White Bodies: An Addictive Psychological Thriller

by Jane Robins

  “You’re a genius!” I say, and he rewards me with a sexy Get me! grin.

  “Felix did the pastry himself,” Tilda says. “He has pastry-making fingers, long and cold.”

  He flutters his fingers while we assure him that we’ve never attempted pastry in our lives, that we always buy ready-made. I notice that Felix has a knack for cleaning up the kitchen as he works, so that when I go to help out after the meal, there’s nothing to do. The surfaces are clearer and cleaner than I’ve ever seen them—all the pots and pans dealt with and back in the cupboards. “How do you do that?” I ask. “It’s like magic.”

  “It comes naturally. . . . Now Callie, forget about cleaning, and tell Tilda that it would be a romantic idea to take a boat down the Thames on Sunday. Up towards Windsor and Bray, where the swans are.”

  “What sort of boat?”

  “Something simple and wooden. Kinda English.”

  “It’s okay,” says Tilda. “I’m sold.”

  She’s looking at him upwards through her hair, a soft dewy gaze, and I feel a stab of pain, realizing that she’s totally in love with him. She notices me watching her and says, “You should come too, Callie. Won’t it be lovely?” This sort of sentimentality is entirely unlike her, and I can’t help making fun of her as I reply, “Oh yes, it will be very lovely . . . very lovely lovely.”

  • • •

  Felix hires a sporty red Peugeot, and on Sunday we pack a picnic to take to Berkshire. It’s not far, an hour’s drive, and when we arrive we’re in another world—the river so wide and brooding, the tangled woodland coming alive with buds and the first tiny leaves of spring. The boat is just as Felix wanted, a little wooden tub, chipped red paint on the outside, all open, with a motor on the back. “It’s perfect,” I say, admiring the way it’s bobbing on its rope, checking out the three benches, the emergency oars. We clamber in and chug along the river, turning our faces to the sun, and it’s glorious to feel the fragile warmth. One minute a golden caress, then gone again. I lean over the side, trailing my fingers in the black water, and shiver, “God that’s cold!”

  We pass by open fields and then Windsor Castle, by whitewashed suburban mansions with lawns that run down to the water, and I spot a heron on the far bank.

  Felix is steering from the back, and he says, “Let’s swim.” We’re on a wide part of the river now, dense woodland on one side, a flat, empty field on the other. I look around, for people, but there’s no one.

  “It’s too cold!” I protest. “And not safe. Don’t people drown in the Thames?”

  But Felix and Tilda aren’t listening. Instead Felix ties the boat to an overhanging branch, and the two of them are ripping off their clothes, frantically, like they’re in a race. Then they’re standing up, totally naked, the boat rocking madly as they position themselves to jump out. Two spindly white bodies, Tilda gripping Felix’s arm and screeching, “I’m bloody freezing already! I can’t do it!”

  “Oh yes you can!”

  In a sweeping move, he scoops up my sister, holding her across his chest in his arms, which I now notice are muscular and strong. She yells “No! No!” and scissor kicks as he flings her overboard, into the water, then leaps in himself. For the briefest, heart-stopping moment, they both vanish into the black; then they are swimming and splashing about, Tilda screaming, and I can’t tell whether she’s exhilarated or furious. But she calls out, “Come on in, Callie! It’s amazing.”

  “You know you want to!” Felix reaches up, pulls the side of the boat down into the water, as though he’s a monster coming to get me, grabbing at my ankle.

  “I won’t!”

  My mind is racing, though, trying to figure out what to do. I don’t want to strip off my clothes in front of them—I’m embarrassed about my roundish pinkish body, and afraid that they’ll laugh at me. At the same time, I’m thinking how wonderful it would be to sink to the bottom of the river, swallowed up by the icy water. Also, I’m intoxicated by the compliment of being included, and, for some reason that I don’t quite understand, I want to impress Felix. So I sit on one of the benches and take off my parka coat and my sweatshirt and jeans and socks. Then I jump in wearing a T-shirt, bra and knickers, sinking down, just as I had wanted, shocked, numb and frozen, unable to think because my head is pounding. My feet touch the bottom, a thick slime with hard edges jutting out. I flinch, and float to the top, where I find that Felix is standing next to me, water up to his chest, and he leans into me, his hands gripping my waist. “I have you in my power,” he says, raising me out of the water, while I pretend to struggle, my hands on his shoulders. Then he throws me backwards; in again, and under, right down to the bottom. When I emerge, I find myself screaming and laughing just as Tilda had done. I want to say, “Do it again! Do it again!” like a child would.

  But Felix has turned to Tilda, and I see that he can lift her thin body much higher than mine, and can throw her into the water much harder. Then, when her head appears, it takes only a swift push with one hand to force her back down, so cleanly that she has no chance to protest, and there is no sign of her, no arms flailing, no disturbance in the water, and I worry that he’s holding her down at the bottom far too long, forcing her into the hazardous mud. “Stop it! It’s too much,” I yell.

  He releases his grip so that she comes up limp and choking, her shoulders heaving. This time he takes her gently in his arms and carries her back to the boat. “You shouldn’t have done that . . . ,” she says, coughing out the words so weakly that I can barely hear, her head resting on his chest, her arm dangling lifelessly at her side.

  Felix flops her over the side, into the bottom of the boat. “You’re fine. Now let’s get dressed and have some food.”

  I swim to the boat and heave myself up to look inside, to check that she’s okay. Her eyes meet mine and she’s blinking slowly, looking startled and empty. There’s something insect-like in the way she is folded into herself in the corner, something maimed. I’m about to screech with concern but she changes her expression, so swiftly that it’s like a magic trick, and she’s laughing and telling us to get into the boat before we freeze to death.

  We take it in turns to use a linen picnic cloth as a towel, and as I watch Tilda drying herself I think I detect that she’s still shaken, but it’s hard to be sure.

  Soon we’re huddled in our dry clothes, eating sandwiches, and drinking black coffee from a flask that we pass around. Tilda’s smiling as she says to me, “This is what it’s like being with Felix—amazing! And I’m so pleased you joined us.” Felix says that he too is pleased I came, and he leans across the boat to touch my bare ankle, just for a second. At that moment, everything is sharper, keener, more intense than I’ve ever known. The sky, the trees, the water—even the ham in the sandwiches.

  Later, when I’m back home, I open up the dossier and write: Tilda is in love with Felix, and maybe I love him too. As her boyfriend, obviously. He’s so handsome and clever and romantic. My pulse raced when he stripped off all his clothes and he jumped into the river. I was amazed that he would do something so spectacular in front of me. I can’t remember such an exciting day in my life as this. I just wish he hadn’t forced Tilda under the water and held her there so long.

  3

  1997

  It’s the hottest, brightest day I have ever known, and we are running, so fast, hurtling down a steep hill, somewhere in Kent. Beneath us, the grass grows in tufts and mounds, and I’m trying to keep my balance, at the same time looking towards the bottom of the hill, at the grown-ups in the half distance. They are sprawling on a blanket and passing a bottle from hand to hand. Mum is slightly apart from the group, drinking her wine, smoking and adjusting the skirts of the long yellow dress she made the night before.

  She looks up to watch our race, shading her eyes with her cigarette hand, and we run faster until we’re tumbling through blue sky into the field, my legs going so fast they’re out of control, making me bump-bump at a million miles an hour, right past the picnicker
s, whose voices I can suddenly hear. Mum yells, “Come on, Tilda!” because my sister is challenging a girl called Precious for first position, and they are neck and neck, belting for the finish line. Tilda’s blond hair is flipping around and her elbows are jabbing outwards, until she is just about in front, and she shrieks, “I’m the winner! I’m the winner!” For a fraction of a moment my heart is broken, then Mum calls out, “Great job, Callie!” and I’m happy again even though I hear the note of consolation in her voice, because I am going to be last. At the bottom of the hill, the other children collapse into one another and I bump straight past them, accelerating instead of stopping, until I fall headlong into the black prickly bush that separates the picnicking field from the one beyond, the one with cows in it.

  Now, the sunny day is gone and I’m on my knees in the bush with my hands pressed into the earth, trying to find a way to stand up, but I can’t because I’m stuck in a mesh of branches that are spiking into my back. I think maybe I can scrunch myself up and inch out backwards, and I shift my hands into a good position so that my right palm presses into something hard and knobbly in the ground. As I grasp it, I hear someone laughing, saying “Look at Callie!” and the others running to the bush to watch me. I’m curious now about the object in my right hand, and am careful to keep hold of it as I scratch myself slowly into the light, rolling backwards until I’m sitting on the grass. I find that I’m holding something pale under dark crumbly soil, which I brush off with the tips of my fingers, tracing along crevices and points. Cradled in my hand, I have the skull of a small animal, and my eyes start to sting.

  Precious says, “That’s gross. What is it?” and everyone crowds in to see. Tilda thinks it might be a calf skull, because of the cows in the next field, and Precious points out that I’m crying. “It’s because you came last,” she says. I smear the tears away but don’t really understand. Maybe I’m upset about being last, maybe I’m jealous of my triumphant sister, or maybe I’m thinking of the dead animal. What I haven’t mentioned yet, is that I am remembering our birthday, Tilda’s and mine. We are seven.

  Tilda says, “Don’t worry about that thing, come back to the picnic and we can have our cake.” I take her hand but have the skull in my other hand, clamped to my chest. When I give it to Mum she inspects it and wraps it up in a paper napkin saying it might belong to a lamb, and it’s a beautiful discovery that she will put into a painting one day, but first it needs a good wash and if I want I can take it to school for the nature table. I hold my hands out while Mum pours water over them from a plastic bottle, then dries them with her skirt. The other children are standing around, watching, and then everyone is singing “Happy Birthday.” I lie on my back with my head in Mum’s lap, looking upwards at Tilda, who’s standing with her legs apart and her face turned to the sky. She’s singing, even though she’s one of the birthday girls, and the sun shines through her hair, making it glimmer like a halo. At that moment I’m hurting with adoration of her. Then Tilda flops to her knees and I sit up, and side by side we blow out the candles.

  The next day is Monday, which means school. I bring in the skull, wrapped in a plastic bag, and we’re drawing pictures of our weekend when our homeroom teacher, Miss Parfitt, looks over my shoulder, saying, “Interesting, Callie, expressive.” I explain that my gashed-up picture is the bush and the skull. Then she examines Tilda’s drawing of a birthday cake and a yellow spider in the sky, which is the sun, and says in an absentminded way, “How lovely.” My picture is dark like my hair, and Tilda’s is gold, like hers.

  Miss Parfitt is my favorite teacher, and she places the skull in the center of the nature table like it’s the most impressive exhibit, which it is, better than the crackly old bird’s nest and heaps of dead leaves, and superior to the egg shells with faces and cress hair. I feel proud.

  But two weeks later, the skull disappears from the display, and I cry in class as Miss Parfitt stands at the front with her arms folded, saying, “Whoever took the sheep skull should put it back on the table, and no more will be said.” Days pass and nothing happens.

  It’s all I can think about. Mum and Tilda both know how upset I am and that I was looking after the skull on behalf of the dead lamb and its mother. To cheer me up, Mum makes a painting of the skull one evening after work, but I have to pretend to like it, because the colors are too bright and it lacks tenderness. And, at night, when we’re in our beds, I tell Tilda that I think Precious is the prime suspect because she doesn’t like the skull and she doesn’t like me. Tilda says she would like to punch Precious in the mouth, that Precious is a gobby attention seeker who needs to be shown a lesson.

  “And you’d be standing up for me,” I say.

  “That too. I’m your guardian angel.”

  I can’t tell from her face whether she means it, or whether she just likes to think of herself as special.

  For a couple of days we follow Precious around the playground chanting, “We know; we know what you did,” and I think to myself, And you have warty fingers and smell of biscuits. Precious finally retaliates with: “Don’t think you can escape your weirdo sister, Tilda Farrow.” At this point Tilda does punch her in the mouth, and I cry with love and gratitude while Precious runs and tells Miss Parfitt. (Years later Tilda said, “Do you remember how horrible we were to Precious Makepeace?” I’ve looked her up on Facebook, but she isn’t there.)

  That night, alone in our bedroom, I take the pink princess notebook that I received for my birthday and I write on page one: “My dossier.” I have learned the word from Mum, who keeps a dossier on her favorite artists, making notes about their techniques and styles, trying to understand them and (Mum’s words) “absorb their essence” so that she can make her own work better. Then I start to write about Tilda, describing everything she did that day, how she looked and what she said. All the small things. The way she laughed when she punched Precious and then looked around to see if she had an audience. The pity in her eyes when she looked at me—her crybaby twin. She’s braver than me, I write. And she’s stronger than me. Then I cross out my words, realizing that while I idolize my sister, I don’t know her at all, not deep down. If I want to absorb her essence, I’m going to have to write a whole lot more.

  When I finish working on my dossier, I look at the pages and feel deeply satisfied, as though by writing about Tilda I’m less dominated by her.

  4

  Spring 2017

  Tilda’s embedding me in the heart of her relationship—join us here, join us there, come bowling, come to the theater. It’s weird because I used to see my sister only once every three or four weeks, and then, only for movie nights. The latest development is an invitation to meet her and Felix at Borough Market to help look for a French cheese called cancoyotte, which has to be served with champagne and walnuts apparently. Also, she wants Lithuanian rye bread and sea salt caramel, and a micro greenhouse that sits on the window ledge and sprouts rocket and chard. Tilda explains her shopping list on the phone in a voice that suggests that her niche ingredients are incredible earth-shattering news, but I infer that the real agenda is for me to spend yet more time with Felix. I say yes straightaway.

  The anticipation of seeing him brings back that sense of an enhanced world, and as I make my way to the market, negotiating the London streets, everything seems to have a splendid clarity—magnolia trees, red buses, people walking labradoodle dogs (they’re everywhere, those labradoodles!). When I arrive at the market, I’m still in that elevated state, my skin tingling, buffed by the sharp air—and I don’t have to wait long, because Tilda and Felix appear on the pavement, walking towards me. Felix’s eyes are smiling, as usual, and he does his hug thing, squeezing me tight, and then the three of us set off into the crowds, shuffling up to market stalls, attempting to see around the heads to the actual produce for sale.

  Tilda and Felix have their arms round each other’s waists; they’re behaving like lovebirds, and, after an hour or so in the market, I find that I’m trailing behind them str
uggling to be part of their conversation; and something happens—instead of being energized, my excitement is draining away so that I start to feel leaden and dull, and it dawns on me that I have somehow fallen into the role of stupid sheep, following them dumbly from stall to stall while they taste little morsels of chorizo and salami and bread dipped into rare olive oils. Felix asks questions about the production processes and the flavors in a distant voice, and I notice for the first time that his habit of talking softly means that people have to lean in to hear him.

  At one point he makes a special effort with me, saying, “Try this one, Callie; doesn’t it have intriguing overtones, salty and sour at the same time?” and he pops a crumb of goat cheese into my obliging mouth. Tilda now has her arm hanging prettily through his, and she’s looking at me, waiting for a reaction. “It’s bitter,” I say, “not like cheddar.” Then we move on to a stall selling freshly pressed apple juice where a bald guy is pouring juice into miniature paper cups.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he says to Tilda, “give this a try.” And then the inevitable, “I know you, don’t I?”

  Everywhere she goes, Tilda is recognized as the actress from Rebecca. Even when she’s wearing big sunglasses. She tastes the drink but doesn’t say anything, and, as she returns the paper cup, Felix ushers her away. The bald guy leans towards me and says, “What’s he? Her minder?”

  We take a cab to Curzon Street, and Tilda and Felix go to the kitchen space to make a lunch out of their purchases at the market, while I sit on the sofa and flip the pages of the Vogue magazine on the coffee table, sniffing the free perfume and rubbing it on my wrists and neck. I look up and notice that Felix is gazing at Tilda lovingly as she sets things out on plates; he’s watching her when she goes to the bedroom. When she comes out again he says, “Shirt looks good.” She’s put on a floppy salmon-colored blouse, bordering on see-through, and I’m sure that it’s been bought by him, as a present. Even to my untrained eye, it looks expensive.