The Making of Us (22 page)

‘Yes. Of course it is. Why on earth would I lie about a thing like that? And what on earth does it have to do with you and Jack?’

Laughter bubbled under the surface. Robyn’s smile widened. ‘I thought – you’re going to think I’m mad – but I thought he might be my brother.’

‘What!’

‘Yeah, I know, it’s nuts, isn’t it? But there were so many things … we look so alike, and then I signed up to the Donor Sibling Registry and they told me I had a brother born in 1983. And I just thought … And you!’ she remembered suddenly. ‘You were so weird, that night at your house, when we were talking about me being a donor’s child. You were looking at me so strangely …’

Sam blinked at her and shook her head. ‘Was I?’ she said.

‘Yes! Like there was something you were thinking. Like you’d used a donor yourself.’

Sam laughed. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t remember. But if I was looking at you strangely it was probably because I just find anything to do with parentage interesting. Because Jack doesn’t have a father. I suppose I’m always subconsciously looking for reassurance, for other views, for different ways of looking at things. Because I’ve felt guilty all my life that I couldn’t give him a dad.’

Her strong face softened then and she put one large hard-skinned hand against Robyn’s. ‘Oh, sweetie,’ she clucked. ‘Sweet girl. I can’t believe you’ve been going around all this time, thinking that you were doing something wrong. You should have come straight to me, sweetie. I could have put your mind at rest a long time ago and saved you all this pain. Because you and Jack, well, you’re perfect together. And, trust me, I will do anything it takes to support the pair of you. I believe in you two, and that is a hard thing for me to say. This is my boy, my only child, no one was ever going to be good enough for him. But you are. I honestly believe that. I mean – why else would I be here?’ She paused for a moment, her mouth still open from her last syllable, her hands spread wide in front of her. And then she leaned back in her chair and laughed.

Robyn smiled. Finally. It was over. She felt all the wrong-ness inside her melt away. She had not slept with her brother. She was not a pervert or a freak. She was normal. She was totally, splendidly, beautifully, utterly normal.

‘So,’ Sam continued, leaning back towards the table, ‘is that it now? Are you reassured?’

‘Yes,’ smiled Robyn. ‘I am. But promise me one thing? Please?’

Sam looked at her, expectantly.

‘Don’t tell Jack. Please don’t tell him. I’d hate to think of him knowing about all the weird shit I’ve been worrying about. I just want everything to go back to normal …’

Sam smiled and nodded. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said, ‘your secret is safe with me.’

*

The first thing Robyn did when Sam left half an hour later was to call Jack. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’ve been freaking out. And I’ve been crazy. But I’m not crazy any more. I’m totally sane. I’ve missed you. I love you. I’ve got your keys in my hand. I’m ready to go. Can I still move in?’

There was a moment’s silence and then Jack laughed. ‘What, now?’

‘Yes,’ Robyn said, breathlessly, ‘why not? I can be packed and there by early evening.’

Jack laughed again. ‘Wow,’ he said, pensively.

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I’m great. I’m good. I’m just, shit, I don’t know. I’ve been so … God, I can’t even put it into words. I’ve just been totally desperate. I’ve missed you so much. I thought …’ He paused and sighed. ‘I thought it was all over.’

Robyn smiled and breathed lovingly into the phone. ‘I hate myself,’ she said. ‘I hate myself. And this – this isn’t me. Honestly. I don’t do this kind of thing. But then, no one ever asked me to live with them before.’

‘It’s my fault. I knew it the minute I said it. I knew it was too much. You’re so young. We’ve only just met. I was an idiot.’

‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! You weren’t an idiot. I was an idiot. An idiot ever to think it wasn’t a great idea. I’ve been ill. I’ve lost half a stone. I look awful. I love you. I really love you. I’m going to pack. I’ll see you in a few hours. I love you.’

‘I love you too,’ laughed Jack.

‘Shh, now. Let me go. I love you.’

‘I love you.’

‘Stop telling me you love me! I love you!’

‘I love you more.’

She sighed. ‘You win. I’ll see you soon.’

She switched off the phone and she rested it on the kitchen table and she grinned at it. She tried to stop smiling but she could not. Her smile was stuck. She glanced then around her parents’ kitchen. She looked at the biscuit-coloured tiles impressed with purplish bunches of grapes, the chunky ceramic pots in a line: TEA, COFFEE, SUGAR, with their fat cork lids. She looked at the magnetic noticeboard studded with plumber’s bills and dental appointments and receipts for wheelbarrows and car batteries, at the stable door hung with stained aprons and rusty barbecue forks. This had been her kitchen since the day she was born. The kitchen had changed not one iota, just tarnished and faded and cluttered itself. But Robyn had changed. Not slowly, not in barely perceptible increments, but overnight, from the moment she met Jack. And now that change was taking her away from here, away from Essex, from her parents’ home. And she was ready now. Ready to be an adult. Ready for Jack. Well and truly.

Except, it wasn’t that simple. Because somewhere inside the grubby chaos of the past few weeks she had brought something else into her world. Two brothers. And a sister. She’d never wanted to know about them. She’d had no interest in these people. They were not relevant to her journey. But now they were here. The ‘sister’ person had requested her information. And now there was another one. He’d signed up just last week. It was the younger of the two brothers. And there they were, in black and white. Real people, fleshed out from translucent shadows to two dimensions, one click of a button away from standing in front of her complete with smells and voices and blemishes and preconceptions and needs and wants. She kept trying to force them back into the box of her past but they refused to stay, bursting out of the sides like excess clothing in an over-packed suitcase. She’d breathed life into these people and now that she was done with them they refused to die. Sister. Brother. Brother. Sketchy, indistinct, sinister as ghosts.

‘What are you going to do about them?’ her mother had asked her the night before.

‘Nothing,’ she’d replied, knowing even as she said it that it wasn’t true. However much she wanted it to be.

Her mother had stopped stirring the gravy granules in a Pyrex jug on the kitchen counter and Robyn had seen her inhale, breathing away her natural reaction. A moment passed and then slowly she’d begun to stir rhythmically at the gravy again. She was trying to find the right words.

‘Well,’ she’d said, eventually, resting the jug in the middle of the table, ‘maybe not now. No. Maybe later on. When you’re more settled.’

Robyn took her mother’s well-intended words and let them sit with her for a short while before saying, circumspectly, but not without feeling, ‘Yes. Maybe later. Maybe soon.’

The conversation was over. Dinner was served.

He could hear her in the background. A small, keening noise, like a bird on a windowsill. It shocked him. He’d never heard her cry. The last time he’d seen her – the first time he’d seen her – she’d been muted by tubes and machinery. There’d been no lusty cry of indignation as she was pulled from her mother’s belly, just pathetic silence. The sound both alarmed and reassured him.

‘Is she OK?’ he asked Rose.

‘Yes, she’s fine. She’s just wanting a cuddle, aren’t you, sweetheart?’

He heard Rose move closer to the keening sound, and then he heard snuffling and waffling sounds of flesh against speaker, and then the keening sound stopped and he heard Rose saying: ‘There, there, my beauty. There, there, my angel. That’s better, isn’t it? There.’

There were half a dozen different sentiments buried inside Rose’s tone of voice and Dean could read them all. Listen, she was saying, that is the sound of your motherless daughter crying. Listen, this is the sound of me instinctively knowing what your crying daughter wants because I have done this so many times before and am doing a much better job than you or your feeble mother could ever hope to do. But listen also to the sound of parenting,
this
is what you should be doing right now. I should not be soothing this crying baby. You should be soothing her. Although, the subtext continued,
I don’t want you anywhere near this baby, you hear me
. This is my baby. My baby’s baby. You have lost any stake in this baby with your gutless and self-centred behaviour of the past ten weeks.

As much as Dean disliked his late girlfriend’s mother, he had to concede that she had a point. He was only on the phone to her now because the council had been in touch about getting the flat back from him and he needed the baby’s birth certificate to try and take it over in his own name. It was a cowardly and feckless thing to be doing because he knew deep down inside himself that he had no intention of ever living here with the baby. The best he could conceivably envisage was that the baby might come here for the odd overnight stay if Rose needed to be elsewhere. But really, this flat would never be a home to his daughter. And he would never be her father. The truth was that he was using the fact of the baby’s existence to try and wheedle himself a home out of the government. He was a loser. He could see Sky now, with her big swollen belly, sitting on that chair opposite him, saying: ‘You’re pathetic, you know that? You’re fucking pathetic.’ And she was right.

‘What d’you want her birth certificate for?’ asked Rose, suspiciously.

‘I need to, er, it’s for, like, child tax credits or something. I had a letter through.’

‘Send it to me. I’ll deal with it,’ Rose barked.

‘No. It says it has to be the registered parent. It says I have to apply.’

‘Hmm,’ she murmured, dubiously. ‘I don’t remember ever having to do anything like that with the rest of them … Saffron, I’ve got Dean on the phone: did you ever have to send off the kids’ birth certificates to apply for your tax credits?’

Dean held his breath, heard Sky’s sister in the background saying: ‘No idea. Don’t think so, though. Think the government gets all the information through computers and stuff.’

‘No,’ said Rose to Dean. ‘I’m not letting you have her birth certificate. End of.’

‘But she’s my kid. It’s my name on that certificate.’

‘Yeah, well, you’re lucky it’s on there. To be honest, I was that close to saying “Father unknown”, because, quite truthfully, Dean, you may as well be.’

And then she hung up.

Dean stared at his phone for a moment. He was not surprised. She’d been quite civil considering. And he didn’t have the energy or the wherewithal to fight back. So that was it. The flat would be taken away from him. He’d be back with his mum. And a small deep-seated part of him was glad. This whole moving out, getting a job, having a baby thing, looking after himself … it had never felt right. It had always felt too soon. He rested his phone on the table and looked around the bare flat. Yes, he thought, yes. His conversation with Rose had sealed it. He would move out. Back with his mum. He would pretend none of the past twelve months had ever happened. He would start all over again. And maybe, in starting all over again, he might discover what exactly the point of himself was.

Dean and Tommy sat side by side in the Alliance, just across the road from the benefits office. Tommy had just been in to sign on – ‘For the first time in my life,’ he’d muttered disconsolately. Dean had signed on, too. Not for the first time in his life. Dean had been unemployed for nearly a year now. Once he’d moved in with Sky he’d let things slide a bit with the driving job. It hadn’t seemed worth getting up for, really. His mum always gave him a few quid every week and in the past he’d saved it up, for his future. Ironic that the moment he started building a future he’d thrown it all away. It was almost as if he’d known there wasn’t going to be one.

It was 3.35 and on the table in front of them were two pints of Dutch lager and two packets of crisps, torn from top to bottom and displaying their silvery, oily innards. Both men stared into the middle distance in silence. Tommy was all or nothing. You either couldn’t get a word out of him or a word in edgeways. It didn’t bother Dean either way.

He let the silence draw out for a while and pulled together his thoughts. There was something he wanted to talk about but he didn’t really know where to start. So he started at the place he knew Tommy would find the most interesting.

‘So, I went home with that redhead on Friday night,’ he said.

‘Oh yeah, I thought you might.’ Tommy winked at him. ‘How was it?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it was all right. She’s a bright girl.’

‘A bright girl, eh?’

‘Yeah. She’s a student.’

‘Wow. What the fuck did you talk about?’

Dean laughed.

‘Oh, right, I see. No talking required, eh?’

‘No, it wasn’t that. We didn’t even … you know?’

‘What? Seriously?’

Dean shrugged.

Tommy picked up his pint. ‘Yeah, well,’ he said, ‘I reckon it’s fair enough. A bit soon probably. A bit soon for all that. You’re probably wise not to get involved.’

‘Well, yeah, it was a bit more than that, though. I mean, I liked her. She was cool. And something happened.’ He inhaled and threw Tommy a quick glance from the corner of his eye.

Tommy looked at him quizzically. ‘Oh, yeah?’

‘It’s a bit weird really, and I haven’t told you any of this before but while you were away my mum told me something. She told me that my dad wasn’t who she’d said it was. That my dad was …’

‘A donor. I know. My mum told me. Years ago.’

‘What, you knew?’

‘Yeah. Sworn to secrecy. I wished she hadn’t told me.’

‘Fucking hell! I can’t believe you knew that all along and you never said anything.’

‘Christ, I nearly did, a hundred times. My mum should never have told me. But that’s great. Your mum finally told you.’

‘Well, yeah, I guess. And it’s cool and everything. I wasn’t really bothered or anything. Sort of made sense really. But that night, with that girl, Kate, we were really wasted. I mean, like, completely fucked, and we went on to the internet and she signed me up with this Donor Sibling Registry thing.’