The Boy Who Fell to Earth Read Free

– leans tipsily into the square. It’s just like all the other houses in the street, identical in style, paintwork, latticing, flower boxes – except for the little boy inside. My son was sitting on the floor rolling a plastic bottle back and forth, rocking slightly, oblivious to the world. I scooped him up and crushed him to me, a hot smudge against my neck. And then I began the agony of self-doubt.
    Was it something I ate whilst pregnant? Soft cheese? Sushi? Or wait! Was it something I
didn’t
eat? Organic tofu, perhaps? Or maybe I ate too much? I hadn’t just been eating for two, I had been eating for Pavarotti and his extended family … Was it the glass of wine I shouldn’t have drunk in the final trimester? Was it that one martini at my sister’s wedding-anniversary party? Was it something I
should
have drunk – like puréed beetroot? Was it the hair dye I’d used to brighten up my bouffant when pregnancy made it lanky and dull? But, oh my God! Wait. Maybe it wasn’t me at all? Did a teenage babysitter drop him on his head? Did the nursery heater leak carbon monoxide? Did we fly with him too early on that holiday to Spain and burst his Eustachian tubes, leading to a seizure and brain damage?
    No. It must have been the negativity I’d exuded while carrying him. Merlin wasn’t planned. He’d come along two years into our marriage. Even though we were excited at the prospect of parenthood, I had slightly resented the unexpected intrusion into our extended honeymoon. The only time in my life I wanted to be a year older was when I was pregnant. It’s putting it mildly to say that I didn’t embrace the moment. In fact, I shunned it. I didn’t feng shui my aura in yogalates classes chanting to whale music like Gwyneth Paltrow and Organic Co. Instead, I moaned and complained and railed against the dying of the waist. Especially as I’d recently spent a whole week’s wages on lacy lingerie to celebrate our anniversary. I said to anyone who would listen that ‘Pregnant women don’t need doctors, they need exorcists.’ Birth seemed Sigourney Weaveresque to me. ‘Get this alien out of my abdomen!’ … Could too many caustically black-humoured jokes have affected his genes?
    But stop. What if it was the difficult birth? Why do they call it a delivery? Letters, you deliver. Pizzas. Good news. This was more like Deliver
ance
. Forceps, suction, the episiotomy … Was it telling the doctor that I now knew why so many women die in childbirth – because it’s less painful than going on living?
    Or perhaps it was the flippant remarks I made in the delivery room to my mother as we peered at the scrunched-up little blue ball I’d just brought into the world? ‘I’ve just given birth to a baby, but I don’t think it’s mine.’
    On and on I fretted. I would stop worrying occasionally to change a nappy – usually the baby’s. But for days after The Diagnosis, a San Andreas of fault lines ran through my psyche, coupled with an overwhelmingly protective lioness-type love, waiting, watchful, my claws curled inside me. I kissed my baby boy’s soft, downy head all over. He coiled into the circle of my arms. I held him close and cooed. I looked into his beautiful blue eyes and refused to believe that they led inwards to nothingness. The doctor had reduced him to a black and white term – ‘autism’. But the prism of my love bathed him in bright and captivating colours.
    I had to save him. It was Merlin and me against the world.

2
    Planet Merlin
    I’M A GREAT believer in ignoring things until they go away. When Facebook and Twitter came along, I turned a blind, technical eye. Just like I ignored the ‘Protein Only’ diet, doing the Macarena, those weird Masai running shoes, bubble skirts and Esperanto. If you wait long enough, these fads fade. But the same logic just wouldn’t apply to Merlin’s diagnosis. It was not something he was going to grow out of.
    There was no choice but to begin the disorientating