The Making of Us (2 page)

It wasn’t until she woke up four mornings later and felt the wetness between her legs, the arrival of another monthly curse, that she began to feel angry again. What use was a man who fired blanks? What use was a man who could fillet a flounder and kick a ball into the back of a net if he couldn’t even stop drinking for long enough to let his sperm sober up?

That was the morning that Glenys Pike decided that she wanted a baby more than she wanted a man. That was the morning that Glenys Pike decided to do it herself.

Rodney Pike had been in love with Glenys since the very first day he’d laid eyes on her. It was in his mum’s front room, the day before Rodney’s birthday. Not that that was why Glenys was in their front room. She was just waiting for Trevor who was upstairs fiddling with his hair in front of the bathroom mirror. There was often a girl on the sofa waiting for Trevor to finish fiddling with his hair. Usually they were blonde, trendy-looking types with fringes and cheap plastic earrings. But this one was different. She had sleek black hair, and a long, elegant neck. She was wearing plain clothes; a white shirt with a belt round the waist, sky blue cotton trousers and silver shoes like a ballet dancer might wear. And she sat very straight, as if someone had taught her how to do it properly. He’d expected her to open her mouth and talk like Audrey Hepburn, but she hadn’t. She had a broad valleys accent and when she smiled her face turned into a caricature of itself. But for that first formative moment, Rod had looked at Glenys Reeves and thought that she was an exotic creature sent from another world to steal his soul, and he never quite lost that feeling.

Trevor showed more intelligence in the thirty seconds it took him to propose to Glenys Reeves a year later than he’d shown in the rest of his life put together. Rod had nodded approvingly when Trevor and Glenys had sat on that same green sofa and he told the family: ‘I’ve asked Glenys to marry me, and, well, you’ll never guess what – she’s said yes!’ He would have been mad not to. The girl adored him, that much was clear, and not only was she the prettiest girl that Rod had ever seen, she was kind and loving too. And you didn’t stumble upon a girl like that every day. Rod had never stumbled across a girl like that. He’d never stumbled across any girls at all really. He was too small for most of them. Welsh girls liked big men and Rod was not a big man: 5′ 6″ and built like a forest imp. He had the same even features as Trevor, just on a smaller scale. He’d always assumed he’d grow to be as big as his elder brother, but it wasn’t to be. Stuck the size of a schoolboy forever more.

Over the years Glenys had always done Rodney the great service of flirting with him mildly. She’d say things like: ‘Oh, maybe I married the wrong brother,’ and always insist on sitting next to him in pubs and restaurants. Rodney, unlike his brother, was not stupid. He knew she was just being kind. He knew that she knew how he felt about her, and he knew that she knew how he felt about himself and was just trying to give him a little confidence boost, a little fillip. It worked. Rodney always felt about 5′ 8″ when he was with Glenys.

And so, when she came to him one morning in early 1979, elegant as ever in a tailored skirt and frilled chiffon shirt, and put her hand over his and said: ‘Rod, I need you to help me. I’m desperate,’ he’d known already that whatever she was about to ask of him, he was destined to say yes.

It hadn’t made any sense at first, what she was saying to him.

‘It’s Trevor … It’s his sperm. They’re no good. That’s why we haven’t had a baby yet, Rodney.’

He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and peered at Glenys through them. ‘What do you mean, they’re no good?’ He found it very disconcerting to be in a room alone with Glenys and for her to be using the word ‘sperm’. He’d never heard her using dirty language before. It made him momentarily deaf to the essence of what she was trying to say.

‘They’re duds, Rod. He’s firing blanks. You know, a
Jaffa
.’

‘Oh, my goodness gracious.’ Rod slapped his hand to his mouth, realisation dawning. ‘Are you sure?’ he said next, because really and truly, how could Trevor be a Jaffa? You only had to look at him to see how virile he was.

‘Well, yes, I’m pretty sure because I’ve been up to the clinic at Llantrisant, like, and they turned me inside out and upside down and hung me from the ceiling and there’s nothing wrong with me and it’s been five years, Rod. Five years, and it’s not, well, you know, it’s not for lack of trying.’

Rod blinked slowly, wanting the image of Glenys and his brother ‘trying’ gone from his head.

‘And the doctor up there said it’s his drinking, you see. And his smoking. And I can’t tell Trevor he’s not to drink and smoke. And the tight trousers. I mean, imagine Trevor in baggy strides? Really.’ She shook her head sadly. Rodney shook his head, too.

‘Have you told him?’ he asked.

‘Oh, my goodness, no! Can you imagine! He’d be
apoplectic
. I don’t think he’d ever forgive me, do you?’

Rodney nodded slowly. She was right. Trevor was not the sort of man who would take a suggestion that he was not fully the man he thought he was very lightly. Rodney caught his breath. There was something massive coming up, something seismic attached to the end of this conversation. He could feel it in the air and see it in the tight contours of Glenys’ lovely face. He tried not to let the obvious thing take root, it was too mind-blowing. There was no way in a thousand, million, trillion years that Glenys would ask him to father her child. Absolutely no way. He shook his head subconsciously against the thought. No, that would mean either betraying his brother or getting involved in messy mechanical stuff with tubes and syringes and God knows what and, really, the thought made Rod feel quite queasy. He and Glenys were of a like mind, he knew that. Gentle people, they were, wholesome you might say, not given to swearing and talking about filth like some. Glenys wouldn’t countenance it and neither would he. So he sat and he waited to find out what she would say next.

‘I’m going to a sperm bank,’ she said eventually, ‘I’m going to a sperm bank, in London. And I want you to come with me.’

Rodney had heard about sperm banks, even thought about donating a few years back, when he was out of work and desperate for some quick cash. But then he’d thought about it again: little Rods running around the world, cursing him for their skinny bodies and their fine hair and their poor eyesight and, really, what woman would want his sperm when they were told that it had been donated by a myopic 5′ 6″ tree surgeon from Tonypandy?

‘Right,’ he said, rubbing his chin gently with his fingertips. ‘I see. You’re not going with Trevor, then?’

Glenys threw him a look which he immediately understood.

‘No,’ he said, ‘of course you’re not.’ He stared at the floor for a moment, considering the request. Then he glanced up again at Glenys. She looked hard. No, not hard,
resolved
. She had no doubt at all that this was what she wanted to do. ‘So, you’ve thought about this then, have you?’

She nodded, firmly.

‘And if I don’t go with you?’

‘Then I’ll go on my own. But I don’t want to go on my own, Rod. What’ll they think of me? They’ll think I’m some kind of crazy woman, showing up without a husband, demanding a baby. I mean, what sort of person would do that? I need you, Rod. I need you to come to London with me and sit with me and pretend that we’re married.’

‘But, if I do that for you, Glenys … and, believe me, I really would like to do it for you … it means lying to Trevor, to my brother.’

She nodded, her eyes wide with desperation.

‘Gosh, Glenys. I don’t know …’

‘Think about how happy your brother will be, Rod. Think about when he holds that baby in his arms. When he can call himself a
man
.’

He blinked and gulped. She had him cornered. When she put it like that, well, she had a point. Trevor would never say so but Rod knew that it galled him that he hadn’t made a baby yet. Everything came so easy to Trevor and he’d assumed that a baby would be the same. He talked about having four or five. But then he also talked about the joys of his child-free life, the clubs and the holidays and the nights out at the pub. But maybe that was just talk, thought Rodney, just macho bluster to keep away the demons of self-doubt.

‘So, will you?’ Glenys stared at him beseechingly. ‘Will you come?’

‘Where is it?’

‘London,’ she said, ‘Harley Street.’

‘Well, I never …’ he mused.

‘Don’t want to do it near here. People talking, and that. And you never know, could turn out it’s someone I know. Imagine that! Imagine it, having a kid who turns out looking like the guy in the electrical shop!’

They laughed then, extra loud, to blow a hole through the nervous tension. Once the laughter petered out, Rodney sighed. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Yes. You will. It’s a big deal, Rod. I know that. And I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t trust you.’ She laid her hand over his and brought her face close to him. ‘I wouldn’t ask you, Rod, if you weren’t the man you are.’

Rod smiled and inside him something expanded and grew and he knew that he would do anything for this woman, even betray his big brother.

Lydia Pike wrapped her arms around her knees and closed her eyes against the hot sun. The dog sat alongside her, tall and panting, overdressed in his thick coat of hair. The grass was long, longer than she’d ever seen it before, and the air in this little dip on the disused railway track was thick and sweet with the scent of cow parsley. Lydia brought the dog here every day, it was part of her regular walk from the flat to the shops and back again. Usually she kept walking, at other times of year this place was dank and unwelcoming, but now, after six weeks of summer, the hottest summer in recent history, the earth had dried to a gentle crust and butterflies ornamented the wild flowers that burst from the banks. A ladybird crawled up Lydia’s wrist and she brushed it gently to the ground. The silence was absolute. She lay back with her head in the soft grass and felt it wriggling beneath her hair, alive with the creatures of summer. She closed her eyes and the big sun strobed through her eyelids, a golden-red symphony.

A few moments passed and then Lydia sat up again, felt inside her rucksack and pulled out the quarter bottle of vodka. It was already half empty, she’d had the rest on the way here, tipped into a bottle of Diet Coke. She brought the bottle to her lips and drank from it thirstily. The alcohol brought even more piquancy to her situation, here on the banks of a long-dead railway line, escaping from home, escaping from life. The sense of loneliness and desperation whispered away, and Lydia felt colour return to her soul. She put her arm around the big German Shepherd; girl and dog, side by side, as they had been for the past ten years. Her dad had bought her the dog, to keep her safe. Not because he was the sort of dad who thought only of his child’s safety, but because he was the sort of dad who couldn’t be arsed to do the job himself. Arnie had been Lydia’s sole responsibility from the age of eight. She had fed him, walked him, groomed him and slept with him at night in her single bed. Arnie. Her best friend.

People thought she was weird. Lydia
pikey
they called her:
of course they did
. Lydia was also the Goth with the Dog. Not that she was a Goth. She just liked black. She wasn’t pierced or tattooed, but still, she was the Goth with the Dog. And the Grunger. That seemed more fitting. She did like Nirvana, she did like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. It had been Greebo before, when she was fourteen, fifteen. She preferred Grunger. Greebo made it sound like she was into Motörhead and Whitesnake. Made it sound like she hung around with smelly fairground boys and never washed her hair. But nobody knew, nobody really knew, what Lydia really was. Lydia barely knew what Lydia really was. She was eighteen. She lived in a third-floor flat in a small village outside Tonypandy with her father who was forty-nine. Her mother had died when she was three. She’d just sat her A levels and was fully expecting three A grades (another reason to hate Lydia, she was clever, too). She had a big dog called Arnie. She wanted to be a scientist. She drank too much.

An hour later Lydia returned to the small block of flats where she lived with her father. Outside the flats was a playground. In these high days of summer, halfway through the school holidays, it was full of teenagers; girls in crop tops and baggy jeans huddled on to swings, boys in singlets and combat shorts. Some of them were smoking. One of them had a beatbox on his shoulder. ‘The Boy Is Mine’ by Brandy & Monica, the soundtrack to their summer but not Lydia’s. She’d known most of these kids since they were toddlers, been to school with some of them, even pushed one or two of them around the estate in their buggies while their mothers sat and gossiped. But none of them was a friend.

Lydia braced herself, but the teenagers were distracted by themselves, not looking for that moment outside their own immediate circle for entertainment. Lydia pulled the dog’s lead closer to herself and the two of them walked, fast and quiet, past the playground and towards the flats. Lydia’s eyes dropped, as they always did, to a patch of tarmac just below her flat, a smudge of pink paint, containing within it the merest outline of a hand, the curl of a finger. And Lydia’s nose filled, as ever, with the scent of paint, thick and noxious and terrifying.

She walked on, around the corner and into the concrete well of the external staircase. Two teens turned their faces briefly towards Lydia as she passed by, making room for her and her dog, too interested in the contents of small plastic bags clutched in their fists to care much about the girl in black making her way to the third floor.

She turned her key in the lock of her door, number thirty-one, pushed it open, held her breath. Her father was attached to his oxygen tank. He was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was hardly surprising given that he’d smoked forty cigarettes a day since he was fifteen. The oxygen tank was a new development and he was attached to it for fifteen hours a day. It frightened Lydia to see him like that. He looked bizarre, oddly perverted, like a character from a David Lynch movie.