The Boy Who Fell to Earth (5 page)

‘Well, I’ve tried meditation, Pilates, pottery, tango, musical societies and ski holidays … but I find pure alcohol is the best escape.’ I swigged at the glass of red I’d positioned atop the toilet cistern.

My sister rubbed her soft knob of nose. Phoebe’s strength is never allowing any room for negative thought. The light
around
her seems warmer somehow. Alluring. She’s like a beacon I can ignite at any time. What’s lovely about my sister is that she never arrives anywhere gloating ‘Here I am!’ She arrives saying ‘
There
you are! How
are
you?’ I could never say anything nasty about my sister and, believe me, of late I’d developed a fondness for saying nasty things about everybody.

‘Lucy,’ she scolded, taking the scissors from my hand. ‘I admire your stoicism. But I also know that you’re putting on a bit of an act.’

‘You’re right … In real life I’m an eighteen-year-old catwalk model.’

She swivelled me by the shoulders to face her. ‘Sometimes you can seem so in charge, so in control, that it can be hard to help you. But if you keep suppressing your anxieties, one day there’ll be this volcanic eruption and you’ll turn into a petrol-sniffing, shop-lifting, Nazi-memorabilia collector or something … Maybe you should go and talk to someone …?’

‘A shrink! Good God, no! I saw a shrink once. She told me that the typical symptoms of stress are eating chocolate, boozing and buying irrational clothes on impulse. The woman is obviously bonkers. I mean, that’s my idea of a perfect day.’

‘But Lulu, you’ve changed. You’ve become so … defensive. Brittle. Ruthless even.’

‘Ruthless? Ha! I’m not ruthless! … Although, after I kill Jeremy and bury him in the garden, do you think I can claim him as a dependant?’

Phoebe’s eyes widened in alarm. I thumped her affectionately in the arm. ‘Come on, Pheebs, Stalin or Mugabe are ruthless. Not
me
… Why is it that a woman only has to
stamp
her stiletto once to be compared to a murdering psychopath?’ I sighed and sagged on to the side of the bath. ‘I just can’t bear it when people say to me, simperingly, “I’m so sorry about your son.” It makes me want to hide away.’

We were looking at each other in the mirror now. Phoebe has brown eyes, thin, arched brows, a smattering of freckles dusting her cheeks and centre-parted, wheat-blonde hair which curls around her face. I am olive-skinned and green-eyed. Our only similarity is our mouths. Jeremy always said my mouth resembled a split persimmon, red and luscious. I saw my sister’s mouth curve into a compassionate smile and her eyes moisten. She briskly set about hiding her sympathy by fussing over my appearance.

‘Lucy darling, if you’re going to cut your hair off, let me soften your look a little, okay?’ Having always been the practical, capable sister, she started snipping. ‘Cut hair too short and you look like a Russian shot-putter cum Gestapo wardress. Too long and you look like an organic puppet-theatre manager … You need a Cleopatra-style square bob. Not blunt, because that could look too hard for your features, but slightly graduated … Maximum style with minimum effort … Oh,’ she exclaimed, examining her handiwork fifteen minutes later. ‘See how a bob brings out your beautiful eyes and high cheekbones and lovely long neck?’

I opened my eyes then glanced up from the auburn pool of my own hair around my ankles into the mirror – and was surprised. The finished effect was clean and sculptural. ‘Now let’s tackle your brows, which,’ she laughed, ‘look like they’ve escaped from Afghanistan. I have seen more ruly caterpillars. “
Is ruly a word, Miss?
” ’ she imitated in the voice of one of my whiny pupils.

Phoebe had topiarized and tamed her own once-bushy
brows
into pencil-thin parentheses which gave her a slightly surprised expression, even when she wasn’t. My fastidious sister set to with tweezers, triggering a volley of sneezes from me. ‘There! You see? If you create more of an arch, it just makes your eyes seem so much more open.’

But my eyes had been opened too much of late. I hadn’t wanted much out of life. A quality set of bedlinen and a solid set of saucepans. A loving husband and a happy baby. Was that too much to ask?

Heartache and anger consumed me for months. I wasn’t exactly on the edge of the world, but I could definitely see it from here. It hurt every time I thought about Jeremy, like a nerve exposed to the air. Maybe I did need to see a doctor? ‘
Patient has absentee husband and handicapped child, but no other abnormalities
.’

But, eventually, there was a gradual blurring of Jeremy’s memory. He became like a watercolour left out in the rain, smudged and faded.

And then there was just Merlin and me.

4

Asparagus Syndrome

BY NOW MERLIN
and I were starring in our very own prime-time medical drama. All that was missing was the luxury trailer and the £60,000 per episode pay cheque.

Once Merlin had started talking again aged four, he just babbled away as garrulously as a brook. Words streamed out of him like traffic, a collision of stories and tangential, lateral lunacy. Trying to teach Merlin to do anything practical, like tie a shoelace or wash his face, and you’d have thought I was instructing him on how to fuel a nuclear reactor. He just stood looking at me in a dazed way. Yet by five he was asking me if he could keep a nit as a pet and if it was mandatory for caterpillars to turn into butterflies and whether God knew the Easter Bunny’s phone number and did they chat with the Tooth Fairy and, if so, who invented God? When his tooth fell out, aged six, he practically produced a PowerPoint presentation on primary orthodontics.

By seven, he wanted to know whether or not he could cry underwater. By eight he had memorized most of Hamlet’s
speeches
and assured me that if Macbeth had booked in with a ‘talking doctor’ he wouldn’t have killed Duncan.

‘Why do people call psychiatrists “shrinks”? They should be called expanders,’ he informed me earnestly.

My sister’s son Dylan enquired if it would be okay to ask Merlin for some information on Shakespeare for an assignment. ‘Would Merlin mind?’ Asking Merlin for in formation on Shakespeare was like asking a haemophiliac for a pint of blood. He haemorrhaged information. Three hours later my nephew came staggering out from Merlin’s bed room, panting for air, food, sustenance.

By the age of nine, Merlin’s encyclopedic obsession switched to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Big Bopper, Big Bill Brunsey and Buddy Holly. He knew more about them than their own mothers.

By nine and a half, he’d developed a fanatical fascination with the history of cricket. My son was Wikipedia with a pulse. I stopped keeping a diary, as Merlin’s formidable memory meant he could recall where I was at any time on any given day of any given year … And yet this same boy couldn’t remember how to toast a piece of bread or brush his teeth. He also became hysterical about insects. You’d think a blowfly was an F1-11 jet trying to land on him, the way he screamed and thrashed. And the continuing panic-stricken frenzy that ensued whenever I tried to dress him would lead you to deduce I’d soaked his clothes in acid. Then there was his wardrobe fetish. While the rest of the male population seemed to be coming
out
of the closet, Merlin was determined to go
in
. The linen press became his favourite place to think. I often found him curled up between the pillowslips, writing numbers from one to infinity. He told me he was shunning sunlight, in case his brain melted. Dyspraxia, which is like
physical
dyslexia, meant that he couldn’t sequence. Directions scrambled in his brain as soon as they’d been given. Remembering how to turn on the kettle or turn off the heating was like hieroglyphics to him. The poor kid regularly became so perturbed he’d hit his head on the floor until it bled. And I was the person upon whom he took out his frustrations. He’d hit and kick and bite me and then, at other times, cling to me as though lost on the big seas. Which we were, really. Cast adrift with no rescue or shore in sight, aboard HMS
Autism
.

But just when I’d resigned myself to accepting that my son was mentally impaired, he would dazzle me with his sudden aptitude. ‘Why is there no other word for “synonym”?’ and ‘If onions make you cry, are there vegetables that make you happy?’ and ‘Is a harp just a nude piano?’ and ‘What is the speed of dark?’ were typical Merlin-type questions. While teachers at his infant and primary schools made regular assessments that Merlin’s IQ was below average, Merlin’s own assessment was ‘my vernacular capacities outstrip my peer group.’

In other words, I didn’t worry about my son
all
the time – only on the days when the sun came up.

Living with Merlin was like living in a minefield. You never knew when you would touch a tripwire. When over-excited my son talked so fast, faster than an auctioneer on amphetamines … Then anxiety would prowl through his psyche like a predator and he’d dissolve into a torrential downpour of tears, followed by hours of mute misery. One bleak day when he was about nine, he tried to throw himself off a window ledge. I talked him inside and then had all the windows locked shut, making our home even more like a prison. Which only increased my other anxiety – creeping loneliness.

With my flight attendant sister and globetrotting mother away so often, I tried to see more of my friends. But when all your friends’ children are thriving and succeeding and getting A*s at school and going on ski trips and enjoying work experience at
Vogue
magazine and top barristers’ chambers, it’s like starving to death outside a banquet hall with the delicious aroma wafting through the windows to drive you to utter madness.

As for Merlin’s friend front, well, basically I just pimped for my son. I bribed the kids from the council estates with free cinema tickets, cakes, trips to the zoo and funfairs. I tempted them to our house with a trampoline, table football and lemonade on tap. Merlin often ended up playing side by side with these kids – ‘parallel play’, the experts called it. He would make no eye contact and sit rocking much of the time, but at least there was the façade of friendship.

When he was five I’d had Merlin ‘statemented’ – which meant that he had a statement of special needs from the education department. Even though I couldn’t bear to have his butterfly-like idiosyncrasies analysed and pinned down, this ‘statement’ promised to ‘fulfil his educational needs’. The local education authority decided this meant ‘mainstreaming’ my son in a normal school, with two hours of support every day from an untrained, twenty-year-old assistant with the IQ of a houseplant. Even though the girl’s only degree was in Advanced Eyeliner Application and she no doubt dotted the i’s on her CV, the school hired her because she was cheap.

In other words, ‘mainstreaming’ meant shoving him into an already overcrowded inner-city classroom with the ambiance of a Dickensian debtors’ prison along with forty other kids, many of whom were refugees and didn’t speak
English,
including three other children with special needs (dysphasia, aphasia and dyspraxia – which sounded like three Russian models who’d formed a pop trio), plus
their
untrained helpers, meaning there were now forty-five people in the tiny classroom. A sardine would have felt claustrophobic in there. You needed a lubricant to get in.

The teacher, who was trying to master rudimentary Somali, Hindi, Zairian, Romanian, Russian, Tswana, Arabic and probably a few words in Klingon, was clearly headed for the loony bin. By the time Merlin turned ten, the only subject at which he was excelling was ‘phoning in sick’. He could get an A in phoning in sick.

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Merlin could be extremely, unintentionally funny. Describing the vacuum cleaner as a ‘broom with a stomach’ and a caterpillar as a ‘worm wearing fancy dress’ or asking how ‘spies know they’ve run out of invisible ink’ or explaining to his art teacher that ‘mauve’ was simply ‘pink trying to be purple’ made me laugh out loud.

But his bedroom had became a hard-hat area. Most mornings I had to drag him, shrieking and punching, out of his pyjamas and into school. We always planned to leave the house by 7.15 a.m.… and, like clockwork, we were usually out the door by 8.35. My son hated school so much he often just wouldn’t get out of the car. Was it possible to have a car surgically removed, I would wonder, slumped on the kerb with my head in my hands, Merlin welded to the seat within.

‘Only fish should be in schools. School doesn’t work for me. It doesn’t suit me. It’s a prison for children. How can you make me sit in that torture chamber all day?’ he’d wail, his eyes the burning blue of a gas flame. A mix of bafflement and betrayal contorted his face into a daily mask of dismay. The one person he trusted was forcing him into a place where he
was
taunted for being different and beaten up so badly that, on one occasion, he needed stitches in his head. He once came home with a sign sticky-taped to his back reading ‘Kick me, I’m a retard.’ Trying to protect him was like trying to stop ice melting in the Gobi desert. Still, I had to keep trying.

Sending your special needs child to a normal school is as pointless as giving a fish a bath. But waiting lists for special schools have queues so long there are Cro-Magnon families at the front. For years I’d been lobbying and pleading with the local council to meet the obligations of Merlin’s statement. As it was, with his assigned, untrained helper off sick or, as I suspected, back in rehab, and with no money for a replacement due to cutbacks, my son now spent the long school day silent, in the shadows. Other children were striving to learn maths and grammar. My son was striving to make himself invisible. If only there were an exam for sitting in the back of the classroom doing shadow hand-puppet workshops, then the kid would be top of the whole school, I’m not kidding you.

In time I understood that an educational ‘statement’ is really just an adroit piece of jargonized sophistry which promises much but delivers little. The system is designed with bureaucratic speed bumps to slow down a parent’s progress. I filled in forests of forms and saw squadrons of educational psychologists. The technical term for this process is ‘being passed from pillar to post’. I kissed so much arse, my lips chafed. Such officials are second only to mammographers in their ability to inflict pain.