The Making of Us (8 page)

At the Hog’s Head later that day, Robyn felt like a celebrity. She’d been coming to the Hog’s Head with her mum and dad since she was a few months old and everyone round here knew her. Everyone had known about Robyn since before she was even born. There was a newspaper clipping on the wall in her bedroom headlined:
Baby Joy for Tragic Buckhurst Couple
. It was illustrated with a photograph of her mum with really bad hair sitting on the sofa in their old house, cupping her baby bump, with her dad stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder. They didn’t look much like they were in the throes of baby joy, they looked really old and really tragic, but then they’d had a tragic few years and Robyn didn’t suppose they were ready to look really happy just yet. Robyn’s mum always said she wouldn’t believe it was going to be OK until she’d held her baby in her arms. Understandable really, given what they’d gone through. But it was Dad’s face in that photo that was really interesting to Robyn. What must he have been feeling, knowing that that wasn’t his baby inside his wife?

She sat on his lap now, her big lovely dad. He was solid, like an armchair, and he smelled of pillows and fabric conditioner. They were having a happy time. They were a happy family. She kissed him on the cheek and shuffled off his lap to take her seat at the head of the table.

‘So,’ said Jan, her father’s sister, ‘how does it feel to be an adult?’

Robyn smiled. She’d felt like an adult for years. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I’m going to start voting in elections, every day. And having anal sex.’

Jan laughed out loud. Robyn’s family was the kind that didn’t feel uncomfortable talking about anal sex. ‘Ha-ha,’ she guffawed, ‘yes, do it now, love, before you’ve had kids. Because you won’t want to do it after!’

Robyn wrinkled her nose and tried not to think what she might mean.

She looked around at her family; her mum, her dad, cousins and aunt, and thought, not for the first time,
I’m different from you
. And not just that but:
I’m better than you
. It wasn’t a good thing to think. It was a hideous, sick thing to think. But she couldn’t help it. All her life she’d been different. Prettier than everyone else. Cleverer than everyone else. 11 GCSEs. 4 AS levels. 4 A levels. About to start studying medicine at University College London. Following in her donor father’s mysterious and glamorous footsteps.

She stood in line at the carvery and smiled at Steve, the chef, who was sweating lightly under the hot lights in a white paper hat, brandishing a large sharp knife.

‘Happy Birthday, Robyn,’ he said with a shy smile.

‘Thank you!’ She smiled back.

Steve was in love with Robyn. They’d been in the same class at primary school and he’d been in love with her then too. Everyone knew that Steve was in love with Robyn. He’d probably asked to be at work today especially because he knew that she would be in celebrating her eighteenth.

‘I got you a card,’ he said, wiping the shine from his forehead with the back of his hand and then slicing her off some turkey. ‘I’ll give it to you later, when I’ve cleaned up.’

She smiled and nodded. She could tell he wanted to kiss her. ‘Thanks, Steve,’ she said, ‘that’s really sweet.’

‘Do you want some stuffing with that?’

‘No, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Just a bit of bacon.’

‘You look lovely,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Will you have a drink with us? After you get off? We’re going to be here for the long haul, I reckon.’

His face went soft as beaten butter and he nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’d be good.’

Robyn piled roast potatoes on to her plate and soggy florets of broccoli and a ton of sprouts and then drowned the lot in the thick winey gravy that the Hog’s Head was renowned for. Then she carried the over-piled plate back to the table and everyone oohed and aahed at her man-sized appetite and said, ‘Ooh, where do you put it all? You must have hollow feet,’ and Robyn looked at her well-upholstered parents and her slightly more than curvy aunty who was prone to saying things like ‘All I have to do is look at a slice of cheesecake and I’ve gone up a size’, and her small-mouthed cousins with their doughy faces and their wide feet, and thought:
I am not one of you. I come from my own tribe, once-removed on the ladder of evolution
. It didn’t mean she didn’t love them. She loved her family with a ferocious passion. But then people loved their dogs with a ferocious passion; didn’t mean they were the same thing.

‘Did you have fun with your friends last night?’ asked Aunty Jan.

‘Amazing,’ replied Robyn. ‘Best night
ever
.’

‘I remember my eighteenth,’ she said, ‘I wore a boiler suit and had a perm. Thought I was It – looked like Brian May,’ she laughed. ‘It was tough being young in the eighties. You girls get to dress so pretty these days. So many lovely things in the shops for you.’

Robyn’s phone buzzed with a text message. It was Christian:
Hey babe, what you up to
?

She groaned:
Hey babe
. Didn’t matter how good someone smelled if they sent you text messages that began
Hey babe
. She shuddered slightly and sent a reply, thumb working furiously over the buttons:
Having lunch with family. See you out and about
. She deliberately left the last line without a question mark. A question mark would suggest that she was
hoping
to see him out and about. She was
not
hoping to see him out and about. She would quite happily spend the rest of her life without seeing him out and about or anywhere else for that matter. Robyn was not interested in the men round here. Not in that way. They were fine for drinking with, partying with, sleeping with. But for the long haul, for the rest of her life, only a doctor would do.

‘A toast!’ said her father, holding aloft his pint of cloudy bitter. ‘To my little girl.
Our
little girl.’ He smiled at his wife. ‘We are so proud of you, my darling, so proud of you for everything you’ve achieved. You’ve brought us nothing but happiness these last eighteen years, nothing but joy. We could not ask for a better daughter. Thank you, Robyn, for being you.’ As the words left his lips, a tear slid from the corner of his eye and down his nose. He wiped it away and smiled apologetically at his little girl. ‘I love you,’ he croaked.

‘Aw, Dad,’ Robyn snuggled into him, ‘I love you, too. Thank you.’ She pulled her mother towards them, too. ‘Thank you both for being the best mum and dad in the world, and I want you to know that I am going to go on and on and keep on making you proud of me.’

This was it, she thought, feeling her parents’ warm flesh against her body, the glow of her family around her, the warmth of this August afternoon of togetherness, this was it. This was all she wanted and needed. She was eighteen now. She could make contact with her real dad, if she wanted to. But she wasn’t going to. This man here was her real dad, this man in his green Blue Harbour crewneck sweater and Clarks shoes and shoulders like a brickie’s.
Her dad
. She didn’t want another.

Her other father, the French paediatrician, he would stay inside her head forever. He would push her, unknowingly, towards a career in medicine and he would make her feel forevermore just a little bit better than everyone else. But her attachment to him would go no further than that. She liked him as he was – a character in her very own fairy tale.

Later than night Robyn sat on the sofa, pressed against her father, her feet tucked beneath her, watching
Big Brother
. Her mother walked into the room, something clutched between her hands and held against her heart. Her face was smiling but oddly strained. Her father sat straighter at the sight of her and Robyn instinctively uncurled her legs and placed her feet upon the carpet.

‘You all right?’ she said.

Her mother nodded. ‘I’m fine, sweetie, just fine. Got something to show you though. Budge up.’

Robyn glanced at the paperwork in her mother’s hands. ‘Oh, no!’ she said, mock-dramatically. ‘Don’t tell me – I’m
adopted
?!’

Her mother smiled. ‘This,’ she began, ‘is what they gave me at the clinic, when I got pregnant with you.’

Robyn put her hand to her throat and recoiled. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said, ‘take it away.’

Her mother sighed and rested her hand on Robyn’s leg. ‘You don’t have to read it,’ she said, gently, ‘but I want you to have it. You’re eighteen now. You’re an adult. It doesn’t belong to me any more.’

‘Then put it in the bin,’ said Robyn, ‘shred it. Whatever. I don’t want it.’

Her mother sighed again. ‘It’s just a letter,’ she said. ‘I’ve read it. There’s nothing alarming in it. And there’s his donor number and info, in case you want to contact him.’

‘I don’t! And I don’t want to read his letter! I know enough about him already and I’m very grateful and everything, but I don’t need him in my life, OK? I really, really don’t want to know.’

Her mum squeezed her leg and smiled. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we won’t be around forever, me and your dad. We’re not old, but we’re not getting any younger either. And when we’re gone, you’ll be all on your own. Take these papers, sweetie, keep them. At least then if anything happens –
which it won’t
–’ she squeezed Robyn again, reassuringly – ‘but if it does and you decide you want to meet him, you’ll have the wherewithal to do something about it, OK? And another thing to think about, even if you don’t want to meet your donor father – what about siblings? Brothers, sisters? I know –’ she cut into Robyn’s half-formed protests – ‘I know you don’t want that now. But in the future. One day. Maybe. OK?’

Robyn eyed the folder of papers and exhaled. It was so charged with explosive potential she could almost hear it ticking. She thought of these nameless, faceless siblings and she hated them. She saw them as grotesque caricatures of herself, all fat lips and attitude, all thinking they were something special because their dad was a sperm donor, their dad was a French paediatrician. That was
her
role, nobody else’s. And besides, she’d had sisters, two beautiful sisters. It was irrelevant to her that they were dead; they were still there, inside her heart, and she didn’t have room in there for anyone new. Robyn pushed her heavy fringe behind her ears and regarded the folder.

‘What will you do with it if I don’t take it?’

‘Put it away,’ said her mother. ‘Somewhere safe. Somewhere you can find it. Later. When we’re gone.’

Robyn thought about this. It was possible, she conceded, that she might, one day, for whatever reason, want to contact her biological father. Maybe she’d need a, you know, a liver transplant or something, or a future child might have some rare genetic disorder. She might one day need this man to stop being a two-dimensional Disney prince and become a fully functioning, flesh, blood and DNA human being. And maybe it would be better then to have these papers in her possession. She flopped back against the brown suede sofa and pulled an expression of resignation.

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘OK. Give it to me.’ She held out her hands. The folder felt heavy, as if it contained wet sand. ‘But I am not even going to
sniff this
stuff unless I really, really have to. You know that, don’t you? I so don’t need this guy or his other kids. I’ve got everything I need. OK?’

She awoke in the night, clammy and unsettled, an unremembered dream pulsing in the corners of her consciousness. She felt lost and disoriented. Her stomach was full of undigested cake and carvery and cheap white wine. She immediately got out of bed feeling there was something she needed to do. She paced her room distractedly, rubbing her angry, distended stomach. Obviously she knew what she was about to do. She’d known it since she’d first felt the folder in her hands, taken ownership of them. She pulled the folder from the bottom of her chest of drawers and she opened it.

Robyn had her microbiology file tucked under her arm and was wearing her black-framed reading glasses, even though she wasn’t reading. She had on a really cute checked shirt dress from Urban Outfitters with green tights and granny boots. She looked cool and clever. Geek chic. She dressed differently for college from how she dressed at home. At home, in Buckhurst Hill, she was more polished. Out here in the hard-nosed streets of London town she let it go a bit. She didn’t want to look like an Essex girl. Still had on proper underwear, though, and was wearing Mac lipstick and Agent Provocateur Boudoir perfume.

She was on Gower Street, headed from a study session at the main library to a guest talk at the Institute of Neurology. She was alone. The sun was low and London felt strangely quiet, like it was early dawn and the tubes hadn’t started running yet. Where was everyone? she wondered. But she liked it, it gave her a feeling of exclusivity, of owning the place, like when they clear the streets to shoot a scene in a film and all the ordinary people have to take detours or just stand around gawping at the much more important people, who are probably just best boys or gaffers or shutter loaders. Empty streets made Robyn feel like she was the star of her very own movie. She smiled, knowing that nobody could see, and let her walk become a sway. No one was watching but she acted like everyone was. She liked these in-between moments, when she was a medical student but she wasn’t actually in the process of studying medicine. Halfway between lectures she was able momentarily to empty her brain of all the facts and jargon and names and numbers that she seemed to carry around with her perpetually these days and just enjoy the fact of her existence in this rarefied world. The rest of the time she was overwhelmed and petrified by the amount of learning she was being required to do. Books like breeze blocks full of vital information, tests every few days, studying, learning, remembering. It was not what she’d been expecting. She’d thought it would be all sitting in airy auditoria with a notepad at her elbow, listening intently to learned men and women whilst gently chewing the end of a pencil. She’d thought exams would be easy, that tests would be a doddle. It was starting to occur to her month by month, in small, discomfiting bursts of awareness, that maybe she wasn’t as clever as she’d thought she was.