White Bodies(16)
It turns out that Liam’s a better swimmer than both Tilda and me, stronger and quicker and—as previously advertised—particularly good at holding his breath (my specialty!). “Watch this!” he shouts, before he holds his nose and sinks down to sit cross-legged on the bottom. We start counting—one, two, three. At thirty, bubbles come up, and at seventy-two we’re still going. Then he bursts up in a great whoosh, looking like he’ll explode. Afterwards, he swims a width underwater, turns and comes halfway back, before coming up for air. On the way home, Liam asks Tilda if she knows how to roller-skate, and she says no but she wants to learn—so I expect a roller-skating invitation to come her way. After he leaves, Mum says, “That boy has intelligent eyes.”
The days pass but the roller-skating invitation never arrives and, in its absence, Tilda becomes edgy if Liam’s name comes up, no longer wanting him to be a feature of every mealtime conversation. It’s in her character to be pushy and to ask Liam outright to teach her to skate, but either he puts her off or she keeps quiet. On my tours of the playground, I see that she and Liam still get together to prepare for Peter Pan, but I sense an awkwardness about their huddles that wasn’t there before. And, at home, Tilda is scratchy and moody with Mum and me, and starts spending long hours in our bedroom with the door shut. One evening, though, she calls me up to help her practice her lines and when I arrive I find her curled up in her bed, bloodshot eyes, runny nose, the sheets pulled up to her neck. “You look awful,” I say. “What’s the matter?”
She puts her finger in her mouth and bites on it so hard that I expect to see a trickle of blood. Then she sits up and starts bashing her head against the wall.
“Stop it!” I pull her away, thinking she’s gone insane, and we both collapse back under the covers heaving with emotion. I stroke her hair and try to reassure her.
“Come on, it’ll be all right. Really. Remember you have me to look after you. . . . Remember that we’re the loved ones.”
She manages a wet little smile. The loved ones is Mum’s name for us—ever since we were tiny.
“And what about Peter Pan?” I say. “Think about Friday, and how wonderful you’ll be.”
“I know.” She sounds despairing. “I have to be good on Friday. I have to . . .”
? ? ?
On Friday afternoon I keep an eye on her at school, fearing that she’ll be in meltdown mode. When I ask if she’s scared she just says, “Oh, no, I’m fine,” as if there’s no cause for concern; but I carry on worrying right up to 5:00 p.m., when the audience arrives. By five thirty the school hall is packed and buzzing and noisy, but the chat quiets down swiftly as the music starts and the curtains part to reveal the bedroom of the sleeping Darling children. A few minutes later, when Tilda appears, I feel sick.
She walks shakily to the center of the stage, her face white, her eyes blank with fear, and I’m rooted to my spot by the wall, hardly able to breathe. But, from somewhere, my sister summons up her courage and starts to let rip with the Peter Pan voice, loud and clear. Soon she’s dominating the stage, jumping around as though the floor were on fire, waving her sword about. And it becomes clear that it’s Liam, not Tilda, who is shaken by the occasion. He was dynamic and swashbuckly in rehearsal, but is now somehow diminished by the spotlight. In every scene he’s outacted by Tilda. Sometimes she does little asides to the audience that have everyone laughing, and her performance causes several bursts of spontaneous applause. At the end, when the parents clap and whistle, she glows as she bows, with Liam glancing at her, half admiring, half puzzled. Afterwards, Mrs. Brookes comes over to Mum, and I’m surprised to see that she’s obese and has a row of fat metal hoops that go all the way up one earlobe.
“Right little actress, your Tilda,” she says, with a smile as wide and open as Liam’s. “I could see her going professional.”
She turns to me: “What about you? Didn’t you want to be in the play?”
I shrug. Liam joins us, and Mum says he gave Captain Hook a soulful side, and he must come to our house some time. As she’s speaking, Tilda arrives and we all go out to the car. “See you Monday,” Liam says. And Tilda beams, as though he’s mended everything between them.
Later, when we’re back home, I go upstairs to our bedroom and rummage through the clothes in a drawer that is jam-packed full of my tops and T-shirts. There’s an old red woolen sweater, too small for me now, that I keep right at the back, well hidden; and I take out my dossier, which I keep wrapped inside the sweater. It’s no longer in the princess book I had when I was seven, but a smart notebook that I bought in WHSmith with my pocket money. I open it up and see that I haven’t added anything for six whole months; but now I get writing with the words coming into my head furiously and hard, like I’m under a waterfall that’s packed with words. I set out the details of how she fell in love with Liam and how it made her obsessed with him. Then I write about how she fell apart when she thought he didn’t like her anymore, crying herself to sleep at night and violently hurting herself, going nearly mad. Everything got better when she was acting, I add. She was an amazing Peter Pan and the whole audience loved her; I even think it made Liam want to be her friend again.
10
2017
I wake up queasy, remembering that Tilda’s meeting me for lunch today. Partly I’m nervous about screwing up, and scaring her off. Also, I’m angsty about Daphne, who sits by the shop doorway, watching everything. My boss has a habit of irritating people with her inquiring, nosy personality, so I suppress thoughts of work while I shower, and instead concentrate on the questions I’ll ask Tilda. I tell myself, Don’t antagonize. Be subtle.