White Bodies(29)

She’s high on the drama of the situation and her own role as best friend of the doomed protagonist, acting like she’s steering Paige towards a tragic destiny—she would have the baby and then fall into an abyss of obscurity. By contrast, Tilda’s own destiny is to involve fame, glamour and the recognition that is her right. I make a mental note, for later, when I’ll write up my observations.

Eventually, Kimberley and Sasha go home, and I return to Tilda’s bedroom. She’s lying on the bed, texting, and she looks up. “Stop lurking by the door and come in.” Then: “Are you worried about Paige’s baby?”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t be. I know her; she won’t have an abortion. She wants to be a mother. It’s her calling.”

“What’s my calling?”

“Come here.” She pats the pillow on the bed, and we lie side by side. “Your calling is to be a nice person, looking out for other people and protecting things.”

It sounds boring.

“There has to be more to me than that.”

“There’s nothing more serious than your calling!” She looks at me crossly. “You love where others don’t. That’s what the sheep-skull day was about. And don’t worry. I see your future as happy. You’ll be a mother. You’ll live in an old country house with a family that loves you. There’ll be log fires and dogs, and fields of sheep all around, and I’ll come and visit even when I’m famous.”

In my mind I start to cast Liam Brookes in the country-house husband role, but Tilda puts an end to that by saying, “You know why I can’t see Liam on Saturday? It’s because he goes to the library to study. I think it’s because he doesn’t have a father, and he wants to look after his mother in the future. He says he’ll be a doctor. Imagine! Liam a doctor.”

“What about your calling? Will you be a doctor’s wife?”

“Hmm. Maybe. I imagine Liam working for Médicins Sans Frontières. It’s a French organization he talks about that works in battle zones in Africa and places. I’ll go with him, and write songs.”

“Wouldn’t you be frightened in a battle zone?”

“I’d be concentrating on my songs. And I think the calling part makes the fear go away.”

“Really?”

Then she starts telling me about meeting Liam again, at a party three months ago. “I hadn’t seen him since we were at primary school,” she says. “We fell out then, do you remember?”

“I never really knew what was going on with you two. I remember you had a row or something when you were rehearsing for Peter Pan. And you wouldn’t come out of our bedroom, and then you did that maniac thing, hitting your head on the wall.” I lie on my side now, facing her, with my arm across her belly.

“I annoyed him by saying I was pleased I didn’t live on the Nelson Mandela estate. Then we had an argument about whether the estate was scuzzy and dangerous. It made him hate me for being stuck-up and judgmental.”

“But you made up after that? After the play.”

“Only for a while. Those things I said did too much damage.”

Then she kisses the top of my head and sings a song that goes: “I’m in love, so in love with him. . . .”

I can’t believe she’s been seeing Liam for three whole months without telling me, and I realize that half her outings to rehearse with the Whisper Sisters were actually romantic assignations. I feel the old urge to eat something of hers—but I try to suppress it. Instead, when she gets up to go to the bathroom, I pull down her purple duvet and get right inside her bed, burying my face in her pillow. I breathe in her smell, which is thick and heady, and as I sit up again I notice one long blond hair lying on the pillow, but I manage not to eat it and instead just take it to my room and tuck it inside my pillowcase. Then I write up my notes.

? ? ?

On Saturday I take my bike and go to the library. I find a seat by the window, spread my books out on the table and start reading, trying to ignore a mad-haired old lady in the chair opposite, snoring under a heap of dirty brown clothes. There’s a stale dustbin smell coming from her too, which explains the empty chairs nearby. I open the window and settle back into my reading.

Half an hour later Liam arrives, but he doesn’t see me, walking right past my table, dangling his jacket over a shoulder and carrying a rucksack jammed with books; and while he’s walking he whispers into the ear of a girl, who also holds her coat over her shoulder—I note her bobbed dark hair and her straight back. She’s tall, far taller than Tilda or me, so that her head and Liam’s are side by side, tilting symmetrically into each other. She wears a short tartan skirt with black opaque tights and flat black ballerinas, and seems more elegant than Tilda and her friends. But I see Liam and the girl only for a moment, because they disappear to a table beyond a bookcase, not in my line of sight.

I stand up and pretend to be browsing the bookshelves behind the bag lady, listening carefully, trying to hear Liam and the girl on the other side. But the only sounds are the scratching of chairs, and pages turning and books being moved about. So I peek round the edge of the stack, and see the two of them sitting together, their backs to me. I watch, and notice the girl’s left hand, which is decorated with a henna tattoo of spiky flowers snaking from the end of her middle finger up her arm—she’s pulled the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows to display it. Her nails match the henna, being varnished a dark red that’s almost black, and she seems mysterious to me. I do nothing for a while, just watch her and Liam reading their books, observing that they seem extremely aware of each other—they are so unnaturally still. Then the girl writes something on a piece of paper, and slides it across for Liam to read, he smiles and writes something and passes it back, then she briefly lays her head on his shoulder.