Making of Us

by Lisa Jewell

  She took the folder to the armchair and settled herself against the heavy upholstery. She held the folder for a while on her lap, feeling the full enormity of her task, the totality of Daniel’s trust in her. There were lives contained inside this folder. People. Stories. And, more importantly, there were secrets. Maggie didn’t care for secrets. Or lies. She didn’t have the right sort of mind for juggling all the requisite bits and pieces, the things you shouldn’t say, the people you shouldn’t mention certain things to, the words that had ‘never been spoken’, the events that had ‘never taken place’. It was all too confusing and nerve-racking. A life without secrets and lies was a simple path to walk. Inside this folder were lives with so many layers of complexity that it made Maggie dizzy just to contemplate them.

  Daniel did not have a computer. ‘Who am I going to send an e-mail to?’ he’d protested. ‘What is there on the internet that I cannot find on my bookshelves? What?’

  ‘But what about booking holidays?’ Maggie had countered.

  ‘Holidays! Ah, yes, holidays,’ he’d replied. ‘I do not go on holidays. I have the sea an hour from my door and I live in one of the most beautiful towns in this country. I take my holidays on my terrace.’ He’d smiled, and Maggie had smiled and thought that she’d never met anyone as simultaneously fascinating and utterly prosaic as Daniel in all her life.

  She would need to take the papers home, back to her house, use her own computer. Her work here was done. But still, it struck her that maybe there was more she could do. She may never come back to this flat. She had no legal right to enter it. She was not included on any of Daniel’s official paperwork. It was likely that she would be the one to deal with his affairs when he was gone, but it was not definite, and supposing, she pondered, supposing she traced a child or two and supposing that child or two wanted to make contact with Daniel and supposing this all happened too late, that Daniel was comatose or, worse, that he was gone. What would she be able to tell that person about the man they’d wanted to meet?

  She could recount her own memories of him, retell her own few meagre anecdotes. But that would not be enough. She had only known this man for a year, and for most of that time he had been dying. She knew so little about him. He was so opaque and impenetrable. She knew that he had an elderly mother, a bachelor brother, that he’d once been a doctor, that he’d retired due to ill health. (He hadn’t elaborated but she’d suspected that the illness had been more mental than physical. People generally liked to talk about their physical ailments. Mental illness on the other hand …) She knew that he had a boat by the sea at Aldeburgh, a dinghy, called Clarissa. (She did not know why it was called Clarissa and she had never had the opportunity to see the boat as Daniel had stopped taking it out when his back started to trouble him, at exactly the same time that he had come into Maggie’s life. She felt it again, that stab of hurt that she really had missed the best of Daniel by such a small margin.)

  She knew that he liked to read and he liked to drink and he liked to eat, that most of the restaurateurs of Bury and the surrounding hamlets knew him by name and shook his hand warmly when he walked into their establishments. She did not know how he could afford to eat out so regularly or how he had afforded to furnish his generously proportioned home so finely or how he paid for the champagne and the wine and the smart clothes and the private physiotherapy. She knew nothing about this man that would really be of any help to a child asking questions and she would hate to pull someone out of their blanket of ignorance and then be unable to give them anything more than a vague sense of a person that they would never get to meet.

  So she went into Daniel’s kitchen and she found a stash of crumpled carrier bags and she then went about filling the bags with what she could only describe as mementoes. It seemed a terrible thing to be doing, stripping the essence of the man away from his home, without his permission, without his knowledge, and it was ordinarily not at all the sort of thing that Maggie would ever do. But this situation was far from ordinary. Daniel had not asked her to do an ordinary thing. The normal rules did not apply.

  She put into a bag the two small framed photos of the long-ago married couple. (‘And this’, she imagined herself telling a dumbstruck twenty year old, ‘is a photo of your father’s parents. Your grandparents, I suppose.’) She put in a bottle of his aftershave (something in a ribbed glass bottle from a shop called Trumper’s, that smelled like cucumbers and cut grass). She found some old Boots photo packets stuffed with pictures of Daniel in various guises: on his boat, sitting on a bench with a lady friend, at the Henley Regatta in a straw boater, holding someone’s King Charles spaniel. She only flicked through them cursorily, having no desire to study them in depth without their owner’s permission. She took a photo album filled with tiny black-and-white photos of long-dead relatives in flapper dresses and long-nosed cars. She took notebooks filed along a shelf, although she did not open them to see what they might contain, feeling that that too went some good way beyond the pale. She took a framed map from the wall, a watercolour representation of the area around Dieppe from where he came, and she took a small blue address book from the telephone table. And then she straightened up the cushion on the armchair to remove the imprint that her behind had left in it, took one last look around the place, and quietly, respectfully, pulled the door closed behind her and headed for home.

  LYDIA

  Lydia had bought a cat. It was blue with a squashed face and fat cheeks. She’d bought it from a dealer on the internet who bred them in a semi-detached house just outside Kettering. The house had been cold, ugly and not warm enough, but the lady had been kind and loving and had seemed almost tearful to say goodbye to the bear-faced cat she’d called Samsara. The cat was a British Blue. Lydia had seen one on an advert for room deodorant and fallen instantly in love. A blue cat that looked like a bear. She’d always been a dog person. But now she was a cat person. It made sense really. Everything about her screamed CAT. Her big empty house, her crush on a gay personal trainer, her faltering friendship with her only real friend, her high-powered job. CAT CAT CAT.

  She called the cat Queenie. The cat was three years old. The breeder had kept her from an earlier litter but it turned out that she was infertile and would not be able to earn her keep. It also meant that she was toilet-trained and not entirely obsessed with balls of string and endless play. From the moment Lydia had unlocked the door on Queenie’s box, it had been clear that she had found herself the right animal. Queenie had delicately shaken out each leg in turn, surveyed the room, spied the white leather modular sofa in the glass extension and immediately jumped upon it, the most expensive piece of furniture in the house. The sun had picked her out, turning her fur duck-egg, and Lydia was sure she saw the cat smile with pleasure, as if to say: ‘Finally, I am in surroundings in keeping with my status as a small blue goddess.’

  The presence of the cat in her home had given her existence some much-needed soft edges. Queenie slept in Lydia’s bed at night and woke her gently in the mornings by pressing her nose against hers and padding her chest gently with her soft feet. The cat then followed her from bed to shower, from shower to dressing room, from dressing room to kitchen and from kitchen to office.

  Juliette hated the cat. She’d recoiled in horror the first time she’d seen Queenie sitting imperiously upon the bright white sofa, studiously licking her own anus. The cat and Juliette had exchanged a knowing look and Juliette had clutched her chest and said something in Tagalog that sounded like a curse, before turning on her heel and leaving the room.

  Lydia had taken full responsibility for the litter tray and the small plastic bowls that Queenie ate her biscuits from. (Lydia loved to watch her eat biscuits. She especially loved the particular tone of the crunch the cat made as she smashed them between her tiny teeth.)

  Queenie was currently sitting on the armchair in Lydia’s dressing room, watching her with interest as she tried to examine the contours of her bottom in the mirror behind her. Lydia had not devote
d much of her life to thinking about her bottom. But today she was wearing new gym trousers. They were very fitted with lots of seams and contours and constructed from a hi-tech fabric with a slight sheen to it. They were not for the faint-hearted and Lydia, when it came to her appearance, was very faint-hearted indeed. She spoke to the cat (what use was a cat to a single woman if you could not speak to it?): ‘I think I can get away with this. Don’t you? I mean, it’s not as if I’m exactly fat. It’s just, you know, lumpy bits. But honestly, anyway, what does it matter? He’s gay. Isn’t he? Do you think he’s gay? You’ve met him. What did you think?’

  Queenie threw her a slightly embarrassed look and then turned away.

  Of course she’s embarrassed, thought Lydia, I am a women. And she is a cat. Lydia sighed and smoothed her hands down her buttocks one last time. She would wear the shiny leggings. If Bendiks was gay (of course he was), then he would not be perturbed by the sight of a few fleshy hillocks in the contours of her behind, but he would be pleased that she had thrown out the baggy fleece-lined joggers with the frayed drawstring waist. Lydia pulled her dark hair back into a tight ponytail and gave her overall appearance one last look before she and Queenie headed downstairs to greet him at the door.

  Bendiks looked different today somehow. He looked less groomed. His face did not look like it had been recently exfoliated and slathered with rich cream. His eyebrows did not appear to have been plucked and combed and his eyes were untroubled by any form of concealer, leaving his sockets looking grey and exposed. His hair was overgrown and he smelled, for once, of perspiration. ‘Hello, Lydia,’ he said. ‘How are you today?’ He dropped immediately to his haunches to pet the cat who had already wound herself around his legs. ‘And how are you, Miss Queenie? How are you today?’ He scratched behind her ears and Queenie’s already smiling face stretched out even further. Lydia’s cat had the same taste as Lydia in everything, it seemed, from sofas to music to men. Bendiks’ smile, on the other hand, was small and unconvincing. If Lydia had not known that Bendiks was an East European she might even have suspected that he’d been crying.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked as he stood up.

  ‘Oh, I’m fine. You know?’

  Lydia sensed a window inside the slightly pathetic ‘You know?’ for her to address his sadness. ‘You look …’ she began.

  ‘I know,’ he said, sadly. ‘I look terrible. It’s OK. You can tell me. I tell you when you look terrible. It is OK for you to return the compliment. I have not slept. In fact, I have not even laid down in order to sleep. I have been up all night.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Lydia, ‘you do look very tired. Is everything OK?’

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘Everything is not OK. Everything is appalling.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, trying not to sound too captivated by the notion of his plight. ‘God, come in, come in. Do you want anything. A tea? A coffee?’

  ‘Ha! A vodka would be better, I think.’

  ‘What, really?’

  ‘No,’ he laughed gruffly, ‘no. That is the last thing I should be doing. A coffee would be nice, though.’

  Lydia peered into the kitchen and asked Juliette very apologetically if she would mind making two double espressos and then led Bendiks on to the back terrace where the spring sunshine was playing on the decking and warming the cream cushions on the rattan furniture. Bendiks sat down and Queenie leaped balletically on to his lap, where she turned three times before settling herself into a ball and staring contentedly at Lydia. Bendiks dropped his chin into his chest and then buried his face in the cat’s body. ‘Shit,’ he said eventually, raising his face again and letting his head roll back on his shoulders. ‘Heavy, heavy, heavy.’ His voice cracked, just a touch, and Lydia froze. She wasn’t sure she was prepared for someone else’s tears right now. She watched him and waited for him to speak again.

  ‘Today,’ he began, eventually, ‘I am a bankrupt.’

  Lydia’s eyes widened.

  ‘Today, I have been to the court and been told that I am a bankrupt. That everything I own is no longer mine. That I am no longer allowed to work in this capacity and that all my credit cards are to be shredded. Today I have ceased to exist.’

  ‘Oh, my God, Bendiks, that’s terrible.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ He sighed and dragged his hands over his strained face. ‘It is totally terrible. I am destroyed.’

  ‘Oh, you poor, poor thing. How did this happen?’

  Bendiks shrugged and plucked at the cat’s fur disconsolately. ‘Credit cards. Overspending. The usual stuff. I’ve been really, really stupid. A real idiot.’

  ‘But,’ Lydia began gingerly, ‘isn’t being bankrupted a good thing when you’re in debt? I mean, like a fresh start?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Not where I come from,’ he said. ‘I have been reduced to the status of a child. No more credit. No more self-employment. I will have to go back to working in a gym, be an employee again. And I have had to give in my notice on my flat.’

  ‘Oh, no, why?’

  ‘Because it was too expensive. It was another stupid decision. I chose a flat I liked rather than a flat I could afford. I have been juggling everything in the air, you know, paying for my whole life on credit so that I could use my wages to pay for this stupid, beautiful flat. And now I will have to live on just my wages. So bye-bye beautiful one-bedroom flat in Willesden. Hello shitty flatshare in Wembley.’

  ‘You’ve already found someone to share with?’

  ‘Well, no. But I’ll have to do that. Probably someone from the gym. And I’ve seen their places. They’re shit-holes.’ He shuddered delicately and looked sadly at the floor.

  Lydia stared at him desperately. Her heart was breaking for him in a way that she hadn’t thought was possible. Lydia’s heart was a sedate organ generally. It sat silently within her and kept her blood flowing smoothly around her body. It occasionally leaped at the sight of an attractive animal or a beautiful man. It sometimes ached dully with loneliness or longing. And once it had even raced with nervous anticipation, in the run up to a live radio interview when she was a student. But most of the time her heart did nothing, felt nothing, sat in its box under her ribs, tick-tick-ticking away the seconds and the moments and the days. So this sensation, she would call it compassion, was a new one for Lydia to contemplate. Bendiks looked broken, there on her rattan sofa. He looked like the child he’d been reduced to in the bankruptcy hearing. She could not bear to think of him packing away his things into boxes and moving them all to a dank house full of people in some far-flung corner of London. She wanted him to feel good about himself. She wanted him to retain some pride. Because his pride was one of his most attractive features.

  ‘Stay here,’ she said, the words out of her mouth and hanging in the air before she’d had a chance to wonder what she was doing.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can rent you a room, for the same as you’d pay for the shitty flatshare. You’d have your own bathroom. Run of the house. Come and go as you please. Just while you’re sorting yourself out.’

  Bendiks’ face fell into an expression of soft amazement. ‘No,’ he said, one hand clasped to his chest. ‘Are you serious?’

  Lydia nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Why not? I mean, this house, it’s always been too big just for me.’

  ‘Yes, but Lydia, your privacy, your space … I would hate to infringe on that.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ she insisted. ‘I spend most of my time in my office anyway. We’d probably never even see each other.’ She ended her words with a small, sharp laugh. Even as she was speaking she was lining up the potential pitfalls of her rash suggestion. Awkward meetings in the kitchen in the mornings with last night’s fungus still coating her tongue and her hair flat and pillow-stale. Passing each other in corridors in states of incomplete dress. The possibility of strange men, women or both passing through the house and mangled sounds of coupling floating through walls at ungodly hours. And, worse still, the terrible prospect of unso
licited conversation, chatter, words, at unexpected junctures. Lydia was accustomed to a very small amount of speech in her day-to-day existence, and she liked it like that. Conversation was overrated, in her opinion.

  Her smile began to wither and wane as these misgivings flooded her thoughts. Would the distinct advantage of being able to see the fragrant Bendiks every day in an informal and intimate environment be quickly outweighed by the disadvantages of sharing her house with a man she barely knew?

  He seemed to have noticed Lydia’s frozen smile and was looking at her thoughtfully. ‘You have not thought this through, have you?’

  ‘No!’ she chimed. ‘I have! It’s fine!’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I love this house, Lydia. You know I do. And I would love to stay here with you. It would solve all my problems. It would be perfect. But I do not, under any circumstances, want you to feel uncomfortable or unhappy. Please, do not be afraid to say so if you’d rather I didn’t come to stay.’

  Lydia’s smile softened again. This would be fine. It would have to be fine. Because she could not say no to this beautiful man.

  ‘Honestly,’ she said. ‘It would be a pleasure. I want you to stay. I really do.’

  Bendiks beamed. ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I would love to accept. Thank you, Lydia. You have made me very, very happy.’

  She could not remember the last time she’d made anyone happy. She went through life touching no one, making no impact. And here it was, like a small, strange miracle. This man had walked into her home ten minutes ago looking grey and lost. Now his face had regained its colour, his whole demeanour was bright and energised. And she had done that. With one, rash, unplanned gesture. And when she looked at him, she felt more than compassion. This, she reminded herself, was a man who understood her. This was a man who had experienced loss. This was a man from a foreign land who had come to London and made a life for himself. This was a man that she felt comfortable with and actually, now she thought about it, this was a person she might quite like to have around as she stumbled towards the most nerve-racking and peculiar experience of her life.