Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction (39 page)

Mrs Garvey was of the opinion that this was an urban myth, similar to the one about the dead granny transported on the roof of a car in a roll of carpet.

A listener from Wolverhampton rang the programme convinced otherwise. He shouted that swan-eating
asylum-seekers could expect a £5,000 fine or six months in prison.

Which, if true, seems to me to be unnecessarily harsh. Surely swans are vermin.

Letter from Glenn.

Dear Dad

Sorry I haven’t wrote, but there is not much time, and when we are not on patrol we are eating and doing our washing and trying to get some kip. The Yanks are lucky, they have got air conditioning, but we have not got it, I don’t know why.

Me and Robbie got the boots this morning, they are great, thanks a lot, and the pick and mix went down well with the lads, thanks a lot again.

Dad, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Half the people are glad Saddam has gone, and half the people are trying to kill us. Trouble is; we can’t tell which is which no more.

One of the cooks here, Tommy Cumberbush, has read that cookery book you wrote years ago. When Robbie told him you were my dad, Tommy asked me for my autograph.

I can’t wait to go on leave, Dad; I’m fed up with people trying to blow me up.

Road blocks are the worst. Me and Robbie tried using the flashcards, but an Iraqi translator attached to our squad said that the Arabic was dead old-fashioned and didn’t mean what the English words meant on the other side of the card. So it’s
back to doing Charades, that game you used to make us play at Christmas. But I was no good at Charades. Nobody could guess when I did
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Remember?

I was in an armoured vehicle the other day when we was caught in a blue on blue and our sergeant got his fingers blown off.

Dad, if anything happens to me, promise you will look after Mum. That bastard Ryan will do a runner one day, like all the others.

Give my love to Granddad. I hope he gets well soon.

Love

Your son, Glenn

PS Sorry this is such a moaning letter, but I’m a bit fed up today.

Daisy entertained my father at his bedside today by telling him about the Summer of Love video she has been promoting in London all week. She said, ‘Do you remember Acid Bungalow, George? Their big hit was “I am a Greenhouse”.’

My father smiled and said, ‘I went to see them at a Rock Festival on the recreation ground, next to the football club. I was eighteen and had a twenty-nine-inch waist, and my hair was longer than Adrian’s is now. A girl with bells on her skirt put a flower behind my ear and said, “This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.” I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

My mother said, ‘I remember Acid Bungalow. I used to love Terry, the lead guitarist, the one with the long red hair.’

Daisy said, ‘Poor Terry. When we went to Broadcasting House he thought he was in the Priory for rehab. I felt more like his nurse than his PR person’.

My mother said, ‘I do envy you, Daisy. It must be fantastic mixing with celebrities on a daily basis.’

Daisy sighed and said, ‘Most celebrities are totally talentless tossers. I’m sick of pandering to their ludicrous demands, feeding their horrible little dogs on Raspberry Ruffles and Badoit water.’ She dropped her voice and said, ‘When I was promoting a book by a certain round-the-world yachtsman, he confessed to me one night in the hotel bar that he’d spent the whole of the voyage moored up in a harbour in Malta.’

‘A Bad Day at Black Rock’.

Barclays Bank

Dear Mr Mole

Unpaid Direct Debits

I am writing to advise you that you have insufficient funds to meet the direct debit payments listed below.

We have debited your account at £35.00 per item for costs incurred, as detailed in our terms and conditions. Please ensure that you have sufficient funds to meet future direct debit payments.

Yours sincerely

Jason Latch

Personal Account Manager

Barclays Bank

Dear Mr Mole

Returned Cheque

I am writing to advise you that we have returned your cheque Number 001876 for the sum of £58.00 in favour of the Imperial Dragon marked ‘Unpaid, please refer to drawer’, due to insufficient funds in your account.

We have debited your account £25.00, as detailed in our terms and conditions.

Yours sincerely

Jason Latch

Personal Account Manager

£130 for two letters. I was tempted to write Jason Latch an offensive letter, but I cannot afford to pay for his reply.

Another letter from the bank.

Barclays Bank

Dear Mr Mole

I write to advise you that your personal account is overdrawn in excess of your approved overdraft limit by £1,282.76.

Please telephone your personal account manager to confirm that you will be paying sufficient funds into your account to bring you within the terms of your approved overdraft limit.

Meanwhile, do not write any further cheques on this account.

Yours sincerely

Jason Latch

Personal Account Manager

Phoned Parvez in a panic, but he was at the mosque. Fatima joked that Parvez was praying that Barclays would give me an extension on my overdraft. She said, ‘What’s happened to you, Moley? You’re spending like you was Michael Jackson or somethink.’

I told her I was trying to fill an emotional void. I blamed my parents because they had brought me up to hide my emotions. I recounted the time I came downstairs to find my goldfish, Cagney and Lacey, floating on top of their bowl. I had sobbed over their bloated bodies, but my parents were indifferent to my grief, and my father had said, ‘Flush ’em down the lav for Christ’s sake, they’re stinkin’ the bleedin’ place out.’

My mother had, it’s true, passed me a piece of toilet paper to dry my eyes but had then gone on to blame me for the fishes’ death, saying, ‘I told you when you won a prize at the Hook-a-Duck to choose a fluffy toy, but you had to choose the fish, didn’t you?’

My father sneered, ‘Everyone knows a fairground fish is already on its last legs.’

Fatima said, ‘So you’re blamin’ dead fish for the fact that you bought a talking fridge?’

I sensed that I was not receiving a sympathetic hearing and said I would ring Parvez when he got back from the mosque.

Phoned Parvez again. Fatima said, ‘’E’s took the kids to the fair, an’ I told ’im to keep away from the Hook-a-Duck.’

I phoned him on his mobile but couldn’t hear a word he was saying for the screaming. He was on the Wheel of Death with his kids.

When I arrived at work this morning there were thirty-eight cardboard boxes stacked on the shop floor. They were from Gorgon Press, Pandora’s publisher.

Bernard Hopkins had been told to order 350 copies of
Out of the Box
using the online ordering service.

Mr Carlton-Hayes cast a practised eye over the boxes and said, ‘I think Bernard may have slipped up.’

He estimated that we now had 750 copies in stock. He
asked me how many copies I thought we could sell. I told him that Pandora had kept me in the dark over the contents of her autobiography. He handed me a copy. A moody photograph of her lovely face was on the front; her name was written in what looked like red lipstick across her forehead; the tip of her tongue was poking out between her full moist lips.

The publishers had slipped a publicity brochure inside the book with some early reviews. A quick professional glance ascertained that they were what is known in the trade as ‘mixed’.

‘A searing indictment of the moral vacuity of the Blair government and an unusually frank account of Dr Braithwaite’s political and sexual credo’
Spectator

‘A naughty, racy, pacy glimpse behind the scenes at Westminister’
Sun

‘Braithwaite is astonishingly frank about her public and private life. “When I was a junior minister at the Department of Ag. and Fish, I asked if I could go out with a trawler fishing for cod. The conditions were appalling. I lost a Cartier watch overboard; it was sucked from my wrist by a huge wave. The trawlermen were amazingly kind to me and the skipper used to join me in my bunk to petition me about quotas.”

‘“I regret nothing in my life. I have been privileged to be part of the working of one of the world’s great democracies. As I said to Bill Clinton, ‘My sex life is full
of light and shade – we all need Monicas and Hilarys in our lives.’

‘“Bill laughed his easy laugh and said, ‘Pan, if you’d kept your pretty legs together oftener, youda made a great Labour leader.’”’

I turned to the index and was both alarmed and pleased to see that ‘Mole, Adrian’ was given three entries.

Page 17: ‘My first boyfriend was a shy, spotty boy called Adrian Mole. I loved him with a passion that blinded me to his unprepossessing appearance. There was something primeval about my love for him. I wanted to protect him from the world.’

Page 38: ‘My political awakening coincided with the faint stirrings of sexuality. My childhood sweetheart led a protest against the school-uniform regulations that only allowed the wearing of black socks. Adrian courageously wore red socks to school one day. It was my first organized protest. At the time I interpreted his choice of colour as symbolizing revolution and dissent. However, Adrian has since told me he only wore red socks because his black ones were in the wash.’

Page 219. ‘A Mole in MI6 took me out to dinner one night and told me that the September dossier in which Mr Blair informed the country that Weapons of Mass Destruction could be deployed in forty-five minutes and hit Cyprus was “missing the caveats and conditionals of the latest reports”’.

I turned to the index again. Under ‘lovers’, it listed 112 entries – 112! I can count the women I have had carnal knowledge of on the fingers of one hand!

Mr Carlton-Hayes was reading the invoice from Gorgon Press Ltd. He said, ‘My dear, I rather think that our computer has made the most monumental mistake. It has ordered 750 copies on a no sale, no return basis. But we can’t possibly sell so many copies.’

I told Mr Carlton-Hayes that I would do some local publicity in advance of Pandora’s book-signing event on Saturday.

Letter from Mortgage Co.

Dear Mr Mole

We have noted with concern that three direct debit payments have not been received. If this is an oversight, please make an immediate payment of £2,100.00 direct to one of our branches.

We enclose a new Direct Debit Mandate.

If you are in financial difficulty and require assistance, please telephone the above number to speak to one of our Mortgage Debt Advisers.

May we respectfully remind you that if payment is not received, the ownership of your property could be at risk.

Yours sincerely

Jeremy Yarnold

Manager, Mortgage Arrears

After two glasses of red wine, I went to the gadget drawer and opened and read all the letters inside. It was worse than I thought.

I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to the World Service on the radio. A woman doctor was giving a live interview from Baghdad. Her maternity hospital has no water or electricity and the drugs and anaesthetics had run out last week.

She said, ‘Thieves and looters come in here with guns and take our equipment. Things were bad before the invasion because of the sanctions but now things are worse.’

A woman was screaming in the background.

I got up and drank the rest of the wine. I crave the comfort of sleep.

I was on Radio Leicester this morning talking about
Out of the Box
.

The interviewer was a genial, literary man called John Florence. He asked me a lot of penetrating and uncomfortable questions about Pandora.

He said, ‘Do you agree with me, Adrian, that Pandora Braithwaite is a bit of an enigma. On the one hand she’s intellectually brilliant. I think she astonished us all in Leicester when she stood up at the Labour Party Conference last year and welcomed the Chinese Trade Delegation in fluent Mandarin, in a speech lasting over half an hour. But, on the other hand, she sometimes, how can
I put this delicately… well, not to put too fine a point on it, she’s notched up a few blokes on her belt, hasn’t she?’

I said, carefully, aware of the listening multitudes, ‘Pandora is a modern woman. She is not constrained by historical vetoes on female sexual behaviour.’

Florence said, ‘Did you support her recent resignation from the government or do you think that she was simply drawing attention to herself?’

I said, ‘My son Glenn is in Basra; I’m a little concerned myself that the Weapons of Mass Destruction have not yet been found, though, of course, I am very relieved that they have not been used against our troops.’

Florence said, ‘When I last interviewed you, Adrian, you were working on a serial killer comedy called
The White Van
. Did anything come of it?’

I said, ‘No, I wrote it for a specific ensemble of actors, and none of them was available.’

Florence said, ‘So, listeners, Pandora Braithwaite, MP, will be signing copies of her autobiography,
Out of the Box
, at Carlton-Hayes bookshop in the High Street at one o’clock tomorrow. And please get there early, because Adrian tells me they are anticipating a huge crowd.’

He then pressed a button and the traffic woman came on to inform the listeners that traffic on the London Road was at a standstill because of a broken water-main at Saxby Street.

Parvez @ Wong’s
. 7
p.m.

It was supposed to be a meeting about my finances – though Parvez persisted in calling it ‘a debt crisis meeting’.

I handed him two sheets of paper. On one was written my monthly income and expenditure, and on the other a list of the amounts of money I owe, and to whom.