Spare

I asked my bodyguard to drive around the block a few hundred times.

Was it that night or another that Flea told me about her distant ancestor? Actually, it was probably neither. A mate told me later, I think. In any event, he’d led the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed advance on Russian guns in Crimea. Incompetent, possibly mad, he’d caused the deaths of a hundred men. A shameful chapter, the polar opposite of Rorke’s Drift, and now I was taking a page from his book, bullishly charging full steam ahead. Over that first cup of Earl Grey, I was asking myself: Could she be my person?

The connection was that strong.

But I was also that mad. And I could see she knew it, read it all over my non–poker face. I hoped she found it charming.

Apparently she did. The weeks that followed were idyllic. We saw each other often, laughed a lot, and no one knew.

Hope got the better of me.

Then the press found out and down came the curtain on our idyll.

Flea phoned me in tears. There were eight paps outside her flat. They’d chased her halfway across London.

She’d just seen herself described by one paper as “an underwear model.” Based on a photoshoot done years and years before! Her life boiled down to one photo, she said. It was so reductive, so degrading.

Yes, I said quietly. I know what that feels like.

They were digging, digging, ringing up everyone she’d ever known. They were already after her family. They were giving her the full Caroline Flack treatment, while still giving it to Caroline as well.

Flea just kept saying: I can’t do this.

She said she was under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Like some kind of criminal. I could hear sirens in the background.

She was upset, crying, and I felt like crying, but of course I didn’t.

She said one last time: I can’t do this anymore, Harry.

I had the phone on speaker. I was on the second floor of Clarence House, standing by the window, surrounded by beautiful furnishings. Lovely room. The lamps were low, the rug at my feet was a work of art. I pressed my face against the window’s cold polished glass and asked Flea to see me one last time, at least talk it over.

Soldiers went marching past the house. Changing of the guard.

No.

She was firm.

Weeks later I got a call from one of the friends who’d set us up at the bar. Didja hear? Flea’s got back with the old boyfriend!

Has she?

Wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

Right.

The friend told me he’d heard that it was Flea’s mother who told her to end things, who warned her that the press would destroy her life. They’ll hound you to the gates of Hell, her mother said.

Yeah, I told the friend. Mums do know best.

45.

I stopped sleeping.

I simply stopped. I was so disappointed, so profoundly dejected, that I just stayed up night after night, pacing, thinking. Wishing I had a TV.

But I was living on a military base now, in a cell-like room.

Then, mornings, on zero sleep, I’d try to fly an Apache.

Recipe for disaster.

I tried herbal remedies. They helped, a bit, I was able to get an hour or two of sleep, but they left me feeling brain-dead most mornings.

Then the Army informed me I’d be hitting the road—a series of maneuvers and exercises.

Maybe just the thing, I thought. Snap me out of it.

Or it might be the last straw.

First they sent me to America. The southwest. I spent a week or so hovering over a bleak place called Gila Bend. Conditions were said to be similar to Afghanistan. I became more fluid with the Apache, more lethal with its missiles. More at home in the dust. I blew up a lot of cacti. I wish I could say it wasn’t fun.

Next I went to Cornwall. A desolate place called Bodmin Moor.

January 2012.

From blazing hot to bitter cold. The moors are always cold in January, but I arrived just as a fierce winter storm was blowing in.

I was billeted with twenty other soldiers. We spent the first few days trying to acclimatize. We rose at five a.m., got the blood flowing with a run and a vomit, then bundled into classrooms and learned about the latest methods that bad actors had devised for snatching people. Many of these methods would be put to use against us over the next few days, as we tried to navigate a long march across the frigid moor. The exercise was called Escape and Evasion, and it was one of the last hurdles for flight crews and pilots before deployment.

Trucks took us to an isolated spot, where we did some field lessons, learned some survival techniques. We caught a chicken, killed it, plucked it, ate it. Then it started to rain. We were instantly soaked. And exhausted. Our superiors looked amused.

They grabbed me, and two others, loaded us onto a truck, drove us to a place even more remote.

Out.

We squinted at the terrain, the skies. Really? Here?