Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years

  Brick said, ‘Level with me, Aidy, I’m your agent for Chrissake, I lie for a f------ living. I can ring Stoat and tell him you’ve been in a f------ coma. But I wanna know the truth. I’m gonna ask you two questions. One: have you written the f------ book?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘OK, so now we’re getting somewhere. Two: is a ghost-writer writing the f------ book?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  Arthur Stoat is threatening to sue me for breach of contract and claim compensation for lost income and damage to his professional reputation. I asked him how much Stoat was demanding. Brick said, ‘The guy was quoting a ballpark figure of sixty K.’

  After I’d replaced the receiver I sat on the stairs for a full five minutes trying to imagine the life that lay ahead of me. I did a quick calculation on the telephone message pad.

  Stoat Books

  60,000

  Legal fees

  6,000 (approx)

  £66,000

  I would be forced to live in penury in my mother’s house with two sons to support and my professional reputation in tatters. It was my darkest hour.

  When my mother came in from Christmas shopping I told her everything: about Glenn, and Stoat Books, and the hopeless future that lay ahead of me.

  She put her arm round me and said, ‘Don’t worry, pet, you’ve still got your mother. I can be strong for both of us.’

  She then went to her bedroom and lay down with a cold white flannel over her face.

  Friday December 19th

  I heard my mother get up at five this morning and then start clacking on her computer keys in the alcove. My bedroom lies directly above Ivan’s work-station and I was forced from my bed by the disturbance. I went down to complain. She swung round guiltily on her typist’s chair and said, ‘I’m writing our round-robin Christmas letter. Go back to bed.’

  She is so inconsiderate: I need all the sleep I can get at a time like this.

  Sunday December 21st

  Am I the only person in this house who is remotely interested in the arrangements for Christmas? There isn’t a candle, a mince-pie or a bag of nuts in the house. And I need to focus my little remaining energy on tracking down a Teletubby.

  Monday December 22nd

  I have bought book tokens from Waterstones for everybody, apart from my mother, for whom I already have a gift. It is a set of mini toiletries I took from a boarding house I stayed in last year: shampoo, conditioner, bath gel, sewing kit, cotton buds and a shoeshine pad. I plan to place them in a wicker bread-basket and cover them with clingfilm. She will never know it is not a bona fide shop-bought present.

  Tuesday December 23rd

  My mother has still not bought a turkey, even though we are apparently to host the entire family on Christmas Day. She is spending sixteen hours a day at the keyboard writing her interminable round robin.

  Wednesday December 24th

  Christmas Eve

  I rose at dawn and went downstairs to find my mother still seated in front of the screen, the ashtray next to her overflowing. I pointed out to her that this was a pointless exercise as she had long missed the last posting day for Christmas and she said that she had turned it into a New Year greeting. When I told her that, after a tip-off from Nigel, I was going to queue outside Safeway’s for a Teletubby, she said, ‘Pick a turkey up while you’re there, and a Christmas cake and stuff.’ As I slammed the door she shouted, ‘Don’t forget the bread-sauce mix.’

  The Teletubby queue was at least thirty people long by the time I arrived; some had been there all night. I cursed God, went inside, filled two trolleys with Christmas Fayre, drove home, unpacked, put the turkey in the bath to defrost, drove to Toys ‘R’ Us, threw a lot of plastic rubbish suitable for a three-year-old into a trolley, and drove home again.

  I was wrapping the book tokens in my room when the doorbell rang with an aggressive urgency. My mother shouted from the computer alcove, ‘For Christ’s sake! Will somebody please answer that bloody door?’

  William got there before me.

  Glenn Bott stood on the doorstep looking down at his half-brother. He was holding a large envelope. Wordlessly he handed it over to me.

  Wordlessly I took it. He would not look me in the eye.

  William said, ‘Do you want to see my dinosaur farm?’

  Glenn nodded, and William led the way up the stairs. I followed, tearing open the envelope. Inside was a Christmas card. A picture of a pipe-smoking-dad type, in a cardigan, sitting by a roaring fire in an armchair with a decanter and a glass on a small round table next to him. Across the top was gold-embossed writing: ‘To Dad at Christmas’.

  May Yuletide cheer

  Be yours this year

  And may your Christmas

  Dreams come true

  If e’er I’m sad

  I think of Dad

  And I’m so pleased

  My Dad is you!

  He had signed it – ‘To Dad, from Glenn’.

  I thanked him and he frowned. He doesn’t go in for smiling much. He looks like a cross between William Brown (the same tuft of hair sticking up at the back) and a younger, blonder, thinner, more authentic version of Gordon Brown. The Chancellor of the Exechequer.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to the boy, and thanked God for William’s obvious social skills. But when William went to the toilet and we were alone, I confided in him my despair at being unable to give William his most devout wish, a set of Teletubbies.

  Was I subconsciously warning the boy about my inadequacies as a parent?

  Eventually, Glenn said, ‘What shall I call you? Dad or Adrian?’

  I said, ‘Dad,’ and he now calls me Dad at least once every sentence. I never call my father anything.

  When William came back, Glenn got to his feet and said, ‘I’ve gotta go, Dad.’

  My mother was waiting at the foot of the stairs. Her face crumpled slightly when she saw him. Glenn blushed a deep red as they were introduced and my mother was uncharacteristically lost for words, so I hurried the boy out of the door. He said, ‘I’ll be back, Dad.’

  After he’d gone I drove to the BP garage, where I panic-bought a plastic football. I hoped that the boy had at least a passing interest in the game.

  I got back to the house to find my mother in the kitchen with Ivan. She kept saying, ‘Just you wait until you see him,’ in a kind of despairing way. Ivan said, ‘Pauline, the child has had none of the advantages of our children: library tickets, nourishing food, etc.’

  This is a joke: I was brought up on boil-in-the-bag.

  Rosie said, ‘He’s riding around on a £200 BMX.’

  ‘It’s probably stolen,’ said my mother.

  I defended Glenn, saying, ‘He is my son, a member of the Mole family. We must grow to love him.’

  My mother said, ‘I’ll try to like him, Adrian, but love may take some time.’

  Rosie had prejudiced my mother against Glenn by telling her that he is a psycho and has been suspended from school three times, once for throwing his shoes over the oak tree in the grounds (one got caught in a lower branch), once for saying that the moussaka he had for school dinner was ‘crap’, and once for asserting to his comparative religion teacher that God was ‘a bit of a bastard’ for allowing famines and plane crashes to happen.

  Thursday December 25th

  Christmas Day – Bank Holiday

  The day has been exhausting. William was up at 5.30. I tried to fob him off with his Christmas stocking and then to persuade him back to bed, but the kid was in a frenzy of excitement and made several attempts to break into the living room, where Santa had left his presents. As arranged I telephoned my father and Tania, and told them that William was about to ‘open’. Next I knocked on my mother ‘n’ Ivan’s door and told them the same. I shouted to Rosie and went down to put the kettle on. This was only the first of my many domestic duties on this day. I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded
as ‘a big Jessie’. It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

  I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. ‘It was a golden age,’ he said, almost choking with emotion. ‘I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.’ His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, ‘That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.’

  The Norfolk Sugdens, my mother’s parents, turned up at 1 p.m. I’m amazed that the Swansea licensing authorities allow Grandad Sugden to drive. He’s got cataracts and narcolepsy, a condition that sends him to sleep every twenty minutes.

  ‘He ain’t asleep for long,’ said Granny Sugden, ‘no more ‘n a second or so.’

  They sat down in front of the television five minutes after arriving, and watched everything on the screen with the same open-mouthed fascination. The signal is weak where they live. I asked my mother if she’d told the Sugdens about the Great Mole/Braithwaite Partner Swap.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘they’re retired potato farmers. It would only confuse them.’

  I certainly saw confusion in Grandma Sugden’s eyes when Ivan took my mother into his arms under the mistletoe and French-kissed her for a good two minutes. I was glad to leave them all to it and get into the kitchen. Though I was enraged to find out that the turkey hadn’t defrosted properly!

  Why not? It had been in the bath at least sixteen hours.

  Rosie sat for an hour with her new Rowenta hair–dryer on full, directing heat into the turkey’s cavities. By the time it came out of the oven, the light was fading and everyone had stuffed themselves full of chocolates and mince-pies. I must admit, my dear Diary, that the last ten minutes before dishing up the Christmas dinner were possibly the most pressured of my life. Serving dinner for sixty at Hoi Polloi was a doddle by comparison. I have been nagging my mother to have the large ring on her electric cooker repaired for months but, oh, no, that would have been too sensible!

  Finally, when all the vegetables were in their serving dishes, and the roast potatoes and chipolatas and stuffing balls were clustered around the turkey, I realized the horrible truth: I had forgotten to make the gravy! In a normal household this would hardly matter – a dollop of Bisto and a few pale Oxos would suffice. But the Christmas Gravy in the Mole house has over the years taken on the stuff of myth and legend.

  My dead grandma, Edna May Mole, is responsible for setting the standard. First the turkey giblets are stewed for twenty-four hours, and when the stock has been reduced and the scum has been removed, then and only then are proprietary gravy brands added, slowly and carefully, until exactly the right shade of light brown liquid, not too thick, not too thin, simmers in the Christmas Gravy Saucepan.

  I tore some kitchen paper from the roll and buried my face in it, only to be jolted from my feelings of inadequacy by Tania, who burst into the kitchen and asked irritably, ‘How much longer must we wait? I’m hypoglycaemic you know.’

  I said, through gritted teeth, that I had forgotten to make the Christmas Gravy.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ she said.

  This would be tantamount to having Charles Manson give the Pope’s Easter Blessing. I tried to stop her but before I could she had pulled the chicken Oxos out of my hand and crumbled them into the turkey roasting-pan. She was stirring it (quite viciously, I thought) when my mother arrived on the scene. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m making gravy,’ said Tania.

  ‘Only a person who carries the Mole name is allowed to make the Christmas Gravy,’ said my mother, whose lips, always thin, had now all but disappeared. ‘Give me that spoon.’

  Tania said, ‘Whether you like it or not, Pauline, I will soon be a Mole. George and I are getting married as soon as we’re all divorced.’

  ‘Fine! Fine!’ shouted my mother. ‘You can make your own Christmas Gravy in your own house, but until then get out of my kitchen!’

  Everybody then congregated in the kitchen to join the row, apart from William who was putting his plastic insects (a present from Rosie, 30 for £1 from Poundstretcher) to bed in various containers.

  Meanwhile, the Christmas dinner, over which I had toiled for most of the day, grew cold. I went upstairs, slammed shut my bedroom door and threw myself on to my bed. I waited for the sound of feet on the stairs; surely somebody would come to me and beg me to rejoin the company? But the next sounds I heard were pings from the microwave, then crackers being pulled, corks being popped, and eventually, to my disgust, laughter!

  Several times I heard the word ‘gravy’ shouted in tones of hilarity!

  I must leave this house at the earliest opportunity.

  I woke at 7.30 in the evening to find Glenn Bott shaking me roughly. ‘Thanks for the football,’ he said. Then, ‘You’ve got dribble on the side of your mouth, Dad.’ He gave me a badly wrapped and Sellotaped parcel, which bore an ill-written label: ‘To Dad, from Glenn’. I opened it and found a bottle of anti-freeze and a mitt for scraping ice off a car windscreen. I was very touched. I’m going to try to persuade the boy to grow his hair. Apart from the tuft his scalp is intimidating.

  Tania patronized Glenn for a few minutes, ‘I say Glenn, those trainers are terribly cutting-edge,’ then left to join Pandora at a hospice carol service. I was glad to see the back of her. She had made it obvious all day that Christmas Day at the Moles’ had been a walk on the wild side for her.

  My father, maudlin on Johnnie Walker, invited us to The Lawns tomorrow for Boxing Day ‘Brunch’.

  Glenn helped me to sort out the Sugdens’ campbeds. We worked quite well as a team. Before he went home on his bike he said, ‘I was just thinkin’, Dad, Jesus is 1,997 years old today, ain’t he?’

  It was a rhetorical question, which, thank God, I didn’t need to answer. Is the boy a religious obsessive? How will he react when he finds out that his father is a radical agnostic?

  Friday December 26th

  Boxing Day – Bank Holiday

  Brunch at The Lawns was a tense affair. It started off badly when Grandad Sugden slipped and fell into the Koi carp pool and damaged the lining. Tania’s mouth turned into a slit and stayed that way throughout lunch. The atmosphere was not helped by my mother laughing openly at their Christmas tree, on which were arranged twenty-five gingerbread men, each hanging by their necks from a noose-like silver ribbon. ‘I thought you were against the death penalty, Tania,’ she said.

  ‘George forgot to put the holes in their heads for the ribbon,’ Tania said, as she handed round a plate of home-made sushi; it looked suspiciously like bits of the Koi carp, which were gasping for breath outside as my father tried desperately to repair the pool lining.

  I saw Ivan look wistfully around at his old spacious home.

  Things livened up a bit when the Labrador puppy woke up and caught one of Rosie’s hair extensions in his paws, but as soon as she was disentangled we left.

  In the late afternoon I took William for a walk with his wheelbarrow, and bumped into Archie Tait outside the BP garage, where he’d just been to buy a turkey burger for his dinner. I asked him how he’d spent Christmas Day.

  ‘Alone,’ he said.

  He asked me how I’d spent the day.

  ‘Lonely, but not alone,’ I replied.

  Some insane impulse prompted me to say that if he felt like coming to Wisteria Walk at 6 p.m. there would be Christmas cake, pickles, leftover turkey, etc. He looked at the turkey burgers and said, ‘I wonder if they would consider a refund.’ Talk about mean!

  10 p.m. I have just realized that the refund remark was almost certainly a joke, because Archie is far from mean. He arrived at the house festooned with presents. H
e gave me a copy of Boswell’s Life of Doctor Johnson that I admired when I was last in his house. To William he gave a set of Lakeland drawing pencils, sixty of them in a wooden box, graded colour by lovely colour. It is far too handsome a present for a three-year-old. William will almost certainly lose or destroy them within hours. I said so to Archie.

  He bent down to William and said, ‘William, these pencils each have their own place in the box and they must be replaced exactly before you go to bed each night.’

  William spent the rest of the day taking the pencils in and out of the box. I asked Archie where he had bought such a lovely present at such short notice. He said he’d had the pencil box for fifteen years. His face showed that he didn’t want to go into further details.

  Saturday December 27th

  Thank God it’s all over and there’s only the New Year to get through.

  Monday December 29th

  My mother received the following note from Archie Tait today.

  Dear Mrs Mole,

  It was most kind of you to have me to your Boxing Day celebration. I enjoyed myself enormously; it was so refreshing to be among people with whom one feels an affinity. As a young man I campaigned for the principles of free love, and the rejection of bourgeois values. It was good to see these values being practised so assiduously in your family.

  Yours, with best wishes,

  Archibald Tait

  PS. Adrian is a fine young man. Congratulations.

  My mother has taken this short note to be a total vindication of her louche and undisciplined behaviour since she came to sexual maturity.

  Glenn turned up (again) this evening to wish us all a happy New Year. And to give me a Hogmanay card from his mother, Sharon. I put it unread on top of the refrigerator. ‘You oughta read inside it, Dad,’ said Glenn.