Pandora and I are now insanely in love! The separation only served to fuel our passion. Our hormones are stirred every time we meet. Pandora slept with the otter pebble in her hand last night. How I wish the otter pebble could have been me.
Mr Singh has had to return to India to look after his aged parents, so Bert has been told that he will have to move back into his dirty old house! Mr Singh says that he cannot trust his womenfolk to be alone in the house with Bert. How stupid can you get? Bert doesn’t mind too much; he said that it is ‘quite a compliment’. Pandora and I are going to clean Bert’s house and help him move back. He owes the council two hundred and ninety-four pounds in rent arrears. He has got to pay the arrears off at fifty pence a week, so it is a certainty that Bert will die in debt.
Pandora and I went to look at Bert’s house today. It is a truly awesome sight. If Bert took all his empty beer bottles back to the off-licence he might get enough money on the empties to pay off his rent arrears.
My father helped us to move all of the furniture out of the ground floor of Bert’s house, the woodworms came out to sunbathe. When we lifted the carpets we discovered that Bert had been walking about on a layer of dirt, old newspapers, hairpins, marbles and decomposed mice for years. We hung the carpets on the washing line and beat them all afternoon, but the dust billowed out non-stop. Pandora got excited at about 5 PM, she claimed she could see a pattern emerging on one carpet, but closer examination showed it to be squashed fairy cake. We are going back tomorrow with Pandora’s mother’s carpet-shampooer. Pandora said it has been tested by Which?, but I bet it has never had to clean a filthy hovel like Bert Baxter’s before.
I have just witnessed a miracle! This morning Bert’s carpets were dark grey in colour. Now one is a red Axminster and the other is a blue Wilton. The carpets are hanging on the clothes line to dry. We have scraped all the floors clean and washed the furniture down with a fungicide disinfectant. Pandora took the curtains down but they fell to pieces before she could get them to the sink. Bert has been sitting in a deckchair criticizing and complaining. He can’t see what’s wrong with living in a dirty house.
What is wrong with living in a dirty house?
My father took Bert’s bottles to the off-licence this morning. The boot, back seat and floor of the car were filled with them. The car stank of brown ale. He ran out of petrol on the way and called the AA. The AA man was most uncivil, he said it wasn’t the Automobile Association my father needed, it was Alcoholics Anonymous!
Twelfth after Trinity. Moon’s First Quarter
Bert’s house looks great. Everything is dead clean and shiny. We have moved his bed into the lounge so that he can watch television in bed. Pandora’s mother has done very artistic arrangements with flowers, and Pandora’s father has made an alsatian flap in the back door so that Bert doesn’t keep having to get up to answer the door to Sabre.
Bert is moving back tomorrow.
Labor Day, USA and Canada
An airmail letter from Hamish Mancini.
Hi Aid!
Howya doin’? I hope the situation Pandora-wise is ongoing! She sounds kinda zappy! Scotland blew my mind! It was so far out as to be nuked! You’re a great human being, Aid. I guess I was kinda traumatized when we rapped but Dr Eagelburger (my shrink) is doing great things with my libido. Mom’s really wiped out right now, turns out number four is a TV and has a better collection of Calvin Kleins than she do! Don’t you think the fall is a drag? Son-of-a-bitch leaves everywhere!
I showed it to Pandora, my father and Bert but nobody understands it. Bert doesn’t like Americans because it took them too long to come into the war or something.
Bert now in his clean house. He hasn’t said thank-you, but he seems happy.
Lousy stinking school on Thursday. I tried my old uniform on but I have outgrown it so badly that my father is being forced to buy me a new one tomorrow. He is going up the wall but I can’t help it if my body is in a growth period can I? I am only five centimetres shorter than Pandora now. My thing remains static at twelve centimetres.
Grandma phoned, she has found out about Doreen and Maxwell going to Skegness. She is never speaking to my father again.
Here is my shopping list:
Blazer PS29.99
2 pairs grey trousers PS23.98
2 white shirts PS11.98
2 grey pullovers PS7.98
3 pairs black socks PS2.37
1 pair PE shorts PS4.99
1 PE vest PS3.99
1 track suit PS11.99
1 pair training shoes PS7.99
1 pair football boots and studs PS11.99
1 pair football socks PS2.99
Football shorts PS4.99
Football shirt PS7.99
Adidas sports bag PS4.99
1 pair black shoes PS15.99
1 calculator PS6.99
Pen and pencil set PS3.99
Geometry set PS2.99
My father can easily spare a hundred pounds. His redundancy payment must have been huge, so why he is lying on his bed moaning I don’t know. He is just a mean skinflint! He hasn’t paid with real money anyway! He used his American Express card.
Pandora admired me in my new uniform. She says she thinks I stand a good chance of being made a prefect.
A proud start to the new term. I am a prefect! My first duty is as, late duty prefect. I have to wait by the gap in the railings and take the name of anyone sneaking late into school. Pandora is also a prefect. She is in charge of silence in the dinner queue.
My new timetable was given to me today by my new form tutor, Mr Dock. It includes my O level and CSE lessons, and it is compulsory to do Maths, English, PE and Comparative Religion. But they do give you a choice of Cultural and Creative subjects. So I have chosen Media Studies (dead easy, just reading newspapers and watching telly) and Parentcraft (just learning about sex, I hope). Mr Dock also teaches English Literature, so we are bound to get on, by now I am surely the best-read kid in the school. I will be able to help him out if he gets stuck.
Asked my father for five pounds fifty for school trip to the British Museum. He went berserk and said, ‘What happened to free education?’ I told him that I didn’t know.
Had a long talk with Mr Dock. I explained that I was a one-parent-family child with an unemployed, bad-tempered father. Mr Dock said he wouldn’t care if I was the offspring of a black, lesbian, one-legged mother and an Arab, leprous, hump-backed-dwarf father so long as my essays were lucid, intelligent and unpretentious. So much for pastoral care!
Wrote lucid, intelligent and unpretentious essay about Scottish wildlife in the morning. In afternoon did shopping in Sainsbury’s with my father. Saw Rick Lemon dithering at the fruit counter; he said selecting fruit was an ‘overtly political act’. He rejected South African apples, French golden delicious apples, Israeli oranges, Tunisian dates, and American grapefruits. In the end he selected English rhubarb, ‘Although,’ he said, ‘the shape is phallic, possibly sexist’. His girlfriend, Tit (short for Titia), was cramming the trolley with pulses and rice. She had a long skirt on but now and again I caught a glimpse of her hairy ankles. My father said he preferred a nice shaven leg any day. My father likes stockings, suspenders, mini-skirts and low necklines! He is dead old-fashioned.