by Lisa Jewell
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.”
“Paint?”
“Yeah, you know, for walls. It was for my final year. But actually I’d been working on it nonstop since school, in my free time, not sure why, just . . . hate the smell of paint. Anyway, I found this compound by a total fluke. I was working on something else at the time, and it completely eliminated the odor. And then a couple of years later I was decorating my flat, and I noticed this gap in the market for organic paint. So I took out a business loan and launched a small range of odorless organic paints. Just five colors to start with, then those sold really well so another five. After five years I had a range of forty colors and was selling through Homebase, B&Q, all the big DIY stores. Then, eighteen months ago, Dulux paints bought my brand. For a lot of money. And I still get royalties for the original compound because I patented it and sold it to other paint manufacturers. So I have the money from Dulux, plus a regular income from the royalties . . .”
“So you just sit back and money arrives in your hands, is that what it is like?”
Lydia laughed again. “Well, no, not exactly,” she said, “I do a lot of work with small businesses . . . with the petrochemical industry . . . write for a couple of trade papers. It’s all quite unglamorous but, I don’t know, for some reason, since I sold the paint business, I just haven’t wanted to go back to science. It’s almost like . . . it’s like I had a mission and I’ve accomplished it and now I’m just swimming along in the wake of that. I tried taking some time off when I sold the business but, well, I wasn’t very good at time off. So ever since, I’ve thrown myself into anything and everything that comes my way.”
“Wow.” Bendiks turned his head toward Lydia and regarded her with awe. “So you are a workaholic? You are very impressive. I am very impressed.”
Lydia smiled. She was quietly delighted to have impressed Bendiks.
In the circuit park, Lydia rained a few blows against the outstretched leather-gloved hands of Bendiks. Her fists made a sound like someone falling to the floor every time they connected with his. She didn’t feel right hitting Bendiks. She didn’t feel right hitting anyone. She’d heard other women talk of this practice as liberating and empowering. To her it just felt slightly undignified.
A mother sat with a baby sleeping in a stroller while her toddler larked around on the circuit-training equipment. The mother stared at a newspaper spread out next to her on a bench. She turned the pages slowly and rhythmically, as though she were exercising her wrist rather than her mind. With her other wrist she moved the stroller back and forth, an inch forward, an inch back, an inch forward, an inch back. Every few moments she would glance up from her paper, eye the slumbering baby, eye the rampaging toddler, eye the newspaper, turn another page; back and forth, back and forth went the buggy. It was rare for Lydia to see anything about parenthood that appealed to her. It all looked so mechanical and wearisome.
Suddenly the toddler was in front of them. He stopped in his tracks and watched as the thin dark woman hit the handsome man again and again and again. Lydia glanced down at him, willing him to walk away. Go, she thought to herself, go away. But he didn’t. Clearly there was something spellbinding about the sight of the two of them. But suddenly the boy’s interest turned from fascination to concern, and then from concern to distress, and his face crumpled and he ran sobbing back to his mother who finally snapped out of her paper/pram/peruse cycle to encircle him in her arms and protect him from the sheer horror of watching the scary lady hit the pretty man.
Lydia sighed. She no longer stalked around in threadbare sweaters with an oversized dog at her side, she no longer drank vodka on sidings and washed her hair with dishwashing soap. She was a grown-up, elegant, some might say, verging on stylish, when she could be bothered. She flossed her teeth, she wore perfume, she waxed her toes, she shopped on the high street and she did nice things to her skin. But still it seemed, to those with an eye for what lurked under the surface, to children and babies and animals and the more perceptive, she was the Scary Lady in Black. Just like she’d always been.
Bendiks looked across at the crying toddler and threw her an amused glance. “He thinks we are fighting,” he laughed. “Poor boy. He is traumatized. He will have to find counseling!”
Lydia smiled grimly and let her arms drop to her sides. Their training was over for another day. She suddenly wanted to reclaim some kind of healthy input from their session instead of the appalling sense of herself she’d been subsumed by.
“So, you,” she began, “why did you become a personal fitness trainer?”
Bendiks laughed, showing off his square white teeth. “Because,” he said, packing away the gloves and a towel into a sports bag and smiling up at Lydia, “unlike you, I was too stupid to do anything else! Okay, I go this way, you go that way, have a great weekend and I will see you on Monday at the club. Okay?”
Lydia stood, damp and disheveled, with quickly cooling sweat rolling down her face, and watched him leave; solid buttocks, strong shoulders, off to be Bendiks somewhere else, with somebody else. She felt it for a moment then, the desperate ache she sometimes felt looking at other people, the ache of never being able to be them, not for even a moment, of always having to be herself.
∗ ∗ ∗
Lydia arrived home fifteen minutes later and as she stepped over the threshold to her house, she saw a large manila envelope on the stairs, left there, she assumed, by Juliette to be taken up later. It caught her eye because, unlike most of the mail that came to her, this one had a handwritten address and looked kind of ungainly. She sat down upon the bottom step and pulled the envelope toward her. The postcode read Tonypandy.
She gasped.
All her adult life she’d been half-consciously waiting for someone from home to contact her. Now finally that moment had arrived. She stared at the handwriting for a moment longer. She knew whose handwriting it was. Not because she recognized it, but because she knew there was only one member of her family who would be interested enough to have managed to track her down. And that was her uncle Rod.
Uncle Rod had once been the closest relative they’d had because he was single and childless and because he was good with Lydia and helpful in ways that Lydia’s aunts, with families and commitments of their own, could not be. But then, within a few days of Lydia’s mother’s death, Uncle Rod disappeared and was never seen again. Lydia was too young to wonder why or even really to notice. But she’d thought of him sometimes, and then she’d seen him at her father’s funeral, fourteen years later, slipping away from the crowd through the trees, dressed in a cheap black suit, the sun glinting off a silver hoop in his ear, and she’d asked someone who he was and they’d said: “That was your uncle Rod, that was your dad’s brother.” She’d wondered briefly why he hadn’t stayed but not thought much about him since.
She stared through the opaque panels of the front door as her head filled with memories of those last few days of her father’s life. She could still smell the hospital, hear the wheels of trolleys heading to dark unknown places, feel her father’s cold hand grasping hers, as tight as a clamp, whispering words into her ear that made no sense. “You’ll always be mine,” he’d said, “always. No one can take that away from me. I raised you. You’re as much mine as anyone’s. Do you hear me? Do you understand me? As much mine as anyone’s.”
They were no more than words to Lydia. She wasn’t looking for meaning at that point. She wasn’t looking for answers. She just wanted him to die so that she wouldn’t be spending her first term of university sitting by his bed in this moldering Victorian hospital or making him cups of tea in their damp loveless flat. She wanted him gone so that the rest of her life could begin. A clean break. From her village. From her past. She was ready to let go of him. And he, she could tell from the look in his eyes, was ready to let go too, not just of her, but of the whole p
ointless, unhappy business of existence.
He finally passed away in the last week of August. Outside the hospital the air was sweet and hot. Inside it was stagnant and stale. There was no one else there. Just her and her dad. His last words to her were: “Tell them it’s stopped hurting. Tell them.” She’d watched the last breath leave his mouth. She’d expected it to leave his body like a small puff of gray-black smoke, a tiny toxic cloud, but instead it rushed from between his lips like a lizard escaping from his soul, panicky and desperate.
His hand went limp in hers and then his head fell slack against the pillows and he was gone and Lydia was still there, suddenly an orphan.
She hadn’t looked back much in the years following her father’s death. She never returned to the village outside Tonypandy, not even when well-intended invitations to her cousins’ weddings arrived in the post, nor when her aunts pleaded with her to join them for cozy Christmas afternoons in small terraced houses with dry turkeys and fresh grandchildren. She lived her life in Aberystwyth, stayed in the flat above the shop during all three annual holidays, even when Dixie was away. She worked as a barmaid at her local pub for the full three years of her time at university, evenings and weekends. And when she wasn’t at the pub she was in the lab, methodically and obsessively searching for something to take the smell out of paint, thinking that she was working toward a clear commercial goal, little realizing that she was trying to scour away a whole film of putrid childhood memories from her subconscious.
And now she was here, twenty-nine years old, the merest undulation of a Welsh accent still present when she spoke, a millionaire, a self-made woman, tall, dark, clever, mysterious, a million miles away from her sad and rather humble beginnings . . . and suddenly a piece of her past was sitting in a brown envelope upon her lap. She took a deep breath and then she opened it.
∗ ∗ ∗
Lydia stared at the newspaper cutting. It lay on her desk, spread out flat. Her right hand rested against the dewy coldness of a tumbler of iced gin and lime. The light in her office was inky and warm, still some smudges of daylight left in the sky. All the lights were off except for the Anglepoise lamp with which she was illuminating the cutting. She’d been sitting here for half a day. Six hours. Staring at the cutting, working her way methodically, coolly, through a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Everything felt stretched and twisted and distorted. Her house didn’t feel like her house. Her legs didn’t feel like they belonged to her. Juliette felt like a stranger. Lydia had sent her home early, turned every light in the house off and made herself drunk.
The contents of the fat brown envelope had been both shocking and simultaneously unsurprising. Some paperwork from a fertility clinic in central London confirming that she had been conceived by means of artificial insemination, using the sperm of a French man whose occupation was classed as that of Medical Student. Also inside the envelope was a newspaper article torn from the pages of the Western Mail and Echo. It was a story about a woman in Llanelli who’d discovered at the age of twenty-five that not only had she been conceived in a fertility clinic under the glare of dazzling halogen lights, but that she had four half sisters all living within a hundred miles of her. Lydia squinted and stared again at the happy gang. They had their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed up against one another’s. They all had brown hair and they all had slightly fleshy-looking noses. They were clearly sisters.
The anonymous sender of this fun pack of seismically life-changing information had also included a leaflet about a website called the UK Donor Sibling Registry. Adults who knew they’d been conceived by donor insemination and knew the name of the clinic where the procedure had taken place could sign up, have their DNA tested and be put in touch with children conceived from the same donor’s sperm. In other words, they could be introduced to their brothers and sisters.
Lydia had never had to wonder why she had no brothers and sisters. It was obvious. Her mother had died before she could have any more. Being an only child was absolutely, intrinsically, who she was. She could not have imagined her childhood, her persona, herself, in any other way.
She stared desperately at the sisters in the paper and then filled her glass again. She hadn’t drunk gin since she was eighteen years old, not since her father had died. The minute he’d gone, so had the sore, tender spot in the pit of her belly that she’d been trying to anesthetize. The smell of the clear spirit, the vapor at the rim of the glass, the tang of bitter old fruit, made her feel it again, all the pain and discomfort of being a tragic, unloved eighteen-year-old.
She thought of her father, the once strong man made of breeze blocks and Bacardi, batter and testosterone, shriveling and shrinking in the room next door to hers, desiccated, drained and mummified as the life seeped out of him. She thought of the way he’d raised her to look after herself, because nobody else was going to do it. To watch her back. To trust no one. To believe no one. To stand alone. She thought of every last moment she’d spent in his company; the meaningless words they’d exchanged, the thoughtless gifts on Christmas Day, the brusque phone calls, the pills gracelessly administered, the silences that sang of secrets, the endless rolling moments that had felt like nothing at the time, just air, just space, just fug, now suddenly filled with meaning and poignancy. She wasn’t his. She wasn’t his.
Her real father was a medical student. A medical student from London with dark hair and dark eyes who stood at five eleven and hailed originally from Dieppe. Her real father was French. Her real father was a doctor. Her real father was not Trevor Pike. She felt something fluid like relief go through her bones. She felt something like delight.
And out there, somewhere, maybe on the street below her window, maybe in a flat in Llanelli, maybe in a briny bar in Dieppe, there were others like her. Brothers. Sisters. People like her. She had never met a person like her before. She was not like her mother, what little she could remember of her, and she was not like her father, although, ha, how he had talked about his “Italian ancestry” over the years, how hard her father had tried to instill in her a sense of pride in her Latin roots. Roots which she now knew were nonexistent. Roots as real as fairy dust. She’d never felt it anyway, her supposed Italian-ness. Always raised her eyebrows impatiently at any mention of it. Just because that’s the only thing that’s interesting about you, she’d think to herself, don’t try and make it the only thing that’s interesting about me.
She’d known she was more than the daughter of a semiliterate fishmonger. She’d known it. Deep down inside herself. She’d felt more related to her old dog Arnie than to her father. The guilt she’d carried for half her life, the guilt of wanting her father to be dead so that she could get on with her life, it lifted and it floated away from her, like an exorcised demon. All that was left was a jumbled sense of strangeness and newness and sadness and delight. She drank another tumbler of gin and lime and she typed the address of the Donor Sibling Registry into her address bar. As the page loaded she felt a quickening in her chest, a sense of rising panic. She wasn’t ready. She closed the browser, shut down her computer and headed for a deep and unsettling sleep full of dreams of strangers.
∗ ∗ ∗
She phoned Dixie the next morning. Her friend sounded startled to hear from her.
“Sorry,” said Lydia, “were you in the middle of something?”
“No, no,” said Dixie, stifling a yawn, “no, I was just, er, just having a sleep.”
Lydia considered the hour. Eleven a.m. It was not like Dixie to be sleeping at 11 a.m., not with shelves to be rearranged and books to be read and people to be having potentially career-enhancing conversations with. Dixie took sleep very much as something forced upon her against her will, something she submitted to once a day and then emerged from groggily and crossly, as though sleep had stolen her soul.
“Yeah,” she continued, “Viola had a bad night. She’s out for the count now so I thought I’d catch up on some lost sleep.”
“Oh, shit, Dix, I’m really sorr
y. I didn’t think.”
Dixie cleared her sinuses loudly, almost, Lydia couldn’t help feeling, to ram home how utterly, deeply asleep she had just been and how much it had taken out of her to rouse herself for this phone call. Lydia bridled slightly and said, “You should have kept your phone switched off.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” She snorted again, and yawned. “I wasn’t thinking. Don’t seem to be able to do much of that these days.” She laughed drily.
These days. That laugh. Lydia bridled again. She hated it when people had babies. No, not when people had babies. When Dixie had babies. Everyone else could sod off and have a hundred babies each for all she cared. She just didn’t want Dixie to have one. She’d only just gotten used to Dixie having Clem. “Boyfriend” was foreign terrain to Lydia but she could make a tenuous grasp on it, having had one of her own at one point in her life. But “Baby” was another planet entirely. “Baby” was consuming in a way that even the neediest boyfriend was not. “Baby” changed everything. And “Baby,” unlike “Boyfriend,” was irreversible.
“That’s all right,” she continued, trying her hardest to sound perky, “I didn’t want to disturb you but . . .” She stopped. Before “Baby” she would have been able to launch straight into the topic she’d called to discuss. Now there was this specter hanging over everything. Would Dixie even care, she wondered, now that she lived in the land of “Baby”? Would it even register? Sorry, a sperm donor, you say? Anyway, did I tell you about Viola’s last nappy?
“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?”
“Okay,” 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.
