The Making of Us (41 page)

Robyn walked towards them in a daze, all her concerns and pre-conceptions fading away, all her efforts to present a certain façade forgotten. As she drew closer she saw their noses, their hollow cheeks, their full lips, their square jaws. They were not identical, but they were alike. They were like her. She increased her pace now as the enormity of this moment began to well up inside her. She wanted to get closer and closer, she wanted to see more and more of these people. She wanted to be inches from their faces and to stare deeply into their eyes.

The woman looked up then and saw Robyn approaching and immediately her beautiful serious face opened up into a smile. She said something to the boy and he turned, too, and looked and smiled a smaller smile. And then they were all walking towards each other, like particles of metal towards an invisible magnet.

Robyn would remember this moment in minute and full sensory detail for the rest of her life. She would remember the smell of oil and meat coming from the Burger King kiosk, she would remember the disembodied boom of a train announcement from the other end of the concourse, she would remember a slice of sunshine falling from the glass ceiling and on to the marble floor beneath her feet, and then she would remember being held in a brief embrace by a woman called Lydia, who smelled of clean hair, and then by a boy called Dean, who felt like a child in her arms, and she would remember their faces, their eyes, all three of them searching each other for whatever it was that had been missing for all their lives: that vital sense of recognition. It was almost as though she was watching the meeting from above, as though she was both studying and participating in the moment. It was like something from a dream.

She couldn’t really remember what was said; it was all just words. If the moment had been a scene in the film of the book of her life there would have been no dialogue, just a rousing soundtrack playing behind it, maybe something epic like ‘Chasing Cars’. But she could remember the overwhelming sense of being part of a gang, and her unparalleled feeling of pride as she walked with her beautiful sister and her handsome brother towards platform nine and on to a train bound for their father.

Lydia gazed at her father in awe.

He stared back at her.

‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m Lydia.’

Daniel looked at her intently and then he smiled. ‘You are very pretty,’ he said, his voice croaking. He turned his gaze from her to Robyn then and said, ‘And so are you.’

The two girls laughed, nervously, happily. And then he saw Dean and put out a thin, claw-like hand. ‘And you are very handsome.’

He closed his eyes then, as though the effort of keeping them open had been too much for him. But his mouth remained curved in the shape of a smile and his hand still gripped Dean’s. The three children stood and stared at him.

The room rang with silence, a silence of shock and awe and coming-to-terms, a silence of absorbing and thinking and not knowing what on earth to say. It was clear that no one was feeling what they’d expected to feel and that everyone was rather unsettled by the terrible appearance of the dying man lying flat against the bed. And it was clear that this was not going to be a moment plucked straight from the dénouement of a saccharine made-for-TV tearjerker. The conversation would not be torrid and affecting but awkward and mundane. Meeting this strange man in the final hours of his existence was not going to change Lydia’s life. Nor anyone else’s, for that matter.

But of every remarkable thing that had happened to Lydia in the past week, this was probably the most remarkable yet. She was standing with her father. Surrounded by her brother and her sister. And across the room stood a man who was her uncle, and not only that but her father’s identical twin. Nearly every person in this room was related to her by blood. The thought left her feeling giddy with fulfilment. She turned to Dean and smiled, and he smiled back at her. She wondered what he was thinking. Unlike Lydia and Robyn, this was the first time that he had ever looked upon a man who could call himself his father.

‘How are you feeling, Daniel?’ asked the nice woman called Maggie, who had told them in the car on the way from the station that she was Daniel’s ‘friend’.

He tipped his head slightly to one side to indicate a neutral answer. ‘I’m happy,’ he said.

The woman called Maggie lit up at these words and tears came to her eyes. ‘Good,’ she said, ‘that’s really, really good.’

And Lydia could sense that that was all the blonde woman called Maggie had ever wanted. And maybe, for all her cynicism, there it was, the grand finale, the happy ever after. Those three simple words: ‘I’m happy.’ And ‘good’. A full circle, a story brought to its gentle conclusion.

Daniel’s eyes opened suddenly and his strange gaze worked over the three of them again, from face to face, before his eyes once more grew heavy and closed. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, huskily. ‘The other one?’

Lydia gulped. She’d known this was going to come up. She smiled sadly and touched her father’s shoulder. ‘He was my brother. And he died,’ she said. ‘When he was a baby. It was a cot death.’

She saw her father’s eyelids pinch together at her words. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘I knew it. Poor little baby boy. How old was he?’

‘Six months,’ she replied. ‘His name was Thomas.’

‘Thomas.’ He tested the name on his dry lips. ‘Poor little boy. How sad. For you. For your mother. For all of us. How very, very sad.’

He turned his face away from them then and let it rest heavily against his pillow. ‘Thank you, all of you, thank you so much for coming. I am happy.’ He closed his eyes again and Lydia looked to Maggie, for instruction.

Maggie smiled and approached Daniel’s side. ‘Would you like a rest now?’ she asked, taking his hand in hers.

He nodded, slowly and painfully. And then, a moment later, it became clear that he was already asleep. Lydia’s heart lurched. Suddenly she was back, back in that stifling hospital room in Cardiff, waiting for her father to die, wondering what on earth death would look like when it finally came.

‘Come on,’ said Maggie, letting go of Daniel’s hand. ‘Let’s go and get a cup of tea. Let’s let him sleep.’

Maggie drove them all back to Daniel’s flat at midnight when it was clear that he was still alive and that the last train to London had long since departed. They left Marc at the hospice. He was to spend the night on a guest bed, next to his brother, unable to bear the idea of Daniel dying in the middle of the night, all by himself. It had looked almost cosy in Daniel’s room, Marc tucked under a blanket, with just the reading light switched on, everything quiet, everything still; it was hard almost to believe that in the midst of all the peace and comfort was a dying man.

They were quiet in Maggie’s car. There had been talking all day long, so much talking. They all needed just a few moments to digest what had happened. Lydia sat in the front seat, hair wrapping itself across her face in the warm wind that came through the open window, her head turned to face the moving scenery. It passed her in streaks and flashes; streetlights and takeaways, bollards and traffic lights. And there, atop it all, a big full moon, staring down at her as though it knew what she was thinking. She gazed into the chalky contours of the moon and contemplated her existence, the arc that had started in a small cubicle near Harley Street and was about to end in a small room in Bury St Edmunds. She thought about the thin, grey man in the bed, the man who had told her she was beautiful, and she tried to find a pinpoint of emotion, something to hook the whole thing on, but there was nothing there. He looked like a nice man. If his girlfriend and his brother were anything to go by, he probably was a very nice man. But he was not much more than that. A man. A nice, French man.

She turned her gaze from the moon to the interior of the car. She looked at her gaunt brother, his face streaked in multi-colours from the lights outside, staring blankly into the distance; and she looked at her pretty little sister, her phone in her hand, texting furiously with her thumbs, and she knew then that this was all that mattered to her. Not her father, but these two. Her brother and sister. She was glad she’d seen her father, glad for the sake of her own personal history that she could strike a line through that particular section of it, but it was not a father she needed, it was a family.

‘Right,’ said Maggie, stifling a yawn while pulling things from a tall cupboard at the top of the stairs. ‘Maybe the girls could share the double bed in Daniel’s room? I’ll need to change the bedding, Marc’s been sleeping there. And you,’ she directed her words at Dean, ‘could sleep down here, on the sofa, if that’s OK? There’s a load of blankets in here. Would that be OK?’

Dean nodded blankly and took a blanket from Maggie’s outstretched hands.

‘There’s everything you need in the kitchen; bread, milk, juice, et cetera. And you’ve got my number, if there’s an emergency. If you need anything else, just call. I’m only ten minutes away. I could be here in a jiffy.’

She showed them the kitchen, the terrace, the locks on the front door – and then, somewhat apologetically, she left. ‘I’ll be here tomorrow morning,’ she said, ‘early. And if there’s any news in the night, I’ll let you know.’

Lydia closed the door behind her a moment later, and then she and Robyn and Dean all looked at each other and it was immediately obvious that they were all thinking the same thing. It had been a long, sober and intense few hours and the mother figure of Maggie had just left them all alone. It felt, weirdly, given their ages, that they’d been left home alone. And after the weighty events of the rest of the day, it was almost like they’d been given permission to act their age.

‘There was a bottle of wine in that fridge, wasn’t there?’ said Robyn, a mischievous glint in her eye.

‘Two,’ said Lydia.

‘Yeah, and a whole rack of it over there – look.’ Dean pointed behind them at a rectangular rack screwed to the wall above them in the hallway.

‘I’m not even tired,’ said Robyn.

‘Me neither,’ said Dean.

Lydia smiled. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I was tired. But, Jesus Christ, after a day like today, I really need a drink.’

‘Shall we do it, then?’ said Robyn.

‘It’s not as if he’s ever going to be able to drink it, is it?’ said Lydia.

Robyn looked at her in delighted shock. ‘Lydia!’ she chastised. ‘You can’t say that!’

Dean laughed and Lydia looked at him. ‘What?’ she said.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You’ve got no heart.’

‘I have got a heart,’ she retorted playfully. ‘But it’s true, isn’t it? It’ll just go off if we don’t drink it.’

‘But what about the brother? He might want it when he comes back, you know,
after
…’

‘Look!’ said Lydia, gesturing behind them at the wine rack. ‘There’s loads here! We’ll just replace it! Come on. He would
want
us to drink this. I know he would. He’s French, for God’s sake!’

Within a few minutes they had collected glasses, a corkscrew and a bottle of something very expensive-looking from the fridge and were clustered together on the floor in the living room, watching Lydia pull out the cork. Someone had switched on the table lamps and the terrace door was open, letting in wafts of chill night air, and Robyn lit a candle and it all felt very cosy and very natural. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was almost a quarter to one.

Lydia raised her full glass of wine to her siblings and said: ‘To us. Whoever the hell we are.’ And as she looked at them, she suddenly realised exactly who they were. They were the kids. Just that, pure and simple. ‘Not ‘kids’ like the sort of kids who ran in and out of the same house, belonging to the same people. Not the sort of ‘kids’ who were referred to by their parents when they weren’t around.
Have you seen the kids?
But kids, nonetheless. ‘Daniel’s kids,’ she said, with a smile. ‘In all our lovely glory.’

Robyn grinned. ‘We are pretty lovely, aren’t we?’

Dean scoffed. ‘Well, you two are. But I’m a minger.’

The girls laughed, affectionately, and then all three of them brought their glasses together and said, ‘Cheers.’ Dean found a CD player and put on the only CD in their father’s collection that all three of them could countenance listening to:
Reload
by Tom Jones. It made for a jaunty, earthy soundtrack to their laughter-filled conversation, almost party-like, and Lydia felt filled with warmth and affection as she watched their young faces, smiling and animated in the glow of the candlelight. And then she saw, almost like a ghost, another face to the left of theirs, another young man, smiling and laughing, a young man who looked a bit like Lydia, a bit like Dean and a bit like Robyn, a young man with a Welsh accent and a big sister called Lydia. A young man called Thomas.

‘Another toast,’ she said, breaking into the conversation, ‘to Thomas. Our lost brother.’

Their faces grew serious at her words and for a moment she felt guilty for souring the jolly atmosphere, but then they smiled and brought their glasses to hers and said, ‘Yes – to Thomas. God rest his little soul.’

Surprisingly, nobody talked about Daniel. It was as though they were in a bubble of their own making, an impenetrable world into which they let only the things that they thought would be amusing or interesting or exciting. Tomorrow morning they would be taken back to the hospice by Maggie Smith and they would probably, presumably, if they weren’t too late, watch their father die. But tonight was about them and their secret club of wonderfulness.

‘So listen,’ said Dean. They were halfway through the second bottle of wine taken from Daniel’s fridge and he was making a spliff on the surface of Daniel’s coffee table. ‘What’s with the gay guy?’

Lydia grimaced at him. ‘What gay guy?’

‘The one who’s living with you. The one with all the …’ He cupped his hands around his chest to indicate overdeveloped pectorals.

‘Bendiks?’

Dean laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘What’s so funny?’

Dean sniggered again and looked at Robyn, who was also laughing, and Lydia felt the distance of the years yawning between them. ‘Bendiks,’ he replied, snorting with laughter. ‘You know … Bend? Dicks? It’s really funny.’