinged-feet stretching almost all the way to the other end, the comforting smell of aftershave and pipe tobacco surrounding him. The tales he told were real Boy’s Own adventures, and I lapped up every word. There were stories about missions behind Nazi lines, ops filled with danger and excitement. And he’d finish each story with a tap on the nose and a wink and a ‘Remember, Rob … Need-To-Know’. I’d give him a tap and a wink back. ‘Need-To-Know’ I’d whisper. He’d ruffle my hair and tell me to sleep well, and then he’d turn off the light and leave me dreaming about killing Nazis and blowing up bridges.
When I hit my teens I realised he’d made it all up. There was no way he did those things. It was only when I started working for MI6 myself and managed to get hold of his file that I discovered that, although he had made it all up, the things he had done were no less spectacular. What’s more, I discovered how highly he was respected within the organisation. His record was spotless and for a while he was being touted as a possible future Chief.
The official report stated that it was a ‘regrettable accident’, but it wasn’t. It was murder, plain and simple. I was ten and my father was stationed in Moscow. Walking home one night he spotted a woman being mugged. Without thinking, he ran to help her and was stabbed. The mugger was never found, not that the authorities tried very hard. This happened way back in the early days of the Cold War. For whatever reason, the KGB had wanted my father taken out of the game, and that was that. Case closed. Of course, there was an inquiry, lots of bureaucratic nonsense that wasn’t worth a damn.
We were told about his death by the head of station, Giles Meredith, a loose-fitting man who seemed to bumble his way through life. To me, he was always a slightly comical figure, but my father seemed to respect him (and now, with thirty plus years of experience, I can appreciate that what you see isn’t necessarily what you get). My parents had been to Meredith’s house a couple of times for dinner parties, but this was the first time he’d come to ours. He took charge of the situation straight away, guiding me and my mother through to the living room, ignoring my mother’s increasingly frantic questions until we were both sitting on the sofa. When he told us what happened it didn’t sink in at first. I thought there must be some mistake, they’d got the wrong person. I kept expecting the living-room door to clatter open and my father to walk in, pipe steaming, a sly smile on his lips. My mother fell into a long silence and then she started screeching. It was the most hideous noise I’d ever heard. I wasn’t sure what to do. I felt I should probably be crying, but I couldn’t. So I sat on the sofa while Meredith tried to console my mother, hands on lap, staring into the middle distance and wondering what was going to happen now.
My mother didn’t die as such, she sort of faded away; after Father was murdered she became less and less substantial until she ceased to exist altogether. First to go was her mind. I got home from school one day to find my grandmother there. There was gin on her breath and disappointment in her eyes. Without an iota of compassion she informed me that my mother had been locked up in the nuthouse, and I was going to live with her because families looked after each other and wasn’t that just fucking marvellous? When I told her there was no way I’d ever live with her she called me an ungrateful bastard and hit me so hard I was sent spinning to the floor with bells ringing in my head. From the get-go I was under no illusions of the way things were going to be. I saw my mother twice more, once in the flesh and once in a casket. The week before my mother died, my grandmother took me to the asylum. She dragged me through the screaming corridors to a dark windowless room. There were four beds in there, each containing the mummified remains of something that might once have been human. This was most definitely the last stop. My mother was in the bed nearest the door. Around her sunken eyes and collapsed cheeks, I could make out the shape of her skull. Her skin was loose yellow parchment hanging from her bones and she weighed next to nothing. With each inhalation there was a moment of suspension at the top of the breath where there was no movement, moments that seemed to go on forever, and each time I thought that was it she’d exhale and hitch in another rattling gulp of air. Thankfully, her eyes stayed shut.
It was only natural I should want to join MI6, but it wasn’t easy. With no help from my grandmother, who spent most of her time either pissed, comatose or beating me, I got a place at grammar school. While there I discovered I had a knack for drama. Playing different characters gave me a temporary escape from the real world, and how I needed that escape. I won a scholarship to Cambridge where I studied psychology, and during my final year I was approached.
The rain eases and the circles in the river shrink, loosen, then disappear altogether. I could go anywhere, be anyone, start all over again. I’ve got the aliases established, got the necessary skills to pull them off. I could be an engineer, an academic, a financier, you name it. Everything’s stashed away in a safe place. Full documentation: passports, driving licences, NI numbers, complete histories, the works. Nobody knows about Stewart Graves or Graham Webster or Harry Mortimer. It would be easy to sneak out the country. The safest way is to head to Ireland, make my way to Dublin and catch the first plane out. But I won’t do that. Not yet, anyway.
I head back to my hotel, an anonymous no-star affair in a part of town that won’t be featuring in the travel guides anytime soon. London’s the perfect hiding place: nobody sees anyone, nobody sees anything. The occasional glance to make sure I’m not being followed, more out of habit than necessity. The streets get narrower, the shadows deepen. The Invisible Ones are huddled in doorways with blankets pulled around them, one hand protecting their few meagre belongings, the other wrapped around a tin of Special Brew or Woodpecker or meths. A scrawny Jack Russell yaps, and a slurred voice growls for it to shut the fuck up.
‘Got any spare change?’
The voice is behind me, off to my left. I turn slowly and see a dark figure hovering in the shadows.
‘Come on,’ the voice says, ‘you’ve got cash to spare.’
‘Fuck off,’ I tell him.
He steps into a streetlight and I get my first good look at the Ratman. His face is long with eyes sunk deep in their sockets, black coronas surrounding them. He’s got that junkie stare, rotting teeth and skin the colour of old marble. His clothes are held together by dirt: three jumpers and a coat, odd shoes that are way too big, hair hidden under a dirty fur-lined Cossack hat. He uses the back of his fingerless glove to wipe away the snail trails under his sharp nose.
‘Just a quid,’ the Ratman says. ‘Just a quid and I’ll fuck off and never bother you again. Promise.’
‘You’ll fuck off now,’ I tell him.
‘For a fiver I’ll do whatever you want. Anything.’
Smiling, I walk towards him. He gulps and his throat is so scrawny it looks as if he’s swallowing a golf ball. The Ratman looks around uncertainly, takes a step back, out of the light and into the shadows, looking for safety where there’s no safety to be found. He backs up to a wall and comes to a standstill. I motion him forward with a wiggle of my index finger. He looks left, looks right, searching for a way out, but in the end all he can do is walk towards me. As he steps back into the light I study his face carefully. The sodium distorts it, and as I stare it starts to change, morphing into all the faces I’ve grown to hate so much over the years. I can feel the anger rising, spreading through me from tip to toe, and I do nothing to hold it back. So often in life we are forced to suppress our real emotions, those primal desires that originate in the most ancient parts of the brain. And sometimes we are given the opportunity to let them loose and for a few glorious moments we know what it means to be truly alive. A deep breath, adrenaline coursing