The Boy Who Fell to Earth Read Online Free

blink away tears. And then I would look into his eyes and realize that they weren’t empty but brimming with fear. It seemed there was a place in him which I could not reach, where he dwelt in solitude. Beneath the surface of his daily existence was a life he lived as if underwater.
    My son was like something that had appeared in a magician’s hat. I had no idea where he’d come from and he was unlike anybody I’d ever met. Merlin seemed to broadcast signals all day but nobody was on the same wavelength. He would raise his face up to the heavens, as though listening intently to cosmic harmonies beyond the constraints of my earthbound senses. Merlin and I could look out of the same window but never see the same thing. Still, one thing was clear. It was my job to stay alert. To pick up bleeps on my Merlin radar. And to stop him from tumbling through a hole in the world, like Alice.
    After my last class one Friday, I was dashing to my car so that I could relieve yet another rattled and overwrought childminder when I saw a mother silently sobbing by the gates of the private primary school next door. My heart lurched. I instinctively felt that she too must have a boy who didn’t fit in. Perhaps the ‘A’ word had been bandied about? My emotions swelled with the recognition of her pain and angst and I found myself dashing to her side, arms open. ‘What is it?’ I said, brimming with fellow feeling.
    ‘It’s my son … He’s five.’
    ‘Yes?’ I soothed, a hand on her arm, urging her to unburden herself to one who would understand.
    ‘He’s not taking to his French.’
    I had an overwhelming desire to get into my car and back over her body repeatedly. And do you know what? A jury of mothers of special needs children would acquit me. For most mothers, their biggest worry is that their offspring won’t eat anything which hasn’t danced on television. I have seen mothers tearing their hair out over this. When my pupils’ more aspirational parents tearfully complained about their wayward progeny not grasping
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, I felt a grinding hollowness. The only remedy was to take a quick sniff of the classroom glue pot. I was tempted to commandeer Merlin’s Postman Pat flask and start carrying something stronger in it than orangeade. Valium, say, with a heroin chaser – Mummy’s ‘little helper’.
    I would have turned to my husband for comfort, but he had taken to imitating the Loch Ness monster: rumours of his existence abounded but there were no actual sightings. I understood that the shock of Merlin’s diagnosis had sent Jeremy retreating into the world of high finance, where he could take solace from the solid predictability of percentages and equations, and at first I’d been patient. Jeremy’s world has always been so certain. The only hard knocks he’d ever taken had been whilst playing polo. He’d perfected his French on frequent skiing trips to Verbier or Chamonix. Entertaining his parents’ friends at dinner parties meant that he had learnt osmotically, from the cradle on, how to charm and disarm. Although professing members’ clubs to be horribly outdated and unnecessary, he attends all the same and secretly relishes them. Having an autistic child was not on his life’s shopping list. Consequently, my darling husband had become like a hostile witness, grunting and only answering in monosyllables.
    He’d had a year to acclimatize and yet still refused to discuss Merlin’s condition. The loud, contentious quality of Jeremy’s muteness bounced off the walls of our ramshackle little terrace. The whole house seemed to be holding its breath. The plastic Philippe Starck garden gnomes he’d given me as a comedic housewarming gift stood back to back on our pocket-handkerchief lawn as though in a huff with each other. Yes, we’d bought our house cheaply as a ‘fixer-upper’, but it was us who needed fixing. We were falling to pieces. I felt I’d woken in my own home to find all the furniture