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47.

When I got home, the reviews were raves. I’d represented the Crown well, according to courtiers. Ireported back to Granny, told her about the tour.

Marvelous. Well done, she said.

I wanted to celebrate, felt I deserved to celebrate. Also, with war in the offing, it was celebratenow or maybe never.

Parties, clubs, pubs, I went out a lot that spring, and tried not to care that, no matter where Iwent, two paps were always present. Two sorry-looking, extremely terrible paps: Tweedle Dumband Tweedle Dumber.

For much of my adult life there had been paps waiting for me outside public places.

Sometimes a mob of them, sometimes a handful. The faces always varied, and often I couldn’teven see the faces. But now there were always these two faces, and always clearly visible. Whenthere was a mob, they were right in the middle. When there was no one else, they were there all bythemselves.

But it wasn’t just public places. I’d be walking down a side street, which I’d only decided towalk down seconds before, and they’d leap from a phone box or from under a parked car. I’dleave a friend’s apartment, certain that no one knew I’d been there, and they’d be standing outsidethe building, in the middle of the street.

Besides being everywhere, they were ruthless, much more aggressive than other paps. They’dblock my path, they’d chase me to my police car. They’d block me from getting into the car, thenchase the car down the street.

Who were they? How were they doing this? I didn’t think they had any kind of sixth sense orextrasensory perception. On the contrary, they looked as if they didn’t possess one full frontalcortex between them. So, what hidden trick were they leveraging? An invisible tracker? A sourceinside the police?

They were after Willy too. He and I talked about them a lot that year, talked about theirunsettling appearance, their complementary ruthlessness and idiocy, their take- no- prisonersapproach. But mainly we discussed their omnipresence.

How do they know? How do they always know?

Willy had no idea, but was determined to find out.

Billy the Rock was determined as well. He walked up to the Tweedles several times,interrogated them, looked deep into their eyes. He managed to get a sense of them. The older,Tweedle Dumb, was doughy, he reported, with close-cropped black hair and a smile that chilledthe blood. Tweedle Dumber, on the other hand, never smiled, and rarely spoke. He seemed to besome sort of apprentice. Mostly he just stared.

What was their game? Billy didn’t know.

Following me everywhere, tormenting me, getting rich off me, even that wasn’t enough forthem. They also liked to rub my nose in it. They’d run alongside me, taunt me, while pressing thebuttons on their cameras, reeling off two hundred photos in ten seconds. Many paps wanted areaction, a tussle, but what Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber seemed to want was a fight to thedeath. Blinded, I’d fantasize about punching them. Then I’d take deep breaths, remind myself:

Don’t do it. That’s just what they want. So they can sue and become famous.

Because, in the end, I decided that was their game. That was what it was all about: two fellaswho weren’t famous, thinking it must be fabulous to be famous, trying to become famous byattacking and ruining the life of someone famous.

Why did they want to be famous? That was the thing I never understood. Because fame is theultimate freedom? What a joke. Some kinds of fame provide extra freedom, maybe, I suppose, butroyal fame was fancy captivity.

The Tweedles couldn’t fathom this. They were children, incapable of understanding anythingnuanced. In their simplified cosmology: You’re royal. So. This is the price you pay for living in acastle.

Sometimes I wondered how it might go if I could just talk to them, calmly, explain that Ididn’t live in a castle, my grandmother lived in a castle, that in fact Tweedle Dumb and TweedleDumber both had far grander lifestyles than mine. Billy had done a deep dive on their finances, soI knew. Each Tweedle owned multiple houses, and several luxury cars, purchased with proceedsfrom their photos of me and my family. (Offshore bank accounts too, like their sponsors, themedia barons who funded them, chiefly Murdoch and the impossibly Dickensian- soundingJonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere.)It was around this time that I began to think Murdoch was evil. No, strike that. I began toknow that he was. Firsthand. Once you’ve been chased by someone’s henchmen through thestreets of a busy modern city you lose all doubt about where they stand on the Great MoralContinuum. All my life I’d heard jokes about the links between royal misbehavior and centuries ofinbreeding, but it was then that I realized: Lack of genetic diversity was nothing compared to pressgaslighting. Marrying your cousin is far less dicey than becoming a profit center for Murdoch Inc.

Of course I didn’t care for Murdoch’s politics, which were just to the right of the Taliban’s.

And I didn’t like the harm he did each and every day to Truth, his wanton desecration of objectivefacts. Indeed, I couldn’t think of a single human being in the 300,000-year history of the specieswho’d done more damage to our collective sense of reality. But what really sickened andfrightened me in 2012 was Murdoch’s ever-expanding circle of flunkies: young, broken, desperatemen willing to do whatever was necessary to earn one of his Grinchy smiles.

And at the center of that circle…were these two mopes, the Tweedles.

There were so many nightmarish run-ins with Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber, but onestands out. A friend’s wedding. Walled garden, totally secluded. I was chatting with severalguests, listening to the birdsong, the whoosh of wind in the leaves. Within these soothing sounds,however, I became aware of one small…click.

I turned. There, in the hedgerow. One eye. And one glassy lens.

Then: that chubby face.

Then: that demonic rictus.

Tweedle Dumb.