by Jane Robins
One Saturday morning I go there to while away the time until lunch, lying on her unmade bed reading an Agatha Christie, and Tilda is at her dressing table plucking her eyebrows. I look up to watch, and she notices me in the reflection in the mirror, flinching as she says: “Come here, and let’s do something about you.”
“What d’you mean?”
She stands up and poses like a beauty queen. “Let me be your stylist.”
“I don’t want to be styled.”
“Come on. Sit on my chair.”
So I sigh, suggesting this is all very tedious, and put down my book, splayed open so I won’t lose my page.
She stands behind me, legs apart, feet turned out like a dancer, and pulls my hair back from my face. Generally I have a long fringe, and it’s a shock to see an expanse of white forehead, sprinkled with acne craters. My exposed eyes are little black pebbles, and my eyebrows look thick and unruly.
“Erhh!” I try to push the hair back down.
“No, let me have a go . . . trust me.”
I capitulate, allowing her to set about my eyebrows with tweezers and cover up my spots with a concealer stick. She holds me by the chin, coming at me with blusher and eyeliner and eyelash curlers, then steps back to admire her work. There’s a quickness and lightness to her movements, but an intensity of purpose too. As she picks out a lipstick from the piles scattered over the dressing table, it seems she’s making an important decision, like a surgeon choosing the perfect scalpel. She dabs my lips with a tissue, adds another coat, and tells me to look in the mirror.
Usually I don’t like my face because it’s too big and kind of flat, like the man in the moon. But Tilda’s attempt at a makeover has made it worse; now I have a child’s garish drawing of a face. Arching black brows, black lines round my eyes, peachy patches on my cheeks. I mull over the possibility that she’s been intentionally unkind. I check her face for clues—and see that she’s suppressing giggles.
“You bitch!”
“What? You look a lot prettier. Honest.”
Still, I’m suspicious. She squeezes in beside me on the chair, gazes at her own face with distant, dreamy eyes and starts to sing one of her own compositions. “The girl in the mirror, so sad and so small, she knows who will kill her, she knows them all—” The words are nonsense, but the tune is sad and she sings in a wistful fashion, swishing her hair around. I interrupt:
“Do you think you’re a special person?”
She stops in her tracks, as if she’s been struck. “What do you think?”
“Yes, you are.”
I say this because I do honestly believe that my sister is different. People are drawn to her because she’s so pretty and committed to her talents, and she has that charming way of switching in an instant from dreamlike and ethereal to serious and focused. But I realize that she cares too much about being special, and that the concept of ordinary is repugnant to her. Worse than that—if she thought she was ordinary, she’d self-harm, or take her own life. That’s what I believe, anyhow, and that’s what I intend to write in the dossier.
• • •
After lunch, Tilda disappears and I take my bike from the shed and cycle to the river, with my book in my rucksack. As an experiment, I keep my hair pinned back and my makeup on. The journey’s quick, about five minutes, and I find a bench and sit down. In front of me, the river is vast and grimy-gray, and a dirty plastic tub of a boat is bobbing about on a slimy rope.
I pull up the hood of my jacket and read my Agatha Christie. In no time, I’m immersed and only vaguely aware of the shrieks and shouts coming from the bus stop at the pier, inane high-pitched comments blunted by the wind. That’s insane . . . What? Fuck off, fuckface . . . But a loud, Stop it, Robbie, you’re hurting me! makes me look over. A group of teenagers is messing about on the bus-stop bench. I don’t recognize the boys, but the girls are Tilda and Paige Mooney, her favorite Whisper Sister and loyal handmaiden. Paige is like Tilda reflected in a distorting glass, same pale features, same long blond hair, but she’s overweight—Tilda says morbidly obese—and there’s an element of desperation about her. She endlessly tries to impress Tilda, who flips, soaking up the adoration one minute and brushing it off the next. They are kissing and touching with the boys, and I’m curious. I haven’t seen Tilda so blatantly in action before. Then Paige runs away, hand in hand with her boyfriend, to hide behind the fish-and-chip shop, leaving Tilda writhing about with the other boy on the bench. I go over, wheeling my bike.
As I come close I say hello, and she extricates herself with a look that makes it clear that I’m not welcome.
The boy’s staring at me with an open face, curious and interested, and I know immediately that it’s Liam Brookes, even though I haven’t seen him in five years. His hair is darker, almost black now, but it still stands up away from his head and has the same woolly look. His face has elongated, and his body has changed—he has broad shoulders and is tall. “Have you met my sister?” Tilda says.
“Hi, Callie,” says Liam.
“Her face isn’t usually like that. A bit of a makeup malfunction before lunch.”
I ram the bench with my bike. Not dramatically, just enough for Tilda to know I’m angry with her. “You said I looked pretty,” I hiss.
“You do, definitely. I just didn’t have time to make it as perfect as I wanted.”
“What are you reading?” Liam is looking at the book sticking out of my pocket, then expectantly at my face, and I can tell he wants to reconnect with me.
“Oh, she’s always reading murder stories,” Tilda snaps. “Bye, Callie, we’re leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Liam’s. His mum will be out this afternoon.”
I want to say, What? I’ve seen you on that bench, in public, groping and snogging—what the hell will you do in private? A futile question—I know the answer and I suppress the urge to picture it in graphic detail. I ask Liam:
“Do you still live on the Nelson Mandela estate?”
He says he does, and I raise my plucked eyebrows at Tilda, because she’s always disparaging about the estate, but she ignores me, stands up, grabs Liam’s hands, pulls him upright and off they go. He has his arm wrapped round her, and she snuggles her shoulders into him, trip-tripping at his side, her skirt blowing against her legs. The air fills with swirling rain, and I cycle back to Harcourt Road, bringing the news that Liam is Tilda’s boyfriend now.
Mum has lit a fire in the sitting room, and she’s sitting in the comfy chair beside it, marking artwork. I notice anew how small and fragile she is, swamped by the chair and its cushions. The chemo seemed to shrink her, and it made her hair fall out. It’s now growing back in soft nut-brown curls, like a poodle coat, but you can see the contours of her skull and in a couple of places there are little round bare patches, the size of a five-pence piece. She makes her face cheer up at the sight of me, saying, “You look damp and cold, darling. Would you like a cup of tea and toast and Marmite?” And soon we’re drinking our tea by the fire, in a fug of smoky, charcoaly warmth, and I tell her about Tilda and Liam. She says, “Doesn’t he go to a different school now?”
“Yes, St. Christopher’s. I don’t know how she found him again.”
“I think you rather liked Liam, didn’t you? When he and Tilda used to practice for Peter Pan?”
I feel my face go red. “Not really.”
I feel like adding that he’s too nice for Tilda, because mostly she prefers the sort of boys who are trouble—disruptive in class and disobedient. Mum doesn’t press me but fetches the playing cards for gin rummy and we play for half an hour. Then I watch my favorite DVD—Little Women with Winona Ryder as Jo, while Mum makes supper.
• • •
A few days later, Tilda comes in from school, drenched by the rain. She’s late, and flushed pink, and she thumps her rucksack on the kitchen table, wriggling out of her wet coat, saying, “Paige is off school, guess why?”
“Food poisoning?”
I’m feigning boredom. Mum stirs something on the stove with a wooden spoon, making the kitchen smell of meat and gravy. She looks up. “Paige Mooney?”
“Yeah. She’s the only Paige. Anyhow—she’s pregnant, thirteen weeks!”
Tilda looks at us with wide eyes. She’s expecting a shocked “Oh no!” and “What an idiot!” or a sorrowful “Poor Paige.” But a sickly silence falls on the room. Mum wipes her hands on a tea towel. “How do you know about this?”
“Everyone’s talking about it. . . . Her brother told his friends, and now it’s all around the school.”
Nobody told me—but I’m not representative.
“It must be traumatic,” says Mum seriously. “She’s your friend, so be supportive and don’t gossip.”
“I won’t.” Tilda grabs some biscuits and pours herself a glass of milk, then goes upstairs. Mum follows her, telling me to guard the stew, and I assume she’s going to ask Tilda about Liam, check that she’s being careful. I wish I could listen to their conversation—I’m dying to know if my sister has a full-blown, proper sex life. I’ve read articles in teen magazines about sex being fun, about discovery and “exploring your bodies,” but it’s obvious to me that these are half-truths, that there’s a devastating, emotional side.
Mum returns to the kitchen, briskly taking the wooden spoon from me, and I ask her outright whether Tilda is having sex. “That’s her business,” she says, with a loving smile so I won’t be upset. I stare into the stew, thinking that Mum and Tilda now have some shared secret knowledge that excludes me and I sense that from now on my sister will drift further away from me, like she’s sailing to the far side of an ocean while I’m stuck on the land.
• • •
The next day the Whisper Sisters, minus Paige, are rehearsing in Tilda’s bedroom and, for some reason, or maybe it’s an oversight, she lets me sit on the floor in a corner and watch. The three of them sit on the bed, talking in a loud hush because of the seriousness of the subject—Paige’s pregnancy.
“My God,” says Tilda, “her life will be ruined—everyone will think she’s a slut and brainless with it. Liam thinks she did it on purpose.”
She stands up on the bed and starts humming one of the Whisper Sister songs and doing the dance moves, shoving her hips out at angles and making the other girls bounce up and down. Then she flops down again, and in a confiding voice says: “The thing about Paige is she has low self-esteem. You must have noticed. I think getting pregnant will make her feel important. But she doesn’t realize how bad it all is. . . . She’s an attention seeker and I think maybe she actually wants to keep the baby, like it would make her someone. But she’ll never achieve anything, and she won’t get famous. She won’t even become a singer—which is a shame because she has a nice voice.”
She’s high on the drama of the situation and her own role as best friend of the doomed protagonist, acting like she’s steering Paige towards a tragic destiny—she would have the baby and then fall into an abyss of obscurity. By contrast, Tilda’s own destiny is to involve fame, glamour and the recognition that is her right. I make a mental note, for later, when I’ll write up my observations.
Eventually, Kimberley and Sasha go home, and I return to Tilda’s bedroom. She’s lying on the bed, texting, and she looks up. “Stop lurking by the door and come in.” Then: “Are you worried about Paige’s baby?”
“I suppose.”
“Don’t be. I know her; she won’t have an abortion. She wants to be a mother. It’s her calling.”
“What’s my calling?”
“Come here.” She pats the pillow on the bed, and we lie side by side. “Your calling is to be a nice person, looking out for other people and protecting things.”
It sounds boring.
“There has to be more to me than that.”
“There’s nothing more serious than your calling!” She looks at me crossly. “You love where others don’t. That’s what the sheep-skull day was about. And don’t worry. I see your future as happy. You’ll be a mother. You’ll live in an old country house with a family that loves you. There’ll be log fires and dogs, and fields of sheep all around, and I’ll come and visit even when I’m famous.”
In my mind I start to cast Liam Brookes in the country-house husband role, but Tilda puts an end to that by saying, “You know why I can’t see Liam on Saturday? It’s because he goes to the library to study. I think it’s because he doesn’t have a father, and he wants to look after his mother in the future. He says he’ll be a doctor. Imagine! Liam a doctor.”
“What about your calling? Will you be a doctor’s wife?”
“Hmm. Maybe. I imagine Liam working for Médicins Sans Frontières. It’s a French organization he talks about that works in battle zones in Africa and places. I’ll go with him, and write songs.”
“Wouldn’t you be frightened in a battle zone?”
“I’d be concentrating on my songs. And I think the calling part makes the fear go away.”
“Really?”
Then she starts telling me about meeting Liam again, at a party three months ago. “I hadn’t seen him since we were at primary school,” she says. “We fell out then, do you remember?”
“I never really knew what was going on with you two. I remember you had a row or something when you were rehearsing for Peter Pan. And you wouldn’t come out of our bedroom, and then you did that maniac thing, hitting your head on the wall.” I lie on my side now, facing her, with my arm across her belly.
“I annoyed him by saying I was pleased I didn’t live on the Nelson Mandela estate. Then we had an argument about whether the estate was scuzzy and dangerous. It made him hate me for being stuck-up and judgmental.”
“But you made up after that? After the play.”
“Only for a while. Those things I said did too much damage.”
Then she kisses the top of my head and sings a song that goes: “I’m in love, so in love with him. . . .”
I can’t believe she’s been seeing Liam for three whole months without telling me, and I realize that half her outings to rehearse with the Whisper Sisters were actually romantic assignations. I feel the old urge to eat something of hers—but I try to suppress it. Instead, when she gets up to go to the bathroom, I pull down her purple duvet and get right inside her bed, burying my face in her pillow. I breathe in her smell, which is thick and heady, and as I sit up again I notice one long blond hair lying on the pillow, but I manage not to eat it and instead just take it to my room and tuck it inside my pillowcase. Then I write up my notes.
• • •
On Saturday I take my bike and go to the library. I find a seat by the window, spread my books out on the table and start reading, trying to ignore a mad-haired old lady in the chair opposite, snoring under a heap of dirty brown clothes. There’s a stale dustbin smell coming from her too, which explains the empty chairs nearby. I open the window and settle back into my reading.
Half an hour later Liam arrives, but he doesn’t see me, walking right past my table, dangling his jacket over a shoulder and carrying a rucksack jammed with books; and while he’s walking he whispers into the ear of a girl, who also holds her coat over her shoulder—I note her bobbed dark hair and her straight back. She’s tall, far taller than Tilda or me, so that her head and Liam’s are side by side, tilting symmetrically into each other. She wears a short tartan skirt with black opaque tights and flat black ballerinas, and seems more elegant than Tilda and her friends. But I see Liam and the girl only for a moment, because they disappear to a table beyond a bookcase, not in my line of sight.
I stand up and pretend to be browsing the bookshelves behind the bag lady, listening carefully, trying to hear Liam and the girl on the other side. But the only sounds are the scratching of chairs, and pages turning and books being moved about. So I peek round the edge of the stack, and see the two of them sitting together, their backs to me. I watch, and notice the girl’s left hand, which is decorated with a henna tattoo of spiky flowers sna
king from the end of her middle finger up her arm—she’s pulled the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows to display it. Her nails match the henna, being varnished a dark red that’s almost black, and she seems mysterious to me. I do nothing for a while, just watch her and Liam reading their books, observing that they seem extremely aware of each other—they are so unnaturally still. Then the girl writes something on a piece of paper, and slides it across for Liam to read, he smiles and writes something and passes it back, then she briefly lays her head on his shoulder.
I pick a book at random from the shelf and take it to the seat opposite Liam, on the other side of the table. The book’s called Kitchen Cupboards: A Do-It-Yourself Guide, and chapter one is “Designing Your Cupboard.” I’ve hardly started reading when Liam says in a loud whisper: “Hello, Callie. What are you doing here?”
I don’t answer.
“This is my friend Mary; we’re revising together.”
“Hi.” Mary treats me to a vague, haughty expression. Like a camel.
“Callie is Tilda’s sister.”
Mary nods, as if to say, Oh really?
“Do you go to Liam’s school?”