by Lisa Jewell
‘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.’
LAST SUMMER
ROBYN
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 …’
At the Hog’s Head later that day, Robyn felt like a celebrity. She’d been coming to the Hog’s Head with her mum and dad since she was a few months old and everyone round here knew her. Everyone had known about Robyn since before she was even born. There was a newspaper clipping on the wall in her bedroom headlined: Baby Joy for Tragic Buckhurst Couple. It was illustrated with a photograph of her mum with really bad hair sitting on the sofa in their old house, cupping her baby bump, with
her dad stood behind her with his hand on her shoulder. They didn’t look much like they were in the throes of baby joy, they looked really old and really tragic, but then they’d had a tragic few years and Robyn didn’t suppose they were ready to look really happy just yet. Robyn’s mum always said she wouldn’t believe it was going to be OK until she’d held her baby in her arms. Understandable really, given what they’d gone through. But it was Dad’s face in that photo that was really interesting to Robyn. What must he have been feeling, knowing that that wasn’t his baby inside his wife?
She sat on his lap now, her big lovely dad. He was solid, like an armchair, and he smelled of pillows and fabric conditioner. They were having a happy time. They were a happy family. She kissed him on the cheek and shuffled off his lap to take her seat at the head of the table.
‘So,’ said Jan, her father’s sister, ‘how does it feel to be an adult?’
Robyn smiled. She’d felt like an adult for years. ‘I like it,’ she said. ‘I’m going to start voting in elections, every day. And having anal sex.’
Jan laughed out loud. Robyn’s family was the kind that didn’t feel uncomfortable talking about anal sex. ‘Ha-ha,’ she guffawed, ‘yes, do it now, love, before you’ve had kids. Because you won’t want to do it after!’
Robyn wrinkled her nose and tried not to think what she might mean.
She looked around at her family; her mum, her dad, cousins and aunt, and thought, not for the first time, I’m different from you. And not just that but: I’m better than you. It wasn’t a good thing to think. It was a hideous, sick thing to think. But she couldn’t help it. All her life she’d been different. Prettier than everyone else. Cleverer than everyone else. 11 GCSEs. 4 AS levels. 4 A levels. About to start studying medicine at University College London. Following in her donor father’s mysterious and glamorous footsteps.
She stood in line at the carvery and smiled at Steve, the chef, who was sweating lightly under the hot lights in a white paper hat, brandishing a large sharp knife.
‘Happy Birthday, Robyn,’ he said with a shy smile.
‘Thank you!’ She smiled back.
Steve was in love with Robyn. They’d been in the same class at primary school and he’d been in love with her then too. Everyone knew that Steve was in love with Robyn. He’d probably asked to be at work today especially because he knew that she would be in celebrating her eighteenth.
‘I got you a card,’ he said, wiping the shine from his forehead with the back of his hand and then slicing her off some turkey. ‘I’ll give it to you later, when I’ve cleaned up.’
She smiled and nodded. She could tell he wanted to kiss her. ‘Thanks, Steve,’ she said, ‘that’s really sweet.’
‘Do you want some stuffing with that?’
‘No, thanks,’ she replied. ‘Just a bit of bacon.’
‘You look lovely,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Will you have a drink with us? After you get off? We’re going to be here for the long haul, I reckon.’
His face went soft as beaten butter and he nodded. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘that’d be good.’
Robyn piled roast potatoes on to her plate and soggy florets of broccoli and a ton of sprouts and then drowned the lot in the thick winey gravy that the Hog’s Head was renowned for. Then she carried the over-piled plate back to the table and everyone oohed and aahed at her man-sized appetite and said, ‘Ooh, where do you put it all? You must have hollow feet,’ and Robyn looked at her well-upholstered parents and her slightly more than curvy aunty who was prone to saying things like ‘All I have to do is look at a slice of cheesecake and I’ve gone up a size’, and her small-mouthed cousins with their doughy faces and their wide feet, and thought: I am not one of you. I come from my own tribe, once-removed on the ladder of evolution. It didn’t mean she didn’t love them. She loved her family with a ferocious passion. But then people loved their dogs with a ferocious passion; didn’t mean they were the same thing.
‘Did you have fun with your friends last night?’ asked Aunty Jan.
‘Amazing,’ replied Robyn. ‘Best night ever.’
‘I remember my eighteenth,’ she said, ‘I wore a boiler suit and had a perm. Thought I was It – looked like Brian May,’ she laughed. ‘It was tough being young in the eighties. You girls get to dress so pretty these days. So many lovely things in the shops for you.’
Robyn’s phone buzzed with a text message. It was Christian: Hey babe, what you up to?
She groaned: Hey babe. Didn’t matter how good someone smelled if they sent you text messages that began Hey babe. She shuddered slightly and sent a reply, thumb working furiously over the buttons: Having lunch with family. See you out and about. She deliberately left the last line without a question mark. A question mark would suggest that she was hoping to see him out and about. She was not hoping to see him out and about. She would quite happily spend the rest of her life without seeing him out and about or anywhere else for that matter. Robyn was not interested in the men round here. Not in that way. They were fine for drinking with, partying with, sleeping with. But for the long haul, for the rest of her life, only a doctor would do.
‘A toast!’ said her father, holding aloft his pint of cloudy bitter. ‘To my little girl. Our little girl.’ He smiled at his wife. ‘We are so proud of you, my darling, so proud of you for everything you’ve achieved. You’ve brought us nothing but happiness these last eighteen years, nothing but joy. We could not ask for a better daughter. Thank you, Robyn, for being you.’ As the words left his lips, a tear slid from the corner of his eye and down his nose. He wiped it away and smiled apologetically at his little girl. ‘I love you,’ he croaked.
‘Aw, Dad,’ Robyn snuggled into him, ‘I love you, too. Thank you.’ She pulled her mother towards them, too. ‘Thank you both for being the best mum and dad in the world, and I want you to know that I am going to go on and on and keep on making you proud of me.’
This was it, she thought, feeling her parents’ warm flesh against her body, the glow of her family around her, the warmth of this August afternoon of togetherness, this was it. This was all she wanted and needed. She was eighteen now. She could make contact with her real dad, if she wanted to. But she wasn’t going to. This man here was her real dad, this man in his green Blue Harbour crewneck sweater and Clarks shoes and shoulders like a brickie’s. Her dad. She didn’t want another.
Her other father, the French paediatrician, he would stay inside her head forever. He would push her, unknowingly, towards a career in medicine and he would make her feel forevermore just a little bit better than everyone else. But her attachment to him would go no further than that. She liked him as he was – a character in her very own fairy tale.
Later than night Robyn sat on the sofa, pressed against her father, her feet tucked beneath her, watching Big Brother. Her mother walked into the room, something clutched between her hands and held against her heart. Her face was smiling but oddly strained. Her father sat straighter at the sight of her and Robyn instinctively uncurled her legs and placed her feet upon the carpet.
‘You all right?’ she said.
Her mother nodded. ‘I’m fine, sweetie, just fine. Got something to show you though. Budge up.’
Robyn glanced at the paperwork in her mother’s hands. ‘Oh, no!’ she said, mock-dramatically. ‘Don’t tell me – I’m adopted?!’
Her mother smiled. ‘This,’ she began, ‘is what they gave me at the clinic, when I got pregnant with you.’
Robyn put her hand to her throat and recoiled. ‘I don’t want it,’ she said, ‘take it away.’
Her mother sighed and rested her hand on Robyn’s leg. ‘You don’t have to read it,’ she said, gently, ‘but I want you to have it. You’re eighteen now. You’re an adult. It doesn’t belong to me any more.’
‘Then put it in the bin,’ said Robyn, ‘shred it. Whatever. I don’t want it.’
Her mother sighed again. ‘It’s just a letter,’ she said. ‘I’ve read
it. There’s nothing alarming in it. And there’s his donor number and info, in case you want to contact him.’
‘I don’t! And I don’t want to read his letter! I know enough about him already and I’m very grateful and everything, but I don’t need him in my life, OK? I really, really don’t want to know.’
Her mum squeezed her leg and smiled. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘we won’t be around forever, me and your dad. We’re not old, but we’re not getting any younger either. And when we’re gone, you’ll be all on your own. Take these papers, sweetie, keep them. At least then if anything happens – which it won’t –’ she squeezed Robyn again, reassuringly – ‘but if it does and you decide you want to meet him, you’ll have the wherewithal to do something about it, OK? And another thing to think about, even if you don’t want to meet your donor father – what about siblings? Brothers, sisters? I know –’ she cut into Robyn’s half-formed protests – ‘I know you don’t want that now. But in the future. One day. Maybe. OK?’
Robyn eyed the folder of papers and exhaled. It was so charged with explosive potential she could almost hear it ticking. She thought of these nameless, faceless siblings and she hated them. She saw them as grotesque caricatures of herself, all fat lips and attitude, all thinking they were something special because their dad was a sperm donor, their dad was a French paediatrician. That was her role, nobody else’s. And besides, she’d had sisters, two beautiful sisters. It was irrelevant to her that they were dead; they were still there, inside her heart, and she didn’t have room in there for anyone new. Robyn pushed her heavy fringe behind her ears and regarded the folder.
‘What will you do with it if I don’t take it?’
‘Put it away,’ said her mother. ‘Somewhere safe. Somewhere you can find it. Later. When we’re gone.’
Robyn thought about this. It was possible, she conceded, that she might, one day, for whatever reason, want to contact her biological father. Maybe she’d need a, you know, a liver transplant or something, or a future child might have some rare genetic disorder. She might one day need this man to stop being a two-dimensional Disney prince and become a fully functioning, flesh, blood and DNA human being. And maybe it would be better then to have these papers in her possession. She flopped back against the brown suede sofa and pulled an expression of resignation.
