Free The Henchmen's Book Club by Danny King

whenever you join an organisation such
as this one. ie. eight hour guard shifts, alternate night duties, no shooting
the local wildlife, my shampoo’s the one with the A on it, that sort of thing
until I had a general idea of what the daily grind was all about. The only
thing that was still a mystery was the mission itself, but I didn’t worry about
that. I never do. That was the adjutant’s department as despite the higgledy saluting
order he looked like the brains of the operation. All I had to worry about was
guarding my bit of the fence and watching my back until the first opportunity
came to slip away. I had no intention of being here for the long haul.
    Still, there was no reason to fritter
away the time twiddling my thumbs so after Captain Bolaji allocated me a bunk
in the main barracks block, I decided to ask about recreation time.
    “Recreation time?” he stared.
    “Yes, what do you do when you’re not on
duty around here?”
    The Captain mulled this question over
from all angles before asking me why I wanted to know.
    “No reason. Just wondered, that’s all.”
    “You just wondered?” he glared.
    “Yes, if you read at all.”
    “If I what?”
    “You know, read. As in books?”
    Now the Captain was truly confused.
    “Read?”

 

 
 
    8.
SHOULD OLD ACQUAINTANCE BE FORGOT
    “I do not understand how he made the perfume out of dead people. Dead people do
not smell good,” Savimbi said.
    “Yes, they smell bad,” Beye agreed.
“Especially the women,” which was a curious statement and one worthy of
Grenouille himself.
    “He wasn’t making the perfume out of the
dead women, he was just extracting one ingredient from their bodies,” I argued,
but the overall consensus was that nothing about dead people smelt nice so how could
anyone make perfume out of them, least of all the most powerful perfume in the
world.  
    “I think it is a metaphor,” Captain
Bolaji said.
    “A metaphor?”
    “Yes, all the women he killed were
beautiful, the most beautiful women Grenouille could find.”
    “I would not have killed them, I would
have fucked them,” Mbandi grinned, slicing open a big papaya with his bayonet
and sinking his pink-yellow teeth into the pink-yellow flesh.
    “Then you would have had to kill them
first, Mbandi,” Savimbi quipped, prompting chairs and papaya to go flying in
all directions as the third meeting of the Special book club descended into yet
another punch-up.
    Captain Bolaji knocked the bayonet out of
Mbandi’s hand while Savimbi’s mates pinned him to the ground until he’d calmed
down, then once order was restored we retook our seats and continued discussing
Patrick Süskind’s Perfume .
    I don’t know what it was with African
men, particularly your typical African bucks. They loved – and I mean
absolutely lived for – ripping the piss out of each other’s virile
inabilities but had a paper thin sense of humour when it came to jibes about
their own lack of sexual prowess. Perhaps it was a tribal thing; an ancient
marker of accord, that their ability to pull virgins, impregnate them with a
single thrust and leave the countryside dotted about with single mums reflected
their position in society. So bigging themselves up as God’s gift while dissing
their mates as seedless grapes was all part and parcel of this primeval
tradition. Locking antlers across the Serengeti, that’s all they were doing.
Locking antlers.
    Of course, blokes in Britain did this
too, only with Turtle Wax and Ford Mondeos.
    Still, as quaintly ritualistic as this
was, it did somewhat hack into the cut and thrust of our debate and turn our
Friday morning meetings into African Gladiators. But on the plus side, they’d
all read the book.
    “Sorry Captain, you were saying?” I
invited.
    “Yes, I was saying it was a metaphor.”
    “A metaphor? For what?” Beye asked.
    “For God’s finger; that this mysterious
ingredient, which was distilled from the most beautiful women in all of France,
was not