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

about lying and saying it was the television in the background, but Marigold knew that ntl had not yet connected my television, so I was forced to tell the truth.
    Pandora laughed at a joke Parvez made.
    Marigold said, ‘Who are you with?’
    Pandora said suggestively, ‘Can I help you to a spring roll, Aidy, darling?’
    Marigold said, ‘Who is that?’
    I left the table and walked over to the fish tank. A large carp swam to the glass. It looked disconcertingly like Marigold without her glasses. I gained courage and said to the fish, ‘Look, Marigold, this is not working for me. Perhaps we shouldn’t see each other again.’
    She said in a flat voice, ‘You’re with another woman, aren’t you?’
    I said I was with three women and two men.
    Marigold sobbed, ‘Three couples.’
    I said, ‘Please, don’t cry.’
    She said, ‘I’ve spent all evening working on a loft apartment doll’s house. It was going to be your Christmas present.’
    I didn’t know how to break off the conversation. It seemed heartless to point out to Marigold that my food was getting cold. I had to let her ramble on about her disastrous track record with men. The carp in the tank continued to stare mournfully at me. I could see my reflection in the glass. I looked a bit mournful myself.
    Eventually Marigold rang off, saying in that spooky flat voice, ‘There’s no point in living without you.’
    The fish swam to the bottom of the tank and lay there without moving. I went back to the table. Keith Wong was putting down a dish of duck and pineapple, but when I pronged a bit with a chopstick it tasted like sawdust in my mouth.
    I drank four tiny cups of sake and told my dinner companions about Marigold. The general consensus was that Marigold had to go.
    Wayne Wong said, ‘No offence, Aidy, but you can do a lot better. She ain’t exactly a laugh a minute, is she?’
    Pandora said, ‘She sounds like one of those snivelling whiny types that give women a bad name.’
    Nigel said, ‘But any woman who fell for Adrian would have to be half off her rocker.’
    Then Pandora said, ‘You forget, Nigel, that I was once in love with Adrian myself.’ She took my hand and held it. ‘We were both fourteen. We were going to live in a farmhouse and have lots of children. Adrian was going to be an ice-cream man during the day and I was going to milk cows and bake bread and wait for him to come home.’
    Suddenly we were both weeping. ‘It’s that fucking rice wine,’ said Pandora. ‘It always does this to me.’
    Nigel broke the party up by saying he had to get up early in the morning, because a woman from the RNIB was coming to interview him to vet his suitability for a guide dog.
    Parvez, being a Muslim, was the only one sober enough to drive, so the rest of us left our cars parked outsidethe restaurant and we squeezed into Parvez’s people carrier and I invited everybody back to Rat Wharf for a nightcap.
    Gielgud was waiting for me in the car park, but I scared him off with a Star Wars light sabre belonging to Ali, Parvez’s youngest son, which had been left in the car.
    I switched the lamps on and made coffee and warned everybody about the glass lavatory. People went out on to the balcony and Pandora said how beautiful the swans looked in the moonlight. I hoped that, for once, Gielgud wouldn’t spoil the party.
Sunday November 24th
    Parvez took everyone home except Pandora. We stayed up talking until it was almost light. She told me about the terrible workload she had, of how she could never get on top of the paperwork, of how the press monitored her every statement. She was almost certainly under constant surveillance. She knew for sure that her phones were tapped, and said that it was a relief to be able to talk openly and freely with an old and trusted friend.
    I said, ‘We should have moved into that farmhouse, Pandora.’
    She laughed and said, ‘It’s a real shame that we were not sexually compatible.’
    I pointed out to her that her