White Bodies(11)

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?”