The Making of Us (16 page)

‘Will you come and stay, if we do move?’

Lydia flinched. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘sure.’

Dixie threw her a look that said that she knew, and Lydia knew, that she would not come to stay but at this point in both their lives they would have to pretend that she would.

‘And I’d be back all the time.’

‘You could stay at mine.’

‘Well, yes, I was going to say that. Might be a bit cramped, though?’

‘Well, yes, I’d have to open up the west wing for you, obviously …’

‘But of course.’

‘And then this flat, wow, it’d be gone.’

‘Forever. Some other youngsters would live here.’

‘Free and footloose and without a care in the world.’

‘Partying, carousing, bed-hopping, pill-popping.’

They laughed out loud in unison and then fell silent, still smiling.

‘It was good being young, wasn’t it?’ said Dixie.

‘It certainly was.’

‘But I’m looking forward to the next bit now. The big, grown-up bit. I think it’ll be fun. I think I’m going to like being middle-aged. I think it’ll suit me.’

Lydia agreed. Dixie had always had something of the cottage-dweller about her: she followed
The Archers
, baked cakes, dusted. Now Lydia thought about it, it was inevitable that her friend would have a baby before she was thirty and relocate herself to the sticks. In the same way that some people had a brief lesbian fling in their youth and then settled with a man, Dixie’s time in London being a Camden hipster had been just a phase, something to get out of her system.

And where did that leave Lydia? Alone. With her Philippine housekeeper and her Latvian trainer and nobody in her life whom she didn’t actually pay to be there. And it struck her as she looked at her fresh-faced friend in her trendy teenage outfit of skinny jeans and oversized t-shirt with a spray-painted sketch of Debbie Harry on the front of it, that even though Lydia herself was the one in the elegant Whistles t-shirt and Autograph jeans, with the big tasteful house and household staff and bank account in seven figures, inside she was still an awkward teenager who would never be able to take on the responsibilities that Dixie had.

Lydia left the flat two hours later. She had not mentioned the letter from her uncle Rod or the Donor Sibling Registry or her growing crush on her (probably gay) personal trainer. She had barely talked about herself at all, in fact. She had not felt that it would help her situation. Dixie had already removed herself from Lydia’s life by becoming a mother. Now she was removing herself physically as well by moving back to Wales. To ask her to get involved with the dark, swirling machinations of Lydia’s inner existence would be pointless and disappointing.

So instead she went home and she poured herself a gin and tonic and she sat at her computer and prayed to it: ‘Please, please, please, today, let there be someone there today. Please.’ And she opened up her e-mail account and there was an e-mail from the Registry. She stopped. There had been e-mails from the Registry before, letting her know about changes to the way the website worked and monthly newsletters. But this looked different. She gulped another neckful of gin and tonic and then, with lightly shaking fingers, she clicked the e-mail open. ‘
Wigmore Fertility Centre
: Donor 32 has a new listing on the Donor Sibling Registry.’

Lydia gasped. She pushed herself backwards on her wheeled chair, physically away from the computer, from this miraculous development. She clasped her hands to her cheeks and then she laughed. Not because it was funny, but because she was so overwhelmed with shock and nerves that she could find no other response, like the time she’d crashed into the back of a woman’s station wagon crammed with small children on an A road in Finchley and laughed so hard she’d been unable to give the woman her details.

She pulled her hands from her face and then she breathed in deeply, quelling the rising hysteria that threatened to engulf her. And then she clicked on the link and waited to see who she was going to find on the other side.

A week after Robyn had seen herself staring back from Jack’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, they celebrated the six-week anniversary of their first meeting. It was Jack’s idea. He, of course, had absolutely no idea what was crashing around inside Robyn’s head. Jack thought it was business as usual. Robyn was trying very hard to pretend that it was indeed business as usual. She’d almost managed to convince herself that the whole thing was ludicrous, that she was mad even to have thought such a thing. After all, look at Paul and Linda McCartney, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie; they’d all instinctively and naturally found themselves attracted to people who resembled them. It was normal. It was inevitable. It was probably a very good thing. It did not mean that Jack was her brother. It did not mean anything. But still, it was there. The doubt. And behind that doubt lay an unpalatable possibility. And as a result of that tiny, infinitesimal possibility, Robyn could not touch Jack.

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 folded 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.