Spare

In honor of Elvis, every member of the bridal party wore blue suede shoes. At the reception there was much kicking up of those shoes, young British men and women dancing drunkenly and singing gleefully without pitch or rhythm. It was riotous, ridiculous, and Guy looked happier than I’d ever seen him.

He’d always been cast as our sidekick, but not now. He and his bride were the stars of this show, the center of attention, and my old mate was rightly savoring it. It made me so happy to see him so happy, though now and then, as couples paired off, as lovers drifted into corners or swayed to songs by Beyoncé and Adele, I’d wander over to the bar and think: When’s it going to be my turn? The one person who might want it most, to be married, to have a family, and it’s never going to happen. More than a little petulantly, I thought: It’s just not fair of the universe.

73.

But the universe was just getting warmed up. Soon after I got back to Britain, the main villain in the phone-hacking scandal, Rehabber Kooks, was acquitted at trial.

June 2014.

The evidence had been strong, everybody said.

Not strong enough, the jury said. They believed what Rehabber Kooks testified on the witness stand, even though she’d strained credulity. No, she’d abused credulity. She’d treated credulity as she’d once treated a redheaded teenage royal.

Likewise her husband. He’d been caught on video throwing black bin liners full of computers and thumb drives and other personal belongings, including his porn collection, into a garage dustbin, just hours before the police searched their place. But he swore it was all a silly coincidence, sooo…no evidence-tampering here, sayeth the justice system. Carry on. As you were. I never believed what I read, but now I truly couldn’t believe what I was reading. They were letting this woman walk? And there was no furor from the general public? Did people not realize that this was about more than privacy, more than public safety—more than the Royal Family? Indeed, the phone-hacking case first broke wide open because of poor Milly Dowler, a teenager who’d been abducted and murdered. Rehabber Kooks’s minions broke into Milly’s phone after she’d been declared missing—they’d violated her parents at the moment of their worst pain and given them false hope that their little girl might be alive, because her messages were listened to. Little did the parents know that it was Team Rehabber listening. If these journalists were villainous enough to go after the Dowlers in their darkest hour, and get away with it, was anyone safe?

Did people not care?

They didn’t. They did not care.

My faith in the whole system took a serious hit when that woman got off scot-free. I needed a reset, a faith refresher. So I went where I always went.

The Okavango.

To spend a few restorative days with Teej and Mike.

It helped.

But when I returned to Britain, I barricaded myself into Nott Cott.

74.

I didn’t go out much at all. Maybe a dinner party now and then. Maybe the odd house party.

Sometimes I’d duck in and out of a club.

But it wasn’t worth it. When I went out, it was always the same scene. Paps here, paps there, paps everywhere. Groundhog Day.

The dubious pleasure of a night out was never worth the pain.

But then I’d think: How am I going to meet someone if I don’t go out?

So I’d try it again.

And: Groundhog Day.

One night, leaving a club, I saw two men come racing around a corner. They were headed straight for me and one had a hand on his hip.

Someone yelled: Gun!

I thought: Well, everyone, we had a good run.

Billy the Rock leaped forward, hand on his gun, and nearly shot the two men.

But it was just Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. They didn’t have guns, and I don’t know what one of them was reaching for on his hip. But Billy held him and screamed into his face: How many times do we have to tell you? You’re going to get someone fucking killed.

They didn’t care. They did not care.

75.

The Tower of London. With Willy and Kate. August 2014.

The reason for our visit was an art installation. Across the dry moat were spread tens of thousands of bright red ceramic poppies. Ultimately, the plan was for 888,246 of these poppies to be spread there, one for each Commonwealth soldier who’d died in the Great War. The hundredth anniversary of the war’s start was being marked all over Europe.

Apart from its extraordinary beauty, the art installation was a different way of visualizing war’s carnage—indeed, of visualizing death itself. I felt stricken. All those lives. All those families.

It didn’t help that this visit to the Tower was also three weeks before the anniversary of Mummy’s death, or that I always connected her to the Great War, because her birthday, July 1, the start of the Battle of the Somme, was the war’s bloodiest day, the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army.