Queen Camilla (2 page)

Her own dogs, Freddie and Tosca, who had produced
two litters together, ran out of the house on their little Jack Russell legs. They joined their mistress at the hen coop.

She said to the hens, ‘You’re so bloody ungrateful. He simply lavishes attention on you and yet you refuse to give him one measly egg. It’s terribly unfair, we’re desperately poor.’

Camilla took a last drag on her cigarette and distractedly poked the still-burning stub through the chicken wire. Eccles ran forwards, picked up the burning stub in her beak and then, with a flurry of feathers, leapt on to the roof of the hen house. Camilla laughed when Eccles allowed the cigarette to dangle in the manner of an avian Lauren Bacall.

In the kitchen Charles heard her laughter and smiled with relief. Camilla didn’t bear a grudge – unlike his first wife, who had kept a sulk going for…
well, years
. He hurried down the path, wiping his hands dry on a tea towel. He had been too hard on her; she’d had servants until very recently, whereas he’d been doing for himself for the last thirteen years, while in exile.

Camilla thought, in the few seconds before Charles saw his precious bird apparently enjoying an imported Chinese copy of a Silk Cut Ultra Low after her dinner, this will make a terribly funny anecdote one day, but the immediate repercussions will be ghastly for poor old me. Charles reached out and spun Camilla round to take her in his arms, and then saw with incredulity that Eccles appeared to be smoking a cigarette and that a fox was sitting behind a row of winter cabbages, staring at him with bold insolence.

Freddie and Tosca crept behind the legs of their mistress; Camilla had never seen a fox at such close quarters, at least not a live one. She’d seen plenty of pieces of dead foxes. She thought to herself, he’s terribly beautiful. The fox stood up, gave a lopsided grin then coolly turned his back, strolled to the corner of the garden and disappeared.

Still on the doorstep, though quickly running out of patience, was the Queen. She was suffering from toothache and wondered if Charles had some oil of cloves in his homeopathic medicine box. She had two dogs with her, both Dorgies (a cross between a Corgi and a Dachshund). One was Susan whom she had inherited from her mother, the other Harris, her own dog, was the son of Harris I, who had accompanied her in the furniture van that had brought her to Hell Close thirteen years before.

‘This is infuriating,’ said the Queen to Harris. ‘Why won’t they answer the door? We know they’re in, don’t we, old boy? We can hear them shouting, can’t we?’

Harris said nothing to the Queen, but he growled. ‘I knew it wouldn’t last.’

Susan yapped, ‘All married couples quarrel. We do!’

‘We quarrel because I’m tired of you,’ said Harris.

‘You’re so cruel,’ whimpered Susan, and ran for comfort to the Queen’s side.

The Queen bent down and stroked Susan’s back, saying, ‘What is it, old girl? What is it?’

Beverley Threadgold, still in her dressing gown at two o’clock in the afternoon, stuck her head out of her bedroom window and shouted down, ‘They’re in
the back garden, Liz. They’re having a big row about Camilla’s smoking. Do you want me to tell ’em it’s you at the door?’

Beverley loved a drama, however small. She habitually turned a drama into a crisis, and a crisis into an incident necessitating the attendance of the police, and once the police helicopter.

The Queen said, ‘No, please don’t bother,’ and hurried away down the path.

Beverley shouted after the departing figure of the Queen, ‘We all got pissed last night on Charlie’s parsnip wine. Charlie was tellin’ us about his unhappy childhood. ’Ow ’e ’ad snow on ’is bed at school.’

The Queen said to Harris and Susan, ‘I really wish Charles would stop whining about his childhood to all and sundry. He’s a man of nearly sixty.’

As the Queen passed Beverley’s house, King, a cross Alsatian, leapt up at the front gate and began to bark furiously at the Queen’s dogs. He was a troublemaker, like his mistress.

The Queen’s early training had taught her to blank out unpleasantness so as she walked along Hell Close she didn’t see the obscenities scrawled on the walls or smell the stench of the uncollected rubbish bags on the pavement. The sounds of screaming and domestic arguments did not reach her ears. She could not afford to fully admit to herself that she was living in such dreadful circumstances.

When she was a little princess, her nanny, the beloved Crawfie, had instructed her to whistle a merry tune inside her head when faced with difficult situations.

When she got to Number Twelve, the Queen heard the amplified sound of somebody, a singer she presumed, shouting not lyrics, but threats and exhortations to commit violence. She could not understand Prince Harry’s taste for what he had told her was called ‘gangsta rap’. True, his royal ancestors had been the gangsters of their day. Was it in the genes? As the Queen stood looking up at the house she could feel the vibrations of the music under her feet. The curtains were drawn and the windows appeared to have been attacked recently with eggs. She said to Harris, ‘I told Charles that it was inadvisable to allow the boys to live without supervision. Just look at the place, it looks like a New York tenement.’

The front door opened, releasing a blast of music, and a teenage girl, Chanel Toby, a large-breasted fifteen-year-old with a foghorn voice and artificially coloured and straightened white hair, ran down the front path weeping, closely followed by Prince Harry’s dog, Carling, a red-haired mongrel with lanky legs and a small head. Chanel ran past the Queen and into her grandmother’s at Number Ten. Carling bounced around the Queen’s legs. He was such a harmless fool that Susan and Harris allowed him to continue.

Harris growled, ‘If this was a village, Carling would be the idiot.’

The Queen took Carling by the scruff of the neck and dragged him up the path and pushed him through the open door. It was dark inside, all the Queen could see were several hooded figures and a heavy cloud of strong-smelling tobacco. She slammed the front door
shut; it had been a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon so far.

As she was letting herself into Number Nine, William drove by in a white pick-up truck on the side of which was emblazoned ‘Arthur Grice, Scaffolding’. She could hear Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ pouring out of the open windows. He papped the hooter and pulled up.

‘How did it go?’ she asked.

William had been given permission to leave the estate and work on a contract erecting scaffolding, in preparation for converting a Norman church into a casino in Swindon.

‘It was OK,’ said William. ‘We stayed in a Travelodge, the other chaps were terribly nice to me. I took a bit of stick at first because my hands were so soft.’

The Queen said, ‘Was it horribly hard work?’

‘Yes, horribly,’ said William. He held out his hands to show the Queen. They were now cut and calloused, but the Queen could see that he was proud of having completed a week of manual work.

She said nothing to him, but she was proud of the boy. He had lived most of his life on the estate, surrounded by some dreadful people, but had managed somehow to remain law-abiding and utterly charming.

England was an unhappy land. The people were fearful, believing that life itself was composed of danger, and unknown and unknowable threats to their safety. Old people did not leave their homes after dark, children were not allowed to play outside even in the daylight hours and were escorted everywhere by anxious adults. To make themselves feel better the people spent their money on things that diverted and amused them. There was always something they thought they must have to make them happy. But when they had bought the object of their desire, they found, to their profound disappointment, that the object was no longer desirable, and that far from making them happy, they felt nothing but remorse and the sadness of loss.

To help alleviate the pensions crisis, the laws on euthanasia were liberalized and pensioners contemplating suicide were encouraged by a government information leaflet entitled ‘Make Way for the Young’.

In a desperate attempt to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about crime and social disorder, the Government’s Department of Liveability embarked on a bold programme to convert the satellite council estates into Exclusion Zones, where the criminal, the antisocial, the inadequate, the feckless, the agitators, the disgraced
professionals, the stupid, the drug-addicted and the morbidly obese lived cheek by jowl.

The Royal Family, those who had not fled abroad, were living in the Flowers Exclusion Zone (known locally as the Fez) one hundred and nineteen miles from Buckingham Palace, in the East Midlands Region. Arthur Grice, a scaffolding magnate and multi-millionaire, owned and managed the estate; he considered it to be his personal fiefdom. The Royals lived in Hell Close, a cul-de-sac of sixteen small semi-detached ex-council houses. The houses had small front gardens, fenced to waist height. A few of the gardens were lovingly kept. Prince Charles regularly won the Grice Best Kept Garden Award, whereas his neighbours’, the Thread-golds’, garden was an eyesore of old mattresses, vicious brambles and festering rubbish bags.

When Charles offered to clear up and cultivate the Threadgolds’ disgraceful garden, Vince Threadgold said, ‘You ain’t confiscatin’
my
land. This ain’t the Middle Ages, an’ you ain’t got no royal prerogative no more.’

Beverley Threadgold had shouted, ‘Anyroad up, there’s field mice nesting in them old mattresses. I thought you was
for
wildlife!’

A twenty-foot-high metal fence topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras formed the boundary between the back gardens of Hell Close and the outside world. At the only entrance to the Fez, on a triangular piece of muddy ground, squatted a series of interconnected Portakabins, housing the Grice Security Police. The residents of the zone were required to wear an ankle
tag and carry an identity card at all times. Their movements were followed by the security police on a bank of CCTV screens, installed in one of the Portakabins.

When Camilla’s tag had been fitted, immediately after her wedding on the estate, she had said, with her usual cheerful pragmatism, ‘I think it flatters my ankle beautifully.’ By contrast, Princess Anne had wrestled two security police to the floor before a third officer had finally managed to attach her tag.

There were many prohibitions and restrictions imposed on the residents of the Fez. A strict curfew had to be adhered to; residents must be inside their homes from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m. at weekends. During the week they must be inside their houses from 9.30 p.m. Residents were not allowed to leave the estate. All correspondence, both in and out of the Exclusion Zone, was read and censored as appropriate. The telephone system did not extend to the outside world. There were only two free-to-view television channels, the Advertising Channel, which showed a few programmes now and then, and the Government News Channel, which, unsurprisingly, had a perceptible bias in favour of the Government.

The Fez heaved with dogs. They were everywhere, running in the streets, gathering on pavements, fighting on the few areas of scrubby grass and guarding their unlovely territory. There was not a single minute, night or day, when a dog was not barking. After a while the human residents no longer heard the noise: it became as much part of them as the sound of their own breathing. It was a continuing mystery as to how some owners
managed to acquire their pedigree dogs, which often cost many hundreds of pounds, since all residents received the same weekly allowance of £71.32.

Jack Barker, leader of the Cromwell Party, Prime Minister and architect of the Exclusion Zones, could not get out of bed. It was ten thirty in the morning and he had already missed three appointments. He lay under the duvet in his bedroom at Number Ten Downing Street, listening to Big Ben striking the minutes and hours of his life away.

He was tired, he lived in a permanent state of déjà vu: he felt that everything he said, he had said before. Everything he did had already been done. Most of his trusted colleagues, those who had been elected with him thirteen years before, on a heady mix of idealism and principle, were dead or had resigned. Jack’s wife of twenty-four years, Pat, his childhood sweetheart and political ally, had confronted him one night and accused him of fraternizing with the Devil after he had spent a convivial evening dining with Sir Nicholas Soames at a gentlemen’s club in St James’s. She had screamed, ‘You’re the leader of the Republican Party, for Christ’s sake! You called the fucking cat Tom Paine!’

Soon after Jack’s second election victory, the Republican Party had changed its name. A team of brand management consultants had deliberated for months, at an estimated cost of three million pounds, on the wisdom or otherwise of giving the party a new name. A 402-page report was produced, which almost nobody read in full, but instead turned to the executive summary,
which said that, yes, a new name was called for due to constant confusion with the American Republican Government, underlined when Jonathan Ross called the Prime Minister ‘Mr Pwesident’ on Ross’s Friday-night chat show. Another firm of fantastically clever consultants was contracted to think up a new name and logo. This team retired to a country house hotel where they brainstormed for five consecutive days and nights before coming up with the Cromwell Party.

Jack was now married to Caroline, who had fine bones and was the eldest daughter of a baronet, but Caroline found politics ‘tiresome’ and had recently started to criticize the way he held his fork. Jack was slightly afraid of Caroline, her vowels intimidated him and her pillow talk was formidably intellectual. Last night she had thrown Voltaire’s
Dictionnaire Philosophique
across the bedroom, shouting, ‘Lightweight!’

Jack had looked up from a report on phone tapping (161 Members of Parliament were currently having extramarital affairs), and said, ‘Who’s a lightweight? Me?’

‘No, fucking Voltaire,’ she had said. ‘Enlightenment, my arse!’

Jack had looked at her lovely profile, at her angry, heaving breasts, and felt a twinge of desire, but the last time they had made love, Caroline had said, after they had peeled away from each other, ‘Jack, you make love like a laboratory rat; your body’s there, but your brain is elsewhere!’