The Making of Us (17 page)

She switched the phone back on and looked at the message again:
Dear Jack
, she imagined herself replying,
I cannot talk to you at the moment because it is possible that we have been incestuous. I am waiting to hear back from the clinic from whence I was sired to discover the identity of my real father so that I may happily eliminate this possibility from my mind. In the meantime, every time I think about what we have been doing together, I feel like I am going to throw up. Lots of love, Rx
’

Instead she typed:
I’m really sorry. I’m not feeling well. It’s nothing you’ve done, I promise. I’ll be in touch soon, Rx

A moment later her phone trilled at her.
As long as I haven’t done anything to upset you. I will try to be patient. Missing you, Jxxx

Finally, the following day, the postman brought Robyn what she’d been waiting for. It was contained within an expensive cream envelope, with a discreet postmark on it:
WFC
in curly capitals. She took the letter to her room and sat cross-legged upon her bed, regarding the unopened missive cautiously. Here it was. The first step on the road. Inside the innocuous cream envelope was a whole new world, a world she’d never wanted to set foot in, a world that terrified her. She breathed in deeply and then sliced it open with her finger.

Dear Miss Inglis,

Thank you for your enquiry regarding Donor 32. According to our records, there are three other live births relating to this donor. A girl in 1980, a boy in 1983, and a boy in 1989. There have been no further live births relating to this donor since yourself. We hope this information is of some assistance to you.

Yours sincerely,

Wigmore Fertility Clinic

Robyn let the letter drop on to her bedcover.

A girl.

Two boys.

A girl.

Two boys.

A boy born in 1983
.

The same year that Jack was born.

Everything inside her curdled as this fact weighed upon her.

Suddenly every doubt she’d had about her fears and her concerns evaporated, leaving her with nothing but stark, bitter certainty. Somewhere out there was a twenty-seven-year-old man who was her brother. And it was probably her boyfriend.

She stuffed the letter back into the envelope, screwed it into a tight ball and hurled it against her bedroom wall.

Robyn’s mum folded up the evening paper she’d been reading at the kitchen table and got to her feet. ‘How about signing up to the Donor Sibling Register?’

Robyn pulled the paper towards herself and stared at her mother in confusion. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘He’s not going to be on there. He thinks his dad was a Barnardo’s orphan killed in a car crash in France. If he is a donor baby, he doesn’t actually know.’

‘No, not to look for Jack. But if you find two boys and a girl on there, then you’ll know. You’ll know that it’s not him.’

Robyn shuddered. She hated the thought of this other woman somewhere who shared her genes. She never wanted to meet her. Robyn would hate her, she knew she would. But it made sense, what her mum was saying. If she signed up to this Registry thing and found another man on there who was born in 1983 then she could dash to the train station, sprint down Jack’s Holloway avenue, leap into his arms, throw her arms around his neck and never, ever let him go.

‘You’re right,’ she said, pushing the paper away from her again, ‘you’re totally right.’

She pushed the thought of the woman who shared her genes from the front of her mind and headed upstairs to her laptop.

UK Donorlink was initially rather forbidding. Robyn downloaded a leaflet and felt winded by the amount of information she needed to process before she could even begin the registration process. And then she felt herself deflate as she realised how many hoops she was going to have to jump through before she was able to find out anything at all about her genetic siblings, male, female, or otherwise. First she would have to fill in a form, then she needed to undertake a DNA test, and then she would have to wait for the agency to get permission for any genetic matches to share their information with her … and everything was carried out in writing. It could take days or even weeks for her to find out what she needed to know. And in the meantime, she still had her boyfriend’s front door keys in her handbag and a huge gaping hole in her heart where he was supposed to be. She sighed, pulled her chair closer to the desk, and began to do what was necessary.

Three days later a letter arrived. Robyn didn’t dare hope that it could be the Donor Sibling Register already. She had crawled her way through the weekend, painfully, as if over shards of glass, imagining Jack in his light-filled flat, bumbling around lost without her. She ripped it open, sparing not an ounce of patience. And there it was. One match. A female. She didn’t read on. She let the letter drop to the floor and then she let herself fall heavily upon the bottom stair. She felt she was going slowly insane. Two weeks ago, before she’d seen her own face in her boyfriend’s reflection, she had been walking a path through Nirvana. Two weeks ago she’d known exactly who she was and where she was headed and she’d had a man by her side who was going to help her get there. Now she’d come careening off the path and landed face down in a ditch. She felt wrong and misshapen, like all the angles and nuances of her most interior self had gone askew. Being with Jack had somehow loosened her bond to her parents. Meeting him had opened her up to the possibility of a life beyond being just a daughter. And now she was home again, a daughter again. And it wasn’t where she wanted to be. She’d had a taste of adult life and had it snatched away again. She wanted to go back to Jack. But she couldn’t go back to Jack. And she couldn’t even tell Jack why she couldn’t go back to him because he would freak out. And meanwhile the only chance she’d had of putting her mind to rest had turned out to be a big fat nothing. A woman. A bloody boring, horrible woman.

She stared at the abandoned letter on the floor. She was furious with the Donor Sibling Registry and she was furious with the woman claiming to be her genetic sibling. Useless. Pointless. Conniving and conspiring to decimate her life totally. And then she felt angry with the man too, her donor father. He was a wanker. Literally, pejoratively, in every conceivable way, a wanker. What sort of man goes around giving his sperm away to strangers? What sort of man allows his DNA to be replicated and abused and ricocheted around the world without a backwards glance? What sort of man could abandon his offspring to the universe, toss them into the air like a pack of cards and then walk away before he’d even seen where they’d fallen?

All her life she’d been grateful to this man. All her life she’d put him on a pedestal, admired him, been grateful for his altruism. Altruism – the first four-syllable word she’d mastered as a child. She’d been born out of altruism. Altruism. Yeah, right. He was no better than some smalltown Romeo, spreading his seed around the village without a care for the consequences. He was just another jack-the-lad. An idiot. Selfish, short-sighted, cretinous and cruel.

As these angry thoughts circled her mind Robyn found herself sobbing violently. Everything rose to the surface then: her poor lovely sisters; her parents who had never really lost the faded bruises of sadness behind their eyes, no matter how hard Robyn had tried to make them glad and proud; her beautiful Jack, sitting alone in the flat he’d offered up to her, wondering why she didn’t want to be in love with him any more.

Robyn sobbed for about thirty minutes. It was the first time she’d cried since she was seventeen. Robyn didn’t like to cry. It wasn’t her style. But these tears were overdue and these tears were necessary and the house was empty so she let them come for as long as they needed to. Until she was stopped in her tracks by the sound of the doorbell chiming. She blinked at the front door. Who could this be? Nobody ever came to the house during the day except the postman and he’d already been. She mopped her face with a tissue, examined the carnage of her red-raw facial features in the mirror next to the door and then sniffed a tentative: ‘Hello?’

‘Robyn?’ It was a woman’s voice, loud and direct.

‘Yes? Who is this?’

‘It’s Sam. It’s Jack’s mum. Can you let me in?’

‘Oh,’ said Robyn, almost in a whimper.

She took another look at her face. She looked like a girl who had been crying for half an hour. She would need to find a reason.

‘Hold on,’ she said to the closed door, while she hurriedly de-smudged her eyes and flattened her hair, ‘hold on.’ And then she pulled the door open and tried her hardest to smile a totally normal smile at her boyfriend’s mum. ‘Hi!’ she said, ‘Sam! What are you doing here?’

Sam gave her a strange look, almost patronising.

‘You know why I’m here,’ she said.

Robyn laughed, nervously.
Here it is
, she thought,
here it is
. ‘Do I?’ she asked, as lightly as she could.

‘Of course you do. Now, are you going to let me in or what?’

Dean took the shot from Tommy’s outstretched hand and necked it in one. It tasted like petrol, like paraffin. It burned at the back of his throat. It issued vapours from his nostrils. It rang in his ears. It numbed all the excruciating corners of his mind. He sucked on the spliff that Tommy had just passed him and then he let his body collapse against the back of the sofa and the world recede away from him, just for a few moments.

Tommy was his cousin. He’d been in the army for the past four years and now he’d signed himself off and was back in London. It was good timing. Dean and Tommy had grown up together and the people you grew up with were the easiest people to be with, Dean always thought. And right now he needed someone easy to be with. Tommy was the looker of the family. Dean had always liked going out on the town with him because the combination of Dean’s dark, other-worldly features and Tommy’s Action Man facial geometry (in some ways he could never have been anything other than a soldier) made quite a formidable impression. And Tommy, unlike Dean, liked talking to girls, approaching them, flattering them, pursuing them. Dean liked girls, he just didn’t like all the palaver you had to go through to get to them. He and Tommy made a good pair in that way.

They’d been talking all afternoon about Tommy’s time in Afghanistan: the bullets, the dirt, the nights under the stars wondering if he would live to see the sunrise. He used a lot of jargon when he talked: medevac, SCUD, sortie. It didn’t mean much to Dean but he appreciated the distraction from his own concerns. For the past two hours he’d been in a world where babies were blown up by snipers, not waiting to be taken home from special care, where men were men and women were not really in the picture at all. It was a good place to be. But now, as Tommy took the half-smoked spliff back from Dean and drew on it, Dean knew that The Tommy Show was almost over. A brief silence fell and Tommy sighed.

‘My mum told me all the shit that’s been happening. Fucking crazy, man.’ He shook his head, sadly.

Dean nodded.

‘I mean, how old was she?’

‘Sky?’

Tommy nodded.

‘Nineteen,’ said Dean.

‘Shit.’ Tommy squeezed air through pursed lips and grimaced. ‘Christ. You know, that kind of thing happens all the time out there,’ he gestured with his arm, to a place that Dean assumed was Afghanistan and not south-east London, ‘you expect it. But here … You know, modern day and age. You’d just think, you’d think they’d be able to stop it. Young girl, all her life ahead of her. Fuck, man …’ He winced again and rubbed the spliff out into an ashtray. ‘And what about the baby?’ he asked. ‘Boy, girl?’

‘Girl,’ said Dean.

‘Right. What’s the deal with her? My mum said she’s still at the hospital.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. She’s been in special care, you know, in an incubator. Wires and shit.’

‘Fuck,’ said Tommy.

‘Yeah, she’s doing well, though. She’s coming out next month, they reckon.’

‘Oh. Right, that’s good. And she’s all right, is she? I mean, you know, brain-wise?’

Dean flinched. He hadn’t even thought about that. With Sky being a premature baby herself it had never occurred to him that a premature baby could be anything other than one hundred per cent normal. The suggestion rankled with him slightly. ‘Far as I know,’ he replied. ‘Yeah. She’s fine.’

‘Good stuff,’ said Tommy. ‘That’s good. And then she’ll be coming here, will she?’ He looked around the unsavoury flat questioningly. It had not been a pretty flat when Sky had lived here, but it had at least been tidy and relatively hygienic and home to things like clean bath towels and washing up liquid. Now, after living here alone, during the toughest four weeks of his life, Dean knew the flat was squalid. He had attempted to tidy up when Tommy had said he was coming to visit, but really all he’d done was to kick things from the middle of the floor out towards the edges of the floor; the flat still smelled of mildew, stale smoke and loneliness.

‘No,’ said Dean, ‘not here.’

‘Then where?’

Dean shrugged. He had not seen his daughter since the day she was born and had no idea what would happen next month when she was finally discharged from the hospital. His mother had offered to take Isadora. But then so, of course, had Sky’s mother, Rose, who felt she had a bigger claim to the child, being her maternal grandmother, and Dean could see her point. In a way he wanted the baby to go to Rose. She was younger than his mother, had other grandchildren, lived in a nicer house and would take the responsibility in her stride. Dean’s mum was different. She liked her life the way it was. She was independent and hadn’t really had to think about anyone apart from Dean for her whole adult life. She was not geared up for life with a baby. But still, the thought of his baby being brought up by that overly controlling woman in her chichi house with all those shit magazines everywhere and her vain daughters and their spoiled children and TV blaring out MTV all day long, and the plastic fucking fairies in the garden … Rose would treat the baby like a doll, put it in a big frilly pram with a rosette on its head and wheel it about Peckham as if it was the holy reincarnation of her princess bloody daughter.