White Bodies: An Addictive Psychological Thriller

by Jane Robins

  I take my laptop out of my bag and write: Tilda seems fearful, unconfident, nervous. I told her about controllingmen.com but she won’t listen. When I talk to her, I make everything worse. I drive her closer to him.

  6

  2000

  The only time I feel that my sister and I are similar, from the inside out, is when we go swimming, which we do most Saturday mornings. Mum sits on the side of the pool, her legs dangling in the water, reading her book and looking up from time to time to check we haven’t drowned, while Tilda and I dive under each other’s legs, performing roly-polies, picking up coins from the bottom. Our weaving about and beneath each other feels harmonious and dreamlike, despite all the yelling and splashing going on around us, and it’s a revelation to feel calm and confident inside. Usually my sister outshines me and I’m diminished by the force of her luminous energy. But, as a swimmer I can keep up—even though I’m useless at other physical activities—and I suspect I have a champion pair of lungs. Underwater I can hold out for more than a minute, and I beat Tilda when we perform handstands. Also, our hair is scrunched up inside identical white swimming caps, so that her goldenness seems, for once, to be hidden. I look forward to Saturday-morning swimming so much that often I start thinking about it around Wednesday.

  School is another matter. There I aim at invisibility, which is the opposite of Tilda, who makes it her business to be noticed. When they cast the school play—Peter Pan and Wendy (with songs)—she pushes to the front of the auditions queue and acts her heart out like she’s Mary-Kate Olsen auditioning for It Takes Two. She’s not the best actor in the class, let alone the school, but she’s the most insistent, her voice carries farthest and has a daring tone that frightens people. When she wins the role of Peter Pan she boasts about beating the hopeless boys, and practices her lines at full blast on the playground. My dagger! Woe betide you, Hook! I watch in wonder. How can she brag like that with the obvious, massive assumption that everyone envies her? You’d think her boasting would make her unpopular, but it doesn’t. Her friends offer to help her rehearse and to practice fighting with plastic rulers.

  I generally watch from a distance, sitting on a brick wall by a privet hedge. But after a while I decide on a new routine for break times and start tracking the perimeter of the playground in pigeon steps, observing other children and stopping for any developments that seemed worthy of my attention, like the secret tunnel being dug by the Year Threes and the insect zoo. I have a regular, clockwise route that takes me by the apple orchard, round the scrubby grass area with the climbing frames and the tunnel, and along by the iron fence and the road and the school gate.

  For the final section, I edge through a forbidden gap between the corrugated iron canteen and the side of the school, picking my way over mangled crisp wrappers and shards of glass. It’s cold and damp down there and smells of drains, and I’m accustomed to coming across small groups of children hiding, or girls sealing friendships by gossiping about other girls. So I’m not surprised when one day I go into the gap and become aware of people at the other end. I can’t see them at first because I’ve gone suddenly from bright sunlight into dark, but I hear giggles, hushed and muffled, and the sound of Tilda saying, “Don’t stop; it’s only Callie.” I shuffle along towards her and realize that she’s wedged in the space between the walls with Wendy Darling and Captain Hook. Wendy has her face pushed into Hook’s, and Tilda is wrapped around both of them, her face up against the other two. Hook turns towards Tilda, and they push and kiss violently, with Tilda’s back against the bricks and her leg up on the opposite wall. She pulls her head away and looks at me, standing there, watching.

  “What are you doing?” It comes out in an accusatory way, which I hadn’t intended.

  My sister opens her mouth up and slowly sticks her tongue out, a bunched-up strawberry snake on it, the sort you can buy from the tuck shop.

  “Pass the snake,” she says carefully, so it won’t fall out, and she’s pulling down her sleeves and her skirt. “Do you want it?”

  I open wide, and Tilda pushes onto me and with our tongues we work the snake from her mouth to mine. I stand back, stunned that I’ve been allowed to take part.

  Then we hear a screechy “Out! Out of there this minute!” The teacher standing at the end of the passage is not Miss Parfitt but scary Mrs. Drummond. “You know that alleyway is out of bounds,” she says, as we emerge in forlorn single file, and then, “I’m surprised at you, Callie Farrow.” I stand with my mouth shut tight, full of snake, then I run into the girls’ toilets instead of going to class, and stay in there looking in the rusty glass at the sweat on my face. I try to make the snake last. Not sucking.

  That was the origin of my idea about eating things that belonged to Tilda. At night we would stand side by side in our pajamas, cleaning our teeth before bed. But now I brush super slowly, waiting for Tilda to leave the bathroom, then when I’m sure she’s properly gone, I take her toothbrush from the cup and use it instead of my own, licking it and sucking on it like a lollipop to make sure I’ve taken some of her spit. Another time, after Mum cut our hair, I pick a golden tuft from the kitchen floor, and take it up to the bathroom. It’s hard to eat hair, because you can’t chew it and if you try to swallow it, you gag. So I use nail scissors to reduce it to tiny pieces and fetch a glass of milk from downstairs, then, looking in the bathroom mirror, I drink down the hair in the milk.

  Tilda keeps a diary. One day I see it lying on our dressing table, alongside the glass animals that we collect, so I tear a piece from the corner of a page covered in her scrawly, chaotic script, and I eat that. Paper is easy to eat; you can make it dissolve in your mouth, but Tilda throws a mad fit when she sees the missing corner, accusing me of reading her diary and damaging it. “I only read one page, but it was so boring I gave up,” I tell her. She hides her diary after that, but I know where it is—tucked in the corner of a pillowcase.

  Another time, I go into the kitchen pantry because I know that if I stand on a stool I’ll be able to reach the shelf that holds the red tin that Mum uses for our baby teeth, the ones we’d put under our pillows for the tooth fairy. I’m standing on the stool, reaching up and touching the tin with my fingertips, and pulling it towards me, when I become aware of Mum watching me.

  “What are you up to, Callie?”

  “I just wanted to look at our teeth.”

  Mum says, “That’s sweet,” and leaves me to it, so I take three teeth out of the tin and run upstairs to my bedroom, and hide them in my underwear drawer. I’ve decided to eat the teeth actually in Tilda’s presence, but without her knowing, figuring that if I manage all three, there’s a good chance that one or more will be Tilda’s. My opportunity comes a week or so later when we arrive home from school one dark afternoon, and our house smells of baking. Mum’s made a chocolate Sacher torte cake; and as we come into the kitchen she says she has sold a painting. This is always a cause for great celebration in our house. We understand that Mum’s work as an art teacher is a source of wholesomeness in our lives, that it pays the bills, but that her painting is something special. I dash to the bedroom to fetch a tooth; then join Tilda and Mum at the kitchen table for orange juice and cake. While the two of them are absorbed in a conversation about apricot jam, I pop a tooth into my mouth with some cake and swallow hard.

  But the tooth doesn’t go down with the cake and is still in my mouth. So I try again with orange juice, but this time I gag, choking up the juice, and the tooth shoots out and lies on the table. I slam my hand over it. Tilda and Mum don’t see; they’re still talking to each other and missed the critical moment, so I take the tooth and run out of the room coughing, with Mum calling after me, “You okay? Did it go down the wrong way?”

  After that, I decide not to swallow teeth in public, instead I do it in the bathroom with the door locked. The first tooth of the three goes down with a massive gulp of water, and as I swallow, I notice that Tilda hasn’t flushed the toilet and her pale greeny-yellow pee is sitti
ng there, looking like apple juice.

  I use my glass to scoop up a small amount of liquid, drinking it down so quickly that I can’t really say what it tastes like—maybe sour like lemons. I feel a momentary rush of satisfaction and exhilaration, and then fear. What if I’ve poisoned myself? At night, I dream myself into a hospital bed being interrogated by male doctors in white coats saying, “How did these germs get into you, little girl? What did you do?” And, as I’m slipping away in the grip of a terrible secret, Tilda appears at my side, tears in her faraway eyes, saying, “Please, Callie, just tell them, it will save your life.” But I know I will stay silent unto death. In the morning I wake up traumatized, and make a resolution to stop eating Tilda’s things.

  7

  2017

  After our disastrous meeting in Regent’s Park, during the following days and weeks, I make calls to check that Tilda’s okay, but her phone is switched permanently to voice mail and with the deepening silence I find myself sinking, constantly worrying about her emotional state. I suppose I’m becoming obsessed, because it’s often the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning. I’m now convinced that Felix is hurting Tilda, physically and psychologically, and while walking to work I invent ways of spiriting her away from him; then, after work, I regularly go online to the Controlling Men website to join in the forums, to discuss emotional abuse and coercive behaviors. I even dream about Tilda, specifically about rescuing her, like mothers dream of rescuing their babies from raging fires or angry seas, and I repeatedly find myself underwater, grabbing her hair with one hand and using the other to swim against the downward force of an almighty current. It’s exhausting.

  Occasionally I take the bus into town and spend time at the Caffe Copernicus on Curzon Street, across the road from her flat. I’m not spying on her exactly; it’s more that it feels good to be close. I fantasize that she might need me in some emergency that’s more serious than a few bruises on her arms, and I sit in a favorite spot by the window, which has an uninterrupted view of Tilda’s front door and of the sitting-room windows up on the second floor. Not that anything ever happens. The new blinds stay down, and there’s no hint of what’s going on behind them, so I’m left with my thoughts drifting off in alarming directions. I find myself concocting bizarre plans for escaping from the flat—jumping out of the bedroom window at the back, for instance, with a glass roof to break the fall rather than risking the long drop from the sitting room to the concrete below.

  I haven’t seen Tilda at all, and I’m hoping that the day will come when she’ll confide in me and allow me to help her. In the meantime, I stay focused by working on the dossier. I have to admit that the dossier has changed a lot. In past years it was like an occasional notebook, just recording this and that about Tilda, and I’d return to it when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by her, or she’d said something to upset me. But now I’m writing in it almost every day, and it’s focused as much on Felix as on her. I’ve found it useful to make an inventory of all his odd and sinister behavior, writing more about the way he was tidying all her cupboards when I first met him; the vitamin jabs, which I had accepted back then but now seem totally bizarre; the way he organized a holiday without consulting her at all and then had his builders do heaven knows what to her flat. And, even worse, the signs of violence—holding her under the water that day on the Thames, those bruises on her arms, and just the way she looks now. Sort of battered and gaunt. And that’s what I’m doing today—reworking my files—and adding my thoughts on how he is isolating Tilda, keeping her from me.

  I’m the only customer in the café, so I don’t have any distractions, and I work quietly for half an hour or so, making my hot chocolate last a long time, and taking small bites from a banana that I’ve brought from home. Then I shut my laptop and pick up my book, the Scandinavian crime novel called The Artist that I took to Curzon Street. It’s about a serial killer who carves clues in his victims’ torsos with a stencil knife, and I’m immersed in it; but I glance up, as though prompted by something, a sound or a nudge, and see that, across the street, the front door is opening. I’m mesmerized, because in all the hours I’ve been spending at the Copernicus, that door has remained shut, like an impermeable barrier keeping me out and Tilda in.

  I’m in luck and it’s my sister standing on the pavement across the street, masked fleetingly by the passing traffic. I wait, wondering whether Felix will appear. But he doesn’t. It’s just Tilda, looking around her, up and down the street, and at one point it seems that she’s peering through the café window, right at me. In that second I see that her face is kind of hollow, even thinner than when I saw her in the Regent’s Park café; and her brow is furrowed. But I don’t have time to draw any conclusions, because she walks away.

  I put three pound coins on the table, stuff the laptop and book into my plastic bag with my remaining half of the banana and rush for the exit, crashing my thigh painfully against the corner of a table. I stand in the doorway, keeping my eyes on Tilda, who’s heading along the pavement before turning towards Shepherd Market. Now I’m half running, and I follow her down a narrow path and into a cobbled courtyard, filled with evening sun and packed with office people standing outside pubs, drinking and smoking. Tilda is ten meters in front of me, weaving through the crowd, keeping her head tucked down so that no one recognizes her, and I catch up just as she dodges into a newsagent’s shop. I wait outside, beside the door so that she can’t see me, and when she leaves I tap her on the shoulder. She jolts like she’s been stung by a wasp.

  “For God’s sake, Callie, what the fuck are you doing?”

  I’m not hurt by her reaction. In the circumstances, it’s understandable.

  “I just saw you. I happened to be on Curzon Street, and I saw you come out of the flat. . . . Are you okay? You look worried. Shall we go to a pub and have a proper talk?”

  “No, I can’t. I mean, I’m in a hurry—I needed to buy some fags, but I’ve got to get back.”

  I check her face and body for signs. She’s wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt, so I can’t see her arms, and she has a thin gray cotton scarf round her neck, so a lot’s hidden, but I can see her bony knuckles and bitten nails. Her hair seems to me more straggly and unwashed than usual, and I’m caught up in anxiety about her when she surprises me. “Look, why don’t I meet you for lunch tomorrow? I’ll come to your bookshop at one, and we’ll go to that pub you talk about, the one round the corner.”

  “Really? You can do that?”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Shall I walk back with you?” It sounds like an innocent offer, but really it’s a test, and Tilda says, “No. Don’t do that.”

  She leans forward and touches my cheek with her lips, which, by the way, are dried up and chapped. I don’t like the look of them and make a mental note to look up chapped lips later on, to see if they can be a symptom of stress.

  “It’s okay,” I insist. “I can walk back with you.”

  “Don’t bother,” she says firmly. “We’ll talk tomorrow. I’ve lots to tell you.”

  She stresses the word lots and I wonder whether she’s planning to come clean about Felix.

  “Okay. I’ll go then.” I return her kiss, and set off through the crowds, turning down White Horse Street to Piccadilly, clamping my plastic bag to my chest.

  8

  I like getting home. My flat feels like a normal place after the mental onslaught of central London. It’s on the second floor, and has a small bedroom at the back of the building overlooking a neglected garden that I’m not allowed to use. I don’t mind. I can open my window to let the fresh air in, and I like the clatter of the trains on the rail track that runs behind the trees. Because of its connection with outdoors, this is my favorite room, and it’s a good place for thinking.

  The other part of the flat is the kitchen and sitting room, which is dark because of the bottle-green walls that I want to repaint, but somehow never do. It has a breakfast bar and a two-seater sofa and a
TV (with DVD player), and a little window facing the bricks in the wall of the next-door house. I cook in that room and watch reruns of Miss Marple and Poirot on television, and Scandinavian crime dramas, but I spend most of my time in the bedroom, sitting at a little table that I found in a Dumpster and put under the window. I eat my meals there and use my laptop—which is what I do the minute I get home after my encounter with Tilda, because I’m eager to go online. I have made friends in the internet forum I told Tilda about—controllingmen.com. They are called Scarlet and Belle, and are both experienced with dealing with abusive relationships. Scarlet joined only a week or so ago—but seems to know a great deal. Belle has been around for ages.

  I eat the remaining half of my banana, which is squished now, and I log on, seeing that Belle is online already, but not Scarlet. She notices me immediately.

  Hey Calliegirl. Welcome back.

  Hey Belle. Interesting day. Need to talk.

  Me 2!!!

  I realize I’ll have to hear her news before I can talk about Tilda, and sure enough, in an instant, Belle is telling me all about meeting her friend Lavender at Starbucks that morning. They had ordered cappuccinos, she said, and granola bars and had just put their tray down on a table when, before they had even sat down, Lavender’s husband showed up “to keep an eye on the conversation” so that Lavender couldn’t discuss anything personal.

  Classic controlling behavier, Belle writes.

  Definitely.

  Belle is a geriatrics hospital nurse in York, and Lavender is her best friend from school. Belle has shared all the grisly details of Lavender’s life and marriage. Her husband forced her to give up her job because he was worried she would meet another man, and now he phones her at home five times a day “just to say hello,” and he’s accusing her of loving the kids and not him. Belle thinks their relationship is reaching a crisis point.