Queen Camilla Read Free Page A

cul-de-sac of sixteen small semi-detached ex-council houses. The houses had small front gardens, fenced to waist height. A few of the gardens were lovingly kept. Prince Charles regularly won the Grice Best Kept Garden Award, whereas his neighbours’, the Thread-golds’, garden was an eyesore of old mattresses, vicious brambles and festering rubbish bags.
    When Charles offered to clear up and cultivate the Threadgolds’ disgraceful garden, Vince Threadgold said, ‘You ain’t confiscatin’
my
land. This ain’t the Middle Ages, an’ you ain’t got no royal prerogative no more.’
    Beverley Threadgold had shouted, ‘Anyroad up, there’s field mice nesting in them old mattresses. I thought you was
for
wildlife!’
    A twenty-foot-high metal fence topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras formed the boundary between the back gardens of Hell Close and the outside world. At the only entrance to the Fez, on a triangular piece of muddy ground, squatted a series of interconnected Portakabins, housing the Grice Security Police. The residents of the zone were required to wear an ankletag and carry an identity card at all times. Their movements were followed by the security police on a bank of CCTV screens, installed in one of the Portakabins.
    When Camilla’s tag had been fitted, immediately after her wedding on the estate, she had said, with her usual cheerful pragmatism, ‘I think it flatters my ankle beautifully.’ By contrast, Princess Anne had wrestled two security police to the floor before a third officer had finally managed to attach her tag.
    There were many prohibitions and restrictions imposed on the residents of the Fez. A strict curfew had to be adhered to; residents must be inside their homes from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m. at weekends. During the week they must be inside their houses from 9.30 p.m. Residents were not allowed to leave the estate. All correspondence, both in and out of the Exclusion Zone, was read and censored as appropriate. The telephone system did not extend to the outside world. There were only two free-to-view television channels, the Advertising Channel, which showed a few programmes now and then, and the Government News Channel, which, unsurprisingly, had a perceptible bias in favour of the Government.
    The Fez heaved with dogs. They were everywhere, running in the streets, gathering on pavements, fighting on the few areas of scrubby grass and guarding their unlovely territory. There was not a single minute, night or day, when a dog was not barking. After a while the human residents no longer heard the noise: it became as much part of them as the sound of their own breathing. It was a continuing mystery as to how some ownersmanaged to acquire their pedigree dogs, which often cost many hundreds of pounds, since all residents received the same weekly allowance of £71.32.
    Jack Barker, leader of the Cromwell Party, Prime Minister and architect of the Exclusion Zones, could not get out of bed. It was ten thirty in the morning and he had already missed three appointments. He lay under the duvet in his bedroom at Number Ten Downing Street, listening to Big Ben striking the minutes and hours of his life away.
    He was tired, he lived in a permanent state of déjà vu: he felt that everything he said, he had said before. Everything he did had already been done. Most of his trusted colleagues, those who had been elected with him thirteen years before, on a heady mix of idealism and principle, were dead or had resigned. Jack’s wife of twenty-four years, Pat, his childhood sweetheart and political ally, had confronted him one night and accused him of fraternizing with the Devil after he had spent a convivial evening dining with Sir Nicholas Soames at a gentlemen’s club in St James’s. She had screamed, ‘You’re the leader of the Republican Party, for Christ’s sake! You called the fucking cat Tom Paine!’
    Soon after Jack’s second election victory, the Republican Party had changed its name. A team