"Therapy wasn't going well. I was sleeping in the coffin again. Even with the lid screwed down I could still hear the voices - mocking me, taunting me - and worse my dreams were tormented with sexual thoughts of Willy and Kate. I needed to do something.
I needed to remove the bug from William's bedroom.
The British Press was no better. One minute they were praising me for my role in Operation Crimson Eagle - my gunnery skills had excelled, and my actions had really made a difference to the war in Afghanistan. The next they taunted me with gruesome stories of a serial killer at a place called Gila Bend in Arizona. The chap was a monster. He took trophies from his victims - he cut off their ear. The Mail, of course - being the absolute worst of the tabloid British Press - had a picture of the location where latest victim had been found. I looked at the bleak desert, the high mountains, the adobe houses with their swimming pools, it reminded me so much of Afghanistan.
I needed to get out.
Chelsy was in Leeds. And I hadn't met Cress yet... so I rang Florence - code-name Flea - to protect her from the British Press - who I now remember was my girlfriend at the time. She was everything I ever wanted in a girlfriend - fun, a bit of a goer, and nothing like my mother.
She reminded me that we didn't meet until after Willy's wedding and not to call her again as we would break up because of the British Press.
So it turns out... I was actually on exercise, with the army, on Dartmoor.
Dartmoor, the very name filled me with dread. Home to the Yorkshire Ripper, famous for a glowing dog, and infamous in the army for the toughness of the training. But I was ready. I had been here before. Willy and I had spent our summers with Uncle Jimmy's mummy. If I could cope the horror of mummy and Uncle Jimmy flirting at breakfast, I could cope with anything special forces might throw at me.
Chelsy wasn't in Leeds. She called round. She'd been at the ceremony when I got my wings. I must have impressed her because unlike every other girl I had ever tried it on with, she was neither on the blob or requiring large quantities of Stolly to get her paralytic. In fact she was very forward. Called me the 'Stallion Who Mounts the World' - some book she'd read, apparently. This excited me enormously. But before I could get half in or half out, Chelsy pushed me away.
"What is that?" she demanded. "It's never happened before." I replied, grabbing a cushion to hide the speaker. "Where's it coming from?" I thrust the cushion over it, and sat on it: smothering the sound with my full body-weight. My todger lost it's ardour. As did Chels. "That sounds like Kate." "It'll be the gardener," I explained, "he's always watching porn when he mows the grass." "It is," continued Chelsy, scrambling to retrieve her clothes, "It is, it's Kate." "It isn't," I cried, impotently beating at the cushion to make the noise stop. "Why are you punching yourself in the dick?" "My therapist told me to." "You're mad!" "I'm madly in love with you." "We're finished." "I chucked you first."
The universe conspired against me as the slam of my front door coincided with Kate's orgasmic crying of, "My King, my King. Take me like Rachel Zane in Suits."
Dartmoor - rock, wind and sheep. A hard place for hard men.
Scotch Billy worked us hard. Three days and three nights without sleep, with nothing to eat but Linda McCartney sausage rolls, and nothing to drink but the sweat from our socks. Lesser men couldn't take it. But not me. I'd walked behind my mother's coffin, shaken the wet hands of the crowd, if the British Press couldn't break me: nothing could.
I had my mother with me too. When my pack grew heavy, I would feel her behind me, lifting it - the straps no longer biting my shoulders. "Thank you mummy," I would whisper. When my circumcised, and tender, todger chaffed within my sweat sodden keks, I would smell the scent I had so often smelled upon mummys lips, and think of Catherine crying out to Rachel Zane....
By the final check-point we were exhausted. But Scotch Billy wasn't done with us yet. As we slumped delirious around a cow-shed, he tossed a sack into our midst, and said, "enjoy your reward ladies." Inside we found a selection of large and murderous knives, a mallet, and a rolling pin made from a frozen wine bottle - a selection of tinned stewed meat, ready to roll pastry, and for those who wanted stale bread croutons - a packet of stuffing. Our helmet's would act as pie tins.
How I got there, or where I was, I can't say. But the light which shone into my face was blinding. I felt a trickle of blood ooze from my broken lower lip. I was naked. My old chap shriveled like a slug in sunlight. My hands were cuffed behind my back. Squeezing my anus I felt a reassuring twitch from the little fellow. A woman's face pressed into mine - imperious, disapproving, disappointed - "no one wants to nibble your nuts," she sneered. "My penis has been the subject of much interest in the British Press," I retorted. "It doesn't fill many column inches I see."
They were trying to break me.
The British Press had been more thorough than I thought, for she knew things about me that not even my family knew. Like my peeping at Zara, my blinding a horse, the letter I wrote to Dear Diedre about my erotic feelings for Pat - but did not send. Nothing was off limits. It all went way beyond the Geneva Convention.
Two other men broke under the strain. They went completely mad.
But I am a warrior - a man - I am the Stallion Who Mounts the Earth - I am Rachel Zane."