The Making of Us Read Online Free PDF

was a sweet-faced man with too much thick dark hair, scuffed cheeks and a slight paunch. Dixie was small and trendy with peroxide-blonde hair, currently showing two inches of pale gold roots after some kind of pregnancy-related bleach ban. They looked like a pair of overgrown students. They were a pair of overgrown students. Lydia had met Dixie (her real name was Suzanne Dixon but she’d been Dixie since she was a very young girl) at university in Aberystwyth. Dixie was studying film-making. Lydia was studying Chemistry. Neither of them could really remember how they’d come together, chalk and cheese as they were in every respect. But they’d co-existed quite happily for ten years, first in a shared room above a shop in Aberystwyth and then, as Dixie and Lydia’s careers had taken off and led them to London, in the two-bed place in Camden Town. An old married couple, that’s how they’d seen themselves, and in that scenario Dixie, cute and domesticated, the sort of person who randomly decided to make cup cakes, for no particular reason, had been the girl and Lydia, lean and formidable and with no notion whatsoever of the difference between caster sugar and icing sugar, had definitely been the man.
    Clem had come into their lives a year ago and Lydia had liked him immediately. She liked that he was unfashionable and wholesome and had views on things other than trendy film directors and club nights at Camden dives. He took Dixie out for walks on the Heath and made her eat meat (she was a rather woolly, uncommitted vegetarian type). And then quickly, rather too quickly in Lydia’s opinion, he got her pregnant. Dixie was twenty-nine. It seemed far too young to be having a baby. And a year seemed far too early on in a relationship to become a parent. But from the moment they’d found out, there’d been no doubt in either of their minds that a baby was the way forward. ‘Why not?’ Dixie had said. ‘It’ll be an adventure.’
    Adventures, Lydia felt, weren’t always necessarily good things.
    The baby started to stir in its seat and she felt herself bristle. It wasn’t that Lydia disliked babies, it was just that she didn’t know babies. She had not held a baby in her arms since she was a teenager, and even then she wasn’t sure if she really had or if it was some kind of false memory. She busied herself extra-zealously to avoid the possibility of Clem or Dixie attempting to foist the baby upon her, keeping her gaze from the baby’s face as it was unclipped and raised from its seat. Suddenly, though, she was face to face with it, its tiny little face a few inches from hers, staring at her with some alarm. Lydia stared back at her with some alarm and then the baby began, quite understandably, to wail. Clem immediately clutched the small bundle to his chest and whisked her away.
    ‘Traumatised for life,’ said Lydia, flatly. Of course the baby had cried. She had fully expected the baby to cry. Lydia was not a baby person and did not have the kind of face or demeanour that a baby would like.
    The baby spent the duration of the meal slurping from one of Dixie’s vastly over-inflated breasts, and then some time draped over her shoulder staring pathetically at the wall behind her. Lydia felt sorry for the child. She was so new and ill-equipped. Every day her eyes would see more of this strange place, every day her brain would process more reality, her tiny limbs would stretch and swell, she’d learn and absorb and empathise and understand and grow and grow and grow … until one day she’d wake up and she’d be just another human being. The length and magnitude of the journey seemed to bear such pitifully small rewards.
    After her friends had left, taking the infant Viola and her new pink clothes with them, Lydia felt curiously sad. She loaded her shiny Miele dishwasher with large Royal Doulton platters and scraped sticky noodles into the very clever German-designed concealed bins. She dropped the empty wine bottle