The Boy Who Fell to Earth (8 page)

Medusa-like, Veronica’s livid gaze nearly turned me to stone. ‘There’s absolutely no history of any mental weaknesses on
our
side of the family,’ she said categorically, implying that it was my side of the egg-quation which had brought about this chromosomatic catastrophe. ‘What history of mental illness is there in
yours
?’

‘Well, my father was a sexually incontinent B-grade actor who took up tantric yoga late in life and died astride a Polish prostitute and part-time druid priestess and my mother then frittered away his life insurance globetrotting with toy boys … but otherwise, no, all relatively sane in the relatives department.’

‘Are you certain?’ Her voice was furiously measured.
‘Actually,
this is the very reason I agreed to come here today. I had a rather distressing call from some kind of …
social worker
.’ She used invisible tongs to hold the words to the light.

‘The educational psychologist? Yes. I gave her your number to set up an appointment for some family therapy.’

‘They were doing some sort of psychological background report. A complete invasion of privacy. As an MP, Derek is in the public eye. This kind of intrusion is potentially very embarrassing.’ She put down her cup with such determination that it wobbled precariously in the saucer.

Ah, yes, I thought to myself. The great parliamentarian Derek Beaufort would not want any shame brought on the family brand. If a tractor could mate with a Doberman, the result of that union would be my former father-in-law.

‘There is only one solution to the Merlin problem,’ Veronica continued through lips as thin as a paper cut. ‘He should be sent away somewhere. I could write you a cheque for £100,000 right now, today – if you let me take Merlin with me and have him looked after properly. In a private care home.’ She placed her crocodile-skin handbag on her lap, where it writhed like something alive. She opened its jaws and extracted her chequebook. ‘And you could start a new life. Jeremy started again. Why shouldn’t you?’ Her smile was as sharp and sweet as icing.

I looked at her, agape. ‘You’re serious?’ My heart gave a wrench of protective love and my throat restricted. ‘But I’m all Merlin has to keep him from crashing through life like a falling stone.’

‘I could make it £200,000.’ Her voice rang out harshly in the still room as she snapped open her chequebook. ‘There’s an institution near us, in the country. So we could visit him …’

How kind, I thought. The woman obviously took skimmed milk with her human kindness.

‘Microwaves warping his brain, talking to dogs, evil scissors, punching you to get a cake, violent episodes …’ The superfluity of Veronica’s flesh quivered like custard ‘… It’s clear the boy needs professional help.’

If my eyes could shoot out lethal beams like Disney super-heroes, she would have been annihilated there and then. My anger boiled over like milk. ‘You’re trying to
buy
my
son
?’

‘Well, it’s clear you’re not coping.’ Jeremy’s mother’s hooked nose suddenly gave her a hawk-like, predatory air. ‘Your anger gives you away. Do you want things to deteriorate to the point where Merlin’s taken into care by social workers? Imagine the scandal. You’ve just told me that you think your son is an alien, that you often pretend he’s not your child, that you find him an embarrassment, that you resent the idea of him living with you for ever, as if he were some feudal lord … It’s clearly impossibly awful for you,’ she concluded with calculated cruelty.

I looked at her string of rubies, which I’d earlier admired. They now seemed to cluster around her neck like bubbles of blood. ‘Yes, raising Merlin is hard. But it also brings me infinite joy.’ Even though my voice was querulous with outrage, I tried to stop my face shattering like glass.

‘What about the psychotic episodes? Setting fire to the headmaster’s hair? Letting the burglars in? The pages and pages of numbers he writes, like some kind of Rain Man …’

I understood the numbers. The numbers provided a vessel Merlin could pour himself into. It gave him a shape. It contained him. But how to explain this to a tweedy, beige battleaxe like Mrs Derek Beaufort? A woman who looked as though she spent her leisure time bludgeoning baby seals?

‘In an institution they can get him on to the right kind of medication,’ she added.

Yes, I mused. As certified by the Albanian Food and Drug Administration. I squeezed as much hauteur into my voice as possible and replied, ‘I don’t want to drug my son into submission.’

‘There’s a very innovative doctor working at our local facility. He’s pioneering a new treatment for autistic children. He dissuades them from behaviour deemed dangerous to themselves or to others with the use of electrodes. It’s only a two-second electric shock to the skin, no more than thirty times a day.’

I looked at her, dumbfounded. Not even the Hubble telescope could locate this woman’s sense of compassion.

‘I’m not sending my child away to be tortured! Truth is, I totally blame you for my marriage break-up. If you’d shown Jeremy the love he was owed, if you’d taught him how to communicate instead of banishing him away to boarding school aged seven, where he wasn’t even allowed to take his teddy bear, he would never have abandoned me. He just didn’t have the emotional maturity to cope. No wonder he moved to America. He just wanted to get as far away from you as possible.’

My ex-mother-in-law gave me a contemptuous gaze, her face screwed up with fury. ‘£300,000 then.’ Her pen was poised above the chequebook. ‘I’m only offering because I feel sorry for you, Lucinda.’

‘You don’t have to feel sorry for
me
. I feel sorry for
you
. And, it’s Lucy, by the way,
Moronica
.’

6

The Coven

THAT WENT WELL
, I told myself, as I sandblasted the last traces of the ex-mother-in-law’s lipstick off the rim of my best china cup. Glancing up, I caught my reflection in a mirrored cabinet. If you look like your passport picture, it’s a pretty good indication that you need a holiday. My expression seemed held in place, as if for an invisible photographer. Little fjords had appeared either side of my lips. If I’d glanced in the mirror more often over the last five years, I might have noticed how my mouth had started to turn down and the glint go out of my eyes.

When had my heart started to harden? I hadn’t realized that I’d changed so much until I walked right through a department store on Oxford Street and nobody, not one spruiker, offered me a free puff of perfume. But it was only when I screamed at a stranger during the meditation section of my peace and tranquillity yoga class (Phoebe’s husband was minding Merlin so I could ‘unwind’) that I admitted that perhaps I wasn’t coping as well as I thought.

‘Lucy!’ My sister yanked me by my leotard up off the floor and out into the changing rooms. ‘What is the matter with you?’ she stage-whispered.

‘Well, that woman wouldn’t move an inch because she wanted to be “close to the plant”, which meant that I was contorted in the doorway, with no mat and lying in a tiny patch of somebody else’s sweat trying to do a downward dog,’ I explained, peeling off my lycra condom.

‘So you swore at her?’ My incredulous sister flicked on the shower knob and had a perfunctory paddle. ‘In the
relaxation
bit?’ Keeping her hair out of the jet stream meant craning her neck sideways, which gave her the look of a peeved giraffe.

Later that night, when the Chinese takeaway hadn’t been delivered and I rang to demand, ‘Where’s it coming from exactly?
Beijing
?’, my mother was summoned back from her adventures. With Dad’s life insurance money all spent, my enterprising mum was now taking National Trust working holidays, where you help to protect some of Britain’s most beautiful historic houses. In exchange for labour, the Trust offered her hundreds of different activities, ranging from goat-herding to archaeology. Mum was currently tending the medieval knot garden at Norbury in Derbyshire before heading off to run a food fair at the Godolphin estate in Cornwall. She arrived in a dazzle of May sunshine, decked out in so much animal print she would have blended into the Serengeti.

‘I’m sorry I’ve been away so long, darling,’ she said, sitting herself down at the rickety little table in our overgrown garden. ‘Now, what’s going on?’ My mother gazed at me with an expression that was both tender and concerned. ‘These outbursts are so out of character, sweet pea.’

It was wine o’clock, so Phoebe cracked a bottle of chardonnay as we half-watched my ten-year-old son re-enacting Shakespearean tragedies with plastic action figures. My mother sighed. ‘Lucy, darling, I was just like you, when your father died. I felt that I could never, ever be happy again.’

My mother, who had spent her life tethered by her apron strings to the kitchen, cooking and cleaning and catering for Dad’s every thespian whim whilst, more often than not, supporting the family on her librarian’s wage, was decimated by his death. It took her a year but she finally found her feet again. ‘Life is in two acts,’ she’d told me at the time. ‘The trick is to survive the interval.’ Well, the woman was having a hell of a second act. She was only fifty-three when Dad died, so she decided that instead of having hot flushes, she’d have hot tropical holidays. And who could blame her?

‘The secret to happiness, Mother, is limbo-low expectations,’ I told her.

‘Darling, nobody’s saying you should be happy all the time. If you were happy every day of your life you’d be a breakfast television weather presenter,’ my mother philosophized. ‘But the occasional bout of mirth is allowable, dear, surely?’

‘I’m fine,’ I stressed.

‘Oh, Lulu! You are so schizophrenic,’ my exasperated sister butted in. ‘You pretend to be all strong and independent, but secretly you’re so lonely.’

‘Hey,’ I jibed. ‘I may be schizophrenic but at least I have each other.’

My family didn’t even dignify my verbal sidestep with an eye-roll. I didn’t mean to hide behind glib comments all the
time,
but it had become my default setting – a protective shell.

‘You’ve isolated yourself from friends,’ Phoebe went on. ‘I mean, when Mum and I are away, who are you going to call if you wake up in a hotel room with an overdosed gigolo?’

‘I would
never
wake up in a hotel room with an overdosed gigolo. Do you know me at
all
??? … And I’m not lonely. I’m thinking of joining a new social network called Faceless Book – for people of a certain age who believe that their private lives are no one else’s fucking business.’

I could almost hear Phoebe poking out her tongue behind my back. My mother gave her Resigned Mother look.

‘Dear, what I diagnose is chronic AAADD – Age-activated Affection Deficit Disorder. You have got to start dating again. Your bed, my love, is emptier than a supermodel’s refrigerator.’

‘Dating again?’ I cringed. ‘But I haven’t done anything wrong! Why must I be punished?’

‘Not just for you, darling. But for Merlin. He needs a male influence in his life.’

‘Not having to worry about men any more is the secret benefit of death,’ I reasoned.

‘Yeah, sure.’ Phoebe poured more wine into my glass. ‘You love being single … except for the no sex, no late-night laughter in bed, no rubbish taken out for you and no big and burly love god to hit the burglar over the head. Yes, it must be joy. Paradise.’

‘My darling daughter, how do you ever expect to meet Mr Right if you don’t go on the odd date?’

I looked at my mother and sister in alarm. The reason I’m such a pessimist is because my family are such bloody optimists. ‘Mr Right? Who the hell are you all of a sudden,
Mother
– Julie Andrews? The idea that there’s someone for everyone is mathematically impossible. I found my Mr Right and he ended up being a Right Bastard. As did yours,’ I added.

My mother talks with her hands. When she sprained her wrist whilst skydiving (don’t ask) it was as though she’d developed a speech impediment. She folded her hands in her lap now and looked down at them, and I instantly regretted my barbed outburst. What was wrong with me? When had I soured so? What happened to the frisky, free-spirited girl I used to be? The one who could do handstands whilst yodelling, and (in the right circumstances) naked? The only thing I had faith in now was that there was nothing to have faith in.

Phoebe stroked my mother’s arm reassuringly. ‘Being hurt by a man doesn’t mean a woman has to keep her heart wrapped in crime-scene tape,
does
it, Mum?’

‘How
is
Jeremy?’ My mother imbued his name with utter contempt.

‘Who?’ I shrugged. As far as I knew, Jeremy was still living in LA indulging his inalienable right to the pursuit of life, liberty and leggy domestic goddesses. Tawdry’s US cable cooking programme had just won some kind of television award, worse luck. It was impossible to avoid the picture of her in the tabloids clasping the statuette to the fluffed-up fleshy soufflé of her breasts.

‘But darling,’ my mother rallied, gesticulating again, ‘it’s been over six years since he walked out on you. You’re a gorgeous-looking woman, Lulu. Pretty
and
witty. If you would just use your feminine wiles you could …’

‘Feminine wiles!’ I interrupted. ‘
Feminine wiles
means nothing more than whiling away wasted hours being pathetically feminine. It’s not for me.’

‘You see what I mean, Mum?’ Phoebe sighed. ‘She’s become so anti-male people are going to start thinking she’s a lesbian.’

I snorted with laughter. ‘Just because I hate men doesn’t make me a lesbian. It makes me a realist.’

‘Darling, ours is a happy family,’ my mother reprimanded. ‘We don’t do dour.’

I looked at my mother with love. Since my father’s untimely departure, her mantra had become ‘Live simply; laugh often; love deeply’. Mine, I suddenly realized, had become ‘Live complicatedly; cry often; hate always’.

Phoebe is equally blessed with hopefulness. Ever since we were children, she’d collected wounded birds, frogs, lizards, squirrels … then, later, men who were all no-hopers and losers. She put them through college and helped with their visa applications and found them jobs. They all left her eventually, as soon as they’d become strong. Except for her painter-decorator husband. Danny was so devoted to my sister, he’d happily build kennels for all her underdogs.