"I hadn't smiled in months. School was horrible. One of the matrons, named Pat, bullied me unmercifully. After showers she made me wait until last for a towel. She always made me share a it with Norman: a fat, common, bucktoothed boy, with bottle-bottom spectacles; his father was little more than a jumped up accountant. We called him Tojo, At lunch, if we had prunes and custard, Pat would always ensure that I got exactly seven - she said "that was all I was worth and what I would become."... though sometimes she gave me eight.
I missed my family. And most of all I missed Pa's hugs.
At last the summer holidays came. Pa came to collect me in the Aston Martin. Mummy was away in Brighton with her friend: again. I didn't mind. I just wanted to get away from the Pat. Willy was there. He looked so much older now. But he was the same old Willy. full of fun.
No sooner had we left the school than he snatched the school report from my bag - after distracting me with a Twix. I tried to get it back but Pa's security pinned me to the back seat - Willy was in the front, as always. Even the security officer was smirking as Willy read page after page of my tutors unfairly judging me. And to put a cap on it, Pat wrote, "Henry is a vindictive, thoroughly unpleasant boy without a single virtue."
Which wasn't true at all. I could reach onto the top of the cistern in a peeing contest. I could hold my breath for fifty four seconds in a sink of water - sometimes longer if Bates had his way. And at Bulldog I was known as The Demon, for a move I developed of jumping up and kneeing the little kids in the chin - a move that worked for both 'on the floor' and 'off the ground'. Pat stopped me doing this, and banned Bulldog, when Tojo bit off half his tongue and ended up in hospital with concussion.
'They can laugh at me' I thought, as I watched the verdant trees flash past, 'But they wouldn't be laughing if they knew I hadn't smiled in months.'
It wasn't only Willy who had grown. Zara had to. I didn't know where to look. The last time I had seen Zara she was a little girl, just my cousin. Now she was bigger and listening to the Sugarcubes. She still reeked of horses, but she smelled of something else, Willy noticed it too. "It's White Musk," Zara explained, before hurrying off to the stables with two of her mother's bulldogs, Tyson and Bruno.
I liked the broad, almost African, skies of Norfolk. And anywhere was a relief to be out of the reach of that twisted sadist, Pat. But Sandringham haunted me. As it was here in 1843 that my ancestor had been murdered by having a red-hot poker shoved where the sun don't shine: after he was captured by diamond stealing slave traders during the Crusades against Robin Hood. I would lie in bed at night - kept awake by Willy's sleep apnoea - and imagine the curlews on the marshes were ghosts - or the unrestful souls of the dark eyed dead - or Pat's shriek when she saw me choking Tojo to make sure he had both shoulders on the ground - as he fitted, blood spurting from his mouth but still refusing to be yield and be caught - the fat little tit.
Everyone was very serious. John Smith had been elected Prime Minister. Pa and Auntie Anne no longer loved our mummy and Zara's daddy. Right Said Fred were number one. The Firm had called a meeting to decide on what must be done.
It was raining. A summer tumult poured from white skies, swirling with thunder and distant lighting. It pummeled against the window. The glass awash with a distorting lens of liquid film: running downwards, ever downwards; filling the gutters: pattering upon the shingled path in a symphony of gloom. We were directly beneath the cyclonic eye, without hope of respite.
Willy didn't notice. Mummy's new friend had bought him a Gameboy. He didn't buy me one. He said he wasn't made of money, so we'd have to share. He obviously didn't know William, he never shared anything.
Thus I found myself wandering the corridors of Sandringham house. There was no-one in the lounge so I went via the secret passage to the conservatory, then on through the billiard room to the library. I've never liked books. Yet rather than push on to the study, my attention was drawn to a fawn leather bound tome extruding from the shelf. Some greater force drew me, compelled me: ignoring the rasping cries of the magpie on the window ledge, it's beak tapping at the pane in existential warning. Cocking my head I read the book's title along the spine, 'Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery'. As a person always ready to make peace, I was intrigued. I tilted the book to take it from the shelf, and was startled to hear a grinding of gears from deep within the bowels of the earth.
The bookcase heaved upon an axle, opening with panting sigh, it swung to reveal a passage beyond. To my surprise a spiral staircase of pure crystal faded into illumination: lit by a dark-fire as one only sees when staring too closely at a candle. Thus bidden, I could not but accept the challenge, I stepped into that space and climbed that stairway - unsure if I would find kismet or death - the bookcase sealed into normalcy in my wake.
I smelt Matey. Heard the tinny trill of Steve Wright in the afternoon drifting from a boombox. This was Zara's room. The door to the en-suite was slightly ajar. I crept on my lightest toe to peep. She was sitting in the bath, the showerhead held like a microphone, stumbling over the words to 'It Only Takes A Minute'.
A prehensile human urge gripped me - some deep psychic energy filling me - surging up from the roots of the earth I tapped into the primeordeal - I needed to pee.
But fortune was with me. For by accident, or inscrutable design, my elbow touched the door. Zara caught sight of the peripheral movement and let out a scream unheard since Lizzie caught the Nigel kissing the gay chef. I kicked into survival mode, using all the skills I had learned in Beavers.
Willy must have heard the scream. For he came running. I confess from my vantage beneath the bed, between the po and a crocodile-skin suitcase, I saw only ankles: and the dancing poorly tailored hem of Zara's bathrobe.
I could barely breath. Knowing I stood condemned if discovered.
In my desperation I reached out to the cosmos.
Being favoured, the universe gave answer.
For then I saw it: a single pearl: some lost keepsake of the greater whole.
A token reaching across the aeons to guide the lovelorn and the lost toward their true destiny.
For the first time in months I smiled, .
Zara and Willy, like the saps they are, decided the peeper must have fled the room and went in pursuit: giving me chance to escape
- with my precious pearl.
They never knew it was me.
And never will."