The Day The Queen Vomited

A Tale of the Perils of Hubris

Queen Elizabeth the Second, sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, sat at the breakfast table, poking listlessly at the asparagus. A look of restless dissatisfaction crossed her proud patrician face, a look noticed by her husband, who was leaning back in his own chair, having just completed an entirely satisfactory muffin of his own.

“What is it, Lizzy?” Phillip asked, filled with concern for the woman who, as far as he could remember, was his wife. “You don’t seem yourself lately.”

“Really, Phillip?” the Queen shot back irritably. “Who DO I seem like, then? Eleanor of Aquitaine? Graham Taylor? Who?”

“There’s no need for that tone,” replied Phillip, trying to conceal just how hurt he was by his wife’s acerbic retort. “I was only asking.”

Elizabeth sighed and poked at her hash brown. “What’s happened to us, Phillip?” she asked. “Where did we go?”

“What do you mean, Lizzy?” said Phillip, a man of compassion and humanity who was nonetheless a total stranger to emotional nuance and subtext. “We’re where we’ve always been.”

“You don’t understand at all, do you?”

“Well, no,” admitted the prince. “I’m going to need some guidance.”

“Look around you!” Elizabeth cried, waving her fork above her head with miserable abandon. “Surrounded by luxury, subservience, the satisfaction of every desire.”

“Yes,” Phillip nodded. “Marvellous, isn’t it?”

“No!” She banged her fist on the table, sending a boiled egg flying through the air into the hair of a nearby footman. “We are so busy being rich and powerful, Phillip, that we’ve forgotten how to be ALIVE.”

“I just don’t see what you’re driving at, old girl. I’m certainly alive, and so are you. Getting on a bit, of course, but one can hardly call that unexpected.”

The Queen gritted her teeth. It was infuriating being married to a man as obtuse as Phillip sometimes. Not that the physical pleasures didn’t more than make up for it, but it was tiresome at moments like this.

“Look,” she said, leaning across the table and jabbing the butter knife in Phillip’s direction. “Do you remember when we first met?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Remember how passionate we were? And how daring? Remember the fun we used to have?”

Phillip smiled, gazing into the middle distance as joyous recollections floated before his mind’s eye. “Ah, yes,” he murmured. “I do remember, old bean. I do indeed…”

“Remember the Chelmsford Gala?” Elizabeth asked, a spark of mischief in her eye. “How during that old duke’s appallingly tedious speech, we ducked behind the ice sculpture and rogered each other like hamsters in full evening dress?”

“Ah, what scamps we were!” the prince cried, clapping his hands in delighted remembrance. “And do you remember the shooting party up at Bumber Strickland-Hesiod’s place? You slipped a finger up the old Khyber just as I was drawing a bead on a pheasant, and I ended up gunning down three beaters by mistake instead.”

“Ah, it was worth it, though, Phillip!” Elizabeth enthused, leaping to her feet. She rushed around the table and gave her husband an energetic hug around the neck. “To give you a single transcendent orgasm, my darling, I would be willing to see a hundred servants shot dead on the moors.”

“I feel the same way, dear heart.”

“Do you remember, Phillip,” Elizabeth asked as she leaned against the breakfast chamber wall and drew a deep, sensuous breath at the memory, “when we met with the prime minister of New Zealand, and at dinner you said you’d dropped your spoon, and when you ducked down to retrieve you gave me the most jolly thorough southerly munching I’d ever had in my life.”

“How could I forget?” replied the prince, becoming visibly tumescent even in his morning suit. “The PM told me later he’d suspected some jiggery-pokery was going on during the meal, but hated to spoil our fun by mentioning anything.”

“Thank goodness for him!” the Queen smiled with a purer delight than she had smiled with for many years. “And thank goodness for dear Queen Beatrix — she saw us stark naked in that duck pond, choking each other, and never said a word.”

“No — she just stood and watched the whole thing,” remembered Phillip fondly. “Good old Bea.”

“Why can’t we be like that again, Phillip?” Elizabeth asked eagerly, grabbing her husband lapels and pulling him close to her.

“Ah, Lizzy,” Phillip shook his head, lightly motorboating the Queen by accident, “we’re too old for that sort of thing, surely.”

“Age is just a number! Isn’t that right, Hemsley?”

“Yes, m’um,” replied the under-butler in stately tones. “Merely a number, your majesty.”

“You see, Phil, my own crinkled Greek God: is there any reason our declining years should not be as euphoric and filled with adventure and pleasure as our youth?”

Prince Phillip rose in a princely — not kingly, but still pretty good — fashion, and raised a fist clenched in defiance. “Damme, you’re right!” he cried. “The passage of years should never deny a man the carnality that is his birthright, whether he be the highest-born of prince-consorts, or the humblest of dirty foreigners. One day, Lizzy, we shall die: but until we die, we shall LIVE!”

“Oh yes, Phillip, yes!” the Queen gasped breathlessly. She pulled him in for a deep, urgent, almost-violent kiss, before pushing him roughly away. She smiled wickedly as she tore off her dress and tossed her crown aside, shaking out her short, tightly-coiffed hair with reckless abandon. Standing before him naked as the day, all those decades ago, that she was born, she beckoned him with one regal finger.

The prince said a silent prayer of thanks, and began to remove his own clothes. Yanking off his tie, he stumbled slightly as he shimmied stiffly out of his trousers and fumbled with the buttons of his pristine linen shirt. Eventually he, too, stood naked before his fellow royal and the dozen or so servants standing loyal and silent around the room.

Queen Elizabeth the Second took a moment to drink in the sight of her beloved prince, nude and unrepentant, standing to attention in every way possible in preparation for a ferocious session atop the breakfast trays. Her still-keen old eyes scanned every detail of his elderly body: every wrinkle, every crevice, every sag and bag and loose flapping unmentionable.

At that moment, the Queen’s mouth opened, and the erstwhile contents of her stomach lurched frantically up the alimentary canal and came cascading out into the fresh air of the palace. The breakfast room was soon awash with royal chunder, as Elizabeth’s intestinal tract spasmed and spasmed and spasmed yet again, sending great gouts of semi-digested food and digestive juices sloshing noisily across every clean surface. The servants stood in stolid silence and waited for the astounding display of gastric evacuation to come to a halt. Which it did, several minutes later, with every inch of the floor soaked and every nook and cranny of the Prince of Edinburgh’s pale and suddenly dispirited body filled with the detritus of his wife’s viscera.

The Queen slowly reached down to the table and took up a glass of what was still mostly water. She took a long, careful draught, then set the glass down again. She cleared her throat. “Well,” she said, the word hanging in the air for what seemed like an age. “Do clear the…er…breakfast things away, won’t you, Hemsley?”

“Yes, m’um,” the under-butler replied obediently, resolutely staring straight ahead.

“Yes. Well. I’m just off for a bath. Phillip, I’ll see you in the drawing room, later, I’m sure.”

“Yes, Lizzy.”

“And…yes. Well. I am sure we shall never mention this again, shall we?”

The chorus came from all around the room: “No, your majesty.”

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