Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction (42 page)

She said, ‘Your accountant said you paid no tax during 1996, 97, 98 and 99.’

‘Apparently not,’ I said, and attempted to explain my circumstances, my job as an offal chef, my divorce from a Nigerian princess, my TV series as a celebrity chef, my inheritance of a house, my single parenthood, my house fire, which destroyed everything, including valuable unpublished manuscripts.

Mrs Hall asked, ‘What kind of manuscripts?’

I explained that I was an unpublished novelist but, as soon as I spoke, I realized, with some sadness, that I
was now more a purveyor of literature than a writer of it.

I told her about my years of living on a sink council estate on income support with my two sons.

At the end of my account, she said, ‘So you went from riches to rags in five years at the expense of the tax-payer.’

I defended myself by telling her that I had been forced to pay for private medical and dental treatment recently, due to a lack of NHS provision in my area, so saving the country money.

Mrs Hall said, ‘You seem to live in a fantasy world, Mr Mole.’

I said I didn’t know what she meant.

She said, ‘You have come to me for help because you are in very serious debt. The first thing I have to do is to make you face up to your responsibilities, and part of that is for you to live in the
real
world. Not a fictional world of African princesses, TV stardom, inheritances and conflagrations in which you lose valuable manuscripts. You need more help than I can give you, Mr Mole.’

I begged her not to abandon me, and she said, ‘Very well, but you must tell me the absolute truth from now on.’

She looked deep into my eyes, much like the hypnotist Paul McKenna, and I wondered if I would wake up in three minutes and be told by Mrs Hall that I had been performing humiliating tasks while under her spell.

I told her that I would do whatever was needed to get out of debt.

Mrs Hall said, ‘Your first priority is move to accommodation more in keeping with your income.’

When I got home I rang Mark B’astard’s office and left a message asking him to call round as soon as possible and give me a valuation on Rat Wharf.

The sound of Zulu chanting woke me up. It was Daisy on the phone, telling me that she was at Beeby on the Wold and had just tried her bridesmaid’s dress on. She said, ‘It’s not mint green, it’s the colour of swan shit.’

I said, ‘Don’t let it get you down. You’ll only have to wear the thing once.’

She said, ‘It’s not only the fucking frock. I’ve had my name down for a Gucci bag for eleven weeks. The shop rang yesterday to say that I’d come to the top of the list. So I went in and blew almost a month’s salary on this bag, this collection of leather and gilt. But, Kipling, I’m looking at it now and I don’t feel good.’

I said, ‘Daisy, it sounds to me as if you’re suffering from buyer’s remorse. You need to stay away from Bond Street.’

There was a long silence, then she said, ‘I’ve got my name down for silver Birkenstocks. I may cancel.’

The wedding took place in the large conservatory of the Heritage Hotel. As we waited for the bride and bridesmaids to arrive, the sun beat down through the double
glazing and Brain-box and I sweated inside our morning suits.

Margaret, the vicar, took her place behind the improvised, flower-banked altar. Then ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ was played on the hotel’s CD player. We turned around and watched as Marigold, attended by Daisy, Poppy and a lumpy cousin of Brain-Box’s, progressed past the guests and took their places.

Marigold was wearing a strapless cream dress in oyster silk. Her face was covered in a veil. Daisy was right about the colour of her bridesmaid’s dress, and I did not think that puffed sleeves and an asymmetrical hem flattered her.

It was the first time I had seen Michael Flowers in a suit, and with his beard trimmed. His injured eye still bore the signs of when he was smacked in the face by Fergal and called a ‘Proddy Gobshite’. Netta was wearing a mother-of-the-bride outfit in apricot and a large picture hat.

My mother had broken an unwritten rule and was wearing white. Animal’s mullet had been chopped off, and he was dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit, white shirt, and a grey silk tie covered in a yellow elephant design. He looked like a dumber and taller Robert Redford.

When Marigold lifted her veil, she wasn’t wearing glasses and an expert had painted her face. The lines of discontent around her mouth had been artfully concealed.

It is true, diary, that every bride looks beautiful until they ruin their hair and make-up at the disco.

*

I was nervous about making my speech, but when I came to deliver it, the words flowed easily, and it was only when my mother hissed, ‘Enough already!’ that I realized that I had been speaking for over twenty minutes.

When I proposed a toast to the bridesmaids, Daisy looked directly at me and gestured sexily with her tongue. I don’t know what came over me, diary, a sudden mad compulsion to cleanse myself in public. I had an urgent need to tell the truth. Something took the brakes off the usual social constraints and I heard myself saying, ‘While I’m on my feet and you’re listening, I would like to announce that Daisy and I are in love, and have been for some time.’

Foolishly (I see now), I had expected a round of applause, cheers and even a few American-style yee-haws, but there was none of this. I sat down to silence, which was broken only by the scraping of Daisy’s chair as she ran from the room.

Nobody knows where Daisy is. Her suitcase had been taken from Beeby on the Wold.

I was accused of many things yesterday. Many angry voices were raised against me, the most angry being Marigold’s, who accused me of sabotaging her wedding.

I did my fair share of grovelling and apologizing to Brain-box, Netta Flowers and my mother, for ‘showing her up’. And this morning I sent an email to the hotel manager apologizing for failing to stop the fight in the car park
between my mother and Netta Flowers, during which a trolley full of clean, pressed laundry was overturned.

But even as I flagellated myself I heard a tiny voice inside my head, protesting, ‘But I only told the truth.’

Mark B’astard came round to give me a valuation early this morning. He told me that clients were queuing outside his office each morning waving their cheque books at him in their eagerness to buy a place in Rat Wharf.

He particularly liked the Smeg fridge, and it was bad luck that it started whining on about the stale-egg situation while he was there. He reckoned that given a lick of paint and the removal of the rat traps, the apartment could fetch £220,000.

He went out on to the balcony and said, ‘Nobody can afford to live in London now, and Leicester is only a seventy-minute commute.’ He asked me why I was selling up.

I said I had flown too close to the sun.

He looked puzzled, but he could not have been as puzzled as me. Why did I say it? What is happening to me?

I was reading aloud to Nigel tonight when he suddenly burst out, ‘Jesus Christ! No more
Crime and Punishment
!’

I was hurt, diary, but I managed to keep my voice light and melodious, and said, ‘Would you like me to read you something a little less intellectual?’

Nigel said, ‘No, it’s not the book I have a problem with. It’s your reading of the thing. Try to put a bit of Dostoevsky’s tormented soul into it, will you? As it is, you sound like metrosexual man.’

‘Metrosexual?’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said contemptuously. ‘A straight guy who’s into skincare and interior design.’

I carried on reading, with a rougher edge to my voice, but when the hero, Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, or Rodya for short, was trying to decide whether or not to kill the old woman, Nigel said, ‘You’re making him sound as if he’s trying to decide between curtains or blinds!’

Graham, the guide dog, got up, saw me to the front door and let me out.

I said goodnight, and heard the cur drop the latch behind me.

Robbie is dead.

A home reserve officer from his regiment, Captain Hayman, knocked on my door last night. My first reaction on being told that Robbie was dead, killed by shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade, was relief that it wasn’t Glenn.

I made Captain Hayman a cup of coffee. He was dressed in a smart uniform, brown suit, beige shirt and displayed a row of ribbons across his chest.

I asked him why I had been formally notified.

He said, ‘Robert put you down as his next of kin.’

I said, ‘But I’m not related to him. He’s my son’s best friend.’ I asked him if Glenn was OK.

He said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know the details of the incident.’

I asked him to phone and find out. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t in front of this good man who had been deputed to break the news of death.

I asked if Glenn would be given compassionate leave.

Captain Hayman said, ‘No, friends don’t count as far as the army is concerned.’

He told me that the army would arrange Robbie’s funeral and asked me to choose the hymns and readings. He said that Robbie’s body would be sent back to England in a batch of five within the next few days, and told me that he would contact me about the funeral arrangements later in the week.

Half an hour later, the phone call I was dreading. It was Glenn.

He accused me of being responsible for Robbie’s death. He said, ‘You told me that I was fighting for democracy, but Robbie’s dead, Dad. Robbie’s dead!’

He said, ‘You’re my dad, you shouldn’t have let me go to Iraq, you should have stopped me.’

I let him shout and swear at me and didn’t try to defend myself, because he was correct in everything he said.

When I told him to try and get some sleep, he said, ‘After what I seen today, I’ll never sleep again.’

*

When I rang to tell Mr Carlton-Hayes about Robbie, he said, ‘The bastards, they send children to fight their filthy wars.’

I told him that I was feeling very low and wouldn’t be in today.

I am morally, spiritually and financially bankrupt. Stayed in bed all day.

Stayed in bed all day, switched my phone off.

Stayed in bed all morning. The fridge told me that the contents of the salad drawer had passed their use-by date. I ignored its nagging for as long as I could, then got out of bed, pulled the salad drawer out and threw the lettuce to Gielgud, who was guiding his sons and daughters down the canal.

At 6.30 I heard Mr Carlton-Hayes calling from the towpath. I put my bathrobe on and went out on to the balcony. He was shaking his walking stick at Gielgud.

I shouted down that I would let him in and told him to press the buzzer for unit 4; it was very strange to see him in these surroundings.

He went straight to my bookshelves and examined the contents. He took down a volume and murmured, ‘Thoreau’s
Walden: Or Life in the Woods
, is it a favourite of yours?’

I told him that I had read Thoreau’s rural experiment when I was nineteen and had concluded that the simple life was for simpletons.

Mr Carlton-Hayes placed the book on my coffee table and said, ‘Perhaps you should read it again.’ He was like an old-fashioned family doctor leaving a prescription.

I couldn’t make him tea or coffee because there was no milk, tea or coffee. So I opened a bottle of wine and we sat on the balcony and watched the young swans.

He asked me why I hadn’t phoned him.

I told him that I had been paralysed with shame and couldn’t bring myself to communicate with anybody. I said, ‘I believed them, when they told me our country needed to go to war, and I even encouraged my son to go to fight.’

I told him the truth about everything else that had gone wrong with my life and ended by confessing that for almost a year I had been living wildly beyond my means, spending money I hadn’t got and that I was now being forced to sell my apartment.

Mr Carlton-Hayes poured me another glass of wine and said, ‘Like Icarus, you flew too close to the sun, and your wings have melted, but I won’t let you fall into the
sea, as he did, my dear. I cannot run the bookshop without you. Bernard is a hopeless drunk and I do hope he moves on soon. He’s getting rather tiresome.’

I told him that I had been having an affair with Marigold’s sister, Daisy.

He took his pipe out, packed it with aromatic tobacco and set light to the bowl. He said, ‘Love makes fools of us all. Leslie and I left our partners for each other thirty-odd years ago. It caused the most dreadful scandal at the time, but hardly a day goes by when I don’t look at Leslie and think that I did the right thing.’

He told me that he had often talked to Leslie about me, and that Leslie had said that it would be good if the three of us met up some time. He made me promise that I would do my best to come into work tomorrow. He said that we were doing very good business lately, thanks to the recent innovations, and that he wanted to talk to me about my salary.

I hardly slept last night. I kept doing mental calculations and trying to work out when I would be clear of debt. I concluded that I will still be paying off my credit card bills when I am a pensioner. There is no possible way I can afford to pay the capital, and the interest will mount and mount and mount with every breath I take.

At 3.30 a.m. I got up and walked about, but the consumer durables I had so recklessly spent somebody else’s money
on seemed to mock me in the pre-dawn light. As I passed the fridge, I heard it sneer, ‘Loser’.

I went into work and was given an affectionate, almost loving, welcome from Mr Carlton-Hayes. He told me, blushing and stammering, that he had talked to Leslie last night and they had agreed that the shop could afford to pay me an extra £200 a month. I blushed and stammered my thanks. Then we turned away from each other and busied ourselves in different parts of the shop.