The Boy Who Fell to Earth (17 page)

‘I told him not to wear it,’ Phoebe fizzed flirtatiously. ‘People will think you’re a fun-fair attraction and want to ride you.’

Archie winked, a cigarette dripping from his lips. ‘Feel free, ladies.’ He raised his glass in a toast. ‘Hair of the dog … ugh,’ he winced after taking a sip. ‘That dog has mange!’

‘You’re drinking already?’ I chided in my best school-ma’am voice, before stubbing out his fag.

‘Of course not. My body is a temple,’ Archie mock-bowed.

‘Yeah … the Temple of Doom.’

And doom was pretty much how I was feeling about the impending party.

Looking back, it’s hard to say which bit of the birthday dinner was more toe-curlingly embarrassing. Was it Archie’s idea of ‘making a sartorial effort’, which proved to mean wearing a cummerbund across the fluorescent tracksuit pants? Or was it the way he held forth to my left-wing brother-in-law about Obama? ‘What’s all this fuss about America havin’ a black president? Zimbabwe’s had one for ages and he’s an absolute fuckin’ disaster.’

Or perhaps it was his soliloquy on global warming? ‘There’ll be some good things. Meltin’ polar ice caps make for much better surfin’. And those long queues at Disneyland will be totally reduced by sunstroke. Plus, you can use “bogged down in road tar” as an acceptable excuse for missin’ work.’

Or was it what Archie said to Merlin’s teacher, Penny, a dedicated feminist? ‘Women should always pay for dinner on a date. You chicks fought for equality! So it would be wrong
of
me not to allow you to pay. In fact, it’d be downright sexist. Hey, Merlin. What do you get if you cross a group of feminists with an Oxo cube? A laughing stock.’

Or was it when he realized that Penny’s boyfriend was Korean. ‘Jeez. Hope you’re not hungry. I didn’t tell the neighbours to hide their dogs.’

But no. The honour of Worst Remark Imaginable must have been his introductory conversational gambit to Moronica. As my ex-mother-in-law offered him a pale cold cheek for a perfunctory peck, Archie winked and said, ‘Maybe you’d prefer an Aussie kiss?’

‘What exactly is an Aussie kiss?’ she asked in her angular, prodding, metallic voice.

‘The same thing as a French kiss, only down under.’ Archie leant over to pat her formidable posterior. ‘My girlfriends call me “the Pussy Whisperer”.’

He later told Merlin’s very grand grandmother, whose usual sucked-on-lemon expression had become even more sour, how much he liked unwaxed pudendas. ‘I love it when the pubes kiss-curl out of bikini bottoms. Talk about a fringe benefit,’ he chortled. ‘My ex-wife – well, she’s still my wife, only she’s screwin’ my best mate – anyway, I satisfied her so much in bed she often had a double orgasm.’

The skin on Moronica’s smooth cheek tic-ed. Despite the silence that fell like snowdrifts around the table, I’d drunk enough to allow me to snort with laughter at his sexual ineptitude. ‘Double orgasm! Huh!’

‘I think you mean multiple,’ Phoebe half-whispered to Archie.

‘Hey, take a multiple and double it,’ Archie rejoindered, before slurping, with succulent indecency, on the oysters he’d brought home from the fish market the day before.

‘What’s an orgasm?’ Merlin asked, putting his shoulders back and making eye contact, as instructed – only the person he was making eye contact with was his totally flummoxed grandmother. Moronica busied herself by poking suspiciously at her gazpacho, as if it were evidence at a crime scene.

Archie proffered the plate of oysters to Moronica. ‘Eat one. Then you’ll know what it’s like to be a lezzo,’ he smirked.

‘What’s a lezzo?’ Merlin asked, attempting to show Interest and Engagement, as I’d insisted.

Optic muscles were now in overdrive as guests played frantic eye-tennis. In floral Laura Ashley, my ex-mother-in-law rustled into a more straight-backed position and sipped at her soup like some old sequestered duchess. ‘Delicious,’ she said blandly, her face a mask of malice. ‘Cold soup. What a … courageous idea.’

But Archie did not take the hint that the subject had been changed. ‘J’know why God invented lesbians, Merlin?’ my boarder persevered. ‘So that feminists wouldn’t breed.’ He chuckled heartily, then slugged back another beer.

Merlin’s teacher, Penny, excused herself and left before dessert with her allegedly dog-famished boyfriend in tow. Moronica patted at her corrugated perm and re-applied cerise lipstick whilst surreptitiously consulting her watch. I hurried things along by launching into a loud rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’. Merlin, shoulders back, making eye contact and determined to be a gracious host, rose to his feet. ‘I’d like to make a speech.’ My toes curled up in my shoes like dead leaves in dread at what my unpredictable son might say.

‘It’s delightful to have my grandma here, even though my mother and my grandma haven’t had the ideal relationship. In fact, I’m rather surprised they’re in the same room.
Mum
says you’re two-faced, Grandma, but if so, why would you be wearing
that
one?’ he asked without a trace of irony.

While the guests’ silent eye-tennis became more frenetic, Archie guffawed out loud.

‘It’s always a delight to see my cousins, with whom I share a fascinating genetic inheritance,’ Merlin continued, unabashed. ‘Even though they think that I’m a geek and a freak because I worry about things like whether you can use yo-yos on the moon. Thank you for my iPod, Aunt Phoebe, and I just want to say that you are nearly as ravishing as my mum. You have beautiful clavicles. And are definitely on my list of the World’s Smoking-hot Babes of your Generation … Thank you for the paints, Grandma, but I’m retiring from art. Artists are too selfish. Name me one artist who isn’t selfish. They think they’re gods. I know there’s a lot of pressure on me to become a genius because I have Asperger’s. But I’m not a genius. I’m not a philosopher either. I think you all want to turn me into a philosopher. Nor am I a discoverer. But I do think I’m at the most handsome point of my career and a legend of society. It would make me feel amazing inside if a woman loved me. It would be so majestic … Why do no love goddesses ever want to ask my age and chat with me? Women make me feel sugar sweet and electric. Women are my number-one priority at the moment and I hope to get a girlfriend soon … Archie is going to teach me how to do this because he tells me he is an animal in bed.’

‘Yeah, a hamster,’ I whispered tipsily to my sister. But the aside died on my lips as I turned back to see the guests gawking at a stash of lad magazines Merlin was pulling forth from a plastic carrier bag.

‘Which is why he’s given me these educational magazines …’

‘Dylan,’ Phoebe called urgently to her son, ‘why don’t you take Merlin to the park to take some photos with his new digital camera?’

Merlin pocketed his new iPod, slung the digital camera my mother had sent from Suva around his neck and slipped on the hideous maroon cardigan Moronica had given him because she thought I didn’t dress him well enough. ‘And don’t forget your phone,’ I called out after him.

As soon as Merlin had left, I rounded on Archie to deliver the routine lecture circa 1970 on how pornography tells lies about women and the truth about men … or maybe just to point out that he was obviously the only living brain donor in medical history. But before I could speak, Moronica’s thick, jewelled claw of a hand was on my arm.

‘I am shocked to find Merlin fraternizing with such a creature. Who
is
this hideous man?’ She spoke as though Archie weren’t even in the room. ‘How can you allow such unsavoury people to live in your home?’

Archie responded with a loud and melodious belch.

‘He’s my cousin’s husband,’ I said helplessly, gathering up the offending gazettes.

Moronica’s expression was vinegary and her angry voice rose half an octave, losing much of its well-bred intonation in the process. ‘Well, it’s clearer than ever that Merlin needs to be somewhere more suitable.’ That word ‘suitable’ held all the glacial condemnation of a judge’s pronouncement of sentence. ‘My offer still stands.’

As Moronica mounted her high horse and set off at a gallop, she gestured with a peremptory sweep of her arm for the table to be cleared, forgetting momentarily that we were not her servants. But Phoebe and I leapt at the excuse and made a beeline for the kitchen, a bemused Archie in our
wake,
leaving Danny to bear the brunt of her complaints. Archie switched on the insinkerator to help drown out my ex-mother-in-law.

‘You see, you can’t kick me out, Lucy,’ Archie grinned, shouting above the grind. ‘I’m just so good in the kitchen.’

‘Yeah, you can just graze there for hours. But you can’t seriously think I can let you keep living here after your appalling behaviour today? Not to mention giving those degrading magazines to Merlin without my permission. For that alone, you leave first thing in the morning.’

When Phoebe and I finally sat back at the table some forty minutes later, Moronica stopped berating a now desperate-looking Danny and turned her attentions back to me. ‘You know you can put a carrot into a mould of, say, Great Britain and it will grow into the shape of Britain? Well, a child is the same. Experts in an institution can mould him.’

‘You want to turn my son into a deformed vegetable?’ I enquired. Phoebe giggled, insubordinately. I might have explored my former mother-in-law’s hilarious horticultural intentions a little further, except that Merlin suddenly thundered into the house. He slammed the door behind him, as though a pack of wild dogs were hot on his heels. The boy was all wide eyed and upset … and only wearing his underwear.

‘Darling, what’s happened?’ I asked, leaping to my feet as though electrocuted.

His face was a blur of misery. ‘My camera. I dropped it. And my iPod. Plus, Mum, my phone …’

I felt panic punch my chest. ‘Merlin. Where are your clothes?’ I hoped that my voice didn’t betray the detonation of fear I felt inside.

‘This man. In the park.’ His voice was plaintive with despair.

I felt my throat clamping. ‘Go on, darling.’ I moved to his side and ran a reassuring hand through his turbulent hair. ‘It’s okay,’ I soothed, as calmly as I could.

‘This man. In the park. He asked me how I was and I remembered to do what you said. I put my shoulders back and made eye contact and asked him how
he
was. He told me that he was a tourist and that he would like to take a photo of a Londoner … I remembered what you said … about being polite to people and not just thinking about myself all the time … so I said yes. He said let’s go into those shrubs over there so I can get a good photo of the foliage. I said it would be my pleasure.’

Merlin’s eyes were darting everywhere and flinching from everything. His words ran into each other like raindrops down a window pane.

‘He started taking photos of me. Then the stranger said, “It’s so hot. Why don’t you take your shirt off?” He said that I had such a good body, would I take my jeans off for the photo too … Then he asked me to take all my clothes off …’

In my mind’s eye, I could see the predator’s slow, lazy blink as he spun his nasty web, and an involuntary shiver gripped my spine.

‘I didn’t want to be rude, Mum, because you said I should try to be more sociable and try to do what people ask even if I don’t want to. Because that’s polite … But it didn’t feel right to take my underpants off. And then he tried to pull them off and …’ Merlin clung to me like melted marshmallow. ‘It was so confusing.’

I was gasping in and out, like a fish on a shore, dreading what was going to come next.

‘And then it just entered my mind that he could be a’ – he searched for the right word – ‘podiatrist. Or even a murderer.
He
said I had good muscles and could he feel them.’ Merlin waved his hand back and forth like a windshield wiper to sweep away the images in his head. ‘I know you told me to be nice to people but I think eye contact is overrated …’

The normally lethargic Archie sprang up like a ninja. ‘What did this bloke look like? Skinhead? Posh? Young, old, middle-aged?’

‘He spoke like Prince Charles. I think he was aged about in the middle,’ Merlin said into the suffocating silence. ‘Trousers – a jaundiced mustard colour. Shirt’ – he pondered for a moment – ‘crushed strawberry.’

Archie was on the street before Merlin had finished his sentence. The front door banged against the hall wall then shuddered backwards, gaping open.

Merlin drew himself against me like a small animal in need of a place to hide. I stroked his hair. In the next half an hour, with the calming comfort of cups of tea and gentle assertions that Merlin had done nothing wrong, I ascertained that the man had tried to coax Merlin back to his flat.

‘But I just had this bad feeling that this was not going to go very well,’ Merlin reiterated, putting on the clothes Phoebe had fetched for him, ‘and ran home … Was that rude?’ he asked, mortified that he may have made another faux pas.

Not getting a joke, not knowing what to say then saying the wrong things, being told off but not understanding why, doing your best but still getting it wrong, feeling confused, frightened, left out, out of synch, all day, every day, this is the world of the Aspergic child. I hugged him fiercely. The relief that he hadn’t been abducted, bashed, raped or killed was so intense it almost felt like pain.

Merlin went on to explain that his cousin had left him in
the
park as soon as they’d got there and gone off to meet his mates. Phoebe, fuming, was already on the phone to ground her son, which would only make Dylan resent Merlin all the more, I noted sadly. ‘Merlin is
not
a retard!’ I heard her seething at my nephew down the phone.

Throughout it all, my eagle-eyed ex-mother-in-law watched from the sidelines. Her eyes were aglow with a chilling triumphalism. ‘You see?’ she announced, with a smug note of certainty. ‘This is why Merlin would be better off living in a protected environment full of people just like him.’ Moronica’s hand shot out like a tentacle and suctioned on to my arm. ‘A place where these things can’t happen.’ Her lips moved like a pair of scissors, as she spat out her cutting comments.

I was about to call the police to report the incident when Archie strode back into the house. He was carrying an expensive-looking camera. His shirt was torn, there were grazes on his knuckles, a scratch on his arm and some skin off his nose. ‘I took a photo of the slimy bastard with his own camera to show the cops. I told him that with each mugshot taken, he would get two complimentary wallet-sized prints … just before I punched the ratbag’s lights out.’