off from their friends and family.
In late June, Tilda and I meet briefly in a café in Regents Park and it’s obvious that something’s deeply wrong. My sister has always looked delicate, but now she seems undernourished, and is nervy. Just after we sit down, I knock my hot chocolate over and a river of froth snakes across the table, reaching her phone. It’s an accident, a tiny mishap, but she makes it seem like the last straw, saying, ‘I can’t stand this,’ and she walks right out of the café, leaving me scrabbling to clean up the mess – I’m on my hands and knees and a young waitress comes rushing over with kitchen paper. ‘Here, have this,’ she says. ‘Was that Tilda Farrow with you…? The actress?’
A few minutes later Tilda returns and apologises. ‘Sorry, I’m feeling so edgy right now.’ She slumps into her chair, wilted and limp. I want to say, ‘What’s wrong with you? You look so ill.’ But I can’t, because I’m frightened that she’ll storm out again. So we discuss neutral subjects, like her latest outings with Felix and how wonderful the house in Provence had been. An ozone pool, she says, at the perfect temperature, and a cook who made extraordinary French meals. Not too much cream and fat, but using amazing fruit and vegetables fresh from the local market. French beans in France are nothing like the ones in Sainsbury’s. There’s no comparison; they have real beany flavour. She’s talking like a travel brochure, and as she speaks there’s an almost imperceptible shakiness in her voice. I take a risk. ‘So the house and the cooking were perfect, but what about the company?’
‘You mean Felix? He was perfect too. He’d planned everything, all our outings, food, everything.’
‘You like that? It doesn’t sound like you, not very free spirit.’
‘It’s fine, Callie.’ Again that shakiness in her voice, a flicker in her eyes and I pause before speaking, aware that I’m about to steer the conversation into darker territory – but I have to do it.
‘You should take a look at this website,’ I say. ‘It’s called controllingmen.com and it tells you about the warning signs you should look out for with men like Felix. So you can be prepared… and safe.’ I fumble with my phone, finding the site, while she drinks her coffee, looking around distantly, like she doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be home with Felix. I find the site, and show her.
‘For fuck’s sake…’ She’s scrolling down, far too fast to read it properly. ‘That’s bloody crazy nut-job stuff, you’re losing the plot, Callie!’ Then she softens, which surprises me. ‘I know you think you’re helping… Now, eat that carrot cake, I need to get home.’
But I’m not ready to leave, and I say, ‘How did you meet him?’
‘God, you’re even suspicious about that! Unbelievable… I met him through Jacob Thynne, the guy who played Max in Rebecca… It was perfectly normal… An evening out at the Groucho.’ As she’s speaking, though, her tone belies her words – her voice is weak and nervous, and I make one last effort.
‘Please, Tilda, let me help… I want to help. Honestly, look at the controllingmen site!’
‘You’re ridiculous, Callie,’ she says. ‘You have to stop behaving like this!’ She stands up, stares at me coldly, then hurries out of the café.
I take my laptop out of my bag and write: Tilda seems fearful, unconfident, nervous. I told her about controllingmen but she won’t listen. When I talk to her, I make everything worse. I drive her closer to HIM.
The only time I feel that my sister and I are similar, from the inside out, is when we go swimming, which we do most Saturday mornings. Mum sits on the side of the pool, her legs dangling in the water, reading her book and looking up from time to time to check we haven’t drowned, while Tilda and I dive under each other’s legs, performing roly-polys, picking up coins from the bottom. Our weaving about and beneath each other feels harmonious and dreamlike, despite all the yelling and splashing going on around us, and it’s a revelation to feel calm and confident inside. Usually my sister outshines me and I’m diminished by the force of her luminous energy. But, as a swimmer I can keep up – even though I’m useless at other physical activities – and I suspect I have a champion pair of lungs. Underwater I can hold out for more than a minute, and I beat Tilda when we perform handstands. Also, our hair is scrunched up inside identical white swimming caps, so that her goldenness seems, for once, to be hidden. I look forward to Saturday-morning swimming so much that often I start thinking about it around Wednesday.
School is another matter. There I aim at invisibility, which is the opposite of Tilda, who makes it her business to be noticed. When they cast the school play – Peter Pan and Wendy (with songs) – she pushes to the front of the auditions queue and acts her heart out like she’s Mary-Kate Olsen auditioning for It Takes Two. She’s not the best actor in the class, let alone the school, but she’s the most insistent, her voice carries farthest and has a daring tone that frightens people. When she wins the role of Peter Pan she boasts about beating the hopeless boys, and practises her lines at full blast in the playground. My dagger! Woe betide you Hook! I watch in wonder. How can she brag like that with the obvious, massive assumption that everyone envies her? You’d think her boasting would make her unpopular, but it doesn’t. Her friends offer to help her rehearse and to practise fighting with plastic rulers.
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 seem 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 realise 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!
