"Slake my thirst" – was the advert's hook as Robert drove past the hoarding – then up the M1 motorway nearing his long-neglected birthplace on the outskirts of Leicester. He had a ploy. He had a wheeze. To write 'Prince Philips' Diary' before Prince Philip wrote his own.
For this reason, he had felt an illogical need to touch home base. See his Mum and Dad, or at least where his Mum and Dad were buried, before embarking on this lucrative project. All the papers would buy it. He'd not make the same mistakes as that guy who once pretended that he had Hitler's diary and sold it to a Sunday newspaper for a song as a genuine part of mid-20th century history. This time, Prince Philip's Diary would indeed be Prince Philip's Diary. With all the warts as well as yappy corgis. Not to speak of his four difficult wayward children and other palace hangers-on.
Leicester Forest service station, on the M1, would serve as Robert's spark, a catharsis – a catharsis amid a thousand end-to-end cups of service station swill.
His thirst was for load and loads of money rather than for that quenching of his dry-as-dust taste buds. Taste buds lurked, he felt, like button mushrooms, in his lower throat. He swallowed hard. Imagining-illnesses-before-suffering-from-those-illnesses had ever been his true complaint. Hypochondria was, indeed, the worst illness of all.
He'd start writing the Diary in the service station. He was, now, after all, here, within the influence zone of his own astrological beginnings, utilising the rollercoaster flows of planetary transits across his original template of time.
Thirty five years ago, he was born, say, two miles from this very Service Station, under the Sign of the Ram upon the cusp of the Crab. An epoch that began when his Mum uttered a blood-curdling scream amid the milling midwives of a Midland dawn.
The centre of England was hereabouts: a significant location for Robert Montgomery, the only Robert Montgomery who would ever live the life of this particular Robert Montgomery. In an alternate world, he might have become the tallest or fattest person ever known to man, instead of the richest as he was due to become because of the planetary influences bearing down upon his obvious talent in writing other people's diaries.
And now he was at the Motorway Service Station, a restaurant, not at the end of the universe, but in the middle of it. A Way Station, in fact, for the very soul and grit of literature. Popular literature that would pay so much cash, he could afford perhaps the dish of the day, instead of dishwater.
He gazed longingly at someone else's all-day breakfast, whilst making do, as Robert was forced indeed thus to do, with his umpteenth cup of swill and no solids. He had been breast-fed when a small baby, and, in Leicester, there was a glut of wet nurses available in those days, and, indeed, his Mum was shrivelled to the very bottom of her chest, so he had been thankful – in hindsight – for the large mercies of riper milk-dugs elsewhere.
He gazed from the window towards the flowing motorway, and spotted another advert hoarding for thirst-quenching products … and he frowned as he lowered his concentrating brows towards the scrap of lined paper he had placed before him on the restaurant table and wrote: "Today, I was given things to suck."
That was a good beginning. A real diary might have started just in that way.
But Prince Philip had not been born in Leicester, had he? Wasn't he Greek? It was hot in Greece. Robert Montgomery knew at least that. Good local colour was important to any literature. He scored out what he had written and rewrote it: "It was hot today, and I was thirsty. The nurse cradled me to the ripe dugs of her breast."
Ah, that was better. Prince Philip to the tee.
Someone had just sat beside Robert – because the place was getting fuller (with passing trade in the main) – and this person flaunted a double decker all-day breakfast with extra trimmings. Including button kidneys glowing in the motorway dawn. Robert scowled and gulped another dose of swill. The chap with the breakfast nursed a huge mug of scalding best-infused tea, Robert could tell, whilst Robert himself had been dished out with the grey fluids dripping from the kitchen draining board.
He thought of his Mum and Dad Montgomery. They had been a humble pair of folk, and they had been proud of Robert. But thirty-five years ago they were into the original boy band called the Bay City Rollers. So they dressed Robert in trousers at half-mast, trimmed with tartan, and gave him long scarves like Dr Who.
As a toddler, Robert had looked strange to the passers-by. Now, he was to prove he was no freak from the Seventies, but a writing talent fit for the 21st century. The Montgomery clan would be proud of him. He sucked his pencil. Then worried about being lead-poisoned . He took a tug of swill from the nozzle of his drink and started to gurgle.
Prince Philip was too young to write. The next minute he was dead. Sprawled over the restaurant table, sprawled over what he'd scrawled.
A ghost child's hand still scribbling, scribbling even in an imaginary death from a real disease.
Leicester Forest Service Station still buzzed with late breakfasters – ignorant of the talent that had lived and breathed its unfulfilled life, here, amid their munching chops.
A lorry slowly drew out of the car park, some drink advertised on its side. Not Tizer. Or Corona. But another name. A Seventies malty drink. With which Prince Philip had once force-fed an already overgrown Prince Charles, because he never stopped teething.
Nearby, later, in a silent Leicester graveyard, a sad, solitary figure looking much older than his thirty-five years, left some flowers by a twin-bed made of stone. The sun was setting at this very singular moment.
He stayed for some while, bent, hands clasped behind his back. A loyal corgi yapping by his feet.
D. F. Lewis - "Prince Philip's Diary"
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