The Boy Who Fell to Earth (13 page)

‘Mum, the kind of men you meet hanging around in museums belong in them – as exhibits.’

Besides, my entire life was taken up with the exciting activity of educating my son. Primary school had been tough enough, but secondary school was giving me a ride like a bucking bronco. Every second day there were letters and phone calls chastising Merlin for being insubordinate. His latest misdemeanour was to explain that the reason he was always late to school was because he liked to stay in bed to play with his penis. ‘Don’t
you
?’ he’d asked the pinstripe-underpanted headmaster matter-of-factly. This won him three detentions and a loss of privileges. Basically, if I’d been in an aeroplane I would have been adopting the crash position.

Of late, a lost look had come into my son’s eyes. He retreated behind a habitual veil of forlorn exclusion. ‘Did my father not love me because I’m insubordinate?’ Merlin asked me one afternoon, on the drive home after his sixth detention in a row. ‘Was he lucky to be rid of me?’

‘Any man would be lucky to have you as a son,’ I assured him. And I was back on the hunt, armed with everything bar a net and tranquillizer dart, to track down a father figure for my bewildered boy. My first stop was a favourite watering hole in the urban jungle – an art gallery, just as my mother had suggested. And, in a triumph of hope over experience, I started dating again. It was to be two weeks from mojito to finito.

Potential Father for Merlin No. 5. The Film Director

Dennis was strikingly handsome, in a historical way, like a carved monument, although, judging by his physique, there was nothing crumbling behind his ramparts. Yes, he was older, but there was a reassuring bulk and gravitas to the man. Dennis sidled up to me and gazed with quizzical good humour at the work of art I was appraising.

‘In my experience, if you have to stand on your head to decipher it, then it’s modern art. What did you think of the Gauguin?’

‘So good you have to Gauguin and again and Gauguin,’ I replied. When he smiled, I recognized him from the Hitchcockian cameos he made in the movies he directed. ‘So did you have to perform sexual favours for yourself on the casting couch to get those parts?’ When he laughed, I greenlit the project.

Over dinner we exchanged basic information – favourite author, least favourite word, what you would be if you could have any other job, attitude to children (answers: Emily Brontë, ‘fecund’, opera singer, adore kids). A few days later I found myself in his Thames-side apartment, which was seared with light. I raised the cut-glass flute to my lips as champagne bubbles gossiped to the surface and felt as
effervescent
as they did. Okay, the guy wasn’t perfect; he only wanted to see obscure films with subtitles about one-legged albino transvestites looking for the meaning of life. I teased him about his footage fetish … but it turned out he had other kinks as well. He was particularly keen on a nondescript French tickling implement with feathers which was not designed to dust things. Still, as I confided to my sister, the great thing about bondage is that you can tie the man up and get control of the remote. ‘It’s love with strings attached,’ I punned. We laughed about his occasional mistimings with Viagra, taking it too early and becoming priapic at the opera, or too late and pole-vaulting on his own penis to breakfast, but agreed that I should keep having fun.

Dennis’s passion for the wilder reaches of sexual behaviour aroused and repelled me in equal measure. But I definitely wanted to explore them in more detail. But my experimentation with nurses’ uniforms, rubber catsuits and being fastened to the hotel bed by the cords of two complimentary bathrobes whilst he videoed the encounter (‘Don’t worry. It will be like the rest of my movies. Nobody will ever see it’) was cut short. And you don’t have to be Einstein to work out by whom.

‘I heard Mum telling my aunt that you’re in your sixties and possibly always have been,’ Merlin blurted when they accidentally met at the door one evening before I’d had time to brief either one of them. ‘What does that mean? How old are you exactly? Were you alive during the reign of Henry VIII?’ Ignoring my frantic interruptions and eye rolls and hand signals, Merlin, pleased that he could think of something to say, just kept parroting our private conversation. ‘My aunt Phoebe is worried about your age difference. She says that impotence is nature’s way of saying “
No hard feelings
” …
I
don’t get that, but they laughed like hyenas … Do hyenas really laugh? Or are they just pretending to get the joke?’

Self-esteem? Don’t leave home without it. If only it came in a spray can so I could replenish Dennis’s supply. Dennis, who had seemed so dashing, suddenly exuded the charisma of a sachet of instant soup – expired.

I didn’t wait around to see the end credits.

When Dennis and I broke up, Merlin wrung his hands, utterly at a loss. He reprimanded himself over and over – ‘I must try not to say what I’m thinking without thinking!’ – but I was under no illusion. The chances of finding a father figure for my son were looking a little remote. Introducing Merlin to anyone filled me with dread. I constantly felt I was looking into a gas tank with a lit match.

By the time my son was fifteen, I’d accepted the fact that there would only ever be Merlin and me. ‘Well,’ I told anyone who enquired, ‘I’ve tried computer dating, speed dating, blind dating, even carbon-dating in Dennis’s case, but I find a good vibrator works best. My new motto – reach out and touch yourself.’

So, you ask, why didn’t I move to some cave somewhere and take up whittling? Or commit myself to a little light calligraphy in a nunnery? Because Merlin started asking more and more questions about his father: ‘Does he like marzipan?’ ‘Is he a man of man’s experience?’ ‘Is he a corporate cowboy or a space cowboy?’ And then he got badly beaten up on his way home from school. When the police showed little interest – ‘People with special needs are routinely targeted,’ the constable told me. ‘I’m afraid it’s the price of disability’ – I knew I just had to endure another
whole
host of disastrous internet encounters. They usually fizzled out two sips into our first cappuccino when my prospective partner either revealed a habit of wearing ‘Home of Big Ben’ boxer shorts, arrived carrying a tub of coconut love butter, proved to have problem flatulence or a penchant for hanging upside down naked in gravity boots.

‘Your standards are too high,’ my sister sighed over my shoulder as I dismissed man after man on the dating website.

‘Yes,’ my mother chorused. ‘If you want to stay a spinster, look for the perfect man.’

‘I’m not looking for the perfect man. At this point, I’m looking for any biped who has his own teeth and some hair and no psychopathic tendencies.’

To be honest, I wasn’t just looking for Merlin’s benefit. My sexual frustration had become so chronic I’d taken to strip-searching myself. I’d practically worn off the fingerprints of my right hand. But every possible romance was accidentally sabotaged by my son.

Like the time Merlin said to my doctor, as he was about to take me into his office for a cervical smear, ‘So, what does Mum mean when she says you’re bonkable?’ Or reporting to the priest who’d been defrocked for insubordination, ‘I heard Mum telling my grandmother that she’s dreading the day you suggest doing it in the missionary position, in case she lies down on her back and you bugger off to China … So exactly what is the missionary position?’

Then there was the dinner when, with cartoonish inevitability, my son asked my very shy new boyfriend, an acupuncturist, what hair colour he puts on his driver’s licence, as he’s bald. Before then enquiring if he’d ever noticed that his chin looked like ‘upside-down testicles’?

The acupuncturist’s response? ‘Take two thumb-tacks and don’t call me in the morning.’

‘Have you ever thought of not saying things, Merlin?’ I begged him, time and time again, my head in my hands. ‘I really think it’s an option we should explore.’

But shortly after, when I’d been home six Saturday nights in a row, I felt myself falling into a trance of desolation. The day was dying in the wet window. The evening was seeping away, and my stamina was dwindling with it. Merlin had now taken to truanting. He was tired out with the effort of deciphering the world whilst smiling fakely at the foe. And I was tired too, with trying to mould him into a world where he didn’t fit.

As always, my mother had something to say. ‘Why have I given up my adventuring if you’re hell bent on becoming a Trappist monk?’ was her comment. ‘I mean, what do you want, Lucy?’

‘I want it all, Mother – and I want it drizzled in truffle oil with a caviar chaser. But that’s not going to happen, is it? It’s not easy to find someone to share your life with when you’re a cynical, bitter, twisted divorced mother of a kid with special needs secretly harbouring a desire to maim all men.’

Well, not all men. As I hadn’t yet met Adam.

Final Potential Father for Merlin. The Tennis Instructor

The probability of being observed by a gorgeous man is directly proportional to the stupidity of what you are doing at the time. I know this from personal experience. I was trying to demonstrate to a squealing Merlin why hitting my head with my hand would not give me brain cancer (by hitting my head repeatedly with one hand) and why walking around the
car
in one direction would not bring him good or bad luck (by circling the car clockwise and then anti-clockwise, faster and faster, whilst hitting my head) when I noticed Adam leaning on a tree in the sports-complex car park, watching me.

Adam had a tennis racket slung over one shoulder. Because he coached at the local sports complex, he’d met Merlin many times before and wasn’t discombobulated by his candid outbursts. Mid-thirties, he was muscular with a wrestler’s handshake, but so elegant he would have fitted very snugly into a tango dancer’s tux. His good looks suggested arrogance, a misconception dispelled by his ready laugh and ebullience. Adam was so funny and upbeat that, after a few morning coffees together, I felt my attention shift towards him like a sunflower turning to the sun.

‘I like him. I don’t know why. It’s just that when I’m with him – well, it’s corny, I know – but I feel like a shrub that’s just been watered,’ I told my mother and sister. I liked Adam enough to allow him to talk me into things I hated, like camping. ‘
Camping?
In the
countryside
? The countryside contains large quantities of nature, doesn’t it?’ I shuddered.

‘I thought Merlin might enjoy it.’

Adam was the first man in my life who wanted Merlin to share our time together. Which is why I put up with mosquitoes the size of sumo wrestlers and living off the land, i.e. half-cooked innards of roadkill garnished with bugs the size of racehorses. If Adam had offered me plutonium on rye I couldn’t have been more appalled but I liked the guy so much I wasn’t going to let the threat of a painful death by salmonella spoil things. He had moles like splashes of mud on his broad back. And I loved every one of them. They were a constellation I kissed on a regular basis.

With my head on his warm, broad chest, bathed in the flickering light of the campfire and soothed by the cadences of the waves on the rocks of the Cornish coast, contentment coursed through my veins. I found myself telling Adam that he was my Only One.

As Adam’s long-term girlfriend had turned out to be a compulsive liar and sexual kleptomaniac who slept with all his best mates, this declaration of monogamy meant a lot to him. His hazel eyes shone. ‘Merlin!’ Adam threw his arm around my son’s shoulders. ‘Your mum has just told me I’m the only man in her life! Besides you, that is.’

Merlin, who was roasting marshmallows, looked puzzled. His famously blue eyes blinked and blinked. ‘Well, technically, that’s not entirely accurate.’

Before I could stop him, Merlin then recited, with computer accuracy, the dates and names and duration of every relationship I’d had in the last five years.

‘2006, 22nd May till 26th May, Octavian, polo player. Finding out how old Mum is meant Dr Love left the building. Bob, a dentist, 3rd March 2007 till 20th April. The affair sank without trace because of his sexual prudery. Ditto Chris, the pilot. 22nd June till 1st September 2008.’

‘Merlin! Okay. That’s enough, darling.’

But he yabbered on with more zeal that an Energizer bunny on crystal meth. ‘Then there was Django, gardener, Brazilian, 6th February till 10th June 2009, ended because of violence in the familial home resulting in hospitalization.’

‘Merlin. Stop!’ But my protests had as much effect as a feather in the path of a category five hurricane.

‘Dennis, the film director, 3rd January 2010 till 18th February, couldn’t face up to his encroaching senility and impotence. Tuesday 29th July, a promising development in
her
private life was prematurely terminated when Dr Kureishi, who my mother said was “bonkable”, determined that she just wanted him for sexual intercourse …’

Pundits are always claiming that conversation is a lost art form. And, right then, how I wished that were true, as I frantically tried to silence my son with a Marcel Marceau repertoire of gestures and grimaces. But Merlin just talked on and on like a demented typewriter, his staccato jabs laying bare all names and numbers. He finally concluded his bravura performance, bursting with pride at his accomplishment, ‘The rest of 2010 and the beginning of the year 2011 proved a mixed romantic bag of one-night stands and broken hearts, including an ex-priest, a policeman, a shrink, a poet, a plumber, an acupuncturist … concluding with you, 6th March 2011 till now, 28th April 2011. But you have definitely been my mother’s favourite partner in her career so far.’

I tried a mock-laugh. ‘Oh Merlin, you’re such an exaggerator …’ My stomach churned and my head pounded.

Adam shifted his body out from beneath my head, which clumped on to the blanket. There was a cold shift in his attitude too. ‘Merlin never gets a fact wrong,’ he said, jerking to standing. ‘You told me that you gave up on men after your husband left you. You lied to me.’