White Bodies(27)

One Saturday morning I go there to while away the time until lunch, lying on her unmade bed reading an Agatha Christie, and Tilda is at her dressing table plucking her eyebrows. I look up to watch, and she notices me in the reflection in the mirror, flinching as she says: “Come here, and let’s do something about you.”

“What d’you mean?”

She stands up and poses like a beauty queen. “Let me be your stylist.”

“I don’t want to be styled.”

“Come on. Sit on my chair.”

So I sigh, suggesting this is all very tedious, and put down my book, splayed open so I won’t lose my page.

She stands behind me, legs apart, feet turned out like a dancer, and pulls my hair back from my face. Generally I have a long fringe, and it’s a shock to see an expanse of white forehead, sprinkled with acne craters. My exposed eyes are little black pebbles, and my eyebrows look thick and unruly.

“Erhh!” I try to push the hair back down.

“No, let me have a go . . . trust me.”

I capitulate, allowing her to set about my eyebrows with tweezers and cover up my spots with a concealer stick. She holds me by the chin, coming at me with blusher and eyeliner and eyelash curlers, then steps back to admire her work. There’s a quickness and lightness to her movements, but an intensity of purpose too. As she picks out a lipstick from the piles scattered over the dressing table, it seems she’s making an important decision, like a surgeon choosing the perfect scalpel. She dabs my lips with a tissue, adds another coat, and tells me to look in the mirror.

Usually I don’t like my face because it’s too big and kind of flat, like the man in the moon. But Tilda’s attempt at a makeover has made it worse; now I have a child’s garish drawing of a face. Arching black brows, black lines round my eyes, peachy patches on my cheeks. I mull over the possibility that she’s been intentionally unkind. I check her face for clues—and see that she’s suppressing giggles.

“You bitch!”

“What? You look a lot prettier. Honest.”

Still, I’m suspicious. She squeezes in beside me on the chair, gazes at her own face with distant, dreamy eyes and starts to sing one of her own compositions. “The girl in the mirror, so sad and so small, she knows who will kill her, she knows them all—” The words are nonsense, but the tune is sad and she sings in a wistful fashion, swishing her hair around. I interrupt:

“Do you think you’re a special person?”

She stops in her tracks, as if she’s been struck. “What do you think?”

“Yes, you are.”

I say this because I do honestly believe that my sister is different. People are drawn to her because she’s so pretty and committed to her talents, and she has that charming way of switching in an instant from dreamlike and ethereal to serious and focused. But I realize that she cares too much about being special, and that the concept of ordinary is repugnant to her. Worse than that—if she thought she was ordinary, she’d self-harm, or take her own life. That’s what I believe, anyhow, and that’s what I intend to write in the dossier.

? ? ?

After lunch, Tilda disappears and I take my bike from the shed and cycle to the river, with my book in my rucksack. As an experiment, I keep my hair pinned back and my makeup on. The journey’s quick, about five minutes, and I find a bench and sit down. In front of me, the river is vast and grimy-gray, and a dirty plastic tub of a boat is bobbing about on a slimy rope.

I pull up the hood of my jacket and read my Agatha Christie. In no time, I’m immersed and only vaguely aware of the shrieks and shouts coming from the bus stop at the pier, inane high-pitched comments blunted by the wind. That’s insane . . . What? Fuck off, fuckface . . . But a loud, Stop it, Robbie, you’re hurting me! makes me look over. A group of teenagers is messing about on the bus-stop bench. I don’t recognize the boys, but the girls are Tilda and Paige Mooney, her favorite Whisper Sister and loyal handmaiden. Paige is like Tilda reflected in a distorting glass, same pale features, same long blond hair, but she’s overweight—Tilda says morbidly obese—and there’s an element of desperation about her. She endlessly tries to impress Tilda, who flips, soaking up the adoration one minute and brushing it off the next. They are kissing and touching with the boys, and I’m curious. I haven’t seen Tilda so blatantly in action before. Then Paige runs away, hand in hand with her boyfriend, to hide behind the fish-and-chip shop, leaving Tilda writhing about with the other boy on the bench. I go over, wheeling my bike.

As I come close I say hello, and she extricates herself with a look that makes it clear that I’m not welcome.

The boy’s staring at me with an open face, curious and interested, and I know immediately that it’s Liam Brookes, even though I haven’t seen him in five years. His hair is darker, almost black now, but it still stands up away from his head and has the same woolly look. His face has elongated, and his body has changed—he has broad shoulders and is tall. “Have you met my sister?” Tilda says.

“Hi, Callie,” says Liam.

“Her face isn’t usually like that. A bit of a makeup malfunction before lunch.”

I ram the bench with my bike. Not dramatically, just enough for Tilda to know I’m angry with her. “You said I looked pretty,” I hiss.

“You do, definitely. I just didn’t have time to make it as perfect as I wanted.”