The Boy Who Fell to Earth (3 page)

Day’s end, though, seeing my pupils spurt out of the school gates like toothpaste from a tube, only reminded me that my own son would never know those normal, exhilarating pleasures. Merlin was like a rubber glove turned inside out.
Everything
I took for granted – smiling, laughing, loving – all as natural as breathing, were alien to him. My son was exiled on to a planet beyond my understanding, beyond logic. Looking up at me, his eyes as bare and round as light bulbs, I knew he was not in the same space-time continuum as the rest of us. The kid was all currents and impulses. Merlin’s moods were so erratic it was as though he were responding to some invisible conductor’s baton. I’d often find him smiling at something secret, as if being tickled from the inside with a feather … only for this to be followed by a sudden darkening of his mood, as the poison of anxiety branched through his little being.

I was also going through childminders like tissues. Even though I only left him with carers who assured me that they were trained in ‘special needs’, a frazzled Tracey or Leanne or Kylie would invariably hand my son over as though he were some rare feral creature recently netted in the Amazon and still adjusting to captivity. Merlin would go rigid with horror when I tried to wrestle him into his car seat, flapping his arms and legs like a trapped bird which was panicking and frantic and crashing into walls. My son’s muteness meant that all I could do was peer into the disturbed, empty reaches of his eyes while pleading with him to be calm. ‘Earth to Merlin, come in. Are you reading me? Over. Ground Control to Major Mum.’

I then drove home, white-knuckled with stress. Eventually Merlin’s crying would subside into a brooding, sullen, twitching silence. Unless I deviated from the usual route, that is. Then he would thunk his head against the car seat, screaming with terror. Once home, he would shudder with exhaustion, clinging to me desperately as he sobbed into my chest. My heart quivered with pity and I would have to blink
away
tears. And then I would look into his eyes and realize that they weren’t empty but brimming with fear. It seemed there was a place in him which I could not reach, where he dwelt in solitude. Beneath the surface of his daily existence was a life he lived as if underwater.

My son was like something that had appeared in a magician’s hat. I had no idea where he’d come from and he was unlike anybody I’d ever met. Merlin seemed to broadcast signals all day but nobody was on the same wavelength. He would raise his face up to the heavens, as though listening intently to cosmic harmonies beyond the constraints of my earthbound senses. Merlin and I could look out of the same window but never see the same thing. Still, one thing was clear. It was my job to stay alert. To pick up bleeps on my Merlin radar. And to stop him from tumbling through a hole in the world, like Alice.

After my last class one Friday, I was dashing to my car so that I could relieve yet another rattled and overwrought childminder when I saw a mother silently sobbing by the gates of the private primary school next door. My heart lurched. I instinctively felt that she too must have a boy who didn’t fit in. Perhaps the ‘A’ word had been bandied about? My emotions swelled with the recognition of her pain and angst and I found myself dashing to her side, arms open. ‘What is it?’ I said, brimming with fellow feeling.

‘It’s my son … He’s five.’

‘Yes?’ I soothed, a hand on her arm, urging her to unburden herself to one who would understand.

‘He’s not taking to his French.’

I had an overwhelming desire to get into my car and back over her body repeatedly. And do you know what? A jury of mothers of special needs children would acquit me. For most
mothers,
their biggest worry is that their offspring won’t eat anything which hasn’t danced on television. I have seen mothers tearing their hair out over this. When my pupils’ more aspirational parents tearfully complained about their wayward progeny not grasping
Beowulf
, I felt a grinding hollowness. The only remedy was to take a quick sniff of the classroom glue pot. I was tempted to commandeer Merlin’s Postman Pat flask and start carrying something stronger in it than orangeade. Valium, say, with a heroin chaser – Mummy’s ‘little helper’.

I would have turned to my husband for comfort, but he had taken to imitating the Loch Ness monster: rumours of his existence abounded but there were no actual sightings. I understood that the shock of Merlin’s diagnosis had sent Jeremy retreating into the world of high finance, where he could take solace from the solid predictability of percentages and equations, and at first I’d been patient. Jeremy’s world has always been so certain. The only hard knocks he’d ever taken had been whilst playing polo. He’d perfected his French on frequent skiing trips to Verbier or Chamonix. Entertaining his parents’ friends at dinner parties meant that he had learnt osmotically, from the cradle on, how to charm and disarm. Although professing members’ clubs to be horribly outdated and unnecessary, he attends all the same and secretly relishes them. Having an autistic child was not on his life’s shopping list. Consequently, my darling husband had become like a hostile witness, grunting and only answering in monosyllables.

He’d had a year to acclimatize and yet still refused to discuss Merlin’s condition. The loud, contentious quality of Jeremy’s muteness bounced off the walls of our ramshackle little terrace. The whole house seemed to be holding its
breath.
The plastic Philippe Starck garden gnomes he’d given me as a comedic housewarming gift stood back to back on our pocket-handkerchief lawn as though in a huff with each other. Yes, we’d bought our house cheaply as a ‘fixer-upper’, but it was us who needed fixing. We were falling to pieces. I felt I’d woken in my own home to find all the furniture rearranged. Disorientated, I had to reevaluate my surroundings.

I tried to make light of it. Against Jeremy’s wishes I’d confided in family and a few close friends, but when other acquaintances, still oblivious to Merlin’s condition, asked why Jeremy was never with us, I explained that he’d enjoyed trying to get me pregnant – ‘He liked trying for that three times a day but contracted morning sickness – the
morning after the baby was born
.’ After they laughed, I’d add, with a practised smile, ‘He’s just taking time to adjust. He’ll get more involved when Merlin is older.’

When my husband missed appointments with our son’s speech and occupational therapists, I told myself I wasn’t stressed. I told myself that it was normal to add chocolate chips to a cheese omelette. When Jeremy didn’t turn up to the interview for the special needs nursery I’d spent months lobbying, I joked with the headmistress that he’d muddled up the dates. ‘The greatest mystery is how men, who are so universally stupid, got to rule the world. Dan Brown should write a thriller about
that
!’

When I had to forgo staff meetings because Jeremy was too busy to pick up Merlin from the latest childminder, I commiserated with the other wives by delivering a stagey eye-roll. ‘Ah, how wonderful marriage would be without husbands.’ I jokingly took to wearing my wedding ring on the wrong finger so that I could quip at opportune moments that I’d ‘obviously married the wrong bloke’.

When Jeremy didn’t make it to Merlin’s third birthday party, I philosophized, glibly, to the small gathering of family members, ‘Do you know the one way to keep a husband at home?’

‘Baking?’ suggested my mother.

‘Gymnastic sex?’ volunteered Phoebe.

‘Let the air out of his tyres,’ I advised caustically.

My mother and sister exchanged concerned glances. My older sister is just like me, except she has a gentle disposition, an attentive, devoted husband, two normal children, a job she adores and a genuine love of humankind.

Our mother, although never the type to cut sandwiches into triangles and knit organic muesli, is also very loving. When she found out I was having a baby, Mum crocheted herself into a coma. Packages arrived from all over the world containing baby booties, mittens, beanies, cardigans, bed-spreads, doilies and matinee jackets (one for the mornings and one for the evenings and one for any unaccounted matinee moments in between). Within weeks, my house was covered in crocheted things, as if a lumpy, multicoloured sauce had dripped over every surface.

After my father had died, naked in the arms of what my mum called ‘a shady lady’, my bookish mother had become a party girl. If there’s a party on across town, she rings to ask if she can speak to herself as she can’t believe she’s not there. She would crochet her own party if she could. To complement her good-time girl image, she traded in her neatly knotted scarves for a feather boa which writhed about her throat like something tropical, exotic and most definitely alive. Mum had been a librarian by trade, which meant that the only excursions she’d experienced were flights of fancy. But then she discovered that my father had over-insured himself,
which
was amusingly typical of his inflated sense of self-worth and caused us to laugh through our tears at the funeral. Now Mum was always making up for lost time and was either off abseiling an Alp or doing a degree on volcanology somewhere unpronounceable or spending a small fortune saving lemurs. (Individually, I presume, at the price.) Most of my mother’s conversations began with ‘I’m just back from …’, or ‘I’m just off to …’ It might be St Petersburg, or Bhutan or Belize. She was always either shark-diving or Turin-shroud authenticating, nude tap-dancing or off on a little trot around the Hermitage. ‘Sorry, darling, but I don’t have a weekend free till early October,’ she’d say, gulping in the good life, every last drop, living the daylights out of every second. My own life just telescoped away to a blip of mundanity. ‘Got a good deal on mincemeat at the supermarket,’ I’d mumble in reply.

She communicated by postcard only. One arrived from Kathmandu with a yak on it and the scrawled message ‘Madly in love with Sherpa.’ Another arrived two months later from Brazil. ‘Sherpa-ectomy. Now on dig for fossils –
not
the archaeologist, although he is fetching.’ Merlin’s diagnosis had brought her home immediately. Needless to say, my vibrant mother and Pollyanna-esque sister found my glib pessimism alarmingly distasteful.

But beneath my Teflon-coated veneer of repartee, my husband’s indifference was cooling my ardour to arctic levels. Jeremy accused me of ‘alienation of affection’ – a legal term for losing the hots for someone. He said that attempting to make love to me was reminiscent of trying to shop in a small country town on the Sabbath. Nothing was open. When he complained that I never initiated sex with him any more, I wanted to tell him to go to hell but realized that, of course, by
this
point, single-parenting a child with autism, hell would be a major improvement on my own life.

My optimistic sister felt sure that Jeremy was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. ‘He’ll come round. Basically, Jeremy is a decent, compassionate man.’

I laughed out loud. ‘Calling Jeremy compassionate is like calling me a Peruvian pole-vault champion.’ Bitterness had started to creep into my voice and lines of resentment were etching themselves on to my countenance. What had happened to the man I adored?

Jeremy began staying out later and later and then not coming home at all. And then when he did finally come home a week before Merlin’s fourth Christmas, it was in a psychological suicide vest, judging by the grenade he threw into my world.

‘I’m leaving you.’ His voice was heavy with weary exasperation, his face flushed with drink. ‘I need to find some peace of mind.’

What he found was a piece of a televisual domestic goddess called Audrey.

With Stevie Wonder’s eye for detail, I hadn’t noticed he was drifting into the arms and freshly lasered legs of a pulchritudinous daytime-TV chef. Finding a false fingernail in our bed should have been a clue, but no, I chose to put it down to an over-beautified babysitter. I trailed him and his suitcase out into the street, past the little Christmas tree I’d spent all day decorating. My face was a rictus of incredulity. ‘Why?’ We’d only been married for five years.

‘Well, if you hadn’t rejected me all the time … if you’d shown me the slightest bit of affection … but you’ve been so preoccupied.’ The thin smoke of his breath was steaming away in the icy air, like a 1950s cigarette ad. ‘All you can think
about
is Merlin. You’ve given up cooking. The house is a tip. You’re so frosty in bed I feel compelled to keep checking your vital signs every half-hour.’

‘Oh, forgive me, Jeremy. I’d love to screw your brains out but Audrey obviously beat me to it … judging by how much you’ve lowered your IQ to shack up with a woman who cooks cupcakes for a living. So, the way to a man’s heart really is through his stomach? I always thought that was aiming too high.’

My sister Phoebe googled the TV temptress. Apart from a regular cooking spot on a daytime television chat show, where she pouted provocatively as though in a porn film, her only other claim to fame was a tabloid exposé of the time she sat in a plate of cocaine at a rock-and-roll party, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘powdering your cheeks’. Photos revealed a scrupulously diet-conscious honey-blonde from the home counties with melonesque breasts, a minuscule waist and a cat-like languor. Her make-up was so consistently perfect it seemed she was permanently poised to receive an award on some imaginary stage for services to lip-liner.

Despite her prime-time habit of practically fellating the more phallic-looking vegetables before she baked them, the woman was so thin Yves Saint Laurent could use her as a straw. Her only large body parts were her breasts, which could easily be mistaken for a breakaway republic. The posh trollop wore cashmere trousers – obviously to keep her ankles warm when my husband took her roughly by the hardy perennials in her herbaceous border. I suppressed a swift shudder of revulsion at the thought of my erudite Jeremy naked with a woman whose tan was the same colour as a carrot. One kiss and you’d have consumed half of your five a day.

When I broke the news to my mother by showing her Jeremy and Audrey’s photograph in
Hello!
magazine (they’d been papped, ironically at some charity ball for disabled children), my mother gasped at the actress’s stick-thin frame. ‘That must be bulimia.’