by Lisa Jewell
‘I’m going to a sperm bank,’ she said eventually, ‘I’m going to a sperm bank, in London. And I want you to come with me.’
Rodney had heard about sperm banks, even thought about donating a few years back, when he was out of work and desperate for some quick cash. But then he’d thought about it again: little Rods running around the world, cursing him for their skinny bodies and their fine hair and their poor eyesight and, really, what woman would want his sperm when they were told that it had been donated by a myopic 5′ 6′′ tree surgeon from Tonypandy?
‘Right,’ he said, rubbing his chin gently with his fingertips. ‘I see. You’re not going with Trevor, then?’
Glenys threw him a look which he immediately understood.
‘No,’ he said, ‘of course you’re not.’ He stared at the floor for a moment, considering the request. Then he glanced up again at Glenys. She looked hard. No, not hard, resolved. She had no doubt at all that this was what she wanted to do. ‘So, you’ve thought about this then, have you?’
She nodded, firmly.
‘And if I don’t go with you?’
‘Then I’ll go on my own. But I don’t want to go on my own, Rod. What’ll they think of me? They’ll think I’m some kind of crazy woman, showing up without a husband, demanding a baby. I mean, what sort of person would do that? I need you, Rod. I need you to come to London with me and sit with me and pretend that we’re married.’
‘But, if I do that for you, Glenys … and, believe me, I really would like to do it for you … it means lying to Trevor, to my brother.’
She nodded, her eyes wide with desperation.
‘Gosh, Glenys. I don’t know …’
‘Think about how happy your brother will be, Rod. Think about when he holds that baby in his arms. When he can call himself a man.’
He blinked and gulped. She had him cornered. When she put it like that, well, she had a point. Trevor would never say so but Rod knew that it galled him that he hadn’t made a baby yet. Everything came so easy to Trevor and he’d assumed that a baby would be the same. He talked about having four or five. But then he also talked about the joys of his child-free life, the clubs and the holidays and the nights out at the pub. But maybe that was just talk, thought Rodney, just macho bluster to keep away the demons of self-doubt.
‘So, will you?’ Glenys stared at him beseechingly. ‘Will you come?’
‘Where is it?’
‘London,’ she said, ‘Harley Street.’
‘Well, I never …’ he mused.
‘Don’t want to do it near here. People talking, and that. And you never know, could turn out it’s someone I know. Imagine that! Imagine it, having a kid who turns out looking like the guy in the electrical shop!’
They laughed then, extra loud, to blow a hole through the nervous tension. Once the laughter petered out, Rodney sighed. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Yes. You will. It’s a big deal, Rod. I know that. And I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t trust you.’ She laid her hand over his and brought her face close to him. ‘I wouldn’t ask you, Rod, if you weren’t the man you are.’
Rod smiled and inside him something expanded and grew and he knew that he would do anything for this woman, even betray his big brother.
1998
LYDIA
Lydia Pike wrapped her arms around her knees and closed her eyes against the hot sun. The dog sat alongside her, tall and panting, overdressed in his thick coat of hair. The grass was long, longer than she’d ever seen it before, and the air in this little dip on the disused railway track was thick and sweet with the scent of cow parsley. Lydia brought the dog here every day, it was part of her regular walk from the flat to the shops and back again. Usually she kept walking, at other times of year this place was dank and unwelcoming, but now, after six weeks of summer, the hottest summer in recent history, the earth had dried to a gentle crust and butterflies ornamented the wild flowers that burst from the banks. A ladybird crawled up Lydia’s wrist and she brushed it gently to the ground. The silence was absolute. She lay back with her head in the soft grass and felt it wriggling beneath her hair, alive with the creatures of summer. She closed her eyes and the big sun strobed through her eyelids, a golden-red symphony.
A few moments passed and then Lydia sat up again, felt inside her rucksack and pulled out the quarter bottle of vodka. It was already half empty, she’d had the rest on the way here, tipped into a bottle of Diet Coke. She brought the bottle to her lips and drank from it thirstily. The alcohol brought even more piquancy to her situation, here on the banks of a long-dead railway line, escaping from home, escaping from life. The sense of loneliness and desperation whispered away, and Lydia felt colour return to her soul. She put her arm around the big German Shepherd; girl and dog, side by side, as they had been for the past ten years. Her dad had bought her the dog, to keep her safe. Not because he was the sort of dad who thought only of his child’s safety, but because he was the sort of dad who couldn’t be arsed to do the job himself. Arnie had been Lydia’s sole responsibility from the age of eight. She had fed him, walked him, groomed him and slept with him at night in her single bed. Arnie. Her best friend.
People thought she was weird. Lydia pikey they called her: of course they did. Lydia was also the Goth with the Dog. Not that she was a Goth. She just liked black. She wasn’t pierced or tattooed, but still, she was the Goth with the Dog. And the Grunger. That seemed more fitting. She did like Nirvana, she did like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. It had been Greebo before, when she was fourteen, fifteen. She preferred Grunger. Greebo made it sound like she was into Motörhead and Whitesnake. Made it sound like she hung around with smelly fairground boys and never washed her hair. But nobody knew, nobody really knew, what Lydia really was. Lydia barely knew what Lydia really was. She was eighteen. She lived in a third-floor flat in a small village outside Tonypandy with her father who was forty-nine. Her mother had died when she was three. She’d just sat her A levels and was fully expecting three A grades (another reason to hate Lydia, she was clever, too). She had a big dog called Arnie. She wanted to be a scientist. She drank too much.
An hour later Lydia returned to the small block of flats where she lived with her father. Outside the flats was a playground. In these high days of summer, halfway through the school holidays, it was full of teenagers; girls in crop tops and baggy jeans huddled on to swings, boys in singlets and combat shorts. Some of them were smoking. One of them had a beatbox on his shoulder. ‘The Boy Is Mine’ by Brandy & Monica, the soundtrack to their summer but not Lydia’s. She’d known most of these kids since they were toddlers, been to school with some of them, even pushed one or two of them around the estate in their buggies while their mothers sat and gossiped. But none of them was a friend.
Lydia braced herself, but the teenagers were distracted by themselves, not looking for that moment outside their own immediate circle for entertainment. Lydia pulled the dog’s lead closer to herself and the two of them walked, fast and quiet, past the playground and towards the flats. Lydia’s eyes dropped, as they always did, to a patch of tarmac just below her flat, a smudge of pink paint, containing within it the merest outline of a hand, the curl of a finger. And Lydia’s nose filled, as ever, with the scent of paint, thick and noxious and terrifying.
She walked on, around the corner and into the concrete well of the external staircase. Two teens turned their faces briefly towards Lydia as she passed by, making room for her and her dog, too interested in the contents of small plastic bags clutched in their fists to care much about the girl in black making her way to the third floor.
She turned her key in the lock of her door, number thirty-one, pushed it open, held her breath. Her father was attached to his oxygen tank. He was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was hardly surprising given that he’d smoked forty cigarettes a day since he was fifteen. The oxygen tank was a new development and he was attached to it for fifteen hours a day. It frightened Lydia to
see him like that. He looked bizarre, oddly perverted, like a character from a David Lynch movie.
He glanced up at her as she walked in and smiled wanly. ‘Hello, love.’ He’d pulled the mask from his mouth.
‘Hello.’
‘Nice walk?’
‘Yeah, bit hot.’
‘Yeah,’ he said, his gaze drifting towards the window, ‘yeah.’ He’d been indoors for thirteen days now, on that sofa for most of them. If he wanted, he could sit on the balcony, sit in the sun, but Lydia’s dad had locked the door on to the balcony fifteen years ago, locked it and never opened it again. She made him a cup of tea and brought it to him. He held out two big hands, thin-fleshed and cold as a reptile’s. Lydia asked him if he needed anything else, and when he said he didn’t she took her mug of tea and her dog into her own small bedroom and sat on her single bed and tried not to feel guilty about leaving her dad like that, out there on his own, dying for all she knew. She battled the guilt for a moment or two but then she remembered the man he’d been before his lungs had caved in and his body had started to collapse. Not a bad man, but not a good father. But he was nice to her now, nice now that she was all he had.
Lydia stared around her room, at the grubby magnolia walls with the hint of cyclamen pink skulking beneath. Her father had painted Lydia’s room only a few days after her mother died. She’d watched in despair as the dun-coloured paint had been slopped over the bright pink. It was as if he was painting away her happiness. Nowadays the magnolia suited her. She found it hard to imagine she’d ever been the kind of little girl who would have wanted her bedroom to be pink.
Lydia was almost four when her mother died. She could remember very little about her. Dark hair. The little silver swans she would make for her daughter out of the lining of her cigarette packets. A skirt with blue roses on it. Long fingernails up the back of Lydia’s top, scratch-scratch-scratching away an itch for her: ‘Harder? Softer? There? There? Ooh, let me scratch that away for you.’ Her name was Glenys. Lydia remembered music, Terry Wogan on the radio, a sink full of washing up, a cigarette left burning in an ashtray, the smell of chips in a fryer, the bars of a playpen, a cardboard box big enough to hide in, the TV Times on the coffee table, shows circled in blue biro, and a little yellow bird in a cage that pirouetted with joy every time Lydia’s mother looked at it. After her mother died these things disappeared, one by one, like stars going out in the night sky. The yellow bird, the TV Times, Terry Wogan, the chips, the back scratches, the delicate silver swans, the pink paint in the bedroom. All that remained was the ashtray.
Lydia heard her father coughing next door. She tensed. Every cough sounded like it could be his last. The thought left her feeling torn between joy and panic. If he died she’d be all on her own. All on her own. She wanted to be alone. But she didn’t want to be all on her own. She glanced at her dog, at his big strong skull, his soft ears. She wasn’t all on her own. She had her dog. She closed her eyes against the sound of her father’s rasping, the thoughts of her future, and let herself fall into a deep, vodka-induced slumber.
2009
LYDIA
Bendiks hoisted Lydia’s leg over her shoulder and ran his hands up and down her calf muscles, squeezing as he went. A fine thread of sweat trickled from Lydia’s hairline, down her temple and into her ear. She stuck a fingertip into her ear and rubbed away the itch.
‘How does that feel?’ said Bendiks.
Lydia clenched her teeth together and smiled. ‘That feels great,’ she said, ‘absolutely great.’
‘Not too much?’ asked Bendiks, his oddly beautiful face softening with concern.
‘No,’ she said, ‘just right.’
He smiled and lifted her leg a little higher. Lydia felt the latticework of muscles behind her knee pulling against the movement and winced slightly. Bendiks had one knee at her crotch and his thick black hair was almost brushing her lips. Gently he lowered Lydia’s leg and rested it on the floor.
‘There,’ he said, ‘finished.’
Lydia smiled and sighed. Bendiks stood above her, his hands on his hips, smiling down fondly. ‘You did good today,’ he said, helping her to her feet. ‘Really good. You want we do it in the park on Thursday. Yes?’
‘The park?’ said Lydia. ‘Yes, why not?’
‘Great.’ He smiled at her again. Lydia smiled back. She tried to think of something witty or conversational to say but, finding nothing inside the cavernous cathedral of her head that seemed to fit the job, just said, ‘See you on Thursday,’ then turned and walked away.
She saw Bendiks’ next client, loitering in her field of vision. It was the Jewish woman, the one with the overstretched Juicy Couture trousers and the fake tan. Lydia knew she was Jewish because her name was Debbie Levy. From behind she looked like a cheap sofa and Lydia despised her, not for her resemblance to a cheap sofa but because of her slinky way with Bendiks.
‘Morning, gorgeous,’ she heard the woman growling behind her, ‘are you ready for me?’
She heard Bendiks laugh, slightly nervously, and then Lydia pushed through the swing doors towards the changing rooms, her personal training session over for another day.
Lydia Pike lived not far from the exclusive health and fitness club where she was trained every other day by a beautiful Latvian man called Bendiks Vitols. The club was so exclusive that it was almost impossible to guess it was there, tucked away up a small St John’s Wood mews, looking for all the world like someone’s rather pretty house. Lydia only knew it was there because it was where Bendiks worked. She’d read about him in a glossy magazine that had been slopped through her letterbox three months ago. ‘Want to get fit for spring?’ said the by-line. ‘We talk to three local fitness experts.’ And there was Bendiks, a head-and-shoulders shot, thick dark hair in a side parting, a black fitted t-shirt, smiling at a third party out of view as though disturbed by a cheeky comment. At the time Lydia had dearly wanted to get fit for spring. She’d wanted to get fit not just for spring, but for summer, autumn and winter too, and the moment she saw Bendiks’ face she knew that she’d found the person to do it. It wasn’t just that he was beautiful, which he was, but there was a softness to his features, a sort of humour about him. She knew he’d put her at her ease. And he had.
From her external appearance you might not imagine that Lydia was in much need of fitness training. She was lean and spare, there was no extra meat on her, except perhaps for a little softness around her belly button. But Lydia knew the truth about her body. She knew that it was a shell behind which ticked a time bomb of unnurtured organs and neglected arteries.
Lydia dropped her gym bag in the hallway and said hello to Juliette, her housekeeper, who was halfway up the stairs with an armful of freshly laundered clothes. She stopped when she saw an Ocado delivery man approaching the front door. ‘You want me to take care of this?’ asked Juliette.
‘No, no, it’s fine. I’ve got it.’
Juliette smiled and continued up the stairs. The man from Ocado unpacked Lydia’s shopping on to her kitchen table while Lydia fingered the contents of her purse for a couple of pound coins with which to show the Ocado man her appreciation for sparing her the inconvenience of doing her own shopping. After the man had left, Lydia began to sort the goods into her kitchen cupboards. Lydia rarely dealt with her kitchen cupboards. She had a vague idea what each cupboard contained, had herself allocated each unit a function during the unpacking process, but really, some of them were slightly mysterious. Where, for example, she wondered to herself, do I put rice vinegar?
Juliette came upon her, a moment later, wafting vaguely around the kitchen with a packet of rice noodles in her hand. ‘Here.’ She took them from Lydia and placed them deftly in a pull-out cupboard next to the fridge. ‘Let me finish.’
Lydia acquiesced and pulled a bottle of sugar-free Sprite from the fridge. ‘I’ll be in my office,’ she said in the strange new tone of voice she’d developed for talking to the woman she paid to deal with her domestic affairs; it sai
d, ‘I am not your friend, no, but neither am I the kind of heartless, overpaid St John’s Wood resident who sees you as nothing more than a paid-for slave. I know that you are a human being and I am aware that you have a meaningful and real life outside my home, but I still do not really wish to discuss your children with you, or to find out what brought you from the palm-lined shores of a Philippine island to our dirty old city. I am a nice person, and I too have travelled a long way to get where I am today, but I would like to keep our relationship purely professional. If that’s OK with you? Thank you.’
Lydia had only had a housekeeper for a few months. It hadn’t been her idea. It was her friend Dixie’s idea. She’d been happy with having a cleaner once a week, but Dixie had taken one look at Lydia’s oversized new St John’s Wood palace and said: ‘Housekeeper. You’ll have to.’
Lydia’s office was at the top of her house. It was painted white with an eaved ceiling and a small Velux window from which, if she stood on her tiptoes, Lydia could see the cemetery and the otherworldly white bulges of the Lord’s Pavilion. It also looked out across a playground, and sometimes when the wind was blowing in her direction Lydia could hear the shouts and calls of small children playing down below, and for a moment would be transported back to another time and another place, far, far away from here.
She twisted open the bottle of Sprite and drank it fast from the neck, thirsty after her workout. The sky seen through her window was densely coloured and strangely mottled, almost like a framed piece of marbled Venetian paper. On her desk was her mail, left in a neat pile by Juliette while she was out. Also in her office was a green plant of some description, and two abstract paintings that rested on their frames against the walls, waiting for nails and pieces of string. She’d been to an ‘affordable’ art fair just after she moved into the house and spent £5,000 on art. In fact, the whole experience of moving into her first home had involved alarming amounts of expenditure. A lamp at a price of £280, which in the context of Lydia’s life pre-house might have seemed offensively expensive, in the context of having spent nearly £4 million on a house seemed something of a bargain: that little? Wow! I’ll have two! Spending £5,000 at an art fair had felt a little like grocery shopping, throwing things into a metaphorical trolley, barely glancing at the price tags.
