White Bodies: An Addictive Psychological Thriller

by Jane Robins

  “Yes. We’re in the same class.” Her tone is flat and dismissive, and she goes back to her Madame Bovary, making it plain that I’m of no interest. I shut my Cupboards book and stand up.

  “That was quick,” says Liam.

  “See you around.”

  Cycling home seems to take forever. I’m practically on fire with excitement at being the bearer of bad news, breathless with the urgency of my mission. I drop my bike at the front door, and as I come in, I can hear singing upstairs: “Tormented, lamented . . . demented on a Sunday.” I thump up the stairs, and make an entrance into her bedroom. The Whisper Sisters (minus Paige) stop singing, and I say: “Do you know Mary someone, who knows Liam?”

  “Mary Strickland?”

  “Tall, shortish dark hair, talks slowly, bit stuck-up?”

  “Yeah, that’s Mary Strickland,” says Sasha, looking at Tilda.

  “What about her?” Tilda speaks in a strained voice and runs her hands through her hair, to mush it up.

  “She’s in the library with Liam, and I saw them whispering to each other and passing notes. . . .”

  “So what?” says Sasha. “They’re friends, that’s all. Are you trying to make trouble, Callie?”

  “Go home! Both of you.” Tilda looks like she’s about to hyperventilate. “I mean it, go! . . . I need to think. And don’t gossip. Really. Liam told me Mary was going to the library with him. . . .”

  Kimberley and Sasha skulk out, and Tilda sits on the bed, her head in her hands.

  “Did he really tell you?”

  She glares at me, her eyes ice-hard. “Of course not. Tell me what you saw. Every little thing.”

  I tell her about the head thing, when she had leaned on his shoulder, and Tilda says Mary’s a bitch and Liam’s naive.

  “Why didn’t you go to the library with him?”

  “He said he wanted to concentrate! He’s so focused on getting A stars in his exams, that’s all that matters to him. She must have tagged along, practically followed him there. . . . Her father is a lawyer, like a judge or something, and she thinks that makes her a superior person. She’s so up herself. She thinks she can just force herself on him when he wants to concentrate!”

  “What are you going to do?”

  She manages a small acid smile. “I’m going to Liam’s this evening, and I’m going to be so nice to him and not let him know at all what I think about Mary Strickland. Never complain, never explain—it’s the best policy.”

  I agree. I can’t see how having a row with Liam would improve anything, and later that day I watch Tilda get ready, removing all her makeup and starting again, changing her clothes several times, doing her hair with a curling iron and applying scent. I wish her luck, and she sets off.

  15

  2017

  I sit by my window for three hours or more, trying different passwords to unlock the memory stick, taking breaks to make tea, stretching my legs by walking around the sitting room. I try everything. I even type in Hook, and TildaandLiam and LiamandTilda and WhisperSisters and a thousand other possibilities, although it all feels rather last-ditch and feeble and I want to give up, to go online to chat to Scarlet and Belle. Then, without thinking about it, I tap TheLovedOnes and, feeling weak and light-headed, I watch as the screen changes from a forbidding black to a welcoming, beautiful glowy orange. I’m reminded of those films of flower petals opening miraculously in the sunshine, and I think—of course! Of course she uses the loved ones; it makes perfect sense.

  But then, a wave of disappointment, because there’s only one file on the screen—a Word document with the dull name Script Notes. Not what I expected. But when I click, I see immediately that the information inside had nothing to do with scripts; instead I’m looking at a letter, addressed to me:

  Dear Callie,

  God knows what’s happened if you’re reading this, because these are my secrets, little one, and you will share them only if something fucking horrendous has happened. I should be more blunt—you’re reading this because I’m dead and because I want you to know, at last, what happened between Felix and me.

  Before I get stuck in—here are a few things you need to know about Felix—so pay attention!

  I am intoxicated by him.

  I am addicted to him.

  He makes me feel healed. No longer wounded inside.

  In short, Callie, he’s the love of my life—and that’s why I resisted your constant prying and snooping, why I refused to speak about him despite your whiny questions—Are you sure he’s good for you, Tilda? Will you let me help you, Tilda? I knew what you were up to; it was so bloody obvious. You were jealous of Felix and out to tear us apart, to destroy my relationship—did you ever admit it to yourself?

  But you couldn’t succeed because I adore him. I love that I can’t boss him around like I’m the queen of Sheba. So many of my exes have been obedient sycophants. I say sit—they sit. I say fetch—they fetch. But, from the start, Felix was different. He set the rules and I went along with them: he told me to wear my Oscar de la Renta dress, I wore it; he said he didn’t like my scent, I chucked it in the bin. You couldn’t stand that behavior, could you? It made you feel powerless and excluded. Then, darling sister, exclusion turned you paranoid and fueled the Controlling Men obsession that screwed up your mind.

  I can see you there now, in your bedroom, reading this, and screaming, But I was right! You’re dead, Tilda! Well, it’s a whole lot more complicated than that, in ways beyond your imagination. It’s hard to explain to you, because we are such different people, but let me try.

  Think about this—you’ve spent your whole life trying to figure out how you belong. You want to put roots down deep into the earth, like a tree does, seeking water and nutrients—sustenance. I’m the opposite, I want to fly like a bird, escape, and move on. I feel exhilarated when something is new and dangerous. I love risk. See where I’m going with this? That’s what Felix gives me—endless risk. With other men I have a sense of their limits, but not with him—what goes on behind those gray eyes is unknowable. I’d find myself just gazing at him, wondering whether he’ll be my destroyer, or my savior. At the minute, I’m believing that he’s most likely my savior. But—in case I’m wrong—I’m setting down in writing how my death came about. What you do with the information is up to you.

  The first time he became violent was just a month or so after I met him. That night we were at a screening of Rebecca in a little private cinema in Soho, and as the film began I was practically orgasmic with fear—it was so important to me that he like my performance, and I already knew that his standards were fucking high. He gripped my hand tightly throughout the film, and every few scenes, he told me that I was gorgeous or sexy or beautiful. . . . At first I was grateful and turned on, but after a while I noticed that his compliments were all about my appearance, not about my skill. So I fished for something deeper, asking, “Did you like the beach scene?” or “Do you think that final confrontation with Max worked; did it have emotional integrity?” He’d do something affectionate like pull my hair away from my face or pretend bite my fingers and come up with platitudes like, “The camera adores you,” or “That scene was yours.” Never anything specific about the hard graft of acting, and I sensed a cold undertone to his words.

  Then, as the lights came up, a couple of young beardy hipsters came over to me and started telling me how wonderful my performance had been and this strange thing happened—Felix appeared to be enjoying the situation, saying, “Yes, she’s amazing . . . I’m so proud of her.” But I could tell that, beneath the surface, he was angry. It was something about the tension in his body, and the way he was on autopilot with his oh-so-perfectly charming manner.

  When we got back to my flat, he was moody, refusing to say what was wrong. Then he grabbed me and, without speaking, pushed me onto the bed and fucked me, forcing me into impossible excruciating positions, gripping my arms so hard that the pain was almost unbearable. Afterwards he fell asleep straightaway while
I lay awake stunned, trying to work out what had happened. I suppose that in a way I felt violated, but I also felt ecstatic, truly alive. And don’t tell yourself it was rape, Callie, because it wasn’t. I did not say no. I did not try to push him away. I made my consent obvious. The fact was that I felt closer to Felix than ever because of the realization that, like me, he’s compelled to experience the extremes in life. In the days afterwards, I would look at the bruises he had made on my arms and cherish them, like they were emblems of our passion, badges of honor. I was sad when, after a few days, they went away.

  About three weeks later Felix and I were having dinner at Le Caprice, and one of his colleagues happened to be dining there, an older guy called Julio who came over and asked to be introduced to me. I liked him straightaway—he had this big crinkled face. Thick white hair; and he was tanned, like he spent half his life sitting on a terrace in Barcelona sipping fine wines. I laughed at his stories. Some of them were at Felix’s expense, though in a benign way. In a fabulous undulant, almost camp Spanish accent he called Felix’s work desk “his Bauhaus residence” and said he viewed “good taste as a moral imperative.” Felix chuckled, and I laughed too. When we parted, Felix man-thumped Julio on the arm in the friendliest way. But, underneath, he was seething, and when we were back at Clerkenwell he was white with anger, stomping around, furious about Julio’s jokes. It was “that prick—pathetic has-been—he won’t last long at the firm.” Then he began to attack me. How dare I flirt with Julio? Couldn’t I see that I was an embarrassment to myself? I protested: “I was being friendly.” I told him he was ridiculous, and I started to walk away. But Felix grabbed a glass vase, a heavy purple thing, and hurled it at me. Or perhaps he was aiming beside my head to give me a fright. Anyhow, it missed me and crashed into a mirror, which shattered, and the vase was all over the floor of his kitchen, a thousand tiny fragments.

  He acted like nothing much had happened, ordering me out of the room “while I clean up this mess.” His voice was aloof and weary; he seemed disgusted at me—and this is strange—but as I went into the sitting room I was thinking that I was at fault, that I must have behaved badly with Julio, and I felt pleased that Felix cared so much. I liked the idea that his feelings for me were so strong that they’d forced him to lose control and smash something. The damage wasn’t terrible, only a cracked mirror and a broken vase. I went back into the room, took him by his shaking hand and led him to the bed. He grabbed my arms, bruised me, hit me, fucked me. But I didn’t think less of him Callie—I loved him more.

  So, this is the truth. He is dangerous, but I collude in and encourage that danger. He has never harmed me against my will. And in so many ways he is good for me. He helps me go through the countless TV scripts that come my way. Most of the parts are lame, stale old clichés—sexy forensic pathologist, love interest for some ancient actor trying to resurrect his flagging career. I’m practically screaming; I’m desperate for something original. And Felix helps me sift through the dross. He’s a genius with comments in the margins, the general theme being You can do better than this, Tilda. He’s right. I should wait until something outstanding or challenging comes along, something worth investing in. I had hoped to play Rachel in My Cousin Rachel, but Felix thought the script was mediocre.

  He’s generous too. Always buying me beautiful clothes and jewelry, and he offered to pay for the therapy that you need. We discussed your pathologically suspicious mind and your obsession with us, and I told him how you used to be with Liam and me. How you used to sit on your bike outside Liam’s house when I was in there, monitoring the bedroom window. Liam called you our little stalker—did you know that? I felt terrible back then because I knew you were unhappy and I couldn’t help. And it’s the same now, as I write this. I see you as pathetic, so lacking in a life of your own that you need to fixate on mine—and I want to help you, Callie. I really do.

  16

  Her letter leaves me breathless. I pace the flat, weak legs and spinning head, then I go into the kitchen searching for alcohol, wanting to get drunk. I had had no idea of Tilda’s disdain for me, no suspicion that she saw me as a pitiful parasite, dependent on and captivated by her wonderfulness. Nor did I realize that she thinks of me as broken, and feels guilty because she can’t fix me, that she pities me. I find a bottle of red wine at the back of a cupboard and, hand shaking, I unscrew the top, pouring it into a large tumbler, drinking it down, wishing that she were in my room right now, beside me, so that I could argue. I’d tell her she’s wrong, that she has everything back-to-front. I’d say, “You’re the damaged one! Look at yourself: you need the spotlight so much, you’re nothing without the adoration of others. And your behavior with Felix isn’t normal. You’re sick—remember your past!”

  I’d remind her of Liam and that day long ago when she went off to the Nelson Mandela estate determined not to be angry about Mary Strickland. She left our house, all attitude, wearing her pink skinny jeans, saying, “It’s bloody nothing, I’m sure of it.They’re just friends,” while I stayed behind in her bedroom, slipping under the purple duvet, feeling like I was under her skin. I was so comfortable that I fell asleep there, and when I woke it was to the phone ringing and Tilda sniveling down the line: “Tell Mum to come and get me, now; I can’t walk.” I waited while Mum took the car the three-minute journey to Liam’s house and, anticipating trouble, I went downstairs to make hot chocolate for the three of us.

  When they returned, Mum ushered her straight up the stairs, arm protectively around her shoulders, while Tilda seemed unable to hold herself straight. Once in bed, she curled up, clutching her stomach, black mascara-filled tears sticking to her cheeks. She couldn’t even look at the hot chocolate, and it went cold on the bedside table.

  This was the beginning of Tilda’s breakdown. After that day, we became accustomed to hearing raw, hacking coughs emanating from the bathroom, as she made herself vomit after meals, and in the following months, she started cutting her arms—short, untidy slashes made with Mum’s kitchen knives or bathroom razors. At school she was the center of attention, her friends huddling around while she displayed her wounds, and they tried to console her with condemnation of that devious bitch Mary Strickland and the fuckwit Liam Brookes, reminding her of how beautiful she is, and how she’ll soon find another boyfriend. But Tilda remained inconsolable and, in fact, deteriorated further, until her friends become bored by her self-pity and dared to suggest that she was overreacting. Mum said that every teenager goes through it—being rejected—and that you just have to carry on and make the best of things. She even used the phrase “plenty more fish in the sea.” But I found the intensity of Tilda’s feelings understandable. She had loved Liam and thought he would be part of her life forever.

  Gradually she became unable to manage the simplest tasks. She lost the ability to write, other than in big, jerky infantile script, and she could no longer do maths; she could barely write out numbers, let alone compute them. Mum, Tilda and I dutifully attended “family counseling” with an expert named Gary Moyse, who wore corduroy and occupied a squashy armchair that smelled of cigarettes. Tilda generally sat silently, and when she did manage to say something, it came out in a fierce whisper: “It’s no good, all this, you can’t cure me.” And Gary Moyse said, “That’s what we call black-and-white thinking, Tilda. Let’s see if we can think of positive aspects. Those things that make us feel warm inside.” “Kittens,” I said, as disgusted with him as Tilda was. Mum was the only one to make a proper effort, talking about the first magnolias of spring, her creative achievements with paint, a holiday we once had in Majorca. But I felt like crying for her, trying so hard to make things better for Tilda when she had her own cancer to think about.

  We saw Gary every fortnight, but Tilda refused to get any better. She clung to her grief and desolation, and her self-harming and bulimia became worse. While her school friends were taking their qualifying exams, she became an inpatient at an addiction unit for teenagers at a Victorian hospital in south
London, where the doctors medicalized her character, offering us no answers that made sense. There was talk of her codependency, of her addictive personality, of something called a borderline personality disorder; one doctor mentioned the word narcissism. It seemed like every specialist wanted to recruit Tilda for his own diseased community—and I was proud of her when she refused to cooperate. By the age of eighteen she’d been in hospital twice, and she’d acquired a permanent aura of fragility and frailty. But somehow she retained her old charm—that ability to switch in an instant from intensity to a beautiful, vague otherworldliness, and back again. Also, she managed to build herself up from skeletal to merely thin.

  Her life started to improve when, after an intense period of studying at home, she scraped three GCSEs and two A-levels, the minimum requirement to study acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London. She performed well at her audition, and when she was offered a place we celebrated with pink sparkling wine, which we drank in the back garden at home in Gravesend. We all felt so happy (nobody mentioned my mediocre exam performance a year earlier), all the flowers that I had planted with Mum were in bloom, the roses and geraniums and sweet peas; and Tilda and I got drunk and danced together, barefoot on parched grass, sweet peas stuck in our hair, and singing her most successful composition—“Demented on a Sunday.” That September she left home, pulling a gigantic red suitcase onto the train. I said to Mum: “She could live in that if she doesn’t like the accommodation,” and we waved her off. I guess both Mum and I were nervous that she’d regress once she was out of our influence, but the opposite was true. At Central she became her old self again—the girl who’d been a dazzling Peter Pan and who commanded the spotlight. We heard stories of her new friends—Henry, “the star of our year,” and Lottie, “my girl crush.” She told us that her teachers were inspirational, and said that acting was her passion.