White Bodies: A gripping psychological thriller for fans of Clare Mackintosh and Lisa Jewell
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 practises her lines at full blast in 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 practise 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 seem 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 realise 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 pyjamas, 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 cuts 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 pillow case.
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 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 sachertorte 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 sitting 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 traumatised, and make a resolution to stop eating Tilda’s things.
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 voicemail 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 controllingmen website to join in the forums, to discuss