Make it to the bus stop

Slowly, dully, Jon put on his other sock, all attention absorbed in manoeuvring it over his heel. Hands on his knees, then elbows pointed forwards, as if about to stand up. There was a pause, a long pause, too long. The radio-alarm clock clicked on once more and blared noise, rousing him again. This time it pushed him with its nonsense to the sink, where he stared at his barely-bearded face.

Brushing of teeth was accompanied by the motion of very few thoughts indeed. Tortuously he shuffled through what he could remember of last night. Apart from singing to an unwilling audience in The Fox and Hounds - which had already struck him on waking up - there was nothing else to cringe over, and he put down the toothbrush, spat one last time, and began to shave.

Shaving began as slowly as anything else so far. Painfully slowly, so as not to be painfully quick. It sped up, however, when Jon remembered with a start that his neighbour from upstairs, Alan, was working nights and due home - check watch - any minute. Alan was as devoid of virtues as he was apparently full of things to say. He collected "transport memorabilia:" Dinky cars, buses and trains; old bits of London buses and Hackney cabs; tube maps from all over the world. The slightest hint of the subject would draw him to it immediately. And, once begun, it was difficult for Alan to be stopped.

With this in mind, Jon shaved faster. He nicked himself twice, once on a smile line - that cut would not heal for some time unless he could find reason not to smile. Towelled off of stray soap, he threw on the rest of his clothes and left the house.

He decided to take a longer journey to a different bus stop, that he might avoid Alan coming home. Detachedly he watched the pat-pat-pat of his trainers as they steadily consumed the pavement ahead of him. For a block or so he wondered why he was acting hungover when his head felt fine, at a distance from it all as it were. After going over the same thoughts several times, his memory finally revealed that he had been smoking pot last night. Harris would not approve if it came to his attention. Pot always slowed Jon down the day after. It killed the pain of hangover, too, but substituted for it a drawn-out nausée, which painkillers clearly couldn't touch.

That was it. The face of Christ in a rock formation, the wracked bodies of men in old, dead trees: barely recognisable as what they clearly are until the pattern is finally overlaid, meshwise, by the brain. Then the images are inescapable. Thus did Jon suddenly perceive the fog of his paranoid fugue, that cut off sight of his feelings and rendered him shallow and animalistic. Seeing it, though, did not mean he could fight through it.

He was surprised to find himself already at the bus stop, suddenly waiting. As he stood, and shuffled, he tried alternately to smile politely at, then deferentially ignore, two bundled-up old women sat a few feet from him. They exchanged a look, and the bus arrived.

As he dropped into his seat, the floor dropped out of Jon's head, and he felt a vertiginous plummet. Down and down he fell, like in a dream, and he felt worse and worse with each passing fraction of a second. As the dive ended in a pit of a grubby despair, Jon guessed that his dope hangover may have been worse than he had first suspected.

"Bad night, Jonathan?" asked a voice next to him.

Perfect timing, thought Jon, and looked to his left, seeing there sat next to him his superior, Dr Harris. How much did he know? Could smoking pot cost him his job? Or could he pull off the demeanour of a hard-bitten service type, driven to the occasional snifter so as not to arouse suspicion amongst his target: Billy Dean, gunman on the Falls Road; or Jerome LeBlanc, international mercenary; or Leon Marakov, Russian embassador and spy? Jon decided none of this would wash: Harris preferred John Le Carré to Jack Higgins, and either Amis to both of them. Was he a fan of Conan Doyle?

"I've felt better," he managed. "Sir. Are you following me to work now?"

Dr Harris smiled; round, thick spectacles gleamed. "Of course not, Jonathan. You're much better at that than me. No, this is just happy coincidence." Jon grimaced. "We have a new commission. Ideal for a sly cur like yourself." The smile became a grin.

"So soon?"

"Yes, I know, dear Jonathan. Keeps you on your toes, though. Earns you your leave. We only received confirmation of this yesterday evening, though, and I didn't want to disturb you and your chums or I'd have had you out of your evening's R-and-R there and then."

Chums. Dr Harris couldn't resist hamming it up. Jon sighed, defeated. "Where to now, then, sir?" Harris pulled his newspaper from under his arm, patted Jon with it in the chest.

"Spain," he announced.