Making of Us

by Lisa Jewell

  She’d pretended she was having a period. ‘A very heavy period,’ she’d said, gravely. ‘The heaviest I’ve ever had, I might even have to go to the doctor about it. And pains,’ she’d added, as an afterthought. ‘Really bad pains.’ She’d massaged her abdomen with her fist and winced.

  Jack had squeezed her shoulders gently and said, ‘Yes, you must, you must see a doctor.’

  ‘And I just feel generally, you know, rough,’ she’d said a moment later when he tried to kiss her. ‘I’m really, really sorry. I really am. I’m sure I’ll feel better soon.’

  He’d kissed the top of her head and she’d thought: That’s fine. A brother would kiss their sister’s head. She accepted her hands being held and squeezed shoulders and stroked hair and even a gentle nose-rub. Because in spite of all her fears and doubts and misgivings, she still loved Jack more than life itself.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked, as he handed her a tissue-wrapped parcel.

  ‘Open it,’ he said. He was perched behind her on the back of the sofa with his arm around her shoulder. The sun was bright through the window behind him and the whole room was bathed in a kind of optimistic light. She saw her fingers on her lap, clutching the delicate gift, which was held together with spirals of frangipani-hued ribbon. She’d bought him nothing. She felt sadness engulf her and breathed deeply to banish it. It was Saturday night. She was with her one true love. He’d bought her a gift. She pulled her shoulders back and began to unfurl the ribbons, peel back the paper. Inside was a cube of fabric, burnt orange, shot taffeta. She unfolded the cube and revealed a dress. The dress. The flame-coloured one she’d admired in the window of that shop all those weeks ago, just before she met Jack, when her life had felt normal and set on a predictable though dazzling course. She’d talked herself out of buying it with her birthday money. And now here it was, in her lap. The same dress.

  Jack felt her silence as disapproval and leaned down towards her. ‘Is it OK?’ he said. ‘Do you like it? I can take it back if you don’t. They said that would be fine. Only I saw it and I could just immediately see you in it …’

  ‘No, no, it’s fine. I love it. It’s just …’ She turned and looked up at him. ‘I saw this dress in a window. Just before I met you. And I nearly went in to buy it.’

  ‘What! The same dress?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She fingered the fabric thoughtfully.

  ‘Wow,’ said Jack, quietly. ‘Well, there you go then. Clearly we were meant to be together.’

  She smiled and attempted to laugh, but it wouldn’t come. Boys had bought her stuff in the past; underwear, perfume, even a pair of cubic zirconium earrings from Elizabeth Duke. The underwear had always been wrong; the wrong size, wrong colour, wrong type. The perfume had always been wrong, too, and as for the earrings … no one had ever bought her clothes before. Her mother had learned a long time ago that buying her daughter clothes would only lead to sadness and a return trip to the clothes shop. Robyn was a woman who knew what she liked and what she didn’t like.

  She stared at the dress in awe. What did this mean? She imagined for a second that Jack really was her brother. Not merely another child sired by the same man who had sired her, but her actual elder brother who had lived with her since the day she was born. Would her real brother have been able to pick out the single most perfect dress available on the high street and present it to her? No, her real brother would probably have totally forgotten it was her birthday and then dashed around the corner to pick her up a box of Ferrero Rocher from the corner shop. So was the fact of this dress actually a good thing? Did it in fact mean that their connection was based purely on romance and animal attraction and not on shared DNA?

  ‘Are you going to try it on?’ asked Jack, getting to his feet.

  ‘Er, yeah, sure.’ Robyn stood up slowly and headed towards the bedroom with the dress in her hands.

  ‘You don’t have to be shy,’ he laughed.

  ‘No, I know. I just, er, I need to use the bathroom, too.’ She forced a smile. ‘Back in a minute.’

  The dress fitted her perfectly. She’d known it would. She gazed at herself in the full-length mirror and admired the way the fabric clung to her waist and pushed up her breasts; the strangeness of the colour against her skin tone, the way it clashed with her hair. She was the only other person she knew who could have seen how well such a dress would have suited her. She decided she would wear it tonight, even though she was in sneakers and not heels. Jack’s face broke into a smile when she walked back in a moment later. ‘Wow,’ he said, admiring her, ‘I am good. Check out my hitherto undiscovered dress-buying skills! You look amazing. Come here.’

  She came to him and allowed him to hug her. She pressed her face against the softness of his sweater and smelled him through the layers of his clothes, that soothing, elegant, sweet smell of her lover. This is fine, she thought, this is right. There is nothing wrong with this scenario. My brother would not have chosen me this dress. My brother would not smell this good. And for the hundredth time that week she pushed her concerns to the very furthest reaches of her mind and slapped on a smile and tried to get on with the business of being in love.

  ‘Got you something else,’ said Jack, pulling gently away from her and smiling.

  ‘Oh, God, what?’ she replied, more harshly than she’d intended.

  ‘Well, it’s not a gift as such, it’s a suggestion. I was going to wait until dinner, but now that the dress has proved such a blinding success I’m all buoyed up, so …’ He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a tiny parcel wrapped in the same creamy tissue as the dress and tied with the same blossom-pink ribbon. ‘And no, don’t freak out, it’s not a ring.’

  She smiled nervously and pulled the ribbon from the parcel. Inside the tissue she found two brass keys on a small brass ring.

  ‘For here,’ said Jack.

  ‘Keys?’ said Robyn, somewhat redundantly.

  ‘Yes. They’re for you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘right.’

  ‘I was thinking …’ He paused then and she could see nerves plucking at the muscles beneath his skin. ‘I hate it when you’re not here. I mean, not that I can’t live without you or anything. But all the planning and stuff, just to be together. And all the travelling you’re doing, back and forth. And your college is literally half an hour away. I just thought it would make more sense for you to, you know, maybe move in?’

  Robyn blinked.

  ‘Live together.’

  She blinked again.

  ‘I mean, I know we’ve only been together for a few weeks, and I know you‘re only eighteen. But I would not tie you down, I promise you. You could come and go and do your own thing and go out every night if you wanted. But just for me to know that at the end of all that you would be here. With me. That’s all.’

  Living together. She let the concept settle in her mind. Living here, in this picturesque flat, waking every morning in Jack’s arms, strolling down his tree-lined avenue to the tube station, coming home from college to find Jack at his computer, tapping away at another well-regarded novel, opening a bottle of wine, drinking it in each other’s arms on the sofa while watching films and interesting documentaries. And doing that every day. She wanted that. She really, really wanted that. She’d wanted that since the first night they’d met; felt the pointlessness of the hours they spent apart, felt the futility of her solitary journeys home on the train, watching everything she cared about dashing away from her through the window in the wrong direction.

  And now he was offering it to her. And she couldn’t take it. Because everything was wrong. She sighed. And then she smiled. She took the keys from their wrapping and held them in the palm of her hand. ‘Can I think about it?’ she said.

  He looked shocked, but it passed in less than a moment. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘of course you can. Take as long as you like. It’s a big deal. I know that. But keep those.’ He pointed at the keys. ‘Keep them. They’re yours.’

  He fold
ed her hand over the keys and then kissed her on the lips.

  She let him.

  Hi, it’s me. Don’t turn me into a stalker. Tell me what’s going on. I can take it, whatever it is. I just need to know, J.

  Robyn sighed and switched off her phone. She felt sick. She had not eaten a proper meal in five days, subsisting on apples, cornflakes and Diet Coke. She had not seen Jack since Saturday. They’d had sex that night and now she couldn’t shake the memories of it from her consciousness. It had felt fine. She’d put everything to the back of her mind, thought about the dress, reassured herself that she wasn’t doing anything wrong and let herself enjoy it. Then the following morning she’d dropped the keys into her handbag, folded her taffeta dress into a carrier bag and left Jack’s flat wondering when or indeed if she would ever come back. If she did in fact discover that Jack was her half-brother then she would have to live with the fact that not only had she knowingly had sex with him, but she’d deceived him, too, by allowing it to happen. Every time she closed her eyes it was there, the two of them devouring each other. At the time it had felt like passion; now it felt like they’d behaved like animals. They’d had two female dogs when she was small, mother and daughter: most of the time they were indifferent to each other, but occasionally one of them would mount the other and hump it as hard as it possibly could. She thought of those two dogs now, doing something so random and so unnatural that had no actual evolutionary or anthropological point to it, and it made her think of herself.

  She switched the phone back on and looked at the message again: Dear Jack, she imagined herself replying, I cannot talk to you at the moment because it is possible that we have been incestuous. I am waiting to hear back from the clinic from whence I was sired to discover the identity of my real father so that I may happily eliminate this possibility from my mind. In the meantime, every time I think about what we have been doing together, I feel like I am going to throw up. Lots of love, Rx’

  Instead she typed: I’m really sorry. I’m not feeling well. It’s nothing you’ve done, I promise. I’ll be in touch soon, Rx

  A moment later her phone trilled at her. As long as I haven’t done anything to upset you. I will try to be patient. Missing you, Jxxx

  Finally, the following day, the postman brought Robyn what she’d been waiting for. It was contained within an expensive cream envelope, with a discreet postmark on it: WFC in curly capitals. She took the letter to her room and sat cross-legged upon her bed, regarding the unopened missive cautiously. Here it was. The first step on the road. Inside the innocuous cream envelope was a whole new world, a world she’d never wanted to set foot in, a world that terrified her. She breathed in deeply and then sliced it open with her finger.

  Dear Miss Inglis,

  Thank you for your enquiry regarding Donor 32. According to our records, there are three other live births relating to this donor. A girl in 1980, a boy in 1983, and a boy in 1989. There have been no further live births relating to this donor since yourself. We hope this information is of some assistance to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Wigmore Fertility Clinic

  Robyn let the letter drop on to her bedcover.

  A girl.

  Two boys.

  A girl.

  Two boys.

  A boy born in 1983.

  The same year that Jack was born.

  Everything inside her curdled as this fact weighed upon her.

  Suddenly every doubt she’d had about her fears and her concerns evaporated, leaving her with nothing but stark, bitter certainty. Somewhere out there was a twenty-seven-year-old man who was her brother. And it was probably her boyfriend.

  She stuffed the letter back into the envelope, screwed it into a tight ball and hurled it against her bedroom wall.

  Robyn’s mum folded up the evening paper she’d been reading at the kitchen table and got to her feet. ‘How about signing up to the Donor Sibling Register?’

  Robyn pulled the paper towards herself and stared at her mother in confusion. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘He’s not going to be on there. He thinks his dad was a Barnardo’s orphan killed in a car crash in France. If he is a donor baby, he doesn’t actually know.’

  ‘No, not to look for Jack. But if you find two boys and a girl on there, then you’ll know. You’ll know that it’s not him.’

  Robyn shuddered. She hated the thought of this other woman somewhere who shared her genes. She never wanted to meet her. Robyn would hate her, she knew she would. But it made sense, what her mum was saying. If she signed up to this Registry thing and found another man on there who was born in 1983 then she could dash to the train station, sprint down Jack’s Holloway avenue, leap into his arms, throw her arms around his neck and never, ever let him go.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said, pushing the paper away from her again, ‘you’re totally right.’

  She pushed the thought of the woman who shared her genes from the front of her mind and headed upstairs to her laptop.

  UK Donorlink was initially rather forbidding. Robyn downloaded a leaflet and felt winded by the amount of information she needed to process before she could even begin the registration process. And then she felt herself deflate as she realised how many hoops she was going to have to jump through before she was able to find out anything at all about her genetic siblings, male, female, or otherwise. First she would have to fill in a form, then she needed to undertake a DNA test, and then she would have to wait for the agency to get permission for any genetic matches to share their information with her … and everything was carried out in writing. It could take days or even weeks for her to find out what she needed to know. And in the meantime, she still had her boyfriend’s front door keys in her handbag and a huge gaping hole in her heart where he was supposed to be. She sighed, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and began to do what was necessary.

  Three days later a letter arrived. Robyn didn’t dare hope that it could be the Donor Sibling Register already. She had crawled her way through the weekend, painfully, as if over shards of glass, imagining Jack in his light-filled flat, bumbling around lost without her. She ripped it open, sparing not an ounce of patience. And there it was. One match. A female. She didn’t read on. She let the letter drop to the floor and then she let herself fall heavily upon the bottom stair. She felt she was going slowly insane. Two weeks ago, before she’d seen her own face in her boyfriend’s reflection, she had been walking a path through Nirvana. Two weeks ago she’d known exactly who she was and where she was headed and she’d had a man by her side who was going to help her get there. Now she’d come careening off the path and landed face down in a ditch. She felt wrong and misshapen, like all the angles and nuances of her most interior self had gone askew. Being with Jack had somehow loosened her bond to her parents. Meeting him had opened her up to the possibility of a life beyond being just a daughter. And now she was home again, a daughter again. And it wasn’t where she wanted to be. She’d had a taste of adult life and had it snatched away again. She wanted to go back to Jack. But she couldn’t go back to Jack. And she couldn’t even tell Jack why she couldn’t go back to him because he would freak out. And meanwhile the only chance she’d had of putting her mind to rest had turned out to be a big fat nothing. A woman. A bloody boring, horrible woman.

  She stared at the abandoned letter on the floor. She was furious with the Donor Sibling Registry and she was furious with the woman claiming to be her genetic sibling. Useless. Pointless. Conniving and conspiring to decimate her life totally. And then she felt angry with the man too, her donor father. He was a wanker. Literally, pejoratively, in every conceivable way, a wanker. What sort of man goes around giving his sperm away to strangers? What sort of man allows his DNA to be replicated and abused and ricocheted around the world without a backwards glance? What sort of man could abandon his offspring to the universe, toss them into the air like a pack of cards and then walk away before he’d even seen where they’d fallen?

  All her life she’d
been grateful to this man. All her life she’d put him on a pedestal, admired him, been grateful for his altruism. Altruism – the first four-syllable word she’d mastered as a child. She’d been born out of altruism. Altruism. Yeah, right. He was no better than some smalltown Romeo, spreading his seed around the village without a care for the consequences. He was just another jack-the-lad. An idiot. Selfish, short-sighted, cretinous and cruel.

  As these angry thoughts circled her mind Robyn found herself sobbing violently. Everything rose to the surface then: her poor lovely sisters; her parents who had never really lost the faded bruises of sadness behind their eyes, no matter how hard Robyn had tried to make them glad and proud; her beautiful Jack, sitting alone in the flat he’d offered up to her, wondering why she didn’t want to be in love with him any more.

  Robyn sobbed for about thirty minutes. It was the first time she’d cried since she was seventeen. Robyn didn’t like to cry. It wasn’t her style. But these tears were overdue and these tears were necessary and the house was empty so she let them come for as long as they needed to. Until she was stopped in her tracks by the sound of the doorbell chiming. She blinked at the front door. Who could this be? Nobody ever came to the house during the day except the postman and he’d already been. She mopped her face with a tissue, examined the carnage of her red-raw facial features in the mirror next to the door and then sniffed a tentative: ‘Hello?’

  ‘Robyn?’ It was a woman’s voice, loud and direct.

  ‘Yes? Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Sam. It’s Jack’s mum. Can you let me in?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Robyn, almost in a whimper.

  She took another look at her face. She looked like a girl who had been crying for half an hour. She would need to find a reason.