Free Adrian Mole and The Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend Page B

‘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.’
Sunday November 17th
    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 thenread 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.
    Dear Dad
    Me and the lads are having a great time. It is dead hot and I