25
LYING DOWN ON THE JOB
On Sunday morning, Doctor Potter, a young Australian with child-care problems, took Philip’s hands in her own.
“Feeling crook, Mr Mountbatten? A bit low?”
The Queen hovered nervously at the end of the bed. She hoped Philip wouldn’t be rude. He had been the cause of so many embarrassing incidents in the past.
“Of course I’m feeling bloody low. I’m lying down!” barked Philip, snatching his hands away.
“But you’ve been lying down for what is it…?”
The Queen answered, “Weeks.” The doctor glanced at the titles of the books on the bedside table. Prince Philip Speaks, The Wit of Prince Philip, More Wit of Prince Philip, Competition Carriage Driving. She said, “I didn’t know you wrote books, Mr Mountbatten?”
“I used to do a lot of things before that bloody Barker ruined my life,” he replied.
Dr Potter examined Philip’s eyes, throat, tongue and fingernails. She listened to his lungs and the beating of his heart. She made him sit on the side of the bed and tested his reflexes by tapping his knees with a shiny little hammer. She took his blood pressure. The Queen held her husband down whilst blood was removed from the vein inside the left elbow. The doctor used a spot of the blood to check his blood sugar level.
“Normal,” she said, throwing the test strip into the wastebin.
“So, may I ask if you have made a diagnosis yet, Doctor?” asked the Queen.
“Could be clinical depression,” said the doctor. “Unless he’s trying to swing a sickie. K’niver look at your pubes, Mr Mountbatten?” she asked, trying to undo the cords on his pyjama trousers.
Prince Philip shouted, “Sod off!”
“K’ni ask you some questions, then?” she said.
“I can answer any questions you may have,” the Queen said.
“Nah, I need to know if his memory’s crook. When were you born, Phil?” she asked cheerily.
“Born 10 June 1921 at Mon Repos, Corfu,” he replied mechanically, as though before a Court Martial.
The doctor laughed: “Mon Repos? You’re pulling my leg; that’s Edna Everage’s address, surely?”
“No,” said the Queen, tightening her lips. “He’s quite right. He was born in a house called Mon Repos.”
“Your ma’s name, Phil?”
“Princess Anne of Battenburg.”
“Like the cake, eh? And your Pa?”
“Prince Andrew of Greece.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“Sisters, four. Margarita, married to Gottfried, Prince Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Officer in German Army. Sophie, married Prince Christopher of Hesse, Luftwaffe pilot…”
“That’s enough sisters, darling,” said the Queen, cutting in. Too many skeletons were coming dancing out of the cupboard enough to supply a Busby Berkeley musical.
“Well, he’s compos mentis,” said the doctor, scribbling on her prescription pad. “Try him on these tranx, eh? I’ll come back this arvo, take some urine. Can’t stop now, I’ve got a list longer than a roo’s tail.”
When they got to the bottom of the stairs, the doctor said, “Trine clean him up, will ya? He stinks worse than a diseased dingo’s den.”
The Queen said she would do her best, but the last time she had tried, he had thrown the wet sponge across the room. The doctor laughed: “Funny how things turn out. I did my Duke of Edinburgh’s Award y’know. Got a gold. Last time I saw your husband was in Adelaide. He was wearing a sharp suit and half a ton of pancake make-up on his face.” Doctor Potter hurried across the road. She had another house call to make in Hell Close. Poverty was hard on the human body.
∨ The Queen and I ∧
26
THE SHOW MUST GO ON
Harris was in mourning. His leader, King, had died under the wheels of a lorry delivering Pot Noodles to the service bay at the back of Food-U-R. Harris had barked a warning, but it was too late.
Victor Berryman had covered King in a piece of sacking and laid him inside a Walkers crisp box. He had then gone to the house of King’s nominal owner, Mandy Carter, and broken the news to her. Mandy, who rarely fed King and often denied him shelter in his own home, sobbed over her dog’s body. Harris watched her cynically. Poor King, he thought, he didn’t even have a collar. He had nothing, not even a food bowl, to call his own.
Mandy Carter had rung the Council on Victor Berryman’s phone and they had called round with a grey van, slung King inside a sack, thrown the sack into the back of the van and driven off. The Pack had chased the van for a few hundred yards, but had eventually given up and gone to their homes.
Harris had waddled back to Hell Close and crawled under the hall table. He had refused a meal (a succulent oxtail), which had caused the Queen some concern, but not for long, he noticed. As usual, she was too busy with Philip to give her dog the attention he needed.
After a short sleep Harris barked to be let out and ran through the back gardens of Hell Close until he reached Charles’s cultivated plot. Harris scattered the compost heap around and then ran up and down the neat seed drills so painstakingly planted by Charles only the day before. He rested for a while, then jumped up and pulled Diana’s white jeans down from the line, chased a robin and ran off to find and sexually harass Kylie, who was playing hard to get. If King had taught him one thing, it was that you had to be tough to survive in Hell Close. And now that King was dead Harris intended to be Top Dog.
The King is dead. Long live the King! thought Harris.
On Monday morning by the second post an airmail letter arrived.
Stage Door
Theatre Royal
Dunfermline Bay
South Island
New Zealand
Dearest Mummy,
♦
I could hardly believe my ears when I heard the election result. Is it too foul, living on a council estate?
I said to Craig, the director, “I shall have to go home, Mummy needs support.” But Craig said, “Eddy, think about it, what can you do?”
And I did think about it and, as usual, Craig was right. It would be terribly unprofessional to leave a show halfway through a tour, wouldn’t it?
Sheep! is doing great business. Many bums on many seats. It is a good show. And they are such a brilliant cast, Mummy! Real troupers. The sheep costumes are horribly hot to wear, let alone sing and dance in, but I have never heard a word of complaint from anybody in the company.
New Zealand is a little dull and a trifle behind the times. I saw a wedding party coming out of church yesterday and the bridegroom was wearing flares and a kipper tie. It was a hoot!
Craig has been a little depressed, but then he is never at his best in the rain. He needs the sun on his body in order to feel whole.
It was frightfully funny yesterday, one of the leads Jenny Love lost her sheep mask during her big number before the first act finale, ‘Lift the Wool from your Eyes’. She completely corpsed and could hardly bleat a word. Well, Craig and I were on the floor but the audience didn’t seem to notice that Jenny’s mask had fallen off. To tell the truth Jenny has got rather an ovine looking face.
We’re leaving for Australia next week. Advance bookings are very good, I wish you could see Sheep!, Mummy. The tunes are lovely and the dancing is terrific. We did have a few problems with the author, Verity Lawson. She and Craig had a major artistic disagreement about the slaughtering scene. Verity wanted a dead sheep to be lowered on a hook from the back of the stage, and Craig wanted the Ram (played by Marcus Lavender of The Bill) to perform a dance of death. In the end Craig won, but not until Verity had called in the Writers’ Union and made things generally unpleasant. Well, enough of this theatrical chit-chat, I’m sending you a Sheep! baseball cap, and also a programme. As you will see under ‘Tour Manager’ I’ve changed my name to Ed Windmount. Ever the peacemaker, eh?
Love from Ed.
P.S. I have had a strange letter from Grandma telling me to rejoice because Everes
t has been conquered!
∨ The Queen and I ∧
27
THE QUEEN AND I
The Queen met the daft teenager in the street as she was about to open Violet Toby’s gate. He was wearing a baseball cap with ‘E’ written on the front. The Queen thought that ‘E’ must stand for ‘Enjoyment’ or possibly ‘Elton’, the popular singer. She asked about Leslie, his baby half-sister.
“She screams all night,” he said, and the Queen noticed that he had black circles under his eyes. “She’s wicked,” he added.
The Queen thought it was a little harsh to call a baby wicked. “Is that her dummy?” she said, pointing to the huge rubber dummy he was wearing on a ribbon around his neck.
“No, it’s mine,” he said.
“But aren’t you rather old for a dummy?” puzzled the Queen.
“No, it’s the business,” said the daft teenager, and he took a nasal block from amongst the voluminous folds of his trousers and stuffed it up his nostrils, and then, to the Queen’s surprise, smeared it over his face. “Have you got sinus trouble?” asked the Queen. “No,” said the daft one. “It gives me a buzz.”
As he walked away sucking on his dummy, the Queen warned, “The laces in your shoes are undone!”
The daft teenager shouted back: “They ain’t shoes ; they’re trainers. An’ nobody does the laces up no more, ‘cept dorks!”
The Queen called for Violet Toby and the two women walked to the bus stop, talking about the latest crisis in Violet’s family. It was a sad story, involving marital disharmony, adultery and fractured bones. When they got on the bus they each grumbled about the fare.
“Sixty cowin’ pee,” said Violet.
Half an hour later they were in the huge covered market picking up vegetables and fruit from off the cobbled floor and putting them into their shopping bags.
“Right as rain when they’ve had a wash,” said Violet, examining some large pears which were only slightly puckered.
They were surrounded by shouting market traders who were dismantling their stalls. Expensive foreign-made vans waited at the kerb with their engines running. Traffic wardens prowled like big cats at feeding time. The poor were scavenging what they could before the Council cleaning squads arrived. The Queen bent down to retrieve brown speckled cooking apples that had collected around a drain cover and she thought, what am I doing? I could be in Calcutta. She picked the apples up and dropped them into her bag.
When Violet and the Queen got onto the bus they held out their sixty pences to the driver, but he said, “It’s a flat fare of fifteen pee now, regardless of journey.”
“Since when?” said Violet, incredulously.
“Since Mr Barker announced it an hour ago,” said the driver.
“Good for Mr Barker,” said the Queen, as she put the unexpected gift of forty-five pence back in her purse.
The driver said, “So it’s two fifteen pees, is it?”
“Yes,” said Violet, throwing thirty pence into the little black scoop next to the ticket machine. “For the Queen and I.”
∨ The Queen and I ∧
28
STEPPING OUT
On Monday evening the Queen sat downstairs in Anne’s living room, talking to Spiggy about scrap metal. Anne was upstairs getting ready to go out to the Working Men’s Club and her mother had come round to babysit. Spiggy was dressed in his best, a new white shirt, a tie with a horses’ heads design and black crimplene trousers, held up with a wide leather belt with a lion’s head buckle. His cowboy boots had been reheeled and resoled. Earlier he had presented Anne with a single red plastic rose in a cone-shaped cellophane wrapper. The rose stood now, veering to the right, in a Lalique glass vase on Anne’s side table.
Spiggy had taken enormous trouble with his toilet. He had cleaned out the dirt under his fingernails with his penknife. He’d bought a new battery for his razor. He had gone to his mother’s for a bath and had washed and conditioned his long, shoulder-length hair. He had gone into a chemist’s and bought a bottle of aftershave, ‘Young Turk’, and had splashed it around his armpits and groin. He had selected his jewellery carefully, he didn’t want to look too flashy. He settled on wearing one thick gold chain around his neck, his chrome identity bracelet on his left wrist and just the three rings. The chunky silver with the skull and crossbones, the ruby signet and the gold sovereign.
Anne had dressed carefully in a figure-concealing A-line dress and flat shoes. She didn’t want to encourage Spiggy into thinking that their friendship was to become a sexual affair. Spiggy wasn’t her type; she preferred dark, slim, delicate-looking men. Spiggy’s rampant masculinity scared her a little. Anne needed to feel that she was in control.
The Queen saw them to the door and watched as they got into the van. She thought, if Philip knew about his only daughter’s assignation, it would kill him. She switched on the television and watched the news. According to the BBC, the country was about to undergo an exciting rejuvenation. All manner of things were to be changed. There would be cheaper gas and electricity and cleaner rivers. Trident was to be cancelled. There would be a maximum of twenty children to a classroom. There would be more money for schoolbooks, more doctors trained. New engineering colleges could open. Social security would be doubled. Late or missing giros were apparently to be a thing of the past.
The Queen watched as film footage was shown of out-of-work building workers as they besieged recruitment centres for what the BBC’s industrial correspondent said was to be ‘the largest public housing construction and renovation programme attempted in the country’.
Damp, cold houses were to be mere memories. The BBC’s medical correspondent confirmed that the economies due to the reduction of damp-related illnesses (bronchitis, pneumonia, some types of asthma) would save a fortune for the National Health Service. Then the outside broadcast unit took over and Jack Barker was seen on the steps of Number Ten Downing Street, waving the document that foresaw all these miraculous changes. The close-up showed the tide to be ‘The People’s Britain!’ Multi-ethnic faces, smiling ecstatically, surrounded the royal blue lettering of the title on the pamphlet.
Another camera angle showed the gates at the bottom of Downing Street. Shot from below, the gates appeared to dwarf the pressing crowds standing behind. Jack stepped up to a microphone which was placed in front of Number Ten.
“This Government keeps its promises. We promised to build half a million new houses this year and we have already given jobs to a hundred thousand construction workers! Off the dole for the first time in years!”
The crowd yelled and whistled and stamped its feet.
“We promised to cut the price of public transport and we did.”
Once again the crowd went mad. Many of them had travelled in by train, tube and bus, leaving their cars at home.
Jack went on: “We promised to abolish the monarchy and we did. Buckingham Palace has been swept clean of parasites!”
A cut-away shot showed the crowd behind the barrier cheering louder than ever. Hats were literally thrown into the air.
The Queen shifted uneasily in her chair, discomfited by the enthusiasm shown by her former subjects for this particular achievement.
When the cheers had died away, Jack continued with fervour: “We promised you more open government and we will give you more open government. So let us now, together, remove the barrier that separates the Government from its people. Down with the barriers!”
And Jack left the microphone and in the growing darkness strode along Downing Street towards the crowd. ‘Jerusalem’ blared out from preset speakers and men and women emerged from a parked van wearing fire-proof overalls and welding hoods. The crowd drew back as the men and women lit their oxyacetylene torches and proceeded to burn through the metal bars of the gates. Jack was handed a hood and welding equipment and began to burn through his own section. The outside broadcast continued even though darkness had fallen and the blue flame of the torches provided the only illumination in
Downing Street.
The Queen watched the extended news programme with growing excitement. She also admired Jack’s sense of drama and his obvious flair for public relations. If only she had been able to call on the skills of somebody like Jack in the Buckingham Palace Press Office!
When the gates were brought down in a dramatic synchronised gesture, the crowd trampled them underfoot and surged into Downing Street, sweeping Jack along with them, and surrounded the front door of Number Ten. Fireworks exploded overhead and the faces that turned toward the sky carried expressions of happiness and hope.
Like the citizens in the crowd and those watching at home, the Queen fervently hoped that Jack’s expensive-sounding plans for Britain would come to fruition. There was a damp patch on her bedroom wall that was growing daily; her giro was never on time; and was it right that there should be thirty-nine pupils in William’s class and never enough books to go round?
The studio discussion that followed the news centred on the Thatcher years. The Queen found it too depressing to watch, so she turned over and watched John Wayne defending the weak against the powerful in the American Midwest. She wondered if she should call at the Christmases next door, where Zara and Peter were playing on the latest Sega game, Desert Storm, but she decided to leave them. She liked to watch cowboy films alone, without interruption.
When Peter and Zara returned they found their grandmother asleep in her chair. They switched off the television, quietly closed the living room door and put themselves to bed.
∨ The Queen and I ∧
29
APPLE PIE
Chief Inspector Holyland was on duty when the American television crew turned up at the barrier at Hell Close. The crew consisted of a cameraperson called Randy Fox, a cropped-haired individual of indeterminate sex wearing blue jeans, Nike running shoes, white tee-shirt and black leather jacket. Randy wore no make-up, but breasts were discernible. The presenter was an excitable young woman in a pink suit called Mary Jane Wokulski. Her golden hair blew in the wind like a pennant. The sound man, Bruno O’Flynn, held his microphone on high over the Chief Inspector’s head. He hated England and couldn’t understand why anybody stayed. For Chrissake, look at the place and the people. They all looked terminally ill. The director stepped forward. It was company policy that, when working in England, he should wear a suit, shirt and tie. It would open doors, he was told.