I think I believed he was a Martian for about a year.
I must have been four,
aware, as I was, of the polished dining-room floor.
I remember I was very close to it.
And he must have been five-and-a-half.
And it was the only thing he ever told me that wasn’t true.
There were other things that I didn’t want to know:
that an Atom Bomb might blow up the world;
that the lounge-room fights, every night,
were not all Daddy’s fault.
He explained osmosis for me,
and I got into trouble at school, when I already knew
that three take away five is minus two.
In his sleep he would recite A squared plus B,
and he told me that popular was just another word for
phoney.
He told me how love was a kind of decision you made, right
or not.
His Teilhard de Chardin books at the head of his boy-bed, and
he wrote…
Life is a blank page, and you are my dot.
The Day of the Triffids was juvenile, he said,
lying in bed with his arm broken in three places,
a tiny transistor radio always within reach.
I remember the close smell of his room that year-
it was the smell of a man taking a boy’s place
inside a chrysalis of plaster.
And I wonder, sometimes, whether even the story of being a
Martian
was not a lie, but an attempt to describe
his inexplicable arrival in such a foreign place-
like when Baby Superman was wrapped and sent
in his interstellar baby capsule
to end up living with Mr and Mrs Kent.
