The Boy Who Fell to Earth (27 page)

Then my gentle sister, who has only ever won an argument with herself, rounded on our stunned mother. ‘Taking your advice on love is like taking flirting lessons from a eunuch. Or, I dunno, discretion lessons from Wikileaks. At your age you should be radiating a mix of authority and dignity, not bellydancing with naked toyboys in Tibetan ashrams.’

‘Phoebe …’ I placed a calming hand on her arm. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you? You’re starting to make Vlad the Impaler look like a librarian,’ I joked.

But my sister refused to be mollified. ‘I’m serious, Mother.’ She shook me off. ‘What kind of financial security can an ageing, fading rock star give your poor destitute daughter?’

‘I’m not destitute. And, anyway, Archie does have a job now,’ I defended him. ‘Plus he’s working on an album.’

Phoebe squawked a laugh. ‘The gap between Archie’s aspirations and his achievements has the same cargo capacity in metres as, say, Idaho. You’re exhausted from single motherhood, Lulu.’ Under fizzing brows, she glowered at our mother before adding vehemently, ‘And the reason she needs financial security is because you’ve spent all our inheritance, flitting around the world like an irresponsible teenager.’

My mother’s pale complexion went an even more arctic colour. ‘As you will one day discover, Phoebe, the difficult thing for women my age is not downshifting a career but upshifting. Just when a mother comes blinking out of her murky, milky years, liberated from the school run, the three meals a day, the laundry and taxi services and housework slavery, all ready for action, society hands you Invisible Man bandages. I don’t want to be a runner-up in the human race.’

‘Why not?’ Phoebe rejoindered bitterly. ‘Your daughters are. Thanks to you.’

A chasm opened in our tight-knit little family circle. My mother was stricken with anguish. After a few minutes of staggered silence, she tried to defuse the situation.

‘I think I’ll write a screenplay next, dears. Everybody else is. Mine will be the touching, autobiographical story of a hardworking woman with a philandering husband who raised her children and then tried to forge a small life for
herself
before she kicks the bucket but whose daughters don’t appreciate all the wonderful things she’s done for them. Julia Roberts will play the mother and the kids will be played by hideous, troll-like George Lucas special effects.’

But her attempt to heal the rift with humour fell flat. My mother is a one-woman task force. It was unnerving to see her emotional resilience faltering. In our family, we usually just argue and argue until my mother is right. But not today.

‘Phoebe, darling, I’m sure all this anger and negativity is merely because your hormones are leaving the building. The good thing about the menopause, dear, is that you can warm your own dinner plate on your forehead. The bad thing is it turns you into a raving maniac.’ She smiled, attempting one more stab at levity, but her lovely singsong Somerset lilt had lost its spring and sounded uncharacteristically dull and flat.

‘
You
have fun all the time, but when
we
get a little pleasure you rain on our happiness parade. How I wish it were
you
leaving the building instead of my hormones.’

My mother bade her grandson goodbye and left before dinner … And Phoebe wouldn’t let me run after her.

19

Dr Love Has Left the Building

ALL MEN MAKE
mistakes, but live-in lovers find out about it sooner.

‘I hope you’re aware that motorbikes are society’s way of promoting the funeral business?’ I said when Archie sauntered in one Saturday afternoon, his head encased in a bike helmet.

‘A mate lent me his Harley.’ Archie levered the heavy helmet off his cranium. ‘Thought Merlin would like a spin so I picked him up from the museum.’

Merlin bumped into the room next, giving a mumbled exclamation, his helmeted head bobbing with glee.

My synapses snapped to attention. ‘Oh my God, Archie! Did you leave several major brain lobes as a deposit? What if he’d fallen off?’

Archie cast an amused eye over me and then, to my surprise, laughed right into my face. Why was he laughing at me? A spasm of irritation darted raggedly through my temples.

‘Don’t make me kill you,’ I seethed. ‘I haven’t had my afternoon coffee yet.’

‘It’s smother-love. You never let the poor kid out the door without sufficient items in his backpack to set up a wilderness homestead.’

I liberated my son’s head from its casing.

‘What an exhilarating and intoxicating adventure!’ he exclaimed. Merlin’s hair was on end as though a couple of wild animals had been grazing there.

I swallowed my anger and said as sweetly as I could, ‘Darling, run upstairs and have a shower. Your father will be here soon to take you to the theatre.’ Jeremy, who’d been absent for a few days in Paris at a conference organized by the British Council, was bursting to see his son.

Merlin grimaced. ‘But I’m theatre-intolerant. I go into actor-phylactic shock.’

‘Why?’

‘You have to sit there with a cramped, stiff arse, staring at the stage with a straight face pretending to understand what’s going on whilst trying hard not to think about other things in your life and the universe.’

‘What about Shakespeare? I thought you adored him?’ I queried, amazed.

‘I’ve retired from Shakespeare,’ he said, drawing his shoulders together defensively. ‘I get tired of Dad expecting me to be a genius. Creativity is associated with a variety of cognitive disorders suffered by high achievers, like Newton, Orwell, Charles de Gaulle, Thomas Jefferson, Enoch Powell …’ He was talking faster and faster, wringing his hands nervously. ‘But not everyone can be a creative genius, you know …’ He trailed off, glancing sidelong at me in sudden embarrassment.

‘No one expects you to be a genius, darling.’ In truth, Merlin’s ‘genius’ was like a planet that sometimes sparkles
into
view or a mirage that shimmers in the sun – there one minute, gone the next. Totally intangible. ‘Just give this a go. It’s a musical. Sondheim. You might like it. And here … can you put away your clean clothes for me? I’ve labelled the drawers so you won’t get mixed up, okay?’

Merlin’s dyspraxia meant that his brain fused when it came to logical practicalities, so socks often ended up in the shoe cupboard, shoes under his pillow, the spoonerisms in the mixed-metaphor drawer.

When Merlin had left the kitchen, arms laden with freshly ironed jeans and T-shirts, I rounded on my irresponsible boyfriend. ‘I know that some people like to sit astride 500ccs of throbbing horsepower screaming down the highway with the wind in their hair …
Most of these people are now dead
. How dare you take a risk with my child’s life without even checking with me first!’

‘Life’s a risk, toots. You’ve gotta start preparin’ him. Merlin is maintained, enclosed, fed, watered, caged … He’s no more than a very expensive pet,’ replied Archie mulishly. ‘Ya gotta let him get drunk and get laid and …’

‘You keep going on about that. And what if he gets some girl pregnant? I’m to be a grandma, am I?’

‘The hottest granny in town.’ With a carnal smile on his fleshy lips, Archie sauntered over and squeezed me to him.

‘It’s not funny. After all that sex education, he asked me the other day whether girls poo … What am I supposed to do? Give him a vasectomy? Who am I?
Hitler
? … Because he’ll never figure out how to put on a condom,’ I objected, pushing Archie away. ‘And even if he does, he won’t remember.’

‘This new special needs school of Merlin’s – well, the girls are bound to be just like him: crazy, wild, hot-to-trot chicks
with
margarine legs – easily spread. It could happen, Luce. Face facts. If you’d let me take him to a brothel, the girls could teach him. Nothin’ like some hands-on experience.’ He ran his fingers up my leg under my dress and gave me a playful spank.

‘Archibald, you are
not
taking my baby boy to a brothel.’

‘Well, you can’t take him. You’d make such a fuss about whether there were nuts in the chocolate body paint and if the duck-down pillows were hypoallergenic …’

‘He’s only a child!’

‘Look, that slimy ex of yours might be able to pay for Merlin to go to a posh private school and take him to eat in fancy-shmancy, courgette-up-the-bum French joints where five people can eat for the price of a small Mercedes. No way can I compete with that. But I can equip the kid with some street-smarts.’ Archie’s face wore a mutinous expression. ‘Ridin’ motorbikes, swearin’, smokin’, sleepin’ around … The reason teens are so vile is so you won’t be upset about the empty nest once they go walkabout.’

‘You don’t get it, do you? There will never
be
an empty nest. Merlin is with me for life. Like psoriasis. Or rheumatism. Or a heart murmur or something. I just hope he dies before I do, because who is going to look after him? The worry of it keeps me awake at night.’

Archie’s thumbs sunk angrily into his jean pockets. ‘You should have more faith in him …’ And, by implication, more faith in my boyfriend, I duly noted. ‘People think Merlin’s weird, the way he can’t make small talk and eye contact. But he thinks
we’re
weird. The hours we spend being nice to people we don’t even like … If it weren’t for the Merlins of this world, human beings would never have got out of the bloody cave.’ Then Archie’s smile grew mischievous and he
shifted
into a more irreverent gear. ‘And you
don’t
,
do
you?’ he mocked.

‘What?’

‘Poo!’ He winked. ‘After all, you are a goddess. Hell, you look positively underdressed without a plinth.’

Turning my back abruptly, I busied myself in the kitchen. I was nursing my coffee cup in both hands, mulling over what Archie had said and wondering if perhaps I could advertise Merlin on eBay – ‘one strapping, quirky youth in need of older, understanding cougar’ – when Jeremy arrived. It was only when I went to open the door and saw the pile of Merlin’s clean clothes dumped on the floor that I realized with a jolt that he’d obviously loitered there in the hall and overheard our argument. A small alarm bell went off in my head. I called his name. No answer. Rifling through his coat pocket, I discovered his wallet was also missing. My face took on the pallor of someone who has just stepped off the Daredevil Thunder Mountain ride at a theme park. ‘Oh God, Archie. I think Merlin overheard our conversation.’

‘What conversation was this exactly?’ Jeremy asked, striding across the threshold.

‘We were having a tiff about me treating Merlin like a little boy and not letting him grow into a man by’ – I paused, searching for the least inflammatory vernacular, ‘keeping pace socially, pharmaceutically and sexually with the other kids.’

‘Merlin is socially immature. I too had a low emotional IQ,’ my ex-husband admitted humbly. ‘But I’ve changed. And, in time, he will too, Lucy, I promise you.’ He held my hands reassuringly.

Archie rolled his gooseberry eyes up to the ceiling. ‘The only reason Merlin is immature is that you two drongos keep
mollycoddlin’
the poor little bastard. Youse never let the kid out the door without instructions on what to do if there’s an earthquake, tidal wave, nuclear attack or alien invasion.’

‘Oh God, Archie,’ I said with sudden insight. It was no longer a small alarm bell ringing in my head but the giant boom of Big Ben. ‘You don’t think he went to a brothel, do you?’

‘How would he have the dosh?’ Archie asked practically.

‘Jeremy, you gave him a few hundred quid the other day, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. For books … But a brothel? It’s preposterous. How exactly in God’s name would he know where to find such a place?’

‘Well, um … when I was lookin’ around for gigs, I popped into that nightclub down on the high street …’

‘What nightclub?’ Jeremy demanded.

‘It’s called the G-spot – which explains why you’ve never found it, Beaufort,’ Archie wisecracked. ‘And, um, Merlin was kinda with me at the time.’

‘You took my son to a lap-dancing club!’ I shrieked.

‘They’re not lap-dancers. They’re singers.’

‘Yeah, right. She’s gyrating on the stage in a black basque cut to show off her singing ability.’

‘And there’s this sauna out the back which I kinda explained to him …’

Jeremy has a lot of flair. Most of it in his nostrils. ‘Let me get this right,’ he flared. ‘You took my son to a lap-dancing club and then encouraged him to frequent a brothel? You know how they say you should live every day as though it’s your last? I suggest you take advantage of that adage immediately.’ Jeremy pulled himself up to his full six-foot-two height and squared up to Archie.

‘Somebody’s
gotta
teach the kid to be a man. And what the fuck would you know about that, you poncey git? You’re probably wearin’ padded jockey shorts. Wonder Y’s – the wonder pant for wimps,’ Archie chortled. ‘Or Disney boxer shorts from “It’s a Small World After All”.’

Jeremy’s glare was as loud as thunder. ‘Lucy, have you ever quizzed this man on his dating history, excluding pets and other animals?’

If it were possible to smug an opponent to death, Jeremy would have won the ensuing skirmish. But, when he threw a punch, Archie intercepted it with expert ease, effortlessly clipping Jeremy across the cheek.

Archie only had time to land that one punch before I inserted myself between their bristling forms. ‘Did you both have a bowl of bile for breakfast? My son is missing! Archie, take me to that club immediately. Jeremy, wait here, in case Merlin comes back,’ I instructed. ‘Call me immediately if he does.’

Archie drove my car towards the high street. The yellow, lopsided moon had a greasy ring around it, like a badly fried egg. I felt so angry I could have fried an egg on my head. Archie tried to lighten the atmosphere by making some flippant remarks about where to park outside a brothel – ‘in an erogenous zone?’ But I just sat in tense silence as all around me the world was exclaiming. My eyes raked the Saturday-night throngs. Archie parked in the grounds of a dilapidated housing estate then led me into the lap-dancing club. Patrons jerked back and forth on the dance floor as though being electrocuted with invisible cattle prods, while semi-naked girls gyrated on podiums above them. I searched through the dancers as they writhed in the multicoloured lights, but there was no sign of Merlin.