The Boy Who Fell to Earth (2 page)

‘Is that an unabridged dictionary in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me?’ I teased him on our first date.

My
main claims to fame (apart from a Mastermind knowledge of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel,
Sanditon
, T. S. Eliot’s pornographic limericks and all the anal-sex references in the novels of Norman Mailer) were knowing how to gatecrash a backstage party at a rock gig, put a condom on a banana using my mouth, and sing all the words to ‘American Pie’. Jeremy, on the other hand, only had Big Talk and no small. While my financial analyst boyfriend found it endearingly funny that the only bank I knew about was the sperm bank, I found it hilariously charming that when I mentioned the Marx brothers, he thought I was referring to Karl and his comrade Lenin.

Jeremy was so good-looking you wouldn’t even consider him as date material unless you worked full-time as a swimwear model. I was a lowly English teacher with a moth-eaten one-piece Speedo and literary aspirations. So, why did I get to play Lizzie Bennet to his dashing Darcy? To be honest, I think it was mainly because my name wasn’t Candida or Chlamydia; he’d come across too many upper-class females curiously named after a genital infection. These women not only owned horses but looked like them. They could probably count with one foot. If you asked for their hand in marriage, they’d answer ‘Yeah’ or ‘Neigh!’ After years of dating and mating with such mannequins, he told me that he found my spontaneity, mischief, irreverence, sexual appetites and loathing of field sports liberating. And then there was my family.

Jeremy, an only child, rattled around in an aloof-looking country mansion, while our Southwark garden flat was crammed with books and musical instruments and paintings
waiting
to be hung and delicious kitchen smells and too much furniture – a home which was comfortable with its lot in life. As were we. And Jeremy loved it.

Whereas meals at the Beaufort mansion were sober, ‘Pass the mustard’, ‘Drop of sherry with that?’ semi-silent affairs, dinner at my house was a riot of heady hilarity, with Dad arabesquing about the place in a tatty silk robe quoting from
The Tempest
, mother denouncing the Booker Prize shortlist whilst shouting out clues from the cryptic crossword and my sister and I teasing each other mercilessly. Not to forget the various blow-ins. No Sunday lunch was complete without a bevy of poets, writers, painters and actors, all regaling us with richly honed anecdotes. To Jeremy, my family was as exotic as a tribe from the deepest, darkest jungles of Borneo. I wasn’t sure whether he wanted to join in or simply live among us taking anthropological notes and photographs. In his world of strained whispers, my family was a joyful shriek.

While the Beauforts were meat and three veg, Yorkshire pudding people, the only thing my family didn’t eat were our words. Garlic, hummus, Turkish delight, artichokes, truffles, tabbouleh … Jeremy devoured it all, along with Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus and other jazz musicians, and foreign films, and performances by banned theatrical groups fleeing from dictatorships like that in Belarus, whom my father was always bringing home to crash on the overcrowded couch.

And, to be honest, an allergy to my father’s excesses is partly why I fell in love with Jeremy. Jeremy was all the things my feckless father wasn’t. Employed, trustworthy, stable, capable, hard-working, as dependable as his expensive Swiss watch. Nor was he the type to come home with a nipple piercing or purple pubic hair, as my pater had been known to do. Whereas my dissolute dad ran up debts
like
others ran marathons, Jeremy was as reliable as the mathematical formulas he pored over at his investment bank. The man put two and two together to make a living.

My father, a character actor from the Isle of Dogs, had a lemon-squeezer-diamond-geezer accent. My mother, an alabaster-skinned, willowy woman from Taunton, Somerset, boasts a sing-song accent, as though everything she says has been curled by tongs. Her lilt makes other accents, including my own South London twang, sound flat to my ear. Except for my beloved’s. His voice has more timbre than Ikea. Just one word in that dark-chocolate baritone of his could calm all chaos.

But not now … Now, in the doctor’s consultation room, he sat mute as sadness flowed down his face from brow to chin.

‘Lucy, it’s clear something is wrong with the boy. Face facts,’ Jeremy finally said, all staccato stoicism. ‘Our son is mentally handicapped.’

I felt the sting of tears in my sinuses. ‘He’s not!’

‘Pull yourself together, Lucy.’ With his emotions now held in check, my husband’s voice was as clipped and precise as that of a wing commander from a Second World War film.

We drove home from the hospital in numbed silence. Jeremy dropped us off and careened straight back to his City office, leaving me alone with Merlin and Merlin’s Diagnosis.

Our tall, anorexic Georgian house in Lambeth, which we’d bought cheaply as a ‘renovator’s delight’ – sales spiel for ‘completely dilapidated’ – leans tipsily into the square. It’s just like all the other houses in the street, identical in style, paintwork, latticing, flower boxes – except for the little boy inside. My son was sitting on the floor rolling a plastic bottle back and forth, rocking slightly, oblivious to the world. I scooped him up and crushed him to me, a hot smudge
against
my neck. And then I began the agony of self-doubt.

Was it something I ate whilst pregnant? Soft cheese? Sushi? Or wait! Was it something I
didn’t
eat? Organic tofu, perhaps? Or maybe I ate too much? I hadn’t just been eating for two, I had been eating for Pavarotti and his extended family … Was it the glass of wine I shouldn’t have drunk in the final trimester? Was it that one martini at my sister’s wedding-anniversary party? Was it something I
should
have drunk – like puréed beetroot? Was it the hair dye I’d used to brighten up my bouffant when pregnancy made it lanky and dull? But, oh my God! Wait. Maybe it wasn’t me at all? Did a teenage babysitter drop him on his head? Did the nursery heater leak carbon monoxide? Did we fly with him too early on that holiday to Spain and burst his Eustachian tubes, leading to a seizure and brain damage?

No. It must have been the negativity I’d exuded while carrying him. Merlin wasn’t planned. He’d come along two years into our marriage. Even though we were excited at the prospect of parenthood, I had slightly resented the unexpected intrusion into our extended honeymoon. The only time in my life I wanted to be a year older was when I was pregnant. It’s putting it mildly to say that I didn’t embrace the moment. In fact, I shunned it. I didn’t feng shui my aura in yogalates classes chanting to whale music like Gwyneth Paltrow and Organic Co. Instead, I moaned and complained and railed against the dying of the waist. Especially as I’d recently spent a whole week’s wages on lacy lingerie to celebrate our anniversary. I said to anyone who would listen that ‘Pregnant women don’t need doctors, they need exorcists.’ Birth seemed Sigourney Weaveresque to me. ‘Get this alien out of my abdomen!’ … Could too many caustically black-humoured jokes have affected his genes?

But stop. What if it was the difficult birth? Why do they call it a delivery? Letters, you deliver. Pizzas. Good news. This was more like Deliver
ance
. Forceps, suction, the episiotomy … Was it telling the doctor that I now knew why so many women die in childbirth – because it’s less painful than going on living?

Or perhaps it was the flippant remarks I made in the delivery room to my mother as we peered at the scrunched-up little blue ball I’d just brought into the world? ‘I’ve just given birth to a baby, but I don’t think it’s mine.’

On and on I fretted. I would stop worrying occasionally to change a nappy – usually the baby’s. But for days after The Diagnosis, a San Andreas of fault lines ran through my psyche, coupled with an overwhelmingly protective lioness-type love, waiting, watchful, my claws curled inside me. I kissed my baby boy’s soft, downy head all over. He coiled into the circle of my arms. I held him close and cooed. I looked into his beautiful blue eyes and refused to believe that they led inwards to nothingness. The doctor had reduced him to a black and white term – ‘autism’. But the prism of my love bathed him in bright and captivating colours.

I had to save him. It was Merlin and me against the world.

2

Planet Merlin

I’M A GREAT
believer in ignoring things until they go away. When Facebook and Twitter came along, I turned a blind, technical eye. Just like I ignored the ‘Protein Only’ diet, doing the Macarena, those weird Masai running shoes, bubble skirts and Esperanto. If you wait long enough, these fads fade. But the same logic just wouldn’t apply to Merlin’s diagnosis. It was not something he was going to grow out of.

There was no choice but to begin the disorientating journey through the labyrinth of social workers, speech and occupational therapists, top paediatric psychologists … For the next year I trekked here, there and everywhere, in the endless search for experts. They ranged from National Health doctors locked away in sooty Victorian mausoleums flannelled with dust, linoleum floors overlaid with reeking antiseptic, to the private clinics of Harley Street with their low, plexiglass coffee tables laden with copies of
Country Life
. I hate to think how many specialists’ kids I’ve now put through law school. (When visiting a private doctor, be sure
to
note carefully where you leave your car, because you will probably have to sell it to pay off their astronomical bills.)

My son had so many tests, he must have thought he was being drafted into the elite moon mission astronaut programme. I had to hold him as he was measured, weighed, blinded with torches, probed, prodded, pinched, stethoscoped and syringed, despite the fact that his body would twist into a spasm of despair as he wept inconsolably.

And, oh, the constant battle to keep my gaze neutral and unperturbed though I was dying inside as various labels were hurled his way – dyspraxia, dyslexia, dysphasia, aphasia, attention deficit disorder, sensory defensiveness, Fragile X, chromosomal abnormalities … Apparently autism was only the tip of Merlin’s diagnostic iceberg. How it made me burn with love for my strange little son.

Meeting after meeting, in government buildings full of grimacing cracks, social workers told me that being the mother of a child with autism would be a challenge but an exciting one … This is as accurate as the captain of the
Titanic
telling his passengers that they were in for a diverting little dip in the briny. Mothering a child on the autism spectrum is as easy as skewering banana custard to a mid-air boomerang.

Denial was my first response, hence the years of alternative medical rounds. I tried everything from cranial massage to karma maintenance and other areas of scientific expertise based on medical ideology that’s been rigorously and methodically proven by Goldie Hawn and other well-known academics.

Anger came next, mostly towards the farcically solemn, flat-shoed educational psychologists with their expressionless expressions. The way to recognize an expert is by the clipboard. A parent needs United Nations headphones to
decode
what these clipboard-wielders are saying. ‘What a fascinating child’ decodes as ‘He’s retarded.’ ‘A true original’ means ‘I’ve never met a child quite so retarded.’ ‘Your son is differently interesting’ translates as ‘Your life is screwed for ever. You might as well put yourself up for adoption immediately.’

I found myself snapping at all clipboard-wielding, euphemistic people. ‘So, let’s stop beating around a dead horse and cut right to the conversational mustard, shall we? Will my son ever lead a normal life?’

‘What do you define as “normal”?’ asked a social worker with ferrety alertness. As her eye twitched and she chewed on her half-gnawed nails, I got the feeling there might be a very fine line between social worker and sociopath.

While I ricocheted from psychologists to bio-feedback practitioners and other nouveau-voodoo nut-jobs until my own inner child wanted to throw up, Jeremy retreated into work. When Merlin was born, Jeremy had been so besotted. He’d spend all day planting kisses on our baby’s soft, plump belly, warm as freshly baked bread, before wriggling and giggling him in and out of his little pyjamas. Jeremy, an only child, had happily professed he wanted three, four – no, five – more children. He took every second day off, left for work late and came home early, his face alight with joy.

But not any more. Now he left for the office pre-dawn, getting home at ten or eleven. Saturdays he indulged himself with a little sleep-in till, say, 6 a.m. His only son was damaged goods. Humiliated, he implored me not to tell anybody. My instinct was to blurt it out, to scream it from rooftops, a howl of indignation and terror. But, under Jeremy’s strict instructions, when people asked about Merlin, I produced a mechanical smile and placed a platitude or two on my lips.
Which
brought on stage three – a bad case of the ‘Why me?’s

I’d been teaching English at the local state school for a year. I now downgraded to part-time but didn’t give up altogether, reasoning that it might prove therapeutic. After all, mono-syllabic teens whine ‘Why me?’ constantly, so perhaps no one would notice my own self-absorption. When my sister, in whom I’d confided, asked me why I didn’t quit work completely as I was clearly going gaga, I glibly replied that London mothers had to be able to afford to buy their kids the latest iPhone or their offspring would put themselves on the ‘at risk’ register. But in truth, now that Jeremy had abandoned me emotionally, single-parenting every night and weekend had quickly made me realize that the only good thing about being a domestic goddess is that you can’t commit suicide by putting your head in the oven as there’s bound to be a casserole in there already. If I gave up work it wouldn’t be long before I’d be licking the cake beaters … while they were still whirring.

Still, I felt so guilty about the relief I experienced when I dropped my son off at the childminder in the mornings … (What kind of heartless mother was I?) … only to feel even more guilty when I picked him up in the afternoons. After all, I was obviously on parental ‘L’ plates. Surely he’d be better off with professionals? Worry became my Mastermind specialist subject. Even though four hours a day teaching a group of truculent teens better armed than your average Colombian drugs cartel was a lot like hosting a hurricane, I found it a respite from mothering Merlin.