The Boy Who Fell to Earth (28 page)

Archie then steered me down a side alley which straggled beside the railway line. The brothel’s windows were painted black. A hot-pink electric sign reading ‘SAUNA’ spluttered on and off like a dying fly.

The outside was positively grandiose compared with the interior. The dimly lit reception was malodorous and musty smelling. A desultory gaggle of girls broiled prawn-like in the glare of naked pink neon. Their velvet glances slid over me and on to Archie, accompanied by a pantomime of half-hearted preening and pouting. The girls started introducing themselves to him. They all had the names of alcoholic beverages – Chardonnay, Tequila, Brandy – only they didn’t mix well, practically elbowing each other out of the way to get to new male meat.

I approached the desk and spoke to an older woman whose hair was piled high into a platinum-blonde halo.

‘I’m looking for a boy … Tall, blond, slim …’

She shrugged noncommittally. ‘Yeah? Well, I’m lookin’ for Brad Pitt naked on a bed of lettuce.’

‘No, you don’t understand …’

‘Why don’t cha just tell me what you want, I can tell you to fuck off, and then our lives can go on?’ she said, gimlet-eyed.

‘I’ve come for my son …’

‘Oh, and I thought it was to steal my Rembrandts.’

Archie disentangled himself, strode over to the desk and gave his most raffish grin. ‘Hi, sugar tits,’ he crooned, much to her pleasure. ‘Thing is, the kid’s underage, which wouldn’t look that good on your rap sheet. So maybe we could just take a quick Captain Cook – a look,’ he clarified, winking.

I didn’t wait for permission but bounded up the stairs, trying not to trip on the moulting shagpile. Where was my son? I stood on the landing beneath a dangling bare light
bulb,
surrounded by an aureole of dust. ‘Merlin! Merlin! Come out here immediately.’

A door squinted open and an inquisitive head peered out. I strained to see through the frugal lighting, but it wasn’t my child. I banged on the walls further down the hall, calling his name. A finger of light probed forth from a door which was ajar. The chapter headed ‘Recovering Your Teenage Son from a Brothel’ is curiously absent in most child-rearing manuals. With no other course of action suggesting itself, heart in mouth, I just peeked inside. And there was Merlin. His face had the bewildered look of someone stuck on a crossword puzzle, but he was at least fully clothed. Relieved, I flung the door wide.

A shabby chenille bedspread lay unruffled atop a lopsided wooden bed. A red scarf draped over a bedside lamp gave the room a post-Chernobyl glow. On the bed, clad in pink baby-doll pyjamas, was a podgy woman in her thirties with pale papery skin and sunken, kohl-rimmed eyes.

The relief of finding him overcame me momentarily. Then I remembered where we were. ‘What’s happened?’ I demanded. ‘Tell me. I’m his mother.’

‘No shit?’ she responded, eloquently. ‘Well, lemme see. So far we’ve nattered on about, like, time travel, Shakespeare, astronomy an’ that. Oh yeah. And why it’s better to live in a communist country where no one gives a toss about material possessions,’ she rasped out in a voice that was just one packet shy of lung cancer.

‘Merlin, we are going home right now,’ I said, as though auditioning for the role of Miss Jean Brodie.

Merlin bent over the woman’s hand and kissed it. The prostitute guffawed at the polite incongruity of the chivalric gesture, yet blushed, as if secretly flattered by the gallantry.

‘Come back again, kid,’ she smiled, then added a postscript addressed to me, ‘Hey, no tip?’

‘Yes. Get a wax,’ I advised her.

‘So, kiddo,’ – Archie ruffled his hair affectionately as we walked back to the car, ‘I hope you didn’t have a good time. It was supposed to be educational.’

I suggested to Archie that if he didn’t shut up I’d be tempted to see how long it would take for his head to explode if I backed my car repeatedly over his skull. ‘Like Jeremy said,’ I concluded, ‘I hope you didn’t have any plans tonight that involved living a little longer.’

Archie was undeterred. ‘Death is the greatest kick of all – that’s why they save it to last. Right, sport?’ He winked at Merlin in the rear-view mirror. Nobody spoke again until Archie was reverse-parking my car into a spot outside our house.

‘So … the women at a brothel, they don’t really love you, do they?’ my son finally asked.

Archie laughed so hard he bumped into a red Saab behind him. ‘Oh bugger. J’have a piece of paper so I can write a note? Doan worry. If there’s any damage, I’ll pay for it.’

‘You bet you will.’ I rummaged in my handbag. The only paper I had was the price list from the sauna which I’d picked up from the counter. ‘So, did you pay that woman any money?’ I asked Merlin tentatively, dreading the reply.

‘Oh yes. She commandeered it all.’

So much for their pro-communist, in-depth discussion on the unimportance of material possessions.

‘She also asked me if I was old enough to open a bank account. And would I take her to the cash machine … How do you open a bank account? With a key? Do you unlock a
box
and there’s lots of money? An account is invisible, isn’t it?’

I glowered at Archie. How could he have taken this child into a den of iniquity? And yet, the man wasn’t all bad, I thought, watching him scrawling a note of apology.

Jeremy, who’d been observing our arrival through my living-room window, pushed a glass of whisky into my hand the minute I walked through the door. ‘Is he okay?’

As they’d now missed the theatre, I persuaded Merlin to bound upstairs for a shower – although I would have preferred soaking him for a week or two in a vat of penicillin – then replied, ‘Yes. Thank God. For a while there I thought we were in some French subtitled movie. All that was missing was Charlotte Rampling or Gérard Depardieu and perhaps a crack team of existentialist philosophers spreading ennui … But nothing happened,’ I concluded with relief.

‘I can never forgive myself for abandoning you to the likes of that cretin.’ Jeremy gestured out of the window at Archie, who was tucking his apology note beneath the windscreen of the red Saab. ‘All the pressure I’ve put you under, raising Merlin alone, well, it’s all just been too stressful. Especially when you’re working. How can I ever repay you? Why don’t you give up work, Lucy? Become a lady of leisure?’

‘I’m not sure I could fill either part of the equation, Jeremy.’ I gulped at my whisky and winced at its bite.

‘You could come on the hustings with me. The by-election’s coming up and I could do with your wise counsel. I would put you on the payroll, so you’d be totally supported financially. With no real workload.’

I looked at my ex. Working full-time whilst trying to look after Merlin meant that life was incredibly busy – which was really just a euphemism for total chaos and please don’t fire
me.
I said nothing but, in truth, Jeremy’s offer was as comforting as a thick winter blanket.

Archie, who was hanging up his leather jacket in the hall, gave a snorted guffaw as merciless as a sneeze. ‘So, the Beatles were wrong. Money can buy you love.’

‘Only in a brothel,’ I snapped angrily. ‘Say what you will about Jeremy, but he would never have exposed Merlin to something so crass.’

‘Jeez, Lou. You’re such a bloody hypocrite. You worry about Merlin going to a brothel, but you’d consider going on the road with a politician? Screwin’ people comes as naturally to your ex as breathin’. You want justice, go to a brothel. You wanna get fucked, go to a pollie.’

Jeremy touched his eye, which was now oystering up with swelling. ‘Well, we can’t all be as moral and upstanding and perfect as you, now can we? I need to wash this dried blood off my face,’ Jeremy said dramatically before striding from the room.

‘I’m amazed it’s not blue,’ Archie called out after him. ‘You could have washed it off while we were away, you wily prick, but then you wouldn’t have got the sympathy vote, right?’

Alone now, Archie and I stood facing each other. The air between us crackled with tension. After an awkward silence, he said, ‘Look, I know those places exploit women. I never said my feminist consciousness was evolved. It’s evolv
ing
! It’s an ongoin’ thing, right? As a bloke, I’d just like to apologize for everything, okay? But you’ve gotta give the kid points for havin’ the balls to even get into the joint. I mean, that took a lot of initiative and guts.’

I turned my back on him. Right now I would have preferred the company of a Somali pirate or even Berlusconi wrestling in jelly.

‘So,’ a refreshed Jeremy said, re-entering the room a few minutes later, ‘Lucy says you grew up in Tasmania?’

‘Yeah. People always laugh when I say I’m from Tasmania, possibly because Tassie has 22,000 people and only seven surnames. Do the maths,’ Archie chuckled, in a valiant effort to soften my mood. ‘That’s the reason I want to move back there one day. ’Cause everyone has the same DNA, meanin’ you can never get caught for a crime.’

‘I think you’d make a rather hopeless criminal, actually, as the good ones never do get caught.’ Jeremy flourished a piece of paper I recognized as the price list from the sauna. It was the note Archie had put under the windscreen of the red Saab. In a bad imitation of an Aussie accent, Jeremy read out what was scrawled on the back.

G’day. Sorry, mate, but I accidentally hit your car. The woman I have the horn for is watching me write this note so I’m pretending to write down my details. An oldie, but a goldie! See ya!

Archie’s expression was that of a man who has been contemplatively collecting driftwood on a beach and has just caught a tsunami in the back of his neck. ‘You lowly piss ant,’ he said to Jeremy.

‘You’re plagiarizing from Byron again, aren’t you?’ Jeremy condescended.

Archie’s face was as weary as an unmade bed. ‘Jeez, Lou. How can you take any advice from a man whose cufflinks and ties are funnier than he is?’

Archie’s deceit impacted like a blow to my chest. ‘Oh Archie,’ I sighed. ‘How can I ever trust a man who could write a note like that?’ My words felt heavy and sour.

‘You don’t seem to have any trouble trusting the president of the Slime Committee here.’

‘But Jeremy has taken responsibility for his mistakes. You can never even admit that you’ve
made
one. Like taking my son on a motorbike and to a brothel.’

‘But what makes you think the scumbag isn’t gonna shoot through again? How can you trust a bloke who talks as though he’s pouring syrup on a pikelet?’

Jeremy insinuated himself between us and spoke in a voice that was sinuous and exact. ‘What is so saintly about you, Lucy, and why I love and respect you so much is that you have always put Merlin first. His life was endangered tonight. Twice.’

‘He wasn’t endangered!’ Archie bellowed. ‘Why don’t you quit workin’ yourself up into seven types of arsehole and keep out of it … Lou,’ he entreated. ‘Talk to me. Say something.’

Before I could respond, Jeremy then reached under the coffee table and upended a rucksack I recognized as Archie’s. Its alarming contents spewed across the table. ‘I took the liberty of going through your things while you were at a
brothel
with my
child
. And look what I found.’ Jeremy poked through the offensive debris with forensic fascination. ‘Amyl nitrate, hardcore porn, marijuana, and what I presume to be ecstasy tablets …’

‘You talk so much shit your teeth must be brown,’ Archie seethed. ‘None of that crap’s mine.’

‘No wonder you’re encouraging Merlin to keep pace pharmaceutically with the other boys, because you’re his dealer.’

‘You fucker. I can’t believe you left out a sex tape of me and Paris Hilton or, I dunno, a clubbed seal. Lucy, come
on.
You can see it’s a set-up. You do believe me, right?’

Angry and discombobulated, I said nothing. That very day I’d checked on Merlin’s score sheet. They’d been deuce for a while, but today it was definitely advantage Jeremy. And I felt inclined to agree with Merlin.

‘Archie, old man, I think it’s time you found your way back to Australia, don’t you? It’s 4,000 miles wide, bright red in colour and surrounded by sharks, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble finding it.’

‘Why don’t you stay out of it, you gangrenous ball sack!’ Archie fumed. ‘This is between Lucy and me. Lou’ – he took me by the shoulders – ‘you know I love ya. If I stuffed things up, I’m sorry. But don’t throw me aside. Nobody will ever know you so well,’ he persevered. ‘Gimme a test. The “How Well Do You Know Her?” test. What is your favourite pizza topping? How many squares of chocolate will you eat on the day before your period? What food do you secretly want me to order so you can nibble it off my plate? How often do you like to be spanked? And, for advanced lovers: at what velocity?’ When his spiel failed to amuse me, he changed conversational key and added sombrely, ‘Lou, if you ever ditched me, the bum would just drop out of my world.’

I didn’t know what to believe. It felt as though the wild animal I’d picked up in the street and taken home and fed and loved out of kindness had swerved around and bitten my hand.

Jeremy shoved the contraband into the backpack and thrust it at Archie. ‘I’ve heard of slow readers but you’re a slow listener. Read my lips. YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE ANY MORE.’

Archie might have decked him there and then, except that a freshly showered Merlin suddenly burst into the room. We
stopped
talking and all looked at him in unison. My son stood there with one leg up behind him like a flamingo, squirming with embarrassment. ‘I don’t always know what to say, you know. I can’t just be yakity yak all the time.’

‘I’m sorry to disillusion you, Lucy. I really am. Especially when I behaved even more atrociously in the past,’ Jeremy added regretfully. ‘But I know you’ll do the right thing.’

My years of expertise perfecting a flinty exterior came in handy now. ‘Merlin,’ I said with ambassadorial diplomacy, ‘Archie has some gigs to go to. He’s going away for a little while,’ I concluded in a voice of clotted-cream consonants modelled on the late Queen Victoria.

Merlin’s wet hair dripped on to his T-shirt while he absorbed this information. ‘It’s not going to end like this, is it, Archie?’