Spare

After, she and I ran off to Botswana, met up with the gang. We started at Teej and Mike’s house. Big hugs and kisses at the door; they’d been worried sick about me. Then they fed me, and Mike kept handing me drinks, and I was in the place I loved most, under the sky I loved most, so happy that at one point I wondered if I might not have tears in my eyes.

A day or two later Chels and I drifted upriver on a rented houseboat. The Kubu Queen. We cooked simple meals, slept on the upper deck of the boat, under the stars. Gazing at Orion’s Belt, the Little Dipper, I’d try to decompress, but it was hard. The press got wind of our trip, and they were papping us constantly, every time the boat neared the shore.

After a week or so we went back to Maun, ate a farewell dinner with Teej and Mike. Everyone turned in early, but I sat up with Teej, told her a bit about the war. Just a bit. It was the first time I’d spoken of it since arriving home.

Willy and Pa had asked. But they hadn’t asked the way Teej asked.

Nor had Chelsy. Did she tiptoe around the subject because she still disliked my going? Or because she knew it would be hard for me to talk about it? I wasn’t sure, and I felt that she wasn’t sure, that neither of us was sure about anything.

Teej and I talked about that too.

She likes me, I said. Loves me, I guess. But she doesn’t like the baggage that comes with me, doesn’t like everything that comes with being royal, the press and so forth, and none of that is ever going away. So what hope is there?

Teej asked point-blank if I could see myself married to Chels.

I tried to explain. I cherished Chels’s carefree and authentic spirit. She never worried about what other people thought. She wore short skirts and high boots, danced with abandon, drank as much tequila as I did, and I cherished all those things about her…but I couldn’t help worrying how Granny might feel about them. Or the British public. And the last thing I wanted was for Chels to change to accommodate them.

I wanted so badly to be a husband, a father…but I just wasn’t sure. It takes a certain kind of person to withstand the scrutiny, Teej, and I don’t know if Chels can handle it. I don’t know that I want to ask her to handle it.

23.

The press reported breathlessly on our return to Britain, how we dashed to Chelsy’s off-campus flat in Leeds, where she lived with two girls, whom I trusted, and who, more important, trusted me, and how I snuck into their flat disguised in a hoodie and baseball cap, giving her flatmates a laugh, and how I loved pretending to be a university student, going for pizza and hanging out in pubs, even wondering if I’d made the right choice in skipping university—not one word of which was true.

I went to Chels’s Leeds flat twice.

I barely knew her flatmates.

And I never once regretted my decision to skip university.

But the press was getting worse. They were now just peddling fantasies, phantasms, while physically stalking and harassing me and everyone in my inner circle. Chels told me that paps had been following her to and from lectures—she asked me to do something about it.

I told her I’d try. I told her how sorry I was.

When she was back in Cape Town she phoned me and said people were tailing her everywhere and it was driving her crazy. She couldn’t imagine how they always knew where she was and where she’d be. She was freaking out. I talked it over with Marko, who advised me to ask Chels’s brother to check the underside of the car.

Sure enough: tracking device.

Marko and I were able to tell her brother exactly what to check for, and where, because it had happened to so many other people around me.

Chels said again that she just wasn’t sure if she was up for this. A lifetime of being stalked?

What could I say?

I’d miss her, so much. But I completely understood her desire for freedom.

If I had a choice, I wouldn’t want this life either.

24.

Flack, they called her.

She was funny. And sweet. And cool. I met her at a restaurant with some mates, months after Chels and I had gone our separate ways.

Spike, this is Flack.

Hi. What do you do, Flack?

She was on TV, she explained. She was a presenter.

Sorry, I said. I don’t watch much TV.

She wasn’t taken aback that I didn’t recognize her, which I liked. She didn’t have a big ego.

Even after she explained who she was and what she did, I still wasn’t certain. What’s your full name again?

Caroline Flack.