WHEN I GOT HOME, the reviews were raves. I’d represented the Crown well, according to courtiers. I reported back to Granny, told her
about the tour.
Marvelous. Well done, she said.
I wanted to celebrate, felt I deserved to celebrate. Also, with war in the offing, it was celebrate now or maybe never.
Parties, clubs, pubs, I went out a lot that spring, and tried not to care that, no matter where I went, two paps were always present. Two sorry-looking, extremely terrible paps: Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber.
For much of my adult life there had been paps waiting for me outside public places. Sometimes a mob of them, sometimes a handful. The faces always varied, and often I couldn’t even see the faces. But now there were always these two faces, and always clearly visible. When there was a mob, they were right in the middle. When there was no one else, they were there all by themselves.
But it wasn’t just public places. I’d be walking down a side street, which I’d only decided to walk down seconds before, and they’d leap from a phone box or from under a parked car. I’d leave a friend’s apartment, certain that no one knew I’d been there, and they’d be standing outside the building, in the middle of the street.
Besides being everywhere, they were ruthless, much more aggressive than other paps. They’d block my path, they’d chase me to my police car. They’d block me from getting into the car, then chase the car down the street.
Who were they? How were they doing this? I didn’t think they had any kind of sixth sense or extrasensory perception. On the contrary, they looked as if they didn’t possess one full frontal cortex between them. So, what hidden trick were they leveraging? An invisible tracker? A source inside the police?
They were after Willy too. He and I talked about them a lot that year, talked about their unsettling appearance, their complementary ruthlessness and idiocy, their take-no-prisoners approach. But mainly we discussed their omnipresence.
How do they know? How do they always know?
Willy had no idea, but was determined to find out.
Billy the Rock was determined as well. He walked up to the Tweedles several times, interrogated them, looked deep into their eyes. He managed
to get a sense of them. The older, Tweedle Dumb, was doughy, he reported, with close-cropped black hair and a smile that chilled the blood. Tweedle Dumber, on the other hand, never smiled, and rarely spoke. He seemed to be some sort of apprentice. Mostly he just stared.
What was their game? Billy didn’t know.
Following me everywhere, tormenting me, getting rich off me, even that wasn’t enough for them. They also liked to rub my nose in it. They’d run alongside me, taunt me, while pressing the buttons on their cameras, reeling off two hundred photos in ten seconds. Many paps wanted a reaction, a tussle, but what Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber seemed to want was a fight to the death. Blinded, I’d fantasize about punching them. Then I’d take deep breaths, remind myself: Don’t do it. That’s just what they want. So they can sue and become famous.
Because, in the end, I decided that was their game. That was what it was all about: two fellas who weren’t famous, thinking it must be fabulous to be famous, trying to become famous by attacking and ruining the life of someone famous.
Why did they want to be famous? That was the thing I never understood. Because fame is the ultimate freedom? What a joke. Some kinds of fame provide extra freedom, maybe, I suppose, but royal fame was fancy captivity.
The Tweedles couldn’t fathom this. They were children, incapable of understanding anything nuanced. In their simplified cosmology: You’re royal. So. This is the price you pay for living in a castle.
Sometimes I wondered how it might go if I could just talk to them, calmly, explain that I didn’t live in a castle, my grandmother lived in a castle, that in fact Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber both had far grander lifestyles than mine. Billy had done a deep dive on their finances, so I knew. Each Tweedle owned multiple houses, and several luxury cars, purchased with proceeds from their photos of me and my family. (Offshore bank accounts too, like their sponsors, the media barons who funded them, chiefly Murdoch and the impossibly Dickensian-sounding Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere.)
It was around this time that I began to think Murdoch was evil. No, strike that. I began to know that he was. Firsthand. Once you’ve been chased by someone’s henchmen through the streets of a busy modern city you lose all doubt about where they stand on the Great Moral Continuum. All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehavior and centuries of inbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to press gaslighting. Marrying your cousin is far less dicey than becoming a profit center for Murdoch Inc.
Of course I didn’t care for Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s. And I didn’t like the harm he did each and every day to Truth, his wanton desecration of objective facts. Indeed, I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the species who’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality. But what really sickened and frightened me in 2012 was Murdoch’s ever-expanding circle of flunkies: young, broken, desperate men willing to do whatever was necessary to earn one of his Grinchy smiles.
And at the center of that circle…were these two mopes, the Tweedles. There were so many nightmarish run-ins with Tweedle Dumb and
Tweedle Dumber, but one stands out. A friend’s wedding. Walled garden, totally secluded. I was chatting with several guests, listening to the birdsong, the whoosh of wind in the leaves. Within these soothing sounds, however, I became aware of one small…click.
I turned. There, in the hedgerow. One eye. And one glassy lens. Then: that chubby face.
Then: that demonic rictus. Tweedle Dumb.
