The Making of Us (38 page)

‘Cool,’ said Bendiks. ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

She opened her eyes and stared at him. ‘Right,’ she said, ‘great. I’ll, er, get us some robes.’

She pulled robes from the cupboard that Cait and Tom had left fully stocked with robes and towels (‘We’ll just buy new,’ Cait had said, with a nonchalant shrug) and brought them back to the sauna. Her heart was hammering under her rib cage and she felt scared and stupid and strangely excited. ‘I’m just going to get changed,’ she said, passing Bendiks a robe. He smiled at her in bemusement. Clearly her state of mind was written all over her face. ‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the robe from her hands. ‘I’ll see you in there.’

Lydia dashed around the back of the sauna and tried to remember Cait’s instructions on how to operate it. There was a remote-control unit screwed to the wall and she pressed buttons randomly until something sounded as if it had been activated and then she quickly climbed out of her sweaty running clothes and into the robe, tying it tight around her waist, adjusting the collar so that her cleavage would not be on show, staring mournfully at her ugly feet and feeling all the sexual energy that had driven her to make this lunatic suggestion in the first place start to wither and die. But then she walked into the sauna and Bendiks was sitting there, legs splayed open, his robe loosely tied, his chest shining in the muted light, and as she closed the door behind her she felt it: sex. It was alive and breathing in this room and she’d just shut the door and trapped it in here with them. Now surely she would find out, once and for all, if Bendiks was gay. Because if he was straight, and not just pretending to be straight to con her out of multiple £50 notes and a cheap room, then there was no way he’d be able to walk out of this room without something having happened between them.

He smiled at her, almost shyly. And then slowly a wall of steam built up between them and Bendiks became a ghostly statue on the opposite bench and for a while they didn’t talk to each other. She saw him peel his arms out of the sleeves of the robe and let them fall on to the bench so that now he was uncovered from the waist up. He rolled his head back on his neck and let it rest against the wall of the sauna and his legs relaxed away from each other so that if there had been less steam in the room Lydia would have been entirely up to speed on the appearance of his genitals. She wondered about his slow and measured unpeeling. Was it deliberate? Or was he just hot?

‘I
love
a sauna,’ he said, ‘I forgot how much I love them.’

‘I’ve never been in one before,’ said Lydia.

Bendiks laughed. ‘You are so funny, Lydia. You buy a house with a sauna in it and you don’t use it.’

‘I’m Welsh,’ she replied. ‘Welsh people don’t
do
sauna.’

He laughed again. Lydia sometimes suspected that nobody ever said anything funny in Latvia. ‘Here,’ he said, patting the bench next to where he sat, ‘let me give you a neck massage.’

She glanced at him, possibly with an expression of horror on her face, and he laughed again. ‘You are so scared of me,’ he exclaimed. ‘Really, you must not be.’

‘I’m not scared of you,’ she replied. ‘I’m just …’

‘Come,’ he said again, still patting the bench. ‘I have been wanting to get those knots out of your neck since the first time I saw you.’

She smiled awkwardly and moved next to him on the bench. She turned her back to him and lowered her gown over her back and shoulders. Bendiks placed his hands against her shoulder blades and gently pushed the gown down lower so that she had to grip the front of it together with both hands. He pressed his hand against the back of her skull and slowly pushed her head down towards her chest. ‘There,’ he said, ‘good.’

And then he took his good, soft hands and he pushed and he kneaded at her damp flesh until all her muscles had turned to sand, and Lydia thought,
Now, now would be perfect
, and just as she thought that, she felt soft lips against the skin of her back and the sweet heat of his breath against her skin and his hands were on her shoulders and he was drawing her against him and instead of wondering what she should do and how she should respond, Lydia just sat there, compliant and intoxicated, soaking up the sensation of being wanted and being touched by a beautiful man. Not one part of her body remained unaffected by his touch and she felt, building deep within her, a loud animal groan of pure pleasure.

As his lips made their way to the crook of her neck, she opened her mouth and she let it out, and he, taking his cue, slowly turned her head towards his and brought his lips down against hers and there it was … finally. Their first kiss. And Lydia thought,
Yes, yes, yes, I knew you weren’t gay. I knew we could do this. I knew I could have you. I knew I wasn’t that stupid
. And as they kissed, she felt it all fall into place; the big empty house, the blue cat, the lack of friends, the weird family, her childhood. It all fell into place because she suddenly knew without any trace of doubt that she was not weird. A man like Bendiks would not kiss a weird woman. A man like Bendiks would only kiss an appealing woman. A woman with some kind of charm and beauty. A woman in whose company he could feel proud. And as she thought these thoughts he pulled his lips from hers and looked into her eyes and said, ‘All these weeks and months, I have been dreaming about doing this.’

And she said, ‘Me too.’

And he looked at her in wonder and said, ‘Really? You really dreamed of this?’

She nodded and he touched her chin and laughed. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘That’s amazing. I thought … I thought you thought I was just a big meathead. I thought you thought you were too good for me. And I thought …’ He paused.

‘What?’ said Lydia, searching his dark eyes with hers.

‘I thought, for a while, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I thought that maybe … you were
gay
?’

‘You thought I was …?’ Lydia stopped. And then she laughed.

‘What?’ said Bendiks, trailing his fingertips up and down her shoulders and upper arms.

‘I thought you were gay, too.’

He looked at her in amazement, then put one hand to his chest. ‘Me?’ he said.

‘Yes, you!’

‘But … but,
why
?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I was just trying to protect myself from you. Or maybe it was the plucked eyebrows.’

He immediately put his hand to his brow and said, ‘But I do not pluck my eyebrows!’

‘You don’t?’

‘No! Well, only a little bit. Just in the middle. And the messy ones around here.’ He pointed out the arch of his brows. ‘Oh my God,’ he continued, ‘does that make me look gay?’

‘No!’ laughed Lydia. ‘Just, well,
groomed
, you know.’

‘And groomed is gay?’

‘No!’ she exclaimed again. ‘You look beautiful. You look perfect. You don’t look gay. Well, at least, not any more. Not after …’

‘After what?’ he smiled.

‘After
that
,’ she said, indicating their two bodies, still pressed close together.

He brought his nose towards hers and held it there, his eyes gazing into hers, his breath against her cheek, and he smiled. ‘We haven’t even started yet,’ he said.

And then they began.

‘Here,’ said Rose, handing Dean a small plastic bottle full of pink liquid.

He stared at the bottle blankly. ‘What is it?’ he said.

‘It’s for your hands. It’s germ-killer.’

He blinked and read the label.

‘It’s the same stuff they had at the hospital, you know, for the preemies,’ she explained, brusquely.

He squirted a small amount into the palm of his hand and he rubbed it in. It smelled of pears. He passed the bottle to his mum and she followed suit. They’d already been told to remove their shoes at the front door. ‘No shoes in this house,’ Rose had said, haughtily, as if this somehow made her a cut above.

Dean had not been to Rose’s house since he’d first started going out with Sky. He felt a chill run through him as he followed Rose up the hallway and into the living room. He had thought that he would never come back here again. The walls were hung with huge blown-up studio portraits of Rose and her children and grandchildren. There was one, above the fake Georgian fireplace, of all of them: Rose, the four girls, Sky nursing a huge bump, her sister Savannah holding her pug-faced toddler on her lap with tattooed arms, all of them wearing white. And there was a new one, above the glass-topped dining table, bigger than the rest, of Sky, just a clean portrait of her face, simply shot in black and white. Beneath it was a vase on a dresser with three stems of Stargazer lilies in it, and a votive candle burning inside a red glass jar. Dean gulped at the portrait, remembering once again how pretty she had been and swallowing, as ever, his unacknowledged feelings of loss and grief.

‘Come in,’ said Rose, gesturing at the leather sofa, ‘sit down. I’ll make us some tea.’

Her youngest daughter, Sienna, was curled into a matching leather armchair set in the bay window. She looked up and smiled as Dean and his mum sat down. ‘Hiya,’ she said. Dean nodded and his mother said, ‘Hello.’

It was warm in Rose’s house. Too warm. It struck Dean that for all her paranoia about germs on hands and on the soles of shoes she should probably keep her house a bit cooler.

Dean smiled at his mum and she smiled back at him. ‘OK?’ she whispered.

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

‘Just heard her stirring,’ Rose shouted through from her kitchen. ‘You can go up and see her, if you want.’

Dean gulped. A man on the television told a woman on the television to
shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about
. Sienna fidgeted and moved her feet to the other side of her. Dean looked at his mum.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I know where she is. Shall we go and see her?’

Dean thought of Lydia’s dad. He thought of how she’d seen him for all those years, as nothing more than a creature. And then he thought of his baby daughter wired up in a plastic tank, not quite real, not quite ready to exist. He thought of the moment back in March, that cold bleak day, lying with his head hanging over the grave of his girlfriend, trying to reach the photo of his daughter. And he thought of Thomas, his brother, who’d never stood a chance. He smiled grimly. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah. OK.’

They took the stairs together, softly and quietly, so as not to take the baby too much by surprise, he assumed. He followed his mum into a room which appeared to be Rose’s. It contained a king-size double bed loaded with furry cushions and velvety throws and was cast in a liverish-red light through claret and gold striped roller-blinds. The room smelled, like the rest of Rose’s house, of plug-in fresheners.

At first Dean felt self-conscious, trespassing into the intimate, womb-like environs of Rose’s boudoir. But then he saw her, in a wicker basket on a wooden frame at the side of Rose’s bed. The basket was lined with pink candy stripes and overhung by a large, faintly oppressive mobile of moon-eyed teddy bears.

The baby was awake and staring up at the mobile, curiously, her hands opening and closing like tiny jellyfish. She was wearing a pink and red striped bodysuit with the words
Cheeky Monkey
emblazoned across the front. Dean blinked at her in surprise. She was so big. Her body filled out the soft cotton of her suit, the buttons straining across her rounded belly.

‘Hello!’ said his mother, rounding the corner of Rose’s bed to reach the basket, ‘hello, little one.’ The baby turned her gaze from the mobile towards the source of the voice and, when she finally located his mother’s face, her mouth curved into a rapturous smile. ‘Look at you!’ It was said in a saccharine falsetto. ‘Look at you! So big! Such a big girl!’ The baby kicked her legs, appreciatively, and made a loud chirruping sound. Dean found himself smiling involuntarily. Even though his mum had shown him pictures of the baby on her phone, he had never really managed to override that image of the tiny ice-blue creature in a plastic box. Yet here she was; long, strong, smiling, almost fat.

‘Come here, my lovely,’ chimed his mum, ‘come to Granny.’

Granny
. His mum was a
granny
. Dean blanched. It had never properly occurred to him before. He watched her tenderly lift the smiling baby from the basket and rest her in the crook of one arm. The baby had a full head of hair, dark hair, like his. And like Lydia’s. His mum ruffled the soft hair with her fingers and then turned to Dean and smiled. ‘Look!’ she said to the baby. ‘Look who’s here! This is your daddy! Yes, it is!’ The baby’s eyes and mouth opened wider and wider the more higher-pitched her grandmother’s voice became. ‘Do you want a cuddle, love?’ his mum asked Dean in her normal voice. He shrugged and smiled shyly. Then he nodded.

They both sat down on the edge of the bed and Dean’s mum gently passed the baby into his arms. ‘Like this,’ she said, arranging his hands, ‘so that you’re supporting her head. That’s it,’ she added, smiling, ‘that’s it.’

Dean looked down into Isadora’s eyes and found that she was staring straight back into his. And there it was again, that deep-seated intelligence, that sheer blinding confidence that had thrown him off-kilter back in the delivery room. Yet this time it didn’t scare him, this time he could absorb it and hold it inside himself like some kind of wonderful compliment. He looked at her and felt it again, that same jolt of recognition he’d felt when he first met Lydia, that same instantaneous attachment. ‘Yes,’ said a little voice inside his head, ‘yes. It is you. And you are me. And I am you. And we are the same.’ He charted the contours of her face, the fleshy mouth, the wide-set eyes, the downy outline of a heavy brow, and he marvelled at the strength of his donor father’s genes, that had fought their way past the fearsome genetic outposts of the Donnelly clan.

Isadora wriggled slightly in his arms and Dean instinctively sat her upon his lap where she immediately caught sight of the shiny zip hanging from the bottom of his hoodie and grabbed for it greedily. Dean passed it to her and then lowered his head to her crown. She smelled of bed and strawberries and something else; something that sent his consciousness spiralling backwards through the coils of his own life, back to his own infancy – the musty, exotic smell of new life.