The Boy Who Fell to Earth (14 page)

‘Mum says that it’s okay to lie. She says that lying is good.’

‘No, darling, I didn’t quite put it that way …’

‘Merlin cannot tell a lie,’ Adam admonished me. His eyes were narrowed to half-slits, his lips zipped shut.

‘Adam …’ But my voice was plaintive with defeat.

The man I thought I could possibly fall in love with shuddered theatrically like a child being force-fed Brussels sprouts. I think he finally saw a downside to camping –
it’s
so hard to storm out after a fight, as you can’t slam the flap.

I tried hard to redeem the situation, but when Adam kissed me goodbye at Paddington station the next day it was with all the zeal of a tree sloth searching for a bit of wilted algae.

Bobbing our way home in the back of the taxi, Merlin, oblivious to the truly baroque bedlam he’d unleashed, enthused, ‘Wasn’t that a great weekend!’

I was hit suddenly with a severe fatigue, which I only experience when talking with my son. I felt as if my ears were going to shrivel and my mouth fall off.

‘Oh Merlin,’ I post-mortemed, ‘why did you blurt out all those dates and names? That was private information. You frightened Adam off. He thinks I’m some kind of floozy. Just call me Hail a Hooker! He won’t be back, thanks to you!’

Merlin, still unsure of what he’d done wrong but aware that I was really upset, gripped my shoulders fiercely, as though I were the rudder of a boat in a big sea. Unable to fathom the reason for my anger, he lashed out at himself. ‘I bet you wish you’d never had a child! I bet you’re regretting it now! … Why did you make me this way? I’m a fucking freak! I can’t do the things other kids can do. I hate it. I hate myself!’ Merlin tilted his face up towards me. He had such a serious, befuddled expression. ‘Why did you make me born with this disease? It’s your fault! Will I ever have a girlfriend? I
won’t
, will I?’ he wailed desolately. ‘Why can’t I be
normal
? I
hate
fucking Asperger’s. I hate it, hate it,
hate it
!!!’

‘Sshhhhh …’ I held him to me, chastising myself for my outburst. A profound melancholy pervaded then, as soft and persistent as Irish rain. As a forty-ish single mother, I no
longer
expected to be asked to pack only a change of lingerie for a private plane flight to a tropical hideaway with an heir to the throne … Or to take a quick impromptu stroll down a Parisian catwalk in Prada. Or to do a little light wrestling in jelly with Brad Pitt before being tossed casually over his shoulder and then ravaged in his penthouse apartment jacuzzi … but I wouldn’t have minded the company of a man now and then. With a world-weary sigh, I resigned myself to the fact that this was never going to happen.

Five years of dating and dashed hopes had been character building … but if I had wanted to build character, I would have gone off to plant rice for the Peace Corps or plotted the overthrow of Ahmadinejad or Mugabe. Besides which, Merlin had quite enough character for one household already.

But just when I was tempted to see if I could shove my son back into the condom vending machine for the refund, I found this card on my pillow.

Dear Legendary Mum, I have thurally enjoyed and taken advantage of being your son and I hope it will continue in the same quality trend. Its been a tremendous plessure to be in your company these sublime 15 years. Every 15 year old that I know would kill to have a mum like you, which is why I try to embrace every moment I have with you. You have been an insperation for me as a mum and a witty, enthusiastic, karismatic goddess. You are an interlectual giant and I am in oar of you. I think you have lots of panash in just about everything. You where the most trendy outfits, which make you look about 30. In my mind you
have
an exquisite physeque and a dazzling, flamboyant and extravagant personality. You are my favourite woman who walks the earth and I think you are a creative, articulate and artistic genius. Your smashing
.

Love from your wity and at times compelling son Merlin
.

There and then I put a sign on the dating website my sister and mother had set up for me four years earlier.

ALIENS ARE COMING TO EARTH AND THEIR MISSION IS TO ABDUCT ALL GOOD-LOOKING AND SEXY PEOPLE. YOU WILL BE SAFE, BUT I’M JUST EMAILING YOU TO SAY GOODBYE.

From now on, there would always just be Merlin and me …

Part Two: Archie

8

There Came a Tall, Dark Stranger …

THE TROUBLE WITH
being a woman at the beginning of the twenty-first century is having to be so damn strong all the time. Fixing fuses in the middle of the night, fending off muggers, changing car tyres in the torrential rain – any more of this equality was going to put me in a psychiatric ward, I thought to myself, as I missed the nail I was attempting to hammer into a broken drawer and whacked my thumb instead. I’d been attempting my own DIY for years, but the instructions were always so complicated. I invariably ended up supergluing my elbow to my earlobe or making a bookcase out of myself. It was early one school morning and I was now sucking my throbbing thumb and leaping about in a fury, hopping from foot to foot as though in some hot-coal initiation ritual in Lower Volta, when my mother’s email plopped into my inbox with a
boing
! Now that I’d given up dating, Mum had given up Merlin-minding. She had rented out her flat to fund her adventures and was currently cruising the Great Barrier Reef with a wealthy widow who called her floating retirement home HMS
Panty Liner
.

Sweet pea, sorry to let you down but I just can’t make it home for the summer, as bloody families, totally impervious to the economic Armageddon, are bunging up planes with their half-witted ‘yuh-whatever’ offspring and I can’t get a cheap flight out of Cairns. But am sending a substitute – your cousin Kimmy’s husband, Archibald. He needs a place to stay in London for a few weeks and has offered to do all your DIY, burglar-bashing and Merlin-chauffeuring in exchange for your spare room. Could work well? Toodles. Must away – we’re counting tiger sharks for scientific research.

Of course you are, I mused sarcastically. Hadn’t marriage to my father been dangerous enough? The reply – ‘No way’ – was typed and ready to be sent when an ominous thump and a stream of expletives erupted from Merlin’s room upstairs. I checked my watch. Seven a.m. He was having his usual meltdown about Guantanamo Bay, which is what he called his school. Every morning I had to endure an exhausting war of words. Even though my son was now nearly sixteen, it could still take me an hour to haul him out of bed, and only then with a mixture of cajoling, begging, pleading, blackmailing and, finally, sheer rage. By screaming till the paint peeled off the walls, I could usually half-stuff him into his uniform, but not before he’d trashed his room in the process, often slamming doors so hard they came off their hinges. My brilliant mothering skills became strikingly apparent when I would then run back to my room and sob into my pillow. Eventually I would drag him, as he cursed and cussed, to his school gates, before dashing to work, all distraught and dishevelled and panda-eyed from mascara leakage. The daily ordeal left me more depleted than Our Lady of
Put-upon
and Exhausted, the patron saint of single mothers.

I abandoned the broken kitchen drawer I’d been trying to fix and trudged towards the stairs. I felt like a pilot about to fly up into a tornado. My nightie billowed out around me like wings as I climbed up into the storm. It was then I suddenly found myself fantasizing once more about how restful it would be to have a man to do a little light Merlin-taming. Plus the odd bit of light-bulb changing and carburettor tuning … The very thought of it was like a holiday. A male guest would be like having a boyfriend, only without the snoring and boring bit.

When I’d finally got Merlin to school that morning and was lying, worn out, in the fetal position on the back seat of my car gnawing at my nails and whimpering, I typed an answer to my mother’s email on my BlackBerry: ‘Okay.’

Over the next few days, against my better – i.e., my more sceptical – nature, I found myself starting to imagine what this Archibald might be like. My mother sent another email explaining that Archie had been a famous rock musician in Oz in the eighties, before he became ‘spiritual’. A picture of an erudite, easy-on-the-eye, wise and witty muscular love god, possibly sitting cross-legged on a flying carpet, began to gel in my addled mind.

I was in front of my terrace house in my pyjamas one warm June morning a few days later, attempting to stamp the recycling into the green plastic box and remember my mother’s recipe for the cake I had to bake frantically for the school fête, when a taxi pulled up and a middle-aged man with a greying ponytail, torn T-shirt and pointy boots alighted carrying a guitar case, a rucksack and an amplifier. He got out of the cab the way a cowboy dismounts his horse, with an understated swagger.

‘How’s it hangin’?’ The stranger spoke in wide, skidding,
languorous
vowels, vowels so elongated and laid back they were practically lounging in a hammock.

I stood and gawped at the Neanderthal figure with his prognathous jaw, minimalist forehead and broken nose. Acne scars corrugated his cheeks. Stubble had worked through the cratered surface. He was dressed head to toe in black. The satanic image was enhanced by scuffed riding boots, a tattooed python coiled on one bicep and a cockily angled cowboy hat. Disappointment clung to me like a clammy raincoat.

‘Flew here on Virgin. Was worried I’d have to swim the last hundred miles ’cause they wouldn’t go all the way.’ The man’s green eyes puckered into an amused squint. His face had more ridges than corduroy. His tanned neck was seared by pale creases where his V-neckline began. As he extended his hand for a shake, I glimpsed underarm hair which resembled an adult yak in hibernation. Steel-wool curls encrusted a chest emblazoned in a sloganed T-shirt reading ‘Elvis is dead, Sinatra is dead but I’m still bloody well here.’

I must have flinched, because his next words were ‘Hey, don’t go by appearances … I’m even sicker than I look.’ He doffed his hat. ‘Thanks for letting me stay till I find my feet. That’s real nice of you.’

‘I gather you’re the “famous” rock star?’ I said, a little haughtily, to hide my disappointment.

‘Yeah, what’s left of him.’ He gave a rich chuckle. ‘Doan worry. I won’t believe everythin’ I’ve heard about you, if you don’t believe everythin’ you’ve heard about me.’ Without waiting for an invitation, he re-shouldered his rucksack and guitar and barrelled past me, carrying his amplifier into my hall. His scuffed boots rang out on the naked wooden floorboards.

I trotted after him, into my living room, welling up with indignant rage. ‘Hey, rock ’n’ roll man!’

The interloper jammed his hands into the pockets of his obligatory black moleskins and swung around to face me. ‘I’m not in a rock band any more. I’ve gone freelance.’

I eyed him with the disdain of a Victorian aunt, despite the fact that I was wearing shortie pink PJs. ‘Oh, so you’re unemployed.’

‘Naw.’ He drilled me back with a stare which was just as judgemental. ‘I’m currently developin’ some fascinatin’ projects.’

‘Oh, so you’re
long-term
unemployed,’ I decoded. ‘I’ve done internet dating. If I meet a man who tells me he’s a solo artist, I immediately ask him which supermarket shelves he’s stacking.’

‘Listen, toots,’ said my cousin’s husband. ‘Music’s not what it used to be. Endless Deep Purple covers, crowds of pissed dickheads, duff equipment, only one speaker out of four workin’ so the whole bloody audience has to list to the left to hear the music. Oh fuck. And the
music
. “Mustan’ Sally/Guess you better slow your mustan’ down” … “Rockin’ All over the World” … “Brown-eyed Girl” … “All Right Now”,’ he medleyed. ‘“Johnny Be Good” … “Pretty Woman” … I used to love “Maggie May” but I can’t stand it now. I’ve sung it every Friday and Saturday night for twenty friggin’ years. I’d rather crawl through my own vomit. But’ – he shrugged off his rucksack – ‘there’s no money in new material. So you just end up whackin’ away in the erection section … the rhythm guitars,’ he explained. ‘I just need to spend some time not hearin’ fuckwits yellin’, “DI it into the PA, man” … Direct input it straight into the public address system,’ he deciphered, clocking my confused expression.

‘If you hate it so much, then why did you become a rock musician?’ I asked superciliously.

‘To get my cock sucked by bimbos, of course.’ His chortle disintegrated into a smoker’s cough. ‘If you’ll pardon my French.’

‘So, it was a vocational calling to a higher art form then,’ I replied scornfully.

‘Hey, is it my fault that when you’re a rock star you can have any chick in the world?’

‘And in your case, you did, judging by the way the syphilis has rotted your brain.’

‘Hey, toots’ – he shrugged with his eyebrows – ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it! When I was born, I got a choice – a big dick or a good memory … I can’t remember what I chose.’ The Neanderthal then gave me the most lascivious wink. ‘Nice place, by the way. Anyway, once again, thanks for havin’ me.’