Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction (8 page)

If you had had a mobile I would have been in regular text contact. This is a v. busy week for me. I move into Rat Wharf on Friday and I will no doubt be engaged in settling in for some time afterwards. But I will contact you when I have some free time.

Yours, with very best wishes,

Adrian

PS I expect your father is annoyed with Geoff Hoon for agreeing to let President Bush install Star Wars missiles on
England’s fair and pleasant land. Myself, I think it is a price we have to pay for freedom.

I reminded my parents that the fire fighters go on strike at 6 p.m. today. I begged them not to smoke in bed and also not to leave cigarettes smouldering in ashtrays while they cut their toenails etc. It would be a disaster if this house burnt down before I move to Rat Wharf and they move to what they now call the Piggeries.

Mr Carlton-Hayes has given me three days off to move. I cannot bear to drag the old cheap pine bed I have been sleeping in since childhood to my new cutting-edge loft apartment. It would be like putting an antimacassar on a Terence Conran sofa. I need to buy a futon, new bed linen, simple but stylish kitchen equipment, a table and two chairs for my balcony, bookcases, a television and curtains for my glass lavatory. The problem is I have no money at all.

When I explained my predicament to my mother, she looked up from her book,
The Beginners’ Guide to Renovating Property
, and said, ‘Nobody uses money any more. Money as such doesn’t exist. Everybody I know lives on credit. Get yourself a store card.’

*

I have found a small firm to help me with my move tomorrow, Two Gals ’n’ a Van.

I spent a confusing and demoralizing afternoon on the phone, listening to Vivaldi and various robots. It appears that the gas at Rat Wharf is supplied by Severn Trent Water, the electricity by the gas board, my water by a French company with a name I can’t pronounce. The cable company ntl is in charge of my phone. They are connecting me to over 200 television channels tomorrow at 2 o’clock.

The two girls of Two Gals ’n’ a Van are not girls. They are strong-looking middle-aged women called Sian and Helen. They came round to assess how many journeys the van would have to make between Ashby de la Zouch and Leicester tomorrow.

The answer was one.

They gave me some cardboard boxes and left me upstairs, packing my books. My mother had invited them downstairs to have a cup of tea.

Soon afterwards my father came up to join me. I could hear female laughter coming from the kitchen. I asked my father what the women downstairs were talking about.

He said, ‘Just women’s silly slobber – the price of cabbage, was Princess Diana murdered, will Hans Blix find any Weapons of Mass Destruction, cats, the change of bloody life,
Sex and the City
, and how men are not needed any more.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Helen is trying to get pregnant. Sian has been doing the business with a turkey baster and a bottle of sperm that’s been donated
by their gay-boy friend.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘Where did we go wrong, Adrian? We let them go to work, we let them be bloody vicars, they drive cars, there’s one who’s a captain in the navy, we bought them machines to make it easier to do their housework, but they still hate us, and they’d rather have sex with a kitchen tool than with a man.’

My father kicked at my boxes and said, ‘You’ve not got much to show for thirty-four years of life, have you?’

When he’d gone, I lay down on my childhood bed and wept for about one minute and thirty seconds.

Sian and Helen moved me into Rat Wharf this morning. My address is now a prestigious one: Unit 4, The Old Battery Factory, Rat Wharf, Grand Union Canal, Leicester. It is entirely to my taste – very spare, very masculine and very hard-textured.

While the ‘gals’ carried the heavy boxes of books upstairs, I opened my sliding door and stood on the mesh balcony, gripping the steel rail which overlooks the canal. A gang of swans immediately swam up and began hissing aggressively. The biggest one, who for some reason reminded me of Sir John Gielgud, the great classical actor, was particularly vicious. An old-fashioned tramp, with string round his trousers, was staggering past the dye works on the opposite bank, swigging from a can of Kestrel.

From my vantage point above the water I could clearly
see several supermarket trolleys, milk crates and what must have been hundreds of Kestrel lager cans lying on the bed of the canal. The water had a curious phosphorous-looking mien to it, and a noxious smell that was certainly not there when I viewed the property in October. I would have liked to have stood on the balcony longer, but quite honestly, diary, the malevolent stare of Gielgud, the biggest swan, drove me inside.

I asked Sian what she thought of my loft apartment.

She said, ‘It’ll be nice when you’ve got some colour on the walls and a few bits and pieces to make it cosy.’

I said that I didn’t do cosy and explained that I intended to live an uncluttered life, a bit like Mahatma Gandhi.

Helen pointed to a box that contained my clothes and said, ‘So what’s in there, loincloths?’

I pointed out that it was Tarzan who wore a loincloth, Gandhi had worn a dhoti, which was quite a different thing.

Before they left, Helen told me that when they were taking the boxes out of the van in the car park, they had seen a ‘stroppy flock of swans’. She warned me to take care, adding, ‘A swan can break a man’s arm, you know.’

I paid them £80, money I could ill afford. I was glad to see them go. I wanted to walk around my beautiful space and listen to my footsteps on my genuine wooden floor.

I unpacked my books and stacked them on the floor in alphabetical order while I waited for ntl to call. The swans kept up a constant racket outside. Occasionally Gielgud
would fly past my balcony window. I had forgotten that swans could fly. I had the eerie feeling that he was spying on me and mocking me because I had so few possessions.

At 4 o’clock I telephoned ntl to ask why their engineer had failed to turn up as promised. A woman said she would ring me on my mobile when she had made contact with their ‘field operative’.

Marigold rang to ask how I was enjoying my first afternoon in my new apartment. I told her about the swans and she said, ‘Be careful, Adrian. A swan can break a man’s arm, you know.’

I, rather irritably perhaps, informed her that I had known this fact since I was four years old.

She thanked me for my letter and said with a little laugh, ‘There’s a certain ambiguity about it. Read one way it sounds like you’re giving me the brush-off, read another way it sounds the same.’ She gave another little laugh. ‘You’re not giving me the brush-off, are you, Adrian?’

Why didn’t I tell her the truth, diary? Why didn’t I tell her that after spending time with her the world seems a darker place, one devoid of joy and hope? She is coming round tomorrow after work.

At 5.30 my telephone rang and an ntl person informed me that the field operative had attempted to call but had been beaten back by swans in the car park, then added, ‘A swan can break a man’s arm, you know.’

I have arranged to be in the car park to escort the ntl engineer to my apartment at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Having no bed yet, I made a platform of books, which I lay on in a sleeping bag. But it was an uncomfortable night:
Frankenstein
dug into my breastbone and kept me awake.

I am still without ntl. The engineer refused to get out of his van because Gielgud and the other swans were walking around the car park, looking as though they owned the place. Before he drove away he said, ‘A swan can break a man’s arm, y’know.’

I met the owner of Unit 2 on the stairs. He is a professor of golf course management at De Montfort University. His name is Frank Green. He said the swans were a bloody nuisance and that he was thinking of selling his apartment and moving to a land-locked location.

I went to Debenhams and confessed to a kindly woman behind the counter in the furniture department that I had no money. She agreed with my mother that a store card would solve my problems and pointed out to me that should I activate the card today, I would get a 10 per cent discount on everything I bought. Within a quarter of an hour and after lying about my salary and showing my passport and Visa card, I was given £10,000 worth of credit.

I should have had somebody with me, somebody sensible. Did I really need a white towelling bathrobe? Was
a white sofa with non-detachable covers a wise choice? And did I really need a home entertainment centre with a cinema screen and Dolby Surround Sound?

I had never slept on a futon before, but I was too shy to test it in the shop. I bought it anyway. I also bought bookshelves and an aluminium bistro table and matching chairs for the balcony, a Dualit toaster and a cafetiere (the last two items are loft living must-haves).

I phoned Sian and Helen and asked if they were free to collect these items from the store’s delivery bay. They arranged to meet me at 4 o’clock.

In the intervening hour I bought a hexagonal-shaped black dinner service, a wine rack and a bottle of extra-extra-virgin olive oil which Debenhams import from an olive grove owned by a close friend of Gore Vidal’s.

When Sian and Helen eventually turned up, I was sitting among my new purchases like a latter-day Howard Hughes, a victim of consumerism.

Sian said, ‘I thought you were strapped for cash.’

I told her about the store card and Helen asked how much interest I would be paying. When I told her 29 per cent, she said, ‘Leave the stuff here, cancel the card, get in the van and I’ll put my foot down.’

But, diary, I couldn’t do it. What is the point of living in a loft if you can’t pad around the wooden floors in your white towelling bathrobe, sit on your white sofa while waiting for the coffee to brew in your cafetiere, then take the pot to the galvanized table on the balcony and eat a croissant from your hexagonal-shaped black plate?

*

Marigold managed to walk swan shit all over my gleaming floorboards. She offered to clean them with a mop and bucket, and when I irritably informed her that I had not yet bought such mundane articles, she said, ‘Life is not only composed of white sofas and extra-extra-virgin olive oil, you know, Adrian.’

She gave me a house-warming present – a collection of hanging feathers, which she called a ‘dream catcher’. Its purpose, apparently, is to catch my dreams and make them come true. I didn’t tell Marigold that I have a recurring dream whereby Pandora Braithwaite falls to her knees and begs me to make love to her.

We sat out for a while on the balcony, drinking coffee. Marigold was wearing a rainbow version of the sweater her father had been wearing for the last month, but after a short time she shivered and said, ‘I catch cold very easily. I’d like to go in now.’

When she asked if she could use my toilet, I felt honour bound to tell her that her outline would be seen through the glass bricks, so she said she would wait until she got home. I hoped it wouldn’t be too long.

She watched me unpack my home entertainment centre and was horrified by the amount of packaging materials that came out of the boxes. When she started banging on about the evils of polystyrene, I found myself defending it. I said it was a beautiful, practical and light material. We were soon having a heated discussion about the earth’s resources. This somehow led into the letter I had sent her on November 12th, which she quoted back to me word for word.

She said, ‘Sooner or later all of my boyfriends write a similar letter.’

She picked at a piece of polystyrene, crumbling it between her fingers. Annoyingly, a slight draught blew it across the floor. I should have told her there and then that I no longer wanted to go out with her. After all, it was the first day of my new life. But courage failed me and I heard myself accepting an invitation to have Sunday tea with her parents at the house in Beeby on the Wold.

Rosie rang and begged me to send her £200 minimum. She said that Simon’s dealer was threatening to break Simon’s legs. I told her the truth, that I was in debt to the tune of thousands of pounds.

I asked her if she had started writing her dissertation yet.

She said, ‘Go and shag yourself.’

I took that to mean no.

I advised her to get Simon out of her life.

She said, ‘I can’t, he needs me. None of our friends will talk to him. He spent last night in a police cell because he stole an NSPCC charity collection box from the uni bar.’

I slept uneasily on my new futon. I’m not used to sleeping so close to the floor. I woke at 5 a.m. and worried for an hour about having tea with the Flowers family. I then
read half a chapter of John Major’s autobiography. It never fails to get me back to sleep.

I was next woken by the sound of my father’s voice shouting, ‘Get back, you bastards, get back.’

And my mother screeching, ‘George, George, don’t antagonize them. They can break a man’s arm, y’know.’

I put on my white bathrobe, went to the balcony and looked down. The swans had surrounded my parents on the towpath. My father held a copy of the
News of the World
in front of him as though it was a rapier and he was the Count of Monte Cristo. As I watched, the swans retreated and regrouped in the middle of the canal. Once again Gielgud stared at me. I swear to God that there was a sneer on his beak. What has he got against me?

The soles of my parents’ shoes were covered in swan shit, so I made them take them off at the door.

They walked around in silence and then my father said, ‘190,000 for this. It’s just one big room with a glass bog!’

My mother said, ‘It’ll be all right when you’ve got some carpet down.’

They lit up cigarettes, but I informed them that the loft was a no-smoking area and ushered them out on to the balcony. A stiff breeze was ruffling the swans’ feathers.

My mother gave me a postcard of a lunar landscape. I was puzzled until I turned it over. It was from Glenn in Tenerife.