Making of Us

by Lisa Jewell

  She nodded and turned to look out of the window. She was staring at the back view of London, at squat yards and stacked windows and brick walls and dirt. There were three hours ahead of them. Three hours to talk. And there was plenty to talk about.

  ‘So,’ she began, ‘did you get the letter?’

  Dean’s eyes opened wide. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. Bit shocking, isn’t it?’

  She nodded. ‘What do you think about it?’

  ‘I think …’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I think. I mean, I was just about dealing with meeting you.’ He exhaled. ‘Christ. I don’t know. I’m freaking out a bit, I think. What about you?’

  ‘The same,’ she said. ‘I feel the same. That’s why … well, that’s why I want to do this. I need to, you know, clean up the old mess before I get stuck into a new one.’

  ‘You think it’ll be a mess?’

  She smiled. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I mean, look at us. Only three meetings and you went AWOL. Clearly I’m not very good at this reuniting thing.’

  Dean looked genuinely upset by her comment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘God, no. It wasn’t you. It totally wasn’t you. It was me. It was just …’

  ‘I know what it was, Dean. It’s OK. I pushed it too far. I shouldn’t have come down heavy on you about the baby.’

  ‘It wasn’t the baby. Honestly. It wasn’t that. It was just … I just felt like you were …’ he looked up at her with his large brown eyes ‘… like you were too good for me.’

  Lydia smiled and shook her head. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s what I thought. And that was another reason why I wanted you to come with me today. I wanted you to see where I came from. I wanted you to understand me and not just be put off by all the bollocks my money has bought me. I’m no different from you, Dean.’

  He looked at her sceptically.

  ‘Honest, I’m not. You’ll see. You really will.’

  He glanced out of the window. ‘I really like you, you know,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s nothing personal, that I’ve been off radar. I think you’re amazing.’

  She looked at him and smiled. ‘Well, I know you’ll probably think I’m just saying this because you’re so flipping insecure, but I liked you the minute I saw you and I’ve liked you more and more ever since. You just need to sort out your self-esteem issues.’

  ‘You can talk!’ he teased.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, you, you’re all rich and super-successful, you’re really good-looking, and you walk around acting like you’re just some … blob.’

  ‘I do not!’ she countered.

  ‘You do, man. You’re all just, like this …’ He curled his upper back into a hump and looked at her nervously. ‘You’re all, Don’t look at me, avert your gaze. You know?’

  She shrugged, feeling suddenly under attack. And then she sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘like I said, we’re the same, you and me. We’re just the same. Pathetic creatures. Pitiful, really.’ She paused and looked at him. And then they both laughed.

  After a moment Lydia said, ‘What do you think the other one will be like? The girl? Robyn? Do you think she’ll be a pitiful creature, too?’

  Dean stopped laughing and considered the question. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said. And then he paused and smiled. ‘I hope so.’

  Lydia laughed again and they both quietened then and stared through the window at the bland city fringes scenery.

  After a while Dean’s face became more tense and it was clear he was about to say something.

  ‘You were right, though,’ he said. ‘You were right about the baby. I’m a loser. I hate myself. Every morning I wake up and I look in the mirror and I see her eyes looking back at me, you know? The same eyes. Every morning she looks at me in the mirror and she goes: You loser. And she’s right.’

  Lydia stared at him as he spoke. She thought of herself at his age. She thought of her life at university, pulling pints and fiddling with test tubes and keeping out the world. Could she have looked after a baby? Could she have looked after an ill baby? On her own? And, more to the point, would she have wanted to?

  He was not a loser, but she would not be able to tell him that. She would have to show him that. So she said nothing and let the pair of them return to a state of restful and contemplative silence while the train took them speedily and urgently towards Wales.

  It was warm when they dismounted from it. Lydia hadn’t expected it to be warm. She pulled off her cardigan and tied it around her waist. Dean replaced his baseball cap and they headed for the taxi rank.

  Lydia felt a chill run through her, in spite of the humidity. She wondered how many hours of her life she had spent at the Cardiff taxi rank. She saw flashes of herself at seventeen, at eighteen, at nineteen. She saw herself in a battered leather jacket, Arnie at her side dressed in a blue bandana and a frayed rope collar. She saw herself younger, hand in hand with her father, heading back home after a stressful journey to Bangor to see her grandmother, dying in a bed in her own front room. She felt herself walking side by side with a dozen ancient versions of herself, and she felt every iota of the misery she’d felt every time she’d been here. Apart from the last time. She saw herself then, freshly graduated, liberated from her family and her past, her things in a trunk, her hair in a brand new twenties bob, Dixie at her side, heading away from Wales and towards London Town.

  She’d vowed to herself, and to Dixie, that she would never, ever come back. She remembered sitting on the train, puffing on a cigarette, staring through the window and saying to Dixie, ‘This is the best moment of my life.’

  For a moment, Lydia cursed herself for breaking her own vow and for tainting the perfection of that moment eight years earlier. But then she looked at her brother, thin and stooped as he followed her towards the taxi rank, and she remembered why she was here.

  ‘Can you take us to Tonypandy, please?’ she asked a man who was folding away a copy of the Penarth Times.

  He eyed her blandly and hit the switch on his meter. ‘What takes you that way?’ he asked, looking at her in the rear-view mirror a moment later.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘nothing. Just family.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, nodding knowingly. ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll need you for the whole day, if that’s OK? Do you have a day rate?’

  ‘Eighty pounds,’ he said, succinctly, and then he turned off his meter.

  Lydia was glad of Dean’s presence in the taxi with her. It kept the focus off making conversation with the driver. Instead she pointed out landmarks to her brother as they drove. That’s where I used to work behind the bar when I was a student. That’s where we went to collect my puppy from when I was eight. That’s the market where my dad used to work. That’s the place that does the best fish and chips in Glamorgan. That’s the hill where I first got stoned.

  ‘You got stoned?’ he asked, whisking his head round to look at her.

  ‘Of course I did.’

  He smiled at her, uncertainly. ‘You never told me that,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well, what did you expect me to say? “Hi, I’m Lydia, and when I was a student I used to smoke weed”?’

  She watched the scenes of her past flash by from the taxi window and then she stiffened as the outskirts to her village appeared. She stared in queasy awe at the 7Eleven with the wheelchair ramp outside where she used to buy herself treats and fizzy drinks, and then, when her dad was ill, where she used to do all the household shopping. She gazed at the hair salon, once called Hair Today, now painted guacamole green and called The Village Spa. She saw the shops give way to terraces and the terraces give way to sprawling estates and then there it was, her block. Ugly as ever, four floors of pebble-dashed mediocrity, set behind a small patch of grass and a play area.

  The play area had been made over, carpeted in springy blue plastic and planted with brightly coloured bouncy ponies and rubberised baby swings. A young woman sat reading a magazine on a bench while her small boy sat at her fe
et, twirling the wheels on his scooter. A rubbish bin by the bench was filled to overflowing with squashed pizza boxes, empty cans and a balled up nappy. Beyond the grass and the play area there was a paved walkway that encircled the whole building and led to the entrance at the side.

  The young mother on the bench looked up as she saw Dean and Lydia walking towards the flats. She smiled wanly, as though she thought she should know them, and then returned her gaze to her magazine.

  ‘Which one was yours?’ asked Dean, looking up.

  Lydia pointed at a balcony on the third floor. ‘That one,’ she said.

  ‘And that’s the balcony…?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She glanced down at the paving. Felt her insides shrink together. Her flesh ran with horror. There it was. Still there, after all these years. The smudge of paint. She dropped to her haunches and stared down at the innocuous pink curl. She put out her hand and touched it with her fingers. Her mother’s hand. She remembered again the silver swans and the lovesick budgie and the circles in the magazines. She searched around inside her head to see if there was anything else to remember, anything she’d left behind. But she found nothing.

  ‘Come on.’ She got to her feet. ‘Let’s go in.’

  The stairwells were empty and seemed somehow less forbidding than they had when she was younger. On the third level she stopped. In front of her was the place she’d called home for the first eighteen years of her life. She pulled in her breath, straightened her clothes and then she knocked, hesitantly, against the door.

  It was opened by a slightly breathless elderly man with greasy white hair and a tortoiseshell cat held in his arms. ‘Who is it?’ he asked, peering at them blindly.

  ‘My name’s Lydia Pike,’ she said. ‘I used to live here.’

  The man’s face relaxed and he put the struggling cat down. It attempted to squeeze through the front door but the man yanked it back by its collar. ‘Quick, quick, come in, before this one does a runner.’ They slipped through his door and into a flat that smelled of stale clothes and fried eggs, and the man pushed the door closed behind them.

  ‘So,’ he said, appraising them, ‘your Trevor’s girl?’

  She looked at him in surprise.

  ‘I wondered when you’d be back,’ he chuckled.

  ‘Sorry?’ She began following him into what had once been her living room but was now very clearly the living room of an elderly man. ‘Did you know my dad?’

  ‘Yes. I did. I used to live on the other side of the building, over there, overlooking the fields. Then I was made a widower and my son got married and it was just me so I asked for a smaller place. They offered me this and I knew no one else would want it, on account of what happened.’ He sighed sadly and looked at Lydia with watery eyes. ‘I’m not a believer in all that karma stuff, you know. I don’t believe in negative energy, or whatever it’s called. And I liked to have the view of the people, you know. I like to sit and look at the kiddies on the swings and watch the world coming and going. I was bored of the view the other side and this suited me just fine. So I snapped it up. Been here on my own ever since.’

  Lydia blinked. She had been expecting a young family. She had been expecting nothing to remain here of her past. Yet here it was. Sitting right in front of her.

  ‘So, do you remember me?’ she asked, uncertainly.

  ‘That I do.’ He nodded, easing himself into his ugly nylon sofa. ‘You had a dog. You were a bit moody, if I recall.’ He smiled at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Pat,’ he said. ‘Pat Lloyd. You might remember my son. Tony. Tony Lloyd?’

  She gasped. She did remember. Tony Lloyd had Down’s Syndrome and used always to stop and cuddle Arnie when he passed them on the stairs or in the garden.

  ‘I remember Tony,’ she said, ‘and he got married, you say?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Took us all by surprise that did. But they’ve been together ten years now, still as happy as the day they met.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Lydia, ‘that’s lovely, that is.’

  ‘So,’ he looked from her to Dean and back again, ‘what brings you back around here then?’

  He was looking for an introduction so Lydia gave him one. ‘This is my brother,’ she said. ‘We’ve only just been reunited. I wanted to show him where I came from.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He stopped and smiled at Dean. ‘I can see the likeness,’ he said, ‘between the two of you. I can see you’re kin.’ Dean and Lydia smiled at each other. ‘But I thought …’ his mouth hung open, mid-sentence. He blinked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, never mind. Anyway, can I make you both a pot of tea?’

  ‘You thought what?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Just getting myself confused.’ He got to his feet. ‘I’d offer you coffee but I’m clean out. Or I think I’ve got some barley water somewhere.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. We’ve got a taxi waiting, we can’t stay.’

  He smiled sadly and returned to the sofa.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how’s life been to you?’

  Lydia nodded. ‘I’ve got a good life,’ she said.

  ‘Married? Any babies of your own?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘just a cat.’

  ‘Cat’s no substitute for a child. What about you?’ he addressed Dean.

  Lydia looked at Dean. Watched the pinkness leave his skin. ‘Er, yeah, I’ve got a baby. A little girl.’

  The old man smiled, satisfied it seemed that at least one of the strangers in his living room had added to the population. ‘Ah!’ he said suddenly, rising to his feet again. ‘Since you’re here, I’ve been keeping this all these years and not known what to do with it …’ He headed towards the door of what had once been her father’s bedroom. ‘Wait here,’ he said. He returned a moment later clutching a rather vintage carrier bag. ‘Now this,’ he began, holding the bag on his lap and opening it slightly, ‘I found when I was replacing the fitted wardrobes. It was hidden inside a sort of false cubby hole. Never knew what to make of it and had no one to ask. But now, well,’ he turned to Dean and smiled, ‘I suppose this should really be for you. Here, take it.’

  Dean blinked at him in surprise, wondering what part he could possibly play in this story. ‘Are you sure, mate?’ he asked.

  The man nodded and handed him the bag. Dean opened it gingerly and Lydia watched him peer inside. ‘What?’ he said, looking up again at the old man. ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Well, they must be yours,’ said Pat, ‘being blue and all.’

  Dean put his hand inside the bag and pulled out a tiny pair of blue cotton leggings, a blue and white striped jacket and a pair of miniature white socks.

  ‘You mean, for my daughter?’ asked Dean, his eyes screwed shut with confusion.

  ‘Well, no, yours. These must be yours. From when you were, you know, from when you were a baby.’

  ‘But I’ve never been here before in my life,’ said Dean, with a small laugh.

  ‘Well, I suppose you don’t remember it, being so small, but you must have been.’

  Lydia interrupted. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You mean, there was a baby here? A baby boy?’

  ‘Why, yes,’ said Pat, his eyes opening in surprise, ‘don’t you remember? Just before she died, your mother had a baby. A baby boy.’

  And as Pat said these words, Lydia looked at the pile of baby clothes on Dean’s lap and saw, with a flash of shock and revulsion, on the sleeves of the striped jacket, a smudge of candy pink paint, dried to an immovable crust.

  ROBYN

  Daniel Blanchard. Fifty-three years old. Bury St Edmunds. Daniel Blanchard. Fifty-three years old. Bury St Edmunds.

  Robyn held the sheet of paper in her hands and stared at it. She had not been expecting this. Donor Sibling Registry it was called. For siblings. Brothers and sisters. Not fathers. She had not been thinking about her father. But he, it appeared, had been thinking about her. And the others. He wanted to make contact. Daniel B
lanchard. Her father.

  Jack brought her in a cup of tea and placed it on the table in front of her.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said, sitting down and resting his hand against her leg.

  Robyn grabbed his hand in hers and nodded. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have done this,’ she said. ‘I knew it was a mistake.’

  ‘You don’t have to see him.’

  ‘No. I know. But then I’ll have to go through the rest of my life knowing that he wanted to see me. And that I rejected him. I’ll go through the rest of my life feeling guilty.’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to feel guilty for!’ said Jack. ‘This was his choice! His choice and your parents …’

  ‘They didn’t have any choice,’ she snapped, defensively.

  ‘No. But you know what I mean; none of this is your fault. You didn’t ask to be in this situation and, frankly, if this man wanted children he could talk to, he should have had them the normal way.’

  ‘But he lives in Bury St Edmunds!’ she wailed.

  Jack looked at her curiously.

  ‘I mean, I’ve been to Bury St Edmunds! I might have passed him in the street! I thought he lived in France! He wasn’t supposed to live here! And now I can never go to Bury St Edmunds again!’

  Jack laughed.

  ‘It’s not funny!’ she cried.

  ‘No, I know, of course it’s not funny. It’s just, well, you can probably live without going to Bury St Edmunds, can’t you?’

  ‘That’s not the point! It’s just, I preferred it when he was in France. I liked having him there. And now he’s here. And I don’t like it.’

  ‘I promise you, on my life,’ said Jack, ‘that I will never knowingly let you go to Bury St Edmunds.’ He brushed his nose against her hair and Robyn let him. He was right. She was being silly. But so far none of this had gone according to plan. She’d made contact with both of them. The woman and the boy. And neither of them had responded. This was remarkable to Robyn. She’d been sick with nerves from the moment she agreed to have her information shared with them. Every morning she watched the postman pull up outside the house with his red cart and sort through bundles of post. Every morning she scurried down to the communal hallway and sifted through the pile of mail, and every morning she breathed a sigh of relief when there was nothing there from the Registry. But, at the same time, she was unnerved. She’d just assumed that they would jump at the chance to meet her. She assumed that they’d be slick, professional Registry users, all primed and ready to go. It had not occurred to her that they might be as uncertain as her. It had not occurred to her, she supposed, that they might be human.