The Making of Us Read Free Page A

Grunger. That seemed more fitting. She did like Nirvana, she did like Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam. It had been Greebo before, when she was fourteen, fifteen. She preferred Grunger. Greebo made it sound like she was into Motörhead and Whitesnake. Made it sound like she hung around with smelly fairground boys and never washed her hair. But nobody knew, nobody really knew, what Lydia really was. Lydia barely knew what Lydia really was. She was eighteen. She lived in a third-floor flat in a small village outside Tonypandy with her father who was forty-nine. Her mother had died when she was three. She’d just sat her A levels and was fully expecting three A grades (another reason to hate Lydia, she was clever, too). She had a big dog called Arnie. She wanted to be a scientist. She drank too much.
    An hour later Lydia returned to the small block of flats where she lived with her father. Outside the flats was a playground. In these high days of summer, halfway through the school holidays, it was full of teenagers; girls in crop tops and baggy jeans huddled on to swings, boys in singlets and combat shorts. Some of them were smoking. One of them had a beatbox on his shoulder. ‘The Boy Is Mine’ by Brandy & Monica, the soundtrack to their summer but not Lydia’s. She’d known most of these kids since they were toddlers, been to school with some of them, even pushed one or two of them around the estate in their buggies while their mothers sat and gossiped. But none of them was a friend.
    Lydia braced herself, but the teenagers were distracted by themselves, not looking for that moment outside their own immediate circle for entertainment. Lydia pulled the dog’s lead closer to herself and the two of them walked, fast and quiet, past the playground and towards the flats. Lydia’s eyes dropped, as they always did, to a patch of tarmac just below her flat, a smudge of pink paint, containing within it the merest outline of a hand, the curl of a finger. And Lydia’s nose filled, as ever, with the scent of paint, thick and noxious and terrifying.
    She walked on, around the corner and into the concrete well of the external staircase. Two teens turned their faces briefly towards Lydia as she passed by, making room for her and her dog, too interested in the contents of small plastic bags clutched in their fists to care much about the girl in black making her way to the third floor.
    She turned her key in the lock of her door, number thirty-one, pushed it open, held her breath. Her father was attached to his oxygen tank. He was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was hardly surprising given that he’d smoked forty cigarettes a day since he was fifteen. The oxygen tank was a new development and he was attached to it for fifteen hours a day. It frightened Lydia to see him like that. He looked bizarre, oddly perverted, like a character from a David Lynch movie.
    He glanced up at her as she walked in and smiled wanly. ‘Hello, love.’ He’d pulled the mask from his mouth.
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘Nice walk?’
    ‘Yeah, bit hot.’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said, his gaze drifting towards the window, ‘yeah.’ He’d been indoors for thirteen days now, on that sofa for most of them. If he wanted, he could sit on the balcony, sit in the sun, but Lydia’s dad had locked the door on to the balcony fifteen years ago, locked it and never opened it again. She made him a cup of tea and brought it to him. He held out two big hands, thin-fleshed and cold as a reptile’s. Lydia asked him if he needed anything else, and when he said he didn’t she took her mug of tea and her dog into her own small bedroom and sat on her single bed and tried not to feel guilty about leaving her dad like that, out there on his own, dying for all she knew. She battled the guilt for a moment or two but then she remembered the man he’d been before his lungs had caved in and his body had started to collapse. Not a bad man, but not a good father. But he was