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Provocative Publishing
featuring the work of Carole Hayman
Queen Camilla
an excerpt
© Sue Townsend
Introducing…
What if being Royal was a crime? The UK has come over all republican. The Royal Family exiled to an Exclusion Zone with the other villains and spongers. And to cap it all, the Queen has threatened to abdicate. Yet Prince Charles is more interested in root vegetables than reigning …unless his wife Camilla can be Queen in a newly restored monarchy. But when a scoundrel who claims to be the couple's secret lovechild offers to take the crown off their hands, the stage is set for a right Royal show down. And the question for Camilla (and rest of the country) will be: Queen of the vegetable patch or Queen of England?
Prologue
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 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 ‘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 being happy they felt nothing but the sadness of loss.
Jack Barker, leader of the Republican Party and Prime Minister 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, who had been his best friend and confidante, had confronted him one night and accused him of fraternising with the devil after he had spent a convivial evening dining with Sir Nicholas Soames at his gentlemen’s club in St. James.
Jack was now married to Caroline who had fine bones and was the eldest daughter of a Baronet, but Caroline found politics tiresome and had recently started to criticise the way he held his fork.
His Government was sometimes accused of being totalitarian, which made Jack laugh. He was far from being a Stalin or a Mao, it wasn’t his fault if there were no viable opposition parties. He had been forced to detain some of his potential opponents, but only because they had been stirring up trouble, he could not take chances with the security of the country, could he?
He was hardly responsible for the political apathy that hung over England like a fog, was he?
A little crowd of agitators, Cromwellians, had stirred themselves enough to hold an unlawful protest outside the Palace of Westminster, accusing the government of revisionism. They had been dealt with but Jack could not help but feel that the tide was about to turn. Perhaps he shouldn’t have had Stephen Fry put under house arrest. Fry had continued to mock the government on the Internet, from Norfolk. He should have sent Fry to Turkey to have his cuticles seen to by one of their security forces crack manicurists. That would have wiped the smile off his satirical face.
His workload was unremitting, remorseless. Just lately, Jack had begun to fantasise about walking away from his desk and never going back. Let some other poor bugger make the decisions, chair the meetings, deal with the arseholes and fools he was surrounded by.
Had nobody noticed he was going mad? Were they unaware that he had developed a tick in his right eyelid? That he was forgetting the simplest of words? Didn’t the strain show in the way that he occasionally found himself weeping real tears in public? What did they think he was doing when they saw him mopping his eyes?
He was not a quitter; he couldn’t give the job up of his own volition.
He knew the Chancellor was after his job, Jack wished Lord would make his move and stick a metaphorical dagger in his back; he couldn’t do it to himself.
At night, trying to sleep, he reviewed the past thirteen years. He’d failed to win Britain’s independence from America, the roads and motorways were almost at a standstill, he was still subsidising British farmers for doing fuck all. The rich were vastly richer, and the poor seemed to be morphing into a deviant subculture. The one thing he could be proud of though, Jack thought, was the removal from British life of hereditary titles. He had, with a stroke of a pen, destroyed the Royal family, forever.
The estate heaved with dogs, they were everywhere, running in the streets, gathering on pavements, fighting on the few areas of scrubby grass, and guarding territory.
There was not a single minute, night or day when a dog could not be heard barking. The constant barking was a permanent backdrop to life on the estate, after a while the human residents no longer heard it, it became as much part of them as the sound of their own breathing.
It was a mystery as to how some people managed to acquire pedigree dogs, often costing many hundreds of pounds, since all residents received the same fixed government allowance of seventy-one pounds thirty-two pence a week to live on.
Chapter One
Each City and Town in England has an inclusion zone; it is where the inadequate, the stupid, the unlucky, the delinquent, and the mad live.
Most of the unfortunate residents had been sent there by the courts after receiving an anti social behaviour order. The British royal family are there courtesy of the Home Office. Hell Close is a cul-de-sac of sixteen semi-detached council houses forming part of The Flowers Inclusion Zone.
They have small gardens at the front, which are fenced to waist height. Some of these gardens are beautifully kept. Prince Charles regularly wins the ‘Best Kept Garden Award’; whereas Princess Michael of Kent’s garden is a mess of old mattresses and split rubbish bags. She does not clear it up because she claims to have “Lost my gardening gloves”.
A twenty-foot high metal fence topped with razor wire and CCTV cameras borders The Flowers Estate, at the only entrance; on a triangular piece of muddy ground is a port-a-cabin, which serves as a police checkpoint. The police officers monitor the movements of all of the residents.
Two police dogs Emperor and Judge are a menacing presence, both are ex drug squad sniffer dogs, and it is widely believed by the dog residents of Flowers Estate they are still users.
At the flick of a switch a mechanical gate can jerk across the narrow road and cut the Estate off from the rest of the World.
Hell Close is where anti-social families are sent after they have exhausted the patience of the Housing Department, the Social Services and the Magistrates Courts.
Hell Close is also where the few remaining members of the British Royal family live. In order of precedence
HRH Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth,
HRH Charles (1), the Prince of Wales with
HRH Camilla, Countess of Cornwall,
Prince William (2) of Wales and Prince Henry of Wales (3),
Prince Andrew (4) Duke of York, Princess Beatrice (5) of York and Princess Eugenie (6) of York
Prince Edward (7) Earl of Wessex and Sophie, Duchess of Wessex, and their daughter Lady Louise Alice Elizabeth Mary Mountbatten Windsor (8)
HRH Princess Anne (9) The Princess Royal and Spiggy with Peter Phillips (10) and Zara Phillips (11)
and Princess Michael of Kent.
HRH Prince Phillip no longer lives in Hell Close, though he is nearby in a local authority nursing home, Frank Bruno House.