Spare (24 page)

Now the voices were saying more explicitly that Red Fox’s cover had been blown, that he was exposed to the enemy, that he needed to be extracted immediately.

Fuck, I said. Fuck fuck
fuck
.

My mind flashed back to Eton. The fox I’d glimpsed, when stoned, from the window of the loo. So, he really had been a messenger from the future after all.
One day you’ll be alone, late at night, in the darkness, hunted like me…see how you like it.

Next day we went on patrol and I was full-on paranoid, worried I’d be recognized. I wore a
shemagh
tightly over my face, with blacked-out ski goggles, while keeping my head on a swivel and my finger tight on the trigger of my machine gun.

After dusk Special Forces collected me, their Chinook escorted by two Apaches I was chatting with over the radio. They flew me across the valley, back to FOB Edinburgh. We landed in darkness and I couldn’t see a thing. I ran into the FOB, then into a green canvas tent, where it was even darker.

I heard a squeak.

A soft light came on.

A man stood before me, screwing a small lightbulb into a socket dangling from the roof.

Colonel Ed.

His long face seemed longer than I remembered, and he was wearing a long green overcoat, like something straight out of the First World War. He filled me in on what happened. An Australian magazine had outed me, told the world I was in Afghanistan. The magazine was inconsequential, so no one noticed at first, but then some bell-end in America picked up the story, posted it on his worthless website, and that got picked up by the crawlers. Now the news was everywhere. The worst-kept secret in the Milky Way was the presence of one Prince Harry in Helmand Province.

So—you’re out.

Colonel Ed apologized. He knew this wasn’t when or how I wanted to end my tour of duty. On the other hand, he wanted me to know that his superiors had been pressing for weeks to pull me, so I was lucky the tour hadn’t been shorter. I’d eluded the powers that be, and the Taliban, and managed to put together a respectably long stint with a sterling record. Bravo, he said.

I was on the verge of begging to stay, but I could see there was no chance. My presence would put everyone around me in grave peril. Including Colonel Ed. Now that the Taliban knew I was in the country, and roughly where, they’d throw everything they had into killing me. The Army didn’t want me dying, but it was the same story as one year earlier: The Army was extra keen that others not die because of me.

I shared that sentiment.

I shook Colonel Ed’s hand, left the tent. I grabbed my few belongings, said a few quick goodbyes, then jumped back on the Chinook, which was still turning and burning.

Within an hour I was back in Kandahar.

I showered, shaved, got ready to catch a big plane bound for England. There were other soldiers milling about, waiting to board as well. Their mood was very different. They were all jubilant. Going home.

I stared at the ground.

Eventually we all began to realize that the boarding process was taking an inordinately long time.

What’s the holdup? we asked, impatiently.

A crew member said we were waiting on one last passenger.

Who?

A Danish soldier’s coffin was being loaded into the cargo hold.

We all fell silent.

When we eventually got on, and took off, the curtain at the front of the plane swung open briefly. I could see three guys on hospital beds. I unbuckled my seatbelt, walked up the aisle and discovered three gravely injured British soldiers. One, I recall, had gruesome injuries from an IED. Another was wrapped head to toe in plastic. Despite being unconscious, he was clutching a test tube containing bits of shrapnel removed from his neck and head.

I spoke with the doctor caring for them, asked if the lads would live. He didn’t know. But even if they did, he said, they faced a very tough road.

I felt angry with myself for having been so self-absorbed. I spent the rest of
that flight thinking about the many young men and women going home in similar shape, and all the ones not going home at all. I thought about the people at home who didn’t know the first thing about this war—by choice. Many opposed it, but few knew a damned thing about it. I wondered why. Whose job was it to tell them?

Oh, yes, I thought. The press.

I landed on March
1, 2008. The obligatory press conference stood between me and a proper meal. I held my breath, went before the chosen reporter, answered his questions. He used the word
hero
, which I wouldn’t stand for.
The heroes are the guys on the plane.
Not to mention the guys still back at Delhi and Dwyer and Edinburgh.

I walked out of the room, straight into Willy and Pa. I think Willy hugged me. I think I gave Pa a kiss on each cheek. He might also have…squeezed my shoulder? It would’ve appeared, to anyone at a distance, a normal family greeting and interaction, but for us it was a flamboyant, unprecedented demonstration of physical affection.

Then they both stared at me, wide-eyed. I looked exhausted. Haunted.

You look older
, Pa said.

I am
.

We piled into Pa’s Audi and zoomed off towards Highgrove. Along the way we spoke as if we were in a library. Very hushed.

How are you, Harold?

Oh, I dunno. How are you?

Not bad.

How’s Kate?

Good.

I miss anything?

No. Same old.

I rolled down the window, watched the countryside fly by. My eyes couldn’t quite absorb all that color, all that green. I breathed in the fresh air and wondered which was the dream, the months in Afghanistan or this trip in the car? The guns of Dwyer, the beheaded goats, the boy in the wheelbarrow—was that reality? Or was reality these soft leather seats and Pa’s cologne?

I was given a month off.
I spent the first part of it with mates. They heard I was home, rang me up, asked me out for a drink.

OK, but just one.

A place called the Cat and Custard Pot. Me: sitting in a dark corner, nursing a gin and tonic. Them: laughing and chatting and making all sorts of plans for trips and projects and holidays.

Everyone seemed so loud. Had they always been so loud?

They all said I seemed quiet. Yeah, I said, yeah, I guess so.

How come?

No reason.

I just felt like being quiet.

I felt out of place, a bit distant. At times I felt sort of panicky. At other times I felt angry.
Do you folks know what’s happening on the other side of the world right now?

After a day or two I rang Chels, asked to see her. Begged. She was in Cape Town.

She invited me to come.

Yes, I thought. That’s what I need right now. A day or two with Chels and her folks.

After, she and I ran off to Botswana, met up with the gang. We started at Teej and Mike’s house. Big hugs and kisses at the door; they’d been worried sick about me. Then they fed me, and Mike kept handing me drinks, and I was in the place I loved most, under the sky I loved most, so happy that at one point I wondered if I might not have tears in my eyes.

A day or two later Chels and I drifted upriver on a rented houseboat. The
Kubu Queen
. We cooked simple meals, slept on the upper deck of the boat, under the stars. Gazing at Orion’s Belt, the Little Dipper, I’d try to decompress, but it was hard. The press got wind of our trip, and they were papping us constantly, every time the boat neared the shore.

After a week or so we went back to Maun, ate a farewell dinner with Teej and Mike. Everyone turned in early, but I sat up with Teej, told her a bit about the war. Just a bit. It was the first time I’d spoken of it since arriving home.

Willy and Pa had asked. But they hadn’t asked the way Teej asked.

Nor had Chelsy. Did she tiptoe around the subject because she still disliked my going? Or because she knew it would be hard for me to talk about it?
I wasn’t sure, and I felt that she wasn’t sure, that neither of us was sure about anything.

Teej and I talked about that too.

She likes me
, I said.
Loves me, I guess. But she doesn’t like the baggage that comes with me, doesn’t like everything that comes with being royal, the press and so forth, and none of that is ever going away. So what hope is there?

Teej asked point-blank if I could see myself married to Chels.

I tried to explain. I cherished Chels’s carefree and authentic spirit. She never worried about what other people thought. She wore short skirts and high boots, danced with abandon, drank as much tequila as I did, and I cherished all those things about her…but I couldn’t help worrying how Granny might feel about them. Or the British public. And the last thing I wanted was for Chels to change to accommodate them.

I wanted so badly to be a husband, a father…but I just wasn’t sure.
It takes a certain kind of person to withstand the scrutiny, Teej, and I don’t know if Chels can handle it. I don’t know that I want to ask her to handle it.

The press reported breathlessly
on our return to Britain, how we dashed to Chelsy’s off-campus flat in Leeds, where she lived with two girls, whom I trusted, and who, more important, trusted me, and how I snuck into their flat disguised in a hoodie and baseball cap, giving her flatmates a laugh, and how I loved pretending to be a university student, going for pizza and hanging out in pubs, even wondering if I’d made the right choice in skipping university—not one word of which was true.

I went to Chels’s Leeds flat twice.

I barely knew her flatmates.

And I never once regretted my decision to skip university.

But the press was getting worse. They were now just peddling fantasies, phantasms, while physically stalking and harassing me and everyone in my inner circle. Chels told me that paps had been following her to and from lectures—she asked me to do something about it.

I told her I’d try. I told her how sorry I was.

When she was back in Cape Town she phoned me and said people were tailing her everywhere and it was driving her crazy. She couldn’t imagine how
they always knew where she was and where she’d be. She was freaking out. I talked it over with Marko, who advised me to ask Chels’s brother to check the underside of the car.

Sure enough: tracking device.

Marko and I were able to tell her brother exactly what to check for, and where, because it had happened to so many other people around me.

Chels said again that she just wasn’t sure if she was up for this. A lifetime of being stalked?

What could I say?

I’d miss her, so much. But I completely understood her desire for freedom.

If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either.

Flack, they called her.

She was funny. And sweet. And cool. I met her at a restaurant with some mates, months after Chels and I had gone our separate ways.

Spike, this is Flack.

Hi. What do you do, Flack?

She was on TV, she explained. She was a presenter.

Sorry
, I said.
I don’t watch much TV.

She wasn’t taken aback that I didn’t recognize her, which I liked. She didn’t have a big ego.

Even after she explained who she was and what she did, I still wasn’t certain.
What’s your full name again?

Caroline Flack.

Days later we met for dinner and games. Poker night at Marko’s flat, Bramham Gardens. After an hour or so I stepped outside, disguised in one of Marko’s cowboy hats, to speak with Billy the Rock. As I exited the building I lit a cigarette and looked right. There, behind a parked car…two sets of feet.

And two bobbing heads.

Whoever it was didn’t recognize me in Marko’s hat. So I was able to stroll casually down to Billy and lean into his police car and whisper:
Bogey at three o’clock
.

What? No!

Billy, how could they have known?

Search me.

No one knows I’m here. Are they tracking me? Are they getting into my phone? Or Flack’s?

Billy bolted from the car, ran around the corner, surprised the two paps. He screamed at them. But they screamed right back. Entitled. Emboldened.

They didn’t get their photo that night—small victory. But very soon after they papped me and Flack, and those photos set off a frenzy. Within hours a mob was camped outside Flack’s parents’ house, and all her friends’ houses, and her grandmother’s house. She was described in one paper as my “bit of rough,” because she’d once worked in a factory or something.

Jesus, I thought, are we really such a country of insufferable snobs?

I continued to see Flack on and off, but we didn’t feel free anymore. We kept on, I think, because we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and because we didn’t want to admit defeat at the hands of these arseholes. But the relationship was tainted, irredeemably, and in time we agreed that it just wasn’t worth the grief and harassment.

Especially for her family.

Goodbye, we said. Goodbye and good luck.

I went with
JLP to Kensington Palace for a cocktail with General Dannatt.

As we knocked at the door to the general’s apartment I felt jumpier than I had when leaving for war.

The general and his wife, Pippa, greeted us warmly, congratulated me on my service.

I smiled, but then frowned. Yes, they said. They were sorry about my deployment being cut short.

The press—they ruin everything, don’t they?

They do, they surely do.

The general poured me a gin and tonic. We gathered in chairs, a sitting area, and I took a big gulp and felt the gin go down and blurted that I needed to get back. I needed to do a full and proper tour.

The general stared.
Oh. I see. Well, if that’s the case…

He began thinking aloud, running through different options, analyzing all the politics and ramifications of each.