American power mummies tapped data into BlackBerries while their offspring slurped organic juices out of recyclable cartons. She walked up and down St John’s Wood High Street, past boutiques and bagel shops and baby clothes shops and double-parked four-wheel-drives, and she stared at every person she walked past with a kind of animal curiosity. Here she was, two miles from the place of her conception. Here she was, potentially, walking through herds of relations. She scrutinised the noses, the gaits, the hands, the eyes, of everyone she looked at. She spotted a similarity in the curve of someone’s jaw and found herself subconsciously following the hapless woman across the street and into a patisserie. She stopped herself at the entrance and turned back towards the street.
Lydia had always felt divided from the rest of the world, elevated almost. She’d always felt cleverer and quieter and stronger and more self-sufficient. Her dad had made her that way. He’d built her up to believe that she was invincible. And alone. And she was. She always looked on the remainder of humanity as just that, an amorphous mass, a sprawling splodge, of flesh and bone. Nothing to do with her. And still, at the age of twenty-nine, she had not had a connection with anyone as strong as the one she’d once shared with her childhood dog.
After an hour of this aimless, eccentric wandering, she headed home. She appraised her house from the pavement. A shiver ran through her. It was so big. So soulless. So unwelcoming with its opaque windows like blind milky eyes. It was, she realised with a sudden discomfiting burst of perspective, a true reflection of herself. Even Dixie said it to her sometimes: ‘You’re scary !’ And that was fine. Lydia was happy to be scary. Being scary kept the world away from your door. But now there was a tiny fleck of possibility that the world was on its way in, and that there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop it. But more surprising than that was the realisation that she didn’t actually want to.
That night, she took a plastic bottle of Sprite and a bag of Haribo Tangfastics up to her office. She twisted the lid of the bottle and waited a beat for the initial puff of sweetened gas to escape before removing it and taking a greedy gulp. She spent a few moments examining the contents of the bag of sweeties, testing her responses to the various options therein. Eventually she settled on a green and red bottle and chewed it contemplatively for a while. She thought about phoning Dixie. This seemed to be such an alarmingly big step to be taking in her life without a single soul knowing about it. The weekend had been long and intense. She felt absolutely removed from reality. She felt scared and excited and sick. On the other side of her next action was another existence. She imagined Dixie sitting with a baby on her gigantic breast, staring mindlessly into space, sighing at the sight of Lydia’s number on her phone display. No. She would do this alone.
She typed in the web address and she filled in the online forms. Then she ate another sweetie, this one in the shape of a baby’s dummy.
Days passed after Lydia posted her details on to the Donor Sibling Registry. They passed slowly and tiresomely, like plodders on the high street, blocking her progress. January became February. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything. She couldn’t see beyond her in box. All day she hovered over her computer, eating sweets, ignoring the phone, checking and checking and checking again her e-mail. The only sparks of life inside this blanket of hibernation were her thrice-weekly sessions with Bendiks and an invitation on her desk to a Welcome to the World party for Viola in three weeks’ time.
She was at home now, waiting for Bendiks. He was training her here today because he’d parted ways with the health club in the mews. Lydia hadn’t asked why. But she was feeling oddly nervous now as the minutes crawled
Lydia had always felt divided from the rest of the world, elevated almost. She’d always felt cleverer and quieter and stronger and more self-sufficient. Her dad had made her that way. He’d built her up to believe that she was invincible. And alone. And she was. She always looked on the remainder of humanity as just that, an amorphous mass, a sprawling splodge, of flesh and bone. Nothing to do with her. And still, at the age of twenty-nine, she had not had a connection with anyone as strong as the one she’d once shared with her childhood dog.
After an hour of this aimless, eccentric wandering, she headed home. She appraised her house from the pavement. A shiver ran through her. It was so big. So soulless. So unwelcoming with its opaque windows like blind milky eyes. It was, she realised with a sudden discomfiting burst of perspective, a true reflection of herself. Even Dixie said it to her sometimes: ‘You’re scary !’ And that was fine. Lydia was happy to be scary. Being scary kept the world away from your door. But now there was a tiny fleck of possibility that the world was on its way in, and that there was nothing she was going to be able to do to stop it. But more surprising than that was the realisation that she didn’t actually want to.
That night, she took a plastic bottle of Sprite and a bag of Haribo Tangfastics up to her office. She twisted the lid of the bottle and waited a beat for the initial puff of sweetened gas to escape before removing it and taking a greedy gulp. She spent a few moments examining the contents of the bag of sweeties, testing her responses to the various options therein. Eventually she settled on a green and red bottle and chewed it contemplatively for a while. She thought about phoning Dixie. This seemed to be such an alarmingly big step to be taking in her life without a single soul knowing about it. The weekend had been long and intense. She felt absolutely removed from reality. She felt scared and excited and sick. On the other side of her next action was another existence. She imagined Dixie sitting with a baby on her gigantic breast, staring mindlessly into space, sighing at the sight of Lydia’s number on her phone display. No. She would do this alone.
She typed in the web address and she filled in the online forms. Then she ate another sweetie, this one in the shape of a baby’s dummy.
Days passed after Lydia posted her details on to the Donor Sibling Registry. They passed slowly and tiresomely, like plodders on the high street, blocking her progress. January became February. She couldn’t seem to focus on anything. She couldn’t see beyond her in box. All day she hovered over her computer, eating sweets, ignoring the phone, checking and checking and checking again her e-mail. The only sparks of life inside this blanket of hibernation were her thrice-weekly sessions with Bendiks and an invitation on her desk to a Welcome to the World party for Viola in three weeks’ time.
She was at home now, waiting for Bendiks. He was training her here today because he’d parted ways with the health club in the mews. Lydia hadn’t asked why. But she was feeling oddly nervous now as the minutes crawled
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