Eliza was a junior journalist who had just completed her stagiaire at a big news corporation. They had decided to keep her on, thrilling the young professional whose dreams have only been about being a journalist. Her favourite ever quote was 'speaking truth to power'.
On her first day as a real journalist she was to be assigned her first assignment. Eliza walked into the editor's office. What would it be, she wondered, as she sat down. Local government corruption? Corporate malpractice? Social injustice?
'We've been following events for some time,' her editor began, a tall supremely imposing man. 'A historic, singular, event, rather, is about to reach its conclusion. Once in a lifetime, Eliza.'
Joyful disbelief! Her dream was coming true before her eyes.
'We want you to write the Queen's obituary.'
Liza's smile lowered till it expressed puzzlement.
'The queen? But I just saw her hosting a brunch. Has she died?'
'No not...yet. We don't have an exact ETA of her passing but one has to be prepared. Every serious newspaper has to be prepared.'
'But this isn't exactly my field of expertise - the royals? I don't even know where to begin.'
'It's okay. You'll just carry on from where your predecessor left off. Eliza. No more buts. I have high hopes for you.’
'I suppose I could see how one would have to be prepared for such an event,' Eliza said to herself in her little cubicle in the large news office. 'In this twenty four hour media cycle one has to be quick and ready. Weird though to write an obituary for a person still alive. Weird and…morbid.'
She opened the file that was sent to her, scrolled down and saw the brunch the queen had just undertaken was mentioned at the end, described as her last official ceremony before she passed. She realised she would have to add to it as if it was a diary, scrapping the last event written in bold with a more recent one as they came along.
The excitement had dimmed a little, diaries excite no one, but flared up again as she thought of the monumental assignment she had been given. The death of a monarch truly was a historical event. It would put some weight on her name if she was the one who contributed and effectively finished the obituary. Millions would read it.
'I am loving. I am positive. I am ambitious,' whispered Eliza at her new desk, before she started going through her assignment. Her daily choice of affirmations.
Eliza had been given a list of connections, sources that would help keep her up to date. A spreadsheet with names and designations, ranked according to usefulness.
The agitation of a new job and dreams realised made Eliza's fingers tremble as she typed an email to 'David', a butler who was very 'in the know', asking him what the queen was up to. Once sent she looked through the other contacts, wondering if she should ask them too what the Queen was up to. A man approached her cubicle and she looked up. This was a muscular guy with a tight dress shirt. Though Eliza did her internship there she hadn't met everyone who worked there and this person was new to her.
'Hello there. I heard you were a freshie and I wanted to say hello. My name is George.' He stretched out his hand. He then added rather queerly: 'The second. George the second.'
'Oh,' said Eliza, flustered. She put her fingers on her neck first, stared at him, an Indian man with an Indian accent named George ...the second… and then shook his hand. 'My name is Eliza,' she then said, crimson faced. 'Did you say the second?'
'Yeah.'
'Was there a first?'
'No.'
'Oh. Then why -'
George bent closer and whispered rapidly:
'Have you been given the Queen brief?'
'The Queen's -'
'Are you writing her…hagiography?' Eliza thought for a moment.
'I am yes.'
'You're so lucky,' said George wistfully. 'I wish they would have given it to me so I could dedicate myself to her hagiography like she dedicated her life to me, to us, to service; but all I got was international reports and the occasional financial column. I wanted that brief when Joseph retired.'
'Why didn't you ask for it?'
She quickly scrolled back to the top of the obituary and saw three names, Joseph being the last.
'I did but I don't know. He said they needed me for the international stuff. I swear I would have written the best hagiography in history if…I lived long enough to see her….pass.'
'Why did you say that like you wouldn't?'
'It seems she's…sturdy. Joseph started, or rather, continued, the hagiography thirty years ago, when she was sixty. And he reached retirement before it actually happened or…supposed to happen, I mean, it should never happen. When you think that they've started a hagiography so long ago and still she hasn't…it makes you wonder if she ever will… '
'This whole thing is so morbid.'
'Lord knows I want her to live forever.'
'I don't. How can I only do this until I retire. I need to do...more - is this hagiography the only thing Joseph ever did here?'
George the second nodded firmly his whole bearing asking why anyone would want to do anything else. Eliza got frightened at her fate being the same as Joseph's…
Towards the end of her day she received a message back from David that the Queen didn't have any formal engagements that day or that week. She wasn't strong enough. A little flutter went through Eliza as she read this. The queen wasn't strong enough.
She read on as it continued that the Queen instead watched her great grandson walk his first footsteps in her private residence into the outstretched arms of her son, next in line for the throne. Eliza opened up the document, the queen's obituary. The sentence concerning the queen's final days began as:
'The Queen, in her illustrious reign, dedicated her entire life to service, her last event being a brunch with the King of Burundi…'
Eliza looked at it, erased the words in bold and wrote:
'The Queen, in her illustrious reign, dedicated her entire life to service, yet her last days were spent watching her great grandson take his first steps towards her son, the future king of England.'
She perused and mused on the last couple pages, paragraphs and lines. She then made the last sentence bold, indicating that this last line was subject to change depending on the queen's life or death.
Eliza started tapping her desk. Normally, a journalist would be active and pursuing news, almost creating news themselves. Yet she was in a position where the news was already made for her, the article already written, where she would have to wait for something to happen - the death of a monarch.
What was she to do? All around her she heard talks of different types of investigations, criminal, political, environmental, sociological; journalists hot on the tracks of some kind of exposé or scoop while she would have to wait for an email from a butler or a dog walker associated with the queen. This became a daily occurrence for her.
Every day she would come into work, reread the same obituary, waiting for it to become valid with the person's death; email the same people, ask how long it would be, was told she was alive - but sickly, always sickly. But what if she wasn't that sick, that she was just weak and old, not ill and dying…then what? She was getting agitated, frustrated, writing one sentence a day, two if it was eventful, and for what? It could be years yet and she had dreams, was ambitious; loving, positive…
Every so often the editor would pass by her desk and ask how it was getting along, standing in front of her, a tall overpowering figure who had 'high, high hopes' for a person who wished to rise high. Eliza would respond with 'one sentence a day' and then ask if she could, maybe, work on something else when she wasn't working on the obituary, which was after all just one sentence a day.
'No, no. Focus on this. We need all your energy on this.'
'But one sentence a day?'
'Of course one sentence, one historic sentence a day. Who knows. It may be the last sentence… Remember. High hopes!'
Eliza would return an unsure smile but comforted nonetheless. A tall imposing figure does that to you, stopping her from tendering her resignation or simply demanding for a different brief. He was counting on her.
The living queen was beginning to affect a change in Eliza. She always had been a young positive idealist who would meditate and use affirmations, trying to manifest good fortune and attributes like a lot of the people from her generation because good things come to those who ask for them, ask for them loudly, incessantly, resolutely. Eliza stopped doing that, and if she did, it came out wrong, at the wrong time because a stupendous, forceful obsession had taken over all her thoughts.
She began to follow the queen's goings and doings and viewed them with a particular slant.
'I am positive.'
If the queen was cutting a ribbon Eliza would watch with chewed up finger tips wishing that the queen would slip, fall on top of the scissors, penetrating her vital organs.
'I am loving.'
Maybe the queen would give her great grand son a hug, not realising he had a virus, harmless to him, but fatal to her.
'I am ambitious.'
If the queen had a dinner somewhere, she would think of unsuspected allergies or some crazy plot involving poison.
Eliza had a thing for old tragedies by Pushkin and could not stop inventing different ways for the queen to die.
She would send a hundred emails a day asking for updates. Most of the time she would not receive a reply. She would read the royalist papers like a fanatic looking for good news, something that signalled the end.
One day she picked up the Spectator and saw the queen smiling with the Queen of Jordan. Suddenly something struck her like a vision.
'The queen will outlive me,' she said to herself, shocked, choking on the silent words, ludicrous if one really thought about it since the queen was ninety five and Eliza twenty one. 'Of course she will. A perfect being like that lives forever. A perfect servant must serve forever.'
The continuous re-reading of the hagiography had deified the queen for Eliza. Royalty hovers between mankind and eternal being, and the queen, the eternal servant, had become closer to God, the eternal being, than she was to mankind, which meant the living queen was not subject to the same laws as mankind, and the death that is its ending.
Depressed, distraught, inconsolable, she went to work, crying on the way there. She had wasted six months of her life waiting and wishing for the death of a person who would not and could not die, when she should have been doing more journalistic things, living her dream, speaking truth to power but you can't speak truth to the most powerful because they are the truth.
Crying, not checking her phone, not hearing those around her on the train, she reached the office having managed to compose herself a little, though her eyes remained red.
She entered the offices which had a different ambience than before, more somber yet strangely electric at the same time. Several people turned to look at her including the editor who ushered her to his office.
'I told you I had high hopes for you. And now we're here,' the editor began, genuinely sad.
'Huh?'
'Your obituary?'
'What about it?'
'Since the queen has died we're going -'
Eliza screamed such a cry that was like a witch's shriek of triumph and then started jumping, laughing, hooting and hollering for joy. A day had come that she only recently dubbed impossible, a few minutes prior even. The editor, aghast, tried to calm her down, embarrassed because everyone was looking into the window of his office to see what was going on, with looks asking how anyone could be so happy on a day like this.
Eliza, an elated Eliza, recovered herself somewhat. Smiling a huge smile she got her phone out where a copy of the obituary was and opened it. She took off the bold on the last line, which was something about a new government, and told the editor he would find it in his email box momentarily. Time for Eliza to speak some truth to power…
'Good, good. Thank you,' a frowning editor replied. 'I'll make allowances for this time of conflict. In any case we have no time to waste since news comes thick and fast these days. No time to waste on the release when appropriate and the preparation likewise. Now that we have a new king, we must prepare, prepare for his…fate. And really he doesn't look too well, even for a seventy three year old. We have to start with his obituary like we did with her majesty's and this time it's you who will do so Liza. Two deaths of a monarch. In one lifetime? Unheard of!'
'You want me to wait for another…'
'I have high hopes for you!'
Four years later the king died, and a journalist was held for his murder. When asked why she did it the haggard regicide said that she couldn't wait any longer…and something else about truth to power. Her editor was contacted for a response and his only words were that he had high hopes for her, always did, until she disappointed him.
