The Making of Us (27 page)

‘I am sorry,’ he said, pulling away from her, releasing his grasp from her arm. ‘I am embarrassing you. I apologise. I am just …’ He turned away and searched for words. ‘I am just slightly in awe of you. And slightly, well, I don’t know how to put it. I think a lot of you. That is all. Please forgive me.’

She smiled at him. ‘Of course I forgive you,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to forgive. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

‘Of course you are,’ said Bendiks. ‘Of course. You said you were tired and I still dragged you out here to drink with me. I just really wanted to spend a few moments with you, because I feel we are constantly like ships passing. And it would be a shame for me to move on from living with you not knowing any more about you than I did before I moved in. But if you’d rather just stick with the passing ships, just tell me. I won’t take offence.’ He threw her a sweet smile.

She smiled too and said, ‘No. I don’t want to stick with passing ships. It’s lovely having you here. And we should do this sort of thing more often.’

‘Good,’ said Bendiks, pouring another shot into each glass. ‘Good. Then another toast. To you and me. More than just ships. But hopefully also friends …’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘friends.’

And as she said it the luscious, illicit thoughts of legs entwined and lips parted and bodies conjoined slipped from her consciousness and away from her.
Friends
.

She tipped the schnapps down her throat and tried to look like she wanted nothing more.

Robyn stared at the paper pinned to the wall outside her homeroom with a sense of dread and disappointment. She had failed again. This was the third monthly exam in a row she had failed. The work was never-ending, three hours of study a day, plus lectures, tutorials, and more study to take you through the weekend. This weekend just past, she had been expected to read and memorise five chapters of text on physiology from a book so big it had made her hands ache just to hold it. She had got as far as the beginning of chapter two and given up. Her brain, which had always been better than everyone else’s, which had always absorbed facts and information without too much effort, was simply not up to the job of retaining all this terminology. And she herself had too many other things preying on her mind to find and practise new ways to learn. She was failing, Robyn Inglis was failing, and she had no idea what to do about it.

She unpinned the paper from the cork board and bunched it up inside her shoulder bag.

Robyn lifted the lid of the shiny silver bin in Jack’s kitchen – no, not Jack’s kitchen,
her
kitchen, she had to keep reminding herself – and recoiled. It was piled to the very rim, mountains of rancid rubbish, squashed down like a garbage Dauphinoise, slivers of paper and card forced down the sides, congealed teabags jammed into crevices, scrapings of flabby old cereal coating everything. It was a bin that should have been emptied at least twelve if not twenty-four hours earlier. Jack had left early this morning, 9.30, for a breakfast meeting with his agent at some trendy members’ club that Robyn felt she was supposed to have heard of but hadn’t. He was not due back until after lunchtime. Which meant that Robyn either had to sit in the flat with this rancid overflowing bin, or empty it herself.

Robyn had never emptied a bin in her life.

Which was not to say that she was unaware of bins or of the fact that they required emptying from time to time. She had watched her mother a hundred times, a thousand times, tear off the slinky black rectangle, divide it with her fingertips, whip it across the room, engorge it with air and then feed it effortlessly into the box that lived beneath the sink. She’d watched her pull a bulging bag from the container under the sink, sometimes it seemed with some effort, deftly manipulate the rim into a tight knot and then take it away. Somewhere. Robyn wasn’t entirely sure where.

Her parents had never asked her to empty a bin.

She studied this bin. It was twice the size of the one in her parents’ house.

She pulled out a few drawers, her eyes searching for a black cylinder. She went to the window to survey the front of the house for signs of places to put large bags of rubbish. She began to feel vaguely panicky. She should be able to do this. She was nearly nineteen years old. She was studying medicine. She should be able to empty a bin. She failed to find a bin bag but found a large carrier bag that seemed as though it would suffice. She took the top off the bin and then she started to tug at the edges of the bin bag.

‘Urgh, yuck,’ she hissed as her fingers brushed against soggy cereal.

She pulled again and the bag lifted a few inches. She pulled it halfway to the top of the cylinder and then let it fall. It appeared to be full of concrete and lead. She bunched up the corners and tried again, and finally, with some effort, she yanked it free of its container. As she did so the bag bulged ominously and then exploded at her feet. Jack’s waxed floorboards were awash with shavings and trimmings and scrapings and skins. A murky liquid trickled darkly from the mulch and dribbled away between the floorboards. The smell was acrid and Robyn put her hand across her mouth.

She was tempted then to pick up her handbag, leave through the front door and not come back until Jack was home. But instead she cried for five minutes and then found a pair of rather large yellow plastic gloves in a cupboard beneath the kitchen sink. She pulled them on, still sobbing, and proceeded to scrape the obnoxious compost from the floor and into the large carrier bag. She knew she was being pathetic. She knew there were barefoot children in India picking through other people’s rubbish for twelve hours a day in intense heat. She knew that she was spoiled and silly. But everything just seemed so hard these days.

On the tube on the way home from college last night the train had stopped for slightly too long in a tunnel and the carriage had quickly heated up to the point of discomfort and Robyn had felt her heart quicken unpleasantly beneath her ribs. The driver had made an announcement across the Tannoy to the effect that they were stuck and he had no idea when they would be moving again. She’d looked around the carriage at the strangers who surrounded her. She’d spied an empty seat a few feet away and wondered about the logistics of getting from where she was standing to there without drawing too much attention to herself. Her heart had quickened further until she was certain the man standing next to her would be able to hear it in her chest. Her peripheral vision began to cloud over and she saw herself collapsing against the side of the carriage; she envisaged being taken to a waiting ambulance, wrapped in a grey blanket, everyone staring at her. She saw all this and her heart beat faster and faster until she felt she was about to scream out for help when finally the train hissed itself back to life and she felt the carriage jerk forward and then they were moving again and her heart slowed down and she was safe. But for those few moments she had felt what it must be to lose your mind, to have no control over yourself. For those few moments she had lost sight of herself completely.

She had no idea why she should be feeling so disjointed. Here she was, back in the heart of her very own romantic novel. Here she was in her Holloway flat with her novelist boyfriend and her perfect face and perfect body and perfect life. She was Robyn Inglis, the luckiest girl in the world. But her world felt like that tube train yesterday: stuck in a tunnel. She could not seem to move on from the dark place she’d been in when she’d thought that Jack was her brother. She felt nervy and unhappy and strange. The only time she was happy was when Jack was here and it was just the two of them. The rest of the time she was lost.

She took the heavy bin bag and she bounced it down the staircase outside their flat, bang bang bang against each step. She pulled it down the garden path and found to her surprise two large green bins, just slightly shorter than she was, parked side by side near the garden gate. They were painted with the number of the house. She lifted the lid cautiously and was assailed by yet another rich and unhappy stench. She attempted to launch the bag from the pavement to the mouth of the tall bin, but failed. A middle-aged man passed the house on a bike. He slowed down and eyed her curiously and for a moment she thought he was going to stop and offer to help her. But he didn’t. He cycled on. Robyn watched him disappearing down the street and wanted to hurl the rubbish bag after him. She tried three further times to heft the bag into the bin, but eventually gave up and left it there on the pavement.

When she returned to the flat she considered the possibility of doing some coursework, catching up with herself, but decided instead to return to bed. The sheets were still tepid from her and Jack’s bodies and the bed was flamboyantly unmade. She remembered waking up this morning, she remembered the feeling of contentment on seeing the nape of Jack’s neck and then the feeling of disquiet and vague panic when he’d reminded her that he was out for the morning. She remembered how her day had broken in half at that very moment.

She lay with her head against Jack’s pillow and she inhaled his smell. And then she cried again.

What had she become? She hated this new version of herself. She’d turned into exactly the sort of person she despised; needy, clingy, hopeless. She could not empty bins. She could not travel alone. She could not function without her boyfriend. Every time he walked out of the room she collapsed. Only the smell of his pillow could rouse her momentarily from her misery. She was pathetic.

She cried herself into a rather fractious slumber. A dream unfurled itself inside her sleep, a dream of her sisters, their gaunt faces in their final days, their ravaged bodies inside the pretty, trendy dresses her mother insisted on buying for them. And then she dreamed of a boy. He was pushing one of her sisters in her wheelchair. He was smiling. And whistling. He stopped when he saw her and said, ‘Hop on,’ and she did, on to her sister’s lap. Except it wasn’t her real sister any more. It was another woman, taller than her, with long legs and long hair. She was aware of the contact between them and she felt the woman’s arms embrace her. She could hear the boy whistling, and saw that they were approaching a pair of doors in front of her. There was a sign on one of them but she couldn’t read it. She knew that if she wanted to get away from this whistling boy and this long-legged woman she would need to jump off the wheelchair before they reached the doors, but then she found herself relaxing, leaning back into the woman’s embrace, being wheeled slowly towards the doors. She clasped the woman’s hand in hers and thought that she smelled nice, she smelled like Jack. The doors opened and then Robyn was awake.

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 OK?’

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 OK?’

‘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?’

‘OK,’ she 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 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 furthest end of the road. It was as wide as four buses and the colour 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 grey stone chips. Hard concrete steps led to a fat grey door fitted with modernist furniture and the number twenty-seven was picked out in the fanlight above in more opaque film.