Spare

He barely reacted. He just frowned like an ultra-patient parent.

I slapped him again. I loved him, but I was determined to hurt him.

He’d seen me like this before. Once, maybe twice. I heard him say to another bodyguard: He’s a handful tonight.

Oh, you want to see a handful? Here you go, here’s a handful.

Somehow Billy and the other bodyguard got me up to my room, poured me onto my bed. But after they left I popped right up again.

I looked around the room. The sun was just coming up. I stepped outside, into the hall. There was a bodyguard on a chair beside the door, but he was sound asleep. I tiptoed past, got into the lift, left the hotel.

Of all the rules in my life, this was considered the most inviolate. Never leave your bodyguards. Never wander off by yourself, anywhere, but especially not in a foreign city.

I walked along the Seine. I squinted at the Champs-Élysées in the distance. I stood next to some big Ferris wheel. I went past little book stalls, past people drinking coffee, eating croissants. I was smoking, keeping my gaze unfocused. I have a dim recollection of a few people recognizing me, and staring, but thankfully this was before the age of smartphones. No one stopped me to take a photo.

Later, after I’d had a sleep, I rang Willy, told him about my night.

None of it came as news to him. Turned out, he’d driven the tunnel too.

He was coming to Paris for the rugby final. We decided to do it together.

Afterwards, we talked about the crash, for the first time ever. We talked about the recent inquest. A joke, we both agreed. The final written report was an insult. Fanciful, riddled with basic factual errors and gaping logical holes. It raised more questions than it answered.

After all these years, we said, and all that money—how?

Above all, the summary conclusion, that Mummy’s driver was drunk and thereby the sole cause of the crash, was convenient and absurd. Even if the man had been drinking, even if he was shit-faced, he wouldn’t have had any trouble navigating that short tunnel.

Unless paps had chased and blinded him.

Why were those paps not more roundly blamed?

Why were they not in jail?

Who sent them? And why were they not in jail?

Why indeed—unless corruption and cover-ups were the order of the day?

We were united on all these points, and also on next steps. We’d issue a statement, jointly call for the inquiry to be reopened. Maybe hold a press conference.

We were talked out of it by the powers that be.

9.

One month later I went to RAF Brize Norton and boarded a C-17. There were dozens of other soldiers on the plane, but I was the only stowaway. With help from Colonel Ed and JLP, I boarded in secret, then crept into an alcove behind the cockpit.

The alcove had bunkbeds for the crew on overnight flights. As the big engines fired, as the plane roared down the runway, I lay down on a bottom bunk, my small rucksack as a pillow. Somewhere below, in the cargo hold, my Bergen was neatly packed with three pairs of camo trousers, three clean T-shirts, one pair of goggles, one air bed, one small notebook, one tube of sun cream. It felt like more than enough. I could honestly say that nothing I needed or wanted in life had been left behind, other than a few pieces of Mummy’s jewelry, and the lock of her hair in the little blue box, and the silver-framed photo of her that used to sit on my desk at Eton, all of which I’d stashed in a safe place. And, of course, my weapons. My 9-mm and SA80A had been surrendered to a stern-faced clerk, who’d locked them in a steel box that also went into the hold. I felt their absence most acutely, since, for the first time in my life, other than that wobbly morning stroll in Paris, I was about to venture forth into the wide world without armed bodyguards.

The flight was eternal. Seven hours? Nine? I can’t say. It felt like a week. I tried to sleep, but my head was too full. I spent most of the time staring. At the upper bunk. At my feet. I listened to the engines, listened to the other soldiers on board. I replayed my life. I thought about Pa and Willy. And Chels.

The papers reported that we’d broken up. (One headline: Hooray Harry’s Dumped.) The distance, the different life goals were too much. It was hard enough maintaining a relationship in the same country, but with me going off to war, it just didn’t seem feasible. Of course, none of this was true. We’d not broken up. She’d given me a touching, tender farewell, and promised to wait for me.

She knew, therefore, to disregard all the other stories in the papers, about how I’d reacted to the breakup. Reportedly, I’d gone on a pub crawl and guzzled a few dozen vodkas before staggering into a waiting car. One paper actually asked the mother of a soldier recently killed in action how she felt about my being publicly intoxicated.

(She was against it.)

If I die in Afghanistan, I thought, at least I’ll never have to see another fake headline, read another shameful lie about myself.