The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online

hours. Staring at the cutting, working her way methodically, coolly, through a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. Everything felt stretched and twisted and distorted. Her house didn’t feel like her house. Her legs didn’t feel like they belonged to her. Juliette felt like a stranger. Lydia had sent her home early, turned every light in the house off and made herself drunk.
    The contents of the fat brown envelope had been both shocking and simultaneously unsurprising. Some paperwork from a fertility clinic in central London confirming that she had been conceived by means of artificial insemination, using the sperm of a French man whose occupation was classed as that of Medical Student. Also inside the envelope was a newspaper article torn from the pages of the Western Mail and Echo . It was a story about a woman in Llanelli who’d discovered at the age of twenty-five that not only had she been conceived in a fertility clinic under the glare of dazzling halogen lights, but that she had four half-sisters all living within a hundred miles of her. Lydia squinted and stared again at the happy gang. They had their arms around each other and their cheeks pressed up against one another’s. They all had brown hair and they all had slightly fleshy-looking noses. They were clearly sisters.
    The anonymous sender of this fun-pack of seismically life-changing information had also included a leaflet about a website called the UK Donor Sibling Registry. Adults who knew they’d been conceived by donor insemination and knew the name of the clinic where the procedure had taken place could sign up, have their DNA tested and be put in touch with children conceived from the same donor’s sperm. In other words, they could be introduced to their brothers and sisters.
    Lydia had never had to wonder why she had no brothers and sisters. It was obvious. Her mother had died before she could have any more. Being an only child was absolutely, intrinsically, who she was. She could not have imagined her childhood, her persona, herself, in any other way.
    She stared desperately at the sisters in the paper and then filled her glass again. She hadn’t drunk gin since she was eighteen years old, not since her father had died. The minute he’d gone, so had the sore, tender spot in the pit of her belly that she’d been trying to anaesthetise. The smell of the clear spirit, the vapour at the rim of the glass, the tang of bitter old fruit, made her feel it again, all the pain and discomfort of being a tragic, unloved eighteen year old.
    She thought of her father, the once strong man made of breeze blocks and Bacardi, batter and testosterone, shrivelling and shrinking in the room next door to hers, desiccated, drained and mummified as the life seeped out of him. She thought of the way he’d raised her to look after herself, because nobody else was going to do it. To watch her back. To trust no one. To believe no one. To stand alone. She thought of every last moment she’d spent in his company; the meaningless words they’d exchanged, the thoughtless gifts on Christmas Day, the brusque phone calls, the pills gracelessly administered, the silences that sang of secrets, the endless rolling moments that had felt like nothing at the time, just air, just space, just fug, now suddenly filled with meaning and poignancy. She wasn’t his. She wasn’t his .
    Her real father was a medical student. A medical student from London with dark hair and dark eyes who stood at 5′ 11″ and hailed originally from Dieppe. Her real father was French. Her real father was a doctor. Her real father was not Trevor Pike. She felt something fluid like relief go through her bones. She felt something like delight .
    And out there, somewhere, maybe on the street below her window, maybe in a flat in Llanelli, maybe in a briny bar in Dieppe, there were others like her. Brothers. Sisters. People like her . She had never met a person like her before. She was not like her mother, what little she