If You're Reading This, I'm Already Dead

by Andrew Nicoll

  Not that I use it for anything else these days. Poor old thing sits there like a baby sparrow fallen out of its nest, and if the girls of the harem went to work as a team, I don’t think they could make him fly again.

  Speaking of the girls of the harem, me and Max and Arbuthnot had just settled down to enjoy a little nightcap when there was a knock at the door of the royal apartments.

  Arbuthnot put his hand on his sword with a kind of “Are you expecting somebody?” look, and Max, who never really paid enough attention to bullets, got his shoulder against the door and said, “Who seeks audience with the king?”

  We heard laughter on the other side of the door—the kind of filthy laughter that only Tifty could produce.

  “Don’t be silly, darling. It’s me. And I’ve brought some friends.”

  Max flung back the door and there was Tifty with all the girls—Mrs. MacLeod, my Sarah and the entire harem, every member of it red-faced and blubbing. They started out quietly enough, like good little houris, but as soon as they saw me they set up a wailing and a howling like cats going through a mangle.

  Tifty and Mrs. MacLeod went clucking and fussing around them, trying to quiet them down a bit, but Sarah paid them no heed at all. She just came right up to me, put her arms round my neck and gave me a big kiss and a tug on the whiskers.

  And then I said the wisest thing of my entire reign. I said, “Sorry, Sarah,” which made her very happy but seemed to turn the cat-mangle by another couple of cranks.

  “For God’s sake, Tifty, can’t you make them shut up? What the hell is wrong with them?”

  “Darling, can’t you tell? They are in love!”

  That was only to be expected. My whiskers were looking particularly magnificent that day and my boots particularly shiny, and in normal circumstances I would have been only too happy to dry their tears and give them each a right good cheering-up, but circumstances had changed, not least because Sarah was standing right at my elbow.

  “Arbuthnot,” I said, “I’m relying on you to translate here. You tell them from me that the king thinks they are absolutely gorgeous, every one of them. Tell them that the king loves them all very dearly, but that I am promised to this lady here.”

  “Is that wise?” he said. “Their fathers are in town, blind drunk and armed to the teeth. Kicking their lovesick daughters out on to the street might not be the best plan.”

  “Just do it.”

  But before he could begin, Tifty almost burst her corsets laughing that filthy, syrupy laugh of hers again. “You might have turned little Sarah’s head, but you’re not that much of a catch. Darling, they are not in love with you! It’s not you they are crying for. Silly man, your harem girls are all in love with village boys back home.”

  And then the cat mangling started again. “Oh for God’s sake, Arbuthnot, talk to them. Find out what’s going on.”

  Well, he did his best to soothe them, but they would not be soothed although, to be fair, Albanok is not a very soothing language, and Arbuthnot’s cooing sounded a lot like a lullaby sung by a mother cheese-grater to her cheesegrater child. Still the howling and the yowling went on and they seemed to me to be encouraging each other to screech a little bit louder and sob a little more hoarsely. Before long Arbuthnot—who was not a patient man—lost his patience with them and started yelling and shouting and, just for a second, I thought that might work. They looked at him like startled rabbits and, thank God, the screaming stopped. Then it started again worse than before and the girls fell on one another’s necks, weeping and sobbing until Sarah and Tifty and even Mrs. MacLeod gathered them up in their arms and joined in the crying, while they all gabbled at each other in a mix of unintelligible tongues.

  But it’s an exhausting business, uncontrollable weeping, and after a bit they were too tired to bother with it any more and they all sat down.

  It seemed like a good idea to offer round the last of the brandy—purely as a restorative—and, little by little, the sniveling died down as Tifty gathered up the dribbles of brandy and emptied them out into her own glass.

  I told Arbuthnot to ask them again, but nicely this time, and it took him a few attempts because they all wanted to join in and speak at the same time, but eventually he got it all out of them.

  God forgive me, I’ve forgotten all their names, but they all had the same story to tell. This one, Lotte, wanted to marry Fritzie, but Fritzie was just a poor shepherd boy and her daddy hated him and he tried everything to break them up and scare Fritzie away and, when he wouldn’t go, Daddy went just about mad crazy until this morning when he heard the new king had arrived and he hit on a plan to get rid of his girl for good.

  And this one, Rosa, wanted to marry Jupp, but she was the last of six girls and there was nothing left for a dowry so she was going to be left at home on the shelf, an old maid, looking after her brother’s children until her hair went gray and her teeth fell out and she had to dine on nothing but bread soaked in warm milk—at least until this morning when her daddy heard that a new king had arrived and, well, you know the rest.

  Arbuthnot went round them all, each in turn, and after each telling there was more caterwauling and crying and sympathetic embracing and cries of “Oh, you poor thing,” in Albanok of course.

  “In short,” said Arbuthnot, “it seems Your Majesty is regarded as no great catch.”

  “But I’m the king!” I said.

  “Apparently a fifth share of a king is less to be prized than a shepherd boy with full vacant possession.”

  “Oh, I understand that completely,” said Sarah.

  “But there’s more—Your Majesty is too old.”

  “Too old!” I gave my whiskers a ferocious shake.

  “Old enough to be their father, it seems—indeed older than most of their fathers.”

  “They start damned young in Albania, by God!” I thought that might raise a laugh but nobody laughed with me because they were all trying so hard not to laugh at me, so it just sounded silly and whiny.

  “In short, they wonder why a man of your age is not already surrounded by strong sons and if there is something wrong with you.”

  I sat down on the royal bed with a thump and everybody forgot that they were trying not to laugh. “Something wrong with me? You tell them from me, Arbuthnot, that if I were not promised to this lady here—who is much nicer than any of them—then they’d soon find out there’s damn all wrong with the King of the Albanoks. Go on! You tell ’em!”

  Arbuthnot translated but the girls seemed unimpressed. They made no reply to me, but instead they turned moony gazes on Sarah, waiting for what she had to say.

  “It’s true. It’s true,” she said, but that cut no ice with them, not until Sarah put her hands together as if in prayer and drew them apart and drew them apart and drew them apart until their little eyes popped and their little jaws dropped and they collapsed into giggles and showered Sarah with excited yammering congratulations.

  “Aww, bloody hell,” said Max. “I’ve seen you naked.”

  “Yes, but darling, you’ve never seen him angry,” said Tifty.

  “Bloody hell,” he said again.

  “Darling, yours is just as nice, believe me.”

  “Bloody hell.”

  I was feeling a lot happier now, and it was quite clear that the girls—and everybody else—were looking at me in a different light.

  “But none of this solves the problem,” I said. “They don’t want to marry me, and I damned sure don’t want to marry anybody who doesn’t want to marry me.”

  Sarah said, “I think they might have changed their minds now.”

  “Too bad. They missed the boat. But I still don’t know what to do with them.”

  Sarah sat down beside me on the bed. “When I don’t know what to do, I always ask my dad.”

  She was so clever and so pretty that I just had to kiss her. “Summon the grand vizier!” I said. “What’s the point of having a vizier if you don’t consult him? Do you think he’s
still up?”

  “I’ll go and see.”

  So she went and I sat on the bed and the girls of the harem looked at me and looked at each other and whispered behind their hands and giggled some more and I felt a bit smug and I grinned at Tifty and then I caught Max’s eye and I looked at my boots and we went on that way for a bit until Sarah came back with her dad in his big blue dressing gown with his hair sticking up at all angles.

  Professor von Mesmer stood leaning on his cane in the middle of the room and he said, “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m sorry to get you out of bed,” I said, “but I need your advice,” and I explained the problem.

  “I don’t see the problem,” he said.

  “Look, it’s very simple. These girls don’t want to marry me and I don’t want to marry them, but if I don’t marry them, their fathers will be upset and somebody might get shot.”

  “You can’t marry them.”

  “But I have to.”

  “But you can’t.” He tapped his way along the line of harem girls. “There are five of them. You are allowed no more than four wives. You can’t marry all of them, so you’d best marry none of them and avoid giving offense to one angry father.”

  “Then they will all be angry.”

  “Probably not. Elevate them to positions of honor. Name them as Royal Sisters and send them home with enormous dowries.” He turned his black gaze to the girls and gave them a quick burst of Albanok. “Would you be happy with enormous dowries?”

  They laughed and clapped and danced and came to hug my boots.

  “I think they will be happy with enormous dowries. Now, can I go back to bed?”

  “Yes. Thank you, Professor. Go back to bed and get some sleep. We’re having a coronation tomorrow and I will need my Grand Vizier at my side.”

  That was that. Everything was sorted out. Everybody was happy. Except for Max, who shook his head and said, “So you’re going to send them all back without even so much as a trot once round the park. What a waste.”

  And everybody went back to bed. Everybody except for Sarah. She didn’t go back to her bed until much later.

  There’s one other thing. I told you I wasn’t going to lie but I lied. I lied about forgetting all their names. The fat one, the one with the nice ass, she was called Aferdita. It means “dawn.” Pretty name. Unusual. If we had had a girl, we were going to call her Aferdita.

  I hope just about everything I’ve told you is something you can understand, something you’ve done for yourself. All right, you might never have stolen a boat and sailed away to the south, but you’ve probably been on a boat—at the very least you’ve seen a boat and you know what the sea smells like. And I hope you know what friendship is. I hope you’ve had your share of fun with girls—or one girl. I hope you’ve had a little drink from time to time. I hope you’ve been happy. I know you’ve been scared. God knows we’re most of us scared most of the time these days so we have all these things in common, and it’s not like I have to begin every page as if I was describing “green” to a man born blind. But there are damned few men in the world—damned few men in the history of the world—who have ever lived this part of my story because there are damned few men who were ever crowned. I was crowned. Me, Otto Witte, acrobat of Hamburg, I was the crowned King of Albania. Who alive can tell you of his coronation day? Franz Josef, gone—and the one that came after him, whatever his name was. No more Kaiser, no more Czar. Portugal and Spain, both relieved of duties and excused boots. There’s that bloke in Italy but I wouldn’t bet on him seeing the war out, and poor, stammering George in England, with his stout little wife and his palace bombed full of holes, but he only got his crown because his brother didn’t want it anyway. Norway, Holland, Belgium, Greece, all chased away. All in exile. All kings without a country. Like me. No, it’s a small club—no more than a handful of us who can say, “I remember the day of my coronation.”

  A coronation is a big thing. It’s like a wedding day, and when a bride gets married she soaks up every moment and tells herself that this is the day she will remember forever. But she doesn’t, of course. Bits of it stay in her head. Odd flashes here and there, the idea that, once, she had a wedding day, but not much more than that. The memory gets put away and, not being used, it gets stale and fades away like old flowers pressed in the back of a book.

  A woman who loves her son for thirty years, watches him grow, sees him become a father with babies of his own, she forgets. She forgets the way he smelled, the funny things he said and did. She forgets because there is simply too much to remember. But the baby dead in the cradle, he is never forgotten. Never. He is remembered every day, believe me.

  And I suppose that’s what it’s like for kings. A bride can’t spend her life thinking about her wedding day because she’s too busy with the business of being married, and kings don’t sit around thinking about the day they were crowned because they’ve got too much ruling to do. But that never happened to me. My coronation never faded. I have taken it out and polished it every day of my life since then. I have remembered, every day, that once I was a king.

  So, as they say, to begin at the beginning. I slept like a baby and I awoke at half past six when Max arrived in my room like a troop of cavalry crossing a cobbled street and flung back the curtains. “Up!” he said.

  “I don’t think you’ve quite grasped the role of trusted retainer and faithful manservant.” My head was thick with brandy and my tongue had more fur on it than a monthold cheese.

  “Up! Breakfast. Dining room. Come on, you’re getting crowned today.”

  God, I remember how that felt. I was about to get crowned. If my mother had said I was going to get a prize at the village school I could not have been prouder, although it goes without saying that getting yourself crowned is a lot easier than winning a prize at the village school. At least it was for me. I flopped back into the warm pillows to enjoy the thought of it for a little longer, but Max tugged the blankets on to the floor and threw an enormous velvet dressing gown in my face.

  “Up!” he said. “Dining room, now!” And he left.

  I suppose, since we had got through the best part of two bottles of brandy between us, I should have felt a lot worse than I did. The truth is, I felt pretty chipper. The blood was singing in my ears, my eyes were bright and I fairly sprang down the long staircase to breakfast, but when I got there, the cook was more than averagely stupid. He stood at my elbow, asking over and over what I wanted to eat and, although I told him, over and over, “Eggs!” it didn’t make a blind bit of difference. Eventually I had to get up from the table and walk down the corridor to the kitchen in my bare feet so I could show him: “Eggs!”

  All my friends were already there, sitting together round a scrubbed pine board with steaming pots of coffee and piles of freshly sliced bread and mounds of golden, buttery scrambled eggs.

  The moment he saw me, even while I was yelling, “Eggs!” at the cook, Arbuthnot dropped his fork in his tin plate, pushed his chair back and stood at attention. And, by the time I’d stopped yelling, “Eggs!” at the cook and he was getting on with the business of rattling pans and kicking the stove and swearing at his boy, all the others were standing at attention too.

  “What the hell are you all doing here?” I said. “There’s a perfectly good dining room next door. Come and have breakfast there.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible, old man.”

  “And why are you all standing there saluting?”

  “Oh, we can’t salute, old man. Improperly dressed. No headdress and all that. Saluting’s completely out of the question. But we can brace up a bit to demonstrate due deference.”

  “Due deference?”

  “We don’t want Cookie catching on. He thinks you are an autocratic oriental potentate and we are your cowering minions, remember.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Yes. So you won’t be joining me for breakfast then?”

  “That’s the Officers’ Mess,” said Arbuthnot,
“and we are distinctly ‘other ranks,’ I’m afraid—except for the vizier of course. He could join you.”

  “Yes, Professor, you could join me.” But whether he was still upset about catching me goosing Aferdita the night before, or whether he just couldn’t be bothered, he made some damned stupid mumbled excuse and stayed right where he was.

  “Right then,” I said.

  “It’s just for a bit,” said Sarah, “until things settle down. You know.”

  “But we won’t be able to join you for dinner either, old boy. Except for the vizier of course.”

  “Of course.”

  I stamped off back to the dining room, as loud as anybody can stamp in bare feet, and I sat down, alone, at one end of my long, shiny table with my fancy cutlery and my fancy crockery and my fancy linen napkin as thick as a sail and I longed for Sarah and the rest of them and a tin plate and a wooden spoon. I wanted to sit in the kitchen with them, but that’s the No. 1 rule of kingship: a king can’t do what he wants. A king has to do what other people want. You might think there is very little point in being the king if you can’t even eat your breakfast where you want with the people you want and you might be right. But then, on the other hand, you’ve never been a king, so you don’t know how sweet it tastes.

  Anyway, after a bit the cook came with my coffee and my eggs and I sat and munched my way through them, alone, with nobody to speak to and nothing to do except look at my big silver candlestick like a bull looking through a gate.

  It didn’t take long to eat breakfast. When you’re sitting round with friends you want to linger over coffee and rolls. You want to chat. You might even want to stay sitting down so you don’t have to go out in the rain and spend all day carrying coals or driving a plow, but I was on my own, with nobody to talk to, so it didn’t take long for a couple of spoons of eggs to go down. I sat with my coffee and looked at the candlestick. Above the empty grate I heard a hobnailed pigeon landing on the chimney pot and start his stamping around and his coo-coo-cooing. The clock ticked in the empty room. I drank some coffee. The cup chinked in the saucer. I drank some more coffee. I looked at the heavy red curtains. I drank a bit more coffee. I counted the curtains while the pigeon danced and cooed at the top of the chimney. Six windows down the length of the room. Each window with two curtains, each curtain with a long, lavish, tasseled tie-back of brocaded velvet holding it back from the window. I did some sums. I counted up in my head. I had an idea. I finished my coffee, got up from the table and bounced my way along the length of the room, snatching up those curtain ties as I went, and on, out the door at the far end and up the stairs back to my room.