Spare

There was no real respite for Meg once she was inside her house. Like every previous night, paps and so-called journalists knocked at her door, rang the bell, constantly. Her dogs were losing their minds. They couldn’t understand what was happening, why she wasn’t answering the door, why the house was under assault. As they howled and paced in circles she cowered in the corner of her kitchen, on the floor. After midnight, when things quietened down, she dared to peep through the blinds and saw men sleeping in cars outside, engines running.

Neighbors told Meg they’d been harassed too. Men had gone up and down the street, asking questions, offering sums of money for any tidbit about Meg—or else a nice juicy lie. One neighbor reported being offered a fortune to mount, on their roof, live streaming cameras aimed at Meg’s windows. Another neighbor actually accepted the offer, hitched a camera to his roof and pointed it straight at Meg’s backyard. Again she contacted the police, who again did nothing. Ontario laws don’t prohibit that, she was told. If the neighbor wasn’t physically trespassing, he could hook the Hubble telescope up to his house and point it into her backyard, no problem.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, her mother was being chased every day, to and from her house, to and from the launderette, to and from work. She was also being libeled. One story called her “trailer trash.” Another called her a “stoner.” In fact, she worked in palliative care. She traveled all over Los Angeles to help people at the end of their lives.

Paps scaled the walls and fences of many patients she visited. In other words, every day there was yet another person, like Mummy, whose last sound on earth…would be a click.

23.

Reunited. A quiet night at Nott Cott, preparing dinner together.

December 2016.

Meg and I had discovered that we shared the same favorite food: roast chicken.

I didn’t know how to cook it, so that night she was teaching me.

I remember the warmth of the kitchen, the wonderful smells. Lemon wedges on the cutting board, garlic and rosemary, gravy bubbling in a saucepan.

I remember rubbing salt on the skin of the bird, then opening a bottle of wine.

Meg put on music. She was expanding my horizons, teaching me about folk music and soul, James Taylor and Nina Simone.

It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day.

Maybe the wine went to my head. Maybe the weeks of battling the press had worn me down. For some reason, when the conversation took an unexpected turn, I became touchy.

Then angry. Disproportionately, sloppily angry.

Meg said something I took the wrong way. It was partly a cultural difference, partly a language barrier, but I was also just over-sensitive that night. I thought: Why’s she having a go at me?

I snapped at her, spoke to her harshly—cruelly. As the words left my mouth, I could feel everything in the room come to a stop. The gravy stopped bubbling, the molecules of air stopped orbiting. Even Nina Simone seemed to pause. Meg walked out of the room, disappearing for a full fifteen minutes.

I went and found her upstairs. She was sitting in the bedroom. She was calm, but said in a quiet, level tone that she would never stand for being spoken to like that.

I nodded.

She wanted to know where it came from.

I don’t know.

Where did you ever hear a man speak like that to a woman? Did you overhear adults speak that way when you were growing up?

I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes.

She wasn’t going to tolerate that kind of partner. Or co-parent. That kind of life. She wasn’t going to raise children in an atmosphere of anger or disrespect. She laid it all out, super-clear. We both knew my anger hadn’t been caused by anything to do with our conversation. It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere that needed to be excavated, and it was obvious that I could use some help with the job.

I’ve tried therapy, I told her. Willy told me to go. Never found the right person. Didn’t work.

No, she said softly. Try again.

24.

We left Kensington Palace in a dark car, a completely different and unmarked car, both of us hiding in the back. We went through the rear gate, around 6:30 p.m. My bodyguards said we weren’t being followed, so when we got stuck in traffic on Regent Street, we hopped out. We were going to the theater and didn’t want to draw attention by arriving after the show had started. We were so intent on not being late, on watching the clock, that we didn’t see “them” trailing us—in brazen violation of stalking laws.

They shot us close to the theater. From a moving vehicle, through a bus stop window.

The shooters, of course, were Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.

We didn’t love being papped, especially by those two. But we’d managed to elude them for five months. Good run, we said.