AllFreeNovel
Share Us
34
The world descends.
Among an ever-rising tide of protesters who wish the Royal family ex-communication, death, and other nasties, Luke focuses intently on our bet. It’s a necessary distraction. He drops his plummy accent around me, though from the look on his face, it pains him almost as much as the rolling news footage on TV. I overhear him at one point him muttering to himself,Dinnae fash, lad, in various shades of Scots, from incoherent to downright offensive, as though testing out the combination of words filtered through his naturally deep voice.
And in return, I’m schooled in how to be a grander, more eloquent orator. My tongue twists along tongue-twisters until I stumble and slur. Luke’s favorite one to torture me with isThe rude red rabbit runs around the farmer’s rod. I have many questions about this sentence — why is the rabbit red? Why is it rude? Why is it running around a farmer’s rod? Is a farmer’s rod what I think it is? And it has to bethink, because I cannot for the life of mesayit. My best attempt beginsThe rude wed rabbit, and my worst attempt sounds like a drunken cacophony.
Every so often, usually while we all focus on the TV in horror, Luke will snap his fingers at me and demand I speak.
The wude red wabbit…
The rude wed wabbit…
Incorrect. Next.
When I’m not failing to recite tongue-twisters for a former prince, I’m being straightened andtsked at for slumping in my seat. At one point, I’m in a happy reading puddle with Danny on the rooftop, our legs comfortably tangled on wicker chairs and the rays of the warm afternoon sun sliding down our exposed skin.
Luke drags me upright until I’m positioned as nobly as though I were on the throne. And even worse, he tells me while fighting a flinch,Nope, I’m not gonna win with you sitting like that.
Gonna.
This is all my fault.
Privately, I don’t mind, because having Luke’s hands on me does things to me. Those warm, large palms skim my bare arms, cup my cheeks, tilt my chin, guide my hips to face him. Luke adjusts me like a porcelain doll and every time I find myself springing gooseflesh and battling shivers. If this were the olden days, my constant heart-pounding state would likely be described as a conniption.
Danny notices, because of course he does. He shakes his head in the background, almost in dismay, like my romantic life is a source of troubling exasperation for him.
But these incidents are happy, occasional pockets that Luke uses to take his mind off other issues in a summer dominated by despair. With faux concern, that’s how the media have defined it — the summer of despair, an alternative to thewinter of discontent— though you can tell from the glee deep in their voices that they’re all absolutely delighted with their new ratings boost.
Benji drums up supporters from all over the globe by having a slick, constantly updating social media presence. His social media is advertised daily, promoted under the guise of news. It’s magnified by the media, who treat him like a demi-god — a shocking, bacchanalian kind, spoken about in whispers as though unsure whether to be excited by the chaos he creates wherever he goes. Benji posts daily vlogs from the frontline, always with a sense of conspiratorial knowledge that adds him followers by the thousands: “If they’ve kept this hidden from us for so long, whatelsehave the elites been hiding? Trust me, Antis, together we’re gonna find out.”
In a rare sit-down TV interview, Benji describes the revolution with a wink and a sly smile, “If no one’s royal, then we all are.”
“Are you fuck?” Luke snaps at the television, and none of us are particularly shocked by this. As the protests lengthen, Luke’s language grows more and more corrupt. I note with mild amusement, however, that Luke will happily curse Benji with every violent expletive under the sun, but continue to wince whenever he attempts a contracted word likewanna.
The idea thatwe’re all royal nowis themodus operandiof Antiro, and their main gimmick to get people on board. In cities up and down the country, protesters become looters and then squatters. They refuse to budge from anywhere designated “royal” — palaces, castles, even shops that had been given the royal seal of approval. The name “Milton” is like waving a flag to a bull. Designer boutiques that regularly supplied pieces for Sophia Milton (a grand for a blouse alone) are broken into, looted and trashed. The protesters (or are they revolutionaries, or looters, or rioters? The media seems conflicted, choosing a new term every week in order to appear impartial) wear decorated cardboard crowns while doing so. It becomes their all-inclusive symbol — a paper crown that everyone can wear.
Streets bearing royal names are vandalized with new, cuddly, ultra-inclusive designations. Statues of kings and queens are ripped down in earnest, almost falling directly onto people’s heads, but it doesn’t matter if anyone’s killed or left brain-damaged, because the revolution marches on in its bloodthirsty hunger, more important than any one protester and desperate for its pound of flesh. The revolution is the beast, and dying for the charge, for that taste of martyrdom, is what any real Antiro protester would want.
Edinburgh is affected by the same political affliction, though the locals here seem to treat the protesters as an embarrassing nuisance. I quickly understand why when the festival rolls into town.
The city swells with newcomers and the population of Edinburgh doubles in size, crammed to capacity for a month by drunkards, idiots, and madmen. The locals reserve the same limp antipathy for the protesters to those who hand out fliers for their free one-woman confessional stand-up show.
A lively protest is not the city’s first rodeo. It’s an annual occurrence. When everything becomes a grab for attention, no one can be bothered.
Despite his new haircut and sense of fashion, Luke remains mostly indoors. He only ever ventures to the rooftop for air, where at first he had to be convinced there weren’t snipers lying in wait. And even then, he never goes out without a baseball cap to shield himself from view. But the rooftop becomes Luke’s favorite spot in the house, the place where he comes to escape the news and see for himself the people in the streets below.
“I’ll go outside with you,” Danny says in a friendly voice to him one day, the eighteenth Luke’s been stuck indoors. He sits at a chessboard by himself, scrutinizing the pieces from their last game. “We can get some air, see a show, whatever you want.”
Luke gazes down at the crowd in the white marquee across from us. The book festival is being held in the garden square opposite, and yes, I have already purchased a brand new to-read list. I even attended a talk from a respected broadcaster, who opined that the planet was in such a merry state of chaos because a race of aliens had taken control of all world leaders in the past five years in an attempt to destabilize Earth. I thought to myself how pleased Danny would be to learn of this.
“I dunno,” Luke says, without even hesitating over the contraction, his voice more confident now. “There’s nowhere for me to go.”
“Then we’ll go nowhere,” Danny says simply, and reassembles the board. “Fancy a game?”
Over the top of my book, as I watch Luke stalk toward the chessboard with a sigh, I note there’s been a shift within the house. Luke’s grown closer to Danny, bonding over endless games of chess like actual proper companions. Not enough to cast Luke adrift from the other chiefs, though it certainly seems to be heading in that direction. Out of guilt, I wonder if I have something to do with that.
Because the intensity of our shared evenings doesn’t lessen. Where I sleep alternates every night. With Rory, with Finlay, or by myself — each night is usually ended in orgasm.
