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

line, ‘we’re fine. How are you?’
    ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Hungover.’ The minute she’d said it she’d known it was the wrong thing to have said, insinuating as it did a night spent drinking sparkling wine and tequila-based cocktails somewhere fun and jazzy and nowhere near a new baby or a dirty nappy.
    ‘Oh, lucky you,’ sighed Dixie.
    Lydia sighed too and thought about hitting Dixie with the reality of her night swallowing gin alone in the dark. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘It was …’ She paused. It was horrible, she wanted to say, but before she could muster the first syllable a plaintive shriek cut into their conversation and Dixie was mumbling something about feeding time at the zoo and could she call her back in a minute, and Lydia said, yeah, sure, even though she knew it wouldn’t be a minute, it would be a hundred minutes at least, and wondered silently why Clem couldn’t take the squealing infant away for just a moment or two, but then knowing anyway that the physical absence of the squealing infant would not render her friend any more able to concentrate on anything beyond the realm of her current situation, and with a sense of dread and sadness Lydia realised that she was not going to be able to talk to her best friend about the most important thing that had happened to her in over a decade.
    And so she hung up and Dixie disappeared in a metaphorical puff of smoke leaving Lydia feeling abandoned and alone.
*
    Dixie didn’t call back a hundred minutes later. She didn’t call back three days later. She sent Lydia a text message on Saturday morning that read: I just sprayed milk six foot across the room and hit the cat in the eye. What are you up to? With every inch that Dixie stepped forward into the world of babies and normality, Lydia felt herself step an inch back, into the world of strangeness and solitude. She typed back: Give the cat some goggles! I’m just hanging . Dixie didn’t reply and Lydia didn’t expect her to. She spent the day alternating between working and drinking.
    That night she pulled a photo album from her storage room and took it to bed with her. It was the one she’d kept when she’d moved out of the miserable flat she’d shared with her father. It was all she had of Glenys. Mum. There were no mothball-scented dresses or heirloom pearl earrings or locks of hair for Lydia to finger thoughtfully, her father had cleared out every last trace of her mother after her death, but he’d kept this. Lydia could not begin to fathom what sort of aberrational thought process had led to his putting it away for her, but he had and it was now her most treasured possession.
    In the past she’d stared at these photos almost as though she was staring at photos of Marilyn Monroe or Queen Victoria, at a dead superstar; charismatic, unattainable, unknowable, powerful and gone. But she looked at them through different eyes that night. She’d always thought of her mother as just a girl. That’s what everyone had always said about her: She was a great girl. A fun girl. A sweet girl. A lovely girl. Ah, yes, Glenys, she was a lovely girl . But girls didn’t go to Harley Street to make babies out of thin air. Women did that. Women who wanted babies. ‘Your mother worshipped me, d’you know that? Worshipped the ground I walked on.’ Her father had said that. Not once, but repeatedly, his way of keeping her all for himself. But as Lydia stared at the photographs it suddenly struck her that her mother had loved her much more than she’d ever loved him. After all, she’d been prepared to risk absolutely everything for her.
    On Sunday Lydia went for a walk. She was sober and tired and the pavement felt like sponge beneath her feet. The light was watery but she wore sunglasses, feeling as she did like a small half-blind creature emerging from hibernation. She walked three times round the old cemetery, averting her gaze from the playground where Asian nannies pushed French babies on swings and