The Boy Who Fell to Earth (25 page)

I felt a smile welling up in me. I tried to bite it back but it was all so habitual, strolling here in the manicured gardens of his family home, past the nooks and crannies where we’d hidden away and even once made love on the moonlit lake. Everywhere I looked, I was soothed by pleasant recollections.

‘I wanted to be footloose and fiancée-free,’ Jeremy punned, ‘but my father’s passing has taught me the importance of belonging. I want to belong to a son, a wife, a home. I want to be a committed father. Not the doofus dad from situation comedies and ads for ready meals who is always peering
baffled
at the pantry. I want to make educational sock puppets – well, he’s too old for that now, but you know what I mean.’

‘A regular Socrates,’ I scoffed, to cover up the confusion I felt. The change in him was new and stupefying. It made me raw with mixed emotions. My eyes swept over him assessingly. Was he sincere?

‘I made a mistake. The worst mistake in my life,’ Jeremy admitted mournfully. The lawn was sprinkled with a shiny confetti of wet leaves the colour of burnt toffee. Swivelling to face me, he suddenly lost his footing and slipped on the slope, sliding down the embankment on his arse in a skid of grass stains. I squawked a laugh at the sight of him sprawled, prone, beneath me. ‘Take me back,’ he said self-deprecatingly. ‘You’ll never find anyone like me again.’

‘Which is why I’m so glad you don’t have a twin,’ I replied tartly, but my mouth was wide with mirth.

‘Seriously, Lucy, we could get back together again. It’ll be just like our marriage, except we’ll be happy and still talk to each other and want to have sex.’

Leaning up, he yanked me down on to the mossy bank and threw one warm, lean leg over mine, half-pinning me to the leafy lawn. I was aroused, alarmed and strangely titillated in equal measure. ‘Don’t try anything, buddy. You may be stronger than me but you forget that I know where all your old sports injuries are.’ I tweaked his hamstring till he yelped.

We exchanged a tentative glance. No longer adversaries, we were unsure of how to speak to each other. The gin had gone straight to my head. Old feelings of affection for him glowed briefly, like a blown-out match.

‘You have no idea how hard it’s been,’ I blurted. A flood tide of grief lay just behind my tonsils.

Jeremy took my face between his palms. ‘I know.’ His voice was melodious, the vowels soft. ‘I’m so, so sorry, Lucy.’ His hands now warmed mine, rubbing at my fingertips. ‘I hate myself for what I did to you.’

My prejudices about Jeremy wavered in the heat of his scrutiny. Perhaps he really had metamorphosed back into the man I had fallen in love with? Then he sang ‘American Pie’ all the way through, word perfect. His hand moved on to my hip. It felt so familiar. Being with him was like walking back into a house you once lived in decades before – you think you’ve forgotten it but still remember where all the light switches are, which floorboards creak and windows stick. Instinctively, I shrugged myself deeper into his embrace and inhaled his familiar aroma. As I nestled in the crook of his arms like a baby, he placed his hot lips against the skin of my neck and gooseflesh as big as acne erupted on my arms and legs as I was ambushed by naked memories.

I felt the wild, vertiginous panic of losing my moorings. Somewhere in the back of my befuddled mind I thought vaguely that now might be a good time to give Archie that SOS call on my speed dial. But instead my lips just drifted in a trancelike state towards the mouth of my ex-husband …

17

The Ham in the Man Sandwich

A JOURNEY OF
self-discovery starts with a single step … But so does falling down a flight of stairs. This is what I thought when Jeremy dropped us home later that night and I clocked Archie’s anxious expression. As soon as Merlin had loped upstairs to bed – vowing to sleep with his cricket bat to ‘bring me good luck in the morning’ – my boyfriend said eloquently, ‘So how is that dingo-dicked, lyin’, cheatin’, two-faced jerk-off?’

‘You could just say “your ex-husband”.’

‘As long as he still is that?’ Archie asked crustily.

‘Believe me, ex does
not
mark the spot,’ I replied. It was true that Jeremy’s kiss had caught me momentarily off guard but then I’d broken away, reminding myself that my ex-husband could charm anyone and anything, from an ocelot to a tea cosy.

‘And how’s that hatchet-faced, bible-bashin’ old battleaxe? A woman who has no vices will have a lot of irritatin’ virtues, I’m tellin’ you. The old gorgon probably thinks it’s a sin to have meaningless sex on a Sunday.’

‘The way
you
make love, it’s a crime any day of the week,’ I teased him, pinching his posterior.

‘Obviously I need more practice.’ Archie nuzzled those words into my ear. As he savoured my neck and throat, lust fluttered beneath my skin. Unclasping my bra, he fixed his mouth to my nipple and kissed me in that dizzyingly slow way of his. I was suddenly jelly-legged with longing, so it was just as well the old rocker then threw me over his shoulder. By the time Archie lay me down on my bed, I was pulling at his boxers – tasteful Calvin Klein, but I wouldn’t have cared, at this stage, if they were neck-to-knee tweedy long johns. But then my pillager paused.

‘Lou …’ Archie’s voice, a semitone lower than most other men’s, dropped even further now as he plummeted into unchartered emotional waters. ‘After Kimmy ditched me, I didn’t think I could ever love another woman,’ he confessed, plunging to Jules Verne-ish depths.

‘I don’t believe in love,’ I countered, in an attempt to bring him back to the surface. ‘I don’t even believe in evolution. If evolution were true, mothers would have developed eyes in the back of our heads by now, no need for sleep and about ten hands.’

‘You can’t just say that you don’t believe in love. Love is like South America. You can’t trust the tourist brochures. You really have to go there and take a walk around.’

I looked up at him, all barrel-chested and piratical, and decided that I liked him too. A lot. I don’t know why I found him so oddly enchanting, but I just glowed in the unexpected light of his gruff adoration. If love is a drug, then Archie had become my all-night chemist. I’d taken such comfort in the warmth of his arms every night for the past month. Guilty about my unexpected kiss, I hesitatingly owned up to it now.
Archie
took a beat or two, then said that it was only natural to have unresolved feelings about an ex.

Relief flooded through me. ‘That’s what I like about you, Archie. You still love me, despite my faults and foibles.’

Archie feigned huge astonishment, widening his eyes in mock-shock. ‘You have faults and foibles?’

His muscular leg parted my thighs. It felt so natural, it seemed we’d been deliberately designed to fit together in this fashion. Whether it was a reaction against lunch with the Beauforts, a place where hors d’oeuvres are speared in the middle and people in the back, or the mischievous glee in Archie’s eyes, I don’t know. But a throb of expectation warmed my body.

‘Some bloody experts were rabbitin’ away on the radio today that the G-spot doesn’t exist. The bloody experts are idiots. Not only can I find your G-spot in a jiffy,’ he said in a granulated, sexy voice, ‘but the search for the G-spot
is
the G-spot. It’s not the destination but the journey.’

And with that, he gnawed his way through my panties.

The journey was sublime and the arrival even more so. I lay in his huge, hairy arms and marvelled at the curious symbiosis I shared with this incongruous creature. The night filled up with soft noise, the wind whipping through the trees, pattering rain, the odd cat mewling – and a long-forgotten sense of serenity branched through my being.

When I woke, late Sunday morning, Archie was perched on the edge of the bed with a tray of eggs, bacon, coffee, fried tomato and toast.

‘See what fun it is to have a lodger? It saves you so much time.’

‘Okay, if you’re so keen to save me time, you can start by taking out the rubbish. Don’t forget’ – I winked at him – ‘it’s the journey not the destination.’

He gave an explosive bark of laughter, so contagious I too was soon hooting into my pillow. I vowed not to let Jeremy slide under my emotional radar again. Some old gravitational pull had drawn me to him out of habit. The only answer was to stay out of his orbit. If his mother wanted to pay Merlin’s school fees to make amends for her neglect, then that was fine. But it didn’t mean I had to spend any time with them. And I would have kept my promise too. Except that Merlin had other ideas …

‘To my gorgous, snazy, mystifous mother, the one and only Lucy,’ read the note shoved under my bedroom door some time during the night, in his big loopy scrawl, with erratic punctuation and spelling. (It took me a good few minutes to de-code ‘mischievous’.)

Horay joy for the world i had the time of my life i am so gratful to you for finding my father i love and adore my entire family. I feel as though i deserve this magical treat. love from your histericle son Merlin
.

On the flipside was a note addressed to Jeremy.

Dearest legendary Dad
,

I have had the tremendous pleasure of knowing you on and mostly off for 16 years. You’ve already had an increadable and remarkable life and ther are so many apsects of your character and demina to admire. Your academic acheevements are top notch. You are a supirior legend of banking and the Andrew Flintoff and Ricky Ponting of politics. I hope you have a sublime and mesmorizing election. I would love to
embrace
the years ahead of our quality relationship. From your favourite son Merlin
.

When Jeremy rang that night, Merlin shimmered with excitement. After a marathon conversation, my euphoric son hung up and then jumped from foot to foot as though doing a demented rain dance. For the rest of the night and all the following day, he nagged me relentlessly about having his newfound father over for dinner. He was like the human Hadron Collider, such was the speed of the words that came crashing out of his mouth. ‘We would have such an awe-inspiring and robust evening,’ he assured me. A week later I finally gave in. Jeremy arrived that very night laden with bottles of Krug, foie gras, an Xbox 360 and a Nintendo Wii.

I overheard Merlin explaining Jeremy to Archie. ‘You, Archie, are a gorilla. But can you see my father’s grey salt-and-pepper hair? And see how he wears a grey and white pinstriped suit? That’s because he’s a polar bear. He’s been raising his other family in the North Pole. He transforms through the fridge. Mum, do you think a polar bear could live in this house? Would polar bears and gorillas try to eat each other?’

I didn’t need to consult
National Geographic
to fathom the answer. Archie crunched Jeremy’s fingers in a chiropractic handshake. I saw Jeremy wince but say nothing, not wanting to lose face.

‘Archie is a legendary character of masculinity. He’s also a composer,’ Merlin elaborated. ‘The secret to being a successful rock star is to remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.’

‘Ain’t that the bloody truth,’ Archie chortled. ‘No rock-’n’-roll composer can have all work and no plagiarism. God, you
kill
me, kid,‘ he said appreciatively, before placing a proprietorial arm around Merlin’s shoulders and leading him into the living room to rig up the new electronic toys.

Jeremy poured champagne into my flute with fastidious care. It hissed in the glass, but not as loudly as my ex. ‘I know it’s none of my business, especially after the appalling way I’ve behaved. But are you really
intimately
involved with
him
?’ He made the words ‘intimate’ and ‘him’ sound like puppy vivisection. ‘My mother told me about his racist and sexist behaviour. What do you see in the man? I don’t want to say that he looks evil exactly, but his features most closely resemble a dark lord of torment last seen in a cautionary fourteenth-century gargoyle. Did you see how hard he shook my hand? He’s clearly borderline insane.’

‘I dunno, Jeremy. Raising a kid with autism all on your own tends to recalibrate one’s view of sanity,’ I said severely. ‘Archie’s the kind of man who grows on you.’

‘Yes. Like plankton.’

I thought of Archie’s panty-gnawing expertise and gave a secret smile at all the private pleasures only the two of us knew about. ‘Archie has hidden charms. Besides, Merlin adores him.’

Jeremy bristled. ‘That was before he had a father. I’m determined to make it up to our son by being the best dad ever.’

Through the rest of October Jeremy sneaked back into our lives so stealthily he might have been wearing camouflage combat fatigues.

He turned up at Merlin’s speech day and sat next to me in the back row. When Merlin was the only kid in his class not to be awarded a certificate of any kind, the boy who had
failed
every maths test commandeered the microphone and told the audience that the difference between two positive numbers is 5 which has a massive arse like a peachy woman, and that the difference between their square is 55, which is two peachy arses, and then the sum of those two numbers is 11, which is skinny like two women on a diet.’

The maths teacher gawped at Merlin, flummoxed, his amazement clearly indicating that Merlin’s deduction was correct. Jeremy and I looked at each other with bewildered pride, and a fleeting feeling of tenderness for our strange son passed between us.

The next week Jeremy gave up the campaign trail once more to attend Merlin’s tennis tournament, cheering from the sidelines, even when our son startled his opponent by delivering a five-minute lecture at the net about friends who had fallen out: ‘Wordsworth and Coleridge, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Banquo and his murderer Macbeth, David Copperfield and Steerforth, Buzz Lightyear and Woody, Falstaff and Prince Hal.’ He then segued on to friendships that had endured: ‘Celia and Rosalind, the fellowship in
The Lord of the Rings
, Laurel and Hardy, Holmes and Watson and … my mum and dad,’ he concluded, beaming at us. When Jeremy and I saw the happiness spilling from our son’s eyes, something altered in the air between us.