Spare

Days later we met for dinner and games. Poker night at Marko’s flat, Bramham Gardens. After an hour or so I stepped outside, disguised in one of Marko’s cowboy hats, to speak with Billy the Rock. As I exited the building I lit a cigarette and looked right. There, behind a parked car…two sets of feet.

And two bobbing heads.

Whoever it was didn’t recognize me in Marko’s hat. So I was able to stroll casually down to Billy and lean into his police car and whisper: Bogey at three o’clock.

What? No!

Billy, how could they have known?

Search me.

No one knows I’m here. Are they tracking me? Are they getting into my phone? Or Flack’s?

Billy bolted from the car, ran around the corner, surprised the two paps. He screamed at them. But they screamed right back. Entitled. Emboldened.

They didn’t get their photo that night—small victory. But very soon after they papped me and Flack, and those photos set off a frenzy. Within hours a mob was camped outside Flack’s parents’ house, and all her friends’ houses, and her grandmother’s house. She was described in one paper as my “bit of rough,” because she’d once worked in a factory or something.

Jesus, I thought, are we really such a country of insufferable snobs?

I continued to see Flack on and off, but we didn’t feel free anymore. We kept on, I think, because we genuinely enjoyed each other’s company, and because we didn’t want to admit defeat at the hands of these arseholes. But the relationship was tainted, irredeemably, and in time we agreed that it just wasn’t worth the grief and harassment.

Especially for her family.

Goodbye, we said. Goodbye and good luck.

25.

I went with JLP to Kensington Palace for a cocktail with General Dannatt.

As we knocked at the door to the general’s apartment I felt jumpier than I had when leaving for war.

The general and his wife, Pippa, greeted us warmly, congratulated me on my service.

I smiled, but then frowned. Yes, they said. They were sorry about my deployment being cut short.

The press—they ruin everything, don’t they?

They do, they surely do.

The general poured me a gin and tonic. We gathered in chairs, a sitting area, and I took a big gulp and felt the gin go down and blurted that I needed to get back. I needed to do a full and proper tour.

The general stared. Oh. I see. Well, if that’s the case…

He began thinking aloud, running through different options, analyzing all the politics and ramifications of each.

What about…becoming a helicopter pilot?

Wow. I leaned back. Hadn’t ever considered that. Maybe because Willy and my father—and Grandpa and Uncle Andrew—were pilots. I was always keen on following my own line, doing my own thing, but General Dannatt said this would be the best way. The only way. I’d be safer, so to speak, above the fray, among the clouds. So would everyone else serving with me. Even if the press were to find out I’d gone back to Afghanistan, even if they did something stupid again—even when they did something stupid again—so what? The Taliban might know where I was, but good luck to them tracking me in the air.

How long until I can qualify as a pilot, General?

About two years.

I shook my head. Too long, sir.

He shrugged. It takes what it takes. And for good reason.

There was a great deal of schoolwork involved, he explained.

Bloody hell. At every turn, life was determined to drag me back into a classroom.

I thanked him, told him I’d think about it.

26.

But I spent that summer of 2008 not thinking about it.

I didn’t think much about anything, besides the three wounded soldiers who’d been with me on the plane home. I wanted other people to think about them too, and talk about them. Not enough people were thinking and talking about British soldiers coming back from the battlefield.

With every free minute I was trying to work out a way I could change that.

In the meantime, the Palace was keeping me busy. I was sent to America, my first official working trip there. (I’d been to Colorado once, white-water rafting, and touring Disney World with Mummy.) JLP was involved in drafting the itinerary, and he knew exactly the kinds of things I wanted to do. I wanted to visit wounded soldiers, and I wanted to lay a wreath at the site of the World Trade Center. And I wanted to meet the families of those who’d died on September 11, 2001. He made it all happen.