The Boy Who Fell to Earth Read Online Free Page B

she’d say, gulping in the good life, every last drop, living the daylights out of every second. My own life just telescoped away to a blip of mundanity. ‘Got a good deal on mincemeat at the supermarket,’ I’d mumble in reply.
    She communicated by postcard only. One arrived from Kathmandu with a yak on it and the scrawled message ‘Madly in love with Sherpa.’ Another arrived two months later from Brazil. ‘Sherpa-ectomy. Now on dig for fossils –
not
the archaeologist, although he is fetching.’ Merlin’s diagnosis had brought her home immediately. Needless to say, my vibrant mother and Pollyanna-esque sister found my glib pessimism alarmingly distasteful.
    But beneath my Teflon-coated veneer of repartee, my husband’s indifference was cooling my ardour to arctic levels. Jeremy accused me of ‘alienation of affection’ – a legal term for losing the hots for someone. He said that attempting to make love to me was reminiscent of trying to shop in a small country town on the Sabbath. Nothing was open. When he complained that I never initiated sex with him any more, I wanted to tell him to go to hell but realized that, of course, by this point, single-parenting a child with autism, hell would be a major improvement on my own life.
    My optimistic sister felt sure that Jeremy was suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome. ‘He’ll come round. Basically, Jeremy is a decent, compassionate man.’
    I laughed out loud. ‘Calling Jeremy compassionate is like calling me a Peruvian pole-vault champion.’ Bitterness had started to creep into my voice and lines of resentment were etching themselves on to my countenance. What had happened to the man I adored?
    Jeremy began staying out later and later and then not coming home at all. And then when he did finally come home a week before Merlin’s fourth Christmas, it was in a psychological suicide vest, judging by the grenade he threw into my world.
    ‘I’m leaving you.’ His voice was heavy with weary exasperation, his face flushed with drink. ‘I need to find some peace of mind.’
    What he found was a piece of a televisual domestic goddess called Audrey.
    With Stevie Wonder’s eye for detail, I hadn’t noticed he was drifting into the arms and freshly lasered legs of a pulchritudinous daytime-TV chef. Finding a false fingernail in our bed should have been a clue, but no, I chose to put it down to an over-beautified babysitter. I trailed him and his suitcase out into the street, past the little Christmas tree I’d spent all day decorating. My face was a rictus of incredulity. ‘Why?’ We’d only been married for five years.
    ‘Well, if you hadn’t rejected me all the time … if you’d shown me the slightest bit of affection … but you’ve been so preoccupied.’ The thin smoke of his breath was steaming away in the icy air, like a 1950s cigarette ad. ‘All you can think about is Merlin. You’ve given up cooking. The house is a tip. You’re so frosty in bed I feel compelled to keep checking your vital signs every half-hour.’
    ‘Oh, forgive me, Jeremy. I’d love to screw your brains out but Audrey obviously beat me to it … judging by how much you’ve lowered your IQ to shack up with a woman who cooks cupcakes for a living. So, the way to a man’s heart really is through his stomach? I always thought that was aiming too high.’
    My sister Phoebe googled the TV temptress. Apart from a regular cooking spot on a daytime television chat show, where she pouted provocatively as though in a porn film, her only other claim to fame was a tabloid exposé of the time she sat in a plate of cocaine at a rock-and-roll party, giving new meaning to the phrase ‘powdering your cheeks’. Photos revealed a scrupulously diet-conscious honey-blonde from the home counties with melonesque breasts, a minuscule waist and a cat-like languor. Her make-up was so consistently perfect it seemed she was permanently poised to receive an award on some