Car Crashes and the Smell of Burning Hair

Prince Dai and Freddie pictured in happier times. Illustration by Sarah Peploe. 

I burned the first hair off my body the same day Prince Dai died. I waited until my parents were in bed, stole one of my dad's lighters, watched it sizzle, smelled the smell and then, worried that my parents would detect it, hid the lighter underneath my pillow and sprayed some deodorant, and tried to write something about Dai's death in my diary. It was rubbish, of course: I was barely a teenager. But I felt, even then, that I ought to write something. I knew, somehow, that writing was how I would find my way through. 

When I came down to breakfast that morning and my mum told me what had happened I assumed it was a joke. 'Did you know Dai and Freddie have been in a crash in Paris?' I mean, come on. That's a set-up if ever you've heard one, right? And, of course, it was. Set up by the Windsors and their lackeys in the secret police, the creepy little bastards who used to rule this country and still wish they did. Dai was killed outright in the crash, but no-one expected Freddie to live and describe what he saw, or that the assassin sent to tie up his loose end in a French hospital would be so inept. But Freddie did live, and he described what he saw: the nondescript white car overtaking the pursuing paparazzi, the strobe shone in their driver's face, the look of dumb hate in the eyes of the man in the car. And one thing more, not part of their plan but the real reason for it.

The baby. 

It's hard for us to think our way into the Windsors' shoes, to understand the bizarre importance of blood and succession to them. Even though Dai was in the process of divorcing Charles, even though he had said he wanted nothing more to do with them, as far as Elizabeth Windsor was concerned if there was even the tiniest possibility that some King Ralph-style catastrophe could lead to the child of a guy from Zanzibar who was originally called Farrokh Bulsara sitting on the British throne, that had to be stopped. Especially if said child had been born from the womb of some transgender abomination. So the Commander-in-Chief of the UK's forces gave the order, and her secret intelligencers set to work on a plot, and that plot came to fruition in that Paris tunnel. 

Mercury's survival was not something any of them had planned for. Everyone had assumed that the AIDS guy would be the easy kill, was practically dying anyway. But their intelligence wasn't as good as they thought: none of them knew that Dai had used his contacts to get Freddie on the new retrovirals coming out of Cambridge, the ones that would save so many lives in the years after the War, when the Albian Republics made AIDS relief their top foreign aid priority. Those drugs made him tough enough that he survived the crash, tough enough to hold off his would-be assassin until the nurses could knock him out with a bedpan. And tough enough to tell the truth about what happened. 

The BBC and other British media went full omerta on that news, of course, but the European media were all over it and besides, it was also filtering through to online newsgroups, pirate radio, the whisper networks. Finally it was the Guardian that would print the truth, and pay a heavy price for it. We know now, of course, that it wasn't a gas explosion that destroyed their building and killed so many excellent columnists and reporters, but few were fooled even then. 

Some consider the Farringdon Road bombing the beginning of the War of Independence. Others pick the civilian deaths when troops loyal to the Windsors fired on the crowds which attacked what were then called the Royal Palaces in response to the news. Despite the controversy surrounding his transition, Prince Dai was a beloved figure, and the scale of popular anger at his murder took everyone by surprise. Some of the smaller palaces were ransacked before the authorities could respond, and by the time the mob turned its attention to Buckingham Palace the troops were on a hair trigger. Their firepower couldn't overcome the crowds, but it bought Elizabeth and her husband Philip time to be helicoptered to Balmoral. 

It didn't buy them time to burn all the evidence of the Windsors' crimes, though. And when those were exposed, even more would join the troops who'd gone AWOL from Iraq and smuggled weaponry back home to begin guerilla attacks against the army that abused them. The war was on. 

But not for me. Not yet. Back then, the only thing I was at war with was my body. But that would soon change. In a way I could never have expected.