The Making of Us (4 page)

She took the boxed-up gift in the blue carrier and headed back home, stopping on the way at the smart wine shop on the corner where she spent £27.99 on a bottle of Gewürztraminer on the recommendation of the salesman. In Camden she would have expected a minimum of three bottles of wine for that amount of money. It was almost, Lydia contemplated as she typed her pin number into the salesman’s machine, as though money had lost its context, had been stretched out of shape. This, she assumed, was what it was to be rich.

An hour later, Lydia paced the kitchen fitfully, peering down the hallway towards the opaque glass of the front door every few moments until finally she saw their outlines. She breathed in deeply. Not only was she unused to entertaining, she was unused to entertaining people with new babies. She pulled open the door and smiled at her friends. ‘Hello!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come in!’

She knew that somewhere in the midst of her friends there was a baby, but as neither of them appeared to be holding one in any easily observable manner Lydia ushered them through, accepting the usual citrus-noted kisses from Dixie and an avuncular slap on the back from Clem, taking coats and steering them towards the kitchen. It was only as they began to seat themselves at the dining table that Lydia could see that they had brought in with them a moulded plastic car seat containing a small sleeping infant. She immediately felt a sense of social unease. It was as though Dixie had arrived with a new facial scar or a malodorous fiancé, something new and permanent about which Lydia was obliged to say something positive and encouraging. She set her face to soft and eyed the contents of the car seat. ‘So this is little Viola?’ She smiled.

‘Vee-ola,’ Dixie corrected.

‘Sorry, Vee-ola, yes, I did wonder. Vee-ola. Well, hello, aren’t you small?’

Dixie snorted. ‘You wouldn’t say that,’ she began, ‘if you’d had to push her out of your body single-handedly. Without any drugs, of any description.’

‘Well, no, I’m sure …’ Lydia wrinkled her nose and trailed off. This was exactly the sort of thing she’d been worried about. Talk of pushing and drugs and, soon, no doubt, of bowel movements and putrid milky burps.

The baby appeared to be involved in a very vivid and involving dream, her eyes pressed shut as though against her will, her face twitching occasionally, her hands held out claw-like in front of her body. Lydia remembered that she was supposed to say something complimentary. ‘Well,’ she said after a moment, ‘she’s sleeping, that’s good.’

Clem smiled and eyed the infant fondly. ‘That’s all she does,’ he said, ‘sleeps. Dreams, feeds, shits, sleeps. She’s an angel.’

For a short while all three adults sat and smiled fondly at the oblivious Viola until eventually they recovered themselves and Lydia turned her mind towards drinks and snacks.

Dixie, she was surprised to notice, as she handed her a glass of sparkling water, still appeared to be pregnant. She was dressed in a kind of smock top and narrow-legged jeans and, as far as Lydia could tell, didn’t look all that different from how she’d looked the last time she’d seen her, two weeks ago, before they had their baby. Lydia wondered about this, and felt worried for a moment that maybe her friend had something wrong with her, a tumour perhaps, but thought better of asking about it.

She passed Clem a can of Grolsch and a glass and poured herself one and then sat down with her friends.

‘So, is this the first time you’ve been out, since she was born?’ Lydia began.

They both nodded and Dixie said, ‘I mean, I’ve taken her out to the corner shop, but this is officially her first car ride and her first dinner party.’

‘Well,’ said Lydia, ‘I must say, you both look great. I mean, a bit tired, but still, great.’

She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting; skulls for faces, sick-splattered clothing, empty expressions, drained of anything that had previously made them what they were. But, no, they seemed jolly and bright and reasonably normal.

‘Knackered,’ agreed Dixie, untying the laces of some rather battered Converse plimsolls and kicking them off beneath the table, a relaxed and somewhat untidy gesture that betrayed their previous incarnations as flatmates. ‘Though she’s in our bed so at least I’m not getting up and down in the middle of the night to feed her.’

‘And it is rather
brilliant
for me,’ agreed Clem, ‘as I don’t have to wake up at all!’

Dixie threw him a withering look. ‘Your time will come,’ she said. ‘Once she’s off the boob, you will be getting very familiar with the bottle steriliser and the Cow and Gate, I can assure you.’

Clem smiled wanly and stroked his beer glass. Lydia got to her feet and lit the gas beneath the two woks on the hob, as per Juliette’s instructions. ‘Well,’ she said, smiling across the hob towards her friends, ‘haven’t we all come a long way? Seems like only yesterday we were all squashed into that little flat together, and now you two are parents and I’m over here in this huge place. Is this it?’ She smiled. ‘Are we grown-ups now?’

Clem and Dixie laughed. ‘Never,’ said Dixie, ‘perish the thought. I keep thinking someone’s going to realise how immature we are and come and take the baby away from us. I’m sure the midwife thinks we’re a pair of losers.’

Clem and Dixie laughed and Lydia glanced across the hob at them again. Her friends. Clem was a sweet-faced man with too much thick dark hair, scuffed cheeks and a slight paunch. Dixie was small and trendy with peroxide-blonde hair, currently showing two inches of pale gold roots after some kind of pregnancy-related bleach ban. They looked like a pair of overgrown students. They
were
a pair of overgrown students. Lydia had met Dixie (her real name was Suzanne Dixon but she’d been Dixie since she was a very young girl) at university in Aberystwyth. Dixie was studying film-making. Lydia was studying Chemistry. Neither of them could really remember how they’d come together, chalk and cheese as they were in every respect. But they’d co-existed quite happily for ten years, first in a shared room above a shop in Aberystwyth and then, as Dixie and Lydia’s careers had taken off and led them to London, in the two-bed place in Camden Town. An old married couple, that’s how they’d seen themselves, and in that scenario Dixie, cute and domesticated, the sort of person who randomly decided to make cup cakes, for no particular reason, had been the girl and Lydia, lean and formidable and with no notion whatsoever of the difference between caster sugar and icing sugar, had definitely been the man.

Clem had come into their lives a year ago and Lydia had liked him immediately. She liked that he was unfashionable and wholesome and had views on things other than trendy film directors and club nights at Camden dives. He took Dixie out for walks on the Heath and made her eat meat (she was a rather woolly, uncommitted vegetarian type). And then quickly, rather too quickly in Lydia’s opinion, he got her pregnant. Dixie was twenty-nine. It seemed far too young to be having a baby. And a year seemed far too early on in a relationship to become a parent. But from the moment they’d found out, there’d been no doubt in either of their minds that a baby was the way forward. ‘Why not?’ Dixie had said. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’

Adventures, Lydia felt, weren’t always necessarily good things.

The baby started to stir in its seat and she felt herself bristle. It wasn’t that Lydia disliked babies, it was just that she didn’t know babies. She had not held a baby in her arms since she was a teenager, and even then she wasn’t sure if she really had or if it was some kind of false memory. She busied herself extra-zealously to avoid the possibility of Clem or Dixie attempting to foist the baby upon her, keeping her gaze from the baby’s face as it was unclipped and raised from its seat. Suddenly, though, she was face to face with it, its tiny little face a few inches from hers, staring at her with some alarm. Lydia stared back at her with some alarm and then the baby began, quite understandably, to wail. Clem immediately clutched the small bundle to his chest and whisked her away.

‘Traumatised for life,’ said Lydia, flatly. Of course the baby had cried. She had fully expected the baby to cry. Lydia was not a baby person and did not have the kind of face or demeanour that a baby would like.

The baby spent the duration of the meal slurping from one of Dixie’s vastly over-inflated breasts, and then some time draped over her shoulder staring pathetically at the wall behind her. Lydia felt sorry for the child. She was so new and ill-equipped. Every day her eyes would see more of this strange place, every day her brain would process more reality, her tiny limbs would stretch and swell, she’d learn and absorb and empathise and understand and grow and grow and grow … until one day she’d wake up and she’d be just another human being. The length and magnitude of the journey seemed to bear such pitifully small rewards.

After her friends had left, taking the infant Viola and her new pink clothes with them, Lydia felt curiously sad. She loaded her shiny Miele dishwasher with large Royal Doulton platters and scraped sticky noodles into the very clever German-designed concealed bins. She dropped the empty wine bottle (it had not been worth £27.99) and beer cans into the recycling compartment and she wiped all her silky, off-white surfaces with a stack of folded kitchen paper. She washed the woks and dried them and put them away, and with every movement she felt something thick and sour sloshing around in the pit of her stomach and it wasn’t her supper. It was a kind of melancholic longing.

It was the baby, something to do with the baby. She too had once been a baby, she too had been a tiny miracle, kept safe and nurtured, talcumed and clothed in doll-sized clothes. She’d been, it was hard to imagine now, a fat baby, with dark ringlets and cheeks like cherries and whey. She had pictures of herself in cotton romper suits with elasticated legs that cut into the meat of her thighs, smiling into the camera as though she were truly the loveliest thing in the world. She had other pictures of herself, dandled on knees like a catch of the day, held in arms like a football trophy, always the centre of the universe, always the reason for the photo having been taken. She remembered nothing about it, of course, nothing about being a baby, but she’d been wanted, she knew that much, wanted and needed by her sweet soft mother, even if her father hadn’t cared.

The longing she felt was not so much for the baby she’d once been as for the life she’d been promised back in those rosy, unknowable days. The promise of gentle voices and warm embraces and a safe place to be. Nearly all babies were made these promises, given these false notions about the world, but few had them ripped away from them as painfully and suddenly as Lydia had. It wasn’t, she now realised, that she didn’t like babies, or that she didn’t find babies interesting, and it wasn’t even that she resented the baby for taking her friends from her and into a strange and unreachable realm, although she did, it was more that instead of feeling joy when she looked at a new baby, all she felt was fear.

On Thursday Lydia met Bendiks in Regent’s Park. He was dazzling in a white t-shirt and a thick red hooded jacket. Lydia was less luminous in off-black joggers and a grey hoodie. She felt the familiar leap of happiness at the sight of her personal trainer. She didn’t know why Bendiks made her feel this way. Lydia wasn’t usually attracted to incredibly pretty men who looked like they should be wearing sailor suits in arty aftershave commercials. Lydia wasn’t, as far as she was aware, usually attracted to anything, these days. Lydia was a scientist. Lydia was a businesswoman. Lydia was wealthy. Lydia was lonely. But Lydia had barely thought about men, women, sex or anything in between for years.

‘Good morning!’ Bendiks beamed.

‘Morning,’ said Lydia, rubbing her hands together against the January chill.

‘How are you this morning?’

‘Oh, I’m fine, not bad. You?’

‘I’m
fantastic
,’ he declared.

Lydia nodded her agreement.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘it’s cold this morning, so let’s warm up nice and quickly. Let’s jump.’ He smiled at Lydia and Lydia swallowed a groan. Jumping at the gym was one thing; jumping out here, in public, was quite another. Bendiks had a special jumping technique: hands at knee-level, knees bent, hopping around the place like a great gangling frog.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘but only if you jump with me too.’

Bendiks smiled. ‘For sure,’ he replied.

And so the two of them clasped their kneecaps and began to hop, Lydia resisting the urge to say, Ribbit. Ribbit. After a moment her blood began to run warm and fast and her cheeks found some colour and her heart hammered against her chest and she laughed, despite herself. Ribbit. Ribbit.

Lydia’s last sexual encounter had been eight years ago, with a fellow student, a man called William. It was William who’d suggested to her that she should take her groundbreaking chemical compound and her business acumen and make a product that would appeal to millions. It was also William who had broken her heart for the very first and only time.

‘So,’ said Bendiks, as they jogged sedately towards the outdoor training circuit in Primrose Hill, ‘you are a scientist?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Lydia. ‘Sort of. I used to be. Nowadays I seem to have become more of a business consultant.’

‘Wow,’ said Bendiks, ‘and how does a scientist become like a business consultant?’

Lydia smiled. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is a long and very dull story.’

‘I don’t mind dull,’ said Bendiks, pursing his pretty lips together and turning to face the path once more. ‘I am a personal fitness trainer!’

His body was extraordinary. Lithe and toned, yet still soft-looking. Lydia didn’t like the thought of those very hard bodies that some men had, she didn’t like the feel of muscle too close to flesh. It was, thought Lydia, the perfect male body. This, she assumed, may be what lay at the root of her strange fascination with Bendiks, just the sheer unlikely perfection of him.

‘So,’ said Bendiks, ‘tell me.’

Lydia caught her breath. ‘Oh, God, honestly, it really is so boring. I invented a chemical compound at uni, result of some strange obsession of mine, a compound to take the smell out of paint.’