Spare (30 page)

Right. So, you’re here. Riiight. OK. It’s you. Hm. Remind me of the problem?

I showed him my todger, softened by Elizabeth Arden.

He couldn’t see anything.

Nothing to see, I explained. It was an invisible scourge. For whatever reason, my particular case of frostnip manifested as greatly heightened
sensation
…

How did this happen? he wanted to know.

North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.

His face said: Curiouser and curiouser.

I described the cascading dysfunctions.
Everything’s difficult, Doctor. Sitting. Walking.
Sex, I added, was out of the question. Worse, my todger constantly felt like it was
having
sex. Or ready to. I was sort of losing it, I told him. I’d made the mistake of googling this injury, and I’d read horror stories about
partial
penectomies
, a phrase you never want to come across when googling your symptoms.

The doctor assured me it was unlikely I’d need one of those.

Unlikely?

He said he was going to try to rule out other things. He gave me a full examination, which was more than invasive. No stone unturned, so to speak.

The likeliest cure, he announced at last, would be time.

What do you mean? Time?

Time
, he said,
heals
.

Really, Doc? That hasn’t been my experience.

It was hard seeing Chels
at Willy’s wedding. There were loads of feelings still there, feelings I’d suppressed, feelings I hadn’t suspected. I also felt a certain way about the hungry-looking men trailing after her, circling her, nagging her to dance.

Jealousy got the better of me that night, and I told her so, which made me feel worse. And a bit pathetic.

I needed to move on, meet someone new. Time, as the doctor predicted, would fix my todger. When would it work its magic on my heart?

Mates tried to help. They mentioned names, arranged meetings, dates.

Nothing ever panned out. So I was barely listening when they mentioned another name in the summer of 2011. They told me a bit about her—brilliant, beautiful, cool—and mentioned her relationship status. She’d just recently become single, they said. And she won’t be single long, Spike!

She’s free, man. You’re free.

Am I?

And you’re well matched! No doubt you two will hit it off.

I rolled my eyes. When does that prediction ever pan out?

But then, wonder of wonders, it did. We did. We sat at the bar, chatted and laughed, while the friends with us melted away, along with the walls and the drinks and the barman. I suggested the whole group go back to Clarence House for a nightcap.

We sat around talking, listened to music. Lively group. Merry group. When the party broke up, when everybody cleared out, I gave Florence a lift home. That was her name. Florence. Though everyone called her Flea.

She lived in Notting Hill, she said. Quiet street. When we pulled up outside her flat she invited me up for a cup of tea. Sure, I said.

I asked my bodyguard to drive around the block a few hundred times.

Was it that night or another that Flea told me about her distant ancestor? Actually, it was probably neither. A mate told me later, I think. In any event, he’d led the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed advance on Russian guns in Crimea. Incompetent, possibly mad, he’d caused the deaths of a hundred men. A shameful chapter, the polar opposite of Rorke’s Drift, and now I was taking a page from his book, bullishly charging full steam ahead. Over that first cup of Earl Grey, I was asking myself: Could she be my person?

The connection was that strong.

But I was also that mad. And I could see she knew it, read it all over my non–poker face. I hoped she found it charming.

Apparently she did. The weeks that followed were idyllic. We saw each other often, laughed a lot, and no one knew.

Hope got the better of me.

Then the press found out and down came the curtain on our idyll.

Flea phoned me in tears.
There were eight paps outside her flat.
They’d chased her halfway across London.

She’d just seen herself described by one paper as “an underwear model.” Based on a photoshoot done years and years before! Her life boiled down to one photo, she said. It was so reductive, so degrading.

Yes, I said quietly.
I know what that feels like.

They were digging, digging, ringing up everyone she’d ever known. They were already after her family. They were giving her the full Caroline Flack treatment, while still giving it to Caroline as well.

Flea just kept saying:
I can’t do this
.

She said she was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Like some kind of criminal. I could hear sirens in the background.

She was upset, crying, and I felt like crying, but of course I didn’t.

She said one last time:
I can’t do this anymore, Harry.

I had the phone on speaker. I was on the second floor of Clarence House, standing by the window, surrounded by beautiful furnishings. Lovely room. The lamps were low, the rug at my feet was a work of art. I pressed my face against the window’s cold polished glass and asked Flea to see me one last time, at least talk it over.

Soldiers went marching past the house. Changing of the guard.

No
.

She was firm.

Weeks later I got a call from one of the friends who’d set us up at the bar.
Didja hear? Flea’s got back with the old boyfriend!

Has she?

Wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

Right.

The friend told me he’d heard that it was Flea’s mother who told her to end things, who warned her that the press would destroy her life.
They’ll hound you to the gates of Hell
, her mother said.

Yeah
, I told the friend.
Mums do know best.

I stopped sleeping.

I simply stopped. I was so disappointed, so profoundly dejected, that I just stayed up night after night, pacing, thinking. Wishing I had a TV.

But I was living on a military base now, in a cell-like room.

Then, mornings, on zero sleep, I’d try to fly an Apache.

Recipe for disaster.

I tried herbal remedies. They helped, a bit, I was able to get an hour or two of sleep, but they left me feeling brain-dead most mornings.

Then the Army informed me I’d be hitting the road—a series of maneuvers and exercises.

Maybe just the thing, I thought. Snap me out of it.

Or it might be the last straw.

First they sent me to America. The southwest. I spent a week or so hovering over a bleak place called Gila Bend. Conditions were said to be similar to Afghanistan. I became more fluid with the Apache, more lethal with its missiles. More at home in the dust. I blew up a lot of cacti. I wish I could say it wasn’t fun.

Next I went to Cornwall. A desolate place called Bodmin Moor.

January 2012.

From blazing hot to bitter cold. The moors are always cold in January, but I arrived just as a fierce winter storm was blowing in.

I was billeted with twenty other soldiers. We spent the first few days trying to acclimatize. We rose at five
a.m.
, got the blood flowing with a run and a vomit, then bundled into classrooms and learned about the latest methods that bad actors had devised for snatching people. Many of these methods would be put to use against us over the next few days, as we tried to navigate a long march across the frigid moor. The exercise was called Escape and Evasion, and it was one of the last hurdles for flight crews and pilots before deployment.

Trucks took us to an isolated spot, where we did some field lessons, learned some survival techniques. We caught a chicken, killed it, plucked it, ate it. Then it started to rain. We were instantly soaked. And exhausted. Our superiors looked amused.

They grabbed me, and two others, loaded us onto a truck, drove us to a place even more remote.

Out.

We squinted at the terrain, the skies.
Really? Here?

Colder, heavier rain started to come down. The instructors shouted that we should imagine our helicopter had just crash-landed behind enemy lines, and our only hope of survival was to go by foot from one end of the moor to the other, a distance of ten miles. We’d been given a meta narrative, which we now recalled: We were a Christian army, fighting a militia sympathetic to Muslims.

Our mission: Evade the enemy, escape the forbidding terrain.

Go.

The truck roared away.

Wet, cold, we looked around, looked at each other.
Well, this sucks.

We had a map, a compass, and each man had a bivvy bag, essentially a body-length waterproof sock, to sleep in. No food was allowed.

Which way?

This way?

OK.

Bodmin was desolate, allegedly uninhabited, but here and there in the distance we saw farmhouses. Lighted windows, smoke curling from brick chimneys. How we longed to knock on a door. In the good old days people would help out the soldiers on exercise, but now things were different. Locals had been scolded many times by the Army; they knew not to open their doors to strangers with bivvy bags.

One of the two men on my team was my mate Phil. I liked Phil, but I started to feel something like unbounded love for the other man, because he told us he’d visited Bodmin Moor as a summer walker and he knew where we were. More, he knew how to get us out.

He led, we followed like children, through the dark and into the next day.

At dawn we found a wood of fir trees. The temperature approached freezing, the rain fell even harder. We said to hell with our solitary bivvy bags, and curled up together, spooned actually, each trying to get into the middle, where it was warmer. Because I knew him, spooning Phil felt less awkward, and at the same time much more. But the same went for spooning the third man.
Sorry, that your hand?
After a few hours of something vaguely approximating sleep we peeled ourselves apart and began the long march again.

The exercise required that we stop at several checkpoints. At each one we had to complete a task. We managed to hit every checkpoint, perform every task, and at the last checkpoint, a kind of safe house, we were told the exercise was over.

It was the middle of the night. Pitch-black. The directing staff appeared and announced:
Well done, guys! You made it.

I nearly passed out on my feet.

They loaded us onto a truck, told us we were headed back to the base. Suddenly a group of men in camo jackets and black balaclavas appeared. My first thought was Lord Mountbatten being ambushed by the IRA—I don’t know why. Entirely different circumstance, but maybe some vestigial memory of terrorism, deep in my DNA.

There were explosions, gunshots, guys storming the truck and screaming at us to look down at the ground. They wrapped blacked-out ski goggles over our eyes, zip-tied our hands, dragged us off.

We were pushed into what sounded like an underground bunker system. Damp, wet walls. Echoey. We were taken from room to room. The bags over our heads were ripped off, then put back on. In some rooms we were treated well, in others we were treated like dirt. Emotions went up and down. One minute we’d be offered a glass of water, the next we’d be shoved to our knees and told to keep our hands above our heads. Thirty minutes. An hour. From one stress position to another.

We hadn’t really slept in seventy-two hours.

Much of what they did to us was illegal under the rules of the Geneva Conventions, which was the goal.

At some point I was blindfolded, moved into a room, where I could sense that I wasn’t alone. I had a feeling it was Phil in there with me, but maybe it was the other guy. Or a guy from one of the other teams. I didn’t dare ask.

Now we could hear faint voices somewhere above or below, inside the building. Then a strange noise, like running water.

They were trying to confuse, disorient us.

I was terrifyingly cold. I’d never been so cold. Far worse than the North Pole. With the cold came numbness, drowsiness. I snapped to attention when the door burst open and our captors barged in. They took off our blindfolds. I was right, Phil was there. Also the other guy. We were ordered to strip. They pointed at our bodies, our flaccid cocks. They went on and on about how small. I wanted to say: You don’t know the half of what’s wrong with this appendage.

They interrogated us. We gave them nothing.

They took us into separate rooms, interrogated us some more.

I was told to kneel. Two men walked in, screamed at me.

They left.

Atonal music was piped in. A violin being scraped by an angry two-year-old.

What is that?

A voice answered:
Silence!

I became convinced that the music wasn’t a recording, but an actual child, perhaps also being held prisoner. What in heaven’s name was that kid doing to that violin? More—what were they doing to that kid?

The men returned. Now they had Phil. They’d gone through his social media, studied him, and they began saying things about his family, his girlfriend, which scared him. It was astonishing how much they knew. How can perfect strangers know so much?

I smiled: Welcome to the party, pal.

I wasn’t taking this seriously enough. One of the men grabbed me, shoved me against a wall. He wore a black balaclava. He pressed his forearm into my neck, spitting every word from his mouth. He pressed my shoulders against the concrete. He ordered me to stand three feet from the wall, arms above my head, all ten fingertips against the wall.

Stress position.

Two minutes.

Ten minutes.

My shoulders started to seize.

I couldn’t breathe.

A woman entered. She was wearing a
shemagh
over her face. She went on and on about something, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t keep up.

Then I realized. Mummy. She was talking about my mother.