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 emotional abuse and coercive behaviours. I even dream about Tilda, specifically about rescuing her, like mothers dream of rescuing their babies from raging fires or angry seas and I repeatedly find myself under water, grabbing her hair with one hand and using the other to swim against the downward force of an almighty current. It’s exhausting.
Occasionally I take the bus into town and spend time at the Caffè Copernicus on Curzon Street, across the road from her flat. I’m not spying on her exactly, it’s more that it feels good to be close. I fantasise that she might need me in some emergency that’s more serious than a few bruises on her arms, and I sit in a favourite spot by the window, which has an uninterrupted view of Tilda’s front door and of the sitting-room windows up on the second floor. Not that anything ever happens. The new blinds stay down, and there’s no hint of what’s going on behind them, so that I’m left with my thoughts drifting off in alarming directions. I find myself concocting bizarre plans for escaping from the flat – jumping out of the bedroom window at the back, for instance, with a glass roof to break the fall rather than risking the long drop from the sitting room to the concrete below.
I haven’t seen Tilda at all and I’m hoping that the day will come when she’ll confide in me and allow me to help her. In the meantime, I stay focussed by writing up my observations. I have to admit that the dossier has changed a lot. In past years it was like an occasional notebook, just recording this and that about Tilda and I’d return to it when I was feeling particularly overwhelmed by her, or she’d said something to upset me. But now I’m writing it almost every day on my laptop, and it’s focussed as much on Felix as on her. I’ve found it useful to make an inventory of all his odd and sinister behaviour, writing more about the way he was tidying all her cupboards when I first met him, the vitamin jabs, that I accepted back then but now seem totally bizarre; the way he organised a holiday without consulting her at all and then had his builders do heaven-knows-what to her flat. And, even worse, the signs of violence – holding her under the water that day on the Thames, those bruises on her arms, and just the way she looks now. Sort of battered and gaunt. And that’s what I’m doing today – re-working my files – and adding my thoughts on how he is isolating Tilda, keeping her from me.
I’m the only customer in the café, so I don’t have any distractions, and I work quietly for half an hour or so, making my hot chocolate last a long time, and taking small bites from a banana that I’ve brought from home. Then I shut my laptop and pick up my book, the Scandinavian crime novel called The Artist that I took to Tilda’s flat. It’s about a serial killer who carves clues in his victims’ torsos with a stencil knife and I’m immersed in it; but I glance up, as though prompted by something, a sound or a nudge, and see that, across the street, the front door is opening. I’m mesmerised, because in all the hours I’ve been spending at the Copernicus, that door has remained shut, like an impermeable barrier keeping me out and Tilda in.
I’m in luck and it’s my sister standing on the pavement
