Queen Camilla (41 page)

‘There’s no way you can turn a Labrador retriever into a fucking moggy,’ said one shirt-sleeved young man. ‘Why don’t you stand up for dog owners, Boy, and oppose the Government?’

Others urged Boy to steer clear of any kind of support for dogs. ‘It’s not as if the fuckers have a vote,’ said a young woman with fashionably tangled hair.

Boy played for time, steering the discussion away from dogs and towards plans to meet the exiled Royal Family.

‘The request is in,’ said one of his young team, ‘but I doubt if Vulcan will grant you access to them.’

‘I’ll play the civil liberties card,’ said Boy. There was laughter from the team; they all knew that civil liberties were old school.

It was Boy’s driver, Duncan, who finally made up Boy’s mind regarding his position on the anti-dog legislation.
The driver conducted his conversation with Boy through the use of the rear-view mirror.

‘What do you make of all this dog malarkey, Mr English?’ he asked. ‘How come it was all right to have a dog a few months ago, and now it ain’t, and what’s with all these posters?’ He gestured to a billboard outside in the Euston Road, where two toy poodles appeared to be tearing a teddy bear apart. ‘I bought my mum, eighty-seven she is, one of them Jack Russells, for company like. She’s called it Gloria, after Gloria Hunniford. Done my old mum the world of good, it has. She dotes on that dog, takes it for a long walk twice a day, feeds it Werther’s Originals. Is this what my granddad fought in the war for?’

‘Did your grandfather survive the war?’ asked Boy.

‘Yeah, but when he came back he’d lost an arm.’

Boy muttered, ‘Brave man.’

‘No,’ said the driver, who was a pedant of the highest order, ‘he weren’t brave. He moaned every bleedin’ day about that missing arm, complaining he couldn’t open a tin. He drove us all bleedin’ mad.’

Boy asked his driver for his opinion on the Royal Family.

‘I’d ’ave the Queen back termorrer,’ said the driver, ‘but I’d make the others work for their bleedin’ living.’

When Boy was next in a radio studio, he converted the driver’s opinion into more or less proper English, and was encouraged by the positive feedback from listeners who were relieved that somebody was standing up for dogs. The telephone lines were blocked with dog lovers promising Boy their votes.

When Vulcan issued him and a film crew with a visiting order for the Flowers Exclusion Zone, he was not to know that it was Jack Barker, his supposed rival, who had signed the order.

It looked to Boy as though he wouldn’t need Graham after all. He was tempted to cancel Graham’s last session with Rip. The bar bill at the Savoy was exorbitant and Rip was constantly on the room phone to America, clocking up even more expense.

Rip Spitzenburger was, in fact, in a TV studio in Soho, conducting a mock interview with Graham, trying to get him familiar with the type of media attention he would receive when Boy unveiled him to the public.

Rip said, ‘So, I’m the interviewer, you’re the interviewee. OK, so first you check your appearance: zipper up, hair smooth, no spinach on teeth. Smile even though your fucking heart is aching, smile though it’s fucking breaking… And remember, Gray, flatter the interviewer. Say “That’s a very interesting question”, or “I’m glad you asked me that, Rip”, or whatever their goddamn name is.’

Graham seated himself on the chair opposite Rip and waited for the mock interview to begin. He had never felt so uncomfortable. He had a mouthful of newly capped teeth, his scalp still tingled from an allergic reaction to the peroxide highlights, and he was wearing the sort of clothes that homosexuals wore on television. As soon as the camera lights were switched on, Graham twisted himself in knots, rolled his eyes back and compulsively checked his flies.

Rip shouted, ‘Forchrissake! Take your bloody hands away from your crotch! You look as though you’re pleasuring your goddamn self!’ He sighed; a week of intensive training had been for nothing.

In his role as interviewer he asked, ‘Prince Graham, how did you feel when you found out you were second in line to the throne of England?’

Graham said, ‘I was over the moon.’

Rip shouted, ‘What did I tell you about clichés? You were not over the goddamn, mother-fucking moon!’

Graham leapt out of his chair and tore the tiny microphone from the lapel of his jacket.

He said imperiously, ‘I am the future King of England. You will not speak to me with such disrespect. My ancestors were conquering the world when yours were eating their own kith and kin.’

Later, after Graham had left the studio, Rip blamed himself. He had tried to put Graham at ease by telling him about the Spitzenburgers’ humble origins in Estonia, and about the Great Freeze in the winter of 1795 when the Spitzenburgers had been forced to eat a fat aunt before the Great Thaw.

Graham ran from the building in Wardour Street and was swallowed up by the crowds of workers and tourists jostling for pavement space. He was sick of being circumspect about his true birth parents. Why should he be used as a political pawn? Why didn’t he take his life in his own hands and tell the world that, one day, he would be the King of England? The thought excited him; he sat at a pavement café in Old Compton Street and ordered a ‘milky coffee’.

The waiter said, in an over-familiar tone that Graham didn’t care for, ‘Milky coffee? How delightfully retro.’

As he sipped his coffee, Graham noticed that many of the men passing on the pavement were blatantly what his adoptive father had called ‘of the other persuasion’. When a young man wearing mascara asked if he could join him, Graham left the café and hailed a black cab, telling the driver to take him to the offices of the
Daily Telegraph
, the newspaper his adoptive father had read. He knew he could trust the
Daily Telegraph
; it supported the monarchy and the English institutions. He was confident that the editor would give him a sympathetic hearing.

Graham had never been to Canary Wharf before. A lesser man might have been intimidated by the towering buildings and acres of reflective glass, but Graham strode into the building housing the
Daily Telegraph
like the king he would one day be. After telling the receptionist that he had the story of the century, an editorial assistant, India Knightly, came down in the lift to speak to him. She was a languid, well-spoken girl who didn’t blink when Graham informed her in a whisper that he was the love child of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles.

‘Really,’ she drawled. Only last week she had listened to a woman who had claimed to be the Pope’s current mistress.

Graham said, ‘Yes, really. I have the papers to prove it.’

‘May I see them?’ India was bored with having to deal with the nutters who seemed to haunt newspaper
offices. She wanted her own column where she could write about the amusing things her cats did and how infuriating it was to choose a squeaky trolley in the supermarket.

When Graham told her that the papers proving he was the future King of England were at home in Ruislip, India signalled to the two security men lounging against the reception desk, and they each took one of Graham’s arms and steered him towards the door. He should, of course, have left it at that and gone home on the tube to Ruislip, but consumed by a need to claim his true identity, he shouted, ‘I am your future king. Unhand me!’ The ensuing struggle resulted in a damaged potted palm, a splintered glass coffee table and an alarming and illegal amount of arterial blood.

When Miranda returned to Boy’s election campaign headquarters and confessed that Graham was on the loose, somewhere in London, Boy shrugged it off. The latest opinion poll had just been published and showed that only twelve per cent of voters cared about the monarchy. However, sixty-seven per cent had strong opinions about dogs.

At the end of
Front Row
on Radio Four, Gin began to worry; Tonic needed his insulin.

‘It’s infuriating that we are so dependent on humans,’ yapped Gin, as he prowled in front of the fridge where the insulin was kept.

Tonic barked, ‘If only we had fingers, Gin. Think how our lives would be transformed.’

They looked at their paws in disgust.

When the cuckoo in the clock had ratcheted out of its nest twelve times and Graham was still not home, Tonic crawled into his basket, whining, ‘He won’t come now, he’s never out after midnight.’

Both dogs were hungry and thirsty and needed to relieve themselves. Gin made many valiant attempts to jump up to the sink to a slowly dripping tap, but his age and his small stature meant that he could only watch as each precious drop of water dripped into the sink. After peeing in a corner, he went to lie alongside Tonic and talked of their lives together, stressing the happy times they’d had when Mr and Mrs Cracknall had been alive.

In the morning, Gin awoke to a terrible silence. There was no sound of Graham preparing for work, no sound of Tonic’s asthmatic breathing. There was only the slow drip of water hitting the sink.

Jack Barker was reading the early editions of the newspapers in bed; it was still dark outside. He laughed quietly to himself when he saw the front page of the
Sun
. The huge black headline read:

GOD COULD BE DOG CLAIMS TOP CLERIC

See page three

Jack turned to page three, and after glancing at a photograph of a bare-breasted adolescent, a Ms Candy Barre from Ludlow, he read:

The Archbishop of Canterbury shocked fellow clerics today when he announced from the pulpit, ‘God was almost certainly not a man or even a woman, but could be a dog.’

The bearded, sandal-wearing, holy man who is head honcho of the Church of England, made his shock claim at a service to celebrate the bravery of animals in both world wars.

After congratulating pigeons, who carried messages from the front line, and horses, who pulled the heavy artillery, he lavished most of his praise on dogs, who, as well as showing bravery in many capacities, were vital in
keeping up the country’s morale and providing comfort to the bereaved.

The lentil-eating cleric shocked worshippers by suggesting that God could be manifested in the form of a dog.

When he said, ‘After all, God is only dog spelt backwards,’ a member of the congregation stormed towards the pulpit, shouting, ‘How dare you use that tired old cliché in God’s house!’

The agitator was wrestled down the aisle by Cathedral Security Staff and was later arrested and charged with ‘causing upset in a public place’.

Jack studied Candy Barre’s pneumatic breasts more closely, and was interested to read that she enjoyed water sports.

The ‘God could be dog’ piece was featured in every newspaper. The Peter Simple column in the
Daily Telegraph
was of the opinion that God was probably a St Bernard. Whereas a columnist in the
Guardian
suggested that God was almost certainly a bitch. The cartoon on the front of
The Times
showed a golden Labrador sitting on a cloud, looking down to earth. Jack didn’t laugh; the archbishop was obviously trying to subvert the dog terror laws. Jack thought, who will rid me of this pesky priest?

Now that did make him laugh.

Lawrence Krill was delighted when The Bastard King of England, as the attendants called him,
was introduced to King George III ward. He wasted no time in informing Graham that he, Lawrence Krill, had in his possession the lost English crown.

Graham sat on his bed muttering, ‘I am the future King of England,’ to himself.

A kind nurse gave Graham his medication, which he swallowed obediently.

‘Of course, you’re the future King of England,’ she said soothingly. In her experience it was better to agree with the poor souls.

Lawrence Krill rummaged in his bedside locker and brought out a cardboard crown he had made in occupational therapy. Lawrence had decorated it with stuck-on jewels made from the cellophane wrappers of Quality Street toffees. It wasn’t the coronation that he had expected, but as Krill lifted the crown and placed it on Graham’s head, he could not help but feel that he was a man apart. A purple toffee wrapper dislodged itself from the crown and floated to the floor. Sunlight shone through the barred windows on to King Graham and his only loyal subject.

The little copse of trees on the green in the centre of Hell Close had been cut down in the middle of the night. Camilla had thought she’d heard a chainsaw, but being in that state between dreaming and wakefulness had, after a few minutes, gone back to sleep. As soon as she drew open the bedroom curtains in the morning, she noticed that the trees were gone, leaving only pale ground-level stumps as a reminder. Without the softening trees, Hell Close looked bleak and raw. The dogs
of Hell Close were sitting together in the spaces between the stumps. They look as though they’re having a meeting, thought Camilla.

Charles came out of the bathroom and was alarmed to see Camilla crying at the window.

‘The trees have gone,’ she sniffed.

Charles looked out and said, ‘What an unspeakable act of vandalism.’

He dressed quickly and went out on to the green. The assembled dogs watched as he kicked at the stumps.

William came to join him and said, ‘When I’m king, I’ll come back and plant a hundred English oaks here.’

Charles patted his son’s shoulder and said, ‘There isn’t room for a hundred English oaks, darling. A mature oak has a tremendous span.’

William’s patriotic fervour deflated, he said glumly, ‘Whatever,’ and bent down to stroke Althorp. ‘C’mon boy,’ he said, ‘time for your breakfast.’

Charles was mystified as to why William said goodbye so brusquely. He put it down to lack of sleep; the lights in William and Harry’s house were often blazing at three o’clock in the morning.

The remaining dogs drifted to their homes despondently. The trees had been their message posts and had provided shade in the summer; some of the dogs had enjoyed chasing the floating autumn leaves and forcing cats to climb to the upper branches.

During the rest of the morning, little knots of residents stood on the green, looking at the space where the trees had been. Only Maddo Clarke’s boys were happy to see level, uncluttered ground. Four of them
took their ragged jumpers off for goalposts and began to play football.