The Boy Who Fell to Earth (4 page)

‘Yes,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Jeremy simply knows all the most interesting people. Her sister, Anne Orexia, is popping by later.’

I kept up this kind of feeble banter and brash façade for weeks. ‘My husband gives reason to my life … He’s the reason why I’m broken-hearted, bitter, cynical and twisted,’ I said to work colleagues.

‘The trouble with women is that we get all excited about nothing and then we marry him,’ I told my unimpressed principal, before taking a few days off on compassionate leave.

‘Do you know what I call it when older m–m–men r–r–run off with younger, thinner women? Sylph fulfilment,’ I slurred over cocktails with my sympathetic sister.

‘We’re having a little marital tiff,’ I informed his family. ‘
I
wanted to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary by having a lovely holiday in the Caribbean with our beautiful son, plus perhaps a new gazebo extension to celebrate Jeremy’s pay rise at the bank … but
he
wanted to divorce me and shack up with a TV cook named Audrey – sorry,
Tawdry
– and follow her to bloody America where she has a TV opportunity. Not even on a proper channel. Only on
cable
… And, let’s face it, the woman’s
mammogram
is probably her best screen work. Is it any wonder I’m a Recovering Optimist?’

‘My husband’s birth certificate is an apology letter from the condom factory,’ I told the childminder, the milkman, the social workers, the accountant …

But, privately, I howled my heart out. I wailed at the world. Like a dog tormented by wasps, I shook all over. I gnawed my pillow at night and curled into the fetal position in a paroxysm of self-loathing and ‘if only’s.
If only
I had paid Jeremy more attention.
If only
Merlin hadn’t been born with autism.
If only
I’d never fallen pregnant in the first bloody place.
If only
I hadn’t allowed Merlin’s condition to seep into our marriage, our laughs and our love-making. (Believe me, no man can wake a woman who is pretending to be asleep. Even if you play amplified heavy metal into her earhole.)

I wrote and told Jeremy how I felt. I promised to do a cooking course, so that I’d never again use my smoke alarm as a timer. ‘I’ve realized that “blancmange” is
not
the highest point in the French Alps,’ I assured him by text. I baked him Yorkshire puddings. I cleaned the house top to bottom. I begged his forgiveness. I suggested having another child. I implored him to come back to us.

At first I felt sure he would, so tried to tease him out of his sulky silence: ‘I would have answered your email sooner, only you didn’t send one.’ But after a month or two of wearing full make-up and silk lingerie, just in case he popped in, things began to feel a little Miss Havishamesque. I was tempted to wander around in my moth-eaten wedding dress, braiding my hair and drooling …

But there was no time for a nervous breakdown. Merlin was now at a local pre-school five days a week and I’d gone back to teaching full-time. Although single parenthood meant that I arrived at 8.55 and left at 3.30, which couldn’t get me the sack as they were the hours I was contracted to do, it was considered a ‘pretty poor show’ by my colleagues. Keen teachers run drama and chess clubs after school and apply for advanced skill status, which I should have been doing by this
stage.
Yes, I am a career woman, I told anyone who would listen, but my tip for young women today …? Just stick to the traditional investment path and inherit many hotels. I also gave up all ideas of penning a novel. It seemed a bit pointless – now that I was actually
in
one.

At home, I started to master my own DIY. Well … more or less, if you don’t count the day I gave myself an impromptu perm in a bizarre electrical accident. I learnt to do housework in half the time. This involved a particularly athletic feat of changing both Merlin’s sheets and duvet cover, flipping and airing the mattresses, and all without waking him once. Martyred domesticity dominated my days. I took to calling myself ‘St Lucy’ of Lambeth. I practically booked myself in for a halo fitting.

Minus Jeremy, life with Merlin became glutinous. Pushing through it was an effort, like swimming underwater against a tide. My second favourite mothering experience was talking to Merlin’s pre-school teacher about my son’s educational progress, my favourite being stubbing my toe repeatedly on the vacuum cleaner until it went gangrenous. In quick succession, Merlin was expelled from three nurseries, Montessori, Sure Start and Tiny Tots. Whenever the phone rang, I steeled myself for the voice of his most recent head teacher, dreading the four lethal words ‘Could you pop by?’ Whenever I was summoned to the pre-school office, a sense of trepidation as heavy as a winter coat hung on my shoulders. It appeared that Merlin’s teachers wanted combat pay. I felt as though my son had been voted ‘Kid Least Wanted in a Classroom’ by teachers countrywide.

And I could understand why. Merlin’s moods were a pendulum swing from dark to light, joy to despair. He’d gaze ahead in silent absorption, as if taking the pulse of the
universe.
For hours he’d just stare into space, as though he could hear secrets the wind was whispering. Then anxiety would creep up on him like a spy and there’d be an avalanche of frustrated rage for no obvious reason. Oh, where was my Owner’s Manual? Then perhaps I could understand why his clothes seemed to scorch him. Each morning, as I tried to dress my son, he’d toss and buck like a horse attempting to escape from a saddle, leaving me bruised and battered.

Ah yes, you learn many things when you’re the mother of someone with autism, like the fact that cats are not the only creatures with nine lives. There are also guinea pigs, goldfish, rabbits – even pet geckos are more durable than they look. (Although if put into the blender with the lid off, your kitchen will quickly achieve a new interior-design look you could only really call ‘art gecko’.)

You also learn that embarrassment, like hair gel for a bald bloke, is a luxury not afforded to you. Nor is there any escape. Not only have you had a baby, but you’ll
always
have a baby. What I mean is that your son won’t grow into a man, he’ll grow into a giant toddler. With a psychological umbilical cord that attaches you for life.

Merlin’s volcanic tantrums turned him into Lana Turner, John McEnroe and Bette Davis all rolled into one fun bundle. After calming his meltdowns with cuddles and counselling, anointing his anxieties with ‘You’re so clever’s until he felt better, I would be left as wilted as an old lettuce leaf. A lettuce leaf that was about to be arrested for child abuse – which would be the only conclusion the neighbours could reach, after all that hullaballoo.

The rest of my time I devoted to happy little hobbies like buying presents for nursery teachers or neighbours to apologize for Merlin’s erratic, sometimes violent behaviour.
To
break the routine, I sometimes took a little jaunt outside to retrieve my many possessions which Merlin had thrown out of the window. Another leisure pursuit involved watching children evaporate away from my son by the swings. The sandbox invariably became a quicksand box. Angry parents, whose heads spun to stare at me judgementally, would half-hear my explanation before trailing off, fearing some AIDS-like contagion and abandoning me to a numbing silence. I spent the rest of my carefree ‘me’ time being told by shop owners that my son was a ‘spoilt brat’ and was no longer welcome in their stores, the crisp reprimand in their voices forbidding further conversation. If only there were a self-help book for social lepers.

I wrote ‘to do’ lists so that I’d stop jolting awake in the middle of the night because I’d forgotten to defrost the leg of lamb for the next day or to plan tomorrow’s lesson on Sylvia Plath appreciation. I was developing my own Plath-ology – a desperate desire to take anti-depressants. There’s nothing wrong with taking Prozac, I convinced myself. Even God-fearing Moses took tablets, and look at the side-effects
he
had.

But my biggest note to myself was to stop yearning to put my head on my beloved husband’s dearly missed prime pectoral real estate … And then, more than anything else, trying not to mind when, aged four, Merlin said his first word since losing his speech at eight months. And that word was ‘Dad’.

3

UFO – Unidentified Fleeing Object

THE WOMEN IN
your life are your human wonder-bras – uplifting, supportive and making each other look bigger and better. My loving sister and mother kept me buoyant during this fraught time. Which is quite a feat when you consider Merlin’s fifth year of life. Basically, things went downhill so fast I was amazed that the Olympic Bobsleigh team hadn’t rung me for some top training tips. When Jeremy emptied our joint account, I realized that love really does end in marriage. My husband had never struck me as mean. He had always been the first to put his hand into his pocket … Unfortunately, now it was to play pocket billiards. The man I adored with all my heart had turned into the kind of guy who would stab you in the back and then call the police to have you arrested for carrying a weapon.

The first item on my ‘to do’ list was to kill UFO – Unidentified Fleeing Object, otherwise known as the Man I Mistakenly Took for My Loving and Committed Husband.

When Jeremy, who was now living in Los Angeles, filed for a divorce
a
year later, my hand flew to my forehead and I actually staggered backwards a few feet, like a heroine from a silent movie. I looked at the dashing arabesque of his signature
– Jeremy Beaufort –
on the dreaded document, which proclaimed that he wanted to dissolve our marriage. Then I vomited. All over the hateful, heartbreaking paperwork.

For the next few months, I tried to make my way through the Kafkaesque miasma of files and scraps of paper which is divorce court. But getting divorced is a vile maze of trapdoors, grilles and hatches. The locks and switches are coin-operated by lawyers. There are horrible spikes everywhere which lacerate your psyche. I joked to my sister that the day you consult a lawyer is the first day of the rest of your life savings. She replied that a divorce lawyer helps you get what’s coming to him. But it was hard to laugh, being so painfully true. The man I had loved body and soul for seven years of my life was busily rearranging his finances to minimize payments to his only child. My uninspired, lacklustre lawyer said that Jeremy had diverted funds to another company which it would take a lot of time and money to trace – money I didn’t have. But, surely, Jeremy’s fast cars and Armani suits, and Audrey’s dazzling, bling-tastic appearance, which was off the
kerching
-o-meter, were pretty good signs that my hubby had a healthy dose of affluenza? He was obviously practising moderation to excess.

‘If you don’t give me some money soon, Jeremy, I’ll be washing your son’s clothes by pounding them on rocks,’ I emailed him. ‘Luckily, the man who runs the corner store is Buddhist. I’ll just tell him I paid for the groceries in a previous life, shall I?’

Jeremy replied that he was strapped for cash, having re located to Los Angeles to help Audrey break into American television.

Cucumber-sandwich-nibbling, River-Cam-punting, Pimms-drinking, Wodehouse-addicted, sticky-wicket-cricket-loving Jeremy, moving country for a
woman
? And to La-La Land? A place where people say ‘Have a nice day’ and then shoot you? Well, it was as unthinkable as Lady Gaga giving up meat frocks and make-up. The sacrifices he was making for his floozy hurt me more than his infidelity. How had she made him do it? Obviously the woman was a vampire on a day pass. The other obvious fact was that Jeremy’s mid-life crisis had started without him.

Jeremy went on to say that there was little left for him to give as I’d squandered all his life savings on quacks for Merlin because I couldn’t accept that the child was mentally handicapped.

Striking while the irony was hot, I emailed back that what I couldn’t accept was how he could be having a mid-life crisis when he’d never left puberty.

Jeremy responded with a list of complaints about me – unloving, sarcastic, obsessional, undomesticated, unreasonable – a list he would no doubt soon put to the court in the contested property settlement. Naturally, the judge, nauseous to the point of projectile vomiting at this catalogue of my flaws, would award him custody of all our possessions – except Merlin, whom he obviously didn’t want. I comforted myself with the knowledge that my husband still couldn’t sing all the lyrics to ‘American Pie’ from beginning to end, the rat. And he certainly put the ‘ass’ into ‘Massachusetts’.

Because I was broke and bamboozled, Jeremy had duped me into signing a settlement that wasn’t linked to the Retail Price Index, which is obfuscatory legal jargon for ‘You’re only getting a hundred quid a week no matter how much the cost of living goes up.’

When I discovered his treachery, I emailed Jeremy immediately. ‘I obviously didn’t sign in ink, but in my own
spilt blood
, you bastard!’ When he didn’t bother to reply, I realized that my darling husband had removed the word ‘human’ from his resumé. And it hardened me, I know it did. Merlin’s diagnosis, coupled with Jeremy’s betrayal, made me defensive. Pretty soon I had developed so many survival instincts I could easily have set off through the jungle with just a knife and a water bottle, my face set into a commando’s grimace and impressively smeared with mud as camouflage against marauding predators. I became so tough that it got to the point where I would have received the news that I was about to be mugged with the mild annoyance of one who would have preferred to have got a parking ticket.

‘Sarcasm can so easily segue into carcinoma,’ my mother warned. According to Mum, the reason I’d lost my faith in humankind was because my ex turned out to be a megalomaniacal tosser with an ego the size of Ben Nevis. Only she didn’t put it quite so nicely.

To spite Jeremy and to help me get over him, I decided to shear off my mane of long auburn hair which he so loved.

When Phoebe found me in her bathroom hacking at my locks with a pair of her kids’ project scissors, she gave me a long, concerned look in her bathroom mirror. ‘Maybe you need to take your mind off things. What about a hobby or something?’