Charles said, ‘You’re quibbling over syntax because you’re trying to deflect me from the beastly fact that you kept Graham’s existence a secret for forty-one years. Forty-one years of deceit!’
Leo crept up to Camilla and laid his big head across her knees. Camilla automatically started to check Leo’s thick coat for fleas.
‘Carry on with the letter,’ she said. ‘I promise not to interrupt.’
But Charles was still angry. ‘I love you desperately,’ he said, ‘but I will not take lessons in the use of the English language from somebody who managed to pass only one “O” level.’
‘It’s more than your first wife got,’ she shouted. ‘The most she managed at school was a prize for Best Kept Guinea Pig.’
Vince Threadgold shouted through the wall, ‘Guinea pigs are filthy little bleeders, it takes a lot to keep ’em clean.’
Charles and Camilla continued the row with lowered voices. ‘I was at Cambridge,’ said Charles. ‘I got a degree.’
Camilla blew her nose on a piece of kitchen towel and said, ‘You’re writing to our son. I ought to have an input.’
‘What do you want to say?’ asked Charles with his pen poised over a new piece of writing paper.
‘Dear Graham,’ Camilla dictated. ‘We were terribly sorry to hear about the loss of your adoptive parents. It would be lovely to see you at your convenience.’
‘At your convenience,’ scoffed Charles. ‘You make him sound like a bloody lavatory attendant.’
‘He could be, for all we know about him,’ said Camilla, who was still smarting from the ‘O’ level jibe earlier. She thought, if I’d put my mind to it I could easily have gone to university. But hanging out with a bunch of boffo students was not her style. As far as she knew, neither Oxford nor Cambridge hunted or had stabling facilities.
‘Oh, just write to him and tell him to apply for a visiting order,’ said Camilla. ‘I’m going to bed. Come, Tosca; come, Freddie.’
She went out of the room without kissing Charles, but he caught up with her and the dogs on the stairs and said, ‘We mustn’t quarrel, darling. We mustn’t let Graham come between us.’ Charles followed Camilla into the bedroom and they began to walk down the well-worn path of forgiveness and reconciliation.
When their strenuous lovemaking was over and Camilla and Charles were lying in a post-coital daze, the dogs crept out from under the bed.
Freddie growled, ‘I thought he was never going to stop.’
Tosca yelped, ‘It’s so embarrassing.’
Freddie growled, ‘Er… talking about sex, er… Zsa-Zsa is coming on heat soon. Would you mind if I…’
‘No,’ snapped Tosca. ‘Mount the bitch, see if I care.’
Freddie said, ‘I’m not a one-bitch dog, Tosca. At least I’m being honest.’
Tosca turned her back on him and scratched at the bedroom door. Camilla disentangled herself from Charles and got out of bed to open the door. Tosca ran down the stairs and went to lie alongside Leo under the kitchen table. ‘I’ve left him,’ she whimpered.
Leo licked her face. ‘Are you sure, babe? We’re all a bit jumpy with this Graham doodah.’
Tosca said, ‘No, I’m sure, Leo. Freddie’s rubbing his philandering nose in my face a little too often now.’
Leo pressed his nose against hers, and panted, ‘Don’t you mind that I’m a mongrel?’
Tosca thought, Ugh! He’s got dreadful dog breath; we’ll have to do something about that. Their relationship was less than a minute old and she was already trying to change him.
In the morning Camilla was surprised to find Tosca and Leo entwined on the kitchen floor. Stepping over them, she said, ‘How long have you two been such good pals?’
Leo barked, ‘We’re not pals, we’re lovers.’
When Freddie came downstairs for breakfast, he saw the two dogs together and went for Leo’s throat, snarling, ‘She’s my bitch, you flea-bitten mongrel!’
When Charles came down to find the cause of the uproar, he took Leo’s side in the argument and called Camilla’s beloved Freddie, ‘A beastly little dog.’
Camilla had shouted, ‘Poor Freddie has been given the cold shoulder. He’s terribly upset.’
King, the Threadgolds’ Alsatian, barked through the wall, ‘Good luck to you, Leo. Give her one for me.’
21
Before leaving the Control Centre, Dwayne tampered with the surveillance cameras trained on Charles and Camilla’s house. He wanted to be able to talk to Charles about The Heart of the Hunter, without having his colleagues sniggering and calling him a fucking boff.
As he walked through the estate, he viewed the inhabitants with a Kalahari Bushman’s eye. Some of them were savage, capable of pouncing on a man and pulling him down to the desert floor, others were merely pariah dogs that slunk away as they saw him approaching. Once again, he found himself outside Paris Butter-worth’s house. He could see her through the living-room window, watching Balamory with Fifty-cents.
She was surprised to see him at the door. She said, ‘Has owt ’appened to me mam?’
Dwayne said, more gruffly than he intended, ‘I dunno. I’ve come to check your tag.’
‘It’s still on. What more do you want to know?’ she asked.
He wanted to kiss her sulky mouth and unfasten her piled-up black hair. His forearms were thicker than her thighs, he noticed.
‘I need to check it’s not been tampered with,’ he said.
She said, ‘Come in, but you’ll ’ave to take your shoes off. I’ve got a pale carpet.’
She was wearing disconcertingly realistic-looking cat’s head slippers. The glass eyes sparkled and the whiskers vibrated as she padded across an expanse of pale carpet in the hallway and living room. He left his boots on the doorstep and followed her in.
Fifty-cents was sitting strapped in his baby buggy, watching the television with a glazed expression as PC Plum cycled up a hill. The room was clean and uncomfortably tidy; Fifty-cents’ toys were stored in their original boxes, on a shelf in one of the alcoves. Paris and Dwayne sat on the sofa and faced each other.
Paris said, ‘You’re not supposed to be alone with me, not in Slapper Alley.’
‘I’m not alone,’ said Dwayne. ‘He’s here, aren’t you, Fifty-cents?’
Fifty-cents didn’t respond to his name; he kept his gaze on the television screen.
‘He likes his telly,’ said Dwayne.
‘He does,’ said Paris, adding proudly, ‘he knows all the adverts.’
‘He’s the same colour as me,’ said Dwayne. ‘Is his dad black?’
‘Yes, his dad is Carlton Williams. Do you know him?’
‘No,’ said Dwayne.
‘No!’ exclaimed Paris. ‘You must know him.’
‘Just ’cause I’m black,’ said Dwayne, ‘it don’t mean I know everybody in the town who’s black.’
They looked at each other, and then looked quickly away. Dwayne thought he now knew what a heartshaped face was like. She could have modelled for Valentine’s Day cards. He said, ‘That poem you wrote.’
Paris looked away. ‘Yeah.’
‘Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it, didn’t she?’
‘’Ow did you know that?’ she asked in amazement.
‘I’m a policeman,’ said Dwayne. ‘I know everything. Can I have a look at your tag, then?’
She pulled off a cat’s head and extended her thin white leg. Dwayne took the weight of her bare foot, holding it by the heel. He stared at the blue veins, which crossed the foot like a faded road map. She had painted her toenails a pearlized pink. He gently turned the metal tag on her ankle.
She said, ‘I have wrote some poems. But they’re crap.’
‘I bet they’re not,’ he said.
‘They are,’ she said. ‘Trouble is, I don’t get no time. I’ve got ’im to look after, an’ he’s a mardy-arse when he wants to be. It was all right for Elizabeth Barrett Browning, all she had to do was lie around on a settee all day, being
ill an’ playing with ’er dog.’
Dwayne said, ‘You did her for a project at school, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ said Paris. ‘I did her dog, Flush.’
Dwayne took out the battered Penguin edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four and put it on the coffee table, saying, ‘Will you read this, please, Julia?’
‘Who’s Julia?’ asked Paris.
Camilla said, ‘What do policemen eat for lunch, Charles?’
Charles said, in one of his Goon-like voices, ‘I don’t know, what do policemen eat for lunch?’
Camilla said, ‘No, I’m not telling you a joke, Charles. I’m asking you what policemen eat for lunch, because I have invited a policeman to lunch.’
Charles thought hard before saying, ‘Don’t they eat bangers and mashy-type stuff? Sardines, perhaps.’
Camilla loved entertaining, but in the past there had always been other people to do the hard work: the invitations, the shopping, the cooking, the table-setting and the washing-up.
Charles said, as she hoped he would, ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll see that your policeman is fed and watered.’
He opened a tin of sardines and arranged them in a criss-cross pattern on a small white plate, then went into the garden and picked a trug full of distorted root and salad vegetables that he had grown according to organic principles. A blackbird flew on to the razor wire surmounting the metal boundary fence and serenaded Charles as he knocked clods of mud off a bunch of twisted carrots. Camilla sat on an upturned flowerpot, smoking her second cigarette of the day.
‘Oh, darling,’ said Charles, looking around the garden. ‘Isn’t it heavenly here, doesn’t your heart swell with happiness to hear the song of a blackbird?’
Camilla said, guardedly, looking at the razor wire, the CCTV cameras and the Threadgolds’ broken bedroom window, smashed during a midnight altercation, ‘It’s sort of heavenly, but sometimes I long for the proper countryside.’
Charles pulled up a leek that was covered in tiny scurrying creatures and said, ‘But we have built our own paradise here, haven’t we?’
Camilla thought about the outside world and imagined herself walking through woodland and alongside a river. She envisaged hills in the distance and shafts of burnished sunlight glowing through a vast cloud-dotted sky. She began to cry. She tried desperately to stop, knowing that tears and a contorted face did not flatter a woman of late middle age.
Charles threw the leek into the trug and knelt beside her. ‘Please, darling,’ he said. ‘Please, don’t cry. I simply cannot bear it.’
‘Sorry, darling, but I can’t bear this place either.’
The doorbell rang. Camilla blew her nose, and wiped her eyes with the hem of her flowered skirt. ‘That’s our policeman,’ she said. ‘Do I look hag-like?’
‘No,’ said Charles. ‘To me, you will always be beautiful.’
His qualifying phrase, ‘To me,’ was not lost on Camilla.
Camilla and Dwayne were sitting at the kitchen table. Charles was washing up at the sink. Camilla stifled a yawn. Charles and Dwayne had been talking almost non-stop about a wretched book she’d never read, written by a man she’d never met.
Charles said to Dwayne, ‘When Laurens and I were in the Kalahari, we washed our cooking pots, plates and utensils in sand.’
‘Sand!’ said Dwayne politely.
‘Yes,’ said Charles. ‘It’s nature’s Fairy Liquid.’
Camilla said, ‘And you’d never run out. Of sand, I mean. There’s a huge amount of sand in the desert.’
Even Dwayne was beginning to weary of the Kalahari. He felt as though he’d been staggering across it in the midday sun without a hat. Charles’s intensity had drained him. He had quite enjoyed his lunch of sardines and strange-looking vegetables, but he was ready to leave now. He stood up and scraped his chair back, and said, ‘Well, thank you very much for everything, but duty calls.’
‘Yes, you must go,’ said Prince Charles. ‘I know about duty.’
Camilla whispered, ‘I wonder if you’d mind posting this?’ She handed him a letter with a Ruislip address.
He thought, I can hardly say no, can I? and put it in his pocket.
Camilla walked with him to the garden gate and said, ‘Is it terribly difficult to remove one’s tag? I mean, do people do it?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Dwayne. ‘There’s people been on holiday before now.’
‘Really,’ said Camilla. ‘Do they use a special sort of tool?’
Dwayne said, ‘Mrs Windsor, you’re better off here in the Fez.’ He hesitated. How could he break it to her that she was not that popular in the outside world? Eventually he said, ‘Everybody knows your face, you’d soon be spotted.’
When Dwayne got back to the Lilliputian studio flat he rented in the town, he steamed open the letter and read the contents.
16 Hellebore Close
Flowers Exclusion Zone
East Midlands Region
EZ 951
Dear Graham,
One wonders how to reply to one's long-lost son, a son whose existence one was unaware of until yesterday, when we received your letter. Your mother confirmed that she did in fact give birth to you in Zurich, on 21st July 1965.
We both send our condolences on your recent double bereavement. To lose one parent is a misfortune; to lose two is a catastrophe.
Naturally, we are both absolutely longing to see you. However, we are confined at present to the Exclusion Zone and, sadly, we are not allowed visitors from outside, though I understand that visiting orders can be issued to certain government officials, so a meeting may not be possible in the immediate future. But we must not lose contact.
It was quite extraordinary to discover that your mother and I have a forty-one-year-old son together. I wonder, do you resemble either of us physically in any way? When you next write, would you please enclose a photograph?
As I write, I feel the hand of history on my shoulder.
Adieu, my son.
I send you the warmest of wishes.
Your father,
Charles
PS. Your mother and I would be terribly grateful if you would keep our relationship confidential, for the moment.
Please reply
c/o PC Dwayne Lockhart
Flat 31, The Old Abattoir
Leicester
East Midlands Region
Dwayne’s first thought was, What a cheek! They might have asked me first. He was ashamed of his second thought, which was, I’m holding an historical document here. I wonder how much it would fetch on eBay?
He took the letter with him when he went to the library and photocopied it on the ancient machine that seemed to be used only by mad people copying their epic poems. On his way home, he posted the original letter in a postbox, pausing for a few seconds before he allowed the letter to drop from his hand.
Freddie was in the kitchen having his overlong claws clipped. It was taking the combined strength of Charles and Camilla to hold the little dog down. He had been barking, ‘Help! Help!’ throughout the procedure. Freddie remembered the time Camilla had cut into his pad and made him bleed.
Charles said, ‘Oh, Freddie, do cooperate. Your claws are terribly long, you must be awfully uncomfortable.’
Camilla said, ‘If you were human, Freddie, you’d be Edward Scissorhands.’
Upstairs on the small landing, taking advantage of Freddie’s absence, were Leo and Tosca. Leo was telling Tosca about the miserable time he’d had as a puppy before being saved by Spiggy and then adopted by Prince Charles.
‘There were nine of us in the litter an’ I was the runt. I could hardly get near my mum’s teats. I could’ve starved to death.’
‘Who were your parents?’ yapped Tosca, who could trace her pedigree back nineteen generations.
‘I dunno who my dad was,’ said Leo mournfully. ‘My mum was a total dog when she came on heat, she had half the bleedin’ estate after ’er! She’d take on anything with four legs an’ a tail.’
>
‘Is she still alive?’ barked Tosca.
‘No, she went under a Grice delivery lorry,’ whimpered Leo. ‘She’s buried in Lee Butterworth’s back garden. She was a pig of a mother. Before she’d finished whelping, she was out every night. I used to cry my bleedin’ eyes out for ’er.’
‘What happened to your brothers and sisters?’ asked Tosca.
Leo whimpered, ‘All I know is that Lee Butterworth put ’em all in a sack an’ told ’is kids that the pups was goin’ to live on a farm in Wales. As if.’
‘Perhaps they did,’ said Tosca.
Leo barked, ‘No. Butterworth was back in ’alf an hour. I don’t know where Wales is, but it ain’t around the corner, is it?’
Tosca barked, ‘Why weren’t you put in the sack?’
Leo whimpered, ‘I were upstairs being dressed up in dolls’ clothes by one of Maddo’s kids. My life was ’ell in that ’ouse.’
Tosca was growing weary of Leo’s self-pity. ‘You were obviously saved for a purpose, Leo. The hand of destiny intervened to bring you to this house, to live with the future King of England.’
Leo looked at Tosca with new eyes. She wasn’t bad looking and she had a lovely glossy coat. He could overlook her short legs; what did it matter that she was half his size? They were equals when they were lying down. Leo edged near to Tosca and sniffed her hind quarters. Instead of snapping at him, like she usually did, Tosca allowed him to take his time.
When Freddie came bounding up the stairs to find Tosca, he was less than pleased to find Leo with his nose up her bum.
Freddie snarled, ‘Get away from my bitch, you low-life mongrel.’ He launched himself at Leo, expecting the bigger dog to slink away and hide as usual.
But Leo snarled, ‘Back off, short-arse,’ and bared his large yellow teeth.
Freddie yelped, ‘Who do you think you are?’
‘I’m somethink special,’ growled Leo. ‘I’m the future King of England’s best friend.’
When it was Tosca’s turn for a pedicure she submitted to the procedure with uncharacteristic good grace.
Camilla said, ‘Tosca’s not herself at all, Charles. Do you think she’s unwell?’