The Boy Who Fell to Earth Read Online Free PDF Page A

imaginary stage for services to lip-liner.
    Despite her prime-time habit of practically fellating the more phallic-looking vegetables before she baked them, the woman was so thin Yves Saint Laurent could use her as a straw. Her only large body parts were her breasts, which could easily be mistaken for a breakaway republic. The posh trollop wore cashmere trousers – obviously to keep her ankles warm when my husband took her roughly by the hardy perennials in her herbaceous border. I suppressed a swift shudder of revulsion at the thought of my erudite Jeremy naked with a woman whose tan was the same colour as a carrot. One kiss and you’d have consumed half of your five a day.
    When I broke the news to my mother by showing her Jeremy and Audrey’s photograph in
Hello!
magazine (they’d been papped, ironically at some charity ball for disabled children), my mother gasped at the actress’s stick-thin frame. ‘That must be bulimia.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said sarcastically. ‘Jeremy simply knows all the most interesting people. Her sister, Anne Orexia, is popping by later.’
    I kept up this kind of feeble banter and brash façade for weeks. ‘My husband gives reason to my life … He’s the reason why I’m broken-hearted, bitter, cynical and twisted,’ I said to work colleagues.
    ‘The trouble with women is that we get all excited about nothing and then we marry him,’ I told my unimpressed principal, before taking a few days off on compassionate leave.
    ‘Do you know what I call it when older m–m–men r–r–run off with younger, thinner women? Sylph fulfilment,’ I slurred over cocktails with my sympathetic sister.
    ‘We’re having a little marital tiff,’ I informed his family. ‘
I
wanted to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary by having a lovely holiday in the Caribbean with our beautiful son, plus perhaps a new gazebo extension to celebrate Jeremy’s pay rise at the bank … but
he
wanted to divorce me and shack up with a TV cook named Audrey – sorry,
Tawdry
– and follow her to bloody America where she has a TV opportunity. Not even on a proper channel. Only on
cable
… And, let’s face it, the woman’s
mammogram
is probably her best screen work. Is it any wonder I’m a Recovering Optimist?’
    ‘My husband’s birth certificate is an apology letter from the condom factory,’ I told the childminder, the milkman, the social workers, the accountant …
    But, privately, I howled my heart out. I wailed at the world. Like a dog tormented by wasps, I shook all over. I gnawed my pillow at night and curled into the fetal position in a paroxysm of self-loathing and ‘if only’s.
If only
I had paid Jeremy more attention.
If only
Merlin hadn’t been born with autism.
If only
I’d never fallen pregnant in the first bloody place.
If only
I hadn’t allowed Merlin’s condition to seep into our marriage, our laughs and our love-making. (Believe me, no man can wake a woman who is pretending to be asleep. Even if you play amplified heavy metal into her earhole.)
    I wrote and told Jeremy how I felt. I promised to do a cooking course, so that I’d never again use my smoke alarm as a timer. ‘I’ve realized that “blancmange” is
not
the highest point in the French Alps,’ I assured him by text. I baked him Yorkshire puddings. I cleaned the house top to bottom. I begged his forgiveness. I suggested having another child. I implored him to come back to us.
    At first I felt sure he would, so tried to tease him out of his sulky silence: ‘I would have answered your email sooner, only you didn’t send one.’ But after a month or two of wearing full make-up and silk lingerie, just in case he popped in, things began to feel a little Miss Havishamesque. I was tempted to wander around in my moth-eaten wedding dress, braiding my hair and drooling …
    But there was no time for a nervous breakdown. Merlin was now at a local pre-school five days a week and I’d gone back to teaching full-time. Although single