The Queen and I (20 page)

The Governor said, “You’re having two new cellmates. You’ll be a little crowded, but you’ll have to put up with that, won’t you?” He paced the small cell. “As you know, we show no favouritism in this prison. One of the prisoners is our erstwhile future King. The other is Carlton Moses, who will protect him from any undue harassment from his fellow prisoners. I have met our erstwhile future King and I found him to be a charming, civilised man. Learn from him, he has much to teach you.”

The door slammed shut and Lee and Fat Oswald were once again alone.

“Christ,” said Lee. “Carlton Moses in our cell. ’E’s seven feet tall, ain’t ’e? What with ’im and you, there ain’t gonna be room to bleedin’
breathe
.”

Ten minutes later, another double bunk was brought into the cell. Fat Oswald could hardly move in the narrow space between the two. Lee bragged to Fat Oswald about his short acquaintance with Charlie Teck. He was less enthusiastic about Carlton Moses, how ever. Rumour had it that Carlton had actually sold his grandmother, or rather, had exchanged her for a Ford Cabriolet XRI. Fat Oswald thought the rumour must be false. In his opinion it was hardly a fair swap. What use was someone else’s
grandmother
to anybody?

Their speculation was cut short by the arrival of Charles and Carlton, who were holding sharp cornered piles of bedding in their arms.

It was the worst day of Charles’s life. He hadn’t expected to go to prison. But here he was. He’d been subjected to several gross humiliations since arriving: having his buttocks parted in the search for illegal drugs had possibly been the worst. The door slammed and the four men looked at each other.

Charles looked at Fat Oswald and thought, my God, that man is simply
grossly
fat.

Lee looked at Carlton and thought, he
did
swap his grandma for a car.

Fat Oswald looked at Charles and thought, I’ll get him to talk about all them banquets he’s been to.

Carlton looked at the cell and thought, this is
serious
overcrowding, man. I’m writing to the European Parliament ’bout this.

“How long you get, Charlie?” asked Lee.

“Six months.” Charles already felt he couldn’t breathe in the cramped cell.

“Out in four then,” said Lee.

“If he behaves,” said Carlton, as he stowed his belongings on to the vacant top bunk.

Oswald turned his attention back to Madhur Jaffrey. He didn’t know how to address royalty. Was it “Sir” or “Your Royal Highness”? He would get another book out of the prison library tomorrow, an etiquette book.

Charles stood on tiptoe and looked out of the little barred window. All he could see was a patch of reddish sky and the top branches of a tree which was covered in new lime green leaves. A sycamore, he said to himself. He thought about his garden waiting for him. The new shoots, sprouting seeds and pricked out plants would miss him. He feared that Diana would allow the compost to dry out in the seed trays and hanging baskets. Would she remember to remove the side shoots from his tomatoes as he had begged her to do? Would she give the Gro-bags a litre and a half a day? Would she continue to throw her vegetable peelings onto his compost heap? He must write to her immediately with full instructions.

“Do any of you chaps have some paper to spare?” he asked.

“Pepper?” Lee looked baffled.

“Writing paper,” explained Charles. “Stationery.”

“You wanna write a letter?” asked Carlton.

“Yes,” said Charles, who had wondered if he had actually been speaking English or had slipped into the French or Welsh language unconsciously.

“You have to be
issued
with a letter,” explained Carlton. “One a week.”

“Only
one
?” said Charles. “But that’s simply absurd. I’ve got masses of people to write to. I promised my mother …”

But he became aware of a new, pressing problem. He needed to go to the lavatory. He touched the bell next to the cell door. His cellmates watched in silence as Charles waited for the door to be opened. Two minutes later Charles was jabbing at the bell frantically. His need was now urgent. One agonising minute later, the door was opened by Mr Pike. Charles forgot where he was.

“About time,” he said. “I need to go to the lavatory; where is it?”

Pike’s brow darkened under his peaked cap. “About time?” he repeated, mocking Charles’s accent. “I’ll tell you where the lavatory is, Teck. It’s there.” He pointed to a container on the floor. “You’re in prison now, you piss in a pot.”

Charles appealed to his three cellmates, “Would you step outside for a moment while I … ?” Their answer was unrestrained laughter. Mr Pike grabbed Charles’s shoulder and led him to the pot. He knocked the plastic lid off with a shiny-booted foot and said, “Urination and defecation takes place here, Teck.”

“But it’s barbaric,” protested Charles.

“You’re coming dangerously close to infringing the rules of this prison,” said Pike.

“What are the rules?” Charles asked anxiously.

“You’ll find out what they are when you break them,” said Pike with great satisfaction.

“But that’s Kafkaesque.”

“It might be,” said Pike, who had no idea what the word meant. “But a rule is a rule and just because you used to be the heir to the throne, don’t expect no favours from me.”

“But I wasn’t, I …”

Pike slammed the door shut and Charles, unable to contain himself any longer, hurried back to the plastic pot and added his own urine to that of Oswald and Lee.

Oswald said shyly, “I’ve read a book by Kafka.
The Trial
it was called. This bloke is up for something, he don’t know what. Anyway, he gets done. It were dead boring.”

To divert attention away from the thunderous sound of his own urination, Charles said, “But didn’t you find the atmosphere tremendously evocative?”

Fat Oswald repeated, “No, it were dead boring.”

Charles adjusted his dress and once again went to the bell and pressed it, explaining to Lee, Carlton and Oswald that he had forgotten to ask Pike for a letter. But Pike had given instructions that the bell to Cell 17 was not to be answered. Eventually the sky darkened, the sycamore branch vanished and Charles removed his finger from the bell. He declined Lee’s offer to lend him a book, saying, “
Fast Car
is not a book, Lee, it is a magazine.”

Carlton was writing to his wife and stopped frequently to ask Charles the spellings of the words: “enough”, “lubrication”, “because”, “nipples”, “recreation”, “Tuesday” and “parole”.

Oswald ate a whole packet of Nice biscuits himself, sliding each biscuit surreptitiously out of the packet without disturbing the wrapping or the other occupants of the cell.

When the overhead light went out, leaving only the red nightlight, the men prepared to sleep. Yet the prison was not quiet. Shouts and the sounds of metal on metal reverberated and somebody with a high tenor voice began to sing, “God Bless The Prince of Wales”. Charles closed his eyes, thought of his garden, and slept.

35 Platinum

Sayako came out of the changing room in Sloane Street wearing this season’s suit, as featured on the cover of English
Vogue
. Last season’s suit lay on the changing room floor in an untidy heap. She surveyed herself in the full-length mirror. The manageress, svelte in black, stood behind her.

“That colour’s very good on you,” she said, smiling professionally.

Sayako said, “I take it and also I take it in strawberry and navy and primrose.”

The manageress inwardly rejoiced. She would now reach this week’s sales target. Her job would be safe for at least another month. God bless the Japanese!

Sayako walked over on stockinged feet to a display of suede loafers. “And these shoes to match all suits in size four,” she said. Her role model was the fibreglass mannequin which lolled convincingly against the shop counter, wearing the same cream suit that Sayako was wearing, the loafers that Sayako had just ordered and a bag that Sayako was about to order in navy, strawberry, cream and primrose. The mannequin’s blonde nylon wig shone under the spotlights. Her blue eyes were half closed as though she were enraptured by her own Caucasian beauty.

She is so beautiful, thought Sayako. She took the wig from the mannequin’s head and placed it on her own. It fitted perfectly. “And I take this,” she said.

She then handed over a platinum card which bore the name of her father, the Emperor of Japan.

As the manageress tapped in the magic numbers from the card, Sayako tried on a soft green-coloured suede coat which was also being worn by a red-haired mannequin, who was doing the splits on the shop floor. The suede coat cost one penny less than a thousand pounds.

“What other colour do you have this in?” asked Sayako of the assistants, who were packing her suits, loafers, bags and wig.

“Just one other colour,” said an assistant (who thought,
Jeezus
, we’ll have a drink after work tonight). She hurried to the back of the shop and quickly returned with a toffee-brown version of the sumptuous coat.

“Yes,” said Sayako. “I take both and, of course, boots to match, size four.” She pointed to the boots worn by the red-haired mannequin.

The pile on the counter grew. Her bodyguard standing inside the shop door shifted impatiently. The limousine parked outside the shop had already attracted the attention of a traffic warden. He and the driver were glaring at each other, but both knew that the Diplomatic plates on the car precluded any possibility that a parking ticket would be attached to the windscreen.

When the Princess and her purchases had been driven away, the manageress and her assistants screamed and yelled and hugged each other for joy.

Sayako sat in the back of the limousine and looked at London and its people. How funny English people are, she thought, with their wobbly faces and big noses and their
skin
! She laughed behind her hand. So white and pink and red. What bodies they had! So tall. It wasn’t necessary to have so much height, was it? Her father was a small man and he was an Emperor.

As the car set off on its journey towards Windsor, where she was staying at the newly opened Royal Castle Hotel, Sayako’s eyes closed. Shopping was so tiring. She had started at 10.30 in Harrods’ lingerie department and now it was 6.15 and she had only taken an hour off for lunch. And when she got home she had that puzzling book to read,
Three Men in a Boat
. She had promised her father she would read at least five pages a day. It would improve her English, he said, and help her to understand the English psyche.

She had already ploughed through
The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland
and most of
Jemima Puddleduck
but she had found these books very difficult, full of talking animals dressed in the clothes of human beings. The strangest of all had been
The House at Pooh Comer
, about a retarded bear who was befriended by a boy called Christopher Robin. Sayako had been told by her tutor in Colloquial English that the English had many words for shit. “Pooh” was one of them.

At Hyde Park Corner the car stopped suddenly, the driver swore and Sayako opened her eyes. The bodyguard turned around to face her.

“A demonstration,” he said. “Nothing to fear.”

She looked out of the window and saw a long line of middle-aged people crossing the road in front of the car. Many of them were wearing beige anoraks that Sayako, a devoted shopper, identified as coming from Marks and Spencer. A few were carrying signs on sticks, on which the letters B.O.M.B. were written in red, white and blue.

Nobody appeared to take any notice of them, apart from a few impatient motorists.

36 Gift Horse

Spiggy rode into Hell Close on the bare back of a chestnut horse called Gilbert. When the horse drew alongside Anne’s house, Spiggy cried: “Ay oop!” and Gilbert stopped and began to eat the couch grass which grew alongside the kerb. Spiggy dismounted and led Gilbert down the path and up to Anne’s front door.

“Wait ’til she sees
you
,” he told the horse. “She’ll be cowin’ gob smacked!”

When Anne opened the door and saw Gilbert’s gentle brown eyes looking into her own, she thought she would melt into a pool on the doorstep. She reached her arms out and embraced the horse’s neck.

“Where’d you get him?” she said brusquely.

“Bought ’im,” said Spiggy. “From a bloke in the club. ’E’s got nowhere to keep ’im.”

“And have
you
got somewhere to keep him?” asked Anne.

“No,” admitted Spiggy. “I’d sunk a few pints and I just sort of took to ’im. He were tied up outside in the car park an’ I just sorta felt, like, sorry for ’im. He were only fifty quid, ’n’ a roll of stair carpet. ’Is name’s Gilbert! ’E’s got new shoes on,” he said anxiously, wanting Anne to agree that Gilbert was a bargain.

Anne’s practised eye told her that Gilbert was a fine horse.

“What’s he been used for?” she said.

“Trekkin’”, the bloke said, in Derbyshire. But ’e’s been on ’is ’olidays lately cos the trekkin’ business went bust. ’E’s got a lovely nature.”

Anne could see that for herself. Gilbert allowed her to run her hands along each fetlock and inspect the inside of his ears. He even bared his teeth when Anne looked into his mouth as though he were sitting in a dentist’s chair and were cooperating with the dentist. Anne stroked his chestnut nose, then took his bridle and led him down the path at the side of the house and out into the overgrown back garden. There was no saddle, but she heaved herself onto Gilbert’s back and they walked to the end of the garden and back again. Spiggy lit a cigarette and sat down on the wrought iron seat that Anne had brought from Gatcombe Park. He liked Anne, she called a spade a bleedin’ spade. An’ she wasn’t a bad looker either – with her hair down, like it was now.

He had been proud of the sensation they had caused when they had entered the Flowers Estate Working Men’s Club on their first date. He had been even prouder when Anne had beaten all his mates at pool. Gilbert was Spiggy’s love token.