Spare (21 page)

She’s dead, I thought.
My God, she’s really gone for good.

I got the closure I was pretending to seek. I got it in spades. And now I’d never be able to get rid of it.

I’d thought driving the tunnel would bring an end, or brief cessation, to the pain, the decade of unrelenting pain. Instead it brought on the start of Pain, Part Deux.

It was close to one o’clock in the morning. The driver dropped me and Billy at a bar, where I drank and drank. Some mates were there, and I drank with them, and tried to pick fights with several. When the pub threw us out,
when Billy the Rock escorted me back to the hotel, I tried to pick a fight with him too. I growled at him, swung on him, slapped his head.

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.

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.

I thought a lot on that flight about dying. What would it mean? Did I care? I tried to picture my funeral. Would it be a state funeral? Private? I tried to imagine the headlines:
Bye,
Harry.

How would I be remembered by history? For the headlines? Or for who I actually was?

Would Willy walk behind my coffin? Would Grandpa and Pa?

Before I’d shipped out, JLP sat me down, told me I needed to update my will.

My will? Really?

If anything happened, he said, the Palace needed to know what I wanted to be done with my few belongings, and where I wished to be…buried. He asked so plainly, so calmly, as you’d ask somebody where they’d like to have lunch. But that was his gift. The truth was the truth, no sense leaning away from it.

I looked away. I couldn’t really think of a spot where I wanted to spend the hereafter. I couldn’t think of any spot that felt sacred, besides Althorp, maybe, and that was out of the question. So I said: Frogmore Gardens?

It was beautiful, and slightly removed from things. Peaceful.

JLP gave a nod. He’d see to it.

Amid these thoughts and recollections I managed to doze off for a few minutes, and when I opened my eyes we were swooping down to Kandahar Airfield.

Time to put on the body armor. Time to put on the Kevlar.

I waited for everyone else to disembark, then some Special Forces guys appeared in the alcove. They returned my weapons and handed me a vial of morphine, to keep on my person at all times. We were now in a place where pain, injuries, trauma were commonplace. They hurried me off the plane into a four-by-four with blacked windows and dusty seats. We drove to a different part of the base, then hurried into a Portakabin.

Empty. Not a soul.

Where is everybody? Bloody hell, was peace declared while I was in the air?

No, the whole base was out on a mission.

I looked around. Apparently they’d left in the middle of a meal. Tables were covered with half-empty pizza boxes. I tried to remember what I’d eaten on the flight. Nothing. I began shoving cold pizza into my mouth.

I took my in-theater test, one last barrier to entry, one last measure to prove that I knew how to do the job. Shortly after, I climbed into a Chinook and flew about fifty miles to a much smaller outpost. Forward Operating Base Dwyer. Long, unwieldy name for what was little more than a sandcastle made of sandbags.

I was met by a sand-covered soldier who said he’d been ordered to show me around.

Welcome to Dwyer.

Thanks.

I asked how the place got its name.

One of our lads.
K-I-A.
Vehicle hit a land mine
.

The quick tour revealed Dwyer to be even more spartan than it looked from the Chinook. No heat, few lights, not much water. There was plumbing, of a sort, but the pipes were usually clogged or frozen. There was also a building that purported to be a “shower block,” but I was advised: use at your peril.

Basically, my tour guide told me, just give up being clean. Focus instead on staying warm.

It gets that cold here?

He chortled.

Dwyer was home to about fifty soldiers, mostly artillery and Household Cavalry. I met them in twos and threes. They were all sandy-haired, by which I mean their hair was matted with sand. Their faces and necks and eyelashes—also encrusted. They looked like fillets of fish that’d been breadcrumbed before frying.

Within one hour, I did too.

Everyone and everything at Dwyer was either caked with sand or sprinkled with sand or painted the color of sand. And out beyond the sand-colored tents and sandbags and sand walls was an infinite ocean of…sand. Fine, fine sand, like talcum powder. The lads spent much of their day gazing at all that sand. So, after completing my tour, getting my cot and some chow, I did too.

We told ourselves we were scanning for the enemy, and we were, I suppose. But you couldn’t stare at that many grains of sand without also thinking about eternity. All that shifting, swirling, whirling sand, you felt it saying something to you about your minuscule niche in the cosmos. Ashes to ashes.
Sand to sand. Even when I retired, settled onto my metal cot, drifted off to sleep, sand was uppermost on my mind. I heard it out there, having whispery conversations with itself. I felt a grain on my tongue. On my eyeball. I dreamed of it.

And when I woke, there was a spoonful of it in my mouth.

At the center of Dwyer
was a towering spike, a kind of makeshift Nelson’s Column. Nailed to it were dozens of arrows, pointing every which way, each arrow painted with the name of a place some soldier at Dwyer called home.

Sydney Australia 7223 miles

Glasgow 3654 miles

Bridgwater Somerset 3610 miles

That first morning, walking past the spike, I had a thought. Maybe I should write my own home up there.

Clarence House 3456 miles

That’d get a laugh.

But no. Just as none of us was eager to draw the Taliban’s attention, I was eager not to draw the attention of my fellow squaddies. My main goal was to blend in.

One of the arrows pointed towards “The Cannons,” two enormous 105-mm guns at the back of the non-working shower block. Nearly every day, several times a day, Dwyer fired off those big guns, lobbed massive shells in a smoky parabola towards Taliban positions. The noise made your blood stop, fried your brains. (One day the guns were fired at least a hundred times.) For the rest of my life, I knew, I’d be hearing some vestige of that sound; it would echo forever in some part of my being. I would also never forget, when the guns finally stopped, that immense silence.

Dwyer’s ops room
was a box wrapped in desert camo. The floor was thick black plastic made of interlinked pieces, like a jigsaw puzzle. It made a weird noise when you walked across it. The focal point of the room,
indeed the whole camp, was the main wall, which featured a giant map of Helmand Province, with pins (yellow, orange, green, blue) representing units of the battle group.

I was greeted by Corporal of Horse Baxter. Older than me, but my coloring. We exchanged a few wry cracks, a rueful smile about involuntary membership in the League of Redheaded Gentlemen. Also, the Balding Brotherhood. Like me, Baxter was fast losing coverage on top.

I asked where he was from.

County Antrim.

Irish, eh?

Sure.

His lilting accent made me think he could be kidded. I gave him a hard time about the Irish, and he returned fire, laughing, but his blue eyes looked unsure.
Crikey,
I’m taking the piss out of a prince.

We got down to work. He showed me several radios stacked along a desk under the map. He showed me the Rover terminal, a pudgy little laptop with compass points stenciled along the sides.
These radios are your ears. This Rover is your eyes.
Through them I’d make a picture of the battlefield, then try to control what happened in and above it. In one sense I’d be no different from the air-traffic controllers at Heathrow: I’d spend my time guiding jets to and fro. But often the job wouldn’t even be that glamorous: I’d be a security guard, blearily monitoring feeds from dozens of cameras, mounted on everything from recon aircraft to drones. The only fighting I’d be doing would be against the urge to sleep.

Jump in
.
Have a seat, Lieutenant Wales.

I cleared my throat, sat down. I watched the Rover. And watched.

Minutes passed. I turned up the volume on the radios. Turned it down.

Baxter chuckled.
That’s the job
.
Welcome to the war.

The Rover had an alternative name,
because everything in the Army needed an alternative name.

Kill TV.

As in:

Whatcha doing?

Just watching a bit of Kill TV.

The name was meant to be ironic, I figured. Or else it was just blatantly fake advertising. Because the only thing getting killed was time.

You watched an abandoned compound thought to have been used by the Taliban.

Nothing happened.

You watched a tunnel system suspected to have been used by the Taliban.

Nothing happened.