THE THERAPIST, it so happened, had met Tiggy. Astounding coincidence. Smallest of all possible worlds. So in another session we talked about Tiggy, how she’d been a surrogate mum to me and Willy, how Willy and I had often turned women into surrogate mums. How often they’d eagerly cast
themselves in that role.
Surrogate mums made me feel better, I admitted, and worse, because I felt guilty. What would Mummy think?
We talked about guilt.
I mentioned Mummy’s experience with therapy, as I understood it. Didn’t help her. Might’ve made things worse, actually. So many people preyed on her, exploited her—including therapists.
We talked about Mummy’s parenting, how she could sometimes over-mother, then disappear for stretches. It seemed an important discussion, but also disloyal.
More guilt.
We talked about life inside the British bubble, inside the royal bubble. A bubble inside a bubble—impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t actually experienced it. People simply didn’t realize: they heard the word “royal,” or “prince,” and lost all rationality. Ah, a prince—you have no problems.
They assumed…no, they’d been taught…it was all a fairytale. We weren’t human.
A writer many Britons admired, a writer of thick historical novels that racked up literary prizes, had penned an essay about my family, in which she said we were simply…pandas.
Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do, but pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at?
I’ll never forget the highly respected essayist who wrote in Britain’s most highly respected literary publication that my mother’s “early death spared us all a lot of tedium.” (He referred in the same essay to “Diana’s tryst with the underpass.”) But this panda crack always struck me as both acutely perceptive and uniquely barbarous. We did live in a zoo, but by the same token I knew, as a soldier, that turning people into animals, into non-people, is the first step in mistreating them, in destroying them. If even a celebrated intellectual could dismiss us as animals, what hope for the man or woman on the street?
I gave the therapist an overview of how this dehumanization had played out in the first half of my life. But now, with the dehumanizing of Meg, there was so much more hate, more vitriol—plus racism. I told her what I’d seen, heard, witnessed, over the last few months. At one point I sat up on the couch, crooked my neck to see if she was listening. Her mouth was hanging open. A lifelong resident of Britain, she’d thought she knew.
She didn’t know.
At the end of the session I asked her professional opinion:
Is what I’m feeling…normal?
She laughed. What’s normal anyway?
But she conceded that one thing was abundantly clear: I found myself in highly unusual circumstances.
Do you think I have an addictive personality?
More accurately, what I wanted to know was, if I did have an addictive personality, where would I be right now?
Hard to say. Hypotheticals, you know.
She asked if I’d used drugs. Yes.
I told her some wild stories.
Well, I am rather surprised you’re not a drug addict.
If there was one thing to which I did seem undeniably addicted, however, it was the press. Reading it, raging at it, she said, these were obvious compulsions.
I laughed. True. But they’re such shit.
She laughed. They are.
