The Boy Who Fell to Earth (7 page)

Sick to my stomach, I watched as she batted her eyelashes – lashes so verdant I suspected lost Amazonian tribes to be lurking there – and fluffed up her breasts in their cups. Breast-fluffing was a mannerism Tawdry employed to ensure that she was the centre of male attention at all times. As she displayed her latest gourmet concoction, I stared glumly at the bowl of spag bol on my lap. It looked as though something had eaten it already. It was clear that my only option was to walk the city streets and lie down in a few chalked outlines to see which one would fit.

When I told Merlin’s teacher that I’d failed to find him a placement, she beamed at my son and said, ‘Well, that’s great, as I wouldn’t want to lose him.’ But her smile was thin and reticent. Like most people, she was wary of Merlin, as though he were benignly radioactive. ‘Have you … considered home schooling?’ she wheedled, a little desperately.

When Merlin played a football match and broke an arm –
unfortunately,
not his own but the arm of the school bully, who vowed vengeance – I knew that I had to get him out of there no matter what. I sat down with my bank statements.

I’m an English teacher and not that good at maths. I spend half the time worrying about addition, half the time worrying about subtraction and half the time worrying about division. As a kid I was more terrified of times tables than of werewolves. But even a mathematical dullard like me knew that there was no way I could make my finances stretch to a private education. How could I make a quick buck? I only had two realistic options: become a prostitute or do a bank robbery. Obviously I could earn a fortune from my swimwear modelling, but was put off by the amount of waxing … If only sarcasm were a bankable commodity. Then I’d be rich as Croesus. Perhaps I could ask my head teacher for an advance on my salary – an advance of, say,
ten years
. As my mother had spent the last of Dad’s death dollars before Jeremy left me, there was only one person to whom I could turn. As events go, I was looking forward to it only slightly more than I would have my own death by stoning in Tehran.

5

My Family and Other Aliens

JEREMY’S MOTHER GLANCED
at my dusty skirting boards and cobwebbed light fittings and the crumbs lying around the toaster in a little landslide with the condescending contempt of a marchioness visiting the home of a plague-riddled serf. Although Veronica is the type of cook who boils vegetables for about a
month
, when I offered her packet biscuits instead of home-baked her eyebrows lifted high in fastidious disdain. My ex-mother-in-law’s visits had always made me feel like a welfare case, but now even more so.

It had been six years since Merlin and I had seen her. After my son’s diagnosis was confirmed, his paternal grandparents had become magisterially uninterested. Autism was a non-negotiable flaw. The Beauforts were not the endearingly eccentric, kipper-breathed, windswept and interesting toffs with comedy comb-overs who won boy scout badges in Trouser Tenting. No, these were the hard-bitten, born-to-rule, survival-of-the-fittest, landed-gentry types who ate Hail ’n’ Hearty Cream of Gristle soup and Split Pea and Road Kill
bisque,
referred to their varicose veins as nature’s pinstripes and didn’t give a hoot that driving down the cobbled lanes of the local village with Bambi’s mother strapped to the fenders of their Range Rovers might traumatize small children for ever.

I had never eaten anything at their home that they hadn’t bred, stalked, snared, shot, plucked, stuffed or roasted with home-grown herbs and then gnawed from the bone. They culled things. They got rid of the runt of the litter. There was no sentiment about it. Derek Beaufort had the loving, affectionate nature of a piece of petrified wood. So it was no shock that, after the divorce, Merlin and I had been simply excised, as you would a tumour. But now, as my ex-mother-in-law gazed at my ten-year-old son, she could see that some of her genes whispered in his veins. Jeremy’s genetic echo was right there before her, and I glimpsed her shock as she registered the fact. Although blond, Merlin was Jeremy in bonsai – slender, tall, tousle-haired, with the same flashing electric-blue eyes.

Merlin was the first to speak. ‘Don’t you find it amazing that you’re my grandma?’ He gave her a smile full of big, innocent teeth.

Veronica (better known as Moronica in my family because of her obstinate stupidity) forced a saccharine smile in his direction. ‘Hello, dear.’

‘Oh! Don’t give that cheesy grin.’ Merlin flinched. ‘Please don’t smile at me! It unnerves me. That cringey grin. Ugh!’ He covered his face, as though being zapped by death rays from a science-fiction stun gun.

It was Veronica’s turn to recoil. She flushed red in the face, as if scalded.

‘Merlin, why don’t you go and write some of your
numbers?’
My curious son had taken to writing cricket scores for hours and hours. He’d memorized every player’s career, every innings, run and test result from every major match ever played on the planet. He was as accurate as a computer … and yet still couldn’t tell the time. My ex-mother-in-law watched aghast as I led Merlin into the hall, where he scrambled inside the linen cupboard. I closed the hall door and turned to face her.

‘There are times when I truly believe Merlin to be an alien,’ I said lightly. ‘Sometimes, I feel that I didn’t give birth to him at all but found him under a spaceship and raised him as my own.’

Veronica balanced her bulk on the edge of her seat and jigged her fat foot with impatience. Her legs were veined and bubbled, like blue and lumpy knitting. Her feet, more at home in wellies, were squeezed into tiny shoes, the ankles ballooning over the leather like cake mixture that has run over the edges of the tin. I sat opposite her and tucked my legs up underneath me, to lend an informal mood to the proceedings.

‘Single-parenting a kid with Asperger’s Syndrome, which is the Latin medical term for “Your guess is as good as mine”, takes the combined skills of a trapeze artist, a nuclear physicist, Freud, a car mechanic and an animal behaviourist,’ I laughed, topping up her tea. (
Was I laying it on too thick?
…
Who was I
kidding
? I’d use a garden trowel if I could
.) I smiled to show that I was inviting friendship and intimacy and offered up the plate of biscuits.

She bit into a HobNob, the crumbs clinging to her lipstick. ‘Nobody said motherhood was easy,’ she replied cautiously. With her composure regained, Veronica’s smile was once again as lacquered as her nails.

‘Merlin’s bright, don’t get me wrong,’ I went on, ‘but his neural circuitry is just wired up differently. I live in a constant state of terror about what he might do. At the school fête, he’s the one who will end up pulling over the table of juice or talking to the dog. My only survival technique is to turn around innocently and say to anyone in the near vicinity, “Who is this child and why is he calling me Mum?”’

Once again, my little attempt to charm her with humour was met with a ceilingward lifting of the eyebrows in finicky disapproval. Abandoning any hope of banter, I took a deep breath, like a diver going under, and tried a more serious tack. ‘And then there’s all his anxieties. He’s worried the radio waves coming in through the microwave will warp his brain … He insists on walking around the kitchen in a certain way for good luck … And he takes everything literally. When I talk about the good scissors – “Has anyone seen my good scissors?” – he thinks there are bad ones, with evil, murderous tendencies. When I say “You’ll have to fight me for the last cupcake,” he squares up. Literally … When I asked him to lock the door, as burglars might steal my jewellery, then came home to find the door open, he explained, perplexed, “Well, why would men want jewellery?” ’

I flumped back in my lounge chair to await some sympathy.

But my ex-mother-in-law had mastered the upper-class art of remaining stoic in the face of someone else’s misfortune. ‘How … quirky’ was all she said.

‘Calling my son “quirky” is like saying that a meteor hurtling towards earth is only a little life-threatening. “Quirky” is the kind way of putting it, Veronica. “Socially awkward” is another. Other mums get Mother’s Day
presents.
Well, apart from the fact that I have no husband around to remind Merlin that it’s Mother’s Day …’ – (
I trowelled away. I was positively from Trowel and Co
.) – ‘I constantly get notes from school suspending him for bad behaviour. Like this week. He interrupted class to ask the teacher if she was worried about the fact that glaciers move. Wasn’t she concerned that glaciers had developed the ability to creep around? What if one stalked him? … You see, I think that’s quite amusing in a tangential way. But his teacher thought it downright mutinous.’ As did my ex-mother-in-law, by the way she rattled her cup irritatedly into the saucer. ‘But he can also be hilariously charming,’ I post-scripted, more positively. ‘It’s just that he has no filter. He always says exactly what he’s thinking.’

The opposite was true of Veronica. She was trying to look empathetic, but her expression remained pinched. She wore the look of a woman who’s just been offered a plate of lightly fried bat’s brains on bubonic beef, in a nice nitroglycerine sauté.

‘I know Jeremy has been paying child support …’ (I had to bite my tongue not to add, ‘
But not too bloody much … Let me get the latest cheque so that you can experience what an oily rag smells like
.’) ‘But what we didn’t take into account at the time of the divorce is that Merlin is always going to be as dependent as a baby. I will always have to cut his toenails and sandwiches, clean out his earwax and backpack. A mother’s job is to hatch, match and dispatch. Correct? But I’ll be bound to my son for the rest of my life – in the role of some indentured servant.’

‘Perhaps he’ll grow out of it?’ Veronica volunteered crisply. ‘Boys are notoriously late developers.’

My guffaw was like a saucepan lid dropped on a terracotta
floor.
The sudden burst of it made my ex-mother-in-law jump. ‘With a kid like Merlin you can never delude yourself into thinking that he’s behaving a little more normally … because that’s the time he’ll set fire to the headmaster’s hair. Mind you, I’m sure he would improve greatly, if I could
just get him into the right school
…’

I let the statement float in the air like a verbal parachute. When she said nothing, I pulled the ripcord. ‘The school he’s at now is just a holding area for the nearest prison. The curriculum involves how to read, write and do a drug deal … Oh, well. At least it will teach him metric.’ I smiled.

Still nothing. The door squeaked open and Merlin bounded back in holding a plate of cold fish fingers he’d retrieved from the fridge. He presented them to his grandmother with scrupulous courtesy. I’d been teaching him always to offer guests food and drink, even though
he
may not be hungry or thirsty, which was a very difficult concept for someone with Asperger’s syndrome. Merlin gave Veronica a lobotomized grin. He’d also, of late, been teaching himself to smile. My heart lurched with affection for my brave little boy.

Veronica’s eyebrows did their usual airborne leap towards her hairline. ‘Do you think fish fingers are an ideal meal, nutrients-wise?’ she demanded in a BBC wartime-broadcast voice. Veronica’s most memorable feature is her nose – possibly because she’s always looking down it.

‘I’d like to be a perfect mother, Veronica, I really would, but I’m too frantically preoccupied bringing up my son
on my own
,’ I replied pointedly.

Merlin gave his grandmother a look that was both polite and sullen, his eyes bright but unreadable beneath an over-long fringe.

‘No … thank … you … Merlin.’ She separated each word
as
though he were hard of hearing or had recently arrived from Gdansk, then smiled up at him, which made him cringe all over again. As I steered my son back to the second shelf of the linen press, he looked me straight in the eye and said, with the kind of perspicacity which occasionally took my breath away, ‘A smile can be a trick, Mum.’

When I returned to the living room, Veronica was examining a framed picture Merlin had drawn of himself, with a tiny body dwarfed by a huge head, massive ears and eyes and over-sized hands. It was a pictorial expression of his over-stimulated senses. Experts called it ‘sensory defensiveness’, a profound sensitivity to visual stimuli, smell, taste, touch and sound. Veronica’s expression as she examined this clumsy crayon creation was as rigid as an Easter Island statue.

‘Dear’ – she spoke slowly, as though soothing a small and irascible pet – ‘it’s obviously terribly hard.’ Her words were crisply enunciated, like those of a TV presenter. ‘And it’s obviously too, too much for you.’

I let down my guard for a moment and replied, genuinely, ‘It is. It bloody is. But you know what motherhood is like. Just when you think your toothpaste tube of devotion is all squeezed out, there comes along another dollop.’

‘But seriously, Lucinda …’ Her eyes shifted around the house, taking in the dust and the debris.

‘Lucy,’ I corrected her, for, oh, only about the six millionth time in my life. Although I was christened Lucy, she had always introduced me to her friends as Lucinda, to make me sound posh enough for her son.

‘What do you think Merlin’s prospects are?’ The word – ‘
prospects
’ – held all the pernickety condescension of a Victorian aunt.

‘Well, if I can get him into a good school – and by that I just mean a school where he isn’t mugged, stabbed, sexually propositioned or sold large quantities of Class A drugs on a daily basis – he does have potential and prospects. He’s bright and original.’ A wave of weariness washed over me. It was time to send the Beauforts on a little excursion – a one-way ticket on a guilt trip.

‘Look, I know you and Derek don’t like to admit that there’s anything wrong with Merlin, because everyone knows that autism and Asperger’s are genetic. But have you searched back through the family tree? There must be a few other defective branches? Maybe it would be worth employing a genealogist? … That’s someone who traces your family back as far as your money will go,’ I said, lamely, in an attempt to lighten the awkward atmosphere. ‘But I do think it’s time to find out why Merlin’s like this … Have there been other idiot savants like him in the Beaufort clan? I mean, take Derek. Highly intelligent, yes, but socially awkward and insular …’