The Making of Us (6 page)

She’d known she was more than the daughter of a semi-literate fishmonger. She’d known it. Deep down inside herself. She’d felt more related to her old dog Arnie than to her father. The guilt she’d carried for half her life, the guilt of wanting her father to be dead so that she could get on with her life, it lifted and it floated away from her, like an exorcised demon. All that was left was a jumbled sense of strangeness and newness and sadness and delight. She drank another tumbler of gin and lime and she typed the address of the Donor Sibling Registry into her address bar. As the page loaded she felt a quickening in her chest, a sense of rising panic. She wasn’t ready. She closed the browser, shut down her computer and headed for a deep and unsettling sleep full of dreams of strangers.

She phoned Dixie the next morning. Her friend sounded startled to hear from her.

‘Sorry,’ said Lydia, ‘were you in the middle of something?’

‘No, no,’ said Dixie, stifling a yawn, ‘no, I was just, er, just having a sleep.’

Lydia considered the hour. 11 a.m. It was not like Dixie to be sleeping at 11 a.m., not with shelves to be rearranged and books to be read and people to be having potentially career-enhancing conversations with. Dixie took sleep very much as something forced upon her against her will, something she submitted to once a day and then emerged from groggily and crossly, as though sleep had stolen her soul.

‘Yeah,’ she continued, ‘Viola had a bad night. She’s out for the count now so I thought I’d catch up on some lost sleep.’

‘Oh, shit, Dix, I’m really sorry. I didn’t think.’

Dixie cleared her sinuses loudly, almost, Lydia couldn’t help feeling, to ram home how utterly, deeply asleep she had just been and how much it had taken out of her to rouse herself for this phonecall. Lydia bridled slightly and said, ‘You should have kept your phone switched off.’

‘Yeah, you’re right.’ She snorted again, and yawned. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Don’t seem to be able to do much of that these days.’ She laughed drily.

These days
. That laugh. Lydia bridled again. She hated it when people had babies. No, not when people had babies. When
Dixie
had babies. Everyone else could sod off and have a hundred babies each for all she cared. She just didn’t want Dixie to have one. She’d only just got used to Dixie having Clem. ‘Boyfriend’ was foreign terrain to Lydia but she could make a tenuous grasp on it, having had one of her own at one point in her life. But ‘Baby’ was another planet entirely. ‘Baby’ was consuming in a way that even the neediest boyfriend was not. ‘Baby’ changed
everything
. And ‘Baby’, unlike ‘Boyfriend’, was irreversible.

‘That’s all right,’ she continued, trying her hardest to sound perky, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you but …’ She stopped. Before ‘Baby’ she would have been able to launch straight into the topic she’d called to discuss. Now there was this spectre hanging over everything. Would Dixie even
care
, she wondered, now that she lived in the land of ‘Baby’? Would it even register?
Sorry, a sperm donor, you say? Anyway, did I tell you about Viola’s last nappy?

‘How are you all?’ she managed.

‘We’re fine. I think. Are we fine, Clem?’ Lydia heard him grumbling something in the background. ‘Yes,’ Dixie came back on the line, ‘we’re fine. How are you?’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Hungover.’ The minute she’d said it she’d known it was the wrong thing to have said, insinuating as it did a night spent drinking sparkling wine and tequila-based cocktails somewhere fun and jazzy and nowhere near a new baby or a dirty nappy.

‘Oh, lucky you,’ sighed Dixie.

Lydia sighed too and thought about hitting Dixie with the reality of her night swallowing gin alone in the dark. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It was …’ She paused. It was horrible, she wanted to say, but before she could muster the first syllable a plaintive shriek cut into their conversation and Dixie was mumbling something about feeding time at the zoo and could she call her back in a minute, and Lydia said, yeah, sure, even though she knew it wouldn’t be a minute, it would be a hundred minutes at least, and wondered silently why Clem couldn’t take the squealing infant away for just a moment or two, but then knowing anyway that the physical absence of the squealing infant would not render her friend any more able to concentrate on anything beyond the realm of her current situation, and with a sense of dread and sadness Lydia realised that she was not going to be able to talk to her best friend about the most important thing that had happened to her in over a decade.

And so she hung up and Dixie disappeared in a metaphorical puff of smoke leaving Lydia feeling abandoned and alone.

Dixie didn’t call back a hundred minutes later. She didn’t call back three days later. She sent Lydia a text message on Saturday morning that read:
I just sprayed milk six foot across the room and hit the cat in the eye. What are you up to?
With every inch that Dixie stepped forward into the world of babies and normality, Lydia felt herself step an inch back, into the world of strangeness and solitude. She typed back:
Give the cat some goggles! I’m just hanging
. Dixie didn’t reply and Lydia didn’t expect her to. She spent the day alternating between working and drinking.

That night she pulled a photo album from her storage room and took it to bed with her. It was the one she’d kept when she’d moved out of the miserable flat she’d shared with her father. It was all she had of Glenys. Mum. There were no mothball-scented dresses or heirloom pearl earrings or locks of hair for Lydia to finger thoughtfully, her father had cleared out every last trace of her mother after her death, but he’d kept this. Lydia could not begin to fathom what sort of aberrational thought process had led to his putting it away for her, but he had and it was now her most treasured possession.

In the past she’d stared at these photos almost as though she was staring at photos of Marilyn Monroe or Queen Victoria, at a dead superstar; charismatic, unattainable, unknowable, powerful and gone. But she looked at them through different eyes that night. She’d always thought of her mother as just a girl. That’s what everyone had always said about her: She was a great girl. A fun girl. A sweet girl. A lovely girl. Ah, yes, Glenys, she was a
lovely girl
. But
girls
didn’t go to Harley Street to make babies out of thin air. Women did that. Women who wanted babies. ‘Your mother worshipped me, d’you know that? Worshipped the ground I walked on.’ Her father had said that. Not once, but repeatedly, his way of keeping her all for himself. But as Lydia stared at the photographs it suddenly struck her that her mother had loved her much more than she’d ever loved him. After all, she’d been prepared to risk absolutely everything for her.

On Sunday Lydia went for a walk. She was sober and tired and the pavement felt like sponge beneath her feet. The light was watery but she wore sunglasses, feeling as she did like a small half-blind creature emerging from hibernation. She walked three times round the old cemetery, averting her gaze from the playground where Asian nannies pushed French babies on swings and American power mummies tapped data into BlackBerries while their offspring slurped organic juices out of recyclable cartons. She walked up and down St John’s Wood High Street, past boutiques and bagel shops and baby clothes shops and double-parked four-wheel-drives, and she stared at every person she walked past with a kind of animal curiosity. Here she was, two miles from the place of her conception. Here she was, potentially, walking through herds of relations. She scrutinised the noses, the gaits, the hands, the eyes, of everyone she looked at. She spotted a similarity in the curve of someone’s jaw and found herself subconsciously following the hapless woman across the street and into a patisserie. She stopped herself at the entrance and turned back towards the street.

Lydia had always felt divided from the rest of the world, elevated almost. She’d always felt cleverer and quieter and stronger and more self-sufficient. Her dad had made her that way. He’d built her up to believe that she was invincible. And alone. And she was. She always looked on the remainder of humanity as just that, an amorphous mass, a sprawling splodge, of flesh and bone. Nothing to do with her. And still, at the age of twenty-nine, she had not had a connection with anyone as strong as the one she’d once shared with her childhood dog.

After an hour of this aimless, eccentric wandering, she headed home. She appraised her house from the pavement. A shiver ran through her. It was so big. So soulless. So unwelcoming with its opaque windows like blind milky eyes. It was, she realised with a sudden discomfiting burst of perspective, a true reflection of herself. Even Dixie said it to her sometimes: ‘You’re
scary
!’ And that was fine. Lydia was happy to be scary. Being scary kept the world away from your door. But now there was a tiny fleck of possibility that the world was on its way in, and that there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop it. But more surprising than that was the realisation that she didn’t actually want to.

That night, she took a plastic bottle of Sprite and a bag of Haribo Tangfastics up to her office. She twisted the lid of the bottle and waited a beat for the initial puff of sweetened gas to escape before removing it and taking a greedy gulp. She spent a few moments examining the contents of the bag of sweeties, testing her responses to the various options therein. Eventually she settled on a green and red bottle and chewed it contemplatively for a while. She thought about phoning Dixie. This seemed to be such an alarmingly big step to be taking in her life without a single soul knowing about it. The weekend had been long and intense. She felt absolutely removed from reality. She felt scared and excited and sick. On the other side of her next action was another existence. She imagined Dixie sitting with a baby on her gigantic breast, staring mindlessly into space, sighing at the sight of Lydia’s number on her phone display. No. She would do this alone.

She typed in the web address and she filled in the online forms. Then she ate another sweetie, this one in the shape of a baby’s dummy.

Days passed after Lydia posted her details on to the Donor Sibling Registry. They passed slowly and tiresomely, like plodders on the high street, blocking her progress. January became February. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything. She couldn’t see beyond her in box. All day she hovered over her computer, eating sweets, ignoring the phone, checking and checking and checking again her e-mail. The only sparks of life inside this blanket of hibernation were her thrice-weekly sessions with Bendiks and an invitation on her desk to a
Welcome to the World
party for Viola in three weeks’ time.

She was at home now, waiting for Bendiks. He was training her here today because he’d parted ways with the health club in the mews. Lydia hadn’t asked why. But she was feeling oddly nervous now as the minutes crawled their way towards eleven o’clock. In only moments Bendiks would be here, in her home. She would open the door and he would smile and she would invite him in … and in another parallel existence it would be evening and she would open a bottle of wine and they would talk across a flickering candle and then retire to bed to explore each other’s bodies for half the night under Lydia’s freshly changed bedding. But in this existence, this existence of stark, unupholstered reality, she would lead him into the wellness room in the basement (yes, she had a wellness room. It had already been here when she bought the house) and he would make her do boring and repetitive things for forty-five minutes and then he would go and she wouldn’t see him again for forty-eight hours.

She glanced at herself in the mirror before descending the stairs. She looked ghostly and vaguely demented. Juliette had jumped when she’d walked in this morning and seen Lydia on the stairs and immediately made her a roast chicken sandwich. Bendiks was less fazed.

‘Good morning, Lydia,’ he said, swinging through her front door with a gym bag and a scent of cinnamon and musk. ‘You have a very nice house.’

‘Thank you,’ she replied, allowing him past her and into the hallway.

He was, as usual, pristinely turned out. It was wrong on so many levels for Lydia to feel the way she felt about Bendiks. He was probably gay. In fact, yes, of course he was. Of course he was gay. His manicured eyebrows, his immaculate black hoodie, his whitened teeth and his pretty tattoos. Of course he was. She hoped he was. If Bendiks was gay then she could stop feeling this way every time she came into contact with him. If Bendiks was gay then she could just carry on living her life.

‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘A glass of water?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ he patted his gym bag, ‘I have my bottle.’ He smiled at her and she felt it. He was not gay. A gay man would not smile at a woman that way. She was sure of it.

‘So,’ she began, leading him down the stairs to the basement, flicking a switch as she went, ‘did you have a good weekend?’

‘Yeah, it was OK. Pretty dull. How about you?’

‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘the same.’

He laughed. ‘If this was my house,’ he said, ‘I would fill it every weekend with beautiful people and make a big, big party.’

Lydia smiled wryly. ‘I don’t know any beautiful people,’ she replied, drily.

‘You know me.’

‘That is true,’ she said. She flicked another switch.

‘Wow, look at it down here, this is amazing.’

‘Yeah,’ she scratched her neck, ‘can’t say I come down here very often.’

‘But it is like your own spa! You have a whirlpool!’

‘Yes, and a sauna. And a treatment room, here.’ She pushed open a door and showed him a small white room painted with cherry-blossom sprigs. ‘And a home cinema, through there.’

Bendiks’ perfect eyebrows were sitting somewhere within reach of his hairline. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Wow.’

Lydia didn’t feel any gratification at his reaction. Try as she might, she could not make this house feel like it had anything to do with her. In her head it still belonged to the slightly forbidding American couple she’d bought it from, to Caitlin and Tom Schnobel and their three handsome teenage sons. In her head the three spare bedrooms belonged to those boys, and this vast dug-out pleasure dome of a basement belonged to Caitlin (‘Call me Cait’). Lydia half-expected them all to walk back in one day with a set of matching luggage and Caribbean tans and thank her for minding their house for them.