The Problem With Q

Le Chiffre. The clue is in the name. Cipher.

An unsafe pair of hands. A man who designs

Chairs you wouldn’t want to sit on.        

A little warped around the gills, perhaps,

But he had Personality.

Oddjob, being merely a metaphor

For how velocity copes under pressure

In aeroplanes, lacks the capacity to engage

On a human level, whereas nowadays,

In our multicultural, cosmopolitan virtuality,

No one who has ever eaten widely           

Would take on so and sneer at Donovan Grant

For choosing red wine with the fish.

But Q,

Brilliant scientist, who could have been a contender

For several Nobel prizes, never designs anything but

Toys for Bond. Did he have no other life,

No wife, no favourite restaurant,

No hobbies or children who look the spitting image

Of Mrs Q? 

                    Consider a Sunday,

And Bond is in the Bahamas, joking

With Felix Leiter about his hook.

The lawn is immaculate and Mrs Q

Dangles one leg over her hammock,

Cooing: “What’s keeping you, big boy?”

Q himself, full to bursting after a long lunch,

Belches in his steel deckchair, searching for

The Eject button; and then remembers:

Here’s home. I can get up and walk.

No devices needed. And I’m as horny as hell

Knowing what Mrs Q isn’t wearing underneath her skirt.

The little Qs are playing by the mulberry tree,

Their minds a million miles away from

Exploding cigarette cases and hollowed-out

Cuban heels. Giggling

With salacious forethought, Q grabs his wife’s hand

And propels her to the small pagoda

At the bottom of the garden which they have built

Specially for such occasions.

They want no more children so he fishes out

A rubber johnny from his box of tricks

And they up the conjugal ante.

She is his Aston Martin, and he drives

Like the devil. 

                          Later,

All breath exhaled and basking in the afterglow

Of ruddiness, he moves to repeat

The performance. She reluctantly protests:

“But that was our last johnny.”

Q smiles.

“This one’s reversible,” he says.