The Making of Us (33 page)

‘Yeah,’ said Robyn, ‘and to you and not having to empty bins.’

‘Hallelujah to
that
, my friend,’ said Nush. ‘And how’s college?’

‘Don’t ask.’

‘What? Really?’

‘Yes, really. I’m fucking up, big time.’

‘What! No way!’

‘Yes way. I reckon they’re close to kicking me out.’

‘Holy shit! But why?’

Robyn shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘My heart’s just not in it, not really. And it’s so tough. You really really
really
have to have your heart in it if you want to succeed. And part of me thinks, I don’t know, maybe I was just fooling myself about all this being a doctor stuff. Maybe I was just …’ She paused, her thoughts still not fully formed. ‘There’s just a lot going on in my life right now, and when I started this medical school thing I was one person and now I’m, well, I’m not another person as such, I’m just sort of in a halfway place. You know?’

‘What, you mean, like, between girl and woman?’

‘Yeah. No. Well, sort of. I just mean, there’s stuff. It’s complicated. It’s …’ Robyn inhaled loudly and let the daisy she’d been twirling between her fingers fall to the grass. ‘It’s my dad. My real dad. I mean, my donor dad. He’s been in touch. He wants to meet me.’

Nush’s professionally threaded eyebrows arched dramatically. ‘For real?’ she said.

‘Yes. For real. Got a letter in the post this morning.’

‘Wowser.’ She stared at Robyn, wide-eyed. ‘But how did he know where you live?’

‘Oh, God, well, that’s a long story. There’s other stuff. There’s …’ She sighed again and then told Nush about the brother and the sister and the Donor Sibling Registry.

‘Oh my God! That’s so exciting!’ said Nush, grasping Robyn’s hands in hers.

‘You think?’

‘God, yeah! Imagine! Your very own brother and sister! And they both live in London. I mean, what were the chances of that?’

‘Well, the clinic is in London, so I suppose …’

‘And your dad! Your actual dad. I bet he’s so cool. Because you’re so cool. Not that your other dad isn’t cool. I love your dad. But, you know, you’ve always been sort of … special …’

Robyn blinked at these words. That was how she used to feel. When it was just her. Now she only felt special when Jack smiled at her. ‘Yeah,’ she said, softly. ‘I know what you mean, it’s just …’ She was going to say, What if I meet him and I hate him and it totally destroys my life? But then she remembered that her ‘perfect’ life was currently sliding downhill like a wooden house in a mudslide. And maybe what she actually needed now was something to come along and stop it. She’d already signed up to meet her brother and sister on the premise that they were going to show her where she was supposed to go next. Now, it occurred to her that maybe the place they’d been taking her in that very vivid dream, the place on the other side of those double doors, was actually to their father. Her life was unravelling and she was letting it. She needed to reel it back in again, and Nush was right; she was special. Her family thought she was special. Her boyfriend thought she was special. She herself had once thought she was special. Maybe her father would be just the person to help her to believe it once more.

‘Would
you
do it?’ she said, turning to face her friend.

‘God, yeah! I mean, he’s not even that old, is he? Fifty-three? Younger than your mum and dad. He might be a laugh. He might even be able to help you with whatever problems you’re having at college. Don’t forget – the man’s an actual doctor.’

‘Well, yeah, he
might
be a doctor. But he might be a total loser, too. I mean, surely if his life was that great, then he wouldn’t be that fussed about us lot, you know, about something he did twenty, thirty years ago?’

‘’Course he would! Maybe he’s only just had children of his own, or grandchildren? Maybe he was waiting until you were all adults? Or maybe he just woke up one morning, in the middle of his perfect life, smiled at his perfect wife, made breakfast for his perfect children, got in his Lamborghini and thought:
Today
? You know, today is the day. Maybe he got in touch
because
his life is totally “that great”?’

Robyn blinked at Nush in surprise. She had not been expecting such a considered response from her friend. She swallowed, trying to gulp away the sense of impending drama. And then she smiled. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘and maybe he’s dying and he’s only got six months to live.’

Nush threw her a look of exasperation. ‘Yeah, well, whatever,’ she said. ‘But you asked me what I’d do, and if I were you then that’s what I’d do.’

Robyn paused for a moment. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger up and down the silken shaft of a blade of grass. ‘What if he’s a wanker, Nush? What if I hate him?’

Nush shrugged and picked up the half-empty wine bottle. ‘Well then,’ she said, ‘at least you’d know. And that’s got to be better than not knowing, right?’

Robyn held out her plastic glass and nodded mutely.

Maybe she was right.

Jack and Robyn got back to their flat at eight o’clock that evening. Jack had managed to shake off Jonathan and Leo who had been hinting quite strongly that they would, in an ideal world, be joining Jack and Robyn back at their place and drinking themselves sick into the rude hours.

The flat felt melancholy when they returned. It was untouched since they’d left almost eight hours earlier. The sun had passed all the way around their terrace, through the front windows, through the back windows, warming the dust, the furnishings, the wooden floors. Now the rooms were cool and dark, silently awaiting their return.

Jack kicked off his flip-flops and pulled two cold beers from the fridge. He removed their lids on the edge of the wooden counter, like some dude in an American sitcom, and brought them to the sofa where Robyn sat, still and pensive.

She was feeling the arms of her current life wrapping themselves around her, squeezing her in a tight embrace. She was studying the minute details of her home; the worn patches in the terracotta kilim, the dark nodding tulips in a glass bowl on the dining table, the crack in the plaster behind the TV that looked like a bolt of lightning, the ornate ridges in the skirting boards, the tasteful pencil sketch of a woman’s head that hung beside the front door, and a framed review of Jack’s first novel from the
Guardian
, entitled ‘Word Perfect’.

Every detail was so new, yet already so familiar. But still there was that tinge of melancholy about her surroundings. Her life should feel perfect, but it didn’t. Her love for Jack should have been enough, but it wasn’t. She should have been sailing through her first year at medical school, but instead she’d dragged herself through, painfully, and was now set to fail.

She turned to Jack as he joined her on the sofa. Her voice left her wine-dry mouth sounding bland and flat. ‘I want to meet my donor dad,’ she said.

Jack’s eyebrows twitched. ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘you’ve come a hundred and eighty degrees since this morning.’

She nodded.

‘What made you change your mind?’ he asked.

She shrugged and picked at the frayed hem of her cutoff shorts. ‘Nothing, really,’ she started, ‘just …’ She sighed. ‘Ever since I signed up with the Registry I’ve been feeling like something’s missing. No, more than that – I’ve been feeling like I’m supposed to be somewhere … like there’s, you know, unfinished business in my life. And I was so determined to get through my life without meeting this man, so determined for just my mum and dad to be enough, for
me
to be enough, and now … I’m not enough, any more. D’you see? I’m just
not enough
.’ She started to cry then and Jack took her in his arms. She pushed her face against the cotton of his t-shirt. It smelled of sun and fresh sweat.

‘Good,’ he said into her hair, ‘good.’

She pulled away and looked at him curiously. ‘What do you mean, good?’ she asked.

He sighed. ‘I mean,
good
because I thought it was me.’

‘Thought
what
was you?’ she asked.

He sighed again. ‘You. The way you’ve been since you moved in here. Well, since
before
you moved in here. I thought you were …’ He paused. ‘I don’t know, what happened … after I gave you the keys. For a while it was as if you found me repulsive. And then you just went completely cold on me. I thought I’d blown it, you know? I was so angry with myself, for what I’d done, asking an eighteen-year-old girl to move in with me. But then you came back and I was just totally overwhelmed. I thought I’d lost you. But even then, you weren’t the same. You haven’t been the same. That sparkle you had the first time I saw you, that look you had in your eye, so cocksure and pleased with yourself – it’s gone. And I thought it was me. I thought I’d done that to you. That leaving home, leaving your friends, living with me had done that to you …’

Robyn wiped away tears from beneath her eyes. ‘No!’ she cried. ‘No. It was never you. It was always me. You’ve always been the meaning of everything. You’ve always been perfect, Jack, totally. It’s me who’s broken down. It’s me who needs fixing. And once I’ve moved on from this, for better or for worse, everything will be about you and me. The world, the universe and everything in it. I love you so much, Jack, so much.’

He smiled at her with joyful relief. He pressed his forehead against hers and clutched her wet cheeks between the palms of his hands.

‘Come on then,’ he said, ‘let’s get writing to this father of yours. Let’s get fixing you.’

‘I used to come down here with my dog,’ said Lydia, her hands in the pockets of her jeans, negotiating the downward camber of the slope leading to an overgrown railway track.

‘You had a dog?’ Dean replied.

‘Yeah. A German Shepherd. His name was Arnie. I used to come down here with him and get drunk.’

‘Cool,’ said Dean, trying to envisage the poised woman in front of him skulking around on disused railways with a massive dog, necking Wild Turkey or somesuch straight from the bottle.

‘Well, no, it wasn’t really that cool. It was pretty tragic actually.’

He followed her down to the bottom of the slope where she perched herself on the grass. He sat himself next to her and viewed the surroundings with his arms wrapped around his knees. ‘Quiet down here, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Yes. Good place to think.’ She placed her chin on her cupped hands and stared into the middle distance.

‘Got plenty of stuff to think about now, haven’t we?’ he said, glancing at the carrier bag hooked over the crook of his arm, thinking about its shocking contents.

‘I think we should go to the police,’ she said.

‘What, seriously?’

‘Yes, I do. This is fucking serious stuff. This is …’ Lydia’s voice trailed away and Dean gulped. He was still reeling from the events of the past hour. He pulled a pouch from his jacket pocket and assembled a spliff. Lydia eyed him from the corners of her eyes. She said nothing but returned her gaze to the tangle of weeds, litter and brambles on the other side of the tracks. ‘I think he killed him. My dad. I think he killed the baby and then I think he killed my mother.’

‘No,’ began Dean, because his brain could not process such a dark and depraved possibility. ‘No, there must be another reason, there must be …’

‘It fits,’ she said, coldly. ‘It fits the mould. My dad, he was strange. He was really strange. He wasn’t what a dad should be and I always put that down to my mum dying and leaving him alone with me, I always put it down to him hating me for not being my mum. But now, I think about it and I can
see
it, do you understand what I mean? I can close my eyes and I can see him doing it, I really can.

‘But what I don’t understand is why I don’t remember it? I mean, I must have been there. Or I must certainly have known my mum was pregnant, that there was going to be a baby. I must have
met
the baby, you know? And then realised that it was there one day and gone the next. I don’t understand how I could have forgotten that? I mean, surely it should be in here,’ she pointed at her own head, ‘somewhere? Surely I should know this. Surely I should know!’ She dropped her head into her hands and groaned. ‘My sick, fucked-up, fucking family,’ she growled.

Dean looked at her with concern. He wanted to calm her down but didn’t want to make things worse. ‘Listen,’ he said, putting a hand on her upper arm. ‘Listen. I don’t want to sound like I don’t believe you, but maybe it’s not as bad as you’re thinking. Maybe there’s a better explanation.’

‘Like what?’

He shrugged. ‘Maybe someone took the baby? Maybe it was adopted? Maybe after your mum died your dad couldn’t cope with a new baby and he gave it away?’ He stopped abruptly. The realisation struck him like a metal weight against his chest: he could be talking about himself. He stopped breathing for a few seconds and then he inhaled. His heart pattered tremulously. He licked the Rizla paper and he sealed the spliff and then he lit it. The first rush of smoke to his bloodstream calmed his nerves for a moment. He imagined Lydia’s father. He imagined him big and shiny, like a skinned Rottweiler. He imagined him with rheumy eyes and thick fingers and a snarling mouth. He imagined him ugly and spitting and crazed. The sort of man who could throw a small baby to its death; the sort of man who could kill his wife and then sit back in an armchair and get on with the rest of his life. He imagined, in other words, the man that Lydia remembered. The weird man. The strange man. The ugly man.

And then he wondered what his own daughter would imagine when she thought of him in years to come. The man who couldn’t raise her because she was too small and too clever and too fucking perfect. The man who couldn’t raise her because he was too small and too stupid and too fucking pathetic. Would she see an ugly man? A spiteful man? Would she hate him so much that she could reasonably picture him throwing babies off balconies?

He blanched at these thoughts, dragged two, three, four times greedily from the spliff before passing it to Lydia.

She took it without comment and he watched with interest as she put it to her lips and inhaled. And as he watched her, all of a sudden he could see her as she said she’d once been, a loner, a drinker, a loser. He looked at her and saw her fade and then reform in front of his eyes into a hunched teenager, with a faithful dog, sitting on the bank of a disused railway, drinking away the pain of her own bitter disappointment. He suddenly felt closer to her than he’d ever felt to any human being. He wanted to pull her to him and hug her, but he could see that she was lost for now in her own terrible thoughts. After a couple of draws on the spliff she handed it back to him with a small smile and then she laid herself backwards against the long grass and crossed her arms across her heart.