The Making of Us (14 page)

He shuffled along a pew and found himself sitting next to Sky’s cousin. He was ten years older and a full foot taller than Sky. He threw Dean an inscrutable look.

Dean hooked a finger inside the collar of his £3.99 shirt and pulled at it. Sky’s mum sat in front of him. She turned when she sensed him behind her and her face was a mask of repressed dislike, out of which she fashioned a smile. She mouthed ‘hello’ and Dean mouthed it back then she whispered, ‘Are you OK?’ and he nodded. And then stopped when he realised that he should not be OK, and in fact on many levels was not OK. He finished with a shrug and an apologetic smile. She patted his hand and turned away. She looked awful. Horrendous. She’d taken her grief-ruined face and painted it with too many colours and emulsions, rendering herself into a terrible child-scaring drag queen.

Sky’s coffin was white with gold handles. On top of it were the letters SKY spelled out in pink rosebuds. There was a photograph of her, too, a big black-and-white blow up of her smiling. Dean couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Sky smile.

‘Beautiful picture of Sky,’ his mum whispered in his ear.

He nodded. It was. She was a beautiful girl.

The service rattled on. People stood up to speak. They’d wanted him to speak but he’d said no. Dean had never before spoken in front of people in his life and he wasn’t about to start now. This wasn’t his day. This wasn’t about him. It was about Sky’s mum and Sky’s sisters and Sky’s wailing friends.

There were eleven speeches in all; Dean stopped listening in the end. The words ‘angel’ and ‘princess’ and ‘beautiful’ were bandied around to the extent that he fully expected a rousing rendition of ‘Candle in the Wind’ to spring from the church organ at any moment. But as it was, he and five other men heaved the lightweight coffin on to their shoulders and left the church to the strains of ‘Ave Maria’.

After Sky’s coffin had been lowered into the ground and everyone had dutifully scattered the hole with earth and roses and teddy bears, the crowd dissipated but Dean stayed. For a while he stood at the edge of the cavity with Sky’s mum and his own and both women draped their arms around him and Dean wanted to hate the sensation of their middle-aged, powdered, perfumed bodies pressed against his, but after a moment he yielded to it and they stood like that for a few minutes until his mum said, ‘Come on, let’s go, they’ll be waiting for us.’

‘One more minute,’ he said, ‘I’ll catch you up.’ And so he stood alone in the box-fresh afternoon and felt in his pockets for the spliff he’d made earlier. He lit it, inhaled, then sank to his haunches, a foot from Sky’s final resting place. He stared down at the dirt-messed stuffed animals, the single stem roses that looked like tragic suicides and there, half-covered with earth, a photo of Isadora. She was staring directly into the camera with her wide-apart eyes and it felt for one fleeting moment as though she were staring directly into his soul, the way it had felt when he’d seen her just after she was born. He gulped and averted his gaze from hers. She was too much for him. Too clever, too strong, too good.

But there was something else in that gaze, something that knocked the wind out of him. It was
him
, his essence. Everyone said she looked like him, but who did he look like? He had his mother’s fine-boned build, her pale English complexion, the bump in the bridge of the nose, her elegant wrists and freckled back. But his eyes were not hers, nor his lips, nor his jawline, nor his deep-seated melancholia and distrust of the concept of human connections and community. His mum ran the local community centre, threw parties for no reason, invited people into her house to keep her company, found points of interest in everyone she met, stayed in touch with people with whom she’d made only the briefest, most fleeting connections. Dean loved her for it, but that wasn’t his style. That wasn’t him.

There’d never been a man in their house. His mum had dated over the years but kept the men away from him, scared in case the man had made Dean love him and then broken his heart by leaving again. He had an uncle but he lived twenty miles away with his wife. Dean had never really felt the absence of a man in his home. And he’d never really given much thought to the man who laid biological claim to being his father, a stranger even to his mother, a man who had sat in a small room and collected his own essence in a jar in return for a few pounds and the knowledge that he was somehow doing somebody some good. Dean had only found that out three years ago, his mum had told him on his eighteenth birthday. Before he had been under the impression that his dad was a random French guy that his mum had met on holiday at the age of forty-one, a late-blooming romance, in the dying embers of a glorious summer, two lonely people, one night of passion, et cetera, et cetera. The bit about him being French turned out to be true. The rest of it was sweet fiction.

Dean had not felt shocked or betrayed by the revelation. It made more sense somehow. He’d never really seen his mum as the type to have a Shirley Valentine-style encounter with a swarthy foreigner. He’d always had trouble aligning the concept with himself and his existence. The anonymous man in the small cubicle who had had no cause to find any common ground with his mum seemed far more compatible with Dean’s notions of himself.

He was conceived just before the law had been changed, before donors were compelled to make themselves accessible to their children when they became adults. Dean had no legal recourse to his father. Dean had no right to see him. And for three years Dean had had no wish to see him and no desire to track him down.

Until now.

He shuffled forward towards the edge of the grave and held the spliff between his lips. He flattened himself to the ground and reached out for the photograph with his extended right hand, but his fingertips did not even come close to the depths where Sky’s coffin lay, the photograph on top of it. He would have to leave her there, his baby, just like he had left her at the hospital. He lay there for a while, his head and arms overhanging the unfilled grave, staring at the photograph of Isadora. Above him clouds gathered in the sky and the afternoon began to settle. The breeze seemed to make a discreet exit; he felt it lift and move away, whispering conspiratorially through the trees behind him. Then it was still and quiet, and for the last time ever Dean was alone with his two girls – Sky in her gleaming white box, Isadora in her dirt-strewn photograph – at peace with one another. Tears came at last, fat, heavy drops that fell from his eyes straight into the hole in the ground.

He left her there, with her bears and her flowers and her daughter, and the last gasp gift of his tears, and he went to find his mother, to lose himself in beer and company.

When Maggie arrived at the hospice on Wednesday morning Daniel was propped up in his bed, holding a cup of tea by the handle and halfway through the
Daily Telegraph
. He glanced up at Maggie as she walked into the room, peering at her genially over the top of his reading glasses.

‘
Bonjour
,’ he said, a smile in his voice if not on his face.

Maggie was taken aback. When she’d left him the evening before, he had been asleep after a long afternoon of discomfort and rather unsettling mumbling and murmuring about things that had made little sense. At one point he had turned to Maggie, spittle collected at the corners of his mouth, and muttered, ‘It’s you. It’s
you
. You’re. Not! Letting me.
Die!
’ She’d spoken to the nurses on duty and they’d said, ‘It may be that it’s spreading to the brain. It may be that his behaviour will become more erratic.’ Maggie had been scared leaving the house this morning, scared of what she might find. For all she knew, today might be the day – the day that Daniel died. She’d brought him some dried fruit and yogurt nuts anyway from the new nut place that had just opened up in the station, and he eyed the paper bag with some relish as she pulled it from her bag and placed it in front of him.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘don’t you look better today?’

He nodded and laid down his newspaper. ‘I am feeling very good today. I am not sure why. Maybe I am going to get better.’ He let out a wry rasp of laughter and Maggie smiled uncertainly. Jokes of that nature often threw her off course. Black humour. Gallows humour. Maggie didn’t really have the requisite widget for laughter in the face of adversity. The only approach to take to death, she felt, was sombre respect.

‘Well,’ she muttered, ‘you’re better today, and that’s marvellous.’ She watched him reach into the brown paper bag and take out a whole dried apricot. He proffered the bag to her. ‘No, thank you,’ she said, ‘I’ve had my own.’

She watched him bite into the amber-coloured lump and begin to chew. He had not chewed anything for days. He had not held a tea cup or picked up a paper for days. Death was playing a childish game, tip-toeing around mischievously: ‘Here I am! Oh, no, only joking, I’m over here … no, over here!’ Every time she asked a nurse, ‘How long? How long do you think?’ she would be met with the same response.
It could be any time
. Death did not just hit you with a stick and then walk away and leave you to die. Death fiddled about with you first. Death forced you head first into the toilet bowl of your demise and then yanked you back by the collar. Death was not as simple as Maggie had imagined.

‘Come on,’ said Daniel, peeling back his sheets, ‘let us go for a walk.’

Maggie looked at him, alarmed. ‘Ooh, are you sure?’

‘Absolutely sure.’ And then he smiled, wide and bright.

He moved slowly, a foot at a time, but he talked quickly. Maggie began to wish she had brought a recording device. His words tumbled out noisily like a jackpot of coins from a fruit machine. She linked her arm through his, and she listened as best she could, some of what he was saying lost in the rapids of his urgency and his accent.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it is not true that I have not had a child. It is not true at all.’

They were in the garden now. It was colder than was comfortable for Maggie who had left her jacket by Daniel’s bed and was left in only a cotton blouse with three-quarter-length sleeves. But the sun shone and they stood by a pond filled with glimmering golden Koi carp, scurrying urgently beneath the jade-green surface of the water.

Maggie looked at Daniel questioningly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ he continued, turning his handsome face towards the sun and squinting, ‘that I have children in this world.’

‘Well …’ Maggie stumbled over her words, unsure what stance to take to a pronouncement that intimated sexual relations with other, faceless women, when with her he had never got as far as first base.

‘I have four,’ he continued. ‘Two boys. Two girls. One is twenty-nine, one is twenty-seven, one is twenty-one and one is eighteen. Imagine that! Four children. And imagine, also, Maggie, that I have never met these children. In fact, that I have spent thirty years pretending to myself that they do not exist. That they are just,
comment s’appellent
… like fairies? You know: like ghosts? Some people believe in them, some people don’t. Unless you have seen one. And because I have never seen these so-called
children
then they do not exist,
n’est-ce pas
?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Maggie, unlinking her arm from his. ‘How could …’

‘I gave away my sperm, Maggie May. My precious seeds, I gave them away, to strange ladies, and I asked that the strange ladies take the seeds, sow them but never come to find me with their babies.’

‘You were a sperm donor?’

‘Yes. I was. Can you imagine that, Maggie? Imagine me, doing that? It seems so distant. It seems so …
extraordinary
now. Now it seems extraordinary, then it seemed normal, mundane even. Then it seemed like giving blood, you know, a nice thing to do. And now, now I finally understand what I did. Now I am nearly old and nearly dead, it is finally real to me. I made life, Maggie!’ He gripped her wrists with his hands. ‘Can you believe it? I made life! Me! Daniel Blanchard! I made four lives! And now, you know, maybe those lives have made other lives. Maybe there are more babies, I suppose, yes,
grandchildren
! There are four adults out there and they are living their lives while I am closing mine and we are totally, completely, inextricably linked. It is … it is like a
miracle
! Yes, a miracle! And it has taken me thirty years to understand this, thirty years to know what it is that I have done.’

Maggie stood and stared at Daniel. His eyes were shining. He looked crazed. But he looked happy. And she knew his words were true.

‘Do you think it is too late, Maggie May? Do you think it is too late for me to know them?’

She caught her breath. She had never seen him like this before, so open, so raw. It made her ache somewhere deep inside, with love, with pity, with fear. She smiled at him, weakly. ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’ She had never called him ‘darling’ before. His demeanour had never invited it. But she felt it now, that he was her darling, her sweet, darling, beautiful man, and that she loved him with every shred of herself, and that she could just about bear to see him die but she could not bear to see him die with this hole in his heart. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if it’s too late. I don’t know how these things work. I mean, what do you know about these children … these people? Do you have any way of contacting them?’

He shrugged. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so. Though the youngest one, the girl, she has my details. She is the only one who could contact me. They changed the rules. I remember the day. I thought:
Well, I will probably be dead by the time this one is eighteen, what harm can it do?
’ He laughed, uproariously, louder than Maggie had ever heard him laugh before. Once again, she struggled to see the humour in it.

‘So,’ he continued. ‘That is that. Unless my youngest offspring decides that today is the day to find her long-lost daddy then all is lost. Because I can feel it, Maggie,’ he pointed at his skull, ‘I feel it. Not every day. Not every moment. But the blackness, it is inside me now and it is comfortable. It has on its slippers,’ he giggled, ‘its gown. Its cocoa. Yes. It is at home now. And I am gone soon. It is sad.’ He looked at her with wide, shining eyes. ‘Yes, it is very, very sad. But now,’ he let the sadness drain from his eyes, ‘while I have the energy, while I can still stand, let us dance, Maggie May, let us dance.’