Scenes from the state funeral

We live in the queue, are the queue, its patient wending, its democratic plod.

You don’t have any particular desire to file past the Queen’s coffin as it lies in state at Westminster Hall, but you don’t really have any choice in the matter either. One morning, you pop out to the shops for a few cans of cold, refreshing gravy, and find that the street outside is full of people with coloured wristbands, standing patiently on both sides of the road. A few cops in yellow jackets pace up and down the line as it shuffles slowly forwards. Volunteers hand out bottled water. There’s a bank of Portaloos by your front gate. It’s the first bright, slightly chilly day of autumn, and all the shelves at the supermarket are empty. A friendly sign by the entrance tells you that as a gesture of respect following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we will not be stocking any products today. We invite you to wander these empty aisles in a spirit of mournful reflection. Something else is doing your grieving for you; every app on your phone has turned funeral black. In the windows of chicken shops, where they usually advertise the price of six wings and a Coke, screens show the late monarch’s dignified beak instead.

So you walk back to your flat, only to discover that the stairwell is full of stoic standing figures too, and so is the hallway, and so is your flat. The steward by your door shrugs a miniature apology. The streets are full, she explains, the whole of London’s been backed up. The queue now stretches down every street in the capital, and it’s expanding into the Home Counties at an alarming rate. To prevent the entire country being consumed, they had to start routing it through buildings. There are ten people jammed into your kitchen. Mourners make a ring around your bed. Across the street, silhouettes stand black on the rooftops, waiting. Nowhere to put yourself that is not, in some sense, part of the line. So when it shuffles forwards, you shuffle with it. You have joined the queue.

Overhead, the RAF are spraying London with a chemical defoliant, so all the trees stand gaunt and spindly to match the national mood. You have been given a wristband. The queue carries you by steady inches in and out of the other flats in your building, through schools, shops, over the rattling walkways of the electrical substation hunched over the banks of the canal. Sometimes a truck grunts past on the road, its bed piled high with dead swans. Those long necks lolling, slit, a darkening red gash ripped through white feathers just above the breastbone, like a cross of St George. Gone to join their mistress. You file through sewage treatment plants and pissy underpasses. The queue is taking you deeper into the shambling backlands of London. Rusty tracts, chain-link fences enclosing scaly wastes of gravel and brackish puddles fringed with slime. Low white warehouses: M HUSSAIN IMPORTS LTD. Behold this kingdom! The queue tramps in and out of retail parks. WORLD OF DOILIES. GANGRENEMART. Shouldn’t you be headed in, converging on the city’s crunchy photogenic core? Not yet, the wardens explain. The queue is too long; you’ve been placed in a holding pattern, spiralling anticlockwise around the edges of London, against the sun.

One-third of the British population have, at some point in their lives, encountered the Queen. In the flesh, they say. She opened their local shopping centre or visited their kids’ school. Twenty million people have seen it: grey strings, flesh, tubed in grey skin. Everyone around you in the queue seems to be one of the twenty million; now they want to stand in the presence of that flesh one last time. Mark had seen her scattering breadcrumbs by the railway tracks in Dollis Hill. Gregor had seen her shoplifting a pint of semi-skimmed milk and a copy of Take a Break from the Nisa Local down the end of his road. She doesn’t carry money, he explains. Penny, with her blue-tinged teeth, says that the Queen was her neighbour for a few years when she lived in Eastbourne. She was quiet, kept herself to herself, but sometimes she’d put her rubbish in Penny’s bins, even though there was a low brick wall between their cottages and it should have been obvious which bins belonged to which property. Penny would open her bin to find it full of empty cans of Pedigree Chum. For the corgis, you see. Once they’d had an argument about it on the street. Yasmin says she’d wandered blearily into her own kitchen late at night to find the Queen in her cupboards, nibbling at Hobnob crumbs. Oh, Yasmin had said, I’m sorry, your majesty. The Queen had smiled; she was totally disarming. It’s quite alright, she’d said, and scurried away with a swish of her furry tail.

It’s all very British, this queue. This is how we Brits respond to a moment of national crisis, by standing in an orderly queue. Sharing our sandwiches. Making small talk. Waiting our turn. We hardly need policing; the cops seem to be just as much in the gentle tide of it all as everyone else. Nobody thinks to complain; there’s just one sound several miles down the line, a baby’s crimson scream. Most of the houses you wander into have already been ransacked. By the time your section of the queue files through the back door the sofas have been reduced to heaps of synthetic stuffing, the TV’s been smashed, books ripped down the spine, clothes shredded, paper torn from the walls like sodden bandages. There’s always more to do; the cops, trying to be helpful, point out whichever objects are still intact. In one home, you watch as a plastic kettle is slammed against the kitchen counter until it splinters into limescale-scratchy shards. Or you can still rip up the carpets. Gnaw out reams of polypropylene fluff, maul at the carpet with your teeth. Someone takes a hammer to a toilet bowl and pisses in the tank, to quick silent congratulatory nods. You file through homes flooded, lit by sparking wires. Shit-smeared walls, cumglobs bejewelling doorknobs, doors kicked in. Then the vandals sip tea from their thermoses and wait. The same thing has probably already happened to your flat, but you discover that you don’t much care any more. Homes: we no longer need them. We live in the queue, are the queue, its patient wending, its democratic plod.

The line doesn’t stop when it gets dark. Dawn catches you soldiering through the wreckage of a dentists’ surgery, trying to eat the plastic model of some well-aligned teeth, trying to eat all their nice pink slimy putty. You are not feeling quite right. You keep touching your neck, and it’s all tender, swollen. When you loop past another segment of the same queue, heading in the opposite direction, you see it on them too. The mourners wave limp British flags and take turns pushing the pram with angry bulbs on the sides of their necks. Some blossom into lesions. Ragged petals of diseased skin, corpse-pale, surround each open sore. Cervical tuberculous lymphadenitis: scrofula. Edward the Confessor was the first to stroke the scrofulous: the touch of a trueborn English sovereign is the magic cure for his evil. You have to get there, to the palace. Bound up the catafalque, wrench open the coffin, and rub your feverish skin against her hands. Then you’ll be well again. You have to reach her before they put her in the ground, and afterwards you’ll queue for something else.

When the day of the funeral comes, you’ve still not made it to Westminster. You have arrived in some desert region of the world, where sands sparkle sharp in the morning heat. You keep walking. Everyone holds their phones out in front of them, watching the ceremony as they plod. Such lovely music: we can still do gravity in this country. I am the resurrection and the life. They place the Queen on a gun carriage, and the queue marches on. She’d planned every detail of this: she wanted to be mounted like a piece of artillery. Maybe, once the procession’s over, the soldiers might tilt the coffin upwards and fire her remains off into the sky.

You’re walking six abreast now, an endless train snaking through endless empty space, all in time to the drums sounding from everyone’s phones. As the queue files over the dunes it sets off small cascades of dust, revealing the deeper strata beneath. Layers of purple sand, the purple of deep viscera, of wombs. Turquoise lizards dart bowlegged into the newly excavated heaps and come out again with big beetles in their mouths. The cops and the stewards have vanished, but here and there the bleached remnants of a Portaloo still rise out of the wasteland. Rusted old security barriers. Flakes of masonry: Portland stone. The procession marches down the Mall and you march through the desert. Ranks and ranks of military men walking without any particular destination. Horns blare, Big Ben bongs, and maybe it’s the heat, but you’re no longer sure which sluggish crawl is which. You are wearing a bearskin. You are wearing a gilded Albert helmet with white plumes. You are wearing a heavy jacket embroidered with the Royal Standard in gold thread, and the sun above you feels unfamiliar, bigger, more bloated, burning a bloodier red than the one you once knew. Far away, they carry her coffin to St George’s Chapel. Stately gothic filigree in its green green gardens. Elizabeth II is lowered, slowly, under its stones.

It’s hard not to feel pride, even as the lesions on your neck seep milky discharge, even with your feet burning and your legs made of wood. You don’t know where it is you’re marching now, or what could possibly be over the horizon, but you’re glad. The body of England cries out to welcome its Queen. A nation drawn from every corner of the earth, of every faith, of every speech, bound by oven chips and spitting rain and you, my liege, great sovereign of our furrowed fields, warbling hedgerows, dusty lanes— of the pylon-lands, where steel giants march the ley lines and threnodies crackle on the wires between— dread empress of our laybys, pebbledash suburbs, our naked estates, stripped of their plastic cladding, lady of the rot, of the big Tesco outside town— victorious, glorious, holder of the orb, of all that lies from the farthest outcrops to Dover’s final ragged tooth… This tomb, this England! This realm, this earth, this soil, this mulch, this England! This ground receives you! Put it in! Deeper! In!