Free The Boy Who Fell to Earth by Kathy Lette Page A

to
buy
my
son
?’
    ‘Well, it’s clear you’re not coping.’ Jeremy’s mother’s hooked nose suddenly gave her a hawk-like, predatory air. ‘Your anger gives you away. Do you want things to deteriorate to the point where Merlin’s taken into care by social workers? Imagine the scandal. You’ve just told me that you think your son is an alien, that you often pretend he’s not your child, that you find him an embarrassment, that you resent the idea of him living with you for ever, as if he were some feudal lord … It’s clearly impossibly awful for you,’ she concluded with calculated cruelty.
    I looked at her string of rubies, which I’d earlier admired. They now seemed to cluster around her neck like bubbles of blood. ‘Yes, raising Merlin is hard. But it also brings me infinite joy.’ Even though my voice was querulous with outrage, I tried to stop my face shattering like glass.
    ‘What about the psychotic episodes? Setting fire to the headmaster’s hair? Letting the burglars in? The pages and pages of numbers he writes, like some kind of Rain Man …’
    I understood the numbers. The numbers provided a vessel Merlin could pour himself into. It gave him a shape. It contained him. But how to explain this to a tweedy, beige battleaxe like Mrs Derek Beaufort? A woman who looked as though she spent her leisure time bludgeoning baby seals?
    ‘In an institution they can get him on to the right kind of medication,’ she added.
    Yes, I mused. As certified by the Albanian Food and Drug Administration. I squeezed as much hauteur into my voice as possible and replied, ‘I don’t want to drug my son into submission.’
    ‘There’s a very innovative doctor working at our local facility. He’s pioneering a new treatment for autistic children. He dissuades them from behaviour deemed dangerous to themselves or to others with the use of electrodes. It’s only a two-second electric shock to the skin, no more than thirty times a day.’
    I looked at her, dumbfounded. Not even the Hubble telescope could locate this woman’s sense of compassion.
    ‘I’m not sending my child away to be tortured! Truth is, I totally blame you for my marriage break-up. If you’d shown Jeremy the love he was owed, if you’d taught him how to communicate instead of banishing him away to boarding school aged seven, where he wasn’t even allowed to take his teddy bear, he would never have abandoned me. He just didn’t have the emotional maturity to cope. No wonder he moved to America. He just wanted to get as far away from you as possible.’
    My ex-mother-in-law gave me a contemptuous gaze, her face screwed up with fury. ‘£300,000 then.’ Her pen was poised above the chequebook. ‘I’m only offering because I feel sorry for you, Lucinda.’
    ‘You don’t have to feel sorry for
me
. I feel sorry for
you
. And, it’s Lucy, by the way,
Moronica
.’

6
    The Coven
    THAT WENT WELL , I told myself, as I sandblasted the last traces of the ex-mother-in-law’s lipstick off the rim of my best china cup. Glancing up, I caught my reflection in a mirrored cabinet. If you look like your passport picture, it’s a pretty good indication that you need a holiday. My expression seemed held in place, as if for an invisible photographer. Little fjords had appeared either side of my lips. If I’d glanced in the mirror more often over the last five years, I might have noticed how my mouth had started to turn down and the glint go out of my eyes.
    When had my heart started to harden? I hadn’t realized that I’d changed so much until I walked right through a department store on Oxford Street and nobody, not one spruiker, offered me a free puff of perfume. But it was only when I screamed at a stranger during the meditation section of my peace and tranquillity yoga class (Phoebe’s husband was minding Merlin so I could ‘unwind’) that I admitted that perhaps I wasn’t coping as well as I thought.
    ‘Lucy!’ My sister yanked me by my leotard