Best-Laid Plans

Kathy Lette

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

www.penguin.co.uk

Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press

an imprint of Transworld Publishers

Copyright © Kathy Lette 2017
Cover illustration: Stephanie Von Reiswitz

Kathy Lette has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448154241

ISBN 9780593071359 (hb)
9780593071366 (tpb)

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

1

Kerb Your Enthusiasm

It was never my intention to take my son kerb-crawling to pick up a prostitute. Nope. Kerb-crawling was definitely not on my ‘To Do’ list after ‘Buy hummus, sort sock drawer, do Pilates’.

A mother does many things for her son – running trays up to his bedroom for nothing more serious than a stubbed toe, detecting lost bits of sports kit, secretly completing overdue homework … But soliciting a prostitute shouldn’t be one of them. ‘So, how much to initiate my son sexually?’ are just not the words a bookish, cake-baking, cryptic-crossword-ninja, law-abiding mum of one ever expects to say to a working girl in thigh-high boots and leather hot-pants in the dead of night in a seedy backstreet.

So how did this sick scenario come about? Well, earlier that night, over dinner, I’d casually mentioned the plans I was making for my son’s twenty-first birthday party. As soon as I mentioned the word ‘party’, Merlin’s face shattered like breaking glass.

‘No. No party! There’s nobody to invite because I’m worthless. I’m nothing … The boys at school said I was a freak. And it’s true … That time I came home with a sign sticky-taped to my back saying “Kick me, I’m a retard” … Well, they were right. I am a retard. No wonder no girl will ever go out with me. Those girls who laughed at me at school were correct – I’m shit on a shoe.’

I can’t quite explain the fierce onrush of tenderness I felt then for my strange, beautiful boy. It overwhelmed me. I tried to hold his hand, but he recoiled as though being doused in boiling water.

‘I can only apologize to you for not being the son you deserve. Why did you ever have me? I bet you wish you’d never had a child.’ My son’s tone was metallic with self-loathing. ‘Why can’t I be normal?’ Each word he uttered was like a bullet to my heart. ‘I’m so sorry I ruined your life, Mum. Without a girl to love, well, I just don’t want to live any more.’

His annihilated voice filled me with desolation. A kind of sludge formed around my heart. Then this sob just wrenched out of him. And, well, it broke something open inside me. I was gripped by a protective, lioness-like love for my gentle, tortured boy for all the years of rejection, bullying and humiliation, for all the misery, isolation and lost dreams. I felt my claws come out … And the next thing I knew those claws were clutching my car keys and I was driving him towards the city to fulfil his inalienable right to the pursuit of life, liberty and human sexual contact.

I’d read in the papers that, since the gentrification of King’s Cross, which was now all gastro-pubs and Pilates studios, the area close to Liverpool Street had become the new red-light district. As we drove closer and my mood cooled, I did register the fact that this was rating rather high on the Oprah-ometer. I mean, what kind of mother gives her son party tips championed by Donald Trump and Berlusconi: ‘Take off pants. Mingle.’ I’m an English teacher at a secondary school … And before you start picturing a boring, pedantic, predictably dull English-teacher stereotype, let me assure you: you are one hundred per cent correct. Was soliciting a prostitute for one’s son a seriously abnormal thing to do? Well, yes, but mothering a child with autism tends to recalibrate one’s view of normal.

When the twin spires of Liverpool Street Station loomed into view, I veered off the main road into a labyrinth of dark streets with low, dilapidated houses huddled together conspiratorially. I nosed my car into a lane-way that resembled a beach after the tide’s gone out – plastic bags, broken bottles, rusting cans and crisp packets, and drunks lying by the wall like drowned sailors.

What the hell was I doing here? I was more likely to be found at a Quilting Bee than on a kerb-crawl. I felt I was going for an interview for a job I didn’t want. This was such a foreign world to me, I might as well have been on Jupiter. It suddenly became an effort to keep hold of the steering wheel. The bitumen seemed to billow under my tyres like a mattress. I could think of a million things I’d rather be doing on this drizzly, grey May evening – a book club, a hot bath – Jesus, reordering my condiment cupboard while doing my tax return looked irresistibly attractive right now.

‘Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea …’ I admitted to my son, who was slumped despondently in the passenger seat beside me. ‘I’m sure someone lovely will come into your life soon, darling.’ My second-favourite mothering experience is lying to my son about his chances of ever having a girlfriend – my favourite being beating my head on his locked bedroom door until drawing blood.

‘It’s so much easier for animals, Mum, isn’t it? Animals are always in pairs. I can’t even go to the zoo any more, because it just reminds me how lonely I am.’

Since puberty kicked in, Merlin has attempted everything to attract girls … Well, everything bar smothering himself in cupcake icing and sauntering through town holding a placard saying, ‘Free Designer Shoes!’ … And still nothing. To girls his own age, he’s just too exotic … The poor boy might as well be a sherbet-winged flamingo flying down the high street.

‘I can’t fathom why no girl wants to date me’ has become his sad mantra. ‘Do you know why, Mum?’

Of course I knew why. Because saying you’re autistic and socially isolated is like saying that you’re on a diet and hungry.

With Merlin’s birthday only a month or so away, his hormones had gone into overheated, obsessive overdrive. When he wasn’t asking me if dogs do it ‘people-style’ or why his penis kept making him touch it, dark moods began to dominate his quick-silvered wit.

‘I’m failing to add up as a person, Mum,’ he’d said a few days before. ‘The constant rejection, it’s breaking me down. I compliment women all the time. I talk to every female I meet … “Are you a woman of experience?” “Do you moisturize?” “How’s the modelling going?” And they just laugh at me. A woman’s sweet smile says nothing about her heart. I struggle, Mum.’ He’d looked at me, his pale-blue eyes wide with confusion. ‘The signals I broadcast make me hum like an amplifier but I’m just not on the same wavelength as women. What can I do, Mum? What can I do?’

What could he do? I’d racked my brains. Mail-order bride? Thai wife? Auction him online? I’d seriously considered this, and was discouraged only by the fact that it’s illegal to sell live things on eBay.

Basically, if I didn’t want his only hobby to be earning Boy Scout badges in Trouser Tenting and his passport to read, under ‘Occupation’, ‘Crazed Loner’, then I had to help him … Which is why I was now kerb-crawling behind Liverpool Street Station.

‘The male kingfisher courts the female by bringing her small fish. They mate even before she’s had time to swallow her wedding present,’ Merlin elaborated.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said, wondering where I could park. The irony of worrying about getting a ticket for parking on a double-yellow line while illegally picking up a prostitute was momentarily lost on me.

‘The male wolf spider presents the females with morsels of food gift-wrapped in silk. Although copulation for spiders must be difficult. How does a male spider let a female arachnid know that he wishes to be her mate and not her meal?’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said again, preoccupied about how I would negotiate the transaction and where the escort would take him. I glanced up at the sooty Victorian buildings crumbling away behind their grey façades. Would she have a room in some seedy B&B, the static electricity from the cheap acrylic carpet providing an impromptu perm? Or – oh God – maybe they’d do it in the car and I’d have to go for a walk? And surely if I walked around here I’d be brutally mugged and my battered corpse tossed into a filthy canal.

Women were skulking out of the shadows now. My heart drilled against my bra. All I could think about were the night-hunting snakes Merlin had shown me on YouTube, and how their infrared sensors allow them to strike at anything warm in the dark.

This was a bad, bad idea. I waved my hand back and forth like a windshield wiper to shoo the women away. White-knuckled, I’d just decided to turn the wheel for home when a statuesque blonde in the clichéd uniform of thigh-high boots and leather hot-pants emerged from a murky whirlpool of pimps and prostitutes.

‘Botticelli’s Venus rises,’ Merlin sighed wistfully, as the woman homed in on us with the nocturnal accuracy of a bat.

I braked abruptly so as not to hit her. By the time I’d established that I hadn’t wet my pants with nervousness, Venus had put one high-heeled foot on my bumper bar like a conquistador. Her beautiful, ice-blue eyes were clear and cold and as hard as mint candies. They were framed by eyebrows plucked into two sceptical arches. Her luscious pink lips were enhanced with the most emphatic lip-liner but I couldn’t quite decipher the exact tone of her smile. It seemed to be held stiffly in place as if for an invisible photographer.

As she leant into the window, I opened my wallet, preparing to launch into the brute vocabulary of the sordid transaction. ‘So, yes … um … so what are your rates?’ I asked, feigning insouciance.

Venus levelled a searing glare at me that only just fell short of igniting my hair.

‘Fifty for a headie. A hundred for the full service. Five hundred for the night … For a thousand, you can have dwarves and a donkey, as far as I’m concerned.’

‘Um … The full service, I guess.’

I extended a fan of twenty-pound notes in her direction. Her hand shot out like a tentacle and wrapped around my wrist. With the contemptuous suavity of a diplomat, she then stated: ‘You’re nicked.’

I dropped the money, the notes scattering over the car floor, and drew back from her as if she were a live socket. ‘Nooooo!’ My volume rivalled the voice of Moses parting the Red Sea. Panic punched my chest. If I were a nuclear reactor, I’d have been going into meltdown. What to do? Pleading seemed the best option. Either that or abandoning the car and sprinting off down an alleyway … an option Merlin now took, leaving the passenger-side door swinging wildly on its hinges.

‘Merlin!’ I called out after him. As he disappeared from view at the far end of the dingy street, I made a noise like a tyre going flat. Couldn’t the undercover officer see that I was more deranged than St Deranged, the Patron Saint of Single Mothers of Special Needs Boys?

‘Please, I must find my son!’ I pushed out of the door to run after him, but Venus blocked my way. The pimps and prostitutes had instantly evaporated back into the shadows, leaving an eerily empty silence.

‘Your son? Jeez, Louise! Tell it to the custody sergeant. He’s gonna love this one.’ The click of the handcuff snapping on my wrist had a dull and final sound to it, like a lead door shutting.

I shouted Merlin’s name again. I tugged the officer in his direction. I flailed about to no avail. ‘Let me go, you idiot!’

‘Do you want me to add resisting arrest to the charges?’

‘You don’t understand! My son is out there alone!’

Venus flashed me her identification badge and began reciting my rights, as a back-up police van pulled up.

As she spoke, I stared at her in shocked silence for what I estimated to be about a million years, then interrupted, ‘But … you can’t arrest me. I have thirty-two English essays on Moral Education Through Literature to mark before morning.’

I’d hoped this would make me appear a sensible, sane, supremely competent career woman and decent member of society rather than a kerb-crawling crazy. But there was no more talk. Despite my squirming protestations and writhing anger, I was told to ‘secure my car’ and was then bundled into the caged back of the police van and dragged off to the local cop shop for questioning.

‘But my son!’ I cried out, beating on the sides of the van. ‘We’re going the wrong way! We should be looking for Merlin!’

When I thought of Merlin alone in the city, a burning sensation skittered through my stomach and my toes curled. How could this have happened? God had clearly taken a sabbatical and left some hopelessly unqualified intern in charge. I felt the wild terror of losing my moorings. Even worse, I’d lost my child. I was a bad, bad, hopeless mother. Kerb-crawling – I mean, what had I been thinking? Clearly, from now on, when it came to parenting I would have to wear a paper hat reading ‘Trainee’.

2

Best-Laid Plans

As I bounced about in the back of the police van, my nerves were shrieking like unoiled hinges. As we swerved through a quarrel of traffic, I pondered the best way to explain the build-up to tonight to the police. How could I adequately express the frustrations my boy had endured in his effort to make female friends for so long.

By his sixteenth birthday, despair had already started creeping in. ‘Mum,’ Merlin had said to me, ‘I think I have an enthralling and charismatic demeanour, don’t you? I’m also at the pulchritudinous pinnacle of my career … It would make me feel amazing inside if a girl loved me. It would just be so majestic … Do you think any woman will ever throw me a lifeline of love?’

I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ but I was thinking, Yeah, the day kangaroos start playing croquet.

After another year of rejections, his voice became even more plaintive. ‘Mum, will I ever feel the lick of love’s tigerish tongue?’

Then, on his eighteenth birthday, he’d beseeched me, ‘Mum, will all women forever find me geekish and freakish?’

I told my son to think of all the wonderful, inspirational people who have been misunderstood – Galileo, Luther, Jesus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Copernicus, Newton, Van Gogh …

He’d interrupted my rattling roll call with the words, ‘I’m not a genius, Mum … If I were a genius, I’d know how to pretend to be normal.’

I said something platitudinous about how there was no such thing as normal and abnormal, just ordinary and extraordinary … And how exciting, tangential, intriguing, creative and unique I found his mind to be … But it was to no avail, because on and on they came – the normal everyday knockbacks, the endless everyday put-downs.

On his nineteenth birthday, Merlin had asked, ‘Why don’t any love goddesses want to chat to me?’ He was gangling in the door, all legs and elbows. ‘Why do girls always say no to a date? Why do they reject me as a retard and a spaz?’

Merlin’s luminous eyes had fleetingly held mine. The green bowler hat he’d chosen to wear that night (he often dressed eccentrically, for ‘good luck’) was tilted at an awkward but absurdly touching angle that tore at my heart.

On his twentieth birthday – just Merlin and me and a chocolate cake – he’d confided, his voice heavy with weary exasperation, ‘My personality is a dazzlement of surprise. I feel I’m at the zenith of my charismatic beguilement. It really hurts when you compliment a girl and tell her how exquisite and delectable she is and she just shoots you down. Or laughs at you. It happens a lot and, most importantly, I don’t know why. Without love, existence is futile. If I don’t lose my virginity before I turn twenty-one, I won’t be able to go on.’ He wrung his hands. ‘Rejection is like a repugnant odour you feel instead of smell. I torture myself, remembering hurtful things women have said to me … If the body is designed to vomit up what is contaminated, why not the brain? Why can’t my brain throw up, Mum? Why?’

How I’d ached with love for my eccentric son. I had to help him. And so began the mission to Get Merlin Laid.

At first I’d tried dating websites. But Merlin’s profile – ‘Adore space–time continuums and tennis scores, plus have encyclopaedic knowledge of Amazonian moths, mathematical equations and black holes’ – tended to put girls off. As did his accompanying declaration suggesting that women ‘Come and join me in my magic world where relationships are at their very zany best.’

His profile picture didn’t help either. The shy, delicate glance he gave to the camera was just right. His tender blue eyes, the flawless lapis of an Italian summer sky, peeking out through his mane of golden hair, coupled with his other-worldly, ethereal aura, gave him the look of a mischievous cherub. If it weren’t for his suit-of-armour-plated six-pack, the result of his obsessional sit-ups (six hundred a day), the kid would have looked under-dressed without angel wings … Except that he was wearing a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat and a monocle. ‘My most lucky look,’ he’d explained.

After running the usual online gauntlet of paedophiles, predators and money launderers who prowl the Web, the only woman who responded was an eighty-eight-year-old great-grandmother whose byline read ‘Time wasters need not apply.’

My sister then proposed that I just ‘Think French.’ It was wine o’clock and we were sitting at her kitchen table mulling over Merlin’s options. My younger, prettier sister, who’s as glossy and flighty as a racehorse – I’m like a plodding Clydesdale beside her – assured me that, if we lived in France, my husband would simply take Merlin to a brothel. Phoebe is very worldly. Literally. She’s a flight attendant. Although right now, I was the one who had done something stratospheric – stratospherically stupid. I was the Sensible Sister. It was so out of character for me to be caught with my synapses down.

Anyway, I’d reminded Phoebe that not only was I neither French nor married, but as a feminist, the exploitation of women wasn’t high on my agenda. But Phoebe had already clicked open her iPad and found a list of twenty-five women within a five-mile radius offering everything from fetish work to adult mothering – whatever the hell that is. She then proceeded to read out the reviews, like TripAdvisor – only this was a walk on the wild side with the sexually dysfunctional, or, rather, the ‘differently pleasured’.

‘“The worker enjoyed the sex,”’ my sister read out to me.

‘Yeah, right. Academy Award-winning orgasms all round …’

‘“ … and offered FWE – the Full Wife Experience.”’

‘What’s that, I wonder? Leaving hubby sulking on the couch eating crisps while she goes off to bonk the pool boy?’

We both snorted out a laugh then, the big, hearty kookaburra cackle we’d inherited from our bohemian Antipodean mother, who was away on another of her SKI – Spend Kids’ Inheritance – trips, somewhere in the big, wide world.

‘But seriously, Phoebe, I can’t take my son to a brothel. What am I going to do? Sit outside the bedroom, knitting? Like some pervy Madame Defarge?’

‘Well, clearly, you can’t take him,’ my sister had said, disappearing in a haze of cigarette smoke – the cigarettes she’d supposedly given up years earlier. ‘Put the hard word on one of your male friends.’

And so, desperate and demoralized, the next day I asked some of my male colleagues if they’d take my son to a brothel.

Invisible tumbleweed blew around the staff room for a while before Philip, the Head of Maths, replied facetiously, ‘Great idea. I’ll just run it by my wife, shall I? Sweetie, do you mind if I just pop off tonight for a few hours? I’m helping out Lucy’s son, Merlin. No, not with algebra, football practice or driving lessons. I’m taking him to a whorehouse to get laid. Seriously, Lucy, does the word “manslaughter” not mean anything to you?’

Undeterred, I next propositioned my lesbian journo pal from Yogalates, peering at her across our perineums while we did the upside-down lotus position.

‘Jesus, Lucy! We’re members of the Women’s Equality Party!’ Her Lycra-clad legs were suddenly as taut as an archer’s bow. ‘How can you condone prostitution?’

‘I wasn’t really seeing her as a prostitute but as a “sex care provider” who is presenting herself as a commodity allotment within a business doctrine,’ I rationalized.

But the only result was that another friend bit the buddy dust.

Next stop, the gay boys, starting with Arron, my urbane and unshockable hairdresser. Well, he reacted as though I’d suggested he support Lance Armstrong’s return to professional cycling. He positively convulsed at the notion. ‘What? And start an ugly rumour that I’m straight?’

Finally, an actor friend did agree to take Merlin to a local brothel for me. He maintained that it would be good research. Off they drove, with high hopes (and low morals), to some suburban house in Kilburn … but he was on the car phone to me half an hour later saying he’d chickened out because someone had recognized him.

‘You’re an actor, for God’s sake,’ I chided him. ‘Why don’t you just pretend to be someone else, you old ham?’

My son’s voice had then piped up over the car speaker. ‘Mum, is ham sick? Is that why it’s got to be cured? Can loneliness be cured the same way? We just passed a dead fox on the road … How do you know if animals are roadkill or suicides? Maybe they were just depressed?’

Most parents’ biggest worry is that their child might get a nose piercing or a tattoo or dye their hair purple. Mine is keeping my son from hurling himself under a moving vehicle. This is the kind of worry that keeps me awake at night.

When Merlin’s twenty-first was only a month or so away, my sister had another idea. ‘With Merlin’s lean, lithe physique and angelic looks, you should get him work as a male escort … Apparently, professional women seeking sexual encounters have fuelled a three-fold increase in the male-escort business ... You could make money out of this libido of his. Merlin would make an excellent escort. He’s so amusing.’

‘Are you crazy? I am not pimping my son! Besides, he might just want to sit around and talk about tennis, or comets, or meteors, or something totally boring. Then she’ll charge him.’

As the police van shuddered to a halt, an idea came to me – a bit late, admittedly. As all my fifty-something, divorced women friends are chewing holes in the furniture with sexual frustration and all the young autistic boys I know are priapic, perhaps I could matchmake them on an app called – maybe – ‘Square Pegs for Round Holes’? Or ‘Tinder-ism’? Or ‘Au-Tinder’? … But before I had time to write my app pitch to Mark Zuckerberg, the police had me clambering out of the van. As my sleeve caught on the wire mesh and tore, I looked up at the grey, grimy walls of the cop shop with foreboding. The whole place had the ambience of a Dickensian debtors’ prison. Clearly this is why I became a mother – I couldn’t resist the glamour of it all.

As I was frog-marched inside, I concluded that a seedy, inner-city police station is definitely not my natural habitat. My natural habitat is the classics section of the local library. Or the cheese counter at a French deli. How had it come to this? Even worse, my son, my vulnerable boy, was now out there, lost, in the big, bad world. It was then that I threw up. Right there on the linoleum floor. When I stopped retching, the ‘prostitute’-turned-arresting-officer tore off her blonde wig and said brusquely, ‘Are you okay? How do you feel?’

I felt like a fish left gasping at the bottom of a bucket.

3

If You’ve Got That Sinking Feeling, Then You’re Probably Drowning

Kerb-crawling with your twenty-year-old son proved a pretty hard concept to explain to the jaded custody sergeant who took my statement half an hour later. Under normal circumstances, the man’s mix of searing blue eyes, musculature and world-weary, rugged, leathery good looks would have meant I’d be tilting my head backwards so that my eyeballs didn’t fall out, but all I could think about was my missing boy.

‘Couldn’t you just turn a blind eye and let me go, Officer?’ It was a pretty gutsy thing to say, considering I was halfway through a major heart attack. ‘My son is lost out there somewhere and I need to find him.’

‘Sure,’ the big bloke drawled sarcastically. ‘And why don’t I make a donation to the Oscar Pistorius defence fund while I’m at it.’ The officer had clearly trained at the Smart Ass Academy.

‘You don’t understand. My son has autism, chronic anxiety and an obsessive compulsive disorder …’

‘OCD? It must have been a very organized crime then,’ he quipped sardonically.

I took a deep breath to stop me hyperventilating. I closed my eyes, trying not to be distracted by the rolling boil of noise around me. Phones were shrilling and people were yelling. The cacophony of voices and complaints, the clattering metal gates scraping along the floor, the doors slamming with a cymbal-like crash made me think of an orchestra tuning up. Police personnel manoeuvred laser-eyed pimps, furtive-looking in their hoodies and handcuffs, away from the grim-faced, skinny-legged sex workers who careered about like drunks in their too-high heels. The air reeked of despondency. Under the harsh fluorescents, other people’s hopelessness wafted like BO from an armpit in a summer Tube at rush hour.

‘Look, this is obviously a mistake. I didn’t intend to break the law. I mean, do I look like a criminal?’ I gestured at my flat sandals and ink-stained fingers. ‘I’m an English teacher, for God’s sake. I’m more likely to order a soupçon of ennui with a nuance on the side and a faux pas to go than a lady of the night …’

I’d been attempting to demonstrate my literary credentials, but clocking the custody sergeant’s nonplussed expression, I diagnosed a serious irony deficiency and rephrased. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t even go on holiday to countries that have a bad human-rights record …’ I peeked over at the officer, looking for some reaction. Nothing. ‘Put it this way’ – I tried a more relatable analogy to illustrate the true level of my dullness – ‘I’m the type of woman who goes to a male strip show and looks at the audience.’

Still nada. I sighed loudly and started again.

‘The point is, it’s my son’s twenty-first birthday soon and he’s obsessed with losing his virginity. He told me that if he didn’t experience any horizontal refreshment, he just wanted to “wake up dead tomorrow”. But sadly, girls are acutely allergic to him … Not that he’s not charming and handsome. He is. But, unfortunately, females his age just can’t see beyond his chronic foot-in-mouth disease and inability to read social situations.’

Judging by the sceptical curl on the lip of the big, beefy sergeant sprawled in a man-spread before me, I wasn’t doing a very good job of reading social situations either.

‘Girls tend to act as though my son’s just been beamed down from Planet Weird and has lost his guide book to understanding earthlings … which is why he often says the wrong thing …’

Like me right now, I thought, blundering on. ‘He has no filter, you see, and tends to say whatever he’s thinking … in the case of a girl, about her breasts or her legs or …’

Where was my filter? Why was I blabbing on like this to a man clearly sired by an armoured tank and a grizzly bear? Obviously, autism was genetic and Merlin must get it from my wilting branch of the family tree and not, as previously thought, from my arctic-hearted, upper-class ex-husband.

‘Although, don’t get me wrong,’ I corrected, ‘my son often says the right thing, too. When he was four he wanted to know what to call a male ladybug … When he was six he asked me why “phonetic” isn’t spelled the way it sounds – you know, with an “F” … When he was eight he asked if I’d ever imagined a world without hypothetical situations … When he was ten we discussed at length just how important a person has to be before they’re considered to be assassinated instead of merely murdered? … The kid’s intellect is so towering it constantly makes a thwacking sound as it bumps into ceiling fans, which is why girls think he’s representing the universe in the Intergalactic Whacky Alien category … Does that make sense?’

Sense? I had a feeling that the custody sergeant was going to arrest that last sentence and have it sent down for life. He ostentatiously checked his watch with end-of-shift weariness. Nerves and exhaustion were causing me to blurt out my words, so I steadied my breathing and tried to refocus.

‘What I’m trying to say is that my son’s been on a mission to get laid. Sex is all he thinks about. And I just thought that an encounter with a prostitute might calm him down, alleviate his depression and, I suppose, slake his curiosity. You know?’

My interrogator clearly didn’t know, judging by the increasingly deep frown lines on his forehead. It’s at times like this that I wish I lived in an earthquake zone. With any luck, there’d be a fortuitous meteor strike or a zombie apocalypse to get me the hell out of here.

‘I’ve read you your rights. You’re aware you’re entitled to legal advice. So, why not just wait in the cell for a duty solicitor?’ The officer yawned.

‘In a cell!’ My life seemed to have suddenly turned into a scene from a Solzhenitsyn novel. ‘Good God, no! I need to go and find my boy. This is all a mistake. Um, look, Officer. I think we got off on the wrong foot. Let’s start again, shall we? You see, the mother of a kid with special needs has to be his advocate, standing up for his rights. She has to be his scientist, challenging and questioning medical solutions. And his full-time executive, making all his decisions—’

‘And part-time pimp,’ the custody sergeant rebuked me gruffly.

I why-me’d my eyes heavenwards. It was after midnight and people were now foaming into the police station like suds from a sitcom washing machine. The sergeant glanced up at the queue of miscreants awaiting his attention which had formed behind me.

‘So are you planning on giving me your name and address any time in my actual lifespan? I gather these ramblings are representations as to whether or not I should charge you?’ he said in a blasé tone.

I suddenly felt the longing to confide like a raging thirst. All the years of pent-up anxiety and desperation just erupted out of me.

‘My son’s mental well-being was at stake. You’ve got to understand that Merlin’s despondency is so great I should be able to claim that hooker as a medical expense, instead of being arrested by your lot. The red-light district – believe me, it’s not an area I would ever frequent if it weren’t an emergency. When I stopped the car in that street, I felt as though I was in one of those nature docs where the shark circles the shoal of fish, except we were a shoal of only two in a car and the sharks were pimps and … undercover police, it turns out.’

‘Rrrright.’ The policeman swirled a grey teabag around in his mug and watched the curls of black spread through the water like ink. ‘So if this is all some innocent misunderstanding, why did your son run away?’

‘In Merlin’s mind, he wasn’t running away, he was being chased. When the prostitute produced handcuffs and arrested me, he just went into spooked-deer mode and bolted off into the shadows.’ I pictured him, running so fast it was as though his feet had taken steroids. ‘And he’s out there now, scared, discombobulated, in danger … Which is why you’ve got to let me go, so I can start looking for him!’

The custody sergeant opened one jaundiced eye and scrutinized me. He rocked back in his chair, arms folded, scratched his prime pectoral real estate and said, ‘All very interesting, but it doesn’t detract from the fact that you were illegally procuring a prostitute.’

‘Look, Officer, my son was desperate. He had a meltdown. I panicked. How else would a middle-aged English teacher end up driving through back alleys looking for a woman to initiate her autistic son into the joys of carnal pleasure? Where’s that chapter in the child-rearing manual, I ask you? Huh?’

The arresting officer stopped by the desk and tapped her watch. I had the distinct feeling that if I didn’t cut to the conversational chase I’d be test-driving dildos in a penitentiary, pronto.

The custody sergeant picked up his pen. ‘So, is that it, then?’

‘No. No, that is not it! Look, I called my son Merlin because I wanted him to stand out and be different, but I had no idea just how different he was. When I realized he wasn’t normal, at first I blamed myself. I worried that maybe motherhood just wasn’t coming as naturally to me as to others. But nobody could have loved that baby more. I lost my marriage over how much I loved him. His father wanted to put him in a home, but I would rather die! Over the years, ‘experts’ diagnosed lead poisoning, sensitivity to food colourings, to additives, to refined sugar … I was accused of smoking during my pregnancy and drinking excessively. Only one thing’s for sure: my darling boy doesn’t fit into the world. He’s so hyperactive he sleeps with one eye open in case he misses anything. It’s exhausting, trying to protect him. The anxiety, the panic attacks, the self-loathing …’ The tangy taste of sweat crept into my mouth. ‘I just hope he dies before I do, because who is going to look after him when I’m gone? That’s the thought which haunts me in the small hours. So, yes, yes, yes! I do want him to find someone who loves him as much as I do. Yes, yes, I do. But how and who?’

I peeked up again at the custody sergeant, who seemed on the point of giving me a commiserating pat. He was just licking his full lips in readiness to speak when he was interrupted by a long, lean streak of acned aggro in uniform who approached the desk, chewing gum ferociously. He fidgeted and jiggled as if he’d been pepper-sprayed. His eyes raked over the custody record. ‘Autistic, eh?’

Now, there are three things you should never say to a mother of a special-needs child: 1) it’s clearly genetic; 2) it could be worse – he could be in a wheelchair; and 3) autism is nothing more than Cold Mother Syndrome.

‘It’s genetic, ain’t it?’ The younger policeman squinted at me. ‘Mind you, it could be worse. It’s not as though he’s in a wheelchair … It’s cold mothers, right? That’s what causes it … So where’s the kid then?’

‘Scarpered,’ the custody sergeant clarified.

‘Are you sure there was a kid? Maybe she was just lookin’ for a bit of lezzer action … That undercover cop, she’s hot. Or maybe some kinky threesome with her old man? Or were you kerb-crawling for a gig-ilo?’ He jigged about a bit, groping his own crotch lasciviously. ‘I’ve seen all them telly shows about all youse desperate housewives.’ He let rip with a machine-gun laugh, spraying spittle.

‘I’m a teacher!’ I exclaimed illogically, squeezing as much hauteur and disdain into my voice as possible, as though my profession immunized me against committing any possible misdemeanour.

‘Yeah, well, I’ve read about youse cougars. Out on the prowl in the urban jungle for hot, young male flesh.’ The cocky cop struck a suggestive pose before firing off another humourless haw-haw.

Of course, if I’d handled this whole booking-in procedure at the police station with more diplomacy, that might have been the end of it. But, that fateful night, I was about as disarming as a Russian hit squad in the Ukraine. I felt my anger boiling over, like milk.

‘And what would it matter if I were? My husband couldn’t cope with his only son not being normal. He said he felt lost and needed to “find himself” – which meant he soon found himself in the knickers of a woman twenty years younger than me. Jesus, I wasn’t sure if he was going to date her or adopt her! But imagine if I’d done that? Abandoned my autistic child for a toy boy? I’d have been crucified by public opinion. I’d be tabloid toast. He, on the other hand, was promoted by his bank and back-slapped by his mates.’

‘Okay, calm down,’ the custody sergeant warned, but I’d mounted my high horse and was galloping towards both policemen, flat out.

‘I hate the assumption that older women are never allowed to have younger men. Why are mothers made to feel we’ve been put out to sexual pasture? Especially when fat, hairy blokes are allowed to strut about in trousers so tight you can detect their religion. I can’t believe Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger’s testicles haven’t put in for a transfer. Keith Richards, Iggy Pop, Steve Tyler, Hugh Hefner … Christ! I’ve seen better-dressed salads! But nobody ever makes cracks about mutton dressed as ram, now do they? If one more ugly, beer-bellied or boring bloke like you two calls me a cougar, I’m going to hit him repeatedly over the head with a copy of The Female Eunuch until he bleeds to death, repenting! Got it?’

To say that my rant went down well with the two officers is like saying that Austria was a little upset about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.

‘Finished?’ the custody sergeant finally drawled.

My words hung irretrievably in the air. I nodded.

‘Funnily enough, I was gonna let you off with a caution. But not now. Now, this’ – he used his fingers to imitate inverted commas – ‘“ugly, beer-bellied, boring bloke” is gonna bail you and send the file to the Crown Prosecution Service, recommending that you be charged, as you’re clearly unfit to be interviewed. So I’ll see you in court … Mother of the Friggin’ Year.’

4

Wine o’Clock

Being arrested for pimping prostitutes for your progeny was off the scale on the Parental Anxiety Gauge. A fast-track scheme to clear up cases of kerb-crawling meant that, after a perfunctory hearing, the magistrates’ court date was set for four weeks’ time. I felt so relaxed I was only changing my underwear, oh, every half an hour or so.

‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ my sister Phoebe soothed a few days later. ‘I mean, it’s not as though you’ve clubbed a seal, or been outed as a cross-dressing Scientologist or something. And hey, at least you’ll get a strip-search. That’ll be the most action you’ve had in years! … Too soon?’ she asked, screwing up her nose at my stony expression.

The thick skin I’d grown from raising a child with special needs meant that I was no longer intimidated by much –well, apart from the tax department, the menopause and Muslim extremists. But a full-cavity search before incarceration in prison? Who wasn’t afraid of that?

‘I don’t want to be strip-searched – not without a date including dinner first.’ I made a half-hearted attempt at humour. ‘Besides, the only contraband I’d want to smuggle into prison are the complete works of Shakespeare, which are notoriously uninsertable. And how will I survive without them? I have a pretty strong suspicion that prison libraries are chronically short of the Bard and Jane Austen and are quite parsimonious with their Proust.’

‘Oh, Lu-Lu, nobody’s going to send you to prison. You have no more business being in a prison jumpsuit than, I dunno … a dolphin in stilettos.’ My sister turned to the bemused teenage waiter who was hovering nearby. ‘I’ll have a magnum of Mum Juice, please. Chardonnay,’ she decoded. ‘And sharpish, there’s a lamb.’

As soon as Phoebe had landed back at Heathrow from LA I’d insisted she meet me in my local wine bar, named, appropriately, Sloshed – The Grape Escape, so that Merlin (who’d thankfully survived the kerb-crawling escapade unscathed after catching a taxi home) couldn’t overhear our conversation. My son’s anxiety disorder is triggered by the smallest things – what colour shirt to wear, which trousers, or DVDs, or walking routes will bring him the most good luck – so I felt pretty sure that his mother’s imminent imprisonment was not the most helpful information for someone of his fragile state of mind.

Sloshed was where we always met when disaster loomed. It’s where we came to dissect Phoebe’s MBD (Marriage Bed Death), when her husband of twenty years, Danny, stopped making love to her. It was where we came when Phoebe found out the reason why she was flying right under Danny’s romantic radar, namely, because he’d joined the Mile-High Club with her best friend from work, a gay air steward named Trevor. (Apparently, on a flight to New York, they’d liaised in the loo the moment the captain had turned off the ‘YOU MAY NOW UNFASTEN YOUR PANTS’ sign.)

It was where we came when Danny filed for divorce, and when, a year later, he announced his engagement to Trevor the Trolley Dolly. And where we retreated when Phoebe’s teenage children – Dylan and Julia – decamped (no pun intended) to their father’s house after Phoebe banned them from attending his engagement party. ‘Your father is not gay,’ she’d told them. ‘No one who’s gay could ever possibly dance that badly … Plus, he doesn’t even like musicals or Madonna!’ she’d tut-tuttedly surmised.

Needless to say, the waiters always gave us a corner table, a box of tissues and a vineyard of vino. Tonight we would need a Loire Valley’s worth, minimum.

‘But seriously, Pheebs, what if I am sent to prison? A prison which recruits the kind of Neanderthal wardens who got sacked for employing tactics deemed too brutal at, say, Guantanamo Bay? I’ve watched Orange is the New Black. What if I get dipped in anchovy paste and thrown to the bull dykes? What if I have to share a cell with a psychopath who writes me love letters about Fallopian tubes and full moons in menstrual blood?’

I suddenly realized that other customers were looking in our boisterous direction. My sister and I have inherited our mother’s motor-mouth tendencies, lobbing banter back and forth at Wimbledon ball speed. I lowered the decibel level and continued my moan.

‘And how will I survive on the food – Split Pea and Sewage-rat Soup, Hot ’n’ Hearty Microbe Mash, Birdseye Assorted Vagina Parts, Bitches-Who-Crossed-Me Casserole …’ An even more terrifying thought then crossed my mind. ‘And who will look after my darling son while I’m inside? How will he cope without me? I’m his carer, his companion, his rock. And, more importantly … what will that rough prison soap do to my skin?’ I concluded on a note of sarcasm, in lieu of some stiff-upper-lip gloss.

‘You are not going to prison.’ My sister’s warm hand was on mine.

‘But I could. I’ve read The Trial. I know how these things go. Situations like this tend to snowball into Kafkaesque confusion. I mean, seriously, Phoebe, how will I survive? I’m a teacher. The only wound I’ve ever received is a paper cut.’

‘Hello? Waiter! Can you hurry up with our wine, please?’

‘Speaking of which,’ I quavered, ‘you do realize I have to plead not guilty. Teachers can’t have criminal records.’

‘You can always just attend Parent–Teacher nights under an assumed name,’ she joked.

‘Phoebe, you’re not getting how serious this is. A guilty verdict means I’ll be sacked and will never be able to get another teaching job.’