Tuesday April 14th The shame of it! No wonder John Birt failed to ring me back. I have studied the handwritten PS endlessly, but don"t recognize the prankster"s handwriting. How will I ever overcome my terrible humiliation and disappointment?
Glenn tried to console me with a joke. "At least you know it weren"t me, Dad, on April 1st. I didn"t have no handwritin"."
Wednesday April 15th Tonight, with Eleanor"s a.s.sistance, Glenn copied out his name and address and also "Gazza", "Hoddle" and "World Cup".
I opened a bottle of Mateus Rose and asked Eleanor to join me in celebrating his progress. I almost wished I hadn"t--after half a gla.s.s she began to gaze at me very intensely. I think I am going off her a little.
Thursday April 16th Eleanor rang at 7.30 a.m. (a touch early, I felt) to apologize for her melancholic behaviour. Apparently she is in therapy due to "inadequate nurturing and a subsequent lack of self-esteem". I didn"t ask for details.
I said that I, too, had been in therapy due to my parents" neglect of me when young.
In thirty-one years I can remember only two acts of parental self-sacrifice from my father. The first was when I was six years old, and dropped my raspberry ripple on the sand at Wells-next-the-Sea. He gave me his own (slightly eaten). The second was when I was suspended from school for contravening the rules by wearing red socks. He took time off work and went to see the headmaster, the fearsome Mr Scruton, and forced him to make a grovelling apology.
2 a.m. Regarding the Red Socks Row. I"ve just remembered the true facts.
My father did not take time off from work. He was unemployed at the time.
He did not confront Scruton at the school. He telephoned him.
Scruton did not make a grovelling apology.
On the third day I capitulated and wore black socks to school.
Sat.u.r.day April 18th Glenn"s birthday Glenn came into my bedroom this morning and thanked me for the "You"re a teenager, Son!" card. (Picture: a blond boy with a baseball cap on back to front, sitting in front of a computer.) He asked me to read the verse inside. After I"d done so I wished I"d read the inscription thoroughly in the shop. I would almost certainly have bought another card.
"It"s a boy!" the midwife said. Emotions went from A to Z. All your life I"ve guided you, taken you to school and zoo, Helped you with your ABC, been there when you needed me. Now you are an in-between, not child, not man, but new-turned teen. As you make your way through life, there may be days of woe and strife Remember I am always here to give, advise and lend an ear. I"m your dad and you"re my son. When most is said, and all is done.
I thought Glenn was moved by these sentiments, though it"s hard to tell, with his face being as it is. He liked the England strip I bought him from JJB Sports, and went to the bathroom straight away to change into it. He"s got my legs: he doesn"t look good in shorts. William gave him a card he"d made at nursery: a cardboard football decorated in glued and painted polenta. When we were sitting eating breakfast (I insist we sit around the table for all meals--I grew up watching my mother eat standing up with her back to the sink and my father sitting on top of the pedal bin), Glenn said, "Am I havin" a surprise party, Dad?"
I said, "No."
Glenn said, "But you"d have to be savin" that, wouldn"t you, Dad?"
When he"d gone outside to kick his football up and down the yard with William, I phoned Sharon and asked her to come to a party with her children.
She sounded pleased--she"s never been to Rampart Terrace before. I then rang round my family and begged them to attend at 5 p.m., and to bring cards and presents.
I left a message on Eleanor"s machine.
I spent most of the day shopping for the "surprise" party. I bought a Jane Asher football cake and thirteen candles. At 4.45 a.m. I made a huge cauldron full of mashed potatoes and put thirty-five links of Walker"s sausages into the oven. I cut up two pounds of Spanish onions and fried them slowly. I then spent the next quarter of an hour on the doorstep, looking anxiously up and down the street, praying that the guests would turn up.
Eventually, Sharon, Caister, Kent and Bradford arrived on foot, then my own family. I asked them all to wait outside until I"d lured Glenn into the yard by telling him I wanted him to help me hone my footballing skills--an unlikely story, but he fell for it. After five minutes of tedious footballing pretence I led him into the living room, which was now crowded with his friends and relations. He blushed to the roots of his hair and fell silent as the a.s.sembled company sang "Happy Birthday To You".
Eleanor"s voice soared above the others; she was like a song-thrush fallen amongst crows. Tania Braithwaite said, in a loud whisper to my father as tea was served, "Sausages, mashed potatoes and fried onions? How very basic" My mother overheard and said to her, "What have you got against sausages?"
Tania said, "I"ve nothing against sausages per se."
My mother nodded towards my father and said, "I expect by now you"ve settled for chipolatas."
Tania turned away angrily and spent the next half-hour talking to Eleanor about cashmere. "It"s scandalous," I heard her say.
When she"d gone I said to Eleanor, "If Tania thinks it"s a scandalous price she shouldn"t buy it."
Eleanor looked back at me, baffled. Then she said, "We weren"t talking about cashmere. We were discussing the situation in Kashmir."
I"m glad I"m no longer fixated with her. No full-blooded man wants a relationship with a flat-chested woman who talks about Kashmir in the late afternoon. Caister was pa.s.sed around and admired by all the guests, except Eleanor. Privately I think the kid is a bit of a Woody Allen lookalike, though without the gla.s.ses, of course.
Sharon looked pleased when Glenn asked my mother to take a photograph of him with his mum and dad.
My mother took several shots of us with her disposable camera. She was not happy when Glenn thanked her, saying, "Thank you, Grandma." She likes William to call her Granny Paulie.
Sunday April 19th This morning I asked Glenn if he knew what "Sabbath" meant. He screwed up his face in concentrated thought, then said, "Would I be right in thinkin" it"s an olden days" band?"
I said, "That"s Black Sabbath, who glorified in mocking Christianity and middle-cla.s.s mores." I explained about the Sabbath, saying that it represented the seventh day, when G.o.d had a day off from designing the world.
He was fascinated. He told me that they"ve done Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Paganism at school, but they haven"t got round to "doin" Christianity yet, Dad".
He has never heard of Moses and the Ten Commandments. As we cleared the Sunday-lunch table, I told him and William about Jesus turning water into wine. "Did he have a drinkin" problem, Dad?" he asked, when I finished.
Most of the people in Glenn"s previous life had an official problem, which the state was helping them to cure. I didn"t tell him about the Opal Fruits, and my netting phobia. He thinks I"m entirely sane. I don"t want to disabuse him of that opinion. After lunch, I slept on the sofa while the boys played with the PlayStation that Sharon bought from a catalogue for Glenn"s birthday.
Had an erotic dream about stripping Eleanor of cashmere in Kashmir. It was some minutes before I could move from the sofa with any dignity.
Wednesday April 22nd Bill Broadway is in Paris tracking down a pair of World Cup tickets. I rang the ticket hotline to buy a few as an investment, but apparently 20 million people had the same idea. Only 15,000 got through. I wasn"t one of them.
3 a.m. Glenn has just had a nightmare that Alan Shearer, his hero, is dropped by Hoddle for being an atheist.
Friday April 24th There is a drug on the market (not Leicester market) called v.i.a.g.r.a. It gives a man an hour-long erection.
My father is already in a state of ecstasy at the prospect! He has persuaded Tania to withdraw some of her pension-plan money and buy two return tickets to New York to track down a supplier! More 1950s baby-boomer madness!
At 6 a.m. I drove my father and Tania to Birmingham Airport. They both sat in the back with their seat belts on. The M6 was particularly awful so I drove slowly, but got trapped between two huge articulated lorries. At one point my father shouted, "For crying out bleddy loud, get a move on. Overtake! We"ll miss the duty-free at this rate."
Tania looked even more tense than usual. I expect she was nervous about the effect the v.i.a.g.r.a drug would have on their relationship. I loaded their luggage on to a trolley--they"ve both got bad backs from gardening. My father muttered to me, "Nine thousand miles and two thousand quid for a bit of pork swordsmanship! It had better be worth it."
Due to the unseasonable heatwave I promised to water their garden twice a day. Global warming is playing havoc with our English horticulture. "Please don"t let the containers dry out," begged Tania. It"s pathetic how enslaved people become to a few plants. I hope it never happens to me.
Sat.u.r.day April 25th I saw my love on the news tonight: she was addressing a small crowd of whelk workers on a quay somewhere. She looked totally ravishing. Her hair was blowing in the stiff east-coast breeze. She spoke about the government"s pledge to protect whelks with pa.s.sion and intensity, as others might speak of Bach or early-English poetry.
Sunday April 26th My father rang from New York at 3 a.m. this morning, oblivious to the fact that in England people were sleeping. He asked about the garden. I lied and said that I had given it a good soaking. "Good," he said, "because when we saw CNN the weather girl said that Britain was having freak hot weather for April." To change the subject I asked him if he had managed to track down some v.i.a.g.r.a. He said, "Yeah, I"ve found a supplier. He"s dropping some off at the hotel tonight." He sounded like Al Pacino.
As soon as we"d had breakfast, we drove round to The Lawns. The gravel was OK, it was very nicely raked, but the plants in the pots were wizened and drooping. I dragged the hose out and ordered the boys to saturate the gra.s.s and the galvanized containers, which contained the various ex-flowers. The water just ran off the impacted surface. "It"s too late," said Glenn. "Everythin"s dead, Dad."
We debated whether it would be better to remove the wilting plants, or leave them where they were. In the end we pulled them up and replaced them with some nice cheerful stuff from Homebase.
We were invited to Wisteria Walk for Sunday lunch. I was pleased to accept. I"m sick of cooking and trying to cater for the very different tastes of the boys. William will now only eat Coco Pops, Marmite on white bread with the crusts removed, seedless grapes and yoghurt with no bits.
Glenn has opted for vegetarianism after watching a World in Action doc.u.mentary called "Slaughter on Perkins Avenue", an expose of an abattoir in Upper Norwood. As the programme came to its horrific conclusion, freeze-framing the face of a stun-gunned cow, Glenn pushed away the beef sandwiches I"d prepared for supper and said, "I shan"t be eatin" meat ever again, Dad. Have we got any cheese?"
I seem to exist on a diet of boiled, mashed, fried, roasted, sauted and baked potatoes, as did the greatest writers in the history of literature, Dostoevsky and Joyce, both of whom hailed from countries where the potato was a staple foodstuff. There is obviously something in the humble spud that aids the creative process.
Ivan is looking increasingly stressed out. As we laid the table my mother told me that he is spending sixteen hours a day at his terminal in the alcove of the dining-room. She said, "Information pours into this house twenty-four hours a day. There"s e-mail, and voicemail, and data from the Web, then there"s faxes and the ordinary phone and letters through the door. The human brain can"t cope with it all, Adrian. Even his b.l.o.o.d.y car tells him what to do."
I agreed that it sounded as though Ivan was suffering from sensory overload. I asked her, "What exactly is it that Ivan does for a living?"
She confessed that she didn"t exactly know.
When I went to tell Ivan that lunch was ready, he was at his terminal, white-faced and sweating. I asked him what was wrong. He said, "I"ve done a Web search for drinking-straw manufacturers and received 17,000 entries."
I steered him gently towards the dining end of the room, but I noticed that, as he carved the chicken, he constantly glanced towards the terminal where the names and e-mail addresses of manufacturers of drinking straws throughout the world were rolling ceaselessly down the screen.
Over lunch I tried to pin down what he did. "I process information," he said, tetchily.
"For whom?" I asked.
"For whomsoever will buy the information I process," he said, raising his voice. The table fell silent, apart from the sound of cutlery on the plates and Glenn"s noisy demolition of a roast turnip.
Later, as the boys and I washed up, I heard my mother say to Ivan, "If this relationship is going to work, I"ll have to have my own terminal and a dedicated phone line." I asked her why she needed her own equipment, and she said that she was hoping to start up a business, desk-top printing greeting cards for the millennium. Divorce cards, love-child cards, I"m Gay cards and in-vitro-fertilization cards.
I was glad to get back inside my own house, where the only cutting-edge thing is Archie Tait"s old bread-knife.
Monday April 27th Brick forwarded a letter from a bloke in Belgrade with an unp.r.o.nouncable name full of Ks and Js who wants to translate Birdwatching, should it ever be published in the former Yugoslavia.
Dear Mr Mole, I am reading your most wonderful good writings Bird-watching and I am thinking that this will be good for Serb people to read also. Are you permission giving for my translate this into English form Serbian language?
I am translating too The Catcher in the Wry, The Lord of the Files, and of my latest Bridget Jones Dairy.
If your agreement with this preposition you will send fax to mine office. As shows this at above.
I am send you in hope good wish.
Jajkj Vljkjkjv I rang Brick. He wasn"t as enthusiastic as I had hoped. He said, "I ain"t got no faith in Vljkjkjv"s English. The guy don"t got no feeling for the language."
William blabbed the truth about the horticultural disaster at The Lawns to Tania as soon as we spotted them in the arrivals hall of Birmingham Airport. She visibly paled. "Did you manage to salvage any of the herbaceous stuff?" she said.
"Describe them," I said.
"When in bloom, they"re rather lovely, pale and subtle," she said.
Glenn said, "You"ve gotta use another tense now, Mrs Braithwaite. Could have been rather lovely, you gotta be sayin" now." He has obviously benefited from private education.
10.30 a.m. Tania has phoned my mother to complain. Apparently she thinks I ruined her garden deliberately. She has pulled up all my colourful replacement plants and replanted with her herbaceous weed look-alikes.
My mother told me in the strictest confidence that Tania is sick to death of my father"s new s.e.xual demands. Apparently (according to my mother, who is not always a reliable witness) Tania lies back for an hour and thinks about her seed catalogues. She told my mother that she will be glad when my father"s supply of v.i.a.g.r.a runs out. She is praying that the NHS refuses to prescribe it to impotent men. She said, "I"d hoped that gardening would sublimate George"s s.e.x drive."
I don"t want my mother and Tania to be friends: it"s against the natural order of things. It would be like Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams going to Ibiza together.
Tuesday April 28th Pandora was on the news tonight. She has been outed as a whelk-hater by an anonymous enemy! My love was secretly filmed in conversation with Peter Mandelson in a restaurant in Notting Hill. There was no sound, but the enemy had employed the services of an expert lip-reader and the following transcript was shown on the screen as "Pandy" and "Mandy" stuffed themselves on Tex-Mex delicacies.
MANDY: You know how much I love Tony, Pandy. I"d do anything for him. Anything.
PANDY: Yeah, yeah, but you can"t expect him to have to choose between you and Gordon, can you? Wow! The salsa is sublime.
MANDY: I"ve tried to like Gordon but...Is that Robin Cook in the corner with Gaynor?
pandy: No, relax, it"s just another ugly bearded git with a young girl.
MANDY: Talking of ugly bearded things, I caught you on the news on Sat.u.r.day night. You know, that whelk thing.
PANDY: You"re thinking of oysters, Mandy darling. They have beards. Whelks are those revolting things that look like diseased genitals. How anybody could put one in their mouth! (Laughter.) MANDY: Anyway, Pandy, you were magnificent. Are you happy at Ag and Fish?
PANDY: No. I want Robin"s job. I speak Serbo-Croat, v Russian, Mandarin, French, Italian and Spanish. I"m made for the Foreign Office. And I"d look great addressing the United Nations. In Vivienne Westwood.
MANDY: I"ll put a word in Tony"s ear, Pandy.
PANDY: Shall we have a pudding?
MANDY: Not for me, just a decaff.
Wednesday April 29th The headline in the Sun said, "WHELKS--"DISEASED GENITALS", SAYS PAN"
Thursday April 30th WHELK STORM GROWS.
Pandora Braithwaite MP has denied saying that whelks remind her of diseased genitals. She said in a statement today, "Lip-reading is not an exact science."
The Whelk a.s.sociation Trust have called for Braithwaite"s resignation. "Her position is untenable," said a t.w.a.t spokesman.
Independent The British a.s.sociation of Lip Readers has joined others in calling for Dr Pandora Braithwaite"s resignation. A spokeswoman for the Society for the Deaf said today, "She has put us back in the Dark Ages."
Rick Stein, renowned fish chef, has commented, "When I look at a whelk, s.e.x is not the first thing that springs to mind."
Brutus--Express My mother said that Pandora has been summoned to an emergency meeting of the Ashby-de-la-Zouch Labour Party tonight. Their first-anniversary celebration, where she was to have been a guest of honour, is to go ahead without her.
Friday May 1st 6.30 a.m. Pandora has just left my bed! She turned up at midnight last night, totally distraught after resigning from her job at Ag and Fish. She said, "I don"t know why I"m here," and fell into my arms on the doorstep. I led her inside and said that it was a tragedy that a few stinking whelks had led to her downfall. We sat by the fire; she took a bottle of Stolichnaya from her briefcase and asked me to fetch two gla.s.ses. I went into the kitchen, I arranged some Twiglets in a bowl, cut some cheese up into chunks, added ice to two gla.s.ses and found a bottle of tonic. I put everything on a tray and took it through.
"I want to get drunk," she said, as I came in.
She had kicked off her shoes and was curled up in Archie"s manky armchair. A portrait of Beatrice Webb gazed sternly down on her as she lit a cigarette. "Whelks b.l.o.o.d.y well do look like clapped-out genitals," she said, defiantly. Then, "Why should I have to lose my job for simply telling the truth?"
It was a naive question from an elected MP. I knelt by her side and took her wrist in my hand. She said, "Why are you taking my pulse?" Then burst into tears and said, "You"ve always been there for me, Aidy."
We finished the vodka, and I opened a bottle of champagne I"d been keeping for Millennium Night. After that had been drunk I searched Archie"s pantry and found a half-bottle of Martell brandy. Andrew spat at me as I slopped some into Pandora"s gla.s.s.
At 2.30 a.m. the telephone rang, but there was only the faint sound of shallow breathing.
Shortly afterwards Pandora and I struggled up the stairs to bed. She slept in my arms all night. We both kept our underwear on (hers was disappointingly functional). I had been looking forward to making love to her in the morning, when we were both sober, and had bolted the door from the inside to prevent interruption, but at 6.15 a.m. her pager bleeped and she leaped out of bed to check it.
She was on message again.