The Making of Us

by Lisa Jewell

  Her phone was ringing.

  She sat forward and swung her legs from the side of the bed so fast that she felt her head spin.

  “Yes,” she whispered into the phone.

  “Hello, love.” It was her mum. “Are you okay?”

  Robyn relaxed. “Yes,” she said, “I’m fine. I just had a strange dream.”

  “You were asleep? But it’s nearly eleven.”

  “I know. I know. I’ve been up and everything. I just, I don’t know, I was tired. I didn’t sleep well. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Yes. Honestly. I’m just . . .” She moved her phone to her other ear. “I don’t know. Everything’s a bit . . .”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Jack’s at a meeting.”

  “Do you want me to come over?”

  Robyn paused. She wanted to say yes. But then Jack was due back in an hour anyway. She sighed. “No, I’m fine. Honestly.”

  “Something just arrived for you. Recorded. I signed for it. Do you want me to find out what it is?”

  “Okay,” she said, and yawned.

  “Oh,” her mother said. “I think I know what it is. It’s one of those kits, you know, a DNA kit. It’s for your DNA test.” She sounded excited. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  Robyn considered the question. She’d filled in the form two weeks ago and ticked the box about being willing to undergo a DNA test. She’d only done it for her mum. “What harm can it do?” she’d said. “You still don’t need to make contact with anyone. But at least you’ll know who they are.”

  Robyn imagined the box in her mother’s hand. And then she thought about her dream: the happy boy pushing the wheelchair, the cuddly woman with the long arms, the doors leading to a mysterious place. She thought about how the dream had made her feel: uncomfortable at first, and then happy as she allowed herself to get close to the woman and to let the boy push her to a different place. It was one of those dreams that felt like more than a dream; that felt like a signpost. She was lost and the boy in the dream seemed to be showing her where to go. She felt something like an invisible rope bridge being thrown then from her consciousness to the box in her mother’s hand. That was where the answer lay.

  “Come over,” she found herself saying, somewhat breathlessly. “Come over now. Bring it with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. I want to do it. I want to meet them.”

  “I’m on my way,” said her mother. “I’ll be there in an hour.”

  DEAN

  Dean emerged into the brightness of a crisp May afternoon from St. John’s Wood tube station. When he’d left Deptford it had been overcast and looking like rain. Maybe this was what the weather was always like in St. John’s Wood, he considered. He followed a rough map he’d drawn on the back of his hand to a short wide road opposite Lord’s cricket ground. Each house was set back discreetly from the road, some behind large electric gates, some behind neat box hedges. The houses were old, Victorian in scale and design, but with the scrubbed, gleaming look of new-builds. And they were gigantic. Dean had never seen so many large houses in a row. In his part of town, houses like this stood alone, usually abutted by squat shops or cheap apartment blocks. He walked slowly, taking in the ambience, the feel of another world. But then he saw a man in a window, watching him suspiciously, and he picked up his pace.

  He found Lydia’s house at the farthest end of the road. It was as wide as four buses and the color of ground bones. The windows were pasted over with opaque film so that you could not see inside from the street. The front garden was spare, planted with black tulips and spiky plants, the ground in between covered over in gray stone chips. Hard concrete steps led to a fat gray door fitted with modernist hardware and the number twenty-seven was picked out in the fanlight above in more opaque film.

  Dean stood on the pavement for a moment with his hands in the pockets of his jeans and appraised the house. His jaw fell open without him realizing. The house was astounding. The house was nothing short of a miracle. He stepped gingerly onto the footpath which was lined on either side with tiny inset halogen lights. Within seconds of his pressing a bell connected to a small TV, Lydia’s face appeared on the screen. “Come in!” she said. He pushed open the door and there in front of him was a small Asian woman wearing an apron. She looked at him in horror.

  “What you want?” she bellowed.

  “I’m, er . . .”

  “He’s here to see me,” said Lydia, descending a wide set of stairs carpeted with vertical stripes in beige and brown.

  The small Asian woman looked at Lydia as if she had lost her mind and then back at Dean. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  Lydia smiled. “Positive, thank you, Juliette. This is my brother.”

  Juliette’s face softened then and she unleashed a wide smile. “Ah,” she said, nodding enthusiastically. “Your brother!” She beamed at Lydia and then she approached Dean with her arms outstretched. She took both his hands in hers and shook them up and down. “I did not know you had a brother! So nice to meet you. So nice to meet you! Yes. Yes. I can see it now.” She pointed at his face and then at her own. “I can see that he is your brother.” She turned to Lydia and wagged her finger. “You did not tell me you had a brother,” she chastised.

  Lydia smiled apologetically at the Asian woman but did not say that until six weeks ago she did not know she had a brother either. Dean and Lydia smiled at each other conspiratorially and then Lydia showed him to an incredible room which was like a glass brick stuck onto the back wall of the house. There was nothing much in it, just a huge white leather sofa, a low table and a palm tree. The glass box framed a wide, ornate garden full of puffball trees and square furniture and what appeared, from this distance, at least, to be an actual kitchen. Somewhere in the distance Dean could make out the form of a man in a scruffy polo shirt doing something to the leaves of a small drooping tree.

  Beyond the other end of the square box, looking back inside the house, Dean could see a black lacquer dining table around which stood twelve clear Lucite dining chairs. In the middle of the table was a turquoise bowl filled with grass. A vast chrome lightshade hung above the table, and the walls were painted a dark charcoal gray, including all the molding and baseboards.

  “Amazing house,” he said, lowering himself onto the startlingly white sofa.

  “Yes,” Lydia replied dreamily. “It is a bit. Not my work, though. It was like this when I bought it. All I did was go out and buy some soulless furniture to fill it with.”

  “No,” he said, “I like it. It’s minimal, isn’t it?”

  “Totally. Too minimal. But then I don’t actually spend any time down here. I’m always in my office. Or in my bedroom. All this is just”—she spread her arms out—“for show.”

  “And what’s the deal with her?” Dean gestured toward the kitchen at the other side of the house.

  “Juliette?”

  He nodded.

  “My, er, housekeeper.”

  “No way!”

  “Yes. Indeed. I have a housekeeper. I know. It’s nuts. I never thought I’d have a housekeeper.”

  “Or a gardener?” He pointed into the garden.

  “Well, yes, though he’s not staff. I mean, he just comes once a week. For a few hours. Whereas Juliette’s here all day every day.”

  Juliette appeared in the doorway at that moment and smiled fondly at Lydia and Dean. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks, Juliette, it’s fine. We’re not here for long. We’re going out in a minute.”

  “Okay, okay. I will bring you crisps. And mineral water. One minute.”

  They both watched her leave and then laughed.

  “Well, you know, I never had a mother, so I suppose I feel she’s like a gift to myself, in a way, to make up for it.” Lydia laughed again and Dean smiled at her.

  “So what . . . what happened to your mum?” He’d wanted
to ask her that night they’d met up in London Bridge but hadn’t liked to. It had felt a bit soon to be asking her about things like that. But this was their third meeting and they’d been e-mailing and texting too and now he thought she might accept the question.

  Her smile didn’t waver. “Depends who you ask,” she said, pulling her legs up beneath her and stroking her kneecaps with the palms of her hands. “According to my dad, she killed herself; according to other members of the family, he pushed her off our balcony. Either way she died on the concrete outside our flats.”

  Dean winced. “How old were you?”

  “Three. I don’t really remember her at all.”

  “And what do you think happened?”

  Lydia shrugged. “No idea. I think they took my dad in for questioning. No one ever got arrested. No one was ever charged with anything. And after that my whole family just imploded. No one would talk to anyone. And Uncle Rod just kind of disappeared.”

  “The guy you think sent you the anonymous letter?”

  “Yes. That’s the one. I didn’t see him again until my dad’s funeral, when I was eighteen. But he didn’t stay. I just saw him leaving. So yes, basically, I have no idea what happened to my mother . . . whether she jumped, whether she was pushed. And if she jumped, I don’t know why she jumped. And if she was pushed, why my dad would have done that. And I’ve found it easier over the years not to ask myself too many questions about it. I decided a long time ago just to put the whole thing in a little box and forget about it.”

  Lydia brought her fingertips together and stared at them. Dean watched her from his end of the sofa. He wondered if she was going to cry. But she didn’t. Her face had set into a kind of plaster of Paris mask.

  Juliette walked into the room bearing a small tray holding a bowl of Twiglets, a bowl of cashew nuts, a bowl of olives and two glasses of sparkling water. She smiled maternally and set these things down in front of them. Dean saw Lydia shuffle uncomfortably as she watched her. “Thank you, Juliette,” she said in a strangely bright voice that Dean hadn’t heard her use before.

  Juliette left the room and Dean turned to Lydia.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your box thing. You know, putting stuff away in it?”

  She shrugged and leaned forward to scoop up a handful of cashew nuts. “No idea,” she said. “But I don’t really know what else I can do. I’m estranged from my family. My dad’s dead. And even if I knew, what difference would it make to anything? You know. I’d still be Lydia Pike. I’d still be me. But I’d be me knowing that my dad wasn’t just a cruel, coldhearted, unloving old git, but that he was also a flipping murderer.”

  “I wonder if you were there,” pondered Dean. “You know, when it happened.”

  She shrugged. “If I was there, I’ve blanked it out. Totally. But I think I must have been there, because of my phobia.”

  “What phobia?”

  “My paint thing. You know, the smell of it. My mum had been painting my bedroom when she fell or got pushed or whatever. She still had paint on her hands. I must have been there because even now, if I smell fresh paint, I kind of freak out. I have to leave. And that was why—”

  “You invented your special paint.”

  “Exactly. Not to get rich. Not for all this”—she gestured at her opulent home—“I never wanted all this. I just wanted to be able to paint my home without giving myself panic attacks.”

  Dean helped himself to a fistful of Twiglets. He loved Twiglets. He hadn’t had them since he was young. “You must have been there, then,” he continued, desperate to uncover facts from this vague recollection. “It makes sense. If you can remember the smell of the paint, if you associate it with her death, you must have been there. You might even have seen it happen.” He was pushing her. He knew he was pushing her, maybe a little too far. He watched her reaction. But her face was still blank. She picked a cashew out of the palm of her hand and popped it into her mouth.

  “Have you ever thought about hypnotherapy, or anything?”

  She laughed then, but not a laugh of amusement, more a laugh of desperate hopelessness. “Er, no,” she replied. “No. I have not. As I say. Past, in box, done.” She wiped salt from her hands and then patted her thighs. “Come on then, let’s go.”

  “Where are you taking me?” asked Dean.

  “I’m taking you to eat. Lots. I want to fatten you up. I want you to put on at least half a stone tonight. Maybe more.”

  Dean looked sadly at the untouched olives in their little glass bowl. He felt guilty leaving them there after that woman had gone to all the trouble of putting them out for him. He looked at his glass of sparkling water. He didn’t even like sparkling water but he drank half of it, just to be polite. And then he grabbed another handful of Twiglets and got to his feet.

  As they passed the kitchen on their way to the front door, Dean popped his head around the door. “Good-bye,” he said to Juliette. “Thanks for the snacks.”

  Juliette beamed at him. “You are welcome,” she said. “You are very welcome indeed.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Lydia took him to a restaurant called Rotisserie. “I had a feeling you might like meat,” she said.

  The restaurant was brown and dim and snug. They were given a booth, shut off from neighboring tables at both ends by wooden panels and sheets of etched glass. Dean felt like he was in some kind of dream. A few weeks ago he’d been living in that damp flat with the gray carpet. A few weeks ago he’d been nothing. Just a man of twenty-one without a job or a home or a girlfriend. Now he was Lydia’s brother. And Lydia was totally amazing. He adored her. He adored her inscrutable face, the way she kept herself all contained and calm. He adored her sarky smile and her Welsh accent. He adored her house, her success, her housekeeper. He adored her e-mails, all the words perfectly spelled. All the grammar and punctuation just so. He adored the way she looked at him, as though she adored him too. And he adored her for bringing him to this posh restaurant, as if it were a perfectly normal thing for him to be doing on a Wednesday evening. But mainly he adored her because behind all the gloss and the glamour, behind the gym-honed body, the shiny hair, the designer jeans and the minimalist mansion, there was a person, just like him. She was an outsider too. She was a loner. She got him. She totally got him.

  When he’d arrived home from their first meeting, his mum had been waiting anxiously for him.

  “So,” she’d said, before he was even fully in the room, “so? What was she like?”

  He’d smiled and said, “She was absolutely fucking perfect.”

  He ordered half a chicken and chips and a bottle of lager. Lydia ordered grilled king prawns and salad.

  She was looking at him with that look of hers, kind of arsey and cool.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just wondering about you.”

  “What about me?”

  “About what’s going to become of you.”

  He laughed nervously. “What do you mean, become of me?”

  “You know what I mean. I mean—your baby, Dean.”

  He flinched. He’d been expecting her to say it, but still it took him by surprise. There were only two people in his life who talked to him about Isadora. One was Rose, but Dean didn’t really hear Rose’s voice. It registered like a distant lament to his ears, like an oil tanker sounding its horn miles from shore. The other person was his mother. But his mother had never pushed him to do anything in his life. She’d let him coast through school, not said a word when he’d given up playing football after school even though his coach had said he showed promise. She’d let him drift away from a college course in catering and hospitality and into a van-driving job, and now she was doing nothing to make him take responsibility for his baby daughter. Every now and then she’d say she’d been to visit the baby. She’d show him photos of Isadora on her phone, and she’d say something innocuous like: “
She’s ever so sweet, Dean. She’s a little dolly.” Dean would glance cursorily at the photo and grunt. He didn’t really look. He didn’t want to look. He would discern some hair, a button nose, a pink T-shirt and, the last time, a smile. “She’s smiling now, Dean. Like a little angel.” But he did not see the whole. If he saw the whole then he would have to let her into him. If he let her into him then she would be there forever, whatever he did, wherever he went, like a scar.

  This was the first time that someone who wasn’t Sky’s mother or his own had referred to Isadora as “your baby.” Tommy always called her “the baby.”

  “What about her?” he countered cautiously.

  “You know what I mean. She’s your baby. You haven’t seen her since she was born. What are you going to do about it?” Lydia’s voice was measured and even. She sounded kind, not harsh. But still the question upset him and he found himself clenching his fists beneath the table against an oncoming rage. “I’m not gonna do anything about it,” he said, hating the sound of his own voice as it filled the space between them, hating that he was showing Lydia this other side of himself, this rough, unmannered, childish aspect.

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at him with her head tilted slightly to one side.

  A waitress brought them two glasses of beer and a basket of bread. He picked up his glass and drank from it nervously.

  “You can’t do nothing about it,” Lydia said eventually. “Nothing is not an option.”