Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction (2 page)

I commiserated with him and told him that, until very recently, I was the full-time father of two boys, but that the British Army was looking after Glenn, the seventeen-year-old, and the nine-year-old, William, had gone to live with his mother in Nigeria.

B’astard looked at me enviously and said, ‘You’re young to have your kids off your hands.’

I told him I was thirty-four and a half and that it was time I put myself first for a change.

After B’astard pointed out the integral granite cheese-board in the kitchen worktop, I agreed to buy the apartment.

Before we left I went out on the balcony for one last look. The sun was setting behind the distant multi-storey car park. A fox walked along the opposite towpath with a Tesco’s carrier bag in its mouth. A brown creature (a water vole, I think) slipped into the canal and swam out of sight. The swans floated majestically by. The biggest swan looked me straight in the eye, as if to say, ‘Welcome to your new home, Adrian.’

10 p.m.

I went into the kitchen, turned the volume down on the radio and informed my parents that I would be moving out of their spare room and into a loft apartment in the Old Battery Factory on Rat Wharf in Leicester at the earliest opportunity.

My mother could not hide her delight at this news.

My father sneered, ‘The Old Battery Factory? Your grandad worked there once, but he had to leave after a rat bite turned septic. We thought he’d have to have his leg off.’

My mother said, ‘Rat Wharf? Isn’t that where the rough sleepers’ hostel is opening next year?’

I said, ‘You’ve been misinformed. The whole area is being transformed into Leicester’s cultural quarter.’

When I asked my mother if she would run me up some curtains for the glass-brick lavatory, she said sarcastically, ‘Sorry, but I think you’re confusing me with somebody who keeps a needle and thread in the house.’

At 7 o’clock my father turned the sound up on the radio and we listened to the news. Britain’s military chiefs were demanding to know what their role would be if Britain goes to war with Iraq. Share prices had fallen again.

My father banged his head on the table and said, ‘I’ll kill that bastard financial adviser who talked me into putting my pension into Equitable Life.’

When the
Archers
theme tune played, my parents reached for their cigarettes, lit up and sat listening to the agricultural soap opera with their mouths slightly open.
They are doing things together in yet another attempt to save their marriage.

My mother and father are elderly baby-boomers of fifty-nine and sixty-two respectively. I keep waiting for them to give in to old age and take up the uniform that other old people adopt. I would like to see them wearing beige car coats, polyester slacks and, in my mother’s case, a grey cauliflower perm, but neither of them will give in. They are still squeezing themselves into stonewashed jeans and black leather fitted jackets.

My father thinks that by growing his grey hair long he will be mistaken for somebody who used to be in the music business. The poor fool is deceiving himself. He will always look like a retired storage-heater salesman.

He is forced to wear a baseball cap at all times now because he has lost most of the hair on top of his head, causing a youthful folly to be revealed: on his stag night, after he had drunk ten pints of Everards Bitter, he agreed to have his head shaved and ‘I am a nutter’ tattooed in green ink on his scalp.

Fortunately the stag night was held a week before the wedding, but it explains why, in my parents’ only wedding photograph, my father looks like the convict Abel Magwitch from
Great Expectations
.

My father has had his other tattoos removed on the NHS, but they will not fund the green ink one. For that he would have to go to Harley Street for laser treatment and pay over £1,000. My mother has been urging him to take out a bank loan, but my father says that it’s easier and cheaper to wear a cap. My mother says that
she can’t bear reading ‘I am a nutter’ when my father has his back turned to her in bed, which is most of the time apparently.

11 p.m.

Had a bath using my mother’s quince and apricot aromatherapy oil. The stuff floated on top of the water, looking like the oil slick that killed most of the wildlife in Nova Scotia. It took a quarter of an hour under the shower before I was able to wash the gunk off my body.

Used two mirrors to measure bald spot. It is now the size of a Trebor Extra Strong Mint.

Checked emails. There was one from my sister, Rosie, telling me that she is thinking of leaving Hull University; she is disenchanted with nano-biology. She said that Simon, her boyfriend, needed her full-time help to overcome his crack habit. She asked me not to tell our parents of her dilemma as they were both totally ‘prejudiced’ about crack addicts.

There were the usual spam deals from firms offering to stretch my penis.

New Moon

My mother moped around the house in her dressing gown all day. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon I asked her if she was going to brush her hair and get dressed. She said, ‘Why should I? Your dad wouldn’t notice if I walked around naked with a rose between my teeth.’

My father sat all day next to the stereo, playing and replaying his Roy Orbison records.

Their marriage is obviously a dead parrot. It is like living in a Bergman film. Perhaps I should tell them that their precious daughter is unlikely to win a Nobel Prize as she is shunning the laboratory and embracing drug rehabilitation. That would liven them up a bit and get them talking to each other. Ha ha ha.

Spent the afternoon writing letters. As I was about to leave the house to walk to the post box, my mother said, ‘You are the only person I know who uses snail mail.’

I replied, ‘You are the only person I know who still believes that smoking is good for your lungs.’

She said, ‘Who are you writing to?’

I didn’t want to tell her that I was writing to Jordan and David Beckham, so I hurried out of the house before she could see the names and addresses on the envelopes.

Jordan

Wisteria Walk

c/o
Daily Star

Ashby de la Zouch

Express Newspaper Group

Leicestershire

10 Lower Thames Street

London
EC3

October 6th 2002

Dear Jordan

I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people’s lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called
Offally Good!
Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.

I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. Sunday afternoons are good for me.

By the way, I was talking with my father about your breasts recently. We both agreed that they are very intimidating. My father said a man could fall into that cleavage and not be found for days.

My friend Parvez described them as being like Weapons of Mass Destruction, and my chiropractor predicted that you would suffer from lower-back problems in the future due to the weight you were carrying on your ribcage.

It is rumoured that you are contemplating having even bigger implants inserted. I beg you to reconsider. Please contact me at the above address. I’m afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title:
Celebrity and Madness
).

I remain, madam,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

A. A. Mole

David Beckham

Wisteria Walk

c/o Manchester United Football Club

Ashby de la Zouch

Old Trafford

Leicestershire

Manchester M16

October 6th 2002

Dear David

Please take a few moments to read this letter. I am not an inane football fan requesting a signed photo.

I am writing a book about celebrity and how it ruins people’s lives. I know what I am talking about. I was a celebrity in the 1990s and had my own show on cable TV called
Offally Good!
Then the fame machine spat me out, as it will spit you out one day.

I would like to arrange an interview on a mutually convenient date. You would have to come here to Leicester because I work full-time. A Sunday afternoon would be good for me.

And please don’t take offence at what I’m about to say – perhaps you were away when grammar was taught at school – but you do not seem to know the very basics of grammatical sentence construction, i.e. last night on television you said, ‘I seen Victoria on a video when she were a Spice Girl an’, y’know, I like said to me mate, I fink I’ve just saw the gel I’m gonna marry.’

The sentence should read: I SAW Victoria on a video when she was a Spice Girl, and I said to my mate, I think I’ve just SEEN the girl I’m going to marry.

Please contact me at the above address. I’m afraid I cannot offer a fee or expenses, but you will of course receive a free copy of the book (working title:
Celebrity and Madness
).

I remain, sir,

Your most humble and obedient servant,

A. A. Mole

Rang my solicitor, David Barwell, on the way to work. His secretary, Angela, said, ‘Mr Barwell is busy having an asthma attack due to the new carpet that has been fitted over the weekend.’

I advised her to expect a correspondence from Mark
B’astard regarding the lease on Unit 4, The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf, Grand Union Canal, Leicester.

She said bitterly, ‘I shan’t bother telling Mr Barwell. It’s me that does all the work. All he does is sit behind his desk and fiddle with his inhaler.’

I had to wait ten minutes outside the shop; Mr Carlton-Hayes had trouble finding a parking space. I watched him walk up the High Street. He looked as if he was on his last legs. I don’t know how much longer he can carry on with the shop. This is just my luck.

He said, ‘Terribly sorry to keep you waiting, my dear.’

I took the keys from him and opened the door. Once inside, he leaned against the recent biographies to catch his breath.

I said to him, ‘If we had a few chairs and sofas in here like I suggested, you could sit down and be comfortable.’

He said, ‘We’re not Habitat, Adrian, my dear, we’re booksellers.’

I said, ‘Customers expect to be able to sit down in bookshops nowadays, and they also expect a cup of coffee and to be able to visit the lavatory.’

He said, ‘A properly brought-up person micturates and defecates and drinks a cup of coffee before they leave their house.’

We had the usual quotient of mad people in during the day. A steam train enthusiast with a ginger beard and sellotaped spectacles asked me if we had a copy of the 1954 Trans-Siberian timetable in Russian. I showed him our Railway section and invited him to search through the mildewed railway ephemera that Mr Carlton-Hayes insists on keeping in stock.

A woman with a crew cut and dangly earrings asked if we were interested in buying a first edition of
The Female Eunuch
. I wouldn’t have bought it. It was in very poor condition, missing its dust jacket, and the pages were covered in annotations and exclamation marks in red ink. But Mr Carlton-Hayes intervened and offered the woman £15. Sometimes I feel as though I work in a charity shop rather than Leicester’s oldest-established second-hand and antiquarian bookshop.

However, just as we were about to close a young woman came in and asked if we had a copy of
Soft Furnishings for Your Regency Doll’s House
. As far as I could make out, she had a passably good figure and a not-bad face. She had the thin wrists and fingers I like in a woman. So I spent some time pretending to search the racks.

I said, ‘Are you sure such a title exists?’

She said that she had once owned a copy but had lent it to a fellow doll’s house hobbyist who had emigrated to Australia, taking the book with her. I commiserated with her and listed all the books I had loaned over the years and had never seen again. She told me that she had a collection of eighteen doll’s houses and that she had made most of the soft furnishings herself, including upholstering the tiny chairs and hanging the tiny curtains. I mentioned that I would need some curtains making when I moved into my new loft apartment and asked her if she would be interested. She said the longest curtains she had ever made were only six inches in length.

Her hair could do with a colour-wash to brighten it up a bit, but her eyes are a pretty blue behind her glasses.
I told her that I would search the Internet tonight when I got home and asked her to call back tomorrow.

I asked for a name and telephone contact number.

‘My name is M. Flowers,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got a mobile, because of the health risk, but you can contact me on my parents’ landline.’ And she gave me the number.

Mr Carlton-Hayes said, ‘She works in Country Organics, the health food shop in the marketplace.’

We went into the back. I counted the takings; Mr Carlton-Hayes sat behind his desk, smoking his pipe and reading a book entitled
Persia: The Birthplace of Civilization
.

I asked him what had happened to Persia.

He said, ‘It turned into Iraq, my dear.’

When I got home to Ashby de la Zouch, I hurried to my room, switched my laptop on and typed ‘Soft Furnishings for Your Regency Doll’s House’ into Google. It came up with 281 sites. I clicked on Wood
Books.com
and they offered me a title,
Making Period Doll’s House Furniture
by Derek and Sheila Rowbottom, but they didn’t actually mention Regency, so I tried McMurray’s Books, who offered me two which might be suitable,
Soft Furnishings for Your Doll’s House
at $14.95 and
Miniature Embroidery for the Georgian Doll’s House: Queen Anne, Early and Late Georgian and Regency Styles
at $21.95.

I immediately rang the telephone number given to me by M. Flowers.

A man answered. He boomed, ‘Michael Flowers here. To whom am I speaking?’