The Making of Us (31 page)

She demolished her Weetabix and banana and gulped down her sugary espresso. She was about to switch on her computer and begin her day with a perusal of the markets and the weather and the state of the world when she heard the doorbell issue its computerised chime. She stopped. It must be Juliette, she thought, forgotten her keys. She went to the monitor outside her office and she switched on the screen, and there on the front step, in a baseball cap and carrying a sports bag slung over his shoulder, was someone who looked very much like Dean.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘It’s me, Dean,’ he said. ‘I got your text last night.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Yeah. Then I got my phone nicked in the pub. Didn’t have your number anywhere else so thought I’d better get here early, in case I missed you.’

‘Oh,’ she said again, ‘I see.’

He stared meaningfully into the frog’s eye of the camera and shuffled from one foot to the other.

‘Is that OK?’ he said, eventually.

‘Yes, of course. Of course. Come in.’ She buzzed him in and met him at the bottom of the stairs. He looked at her in surprise, taking in her pyjamas and her uncombed hair. And then he looked behind her and blinked. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘sorry.’

‘Sorry for what?’

‘I didn’t realise …’

‘What?’ She looked behind her and saw that Bendiks was standing on the landing, topless and in cream drawstring cotton trousers.

‘Morning,’ he said, flashing white teeth at them.

‘Oh, hi, Bendiks. This is my friend,’ she began, then corrected herself, ‘my brother. This is Dean. Dean, this is Bendiks. My lodger. My trainer.’

‘Her
friend
,’ said Bendiks, padding down the stairs with his hand outstretched.

Lydia looked from Dean to Bendiks and back again. As much as she wished that Bendiks was significantly more than just her friend, she felt awkward at the notion of her baby brother getting the wrong impression. ‘Yes, but not …’

‘No,’ reassured Bendiks, rather too breezily, ‘not that sort of friend. Excellent to meet you.’

Dean smiled uncertainly at Bendiks, clearly blinded by the brownness of his skin and the whiteness of his teeth and the sheer size of his overdeveloped pectorals. This was why Lydia always made sure she was not in the kitchen after 8.30. She had once crossed paths with Bendiks wearing, underneath an unbelted cotton gown, a pair of fitted pants in black that appeared to have a kind of seamed pouch built into them to contain in great detail the fullness of his genitalia. Lydia, swollen as she was with urgent carnal longing, had found it slightly too informative an advertisement for things she could not afford.

‘Come in,’ she said to Dean. ‘Have you had any breakfast?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I got a bacon roll on the way here. I’m fine.’

‘Cup of tea?’

‘No.’ He smiled apologetically. ‘I’m good.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘what happened to your phone?’

‘Oh, nothing much. Just left it in my jacket pocket, hanging off the back of the chair. Someone lifted it.’ He shrugged. ‘My own fault.’

‘You insured?’

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Of course not.’

‘I’ll get you a new one,’ said Lydia, the words tumbling from her mouth before she’d had a chance to check herself.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said. ‘It’s fine. My mum said she’d get me a new one.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘right. Of course.’ She’d forgotten that he wasn’t an orphan, like her. She left him downstairs with Bendiks on the terrace while she ran upstairs to get dressed. She pulled on some jeans and a t-shirt with a baggy cardigan and trainers. She didn’t touch her face or her hair, she was in too much of a hurry to get back downstairs and break apart the unsettling duo of Dean and Bendiks. As a classic compartmentaliser Lydia couldn’t bear the thought of these two disparate characters being together apart from her.

‘So,’ she said, addressing Dean, ‘shall we go?’

‘Right,’ he said, placing his hands against his knees. ‘Sure. Yeah. Let’s go.’

‘Where are you going?’ asked Bendiks.

‘Oh, nowhere. Just to see some old family.’

‘Yeah, right,’ Bendiks slanted his eyes at her, ‘and I thought your family were all dead?’

Lydia was taken aback by this. She’d expected him to pass no comment. ‘Well, no, not all of them. I have an uncle. I have aunts and cousins …’

‘You told me you had lost contact with them all?’

Lydia had no idea why Bendiks was acting so confrontationally. ‘Well, yes, I did. But now …’

Bendiks’ face softened, as though he was aware that he’d been pushing too hard. ‘Good.’ He smiled. ‘That’s great. And I am so happy for you that you have found your brother. You are very, very lucky.’ He smiled sadly and Lydia felt her stomach lurch. Of course, she thought, of course. She had found her brother, Bendiks would never find his. She ignored a compulsion to touch his arm – he was still too naked to be touched – and instead she smiled at him and said, ‘Thank you.’

‘Did you tell your mum where you were going today?’ she asked Dean, eyeing him across the Formica-topped table that separated them in the first-class carriage.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘What did she say?’

‘Nothing much,’ he said. ‘My mum doesn’t say much about anything usually.’

Lydia nodded. ‘Do you think this is crazy? Doing this?’ she asked after a moment.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I think you’d be crazy not to.’

She nodded and turned to look out of the window. She was staring at the back view of London, at squat yards and stacked windows and brick walls and dirt. There were three hours ahead of them. Three hours to talk. And there was plenty to talk about.

‘So,’ she began, ‘did you get the letter?’

Dean’s eyes opened wide. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know. Bit shocking, isn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘What do you think about it?’

‘I think …’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘I don’t know what I think. I mean, I was just about dealing with meeting you.’ He exhaled. ‘Christ. I don’t know. I’m freaking out a bit, I think. What about you?’

‘The same,’ she said. ‘I feel the same. That’s why … well, that’s why I want to do this. I need to, you know, clean up the old mess before I get stuck into a new one.’

‘You think it’ll be a mess?’

She smiled. ‘Probably,’ she said. ‘I mean, look at us. Only three meetings and you went AWOL. Clearly I’m not very good at this reuniting thing.’

Dean looked genuinely upset by her comment. ‘No,’ he said, ‘God, no. It wasn’t you. It totally wasn’t you. It was me. It was just …’

‘I know what it was, Dean. It’s OK. I pushed it too far. I shouldn’t have come down heavy on you about the baby.’

‘It wasn’t the baby. Honestly. It wasn’t that. It was just … I just felt like you were …’ he looked up at her with his large brown eyes ‘… like you were too good for me.’

Lydia smiled and shook her head. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s what I thought. And that was another reason why I wanted you to come with me today. I wanted you to see where I came from. I wanted you to understand me and not just be put off by all the bollocks my money has bought me. I’m no different from you, Dean.’

He looked at her sceptically.

‘Honest, I’m not. You’ll see. You really will.’

He glanced out of the window. ‘I really like you, you know,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s nothing personal, that I’ve been off radar. I think you’re amazing.’

She looked at him and smiled. ‘Well, I know you’ll probably think I’m just saying this because you’re so flipping insecure, but I liked you the minute I saw you and I’ve liked you more and more ever since. You just need to sort out your self-esteem issues.’

‘You can talk!’ he teased.

‘What?’

‘Well, you, you’re all rich and super-successful, you’re really good-looking, and you walk around acting like you’re just some … blob.’

‘I do not!’ she countered.

‘You do, man. You’re all just, like this …’ He curled his upper back into a hump and looked at her nervously. ‘You’re all,
Don’t look at me, avert your gaze
. You know?’

She shrugged, feeling suddenly under attack. And then she sighed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘like I said, we’re the same, you and me. We’re just the same. Pathetic creatures. Pitiful, really.’ She paused and looked at him. And then they both laughed.

After a moment Lydia said, ‘What do you think the other one will be like? The girl? Robyn? Do you think she’ll be a pitiful creature, too?’

Dean stopped laughing and considered the question. ‘Fuck knows,’ he said. And then he paused and smiled. ‘I hope so.’

Lydia laughed again and they both quietened then and stared through the window at the bland city fringes scenery.

After a while Dean’s face became more tense and it was clear he was about to say something.

‘You were right, though,’ he said. ‘You were right about the baby. I’m a loser. I hate myself. Every morning I wake up and I look in the mirror and I see her eyes looking back at me, you know? The same eyes. Every morning she looks at me in the mirror and she goes: You
loser
. And she’s right.’

Lydia stared at him as he spoke. She thought of herself at his age. She thought of her life at university, pulling pints and fiddling with test tubes and keeping out the world. Could she have looked after a baby? Could she have looked after an ill baby? On her own? And, more to the point, would she have wanted to?

He was not a loser, but she would not be able to tell him that. She would have to show him that. So she said nothing and let the pair of them return to a state of restful and contemplative silence while the train took them speedily and urgently towards Wales.

It was warm when they dismounted from it. Lydia hadn’t expected it to be warm. She pulled off her cardigan and tied it around her waist. Dean replaced his baseball cap and they headed for the taxi rank.

Lydia felt a chill run through her, in spite of the humidity. She wondered how many hours of her life she had spent at the Cardiff taxi rank. She saw flashes of herself at seventeen, at eighteen, at nineteen. She saw herself in a battered leather jacket, Arnie at her side dressed in a blue bandana and a frayed rope collar. She saw herself younger, hand in hand with her father, heading back home after a stressful journey to Bangor to see her grandmother, dying in a bed in her own front room. She felt herself walking side by side with a dozen ancient versions of herself, and she felt every iota of the misery she’d felt every time she’d been here. Apart from the last time. She saw herself then, freshly graduated, liberated from her family and her past, her things in a trunk, her hair in a brand new twenties bob, Dixie at her side, heading away from Wales and towards London Town.

She’d vowed to herself, and to Dixie, that she would never, ever come back. She remembered sitting on the train, puffing on a cigarette, staring through the window and saying to Dixie, ‘This is the best moment of my life.’

For a moment, Lydia cursed herself for breaking her own vow and for tainting the perfection of that moment eight years earlier. But then she looked at her brother, thin and stooped as he followed her towards the taxi rank, and she remembered why she was here.

‘Can you take us to Tonypandy, please?’ she asked a man who was folding away a copy of the
Penarth Times
.

He eyed her blandly and hit the switch on his meter. ‘What takes you that way?’ he asked, looking at her in the rear-view mirror a moment later.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘nothing. Just family.’

‘Ah,’ he said, nodding knowingly. ‘Right.’

‘We’ll need you for the whole day, if that’s OK? Do you have a day rate?’

‘Eighty pounds,’ he said, succinctly, and then he turned off his meter.

Lydia was glad of Dean’s presence in the taxi with her. It kept the focus off making conversation with the driver. Instead she pointed out landmarks to her brother as they drove. That’s where I used to work behind the bar when I was a student. That’s where we went to collect my puppy from when I was eight. That’s the market where my dad used to work. That’s the place that does the best fish and chips in Glamorgan. That’s the hill where I first got stoned.

‘You got stoned?’ he asked, whisking his head round to look at her.

‘Of course I did.’

He smiled at her, uncertainly. ‘You never told me that,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well, what did you expect me to say? “Hi, I’m Lydia, and when I was a student I used to smoke weed”?’

She watched the scenes of her past flash by from the taxi window and then she stiffened as the outskirts to her village appeared. She stared in queasy awe at the 7Eleven with the wheelchair ramp outside where she used to buy herself treats and fizzy drinks, and then, when her dad was ill, where she used to do all the household shopping. She gazed at the hair salon, once called Hair Today, now painted guacamole green and called The Village Spa. She saw the shops give way to terraces and the terraces give way to sprawling estates and then there it was, her block. Ugly as ever, four floors of pebble-dashed mediocrity, set behind a small patch of grass and a play area.

The play area had been made over, carpeted in springy blue plastic and planted with brightly coloured bouncy ponies and rubberised baby swings. A young woman sat reading a magazine on a bench while her small boy sat at her feet, twirling the wheels on his scooter. A rubbish bin by the bench was filled to overflowing with squashed pizza boxes, empty cans and a balled up nappy. Beyond the grass and the play area there was a paved walkway that encircled the whole building and led to the entrance at the side.

The young mother on the bench looked up as she saw Dean and Lydia walking towards the flats. She smiled wanly, as though she thought she should know them, and then returned her gaze to her magazine.

‘Which one was yours?’ asked Dean, looking up.

Lydia pointed at a balcony on the third floor. ‘That one,’ she said.

‘And that’s the balcony…?’

‘Yeah.’ She glanced down at the paving. Felt her insides shrink together. Her flesh ran with horror. There it was. Still there, after all these years. The smudge of paint. She dropped to her haunches and stared down at the innocuous pink curl. She put out her hand and touched it with her fingers. Her mother’s hand. She remembered again the silver swans and the lovesick budgie and the circles in the magazines. She searched around inside her head to see if there was anything else to remember, anything she’d left behind. But she found nothing.