The Making of Us by Lisa Jewell Read Free Book Online Page A

could remember of her, and she was not like her father, although, ha, how he had talked about his ‘Italian ancestry’ over the years, how hard her father had tried to instil in her a sense of pride in her Latin roots. Roots which she now knew were non-existent. Roots as real as fairy dust. She’d never felt it anyway, her supposed Italian-ness. Always raised her eyebrows impatiently at any mention of it. Just because that’s the only thing that’s interesting about you , she’d think to herself, don’t try and make it the only thing that’s interesting about me .
    She’d known she was more than the daughter of a semi-literate fishmonger. She’d known it. Deep down inside herself. She’d felt more related to her old dog Arnie than to her father. The guilt she’d carried for half her life, the guilt of wanting her father to be dead so that she could get on with her life, it lifted and it floated away from her, like an exorcised demon. All that was left was a jumbled sense of strangeness and newness and sadness and delight. She drank another tumbler of gin and lime and she typed the address of the Donor Sibling Registry into her address bar. As the page loaded she felt a quickening in her chest, a sense of rising panic. She wasn’t ready. She closed the browser, shut down her computer and headed for a deep and unsettling sleep full of dreams of strangers.
    She phoned Dixie the next morning. Her friend sounded startled to hear from her.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Lydia, ‘were you in the middle of something?’
    ‘No, no,’ said Dixie, stifling a yawn, ‘no, I was just, er, just having a sleep.’
    Lydia considered the hour. 11 a.m. It was not like Dixie to be sleeping at 11 a.m., not with shelves to be rearranged and books to be read and people to be having potentially career-enhancing conversations with. Dixie took sleep very much as something forced upon her against her will, something she submitted to once a day and then emerged from groggily and crossly, as though sleep had stolen her soul.
    ‘Yeah,’ she continued, ‘Viola had a bad night. She’s out for the count now so I thought I’d catch up on some lost sleep.’
    ‘Oh, shit, Dix, I’m really sorry. I didn’t think.’
    Dixie cleared her sinuses loudly, almost, Lydia couldn’t help feeling, to ram home how utterly, deeply asleep she had just been and how much it had taken out of her to rouse herself for this phonecall. Lydia bridled slightly and said, ‘You should have kept your phone switched off.’
    ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ She snorted again, and yawned. ‘I wasn’t thinking. Don’t seem to be able to do much of that these days.’ She laughed drily.
    These days . That laugh. Lydia bridled again. She hated it when people had babies. No, not when people had babies. When Dixie had babies. Everyone else could sod off and have a hundred babies each for all she cared. She just didn’t want Dixie to have one. She’d only just got used to Dixie having Clem. ‘Boyfriend’ was foreign terrain to Lydia but she could make a tenuous grasp on it, having had one of her own at one point in her life. But ‘Baby’ was another planet entirely. ‘Baby’ was consuming in a way that even the neediest boyfriend was not. ‘Baby’ changed everything . And ‘Baby’, unlike ‘Boyfriend’, was irreversible.
    ‘That’s all right,’ she continued, trying her hardest to sound perky, ‘I didn’t want to disturb you but …’ She stopped. Before ‘Baby’ she would have been able to launch straight into the topic she’d called to discuss. Now there was this spectre hanging over everything. Would Dixie even care , she wondered, now that she lived in the land of ‘Baby’? Would it even register? Sorry, a sperm donor, you say? Anyway, did I tell you about Viola’s last nappy?
    ‘How are you all?’ she managed.
    ‘We’re fine. I think. Are we fine, Clem?’ Lydia heard him grumbling something in the background. ‘Yes,’ Dixie came back on the