by Lisa Jewell
‘How are you all?’ she managed.
‘We’re fine. I think. Are we fine, Clem?’ Lydia heard him grumbling something in the background. ‘Yes,’ Dixie came back on the line, ‘we’re fine. How are you?’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Hungover.’ The minute she’d said it she’d known it was the wrong thing to have said, insinuating as it did a night spent drinking sparkling wine and tequila-based cocktails somewhere fun and jazzy and nowhere near a new baby or a dirty nappy.
‘Oh, lucky you,’ sighed Dixie.
Lydia sighed too and thought about hitting Dixie with the reality of her night swallowing gin alone in the dark. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It was …’ She paused. It was horrible, she wanted to say, but before she could muster the first syllable a plaintive shriek cut into their conversation and Dixie was mumbling something about feeding time at the zoo and could she call her back in a minute, and Lydia said, yeah, sure, even though she knew it wouldn’t be a minute, it would be a hundred minutes at least, and wondered silently why Clem couldn’t take the squealing infant away for just a moment or two, but then knowing anyway that the physical absence of the squealing infant would not render her friend any more able to concentrate on anything beyond the realm of her current situation, and with a sense of dread and sadness Lydia realised that she was not going to be able to talk to her best friend about the most important thing that had happened to her in over a decade.
And so she hung up and Dixie disappeared in a metaphorical puff of smoke leaving Lydia feeling abandoned and alone.
*
Dixie didn’t call back a hundred minutes later. She didn’t call back three days later. She sent Lydia a text message on Saturday morning that read: I just sprayed milk six foot across the room and hit the cat in the eye. What are you up to? With every inch that Dixie stepped forward into the world of babies and normality, Lydia felt herself step an inch back, into the world of strangeness and solitude. She typed back: Give the cat some goggles! I’m just hanging. Dixie didn’t reply and Lydia didn’t expect her to. She spent the day alternating between working and drinking.
That night she pulled a photo album from her storage room and took it to bed with her. It was the one she’d kept when she’d moved out of the miserable flat she’d shared with her father. It was all she had of Glenys. Mum. There were no mothball-scented dresses or heirloom pearl earrings or locks of hair for Lydia to finger thoughtfully, her father had cleared out every last trace of her mother after her death, but he’d kept this. Lydia could not begin to fathom what sort of aberrational thought process had led to his putting it away for her, but he had and it was now her most treasured possession.
In the past she’d stared at these photos almost as though she was staring at photos of Marilyn Monroe or Queen Victoria, at a dead superstar; charismatic, unattainable, unknowable, powerful and gone. But she looked at them through different eyes that night. She’d always thought of her mother as just a girl. That’s what everyone had always said about her: She was a great girl. A fun girl. A sweet girl. A lovely girl. Ah, yes, Glenys, she was a lovely girl. But girls didn’t go to Harley Street to make babies out of thin air. Women did that. Women who wanted babies. ‘Your mother worshipped me, d’you know that? Worshipped the ground I walked on.’ Her father had said that. Not once, but repeatedly, his way of keeping her all for himself. But as Lydia stared at the photographs it suddenly struck her that her mother had loved her much more than she’d ever loved him. After all, she’d been prepared to risk absolutely everything for her.
On Sunday Lydia went for a walk. She was sober and tired and the pavement felt like sponge beneath her feet. The light was watery but she wore sunglasses, feeling as she did like a small half-blind creature emerging from hibernation. She walked three times round the old cemetery, averting her gaze from the playground where Asian nannies pushed French babies on swings and American power mummies tapped data into BlackBerries while their offspring slurped organic juices out of recyclable cartons. She walked up and down St John’s Wood High Street, past boutiques and bagel shops and baby clothes shops and double-parked four-wheel-drives, and she stared at every person she walked past with a kind of animal curiosity. Here she was, two miles from the place of her conception. Here she was, potentially, walking through herds of relations. She scrutinised the noses, the gaits, the hands, the eyes, of everyone she looked at. She spotted a similarity in the curve of someone’s jaw and found herself subconsciously following the hapless woman across the street and into a patisserie. She stopped herself at the entrance and turned back towards the street.
Lydia had always felt divided from the rest of the world, elevated almost. She’d always felt cleverer and quieter and stronger and more self-sufficient. Her dad had made her that way. He’d built her up to believe that she was invincible. And alone. And she was. She always looked on the remainder of humanity as just that, an amorphous mass, a sprawling splodge, of flesh and bone. Nothing to do with her. And still, at the age of twenty-nine, she had not had a connection with anyone as strong as the one she’d once shared with her childhood dog.
After an hour of this aimless, eccentric wandering, she headed home. She appraised her house from the pavement. A shiver ran through her. It was so big. So soulless. So unwelcoming with its opaque windows like blind milky eyes. It was, she realised with a sudden discomfiting burst of perspective, a true reflection of herself. Even Dixie said it to her sometimes: ‘You’re scary!’ And that was fine. Lydia was happy to be scary. Being scary kept the world away from your door. But now there was a tiny fleck of possibility that the world was on its way in, and that there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop it. But more surprising than that was the realisation that she didn’t actually want to.
That night, she took a plastic bottle of Sprite and a bag of Haribo Tangfastics up to her office. She twisted the lid of the bottle and waited a beat for the initial puff of sweetened gas to escape before removing it and taking a greedy gulp. She spent a few moments examining the contents of the bag of sweeties, testing her responses to the various options therein. Eventually she settled on a green and red bottle and chewed it contemplatively for a while. She thought about phoning Dixie. This seemed to be such an alarmingly big step to be taking in her life without a single soul knowing about it. The weekend had been long and intense. She felt absolutely removed from reality. She felt scared and excited and sick. On the other side of her next action was another existence. She imagined Dixie sitting with a baby on her gigantic breast, staring mindlessly into space, sighing at the sight of Lydia’s number on her phone display. No. She would do this alone.
She typed in the web address and she filled in the online forms. Then she ate another sweetie, this one in the shape of a baby’s dummy.
Days passed after Lydia posted her details on to the Donor Sibling Registry. They passed slowly and tiresomely, like plodders on the high street, blocking her progress. January became February. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything. She couldn’t see beyond her in box. All day she hovered over her computer, eating sweets, ignoring the phone, checking and checking and checking again her e-mail. The only sparks of life inside this blanket of hibernation were her thrice-weekly sessions with Bendiks and an invitation on her desk to a Welcome to the World party for Viola in three weeks’ time.
She was at home now, waiting for Bendiks. He was training her here today because he’d parted ways with the health club in the mews. Lydia hadn’t asked why. But she was feeling oddly nervous now as the minutes crawled their way towards eleven o’clock. In only moments Bendiks would be here, in her home. She would open the door and he would smile and she would invite him in … and in another parallel existence it would be evening and she would open a bottle of wine and they would talk across a flickering candle and then retire to bed to explore each other’s bodies for half the night under Lydia’s freshly changed bedding. But in this existence, this existence of stark, unupholstered reality, she would lead him into the wellness
room in the basement (yes, she had a wellness room. It had already been here when she bought the house) and he would make her do boring and repetitive things for forty-five minutes and then he would go and she wouldn’t see him again for forty-eight hours.
She glanced at herself in the mirror before descending the stairs. She looked ghostly and vaguely demented. Juliette had jumped when she’d walked in this morning and seen Lydia on the stairs and immediately made her a roast chicken sandwich. Bendiks was less fazed.
‘Good morning, Lydia,’ he said, swinging through her front door with a gym bag and a scent of cinnamon and musk. ‘You have a very nice house.’
‘Thank you,’ she replied, allowing him past her and into the hallway.
He was, as usual, pristinely turned out. It was wrong on so many levels for Lydia to feel the way she felt about Bendiks. He was probably gay. In fact, yes, of course he was. Of course he was gay. His manicured eyebrows, his immaculate black hoodie, his whitened teeth and his pretty tattoos. Of course he was. She hoped he was. If Bendiks was gay then she could stop feeling this way every time she came into contact with him. If Bendiks was gay then she could just carry on living her life.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘A glass of water?’
‘No, it’s fine,’ he patted his gym bag, ‘I have my bottle.’ He smiled at her and she felt it. He was not gay. A gay man would not smile at a woman that way. She was sure of it.
‘So,’ she began, leading him down the stairs to the basement, flicking a switch as she went, ‘did you have a good weekend?’
‘Yeah, it was OK. Pretty dull. How about you?’
‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘the same.’
He laughed. ‘If this was my house,’ he said, ‘I would fill it every weekend with beautiful people and make a big, big party.’
Lydia smiled wryly. ‘I don’t know any beautiful people,’ she replied, drily.
‘You know me.’
‘That is true,’ she said. She flicked another switch.
‘Wow, look at it down here, this is amazing.’
‘Yeah,’ she scratched her neck, ‘can’t say I come down here very often.’
‘But it is like your own spa! You have a whirlpool!’
‘Yes, and a sauna. And a treatment room, here.’ She pushed open a door and showed him a small white room painted with cherry-blossom sprigs. ‘And a home cinema, through there.’
Bendiks’ perfect eyebrows were sitting somewhere within reach of his hairline. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Wow.’
Lydia didn’t feel any gratification at his reaction. Try as she might, she could not make this house feel like it had anything to do with her. In her head it still belonged to the slightly forbidding American couple she’d bought it from, to Caitlin and Tom Schnobel and their three handsome teenage sons. In her head the three spare bedrooms belonged to those boys, and this vast dug-out pleasure dome of a basement belonged to Caitlin (‘Call me Cait’). Lydia half-expected them all to walk back in one day with a set of matching luggage and Caribbean tans and thank her for minding their house for them.
‘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.
