The Making of Us (7 page)

‘I thought we could work out here,’ she said, indicating a space by the back door with a ballet barre and a mirrored wall and built-in gym mats.

‘Well, yes, your own personal home gym, I think, yes, that does seem the logical place to work out.’ He smiled widely, explaining his joke to her. ‘You know, in this job I have been in some amazing houses belonging to, like, celebrities and things, but I think your house is the best. It’s the most …
me
, you know?’ He smiled again and began to unpack his gym bag. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘are you ready to go?’

She nodded wanly.

‘You look … I hope you don’t mind me to say this, but you look bad today.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘thanks a lot.’

‘No, I don’t mean you look unpleasant. I mean, you look like there are bad things in your head. You look weighted down, squashed, you understand?’

Lydia grimaced. Squashed and weighted down. He made her sound like a slug under a brick. ‘Just stuff,’ she muttered. ‘Some weird stuff going on in my life, that’s all.’

He arched an eyebrow. ‘Anything you’d like to talk about?’

She laughed, louder than she’d meant to.

‘What,’ he teased, ‘you think I can’t talk? That I am just some big meathead?’

‘No! Of course not. It’s just … I don’t know. We never talk. It would be weird.’

He smiled and folded his arms across his chest. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I am here as your personal trainer, right? You pay me to make you fit. That is the deal. But also, I have to know that you are in the right place, mentally, for me to make you fit and I have noticed lately that you are not. That I leave you and then you go like this,’ he collapsed his upper torso, pathetically, ‘until the next time I see you. And that is no good. So, if you think it would help, talk to me. I am cheaper than a shrink!’

‘Oh, God,’ she said, drily, ‘I wouldn’t know where to start. I really wouldn’t.’

‘Try me.’ He smiled. ‘I think I’ve heard pretty much everything there is to hear. I’m pretty hard to shock.’

Lydia glanced at him. He’d crouched down on his haunches to her level. His skin was like chamois, matt and unblemished. She was sure she could see a hint of concealer under his eyes. That confirmed it. Bendiks was gay. And the fact of his being gay made him suddenly emotionally accessible. ‘Right, well,’ she began, slightly defensively, ‘up until four weeks ago I had no idea that my mother, who died in suspicious circumstances when I was three, had used a sperm donor to conceive me. Someone from my home town sent me an anonymous letter. And last week I signed up to a website that promised to reunite me with any siblings I may unwittingly have dotted around the world. I have had a DNA test and been told that my father’s name was Donor 32 and that so far no other children have signed up or registered, so now every single day I sit by my computer checking and checking and checking to see if anyone’s added their details, to see if I have a brother or a sister. And I’m finding it really hard to concentrate on anything else. When I’m not hovering over my computer, I’m walking the streets staring at people like a loon, wondering if they look like me, wondering if they might be my …
family
.’

She felt her body relax as the words left her mouth. The physical feel of them was soothing and pleasant, like syrup.

Bendiks exhaled slowly from bellowed cheeks and lowered himself on to his backside. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Unbelievable.’

Lydia nodded.

‘So your father … the man who brought you up … he could not …?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose not,’ she said.

‘And he knew? That you were not his?’

She shrugged again. ‘I don’t know. He said something strange once, just before he died, said that I was as much his as anyone’s. Never knew what he meant by that, I thought he meant I was as much his as I was my mother’s. But that makes sense if he knew, doesn’t it? And it would explain why he hated me.’

Bendiks began to make a scoffing sound.

‘No, really, he did. I always knew he hated me and I always thought it was because I hadn’t died instead of my mother. I always felt guilty, you know, that I wasn’t enough to make up for him losing my mum. And then, well, now
I
know that he wasn’t my real dad, and if he knew it too, which I think he probably did, well then – he didn’t have to love me at all, did he?’

A heavy silence fell upon them.

‘I understand,’ said Bendiks, softly.

Lydia glanced at him.

‘I understand you. My brother died. He got knocked down by a truck, outside our home.’

Lydia blinked and examined her fingertips. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘You don’t need to be sorry. It is not your fault.’ He smiled.

‘No, of course it’s not, it’s just … it’s just what we say, when we feel bad for someone. How old were you?’

‘Fourteen. My brother was eight.’ He shrugged again. ‘So, you know, I kind of get where you’re coming from. I used to have a brother. Now I don’t have a brother and I walk around and I still see him. I try to imagine him at fourteen, at twenty, at twenty-four. He’d be twenty-four now.’ His eyes filled with sadness for a second. ‘And, wow, if I thought there was a chance for me to find I had another brother or a sister, someone who looked a bit like me or sounded a bit like me, it would be a miracle … I understand,’ he said, cupping her hand with his. ‘I understand how you are feeling.’

Lydia glanced down at the hand that covered hers. She stared at the perfect fingernails, the smooth cuticles, and then she imagined that hand sliding from her hand up her bare arm, moving her hair from her shoulder, cupping the side of her neck, pulling her face towards his. Of all the people, she thought to herself, of all the people to have shared this with …
Bendiks
. Her trainer. The man who made her do frog jumps and punch him. This man from a foreign land.

There was a whole night’s worth of talking between their two stories, but Lydia could feel herself closing up again, slowly but determinedly, like the jaws of a Venus flytrap. She felt exposed and raw. It was time to go back to basics. ‘Come on,’ she said, jumping to her feet. ‘Time to make me sweat.’

‘You are sure?’ asked Bendiks, his voice soft with concern. ‘We can talk some more?’

Lydia opened her mouth. Yes, she wanted to say, yes, I want to talk and talk and talk and then I want to take all your clothes off and have you take all my clothes off and then sweat and pump and grind and breathe and groan and then lie with your beautiful body wrapped around mine in pools of our own shared salty sweat and then talk some more.

‘No,’ she said, ‘no. I’m done talking for now. But thank you,’ she said. ‘I thought I was going mad. And now I know I’m not.’

Robyn Inglis celebrated her eighteenth birthday with a Voltz energy shot and the morning-after pill.

The night before she’d still been seventeen, but she wasn’t having her birthday party on a Sunday night, no way. Besides it had been half legal, the party hadn’t started ’til nine o’clock, she’d turned eighteen at midnight, the last four hours she’d been partying as a proper bona fide paid up member of the adult population, thank you very much.

The man, the
boy
(he was still only seventeen, poor fool), was irrelevant. She’d just had to do it, quickly as possible, christen herself and her
adultness
. Christian was his name. Jewish was his religion. Circumcised was his penis. Quick was his coming. But Robyn didn’t care. He was pretty and smelled nice and she’d only missed out on ten minutes of her totally brilliant party. She’d been planning that party for nearly a year, it was like it was her
wedding
or something. Her mum and dad had given her £500 towards it and she’d put in another couple of hundred of her own money, saved up from her Saturday job in Zara. A limo, yes indeed, a limo had come to collect her and three of her besties from her house on Saturday night. They all looked like actual celebrities, they really did. Robyn was channelling Anna Friel’s backstage look, in a proper prom dress with petticoats and everything. And red lipstick and her hair up. She looked
amazing
. Everyone said so. They all did.

Robyn’s mum had gone all funny when she came downstairs in her prom dress, cupped her hands over her mouth and sucked in her breath and said, ‘You look stunning, stunning. A real, true princess.’ Her dad had just smiled his big dumb smile and looked a bit proud. And then they’d said all the usual rubbish about
don’t go anywhere without telling your friends
, and
call us if you’re in trouble, it doesn’t matter how late it is
, and
never leave your drink unattended and don’t accept drinks from strangers unless you’ve seen the barman pour it with your own eyes
. Yeah yeah yeah. It wasn’t as if she’d never been out drinking before. She’d been out drinking since she was about
thirteen years old
, for God’s sake. Robyn could take her drink.

Even when she was at it with Christian (why would a Jewish person call their son
Christian
, it didn’t make any sense?) up against a wall outside the men’s toilets, she’d been in control. Totally. Except that he wouldn’t put a condom on. It didn’t matter really because she knew she had two morning-after pills in her drawer, and she figured he smelled too good to have an STD. No one with hair that smelled of actual
roses
could have an STD. Anyway, she’d been in total control, pulled him over by his tie, taken him out of his trousers, kissed him hard,
really hard
. ‘You’re my birthday present to myself,’ she’d whispered in his ear.

After the restaurant had kicked them out at 1 a.m. they’d streamed down the high street, gorgeous girls and boys, everyone with their arms around each other; they were singing, it was like a scene out of a film. She’d tried to get a photo of it on her mobile but the light wasn’t good enough, just a blur of streetlamps and streaks of people. But she’d keep it forever, anyway. Good times. The best night of her life.

She swallowed down the pill with the energy shot and prayed that they would both stay down. She only had one pill left and if this one came back up, that’d be it, back to the GP. She didn’t have a hangover, Robyn didn’t get hangovers. Liver of steel. But she felt as tired as a dead person just crawled out of their grave. She pulled her black hair away from her face and gazed at herself in the mirror on her dressing table. Was it right, she thought, to think that you were so pretty? Was it normal? Did other eighteen-year-old girls look at their own faces in the mirror and think, Mmm,
pretty
? She did. Every time she saw herself she felt a little shiver of pleasure, of satisfaction. She was already worried about losing it. Already knew that come her late-twenties she’d be Botoxing the crap out of herself. Or whatever people would be doing in the year 2018. Sitting in tanks of Martian pee or something. Actually she’d rather have Botox than sit in a tank of Martian pee. But anyway, she’d definitely be on the case.

There was little in the world that Robyn could imagine being worse than looking bad. But as it was, she looked good, even on five hours’ sleep and a bloodstream full of metabolising vodka. Her hazel eyes were shaped like fish, and her eyebrows were finely arched and a really nice shade of brown. She had a – well, there was no other word for it really but a perfect nose. Not turned up, not long, not short, absolutely straight, with nice little nostrils. And then there was her mouth. It was cushiony. As a child she’d looked almost alien: over-wide eyes and a huge pair of lips that looked like they’d been unpicked from the face of a thirty-year-old woman. She’d had to grow into her extreme features, had to grow bones and an underlying structure to support them. People sometimes said she looked like Angelina Jolie. And she wondered, she did wonder, about these lips and where they had come from. They looked like African lips. It was possible, she supposed. They weren’t her mother’s, that was for certain, her mother had a hard mouth, lips like tramlines. And her father, well,
obviously
she hadn’t got her mouth from him, because he wasn’t her real father and her mother had never met her real father so she had no idea what sort of face he might have had. Full-lipped, she’d have to assume. Full-lipped and dark, with cheekbones like boomerangs.

She knew a few things about her real dad. He was French. Lived in London. A medical student. And not just any old medicine but
children’s
medicine. How amazing did he sound? And he was a – what was it they’d called him, her mum and dad? – an
altruist
. That’s right. He worked with sick children and he gave his sperm away to strangers. Which was quite funny because apparently altruism was also something that occurred in the animal world where a creature forwent its own comfort and safety to ensure the dissemination of its genes. Not necessarily by giving its sperm to lady animals, but just, you know, looking out for its own kind. Anyway, he sounded like the nicest man in the whole world and Robyn was never going to meet him but she loved him all the same, loved him for his altruism and for making her the way she was, so pretty and clever and everything.

Everyone knew that Robyn’s dad was a sperm donor. It was no biggie. There were three completely separate people at Robyn’s school who lived with gay parents, you know, two mums or two dads, and there was a kid in year ten who was having hormone therapy to turn him into a girl, so really, all in all, an anonymous dad was totally nothing. Half the kids at the youth project round the corner probably had anonymous dads but Robyn would bet that theirs weren’t French paediatricians.

Her phone vibrated across the top of her dressing table. She grabbed it.

‘Nush! Fuck! Did you get home all right? Christ, I thought that bloke was stalking you. Yeah, that weird one. I mean, did he have an actual
forked tongue
or was I just imagining that? Ha-ha! Yeah, no, I feel fine, you know me. Liver of steel. Yeah. Yeah. It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Seriously brilliant. Totally. I know. Today? Oh, nothing much, lunch out with Mum and Dad and my aunty and cousins and stuff. Roast at the Hog’s Head. No, it’ll be nice. I’m wearing that dress from Kookai, you know, the one with the sash thing round the waist. Hair up, it’ll have to be … aw, and thanks for the beautiful necklace, it’s so gorgeous. I love it. I love you. Yeah, I do! I love you, Nush! I love you so much that it makes bluebirds fly around my heart. Yeah. Right now. They’re flying round and round it right now, can’t you hear them tweeting – listen …’