Spare (31 page)

Your mother was pregnant when she died, eh? With your sibling? A Muslim baby!

I fought to turn my head, to look at her. I said nothing but I screamed at her with my eyes.
You doing this for my benefit now—or yours? Is this the exercise? Or you getting a cheap thrill?

She stormed out. One of the captors spat in my face.

We heard the sound of gunshots.

And a helicopter.

We were dragged into a different room and someone called out,
OK, that’s it. End exercise!

There was a debrief, during which one of the instructors offered a half-arsed apology about the stuff to do with my mother.

Hard for us to find something about you that you’d be shocked we knew.

I didn’t answer.

We felt you needed to be tested.

I didn’t answer.

But that took it a bit too far.

Fair enough.

Later I learned that two other soldiers in the exercise had gone mad.

I’d barely recovered
from Bodmin Moor when word came down from Granny. She wanted me to go to the Caribbean. A two-week tour to commemorate her sixtieth year on the throne, my first official royal tour representing her.

It was strange to be called away so suddenly, with a finger snap, from my Army duties, especially so close to deployment.

But then I realized it wasn’t strange at all.

She was, after all, my commander.

March 2012. I flew to Belize, drove from the airport to my first event along roads thronged with people, all waving signs and flags. At my first stop, and every stop thereafter, I drank toasts to Granny and my hosts with homemade alcohol, and performed many rounds of a local dance called the punta.

I also had my first taste of cow-foot soup, which had more of a kick than the homemade alcohol.

At one stop I told a crowd:
Unu come, mek we goo paati.
In Creole that means:
Come on, let’s party.
The crowd lost it.

People cheered my name, and shouted my name, but many shouted my mother’s name. At one stop a lady hugged me and cried:
Diana’s baby!
Then fainted.

I visited a lost city called Xunantunich. Thriving Mayan metropolis, centuries ago, a guide told me. I climbed a stone temple, El Castillo, which was intricately carved with hieroglyphs, friezes, faces. At the top someone said this was the highest point in the whole nation. The view was stunning, but I couldn’t help looking down at my feet. Below were the bones of untold numbers of dead Mayan royals. A Mayan Westminster Abbey.

In the Bahamas I met ministers, musicians, journalists, athletes, priests. I attended church services, street festivals, a state dinner, and drank more toasts. I rode out to Harbour Island in a speedboat that broke down and began to
sink. As we took on water, along came the press boat. I wanted to say no thanks, never, but it was either join them or swim for it.

I met India Hicks, Pa’s goddaughter, one of Mummy’s bridesmaids. She took me along the Harbour Island beach. The sand was bright pink.
Pink sand?
It made me feel stoned. Not altogether unpleasant. She told me why the sand was pink, a scientific explanation, which I didn’t understand.

At some point I visited a stadium full of children. They lived in abject poverty, faced daily challenges, and yet they greeted me with jubilant cheers and laughter. We played, danced, did a little boxing. I’d always loved children, but I felt an even keener connection to this group because I’d just become a godfather—to Marko’s son Jasper. Deep honor. And an important signpost, I thought, I hoped, in my evolution as a man.

Towards the end of the visit the Bahamian children gathered around me and presented me with a gift. A gigantic silver crown and an enormous red cape.

One of them said:
For Her Majesty.

I’ll see that she gets it.

I hugged many of them on my way out of the stadium, and on the plane to the next stop I donned their crown proudly. It was the size of an Easter basket and my staff dissolved into fits of hysterical laughter.

You look a perfect idiot, sir.

That may be
.
But I’m going to wear it at the next stop.

Oh, sir, no, sir, please!

I still don’t know how they talked me out of it.

I went to Jamaica, bonded with the prime minister, ran a footrace with Usain Bolt. (I won, but cheated.) I danced with a woman to Bob Marley’s “One Love.”

Let’s get together to fight this holy Armagiddyon (one love)

At every stop, it seemed, I planted a tree, or several. Royal tradition—though I added a twist. Normally, when you arrive at a tree planting, the tree is already in the ground, and you just throw a ceremonial bit of soil into the hole. I insisted on actually planting the tree, covering the roots, giving it some water. People seemed shocked by this break with protocol. They treated it as radical.

I told them:
I just want to make sure the tree will live
.

When I got home,
the reviews were raves. I’d represented the Crown well, according to courtiers. I reported back to Granny, told her about the tour.

Marvelous. Well done,
she said.

I wanted to celebrate, felt I deserved to celebrate. Also, with war in the offing, it was celebrate now or maybe never.

Parties, clubs, pubs, I went out a lot that spring, and tried not to care that, no matter where I went, two paps were always present. Two sorry-looking, extremely terrible paps: Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.

For much of my adult life there had been paps waiting for me outside public places. Sometimes a mob of them, sometimes a handful. The faces always varied, and often I couldn’t even see the faces. But now there were always these two faces, and always clearly visible. When there was a mob, they were right in the middle. When there was no one else, they were there all by themselves.

But it wasn’t just public places. I’d be walking down a side street, which I’d only decided to walk down seconds before, and they’d leap from a phone box or from under a parked car. I’d leave a friend’s apartment, certain that no one knew I’d been there, and they’d be standing outside the building, in the middle of the street.

Besides being everywhere, they were ruthless, much more aggressive than other paps. They’d block my path, they’d chase me to my police car. They’d block me from getting into the car, then chase the car down the street.

Who were they? How were they doing this? I didn’t think they had any kind of sixth sense or extrasensory perception. On the contrary, they looked as if they didn’t possess one full frontal cortex between them. So, what hidden trick were they leveraging? An invisible tracker? A source inside the police?

They were after Willy too. He and I talked about them a lot that year, talked about their unsettling appearance, their complementary ruthlessness and idiocy, their take-no-prisoners approach. But mainly we discussed their omnipresence.

How do they know? How do they always know?

Willy had no idea, but was determined to find out.

Billy the Rock was determined as well. He walked up to the Tweedles several times, interrogated them, looked deep into their eyes. He managed to get a sense of them. The older, Tweedle Dumb, was doughy, he reported, with close-cropped black hair and a smile that chilled the blood. Tweedle Dumber,
on the other hand, never smiled, and rarely spoke. He seemed to be some sort of apprentice. Mostly he just stared.

What was their game? Billy didn’t know.

Following me everywhere, tormenting me, getting rich off me, even that wasn’t enough for them. They also liked to rub my nose in it. They’d run alongside me, taunt me, while pressing the buttons on their cameras, reeling off two hundred photos in ten seconds. Many paps wanted a reaction, a tussle, but what Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber seemed to want was a fight to the death. Blinded, I’d fantasize about punching them. Then I’d take deep breaths, remind myself: Don’t do it. That’s just what they want. So they can sue and become famous.

Because, in the end, I decided
that
was their game. That was what it was all about: two fellas who weren’t famous, thinking it must be fabulous to be famous, trying to become famous by attacking and ruining the life of someone famous.

Why did they want to be famous? That was the thing I never understood. Because fame is the ultimate freedom? What a joke. Some kinds of fame provide extra freedom, maybe, I suppose, but royal fame was fancy captivity.

The Tweedles couldn’t fathom this. They were children, incapable of understanding anything nuanced. In their simplified cosmology: You’re royal. So. This is the price you pay for living in a castle.

Sometimes I wondered how it might go if I could just talk to them, calmly, explain that I didn’t live in a castle, my grandmother lived in a castle, that in fact Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber both had far grander lifestyles than mine. Billy had done a deep dive on their finances, so I knew. Each Tweedle owned multiple houses, and several luxury cars, purchased with proceeds from their photos of me and my family. (Offshore bank accounts too, like their sponsors, the media barons who funded them, chiefly Murdoch and the impossibly Dickensian-sounding Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere.)

It was around this time that I began to think Murdoch was evil. No, strike that. I began to know that he was. Firsthand. Once you’ve been chased by someone’s henchmen through the streets of a busy modern city you lose all doubt about where they stand on the Great Moral Continuum. All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehavior and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting. Marrying your cousin is far less dicey than becoming a profit center for Murdoch Inc.

Of course I didn’t care for Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s. And I didn’t like the harm he did each and every day to Truth, his wanton desecration of objective facts. Indeed, I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality. But what really sickened and frightened me in 2012 was Murdoch’s ever-expanding circle of flunkies: young, broken, desperate men willing to do whatever was necessary to earn one of his Grinchy smiles.

And at the center of that circle…were these two mopes, the Tweedles.

There were so many nightmarish run-ins with Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, but one stands out. A friend’s wedding. Walled garden, totally secluded. I was chatting with several guests, listening to the birdsong, the whoosh of wind in the leaves. Within these soothing sounds, however, I became aware of one small…
click
.

I turned. There, in the hedgerow. One eye. And one glassy lens.

Then: that chubby face.

Then: that demonic rictus.

Tweedle Dumb.

The one good thing
about Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber was that they made me ready for war. They filled me with choking rage, always a good precursor for battle. They also made me want to be anywhere but England.
Where are my goddamned orders?

Please send my orders.

And then, of course, as so often happens…

I was at a music festival and my cousin tapped me on the shoulder.
Harry, this is my friend Cressida.

Oh. Um. Hello.

The setting was inauspicious. Lots of people, zero privacy. Also, I was still suffering a broken heart. On the other hand, the landscape was lovely, the music was good, the weather was fine.

There were sparks.

Soon after that day we went to dinner. She told me about her life, her family, her dreams. She wanted to be an actress. She was so soft-spoken and shy,
acting was the last profession I’d have imagined for her, and I said so. But she confessed that it made her feel alive. Free. She made it sound like flying.

Weeks later, at the end of another date, I gave her a lift home.
I’m just off the King’s Road.
We pulled up to a large house on a well-kept street.

You live here? This is your house?

No.

She explained that she was staying for a few days with an aunt.

I walked her up the steps. She didn’t invite me in. I didn’t expect her to, didn’t want her to. Take it slow, I thought. I leaned in to give her a kiss, but my aim was off. I could take out a cactus from three miles away with a Hellfire missile but I couldn’t quite find her lips. She turned, I tried again on the return trip, and we managed something like a graze. Painfully awkward.

The next morning I phoned my cousin. Discouraged, I told her the date had gone well, but the ending had left something to be desired. She didn’t disagree. She’d already spoken to Cressida. She sighed.
Awkward
.

But then came the good news. Cressida was game to try again.

We met days later for another dinner.

As it happened, her flatmate was dating my longtime mate Charlie. Brother of my late friend Henners.

I joked:
Obviously this is meant to be. The four of us could have so much fun
.

But I wasn’t totally joking.

We tried another kiss. Not so awkward.

I had hope.

For our next date she and her flatmate had Charlie and me over. Drinks, laughs. Before I knew what was happening, we were a thing.

Sadly, however, I could only see Cress at weekends. I was busier than ever, doing my final preps for deployment. And then I got my official orders, my actual deployment date, and the clock was now loudly ticking. For the second time in my life I needed to tell a young woman I’d just met that I’d soon be going off to war.

I’ll wait
, she said.
But not forever
, she added quickly.
Who knows what’s going to happen, Haz?

Right. Who knows?

Easier to just tell myself, and others, that we’re not together.

Yes. That is easier, I suppose.