The Boy Who Fell to Earth (20 page)

‘You’re the only woman in his life and it’s gettin’ a little bit like a Greek tragedy around here.’

‘Don’t be obscene! There’s nothing inappropriate about Merlin’s feelings for me.’

‘Maybe not in
Tasmania
.’ Archie’s amusement grew as he took pleasure in my discomfiture. He was practically cocking his elbow on an invisible car window ledge and whistling a tune.

‘You disgust me!’ I slapped the lid on some Tupperware and burped it tightly – my emotions similarly concealed. Furious, I retreated into martyred domesticity, peeling vegetables and rattling saucepans, little tornados of steam fuming ceilingwards.

I didn’t speak to Archie again until Merlin bounded into the room straight from his tennis lesson at the local gym, all limbs and jerky wild movements. He hugged me as usual with the kind of fervour that could result in hairline fractures.

‘Oh Mum, you are such a gorrrrgeous woman. You have such a
fab
ulous figure for a woman your age. You have such a curvy arse. Your arse is soooooo peachy. Do men
crave
over you?’ my tall, muscular son boomed, squeezing me to him again. ‘Do you take your pelvis seriously? And your
skull
! Mmmmmm … You have such a firm skull. We’re so lucky to have shoulders, or our heads would just roll off … Do men ask if you’re single at parties? Great guns, Mum!’ he enthused, squeezing my biceps. ‘They feel
really
good. Isn’t my mother sexy?’ he asked Archie. ‘She has such a sexy body. She has the most silky’ – I looked at him in alarm and only relaxed when he added – ‘
earlobes
… Do men tell you that you have beautiful breast—’ I glanced up again in horrified Oedipal anticipation. ‘… bones?’ he concluded, running his hand along my neckline. ‘Great clavicles, Mum. Mmmm. I
love
the smell of your marzipan skin. It makes me feel so electric.’

Archie erupted into a rich chuckle and raised an ‘I told you so’ brow.

I gave my son a long, measuring look. For the first time I noticed a light dusting of acne across his chin, and then saw that there were more pimples plotting to break out on his forehead. He was jangly with biochemicals as adolescent hormones coursed through his veins. ‘Merlin, darling, it’s not really appropriate to talk to your mother that way, sweetie.’

‘Why not? I’ve known you since you were twenty-six. You’re one of my oldest friends, Mum. I keep asking, but you never tell me, who introduced us? Am I bisexual? I might be bisexual. Or I might just be a lover of the world. What do you think I am?’

Merlin pulled his T-shirt up over his head. His torso was honey-coloured and smooth. I saw the ridges of muscle on his taut stomach and marvelled at just when my lithe little boy had morphed into this contoured, chiselled specimen? His fine, delicate jaw was lichened with incipient stubble. He was becoming a man, whether he liked it or not.

‘I do think I could keep a girl in a contented dazzlement of surprise. This is a message to all smoking-hot babes,’ he foghorned. ‘
Come and join me in my magic world, where relationships are at their quirky best
. Dr Love is in the Building!’ But then his face clouded over and his voice softened. ‘Will I ever get a girlfriend, Mum? Or will I always just be wandering in the wilderness?’

I was surprised by the desolation in his voice. No matter how fast Merlin ran, his dark moods chased him, casting long shadows that would occasionally fall over him like a net. ‘Of course you will, darling.’

‘I won’t. There’s this dance at school. But nobody’s asked me. I’m not into those phoney Heath Ledger movies, which is
why
I’m not going.’ The atmosphere in the room became cloudy, as Merlin started pacing and squeezing any objects within reach. ‘I’m a high-functioning autistic. I don’t want to make the transition to adult. I don’t want to grow up. People aren’t really adult. They’re in adult disguise.’ Anxieties were buzzing around his brain as insistently as wasps. ‘You always build me up to be some ladies’ man, Mum, telling me how handsome I am. Well, I’d like to give a woman a good seeing-to and get some rambunctious fluff – some tang on the side. But it’s never going to happen. It really hurts me when you compliment a girl and tell her how delectable she is and she shoots you down. It happens a lot and, most importantly, I don’t know why. Will any woman ever throw me a lifeline of love?’ Merlin scrunched his eyes closed and smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Anyway’ – his voice darkened – ‘women are a waste of time. If women are so great, why aren’t there many female world leaders? Tell me that then? I bet you wish you had a penis, don’t you?’

Upset, he avalanched out of the room, a tumble of limbs and flying wild hair.

Archie gave me another of his knowing looks. ‘Believe me, if that son of yours doesn’t get laid soon, he’s gonna become a full-on misogynist,’ he counselled.

‘Oh, unlike
you
. A “good seeing-to”? “Fluff”? “Tang on the side”? I wonder where he got
that
phraseology. Anyway, it’s a ridiculous idea. He’s still so young …’

‘Mmm. Nice breast
bones
,’ Archie mimicked.

Unable to protect my son in an enshrouding embrace, I hugged myself around my waist instead.

‘
You
should get laid too,’ Archie chuckled. ‘You’re just sooo uptight. Right now, your favourite sexual fantasy is – a partner, am I right?’

‘No, you are not!’ I gave the man a withering glance straight out of the facial repertoire of Mrs Danvers in the draughty drawing rooms of Manderley. But, in truth, I was so sexually frustrated I was starting to have romantic thoughts about my electric toothbrush. Just last week I’d found myself cooking anatomically correct gingerbread men.

‘I’m actually havin’ interestin’ thoughts about you right now … Maybe we can grab a bite – then have dinner?’ he said, with a playful smirk. ‘Merlin’s right. Men do crave over you. I for one would love to slide my hand over the sweet contours of your peachy arse …’

‘Well, I wish you’d stop
talking
out of yours.’ I turned up the volume of Classic FM and let Wagner’s great wash of strings sweep his crassness from my mind.

With the pressure of having to complete my School Action Plan (an activity so riveting I’d had to remind myself on an hourly basis that there were worse jobs – say, starting the cars of Colombian judges) I completely forgot about the school disco until Archie informed me that he’d organized Merlin a date. When he told me she was a 22-year-old backing singer called Electra, my instinct was to smother the idea with an emotional emergency fire blanket, but Merlin was incandescent with excitement.

‘All right,’ I finally acquiesced. ‘But I need to establish what time he’s expected back. I think 11 p.m.,’ I suggested.

‘Really?’ said Archie. ‘I was thinkin’ Monday.’

‘Monday!’

‘Although I will point out that it’s Electra’s responsibility to get the kid to school on time.’

‘I’m so worried Merlin’s going to do or say something wrong … Archie, why don’t you just take him?’

‘No bloody way. The only way you can get me to dance is to shoot at my feet.’

The night of the school disco a week later, Merlin appeared in the doorway and I did a double take. There was my son, dressed, pressed, suited, booted, scrubbed and rubbed. I was ambushed by feelings of tenderness for my handsome, idiosyncratic boy. Maybe he would add up to a whole person one day? Then he spoke.

‘Why does my stomach have feelings? Are there really butterflies in there? Do they fly in formation? Were they caterpillars once? … I like being on my own actually … What if my date makes a cheesy grin and unnerves me? What if she’s all talky-talky yakkity-yak? What if she doesn’t like my moves?’

Merlin launched into an eccentric choreography, which consisted of ‘The Chopping Board’, where he mimed chopping a tomato; ‘The Typewriter’, which was similar but with more dervish-like thrashings of arms, and ‘The Angel-wing Dance’, involving an inversion of his hands behind his back and then a lot of mad flapping. I had seen him dancing at family gatherings, and his total lack of inhibition made for a rather funny but also slightly terrifying performance, especially when he ripped off his shirt and twirled it above his head with increasingly explicit groin thrusts. It was as though his feet had taken steroids.

‘The music moves me, but it moves me ugly!’ Merlin exclaimed, sliding on his knees across the carpet. ‘I’m going to sweat bullets on the dance floor!’

I was so eaten up with nerves that he would make a faux pas or lose his temper or become a laughing stock when he leapt too high and grazed his nose on the glitter ball … but Archie let out a chuff of laughter, a raucous,
kookaburra
volley of squawks which made me laugh too.

I walked my son to the door. ‘Have a great time, Merlin. And don’t forget to tell your date how pretty she looks and—’

‘But what if she doesn’t look pretty?’ Merlin asked, perplexed.

‘Just tell her she does anyway,’ I coached.

‘She’s a backin’ singer in the band I’m playin’ with down the pub. Believe me, she’s hot. Have fun, kiddo. Come and I’ll introduce youse.’

Electra was gunning the engine of a red rust-bucket. The roof of the car was peeled back, so I could see she was wearing a sequinned dress which was so short I was worried her ovaries might catch cold. The backing singer had rouged cheeks, iridescent green eyeshadow and stilettos sharp enough to disembowel a ferret. I swallowed hard. Merlin introduced himself with the words, ‘So, are you a woman of experience?’

By the look of her, she definitely was – and no doubt charged for it by the hour.

Archie led me back inside before I could call the whole thing off. ‘You need a glass of fizz,’ he declared, popping open a bottle of something French he’d bought for the occasion and filling the flute to the brim. I glanced at the rain pattering on the window, twisting my rings this way and that. I calculated I had five or six hours of worry ahead of me.

‘I wish you wouldn’t look at me at all times as though I’ve got a red-bellied black snake tied to my dick,’ Archie said, pouring more champagne. ‘Don’t worry about Merlin. I’ve paid Electra not to mind anythin’ he says or does. She’s gonna get him such kudos with the other kids.’

I nodded my head mutely but all I could think about was
Electra’s
ramshackle car and the slick, wet road with its treacherous bends … not to mention the conversational collisions awaiting my son. ‘But what if he says something inappropriate to one of the boys and gets head-butted?’ I blurted, slumping into the couch. ‘Or what if he asks some other girl the size of her clitoris? Or to show him her breasts for educational purposes? And then she hits him with a sexual harassment charge? What if Electra doesn’t bring him back safely?’

‘I know a pretty good cure for insomnia,’ Archie said with a lopsided grin. ‘Sleep.’

‘I’m going to stay awake all night,’ I pronounced resolutely. The pile of thirty-eight essays I had to mark on the use of the pathetic fallacy in romantic literature (which, pathetically, was the only place I got any romance these days) nagged me from the kitchen table. My headmaster had recently hauled me over the career coals about failing to hand in my action plans on time, meet targets and provide leadership. That’s the trouble with opportunity. Sometimes, when it knocks, you’re out in the forest trying to trap a rabbit to get its foot.

As I was thinking all this, Archie leant down, slipped off my shoe and swung my own foot up into his lap.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ But as he kneaded my toes an intoxicating lassitude took hold of me. When he lifted my other foot into his lap and ran his strong musician’s hands up and down the arch, I wafted into a dreamlike state.

Some time later, I jolted back to consciousness. ‘Oh my God, did I drift off?’

Archie gave me an impertinent wink. ‘Yep. I think you exhausted yourself
staying awake all night
,’ he teased.

‘What time is it?’

He checked the TV screen, where a football match was playing softly. ‘Ten thirty.’

‘Oh my God. I’m not cut out for motherhood. I just don’t have a big enough capacity for alcohol. Have you been rubbing my feet for two hours? I hope I didn’t snore or anything.’ I sat up, startled.

‘No, but has anyone ever told you how cute you look with drool coming out the corner of your mouth? Christ! Pins ’n’ needles!’ Archie rose and stretched before shuffling to the kitchen for refreshment reinforcements. ‘These jeans are so bloody tight. Your cupboards are bizarre. You hang somethin’ in your wardrobe for a couple of weeks and it shrinks two sizes.’

‘Is that right?’ I snickered. ‘You don’t think it’s got something to do with the fact that the older you get the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your flab are really good friends?’

It was Archie’s turn to laugh – a rich chuckle that he really meant. His walk back from the kitchen with the crisps and wine was pure panther.

‘Why are you walking in that sexy way?’ I asked him, slightly alarmed.

‘Sexy?’ he growled in his granulated voice. ‘I’m just trying to hold my stomach in. Although I want you to know that this is not a beer belly, it’s a’ – he read the label before he poured – ‘
Beaujolais
belly, since living with you. Ironic, isn’t it?’ he drawled. ‘I began by dropping acid and now I’m dropping antacid. I’m just getting way too old for rock ’n’ roll.’

‘I thought you were giving up on rock ’n’ roll because everyone is selling out to conglomerates?’

‘Truth is,’ he sighed, ‘I’d bloody love to sell out, only nobody’s made me a bloody offer.’

After months of bluster and bravado, his confession was as alarming as his nakedness a few days earlier. ‘So why did you come to London then? Oh Christ. You’re not really skipping parole, are you?’

‘Nope. After my wife buggered off, I skedaddled. I mean, life in London still has no meaning, but I’m less likely to run into people who can’t wait to tell me that they just saw my missus sittin’ on the face of my best mate.’

‘You’ll find somebody else,’ I platituded.

‘Naw. Women are too complicated these days,’ he said with a playful smirk. ‘I can’t read the signs. You’re, like, I want you to take me, slap me, rape me and cuddle me all at the same time, without touchin’ me. And I want you to do it right now! Except I’m pissed off you didn’t read my mind that I wanted all that.’