12

Nothing Risquéd, Nothing Gained

AFTER SIXTEEN YEARS of raising Merlin I could qualify for a Ph.D in angst. If nail-biting adventure had been what I was looking for, I would have tried jumping over the Grand Canyon on a motorbike, diving with sharks, crossing the English Channel on a Lilo or taking a job as a BP oil-company executive. Trying to conquer Merlin’s condition all on my own was as effective as attempting to kill Genghis Khan with a paper cut.

My main worry about my son involved mugging. After failing all his exams, Merlin was repeating his GCSE year. In the course of his first week back at school in September, he was beaten up on the school bus, all for £1.50. On the way to the cinema he was mugged at knife-point to extort fifteen quid and his iPod. On the way to the British Museum by bus, he was cornered in the shelter by a gang who humiliated him by holding a lighter under his chin and filming it on their phones. For Merlin, leaving the house was as hazardous as Scott leaving his Antarctic base camp. He was held up so often that Archie started giving marks out of ten for the robbery. Plus extra money. ‘Here you go, kiddo. Money for the bus and a bit extra for the mugging.’ He also started teaching my son how to kickbox and some other forms of self-defence. ‘But screamin’ like a girl and runnin’ for the hills is also good,’ he advised, chortling. ‘That’s my motto, kid. Do unto others … and then run!’

As Mother was currently helping street children in Peru before trekking to Machu Picchu on the Inca trail, as you do, there was little choice but to trust Archie to keep an eye on Merlin after school. I’d planned to be deputy head by this age and, in my spare time, win the Orange Prize for literature, presented, of course, by Daniel Craig, preferably wearing his James Bond budgie smugglers … But all that going home as soon as the bell rang and popping out at lunchtime meant that I hadn’t even been promoted to head of department. Now that the hairy old rocker was earning his keep, I was trying to make up for my poor performance by running the after-school drama club and poetry appreciation. If opportunity doesn’t knock – get a doorbell. That was my new motto.

‘Sure. You can trust me,’ Archie said – words which had the same striking ring of authenticity as Iran saying it wasn’t developing a nuclear weapon.

‘Okay,’ I quizzed, as I threw together a packed lunch to take to work, ‘if Merlin was choking on, say, an ice cube, what would you do?’

‘If he was chokin’ on an ice cube, I’d simply pour a cup of boiling water down his cake-hole. That should do the trick … I’m jokin’,’ he said, to placate my horrified reaction.

But it wasn’t such a funny joke when I arrived home after drama rehearsal to find Merlin urinating in the bathroom basin. ‘Merlin! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Archie told me the best way to avoid arguments with women about leaving the toilet seat up is to pee in the basin.’

‘Archie!’ I stormed through the house looking for my hapless boarder. I found him stretched out in my bathtub beneath a blanket of bubbles, with the door ajar. ‘Why did you tell Merlin that!!! About the basin??’ I was stopped in my tracks by an unmistakably pungent odour. ‘Are you smoking dope?’

‘I smoke drugs to forget I smoke drugs. Just like I have casual sex to forget that I have casual sex,’ he teased.

How could I let him know just how displeased I felt? Perhaps if I turned on my hairdryer and tossed it into the bath? ‘What kind of example are you setting my son?’ I pulled the plug on his bubble bath. But the symbolism that I was about to pull the plug on a whole lot more was obviously lost on the miscreant because he then said, ‘Hell, I can set a good example. Merlin!’ he called out. ‘Some advice, son. Say no to drugs, so you’ll have more time to drink.’ Archie sank below the frothy surface then blew a stream of water vertically through the suds, like a sperm whale.

I waited impatiently for him to reappear. ‘And if you think casual sex is satisfying you need to have both your heads examined.’

Merlin’s tousled cranium popped around the door. ‘So,’ he asked us, grinning like the cat which had not only licked the cream but also eaten the canary, ‘are you two having the ideal relationship?’

Archie’s laugh came from deep within his chest and rattled around the tiled bathroom. Merlin mimicked his chortle all the way down the hall.

‘What other life tips did you give my son?’ I demanded to know, averting my eyes as the water drained away. ‘Besides the fact that Iron Man is a superhero and that “Iron Woman” is a command.’

The bath water had drained, leaving my boarder beached on the white enamel, his body hairs glistening. I’d imagined Archie to be so hairy that he’d make Chubaka look waxed. I thought he’d be as bulky and white as a fridge, with an IQ to match. But, naked, he was alarmingly manly. Not to mention his obvious potential for a very lucrative jockey underwear endorsement deal.

‘You’re right, Lou. I feel totally remorseful … but I reckon I have the strength of character to fight it,’ he scoffed.

‘You see, that’s the kind of statement you make as a result of controlled substances being in widespread use. What you don’t understand is that Merlin takes everything literally.’

‘You’re so friggin’ overprotective. I can’t believe you let the kid out … Out of your womb, I mean.’ Archie hauled himself up on to his feet in an avalanche of foam. He faced me, his muscular legs planted in a V-sign. I turned my back on him before the foam evaporated.

‘Of course I’m overprotective! Most parents expect their kids to have all the things in life they couldn’t afford so it’ll be nice to move in with them in old age. But my son will never leave home.’

‘Bullshit. How will you ever know if Merlin can cope in the outside world when you never let him in it? Every time he leaves the bloody house you’d think he was emigratin’. The fuss, the cryin’, the worry, the long hugs an’ heartfelt goodbyes. It’s nauseatin’.’

Fury bubbled up in me. ‘What do you know about it? Someone has to make sure he’s charged his mobile phone, that he has enough money on his travel card … Someone has to make sure he eats his vegetables. And that person is me.’

‘The way you get a kid to eat vegetables is to coat them in chocolate,’ he jibed.

‘Do you mind getting a towel? You naked is a sight people pray they don’t live long enough to witness,’ I lied.

‘The kid’s sixteen. In two years he can vote, for Chrissake.’

‘You’ve heard what Merlin says! He doesn’t want to grow up. He wants to stay a teenager.’

‘Well, who wouldn’t?’ he said, towelling off. ‘You get to take drugs, get pissed, stay out all hours, never work and not pay taxes. Seems perfectly sane to me. In fact, I want to stay a teenager too.’ Togaed in a towel, he sauntered downstairs to the kitchen to help himself to some of my food.

‘You know what?’ I complained, trotting after him. ‘I think I’d rather take grammar lessons from George W. Bush or, I dunno, grooming lessons from Motorhead’s Lemmy than parenting tips from you.’

‘Truth is, toots, the kid doesn’t need a babysitter. At his age, he could babysit. Besides, j’know what Merlin said to me about babysitters? He told me that he doesn’t understand why adults hire teenagers to act like adults, so that the adults can go out and act like teenagers. Pure genius,’ he chortled. ‘Strewth! The kid’s shavin’. But look at the instructions you leave when you go out.’ He picked up my list of emergency phone numbers. ‘It’s longer than War and bloody Peace.’

I was outraged by his ill-informed audacity. ‘She’ll be right, mate,’ I mimicked his accent. ‘That’s your answer to every angst, from parking tickets to a tracheotomy.’

Archie gave me a reproachful stare. ‘Merlin’s like a bungee-jumper. That invisible umbilical cord keeps snapping him back to you. Cut the kid free. Let him glide, soar …’

‘Does the word “splat” mean anything to you?’ I carped coldly. ‘I think you’ll find that a mother knows best.’

‘Bullshit!’ He rounded on me. ‘Mothers get stuff wrong. My mum told me that good things come to those who wait, that the meek shall inherit the earth and, oh yeah, that money ain’t everythin’. What a steamin’ pile of horseshit. For your information, sweet-cheeks, your son thinks you’re an interferin’ snoop … But I’m sure you’ve already read that on his Facebook.’

‘I need to interfere. It may have escaped your notice, Einstein,’ I castigated, ‘but my son is not normal … unless you count it normal writing thousands of cricket scores on the bedroom walls, blogging about his wet dreams, wearing a Batman mask on the tube and a bike helmet to bed in case his brain melts out of his ears, and wanting to live in a communist country so that he doesn’t have to make any decisions.’

‘You want Merlin to be normal, but what the hell is normal? Are you? Am I?’ Archie cast an amused eye over me and then, much to my surprise, laughed right into my face. ‘It’s abnormal to be normal. Everyone seems bloody normal until you get to know them.’

‘You’re not getting this, are you? When a woman’s pregnant, she’s always wondering, when will my baby move? Well, the answer is right after he’s finished college. But my son will never go to uni or have a job or move out. He can’t concentrate in class. He failed every one of his GCSE exams. Examination papers are like Swahili to him.’

‘Seems to me that Merlin has this photographic memory – which has yet to develop,’ he punned. ‘But I have a feelin’ the kid’s gonna grow into his brain … Meanwhile, you’ve gotta let him make mistakes, get drunk, get laid …’

‘Laid?’ I snapped, appalled. ‘He’s not a carpet, Archibald.’

‘You’re the only woman in his life and it’s gettin’ a little bit like a Greek tragedy around here.’

‘Don’t be obscene! There’s nothing inappropriate about Merlin’s feelings for me.’

‘Maybe not in Tasmania.’ Archie’s amusement grew as he took pleasure in my discomfiture. He was practically cocking his elbow on an invisible car window ledge and whistling a tune.

‘You disgust me!’ I slapped the lid on some Tupperware and burped it tightly – my emotions similarly concealed. Furious, I retreated into martyred domesticity, peeling vegetables and rattling saucepans, little tornados of steam fuming ceilingwards.

I didn’t speak to Archie again until Merlin bounded into the room straight from his tennis lesson at the local gym, all limbs and jerky wild movements. He hugged me as usual with the kind of fervour that could result in hairline fractures.

‘Oh Mum, you are such a gorrrrgeous woman. You have such a fabulous figure for a woman your age. You have such a curvy arse. Your arse is soooooo peachy. Do men crave over you?’ my tall, muscular son boomed, squeezing me to him again. ‘Do you take your pelvis seriously? And your skull! Mmmmmm … You have such a firm skull. We’re so lucky to have shoulders, or our heads would just roll off … Do men ask if you’re single at parties? Great guns, Mum!’ he enthused, squeezing my biceps. ‘They feel really good. Isn’t my mother sexy?’ he asked Archie. ‘She has such a sexy body. She has the most silky’ – I looked at him in alarm and only relaxed when he added – ‘earlobes … Do men tell you that you have beautiful breast—’ I glanced up again in horrified Oedipal anticipation. ‘… bones?’ he concluded, running his hand along my neckline. ‘Great clavicles, Mum. Mmmm. I love the smell of your marzipan skin. It makes me feel so electric.’

Archie erupted into a rich chuckle and raised an ‘I told you so’ brow.

I gave my son a long, measuring look. For the first time I noticed a light dusting of acne across his chin, and then saw that there were more pimples plotting to break out on his forehead. He was jangly with biochemicals as adolescent hormones coursed through his veins. ‘Merlin, darling, it’s not really appropriate to talk to your mother that way, sweetie.’

‘Why not? I’ve known you since you were twenty-six. You’re one of my oldest friends, Mum. I keep asking, but you never tell me, who introduced us? Am I bisexual? I might be bisexual. Or I might just be a lover of the world. What do you think I am?’

Merlin pulled his T-shirt up over his head. His torso was honey-coloured and smooth. I saw the ridges of muscle on his taut stomach and marvelled at just when my lithe little boy had morphed into this contoured, chiselled specimen? His fine, delicate jaw was lichened with incipient stubble. He was becoming a man, whether he liked it or not.

‘I do think I could keep a girl in a contented dazzlement of surprise. This is a message to all smoking-hot babes,’ he foghorned. ‘Come and join me in my magic world, where relationships are at their quirky best. Dr Love is in the Building!’ But then his face clouded over and his voice softened. ‘Will I ever get a girlfriend, Mum? Or will I always just be wandering in the wilderness?’

I was surprised by the desolation in his voice. No matter how fast Merlin ran, his dark moods chased him, casting long shadows that would occasionally fall over him like a net. ‘Of course you will, darling.’

‘I won’t. There’s this dance at school. But nobody’s asked me. I’m not into those phoney Heath Ledger movies, which is why I’m not going.’ The atmosphere in the room became cloudy, as Merlin started pacing and squeezing any objects within reach. ‘I’m a high-functioning autistic. I don’t want to make the transition to adult. I don’t want to grow up. People aren’t really adult. They’re in adult disguise.’ Anxieties were buzzing around his brain as insistently as wasps. ‘You always build me up to be some ladies’ man, Mum, telling me how handsome I am. Well, I’d like to give a woman a good seeing-to and get some rambunctious fluff – some tang on the side. But it’s never going to happen. It really hurts me when you compliment a girl and tell her how delectable she is and she shoots you down. It happens a lot and, most importantly, I don’t know why. Will any woman ever throw me a lifeline of love?’ Merlin scrunched his eyes closed and smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. ‘Anyway’ – his voice darkened – ‘women are a waste of time. If women are so great, why aren’t there many female world leaders? Tell me that then? I bet you wish you had a penis, don’t you?’

Upset, he avalanched out of the room, a tumble of limbs and flying wild hair.

Archie gave me another of his knowing looks. ‘Believe me, if that son of yours doesn’t get laid soon, he’s gonna become a full-on misogynist,’ he counselled.

‘Oh, unlike you. A “good seeing-to”? “Fluff”? “Tang on the side”? I wonder where he got that phraseology. Anyway, it’s a ridiculous idea. He’s still so young …’

‘Mmm. Nice breast bones,’ Archie mimicked.

Unable to protect my son in an enshrouding embrace, I hugged myself around my waist instead.

‘You should get laid too,’ Archie chuckled. ‘You’re just sooo uptight. Right now, your favourite sexual fantasy is – a partner, am I right?’

‘No, you are not!’ I gave the man a withering glance straight out of the facial repertoire of Mrs Danvers in the draughty drawing rooms of Manderley. But, in truth, I was so sexually frustrated I was starting to have romantic thoughts about my electric toothbrush. Just last week I’d found myself cooking anatomically correct gingerbread men.

‘I’m actually havin’ interestin’ thoughts about you right now … Maybe we can grab a bite – then have dinner?’ he said, with a playful smirk. ‘Merlin’s right. Men do crave over you. I for one would love to slide my hand over the sweet contours of your peachy arse …’

‘Well, I wish you’d stop talking out of yours.’ I turned up the volume of Classic FM and let Wagner’s great wash of strings sweep his crassness from my mind.

With the pressure of having to complete my School Action Plan (an activity so riveting I’d had to remind myself on an hourly basis that there were worse jobs – say, starting the cars of Colombian judges) I completely forgot about the school disco until Archie informed me that he’d organized Merlin a date. When he told me she was a 22-year-old backing singer called Electra, my instinct was to smother the idea with an emotional emergency fire blanket, but Merlin was incandescent with excitement.

‘All right,’ I finally acquiesced. ‘But I need to establish what time he’s expected back. I think 11 p.m.,’ I suggested.

‘Really?’ said Archie. ‘I was thinkin’ Monday.’

‘Monday!’

‘Although I will point out that it’s Electra’s responsibility to get the kid to school on time.’

‘I’m so worried Merlin’s going to do or say something wrong … Archie, why don’t you just take him?’

‘No bloody way. The only way you can get me to dance is to shoot at my feet.’

The night of the school disco a week later, Merlin appeared in the doorway and I did a double take. There was my son, dressed, pressed, suited, booted, scrubbed and rubbed. I was ambushed by feelings of tenderness for my handsome, idiosyncratic boy. Maybe he would add up to a whole person one day? Then he spoke.

‘Why does my stomach have feelings? Are there really butterflies in there? Do they fly in formation? Were they caterpillars once? … I like being on my own actually … What if my date makes a cheesy grin and unnerves me? What if she’s all talky-talky yakkity-yak? What if she doesn’t like my moves?’

Merlin launched into an eccentric choreography, which consisted of ‘The Chopping Board’, where he mimed chopping a tomato; ‘The Typewriter’, which was similar but with more dervish-like thrashings of arms, and ‘The Angel-wing Dance’, involving an inversion of his hands behind his back and then a lot of mad flapping. I had seen him dancing at family gatherings, and his total lack of inhibition made for a rather funny but also slightly terrifying performance, especially when he ripped off his shirt and twirled it above his head with increasingly explicit groin thrusts. It was as though his feet had taken steroids.

‘The music moves me, but it moves me ugly!’ Merlin exclaimed, sliding on his knees across the carpet. ‘I’m going to sweat bullets on the dance floor!’

I was so eaten up with nerves that he would make a faux pas or lose his temper or become a laughing stock when he leapt too high and grazed his nose on the glitter ball … but Archie let out a chuff of laughter, a raucous, kookaburra volley of squawks which made me laugh too.

I walked my son to the door. ‘Have a great time, Merlin. And don’t forget to tell your date how pretty she looks and—’

‘But what if she doesn’t look pretty?’ Merlin asked, perplexed.

‘Just tell her she does anyway,’ I coached.

‘She’s a backin’ singer in the band I’m playin’ with down the pub. Believe me, she’s hot. Have fun, kiddo. Come and I’ll introduce youse.’

Electra was gunning the engine of a red rust-bucket. The roof of the car was peeled back, so I could see she was wearing a sequinned dress which was so short I was worried her ovaries might catch cold. The backing singer had rouged cheeks, iridescent green eyeshadow and stilettos sharp enough to disembowel a ferret. I swallowed hard. Merlin introduced himself with the words, ‘So, are you a woman of experience?’

By the look of her, she definitely was – and no doubt charged for it by the hour.

Archie led me back inside before I could call the whole thing off. ‘You need a glass of fizz,’ he declared, popping open a bottle of something French he’d bought for the occasion and filling the flute to the brim. I glanced at the rain pattering on the window, twisting my rings this way and that. I calculated I had five or six hours of worry ahead of me.

‘I wish you wouldn’t look at me at all times as though I’ve got a red-bellied black snake tied to my dick,’ Archie said, pouring more champagne. ‘Don’t worry about Merlin. I’ve paid Electra not to mind anythin’ he says or does. She’s gonna get him such kudos with the other kids.’

I nodded my head mutely but all I could think about was Electra’s ramshackle car and the slick, wet road with its treacherous bends … not to mention the conversational collisions awaiting my son. ‘But what if he says something inappropriate to one of the boys and gets head-butted?’ I blurted, slumping into the couch. ‘Or what if he asks some other girl the size of her clitoris? Or to show him her breasts for educational purposes? And then she hits him with a sexual harassment charge? What if Electra doesn’t bring him back safely?’

‘I know a pretty good cure for insomnia,’ Archie said with a lopsided grin. ‘Sleep.’

‘I’m going to stay awake all night,’ I pronounced resolutely. The pile of thirty-eight essays I had to mark on the use of the pathetic fallacy in romantic literature (which, pathetically, was the only place I got any romance these days) nagged me from the kitchen table. My headmaster had recently hauled me over the career coals about failing to hand in my action plans on time, meet targets and provide leadership. That’s the trouble with opportunity. Sometimes, when it knocks, you’re out in the forest trying to trap a rabbit to get its foot.

As I was thinking all this, Archie leant down, slipped off my shoe and swung my own foot up into his lap.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ But as he kneaded my toes an intoxicating lassitude took hold of me. When he lifted my other foot into his lap and ran his strong musician’s hands up and down the arch, I wafted into a dreamlike state.

Some time later, I jolted back to consciousness. ‘Oh my God, did I drift off?’

Archie gave me an impertinent wink. ‘Yep. I think you exhausted yourself staying awake all night,’ he teased.

‘What time is it?’

He checked the TV screen, where a football match was playing softly. ‘Ten thirty.’

‘Oh my God. I’m not cut out for motherhood. I just don’t have a big enough capacity for alcohol. Have you been rubbing my feet for two hours? I hope I didn’t snore or anything.’ I sat up, startled.

‘No, but has anyone ever told you how cute you look with drool coming out the corner of your mouth? Christ! Pins ’n’ needles!’ Archie rose and stretched before shuffling to the kitchen for refreshment reinforcements. ‘These jeans are so bloody tight. Your cupboards are bizarre. You hang somethin’ in your wardrobe for a couple of weeks and it shrinks two sizes.’

‘Is that right?’ I snickered. ‘You don’t think it’s got something to do with the fact that the older you get the tougher it is to lose weight, because by then your body and your flab are really good friends?’

It was Archie’s turn to laugh – a rich chuckle that he really meant. His walk back from the kitchen with the crisps and wine was pure panther.

‘Why are you walking in that sexy way?’ I asked him, slightly alarmed.

‘Sexy?’ he growled in his granulated voice. ‘I’m just trying to hold my stomach in. Although I want you to know that this is not a beer belly, it’s a’ – he read the label before he poured – ‘Beaujolais belly, since living with you. Ironic, isn’t it?’ he drawled. ‘I began by dropping acid and now I’m dropping antacid. I’m just getting way too old for rock ’n’ roll.’

‘I thought you were giving up on rock ’n’ roll because everyone is selling out to conglomerates?’

‘Truth is,’ he sighed, ‘I’d bloody love to sell out, only nobody’s made me a bloody offer.’

After months of bluster and bravado, his confession was as alarming as his nakedness a few days earlier. ‘So why did you come to London then? Oh Christ. You’re not really skipping parole, are you?’

‘Nope. After my wife buggered off, I skedaddled. I mean, life in London still has no meaning, but I’m less likely to run into people who can’t wait to tell me that they just saw my missus sittin’ on the face of my best mate.’

‘You’ll find somebody else,’ I platituded.

‘Naw. Women are too complicated these days,’ he said with a playful smirk. ‘I can’t read the signs. You’re, like, I want you to take me, slap me, rape me and cuddle me all at the same time, without touchin’ me. And I want you to do it right now! Except I’m pissed off you didn’t read my mind that I wanted all that.’

Whether it was the alcohol or the nervous tension, I laughed so hard I thought I’d rupture a key internal organ.

‘Life went bad for us blokes once they invented wheelie bins. As soon as they put wheels on the dustbins, we men weren’t needed any more.’

His rough-and-ready charm softened my resentment like sun on butter. ‘I don’t know. I could definitely have done with a man around while I’ve been raising Merlin. His father pissed off at the first diagnosis.’

‘Yeah?’ His gaze was like the touch of a warm hand and I felt myself unclench.

‘We met on a plane. Phoebe got me a birthday upgrade to New York. Jeremy was the most self-centred, arrogant smart-arse I’d ever encountered.’

‘So you got up the duff by accident?’

‘No. I fell completely and utterly in love with the bastard, got married and had his baby.’

‘And what a baby.’ Archie raised his brows. ‘It must have been bloody hard yakka. You should get a medal. How could the 24-carat pissant abandon youse?’

‘My ex-husband is a selfish, mean-spirited, low-down snake … but I don’t say that in any disparaging way. To know him was to love him … until you really got to know him and then you wanted to kill him,’ I added.

‘There’s only two types of people in a divorce. Those who screw you over and those who get screwed. If you’re unlucky enough to be the one gettin’ shafted, they do it without lubricant in every orifice, with no foreplay, and then cut you open with a chainsaw and shove maggots in your weepin’ wounds.’

‘Divorced people – you can spot us a mile away,’ I agreed. ‘We get that tortured, soul-destroyed, shell-shocked look of prisoners of war who have just tunnelled to freedom …’

‘Yeah, only to find ourselves smack bang in the middle of the Battle of the bloody Somme.’

‘Exactly. Anyway, if it makes you feel any better, I’m a much bigger failure than you, Archie. I’m a teacher who has failed to teach her own son. I should also be deputy head by now, but instead I’m trying to teach English literature to teens whose reading material is limited to takeaway menus. My GCSE-level English class told me recently that they hate books, especially when they have to read them.’

‘Literature should be banned. It’s the only way to make reading popular again,’ Archie teased.

‘Yes, besides the kind of books which have a sex goddess on the jacket and no jacket on the sex goddess … And whatever happened to my own Great Novel?’

‘Well, what the hell’s stoppin’ ya? Just put the word “memory”, “road” or “ghost” in the title, which means that it’s gonna have a shitload of war and torture in it, and then it’ll be shortlisted for every bloody prize goin’.’

As I laughed, Archie switched off the football match and turned to face me. ‘By the way, foreplay for Australian men is the technical term for turning off the telly,’ he said, and then he leant forward and kissed me.

I gave the surprised gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea. I felt an instinctive sexual quickening within me, an unexpected fizz of exhilaration. He tasted like coffee beans, a smoky, burnt flavour of amaretto and caramel. His spicy, musky tang of sweat and wine and smoke enhanced my senses. His beard was rough on my face. I savoured the weight and bulk and muscle of the man. An electric current ran from my tonsils to my toes and quite a few places in between. I stopped fretting and felt myself vanish into the moment.

When we broke apart, Archie gave me a look which was both tender and lascivious. Even though my heart was beating insubordinately, I decided to utilize Archie’s Aussie foreplay technique in reverse and flicked the telly back on. Confused, I slunk to my end of the couch and pretended to be riveted by a re-run of a Romanian darts final that had come on. Big emotional displays were no longer my forte. These days I was better at bitterness and sarcasm. I sat in taut, bamboozled silence until Merlin rattled his key in the lock. He practically Nureyeved down the hall.

‘My first date!’ He was helium-filled with happiness. ‘What a majestic evening. I had a very special moment in my life. The atmosphere was electric. I ripped off my shirt and started busting out some phenomenal moves. It made me feel immortal … I think I have a mesmerizing personality, don’t you, Mum?’

I laughed. ‘Yes, darling, you do.’ My son seemed to have ripened and grown almost luminous. He launched himself at me for his usual bearhug, squeezing the breath out of me as though I were a fleshy accordion. His shivering delight transmitted itself to me.

‘Lucky Merlin,’ Archie said softly, an audible smile in his voice.

I wished Archie goodnight with the formality of a French courtier and retreated to my bedroom. Shortly after, a note was slipped under my door.

Just got a very interesting call from the chairman of the International Missed Golden Opportunities Commission.

I think they want to honour you at their next big gala.

I gave them your number.

Signed, YRRGC (Your Resident Rock God Chum)

I lay in bed, wide awake, Archie’s touch whispering away on my skin. I found myself wondering how he would move in bed, how he’d smell, how his powerful legs would feel wrapped around me. And then I heard music. Soft, liquid notes lured me out into the corridor and Pied Pipered me to the top of the stairs. A cascade of melody spilt into the hall below. It was Archie, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. The surprising poignancy of the composition and the tender timbre of his voice gave me goose-pimples on my goose-pimples. By the time the song concluded, Archie had gained an entire new dimension. There was a fascination about him now. Retreating to my bed, I realized that the man was not a Neanderthal after all. He’d positively moved up the evolutionary scale to Homo erectus. It was obvious to me that Archie had been putting on an act … As had I.