The Boy Who Fell to Earth (34 page)

‘Okay, Merlin. You want to be independent? Then let’s
practise.
Why don’t you make me a cup of tea?’ I flumped back into a kitchen chair, exhausted.

‘Why should I?’

‘What?’ I replied, dumbfounded. ‘Why
shouldn’t
you? Why don’t you just think back on all the millions of things I’ve done for you, Merlin?’

‘Yes, but you haven’t done anything for me
today
.’

I stared at him, flummoxed by his logic. ‘But what about all the meals I’ve cooked for you? The schools I’ve driven you to? The friends I’ve made for you? The parties I’ve thrown for you? The men I’ve given up for you? …’

Merlin’s faux pas chalked themselves up in my mind like a grocery list. As I thought about my ruptured life, bitterness took root again. I could feel it entering through my feet, working its way up into my heart, where it knotted and twisted so tightly that it screwed up my face into a mask of rage. The unfairness of my plight, the incomprehension of the burden, the loss of the brilliant boy who could have been, the loneliness of the years ahead, reared up like a tidal wave and tsunamied down upon my head.

‘Why are you always trying to change people, Mum? Archie told me that you can’t accept people the way they are. If
you
were an animal you’d be a woodpecker, or a rooster or a wasp.’

His voice burnt like acid on my ears. ‘Merlin, you have to start thinking about what you’re saying before you say it.’

‘Thinking is overrated. I’m not a genius,’ he announced with quiet lucidity ‘Everyone keeps expecting me to be a genius. But I’m not.’

I was on the point of flying apart like an exploding light bulb. I wanted to shout out, ‘
I don’t want you to be a genius! I just want you to be normal! Why can’t I just have a normal son?
’
It
was on the tip of my tongue. I bit it back. I promised myself I wouldn’t say it. ‘I just want you to be happy, Merlin,’ I said instead.

‘I’ll never be happy!’ he shouted. ‘It’s not my fault.
You
made me. Why did you make me like this?’

The sound of anguish detonated in my head. ‘I know it’s not your fault! But it’s not my fault either! And yet I’m the one who has to pay. For the rest of my life!’

Unused to my temper, Merlin shrank away from me. ‘I think you need to see a talking doctor. Or perhaps it’s senility. Old age makes people cranky. Either way, therapy would be advisable.’

I felt my body clench and cold ripples shiver up my spine. It was the last psychological straw. ‘Why? And why exactly do you think
I
might need therapy? Could it be because I’m wrung out? And lonely? And at my wits’ end?’ And then the words, the careless words I didn’t really mean and would regret for the rest of my life, just tore themselves from my throat.

‘
You’ve ruined my life. I wish I’d never had you. Why can’t you be normal?!
’

26

Merlin and Me

HOW LONG HAVE
I been sitting here, aching body and soul, telling our story to whoever will listen? I pine for the miraculous comfort of my son’s smile. But Merlin lies as flat as roadkill. His hand is flung across his chest.

A nurse I don’t recognize nods sympathetically and pats my hand. Feel I’ve been talking for ever. Raw with shame and desolate from weeping, I’m shocked when the nurse tells me that only two days have elapsed since my son was run over. I’m just not myself at all, and it’s quite clear I won’t be again. I simply find it impossible to look ahead from one minute to the next.

Doctors come and go. They talk at me about head trauma, airway management, imaging, scans, possible damage to the brain stem, bilateral damage to the reticular formation of the hindbrain … I put the information into the swill I call my ‘thought process’. Their medical jargon is obfuscatory, and I’m glad because I don’t want to decode ‘negative patient care outcome’ or ‘terminal episode’. My take-charge planning gene is horribly frozen.

Merlin is hooked up to a catheter, an arterial line, IV drip and heart monitor leads. I never take my eyes from his face, as I pray to gods I don’t believe in for the faintest reassuring twitch of an eyebrow, the tiniest squeeze of my hand. But fuzzy hours follow; long, dim stretches of bleak desperation. All I can taste is thick, furry-tongued self-loathing and recrimination as I’m lacerated by the memories of what I said. I am flaying myself alive. How I long to breathe myself back in time, to hover invisibly there and not launch those verbal Exocet missiles which propelled Merlin from our living room out into the road.

My eyes are gritty with sleeplessness. The room pitches around me like the deck of a sinking ship. Merlin’s bed seems to undulate slightly and I can’t make the objects around me stop moving. But sleep is impossible. Whenever I lean my head back against the chair and close my eyes I descend into the cold damp shaft of my guilt. Savaged by nightmares, I jerk awake.

I’m watching the sun rise again in a gory display of colour as violent as a car crash. My grief has no texture now – just an ache in the throat and the chest. It is simply darkness, a cloak which shrouds me. A nurse enters. She’s wearing her bright hostess look, as though presiding over a cocktail party, not a coma patient. ‘How are we today?’

She’s come to wash and turn my darling boy. I leave the room to give him privacy, and pace the corridors. The linoleum is bile-green. It billows under my feet like clouds. It’s an effort to press it down. The hospital smells of decaying flesh. Feel I’m stumbling through a giant intestine. The clanking radiators rattle emphysemically. A death rattle. The radio on a hospital orderly’s belt gives a spluttering cough, as though it’s contracted some contagious ailment.
People
seem to be giving me a wide berth in the corridor. Can they smell the grief on me? Lose a husband, you’re a widow; a parent, you’re an orphan – but what am I?

In the relatives’ room, I push my hot face up against the cold windowpane. Below me, London’s gruesome arteries are already choked with peak-hour traffic, jostling and honking. I’m incredulous at the vivid hum and thrum of life, the happy riot of pedestrians engrossed in their own charmed lives, still with all their luck. I glimpse my own face in the window. I look at the sunken caverns of my sockets and shed silent tears.

Back in our corner of intensive care I perch on the side of Merlin’s bed and hold his hand. The hot wine-dark worm of my child’s blood inches through a clear tube. A nurse hands me a note which she’s found crumpled in my son’s jeans pocket. I stare at the familiar loopy, ungrammatical scrawl for a long time before I can bring myself to read it.

Happy Valentines Day. You are stunningly beautiful inside and out. The last 16 and a half years have been an absolute joy and you are a girl for the world. I adore u and whenever I see you, u always brighten up my day. I am your greatest admirer and I think you are a living legend, a legend of society, a genius and the world’s funniest and wittiest best mother. You have style, flair and panash and I am enamoured on you, u divine love goddess. You look beautiful in every outfit you have a sublime smile and a mesmerizing figure. Make this day bring happyness and love to your life You are my favourite woman in the world and
I
love you from your intriguing handsom and phenomenal son Merlin the king of swing
.

I check the date on my watch. February 14th. He’d intended to give it to me today. I bury my face in Merlin’s hair and breathe in the familiar sherbet aroma. And then I’m sobbing. Huge heaving gulps of pain. There is much talk about calling my family. I let them take my mobile phone from my pocket. I’m told I’m in shock and need support. From a long way off I hear the nurse asking if she can contact the numbers on my speed dial. I slump back into the chair by Merlin’s bed and cry myself into a state of exhaustion. Darkness topples down and pulverizes me.

A clicking sound wakes me. The brittle winter afternoon sunshine is knife bright and slices into my eyes. I see the Queen of England hairdo first. Then the number-nine needles, as if she’s waiting for heads to fall into the basket by a guillotine. She manoeuvres her lips through a series of rubbery contortions which are trying to become a smile. The smile a crocodile would wear, if a crocodile could smile. ‘Can I get you anything?’ my ex-mother-in-law asks, in a voice meant to discourage. ‘The hospital rang. We came straight away. Jeremy sat with Merlin for a good two hours but now he’s had to go back to vote. So I’m holding the fort.’

Vote? The only vote he’s interested in is the vote of sympathy. He was probably holding press conferences right now about his handicapped son, tragically run over and now in a coma. I can envisage the heads of female journalists nodding compassionately as they surreptitiously fluff up their breasts in their bra cups.

Reoriented, I look up with urgency to Merlin’s bed. His
chest
is rising and falling rhythmically. No change. Numbness washes over me.

Veronica sniffs and dabs at the corner of each eye with her thumb pad. This is the sort of woman who would normally only ever shed a tear if the Ascot racetrack went underwater in a freak thunderstorm on Ladies Day.

‘It’s unbearable.’ But I also detect in her voice a tinge of excitement. ‘But you mustn’t despair. It could be a blessing in disguise, have you thought of that?’ Veronica shifts in her hardback chair and orchestrates her tweed skirt around her. ‘Perhaps Merlin will wake up from the coma completely altered? Some people wake up from comas to find they’re suddenly talking fluent French or Farsi. Or playing concert piano. The shock may rejolt his mental wiring,’ she reflects, her voice both wheedling and commanding. ‘Perhaps he’ll be cured?’ She touches my arm the way you touch the pet of an acquaintance even though you’re allergic to it. ‘He’s such a handsome lad, isn’t he? It’s so unfair that such a beautiful shell should house such a disappointing occupant.’

A scallop of sunlight falls across Merlin’s fine features. ‘I don’t want him cured! I love him just the way he is. And he’s not disappointing.
You
are.’ It takes an enormous effort to stop myself from yelling this at her. But my voice must be raised because she rears up in her chair. Her bouffant puffs up around her head like the hood of a cobra.

‘I think it would be advisable for you to see a counsellor, Lucinda.’ My addled thoughts fly back to the supercilious social worker La–ah, with her noisy dash. Oh that’s
just
what the doctor ordered.

The door wheezes and my mother bursts into intensive care. My normally chic parent is wearing odd shoes, one leopardskin and one blue suede, and is all wild hair and no
make-up.
Crumpled with anxiety, her flamboyantly coloured clothes hang on her frame like boat sails in dead calm. ‘Darling, oh darling, why didn’t you call me!?’ She throws her arms around me and rocks me back and forth for a full five minutes before she notices Veronica. She regards her with slant-eyed hostility.

‘I just came to offer some words of hope.’

My mother takes a leaf from Phoebe’s book on bitchery. ‘Well, while you’re here at the hospital why don’t we book you in for a scruples transplant? And maybe we can find a spine donor for that cowardly son of yours.’ Her chilly monotone signals that the conversation is over.

Rising to her feet, my mealy-mouthed and small-minded former mother-in-law gives a forced smile, but her eyes glitter with indignation. ‘I’ll report to Jeremy and pop back at regular intervals. It’s the least I can do. As a concerned grandmother,’ she barks, then closes the door on us magisterially.

My mother then holds Merlin’s hands and cries. ‘The tear ducts have gone along with the rest of the plumbing. I’m a very leaky woman,’ she tells me, trying to control herself.

Phoebe arrives next, straight from the airport, her stockings laddered in her haste. The war between them is forgotten as my mother now throws her arms around her two daughters. ‘Only women’s hearts can know the blind devotion of a mother for her child,’ she says, and we sob together in a huddle.

Emotions spent, the best anyone can do is breathe in, breathe out and wait. The day crawls by. The next time I glance out of the window, the sky has turned into a big black bruise. The grey actually feels as if it’s in the air. The air seems almost solid. Some indiscernible amount of time later, from out in the squelching world, Archie arrives, emitting a damp
fungal
reek from the rain. He takes off his wet outer garments and folds them on to the radiator with care that is almost like tenderness. Then he sits with us, silently. A cleaner regards us with uninterested eyes, completely unconcerned that our lives are now smudged with grief.

As the day seeps into night, there’s a tentative, timorous acceptance of how long the wait might be. I’m vaguely aware of a schedule being decided amongst my family, a roster. Over the next few days, they come and go, my mother trying to tempt me to eat occasionally, Archie strumming his guitar softly – some Beatles, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan songs which Merlin has always loved – Phoebe brushing my hair.

I just sit by my son, reading and talking and willing him to claw his way back into consciousness; urging the fibres of light to crawl into his cranium. I hold him gingerly, as if he’s made of crystal. I watch over him as he lies there either bathed in starlight or awash with sun, wisps of light flitting across his beautiful face like dreams.

And then, with biblical drama, the fog just lifts. It’s like something out of the World’s Most Popular Plots. If this were a Dickens novel, it would now be discovered that Merlin has a secret benefactor who has left him his estate. If we were on an Oprah-type chat show, a miracle cure would be discovered called Merlin’s Oil. But the truth is, he just wakes up. My son is merely one of the statistically 10 per cent of coma victims who recover.

When his eyelid flutters, I think I’m hallucinating. The room seems to tilt and start sliding slowly towards the street. An eye peels open. My son looks at me – then smiles his goofy grin. I scan his face anxiously.

‘How are you?’ he asks me croakily.

It is the most meaningful question I have ever been asked.
I
nod so hard I’m surprised my head doesn’t fall off and roll out into the corridor. ‘I’m good! I’m excellent!’ In fact, no one has invented the adjective I need, so I have to make do with a great whoop of joy. The variety of sound effects available to me as a human seems insufficient and I wish I were a kookaburra so that I could cackle with joy at the fact that my son has woken up. Sobbing, I cling to him much like a rescued ocean swimmer miles from shore clings to the dorsal fin of a friendly dolphin.