Read The Boy Who Fell to Earth Online
Authors: Kathy Lette
The Boy Who Fell to Earth
About the Book
Meet Merlin. He’s Lucy’s bright, beautiful son – who just happens to be autistic.
Since Merlin’s father left them in the lurch shortly after his son’s diagnosis, Lucy has made Merlin the centre of her world. Struggling with the joys and tribulations of raising her eccentrically adorable yet challenging child (if only Merlin came with operating instructions), Lucy doesn’t have room for any other man in her life.
By the time Merlin turns ten, Lucy is seriously worried that the Pope might start ringing her up for tips on celibacy, so resolves to dip a poorly pedicured toe back into the world of dating. Thanks to Merlin’s candour and quirkiness, things don’t go
quite
to plan . . . Then, just when Lucy’s resigned to a life of singledom once more, Archie – the most imperfectly perfect man for her and her son – lands on her doorstep. But then, so does Merlin’s father, begging for forgiveness and a second chance. Does Lucy need a real father for Merlin – or a real partner for herself?
Funny yet heartbreaking, witty and wise, this unputdownable, bittersweet novel – about keeping your family together when your world is falling apart – is the wonderful Kathy Lette at her very, very best.
Contents
Chapter 1. I’ve Just Given Birth to a Baby but I Don’t Think It’s Mine
Chapter 3. UFO – Unidentified Fleeing Object
Chapter 5. My Family and Other Aliens
Chapter 7. Relationship Roulette
Chapter 8. There Came a Tall, Dark Stranger …
Chapter 10. A Walk in the Park
Chapter 12. Nothing Risquéd, Nothing Gained
Chapter 13. Dr Love is in the Building
Chapter 14. The Born-again Human Being
Chapter 16. Paying Lip Service to Love
Chapter 17. The Ham in the Man Sandwich
Chapter 18. A Rip in the Designer Genes
Chapter 19. Dr Love Has Left the Building
Chapter 22. Smuggery, Buggery and Skulduggery
Chapter 23. Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happy Hour
Chapter 24. Testicle Carpaccio on the Disorient Express
Chapter 25. The Idiot and the Savant
Fell to Earth
Kathy Lette
For my darling children
Prologue
The car hits my sixteen-year-old son at 35 miles per hour. His body jack-knifes skywards then falls with a sickening thud on to its bonnet before bouncing down to the bitumen. The last words I’ve said to him just two minutes earlier are ‘You’ve ruined my life. I wish I’d never had you. Why can’t you be normal?!’
I’d tried to claw back these words as we faced each other in the kitchen but they rained down upon my child like blows. He’d stood, silent as a monument for a moment – then he was gone in a wild blur of limbs.
As I heard the door slam, I sat there aghast, helpless, horrified. I then gave chase, calling his name. I could see the pale denim of his legs scissoring towards the busy road. I heard the low rumble of a car cresting the hill. I spasmed with fear and then the world crumpled.
The windscreen winced at the impact, then shattered. The smashing glass tinkles like waves on shingle. The wheels throw up dirt and noisy gravel as the driver brakes in a belch of petrol. The earth moves slowly up towards my son’s golden head. He collapses, like a crushed cigarette packet. I
freeze
in the tourniqueted silence. The pedestrians are so still they’re like a concert audience hushed in anticipation … Then terror detonates inside me. Each ragged breath feels as though I’m inhaling fire. I hear a primal, bloodcurdling scream and realize it’s my own.
I fall to my knees beside him. A thickening, lacquered pool of blood is forming on the road. And then the air is cleaved by my wailing. The world darkens and everything goes black.
I’m in the ambulance now. How much time has elapsed? I replay the impact, over and over. The smell of burning rubber. The full-throated roar of the crash. The terror exploding on to the screen of my eyelids. I feel again the shriek in my blood. The earth and sky merging, imploding, then finally coalescing into fact: my son has been hit by a car. My eyes start to burn and my body trembles. Grief shakes me between its jaws like a lion shakes a half-dead gazelle.
Intensive care. The doctor’s voice seems to shout, as if from far away: ‘Your son’s in a coma.’
And then I’m vomiting in the toilet, dousing my face with water over the sink and shaking myself dry like a wet animal.
So the vigil begins. I watch over my darling. His skin is the colour of a cold roast. I strain my eyes until they sting but see no movement. I stroke a bruise which is erupting with the speed of a Polaroid on his soft cheek. Where is Superman when I need him, to reverse the earth’s rotation so that I can go back in time and not utter those hateful words to my dear, dear boy? Where is Stephen Hawking’s wormhole in space, his gateways linking different parts of the universe so I can quantum-leap backwards and bite my tongue? I whisper into Merlin’s ear about how much I love him. Knowing how
uncomfortable
he is with emotion, I jokingly promise to eat my own foot so I won’t put it in my mouth ever again. All the time my tears splosh on to the sheet, and a great stalactite of snot hangs from my nose.
‘Is there anyone you want to call?’ a nurse asks, under the glare of naked electricity. ‘His father?’ she suggests, tentatively.
‘His father?’ After Merlin’s diagnosis, Jeremy retreated into work. I used to joke that it was a wonder British Airways hadn’t embroidered his monogram on a business-class seat as he was in the sky more than he was on the ground. The smell of antiseptic cuts pungently through the air. Outside, the night is seeping away, dwindling into dawn. Below the hospital window, I see the cars parked diagonally, like sardines nosing up to a tin can – cars belonging to workers who will soon be going home to happy lives and unhurt children.
The nurse places her hand on my arm and guides me down into a chair. She sits beside me. Still holding my arm and stroking my skin, she repeats in a gentle voice, ‘Is there anyone you’d like me to call, pet?’
‘This is all my fault.’ Raw with weeping, racked with guilt, my voice is seesawing with emotion.
‘I’m sure that’s not true. Why don’t you tell me all about it, love. But first, there must be somebody you’d like me to call?’
‘No. There’s only ever been Merlin and me.’
She takes my hand. ‘Tell me,’ she says.
Part One: Merlin
1
I’ve Just Given Birth to a Baby but I Don’t Think It’s Mine
LIKE MANY ENGLISH
teachers, I dreamt of being an author. All through my pregnancy I made cracks to Jeremy, my husband, about naming my firstborn ‘Pulitzer’ – ‘just so I can say I have one’. But I was sure about one thing. I wanted our son to have a name which would make him stand out in a crowd, something out of the ordinary to mark him as different … Well, not in my wildest imaginings could I have known how different my son would turn out to be.
My wunderkind started speaking early, then, at eight months, just stopped. No more cat, sat, hat, duck, truck … Just a perplexing, deafening silence. By the time he was one year old, his behaviour was repetitive, his moods fractious, his sleep erratic, his only comfort being plugged into my raw breast. I was worried I’d be breastfeeding him until he went to university.
Until I began to wonder if he ever would …
As Merlin was my first child, I wasn’t sure if his behaviour
was
abnormal and made tentative enquiries to relatives. Since my father’s fatal aneurism while in bed with a Polish masseuse (and part-time druid priestess), my mother had been mending her broken heart by spending his life insurance on a never-ending globetrot. Unable to reach her in the Guatemalan rainforest or halfway up Mount Kilimanjaro, I turned to my in-laws for advice.
Jeremy’s family enjoyed a wealthy lifestyle on the land, just outside Cheltenham – and before you start picturing the kind of family that has a wealthy lifestyle outside Cheltenham, let me assure you that you’re absolutely spot on. When I tried to broach the subject, my father-in-law’s eyebrows took the moral high ground. Jeremy’s father had achieved his life’s ambition of becoming a Tory MP, for Wiltshire North. He had a broad, severe forehead like Beethoven but was completely tone deaf to life’s lyricism. It’s quite a Newton-defying feat, really, to rise by gravity. But that’s what he’d done. The very earnest Derek Beaufort was the coldest, smoothest man I’d ever met. He was remote, chilly, self-absorbed; I’d often glimpse him on news programmes working hard at turning up the corners of his mouth into what could be mistaken for a smile. He didn’t even attempt to simulate friendliness now.
‘The only thing wrong with Merlin is his mother,’ he proclaimed.
I waited for my husband or my mother-in-law to leap to my defence. Jeremy squeezed my hand under the heavy mahogany heirloom dining table but kept wearing his expression of bolted-on politeness. Mrs Beaufort’s (think Barbara Cartland but with more make-up) smile thinned out between twin brackets of condemnation. She had always let me know that her son had married beneath himself. ‘Which is
true,
as I’m only five foot three,’ I’d joshed to Jeremy at our engagement party. ‘Just think, darling, you can use me as a decoration on our wedding cake.’
Merlin was two when the doctor made his diagnosis. Jeremy and I were sitting side by side in the paediatric wing of the London University College Hospital. ‘Lucy, Jeremy, do sit down.’ The paediatrician’s voice was light and falsely cheery – which was when I knew something was seriously wrong. The word ‘autism’ slid into me like the sharp, cold edge of a knife. Blood pulsed into my head.
‘Autism is a lifelong developmental disability which affects how a person relates to other people. It’s a disorder of neural development chiefly characterized by an inability to communicate effectively, plus inappropriate or obsessive behaviour …’ The paediatrician, kind but robust, his white hair floating above him like a cumulus cloud, kept talking, but all I heard were exclamations of protest. Rebuttals clattered through my cranium.
‘Merlin is not autistic,’ I told the doctor emphatically. ‘He’s loving. He’s bright. He’s my perfect, beautiful, adored baby boy.’
For the rest of the consultation, I felt I was buckling with pressure, as if I were trying to close a submarine hatch against the weight of the ocean. I glanced through the glass panel at my son in the waiting-room playpen. His tangled blond curls, ruby-red mouth and aquamarine eyes were so familiar. But this doctor was reducing him to a label. Suddenly Merlin was little more than an envelope with no address.
An ache of love squeezed up from my bone marrow and coagulated around my heart. Dust motes danced in the heavy air. The walls, a bilious yellow, looked how I felt.
‘He will have developmental delays,’ the doctor added
parenthetically.
This was a diagnosis which pulled you into the riptide and dragged you down into the dark.
‘You can’t be sure it’s autism,’ I rallied. ‘I mean, there could be some mistake. You don’t know Merlin. He’s more than that.’ My darling son had become a plant in a gloomy room and it was my job to pull him into the light. ‘Isn’t he, Jeremy?’
I swivelled towards my husband, who sat, rigid, in the orange bucket chair next to me, gripping the armrests as though trying to squeeze blood from them. Jeremy’s profile was so chiselled it belonged on a coin. He looked dignified but suffering, like a thoroughbred coming in last in a hacking event.
Falling in love with Jeremy Beaufort, I had scraped the top of the barrel. When I first saw him – tall, dark, turquoise-eyed and tousle-haired – if I’d been a dog I would have sat on my hindquarters and hung my tongue out. The first thing he told me when we met on the red-eye from New York – the flight had been a gift from my sister, an airline stewardess, for my twenty-second birthday – was that he loved my laugh. A few weeks later he was telling me on a daily basis how much he loved my ‘succulent quim’.
But it wasn’t just his ‘Quite frankly, my dear’, Rhett Butler good looks that attracted me. The man had a towering intellect to match. The real reason I fell for Jeremy Beaufort was because he’d graduated from the College of Really Erudite Personages. Besides his MBA, fluent Latin and French, and reputation as the Scrabble ninja, he just knew so much. Wagner’s birthplace, the origins of the Westminster system, that the Lampyris
noctiluca
and the Phosphaenus
hemipterus
, though commonly known as glowworms, are in fact beetles, that the Bunker Hill Monument is in Massachusetts … Hell, he could even spell Massachusetts.