Queen Camilla Read Free

the windows appeared to have been attacked recently with eggs. She said to Harris, ‘I told Charles that it was inadvisable to allow the boys to live without supervision. Just look at the place, it looks like a New York tenement.’
    The front door opened, releasing a blast of music, and a teenage girl, Chanel Toby, a large-breasted fifteen-year-old with a foghorn voice and artificially coloured and straightened white hair, ran down the front path weeping, closely followed by Prince Harry’s dog, Carling, a red-haired mongrel with lanky legs and a small head. Chanel ran past the Queen and into her grandmother’s at Number Ten. Carling bounced around the Queen’s legs. He was such a harmless fool that Susan and Harris allowed him to continue.
    Harris growled, ‘If this was a village, Carling would be the idiot.’
    The Queen took Carling by the scruff of the neck and dragged him up the path and pushed him through the open door. It was dark inside, all the Queen could see were several hooded figures and a heavy cloud of strong-smelling tobacco. She slammed the front doorshut; it had been a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon so far.
    As she was letting herself into Number Nine, William drove by in a white pick-up truck on the side of which was emblazoned ‘Arthur Grice, Scaffolding’. She could hear Wagner’s ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’ pouring out of the open windows. He papped the hooter and pulled up.
    ‘How did it go?’ she asked.
    William had been given permission to leave the estate and work on a contract erecting scaffolding, in preparation for converting a Norman church into a casino in Swindon.
    ‘It was OK,’ said William. ‘We stayed in a Travelodge, the other chaps were terribly nice to me. I took a bit of stick at first because my hands were so soft.’
    The Queen said, ‘Was it horribly hard work?’
    ‘Yes, horribly,’ said William. He held out his hands to show the Queen. They were now cut and calloused, but the Queen could see that he was proud of having completed a week of manual work.
    She said nothing to him, but she was proud of the boy. He had lived most of his life on the estate, surrounded by some dreadful people, but had managed somehow to remain law-abiding and utterly charming.

2
    England was an unhappy land. The people were fearful, believing that life itself was composed of danger, and unknown and unknowable threats to their safety. Old people did not leave their homes after dark, children were not allowed to play outside even in the daylight hours and were escorted everywhere by anxious adults. To make themselves feel better the people spent their money on things that diverted and amused them. There was always something they thought they must have to make them happy. But when they had bought the object of their desire, they found, to their profound disappointment, that the object was no longer desirable, and that far from making them happy, they felt nothing but remorse and the sadness of loss.
    To help alleviate the pensions crisis, the laws on euthanasia were liberalized and pensioners contemplating suicide were encouraged by a government information leaflet entitled ‘Make Way for the Young’.
    In a desperate attempt to be seen to be ‘doing something’ about crime and social disorder, the Government’s Department of Liveability embarked on a bold programme to convert the satellite council estates into Exclusion Zones, where the criminal, the antisocial, the inadequate, the feckless, the agitators, the disgracedprofessionals, the stupid, the drug-addicted and the morbidly obese lived cheek by jowl.
    The Royal Family, those who had not fled abroad, were living in the Flowers Exclusion Zone (known locally as the Fez) one hundred and nineteen miles from Buckingham Palace, in the East Midlands Region. Arthur Grice, a scaffolding magnate and multi-millionaire, owned and managed the estate; he considered it to be his personal fiefdom. The Royals lived in Hell Close, a