The Making of Us Read Online Free PDF Page B

(it had not been worth £27.99) and beer cans into the recycling compartment and she wiped all her silky, off-white surfaces with a stack of folded kitchen paper. She washed the woks and dried them and put them away, and with every movement she felt something thick and sour sloshing around in the pit of her stomach and it wasn’t her supper. It was a kind of melancholic longing.
    It was the baby, something to do with the baby. She too had once been a baby, she too had been a tiny miracle, kept safe and nurtured, talcumed and clothed in doll-sized clothes. She’d been, it was hard to imagine now, a fat baby, with dark ringlets and cheeks like cherries and whey. She had pictures of herself in cotton romper suits with elasticated legs that cut into the meat of her thighs, smiling into the camera as though she were truly the loveliest thing in the world. She had other pictures of herself, dandled on knees like a catch of the day, held in arms like a football trophy, always the centre of the universe, always the reason for the photo having been taken. She remembered nothing about it, of course, nothing about being a baby, but she’d been wanted, she knew that much, wanted and needed by her sweet soft mother, even if her father hadn’t cared.
    The longing she felt was not so much for the baby she’d once been as for the life she’d been promised back in those rosy, unknowable days. The promise of gentle voices and warm embraces and a safe place to be. Nearly all babies were made these promises, given these false notions about the world, but few had them ripped away from them as painfully and suddenly as Lydia had. It wasn’t, she now realised, that she didn’t like babies, or that she didn’t find babies interesting, and it wasn’t even that she resented the baby for taking her friends from her and into a strange and unreachable realm, although she did, it was more that instead of feeling joy when she looked at a new baby, all she felt was fear.
    On Thursday Lydia met Bendiks in Regent’s Park. He was dazzling in a white t-shirt and a thick red hooded jacket. Lydia was less luminous in off-black joggers and a grey hoodie. She felt the familiar leap of happiness at the sight of her personal trainer. She didn’t know why Bendiks made her feel this way. Lydia wasn’t usually attracted to incredibly pretty men who looked like they should be wearing sailor suits in arty aftershave commercials. Lydia wasn’t, as far as she was aware, usually attracted to anything, these days. Lydia was a scientist. Lydia was a businesswoman. Lydia was wealthy. Lydia was lonely. But Lydia had barely thought about men, women, sex or anything in between for years.
    ‘Good morning!’ Bendiks beamed.
    ‘Morning,’ said Lydia, rubbing her hands together against the January chill.
    ‘How are you this morning?’
    ‘Oh, I’m fine, not bad. You?’
    ‘I’m fantastic ,’ he declared.
    Lydia nodded her agreement.
    ‘Right,’ he said, ‘it’s cold this morning, so let’s warm up nice and quickly. Let’s jump.’ He smiled at Lydia and Lydia swallowed a groan. Jumping at the gym was one thing; jumping out here, in public, was quite another. Bendiks had a special jumping technique: hands at knee-level, knees bent, hopping around the place like a great gangling frog.
    ‘OK,’ she said, ‘but only if you jump with me too.’
    Bendiks smiled. ‘For sure,’ he replied.
    And so the two of them clasped their kneecaps and began to hop, Lydia resisting the urge to say, Ribbit. Ribbit. After a moment her blood began to run warm and fast and her cheeks found some colour and her heart hammered against her chest and she laughed, despite herself. Ribbit. Ribbit.
    Lydia’s last sexual encounter had been eight years ago, with a fellow student, a man called William. It was William who’d suggested to her that she should take her groundbreaking chemical compound and her business acumen and make a product that would appeal to millions. It was also