The Boy Who Fell to Earth (12 page)

Potential Father for Merlin No. 3. The Pilot

I was returning from an ‘Assessment for Learning’ conference in Dublin put on by educational bigwigs for smaller wigs like me – although who was I kidding? Careerwise, I was nothing more than a lanky hair extension. But it was whilst waiting in the taxi queue that my bag locked wheels with a captain’s suitcase. ‘I hope your flight ran more smoothly,’ he smiled, cute little cap rakishly askew.

‘I hate flying. I don’t know why you made me pay for a whole seat when I only used the edge of it. I want my money back,’ I replied.

The pilot’s eyes narrowed with keen interest – hazel eyes topped with thick, curved lashes, I now noticed. He laughed and we began to banter. Chris’s voice was deep and moist, like warm mud slipping between your toes. He didn’t look like a captain at all. His collar-length, ruffled dark hair and long, lean body lent the man the elegance of a matador. Four dates later, he suggested a little trip. ‘Vanuatu is a bit far’ – his soft brown eyes caressed me tenderly – ‘Positano with a side trip to Ravello maybe?’

‘Sounds fabulous,’ I purred. ‘But a girl’s favourite destination is a cosy little spot which goes by the name of G.’

‘I know that place. Hard to find but well worth it when you get there. The views are magnificent.’

And I wasn’t disappointed. By the foreplay
or
the wordplay. When we pulled away from each other in bed he fondled the lace on my lingerie before referring to us as ‘basque separatists’. The man was as thin and as straight as a pencil. But there was a lot of lead in it. And oh, it felt so good to be kissed and caressed again.

Two months into our love affair, we introduced our children. He was a recently divorced father of a fourteen-year-old girl, and this time I took the precaution of telling him about Merlin’s quirks. I felt confident that, forewarned, the social cogs would turn more smoothly. After all, Merlin was now educated about sex. What I hadn’t realized is that there is such a thing as being too educated …

My mother cooked her famous paella dish. While the rest of us noshed happily around my kitchen table, Merlin remained taut as an archer’s bow. His hair was falling into his
eyes
like the mane of a shy pony. Chris cheerily asked Merlin if he was going to start shaving soon, now that he was a teenager and, as there was no man in the house, would he like some lessons in the next year or two? My spirits rose at this intimation of commitment and I beamed at my beau. Then I looked at Merlin, wriggling my brows in encouragement.

My son moves sluggishly through social situations, as though encumbered in an old-fashioned diving suit in deep water. His lips were stiff with the effort not to say the wrong thing, but he also knew he was expected to say something.

‘I don’t understand the point of shaving,’ Merlin finally replied. ‘It only grows back. Body hair is very confusing.’ Sweat began to tingle in my armpits. I suddenly felt there was a time bomb ticking beneath the conversation. ‘I used to look at my mother in the bath and think “Have you got a willy? Are you sure? Under all that hair?” ’

Silence swooped down and tightened its grip around the table. Chris’s teenage daughter was ogling my thirteen-year-old son with horrified fascination. Forget Paris Hilton’s suduko attempt, I was now sweating more than George Bush trying to play Scrabble. Merlin lit up, smiling at me blissfully, convinced I’d be proud of his effort to be sociable.

‘Who’d like more salad?’ I squeaked, telepathically begging Merlin to shut up, a grin plastered to my face.

‘I’ve read all the books Mum gave me,’ my son persevered with undiminished zest, his words crashing into the low-key conversation, colliding and smashing and ricocheting off the walls, ‘although I do have many questions. For example, do dogs do it “people-style”?’

Merlin’s confused reaction at the lack of response was to crank up his enthusiasm level. ‘But I know now that on girls
hair
first grows on the labia before filling the pubic triangle and then the thighs. Pubic hair grows to stop chafing.’

A sharp elbow in the ribs is the accepted international signal to abandon a topic. But not to my son. He just said, bemused, ‘Why are you elbowing me, Mum? That information is correct.’ In his nervousness he began to speak faster. Like a skater on thinning ice, he accelerated to save himself from drowning. ‘I’d actually like to make an important announcement,’ he declared formally.

I quailed inwardly, suggesting with brittle urgency that he hurry up and finish his meal so we could have dessert.

‘I’m having wet dreams!’ my son exclaimed triumphantly, as excited by this discovery as a Labrador in a pork-chop shop.

Little black dots danced in front of my eyes. It struck me then how ironic it was that I’d spent so much money getting my son speech therapy when all I wanted him to do was shut up.

‘Merlin,’ my mother spluttered, ‘don’t you think that might be private information? Something you might want to keep to yourself?’

Merlin looked at my mother, scandalized. ‘But you’re my grandma. Surely you should want to know everything about me?’

Merlin’s words stood in the air, like skywriting. I could only wait for them to evaporate. The silence was broken by Chris’s daughter, who made a face of a snail being poisoned on a slug pellet before fleeing outside to their car. Merlin, trying to appear friendly, gave his best and brightest high-wattage smile, a grin which could laser four layers of skin off your face. But his eyes were full of a helpless, painful expression. He wanted to atone for his unconscious mistake
but
couldn’t, not knowing what it was. And my heart went out to him.

As Chris departed, he patted my son gingerly on the back, as if he were an exotic pet which might bite his fingers. ‘I’ll call you,’ he said to me. But soon started flying long-haul.

Now I don’t want you to get the impression that this was a non-stop sexual gymkhana. By the time Merlin was in his third year in secondary school, I had resigned myself to the solitary, sexless life of an amoeba or some other single-celled organism. Lambeth had changed in the sixteen years I’d lived there. Our square was now full of yummy mummies who did yogalates, baked bread, wore zodiac-inspired toe-rings and bought those beautiful educational wooden toys that kids so adore … well, kids named after pieces of fruit or large land-masses anyway. Our ‘renovator’s dream’ house had never been renovated. As all the properties around us had undergone architectural facelifts, mine looked even more faded and jaded. Although not on the inside. I used to think that any woman who said she got high doing housework was inhaling way too much cleaning fluid. But over the last few years I’d become obsessed with cleaning. My sister said it was obviously a way of exerting some control over the chaos of my life, which seemed to be getting increasingly chaotic. Merlin’s outbursts meant that the neighbours were polite to us but looked at him as though he had just won the right to represent earth in the Intergalactic Weird Alien category. I did explain that Asperger’s wasn’t infectious, but the parents of all those Apples and Peaches and Chinas and Indias just didn’t feel we fitted into their gastropub and power-plate world.

I was also the only mother on the square whose child
wasn’t
attending a private school. Local education authorities allocate children to state schools in random and mysterious ways. The authority, who’d obviously attended the Mad Dog Gaddafi School of Reason and Logic, had rejected my first-preference secondary-school request for Merlin to be enrolled where I taught, enabling me to protect him. At the start of each school term I’d push again for a special needs school, which involved the annual trek to La–ah’s office for the ritual flagellation, fasting, sacrifice of virgins, etc. But I had to face the fact that it was more likely that the Amish community would introduce a lap-dancing club than that Merlin would get the placement he’d been promised. I could sue the education authority for not fulfilling the obligations of Merlin’s statement, but it would cost around £25,000 for a lawyer, plus £20,000 for all the medical reports and assessments. Or it meant joining another interminable queue, this time for legal aid. (And people say you can’t have it all!)

Merlin’s secondary school had proved to be even worse than his primary. The wiry, pale young boys in his class had hair cropped to stubble and were muscled like fighting dogs, with eyes sharp as knife blades. Merlin proved very sweet meat to them. The newspapers were full of stories about the increase in London’s prison population. And I was pretty sure most of them had been pupils at my son’s secondary school. There were so many local thugs and felons, Hallmark cards needed to put out a new line for exclusive sale in our area with messages which read ‘To a man of many convictions’ or ‘Condolences on losing your appeal’ or ‘Here’s hoping you get the top bunk!’

When Merlin had his head flushed down the school toilet for the second time, I made an appointment with his latest headmaster. I tried to hold out hope that he would be more
sympathetic
and effective than the last two or three, but Merlin and I set out to see him like prisoners off to our own execution.

‘This is all a test, isn’t it, Mum?’ Merlin asked me dejectedly. ‘You’re giving me marks out of ten, aren’t you? To see if I can pass as normal.’

When the new headmaster began the interview by steepling his fingers, I knew there was no hope of help. Finger-steeplers are nearly always substandard headteachers. As he droned on about lack of proof to punish the perpetrators, I looked at my vivid, original son and longed to shelter him from the world.

‘It keeps going round and round in my head, what those bullies said to me,’ Merlin confided on the way home. ‘About being a spastic and a cretin and a retard. If the body’s designed to vomit up anything contaminated, why not the brain? Why can’t my brain throw up, Mum?’

Forget brain. Brawn, that was what I needed. And I determined there and then to bloody well find it any way I could, through the internet, blind dates – hell, I’d stand on a street corner if needs be.

Potential Father for Merlin No. 4. The Gardener

Hackney is not a wealthy neighbourhood, but it is full of men more at home with a computer keyboard than a chainsaw. For ridiculously reasonable rates, Django would trim treetops and de-leaf rain gutters and dispose of rats. He was now Phoebe’s odd-job man too.

‘You’ll like him,’ she enthused. ‘He’s from Bahia, in Brazil. Macho, but sensitive. His ex-girlfriend told me he often cried during sex.’

‘Yeah, well, pepper spray will do that to you,’ I scorned.

Django’s clients were throwing him a small surprise party in the local pub to celebrate the Home Office granting him citizenship. The pub was called The Queen’s Legs. ‘I’m waiting for The Queen’s Legs to open so I can get a drink’ is how Phoebe’s husband Danny explained it to me. I entered expecting the worst. It was the sort of bar where even the water is watered down. I walked in as though I already wanted to leave.

‘The English don’t do anything spontaneous without a warning … which is why I’m kind of surprised to be at a surprise party,’ I said when my sister introduced me to Django. His exotic name was matched by exotic looks – ebony eyes, silky skin as dark as imported Swiss chocolate, wild Medusa hair, a powerfully built body, each bicep the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The white crescent of his smile was dazzling. Even more dazzling than the sex, which was so hot it only just fell short of igniting my pubic hair. But we had little else in common. While I preferred conquering the great indoors – galleries, theatres, restaurants – Django liked to kayak, canoe and rock-climb.

‘Um, I’m British. I’m only slightly more mobile than a pot plant or a fire extinguisher,’ I assured him.

Django threw back his head and guffawed at nearly everything I said, which I found so beguiling that I was soon kayaking, canoeing and rock-climbing. Best of all, he liked Merlin. Even when we arrived at his flat in Hackney and the first thing Merlin asked was ‘Which bathroom should I use for poo?’

But Django’s teenage boys didn’t share their father’s magnanimity. Two hulking, big, streetwise boys bedecked in bling hunched over their Cokes, they eyed Merlin warily. As
we
sat around the table sharing chorizo and fresh fish, nerves made me flutter my hands aimlessly. Merlin was also jumpy, playing jerky drum solos with his knife and fork. A variety of emotions scudded like clouds across my son’s face. Every hour of every day for Merlin is like being a gymnast trying to balance on a beam. He can never relax, in case he falls. My nagging meant that he now kept constant vigil on what he was saying.

‘I’m sure I’ll give a flawless performance at dinner tonight,’ he’d told me bravely on the drive over, before adding perspicaciously, ‘The trouble with talking too fast is that you might say something you haven’t thought of yet.’

I watched now as my son selected a warm smile from his repertoire of facial expressions and then, in his desperation to please me, attempted some light repartee.

‘So, where are you from? Africa?’

‘Hackney,’ the boys replied in broad Cockney accents, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

‘No, no,’ Merlin corrected them. ‘You must be from Africa … So, have you played Othello?’ he asked. ‘I used to think that all black men were Othello.’

Both boys sat stock still, their faces rock hard. Confused, but determined to act sociably, Merlin beamed so broadly you’d think he’d just been given a vitamin B12 shot. ‘You do have quite splendid pectorals.’ He then leant over and squeezed the biceps of the sixteen-year-old boy, oohing and aahing appreciatively. ‘If I were gay, I would find you very attractive because of your exquisite musculature.’

It was then that the younger one punched Merlin hard enough for my son to require a three-hour wait in casualty with a chronic nosebleed. I spent the time contemplating
emigration
to Iceland, and Django, the dishy gardener, decided to sow his wild oats elsewhere.

One thing I learnt in my three years of disastrous dating is that when Cupid closes one door … he slams another in your face. Who knew that Asperger’s was sexually transmittable? But it must be, judging by the way men bolted at the first glimpse of Merlin. I didn’t even bother buying full packets of condoms any more as it was just a waste of rubber. But my mother didn’t give up. For my fortieth birthday, she bought me a membership to the Tate Galleries. ‘A lot of women I know hang around in museums to meet men. Any man who collects old masters also collects young mistresses,’ she counselled.