True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (7 page)

“I wish to speak to my mother, Mrs Mole,” I said.

“Pauline,” he bellowed before banging the phone down on the hall table. I heard the click of my mother’s lighter, then she spoke.

“Adrian, where are you?”

“I’m in Oxford.”

“At the University?”

“Not
studying
at the University, no, that honour was denied me. If I’d had a complete set of Children’s Encyclopaedias perhaps I’d…”

“Oh don’t start on that again. It’s not my fault you didn’t get your ‘A’ levels…”

“I’m here with Pandora and her husband.”

“
Husband?
”

I could image the expression on my mother’s face. She would be looking like a starving dog which was being offered a piece of sirloin steak.

“Who? When? Why?” asked my mother who, in the unlikely event of being asked for her recreation by the publishers of
Who’s Who
, would be honour bound to reply: “My main recreation is gossiping.”

“Do Pandora’s parents know that she’s married?” asked my mother, still agog.

“No,” I replied. Then I thought, “But it won’t be long before they do, will it, mother?”

In the afternoon, Pandora and I went shopping. Julian Twyselton-Fife was lying in bed reading a Rupert Bear annual. As we were leaving, he shouted, “Don’t forget the honey, darlings.”

Once we were outside, on the street, I told Pandora that she must start divorce proceedings. “Right now, this minute.” I offered to accompany her to a solicitor’s office.

“They don’t work on Saturday afternoons,” she said. “They play golf.”

“Monday morning,” I said.

“I’ve got a tutorial,” she said feebly.

“Monday afternoon,” I pressed.

“I’m having tea with friends,” she said.

“Tuesday morning?” I suggested.

We went through the whole week and then the following week. Pandora’s every waking moment seemed to be accounted for. Eventually I exploded, “Look Pandora, you do
want
to marry me don’t you?”

Pandora poked at a courgette (we were in a greengrocer’s shop at the time), then she sighed and said, “Well actually darling, no; I don’t intend to remarry until I’m at
least
thirty-six.”

“
Thirty-six!
” I screeched. “But, by then I could be fat or bald or toothless.”

Pandora looked at me and said, “You’re not exactly an Adonis
now
, are you?” In my hurry to leave the shop I knocked a pile of Outspan oranges onto the floor. In the resulting confusion (in which several old ladies reacted to the rolling oranges as though they were hand grenades, rather than mere fruit coming towards them), I failed to see Pandora leaving.

I ran after her. Then I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder, then a growling voice: the greengrocer’s.

“Runnin’ off without payin’ eh? Well, I’m sick of you students nickin’ my stuff, this time I’m prosecutin’. You’ll be in a police cell tonight, my lad.”

It was with horror that I realized I had an Outspan orange in each hand.

Sunday June 19
^th

I have been charged with shoplifting. My life is ruined. I shall have a criminal record. Now I will never get a job in the Civil Service.

Pandora is standing by me. She is feeling dead guilty because when
she
ran out of the shop she forgot to pay for a pound of courgettes, a lettuce and a box of mustard and cress.

Nothing has changed. It’s still the rich what gets the gravy and the poor what gets the blame.

∨
The True Confessions
∧

Mole at the Department of the Environment

July 1989

Monday July 10
^th

I was called into Mr Brown’s office today, but first I was kept waiting in the small vestibule outside. I noticed that Brown had allowed his rubber plant to die. I was scandalized by the sight of the poor, dead thing. Taking my penknife out of my pocket, I removed the decayed leaves until a brown, shrivelled stump was left.

Brown bellowed, “Come”. So I went, though I was annoyed at being summoned in like a dog.

Brown was looking out of the window and jiggling the change in his pocket. At least I
think
that was what he was doing, the only other possible alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.

He turned and glowered at me. “I have just heard a disquieting fact about you, Mole,” he said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh, indeed,” repeated Brown. “Is there something you should tell me about your lavatorial habits, Mole?”

After a period of thought I said, “No sir, if it’s about the puddle on the floor last Friday, that was when I…”

“No, no, not at work, at home,” he snapped. I thought about the lavatory at home. Surely I used it as other men did? Or did I? Was I doing something unspeakable without knowing it? And if I was how did Brown
know
?

“Think of your lavatory
seat
, Mole. You have been heard bragging about it, in the canteen.” As I was bidden I thought about the newly installed lavatory seat at home.

“
Describe
the aforementioned lavatory seat, Mole.” I fingered my penknife nervously. Brown had obviously gone mad. It was common knowledge that he wandered around on motorway embankments at night, muttering endearments to hedgehogs.

“Well sir,” I said, edging imperceptibly towards the door. “It’s sort of a reddish brown wood, and it has brass fittings…”

Brown shouted, “Ha, reddish brown wood!…Mahogany! You are a vandal, Mole, an enemy of the earth. Consider your job to be on the line! Mahogany is one of the earth’s most precious and endangered woods and you have further endangered it by your vanity and lust.”

Tuesday July 11
^th

Pandora and I had an in-depth discussion about the mahogany lavatory seat tonight. It ended when she slammed the lid down angrily, and said, “Well, I like it; it’s warm and comfortable, and it’s staying!”

I have started scanning the job pages in the
Independent
.

Wednesday July 12
^th

Brown has sent a memo round to all departments ordering the expulsion of all aerosols in the building. A spot check will be carried out tomorrow. The typing pool are in an ugly mood and are threatening mutiny.

Thursday July 13
^th

There were pathetic scenes throughout the day as workers tried to hang on to their underarm deodorants and canisters of hairspray. But by four o’clock Brown announced a victory. It was a perspiring and limp-haired crowd of workers who left the building. Some shook their fists at the sky and swore at the ozone layer, or the lack of it. One or the other.

Friday July 14
^th

Bastille Day

Now there is trouble with the cleaning ladies! Apparently Brown has left a note in each of their mop-buckets ordering them to rid themselves of their Mr Sheen and Pledge. Mrs Sprogett who cleans our office was very bitter about Brown. “‘E’s askin’ us to go back to the dark days of lavender wax,” she said. I tried to explain to the poor woman, but she said, “What’s a bleedin’ ozone layer when it’s at home?”

Saturday July 15
^th

Made a shocking discovery this morning. Our so-called mahogany seat is made entirely of chip-board! I rang the bathroom fitments showroom and informed them that they had contravened the Trade Descriptions Act. I demanded a full refund.

Monday July 16
^th

Went to Brown’s office to apprise him of the latest facts regarding the lavatory seat, but he wasn’t there. He has been suspended on full pay pending an enquiry into his wilful neglect and cruelty to a rubber plant.

∨
The True Confessions
∧

Susan Lilian Townsend

∨
The True Confessions
∧

Majorca

Week One

Thursday October 29
^th

The flight to Majorca is delayed. My boarding pass is rejected by a uniformed youth of thirteen.

ME: “Why?”

YOUTH: “Something’s wrong with the plane.”

ME: “What
exactly
is wrong with the plane?”

YOUTH: “Dunno.”

ME: “How long before…?”

YOUTH: “Dunno.”

♦

I predict a glittering future for the youth. Foreign Office spokesman is one job that comes to mind.

Although there are at least two hundred empty seats in the departure lounge, the majority of my fellow passengers begin to queue in front of the desk. Why? We have all been given our seat numbers for the aeroplane. There is a café only five yards away but few passengers break ranks and avail themselves of its facilities.

Some people stand for one hour and ten minutes
carrying
heavy hand luggage. Not for them the luxury of placing it on the floor at their feet. Apart from it being communal airport neurosis, I cannot explain this perverse behaviour. Who says the English cannot be led into revolution? Get them inside an airport and they will follow any leader and have heads on pikestaffs quicker than you can say ‘boarding card’.

Eventually we board the plane. The middle-aged couple next to me are wearing tweeds and are discussing their plans for Christmas – who to invite out: “
Certain
people will not be welcome, not after last year,” he says. My guess is that the ‘certain people’ are on her side of the family because she goes into a sulk. I don’t exchange a word with this couple until we descend from the clouds above Majorca and I say aloud, “Oh mountains!” He tells me that most of Majorca
is
mountains, which is why he and his wife love the island. “The coast is hell for most of the year,” he says.

We passed over red and green and black fields which together look like a vast Rastafarian draughtsboard, then hundreds of working windmills, and eventually Palma Bay, which looks like a child’s drawing of the seaside: brilliant blue sea, custard coloured sand, white yachts and purple mountains in the background.

Within twenty minutes of landing I am in a taxi and speeding along the coast road. The taxi driver curses the other drivers. We pass an open truck which is full of roistering men waving bottles of wine about. They are middle-aged and conservatively dressed. They turn out to be English. The taxi driver smiles and says, “
Inglese
”, as one might say ‘madmen’.

“I have no knowledge of you,” says the stern-faced Manuel at hotel reception. “You are not on the computer.” I showed him my reservation, pointed to the magic words ‘confirmed’ and ‘telex’. He went into the back room. He picked up a phone. “There is no room in the hotel,” he said, returning from the savage-sounding telephone conversation. I stood at the desk for twenty minutes. I sighed, I looked sad, I began to write in my notebook. Eventually he waved a large key at me and said, “There is only one room.” I understood why when I got there. The plywood door stood ajar. The room was so unlovely that nobody in their right mind would want to steal anything at all from it. The decor was in shades of suicide brown, the lighting was to Albanian specifications. There was an appalling smell, as though a disease-racked creature had died and been decomposing behind the skirting board for some months. I sprinkled duty free perfume about like a high Anglican priest; the smell got worse. On such occasions I count my blessings: 1: I’m alive. 2: I’m almost healthy. 3: I’m not in a car on the Birmingham Inner Ring Road.

I changed out of my English woollens and into my daughter’s Bermuda shorts. I looked in the mirror. First the front view; not bad, Townsend. Then the back view; grotesque, Townsend. Take them off, woman.

Twelve floors down, Spanish women were strolling in the street, elegantly attired in tailored suits and high heels.

I inspected my holiday clothes. Had somebody, some mad person with a grudge against me, broken into my house the night before and thrown my carefully co-ordinated clothes away, and replaced them with this bizarre collection? How else to explain the presence in my luggage of an ankle-length, beige linen circular skirt,
jewelled
espadrilles,
two
evening bags. Bloodstained blue and orange sandals. A size sixteen sundress (I am size twelve). Harem trousers overprinted with (possibly insulting) Spanish phrases. How did my daughter’s old school cardigan get in there?

It was in the jewelled espadrilles and a cotton pyjama suit with an evening bag slung across my chest that I left the hotel and went for a walk. As I left the hotel my sunglasses fell off and broke on the pavement. I walked twenty-five yards and sat down at a pavement café. After a quick repair job on the sunglasses I ordered coffee and read my guide book:
Majorca
, English edition by Antonio Cammpana and Juan Puig-Ferran.

Dear Friends and Readers, if you are or imagine you are a victim of neurasthenia, deafened and confused by the noise of our modern civilization and the urge to arrive more quickly at some place where you have nothing to do, and if business has filled with numbers the space in your brain that is intended for what we call intelligence; if the cinema has damaged your optic organism and the flickering has become chronic, and restlessness and worry will not let you live, and you want to enjoy a little of the rest to which anybody in this world is entitled who has done no harm to anyone – then follow me to an island where calm always reigns and men are never in a hurry, where the women never grow old, where words are not wasted, where the sun stays longer than anywhere else and the Lady Moon moves more slowly, sleepy with idleness.

This island, dear Readers, is Majorca.

Santiago Rusinol.

Using my ‘optic organisms’ I see many taxis passing by with signs behind the windscreens saying ‘libre’. I flag one down and ask for Palma Nova. I have a reason for wanting to visit Palma Nova; my daughter and her friend spent two weeks there in July. They have dined out on it since. A hotel barman had stripped all his clothes off, then run into the lift and shouted, just before the doors closed, “Who wants me?” Nobody – as it turned out. Then there was the incident of the quarrelling honeymoon couple who had a fist fight in the hotel dining room (he ordered her to sell her horse on their return to England, she refused saying that she loved the horse far more than she loved him).

Worst of all were the battalions of drunken young European men who kept up a twenty-four-hour chant of ‘‘ere we go, “ere we go’. As some fell asleep, chanting, others rose from their beds and carried on. Remember this was in July.

On the October afternoon I was there the loudest noises came from the construction gangs singing as they worked on the new buildings. The beaches were deserted, as were the cafés and bars. The shops were devoid of any customers. A few elderly people strolled along the promenades. I went for a paddle; the sea was clear and warm. Unable to resist it I went for a swim. I hadn’t brought a towel but it didn’t matter. I lay on the sand and was dry in ten minutes. Both sides.

When the sun went down, promptly and spectacularly at 6pm, I caught a bus back to Palma. This took me into the city centre where I got lost. In my opinion it is essential to get lost in a new city, that way you are forced to walk about and discover places at a proper, natural pace. But you must have the taxi fare home, and it helps if you can remember the name of your hotel.

I wandered into the old part of the city and began a happy exploration of the winding alleys and steep narrow streets full of shops. The smell of leather filled the air. Palma has almost as many shoe shops as Leicester, so I felt quite at home. Eventually the jewelled espadrilles began to pinch so I flagged a taxi down on
Jaime III
, which is Palma’s equivalent to Regent Street, and went back to the hotel.

I dined in a Chinese restaurant which had no chopsticks on the premises. Everything came covered in Lee and Perrins sauce. A Chinese man stood at the door shaking hands with incoming customers. He had the sense not to attempt the same with outgoing customers. When the kitchen door opened I could see the Spanish cooks toiling over their woks.

Thus ended the first day.

Friday October 30
^th

I walked thirteen miles today. It took me eight hours. I set out to look at the Cathedral, a magnificent building which dominates the bay. As it happened the nearest I got to the cathedral was sitting on the terrace of a café opposite. I felt disinclined to miss any of the hot sunshine so I walked along the promenade admiring the flowering shrubs and trees. I stopped for a swim on an empty beach closely watched by three ancient gardeners who were sprinkling and watering grass seed onto the verge of the road.

They shouted encouragement as I swam (I think it was encouragement) and waved goodbye when I collected my things and headed away from them. At this point a little white dog joined me. I am frightened of most English dogs owing to their unpredictable tempers, but Majorcan strays displayed nothing but good-natured curiosity – they fought amongst themselves occasionally but I never saw them bother humans apart from butchers, whose doorways they haunted.

I talked to the mangy dog as we walked along the very edge of the bay. I told him that I was also alone and hadn’t spoken more than a few words to anyone for over thirty-six hours. He looked sympathetic. Together we crossed irrigation channels, and bridges. We detoured up side roads passing shut-up holiday villas. For some alarming miles we walked along a busy dual carriageway until we found a route back to the sea. We stopped at a restaurant and I ordered an excellent paella. I was the only customer. The dog sat under the table begging for scraps for a while, and then went to sleep. The proprietor
forced
me into having a drink with him – he wanted to tell me that he’d visited London several times and thought it was ‘very good place’. He asked me if my husband was ‘dead’. I told him ‘no’. He asked if my husband was ‘gone’. I told him ‘no’. Eventually I extricated myself from him with some difficulty and, leaving the dog asleep, I walked on without stopping until I came to C’an Pastilla which is a seaside resort blessed with wide sandy beaches, numerous shops and cafés, and conveniently placed pedestrian crossings. I mention the crossings because a dual carriageway runs along this part of the coast. Two elderly English women strolled along the beach, arm in arm, confessing lifelong resentments: “John was tetchy for forty years.”

“So was Ron, for forty-one.”

It gladdened my heart to see so many elderly people in the autumn sunlight. You could almost
see
arthritic bones mending, backs straightening and complexions tanning. There were many pensioners swimming in the sea and sunbathing on the beach, and, later that evening, getting very drunk in the bars.

I journeyed on and at some point C’an Pastilla merged and then became Arenal, and as night fell the sound of the dreaded electric organ began to drift up from basement bars. Arenal belonged to the German elderly. They strolled along the pavements, hand in pudgy hand, trying to decide where to eat. I ate on the terrace of an Italian restaurant; 1,000 pesetas for soup, bread, salad, tagliatelli, two glasses of Torres, dry white wine, one bottle of mineral water, three cups of café con leche. The night was warm and the food was good, and I decided that I liked Majorca. I caught a bus back into Palma (75 pesetas) and was in bed by nine-thirty.

Saturday October 31
^st

Today I went in the opposite direction, to Illetas. I caught a bus behind my hotel in Palma and twenty minutes later I got off the bus and found myself in Paradise. Illetas is where the rich spend their holidays. The villas and hotels are magnificent and the foliage is even more abundant.

I walked up and down a hilly road until I came to a sign which said ‘to the beach’. I then walked through a gate and into the Garden of Eden. I passed a woman cleaning the shutters of a holiday villa with a wet sweeping brush, then I walked down a twisting path shaded by palms and hibiscus through which could be seen the unnaturally blue sea. Ahead of me I saw a youth – whom I took to be a young gardener pruning a bush; the leaves were shaking and scarlet petals were falling. The youth saw me approach and stepped from behind the bush. It was
not
a pair of secateurs in his hands, he was holding something quite different. I stood very still. He sat down on the raised edge of the pathway. There was nobody else about.

“Put it away,” I said in brisk English tones. He took his hands away and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “You can see the state I’m in, what can I do?” I shouted “Senora!” to the woman cleaning the shutters. She didn’t turn round, perhaps she was a señorita. The youth continued his urgent manipulations. I didn’t know where to look but I was too scared to turn my back on him, and I was damned if he was going to stop me getting to the beach.

“Bad boy,” I said.

Suddenly three little children ran down the path. Before I could stop them they saw the youth. They turned back. A little girl began to cry. I was furious then. I shouted to the youth, who ran away holding his jeans in one hand, and himself in the other. He ran past the children, who screamed.

An old gardener came trudging up the path. He saw the fear on my face. I tried to explain. The gardener gave a spirited mime of what he thought had happened (rather too spirited in fact), then he saw the youth and ran towards him shouting violently. I carried on down the glorious pathway and found a perfect cove at the bottom.